  :I'd say you like Nintendo too much. ;)  :It's a good idea, now I think about it. I've been trying to think back to when bosses became popular (a mite difficult seeing as I would have been about five years old), and it seems that the flash point is in 1985.  :However, I am quite heavily biased toward scrolling shooters, so I'm probably missing something important. Bosses are, on the other hand, probably more important in scrolling shooters than any other genre, because they have to break up the linearity of the game.  :Anyway. In 1985, you've that Mario game thingy, and Gradius, which is the first time I can recall having to fight a huge boss character. Then in 1986 you've got Darius, which is the earliest game I know of that had different bosses for every level. I think it had minibosses too.  :And then it really gets going. In 1987, I can name R-Type, Raiden, and Rainbow Islands as having distinct bosses, and by this point it was all pretty standard. But I'm just namedropping (and article-dropping too, seeing as I wrote most of those articles ;) ). The point is that there seems to be a dark age of bosses before 1985, so it would probably be interesting to unravel that.  :The very earliest enemy-that-could-conceivably-be-thought-of-as-a-boss that I can think of (not including that Dungeons and Dragons thing mentioned in the article, which I know nothing about) is the Flag Ship from Gorf, an arcade game released in 1981, in the prime of the Space Invaders Era. Gorf was like five games in one, and when the player completed a level, they would move onto a level in the next game.  :The fifth level was a battle with the Flag Ship. It has all the hallmarks of a boss: It's much bigger than the player's ship, much better armed, has its own forcefield, and is only minorly damaged by the player's weapon. The only way to destroy it is to hit it in its weak spot - a reactor situated deep within the ship.  :Now I think about it, I don't know why I didn't mention this before. The thing is, I always thought of the Flag Ship as a 'level' rather than a boss. There wasn't really any concept of a boss at that point in history. Still, it's a start.  