The Unsung Heroes of PC Gaming History 325
An anonymous reader writes "The history of PC gaming is littered with many well-known and highly regarded titles, but what about the titles you mightn't have heard of? This list of the top games in the history of the PC includes the usual suspects, such as Half-Life and Doom, but also some often overlooked PC games including such classics as Elite, the space trading RPG developed in 1984 by two college friends from Cambridge for the Acorn and BB Micro systems. The game used a truly elegant programming hack to create over 200 different worlds to explore while using 32kb of memory, all with 3D wireframes. Also in the list is Robot War, which required players to actually code the participants, and one of the first online multiplayer RPGs, Neverwinter Nights, which introduced many of the developer and user behaviors, such as custom guilds, that have made modern RPGs so popular."
What's your favorite classic game that always gets overlooked in these kinds of lists? My vote goes for Star Control 2.
Microprose (Score:5, Interesting)
The games that have kept me occupied for the most time would be the various Microprose sims. F-19 Stealth Fighter, M1 Tank Platoon, Falcon 4.0. Admittedly, it may have been the manual that kept me occupied. Good times...
I would also make an honourable mention for Sir Geoff Crammond and his Formula 1 Grand Prix series.
trash reviewers (Score:4, Interesting)
Iain Thomson: Minesweeper has probably cost more time in lost productivity in the office than anything else, including human resources meetings.
The game was bundled in with Windows 3.11 and all subsequent versions and is simplicity itself.
It Came out in Windows 3.1 (possibly earlier), not Windows 3.11 for workgroups.
World of Warcraft Should not even be on the list, Warcraft maybe, Starcraft maybe, Diablo maybe, but not WoW.
Duke Nukem Forever should be (as well as Starcraft Ghost) for having names that are ironically fitting.
Darklands, Commander Keen, Hunter Hunted, etc. (Score:5, Interesting)
Darklands [wikipedia.org]. Freakin' great game. RPG, set in a medieval Germany where everything people at the time believed to exist does, in fact, exist. Very free form, but with two or three "main" quests you can go on (or not)--I won't say what they are, since discovering them is part of the fun. Pain-in-the-ass manual-based copy protection, so be sure to grab a PDF of the manual if you download it from an abandonware site or something.
The Commander Keen [wikipedia.org] series (especially 4-6), Duke Nukem [wikipedia.org] (especially 2--I'm not talking about the 3-D Dukes here) and Hunter Hunted [wikipedia.org] all need more love than they get. They're not better than the best console platform games, but they're at least in the same league.
Tachyon: The Fringe [wikipedia.org] was one of the last good space fighter "sim" games. Doesn't come up nearly as often as X-Wing, Tie Fighter, etc.
STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl [wikipedia.org] is the only really good FPS game I've played in quite a damn while that wasn't developed by Valve, but either no one else who played it thought so or not nearly enough people played it.
BBS games (Score:4, Interesting)
Dwarf Fortress (Score:4, Interesting)
Thats a simple one,
Dwarf Fortress!
This is one of the best games which has been in development by a single programmer for quite some time now. He works fulltime on the game living on donations from a very dedicated fanbase. The game revolves around creating and guiding (controlling would be too big of a word) a settlement of dwarfs, however the detail in the game in staggering. An insane amount of bodyparts are tracked for each dwarf, there is gravity, magma, water, and ofcourse.. lots of mining! The game offers almost an unlimited amount of fun and it is really up to the user to push the boundries of code!
If i this got your attention be sure to have a look at it: http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/
PS. Dont let the graphics fool you:
- http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/Stonesense_%28visualizer%29
- http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d3/Mayday-tileset.gif
Ugh-lympics (Score:3, Interesting)
The first truly addictive game I encoutered was Sopwith [wikipedia.org]
Re:Add to the unsung heros list (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd still prefer Ultima IV out of that list...
More unsung heroes:
Lords Of Midnight (ZX Spectrum, C64): strategy game with some RPG traits in the characters. Also the first game I remember to have multiple ways for the player to win (find and destroy the 'Ice Crown', OR take the opponent's home citadel ('Ushgarak') - and similar your opponent can win by killing Morkin (one of the player characters), subdue the players armies, or take the southern citadel (xajorkith). Also, what made the game 'special' was that it used first-person perspective of the entire map, not a 'map view' where you can see everything, but rather forcing the player to find out about the landscape by exploring it. (there was a drawn basic map of what the country would look like on the back of the box to give you some rough bearings, but not enough to know or see everything).
