With games originally released for the arcades in 1972, 1980 and 1981 respectively, Arcade Classics contains 16-bit translations of Pong, the world's first commercially successful videogame, Missile Command, one of the earliest games to use a trackball, and Centipede, one of the first games designed by a woman (Donna Bailey).

Pong is a tennis-like game in which you control a paddle that hits a ball back and forth across a net that is represented by a straight vertical line. A hockey rendition of Pong is also included. Both games are comprised of simply drawn lines on a solid black background.

In Missile Command, you guide a target all over the screen, defending your ground-based cities and missile bases by shooting down enemy cruisers, ballistic missiles and cruise missiles that fall from the skies. The game ends when all your cities have been destroyed.

Centipede takes place in an enchanted forest filled with mushrooms, centipedes, spiders, fleas and scorpions. While your mission is to shoot everything in sight to score points, centipedes are your primary opponent. As a centipede rapidly descends toward you, weaving in and out of the mushrooms, you must blast it out of existence (one segment at a time) with a magic wand that you maneuver along the bottom third of the screen. As soon as you've cleared one centipede off the playfield, another takes its place.

In addition to the standard translations of the famous titles in this collection, Missile Command and Centipede each have a specially modified Sega version with graphics updated for the 1990s. Both versions of Missile Command and Centipede have two-player alternating modes. Pong features two-player head-to-head action.