How to 1 Credit Clear (1CC) Arcade Games

By DUCK_BERET

September 14, 2026

Categories: Articles | Game Journal

So you want to try to clear an arcade game. Good! Almost all of my favourite games are arcade games, and I've had a lot of fun learning to to 1CC them. If you're curious about which games I've played, I posted most of my 1CC runs on my YouTube channel and wrote about them in my game journal.

Arcade games, for the most part, are not as difficult as most people seem to think they are. Lots of arcade games take under 20 hours for an average arcade player to clear, and there are plenty out there that can be cleared in under 10 hours. Even if a player with less experience takes 40 or 50 hours to clear their very first arcade game, that's still much less time than it takes to play your first playthrough of a modern game like Elden Ring or Persona 5.

You don't have to play a game perfectly to get a 1CC either. Most arcade games let you make plenty of mistakes along the way, thanks to extra lives, healthbars in beat 'em ups, bombs in shmups and so on.

One last thing before I get started: I am far from the first person to write a guide on clearing arcade games. Here are some more:

Getting started

First, pick a game to play! I'm assuming that you already have an idea of what you want to play, so just grab something that looks appealing to you.

If not, here are a few difficulty lists to help you search for games that aren't too difficult:

You can also just look up other players' 1CC runs of the game you're curious about, and check if they talk about the game's difficulty in the video description.

Just remember that people's difficulty descriptions will be comparing the game to other arcade games, so a "low difficulty" arcade game means something that an average arcade player can clear in under ten hours if they try hard, not something that you're supposed to immediately clear with no effort. Besides, even if you take longer than other people to clear the game you're playing, that just means you get to play it for longer. Arcade games are fun, after all!

If you're struggling to decide what game to play, here are a few games I enjoyed:

This guide assumes that you're playing a standard run-based arcade game, where you play through a series of stages to reach the ending, and a full run usually takes a total of 10-45 minutes. My advice won't directly map onto games like Pac-Man where you repeat the same stage over and over again at gradually increasing levels of difficulty, or games like rhythm games and racing games where you try to clear a very short (<5 minute) self-contained challenge.

Once you've picked a game to play, you should also make sure you have a way of practicing individual sections of it. Lots of modern arcade-style games or commercial home ports of arcade games have practice modes that let you play individual sections of the game in any order, and lots of emulators (and some home releases like Capcom Arcade Stadium) have save states that let you save a state at the start of each section. If don't have access to either of those features, maybe someone will have made a practice mod for your game. If that doesn't exist either you'll have to make do with whatever you have, such as a level select option.

Step 1: learn a small section of a game

Personally I like to learn to 1CC a game by breaking it down into smaller sections. Learning to clear Ghouls 'n Ghosts with no continues might seem daunting at first, but learning to clear the first half of stage 1 of Ghouls 'n Ghosts without dying might not be such a stretch.

So load up the first short section of your game that you want to learn (e.g. the first half of the first stage) and practice it until you can consistently clear it. You're just doing low-stakes practice here, so experiment with lots of different strategies and routes through the section and see what works! You could try hanging back and playing slowly, or playing hyper-aggressive taking out enemies right as they spawn, or anything else that comes to mind. Just play around and try things!

You have to decide when you think you're consistent enough at clearing a section that you can move on to the next one. For example, you could try to clear it five times in total, try to clear it three times in a row, or just keep going until you personally feel in your heart that you can clear it most of the time. Whatever works for you!

What to do if you get stuck

If you keep dying and can't figure out what you're doing wrong, remember that the vast majority of arcade action games make it hard for you to escape once you've been cornered, surrounded, or put in some other similar bad situation. So in most of these games it's very important to try not to get cornered or surrounded in the first place, and remember that the mistake you made might have happened three seconds earlier. Maybe you let enemies surround you in a beat em up because you didn't group them together efficiently enough, or let them push you towards a corner in a bullet hell shmup because you didn't stream their shots efficiently enough, or let too many enemies fill the screen because you didn't take them out quickly enough.

To get an idea of what you're supposed to be doing, you can watch other people's replays. it's like watching another player at the arcade while you wait your turn, except online. When you're looking for other people's 1CCs on YouTube, it's usually best to specifically look for runs with arcade terms like "1CC" or "ALL" in the title and to stay away from "longplays", no damage runs (from channels that seem to miraculously put up no damage runs of lots of games) or anything else that looks like it's from a non-arcade player. Many of these runs are either spliced together from multiple segments, letting the players do inconsistent strategies that are unlikely to work in your own full runs, or are straight-up recorded in slow motion, allowing them to use TAS strategies that you almost certainly won't be able to replicate yourself:

(If you're curious how to actually deal with the miniboss in that cheated Dragon Blaze gif, here's how some legitimate runs do it: one, two, three)

Here are a few YouTube channels full of legitimate arcade game runs, if you need somewhere to start and don't just want to type "(game name) 1CC" into the search bar: Dumplechan, Janet, LordBBH, OmKol, Replay Burners, baf, iconoclast, Jaimers (shmups), PAN (shmups), Pearl (shmups). This list is not even remotely close to being exhaustive.