Tau Ceti (ZX Spectrum, C64): just the complexity of the game, in a game that loads completely in 48k memory. I could have screamed when I finally won the game and all the game does it say 'mission accomplished, thank you' - but I did get the authors argument that he would have had to scrap part of the gameplay in order to put in some special effects to end the game...
Atic Atac (ZX Spectrum): Labyrinth game; made cool by introducing difficulty levels purely through the characters, by giving each character a set of secret passages - with the easiest just having more secret passages than the more difficult ones. Also, at the end of the game, it would present you with a score, but also the time taken to finish and the percentage of rooms seen in the game - so you can always replay it trying to maximise on something different (just straight highest possible score; try and get out as quickly as possible; visit as many rooms as possible before finishing). To me, this makes the game replayable even today...
Starflight (Score:3, Interesting)
I still am amazed what can be accomplished on two 360K Floppy CDs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight [wikipedia.org]
I have a Tandy TX (80286 on a XT motherboard) just so I can have access to this game. The sequel Starflight II was almost as good as the original and introduced a race whose appearance and actions changed based on their planet's solar cycle. Lots of science fiction goodies for the geek, like an encounter with an obvious Enterprise star ship.
Worlds that were unique through ingenious programming and even noted which you visited and gathered resources from so if you went back you had to land elsewhere, even Earth looked right from space using this system.
All and all an impressive game done on those 2 360k discs that many have not surpassed using DVD
Some classic for me: (Score:4, Interesting)
Wizard of Wor (1981) [youtube.com], a game that basically looks like a Pacman style labyrinth meets space marines. What makes this game brilliant is the pacing, you start out with a large number of small moving targets, then go to a faster moving, but smaller number of targets. The enemies abilities improve too, the last one can teleport, other can get invisible. The game also features COOP gameplay (or VS if you like, as you can shoot your buddy) and music that very effectively underlines the pacing. From all the really old games out there, this one really stands out for me, as its still fun to play for its gameplay, not just for nostalgia.
EF2000 (1995) [youtube.com] is what I consider the best flight simulation ever. It might not be quite as realistic as Falcon4.0, but its a lot more accessible. It is also the first game I have seen that simulated a complete dynamic campaign and persistant world. Instead of just having self standing missions, everything was generated dynamically and your action did have actual impact on how the war advanced. To bad that the concept of a dynamic campaign seems to have been lost in time, as it is nowhere to be seen in todays console games.
The Last Express (1997) [youtube.com] is an adventure game, but not just your average adventure game, this one happens in (almost) realtime. Unlike other games this one doesn't sit around till the player takes action, but instead all the other characters in the game world actually act on their own. This makes the game world feel much more alive then basically every other game. I still haven't seen anything quite like it and its ironic how even todays "action" games allow you to basically sit around and twiddle your thumbs, you have to walk to the action, the action doesn't come to you.
Honorable Mention (but not really that obscure): Another World (Ico and SotC got a lot of inspiration from this), The Longest Journey (adventure with the best storytelling ever), Operation Flashpoint (best tactic shooter/warsim around), Syndicate (kind of realtime XCom:UFO), Strike Commander (storyline meets flightsim), Mech Warrior 2 and 3 (mech sim, not watered down mech action game).
So many games (Score:5, Interesting)
so little time and space to remember them.
Yes, Elite was probably one of the first large scale space exploration/combat games. And for all its simplicity, quite unique and addictive.
But many games exist that fits this bill in other genres:
Eye of the beholder, one of the first D&D dungeon hacks, certainly one of the more popular
Tiger mission, the first shoot 'em up. The previous ones were shoot 'em sideways, mainly
Zaxxon, the first shoot 'em sideways that tried to use 3D effects and movements
Ghost'n'Goblins, the original platform game
Maniac Mansion, an original graphical horror adventure game
Paperboy, one of the first arcadegames that had more than a joystick (joysticks today, you can't even find in an arcade hall)
Mines of Titan, among the first D&D style games with a strategic combat system
Arkanoid, for all its originality, never duplicated sucessfully.