With that, hopefully you can learn the first section of the game you're playing!

How to learn the rest of the game

With the first section of the game under your belt, you can move onto the next section (e.g. the second half of the first stage, not including the boss) and learn it the same way. After that, you can learn to clear the boss consistently. Once you've finished learning an entire stage one section at a time, you can put it all together and learn to consistently clear the whole stage from start to finish without dying.

When I write the process out like this, it might sound somewhat boring. You might have been playing the game for an hour or two by this point, and all you've been doing is playing stage 1 over and over again. Fortunately, well-designed arcade games will have enough difficulty and variance that they're fun to play over and over again! That's the whole point of them! The variance between runs could come from randomizing the enemies' behaviours, randomizing their spawn positions, randomizing their bullet patterns in shmups, or simply having granular enough gameplay states that any small mistake will throw you off your default route and force you to improvise and recover until you're back on track. And if a game doesn't have as much variance, you're probably not going to have to spend as long practicing it anyway.

Now that you've learned a stage, you can do the same thing with all the other stages! If you really do want to take a break from learning the stage that you're currently playing, feel free to go back and replay an earlier stage, or try a full run from the start of the game to see if you see how consistent you actually are at the stages you've learned so far.

Once you've learned every stage this way, you're ready to attempt some full runs. Play the game from the start and try to clear the whole thing without any continues! If you get a game over, you can either start the run again or play out the rest of the game (if you're playing a game with continues) so you get to practice the later sections.

If you manage clear the game, congratulations! If you keep dying in the same place, go practice that section for a while (e.g. try to clear it three more times, or try to find a more effective route/strategy for that section) before you return to your full run attempts.

That's all you need to do. Good luck!

Some tips

Here are some more tips for learning arcade games:

If you find yourself getting nervous towards the end of a run (such as when you reach the final stage), play some practice runs where you start at the point that makes you nervous and play out the rest of the game from there. Keep doing it until you're comfortable clearing the last part of the game. Then when you get there in a real run, you can rest in the comfort that you just need to do what you've practiced.

Some arcade games are naturally fairly consistent from run to run, and some other games have more variance. if you're playing a game that's more on the static and consistent end (e.g. Bonanza Bros.) you might only have to clear each stage once or twice to be consistent at them, whereas if you're playing a game with a lot of variance (e.g. Final Fight) there's going to be a much bigger skill gap between being able to occasionally get a lucky clear of a stage and being able to consistently clear it in full runs. If your game has a lot of variance, keep practicing each section until you're confident that you can recover from small mistakes and unlucky moments! For games with a ton of variance, maybe you could even spend more of your time doing full runs instead of focusing on small sections.

Some arcade games have a fairly flat difficulty curve (e.g. Ghouls 'n Ghosts) where the first stage is almost as difficult as the last stage, whereas some other games heavily escalate in difficulty over the course of a run (e.g. Tetris The Grand Master and most other arcade puzzle games, and most arcade games that loop indefinitely). If your game has a steep difficulty curve, you probably want to spend most of your time practicing the hard parts. This applies to other shapes of difficulty curve too. For example, if a game has a particularly easy stage 1 and stage 2 but presents a real challenge from stage 3 onwards, you can practice "full runs" of the game from the beginning of stage 3 until you're somewhat consistent, and only then do you need to attempt actual full runs.

Similarly, you don't have to learn the stages of a game in order. If you're feeling brave and want to jump in the deep end, you can learn the final stage of the game first then go back and learn the easier stages afterwards.

Some games might have sections that are so difficult that you plan to spend some of your game-long resources on them. For example, you might assume that you'll lose a life to the hit squad in Final Fight or spend a bomb on a particularly nasty boss pattern in a shmup. Ideally you won't have too many planned resource uses though, leaving you enough resources free that you can make plenty of mistakes in a full run and still clear the game.

Remember that it's hard to play arcade games when you're tired. if you need a break or if you're just not playing well today, come back again when you're rested.

If you're using save states to practice, watch out for RNG! your save state will almost certainly save the current state of the game's random number generator, so if you're practicing a heavily randomized attack pattern or section, there's a chance you'll accidentally only be practicing one specific random permutation of it. If this is the case for the game you're playing, you could try practicing from an earlier save state just in case that helps mix up the RNG more.

My final tip is that arcade games are supposed to be fun, and the method outlined in this guide is just a suggestion. If you don't enjoy learning a game this way and you would rather just do lots of full runs, you should do that. But even then, you might still want to occasionally jump into practice mode or check someone else's replay if you just need to spend a little more time figuring out a particularly tricky section.

What do I do next?

Congratulations, you cleared an arcade game! Now you can do whatever you want. You could try playing the game on a harder difficulty mode if it has one, going for a higher score if it has a fun scoring system, or you could just move on to another game.

The next arcade game you play could be a harder game in the same genre as the one you just played, another game by the same designer, an earlier game that influenced them, a later game that was influenced by them, or something else entirely. You could even just browse the YouTube pages I mentioned earlier or a list of arcade games, and pick whatever catches your eye. There are so many arcade games out there waiting for you to play them!

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