Star wars rebellion, just for the fact that I still play that game today, more than 10 years since its original release.
Being the nerdy, gamer, looser type that I am, I could probably go on for a LONG time, and still not have gotten to the 1990'ies. ;)
Re:Dwarf Fortress (Score:3, Interesting)
Heck yeah! I would say that, compensating for nostalgia, Dwarf Fortress is probably the best game ever created, on any platform. It's also the most ambitious. Seriously, anyone that hasn't played it yet needs to do so immediately.
Spacewar and Sins of a Solar Empire (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Facts (Score:3, Interesting)
Rich storyline? You mean the fact that the game was packaged with a story that bore at least a passing resemblance to the gameplay? That's not what we mean these days when we say a game has a storyline.
The point is that 1984 wasn't "these days". I don't know that Elite was actually the first to package a scene-setting novella by an actual author (edit: Wikipedia says it was [wikipedia.org]) and an "in-character" instruction manual, but it was certainly one of the first - SOP back then was more along the lines of "you are mankind's last hope - press SPACE to fire".
However, perhaps TFA should have said "back story" rather than "storyline", considering that the USP of Elite was its totally unstructured play...
(2) Not particularly elegant or innovative, if you ask me, using a PRNG to generate random worlds. Things very much like it had been done time and time before.
Certainly, generating "original" descriptions and phrases from random word lists was nothing new - but Elite made particularly good use of it to produce a universe that was just too big to completely explore, without being silly.
We've largely stopped doing it this way, but only because we don't have to any more...
Its a pity that newer games didn't come up with more sophisticated ways of generating huge universes.
Elite may have had rather more sophisticated graphics than its predecessors, but it was still a game that required you to bring your own imagination. It was always bloody obvious how the random worlds were generated, but you could willingly suspend disbelief and imagine you were exploring a vast galaxy, and the red herrings in the manual (generation ships etc.) helped you imagine that there were mysteries out there. None of the successors have had that feeling - even if they have original artwork for every world you visit.
Re:Add to the unsung heros list (Score:2, Interesting)
I'd still prefer Ultima IV out of that list...
Word on that, I drove my entire family insane with the sound track to that game.
That said, was an awesome game, only Ultima V has any claim to being as much fun. That said, I do still remember IV more fondly than any other in the Ultima series
Tau Ceti (ZX Spectrum, C64): just the complexity of the game, in a game that loads completely in 48k memory. I could have screamed when I finally won the game and all the game does it say 'mission accomplished, thank you' - but I did get the authors argument that he would have had to scrap part of the gameplay in order to put in some special effects to end the game...
There was a Gauntlet-esque game I played furiously on the C64 called "Into The Eagle's Nest" [lemon64.com]. It had no save points, and in the style of Gauntlet required you to remember where the health and ammo dumps were, and use them judiciously. After many long months learning this silly game on and off, I finally got to the end, to be told:
"THE CASTLE HAS BEEN DESTRAYED (sic)"
Worst. Ending. Ever.
Re:Darklands, Commander Keen, Hunter Hunted, etc. (Score:4, Interesting)
Agree with Commander Keen! Smooth scrolling on an 8088/CGA machine? That was incredible back in the day.
The other game that took many, many, many hours from me was the original Wing Commander. That game was incredible for it's time, from the graphics, music, and storyline. It put my old Adlib card to good use. Many, many fun times!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbzioZBTUIU [youtube.com]
Re:Add to the unsung heros list (Score:3, Interesting)
Released in 1985, there were many features that were considered "revolutionary" by games that were released as much as 7 to 20 years later. Things like hidden stats that changed based on your actions, and changed the way an NPC would interact with you. (Some guilds wouldn't let you join if you killed peasants, while others wouldn't let you join unless you killed peasants. [plus the guild didn't always tell you what actions allowed or prevented you from joining.]) It also multiple stats such as hunger, fatigue, sickness, cold or hot, thirst, or how much you were carrying that actually changed how fast you could move. Movement seemed so much smoother than other 3D game of the time, and distant object came into focus gradually as you got closer. As the sun rose and set, or if it started raining, the entire color pallet would change, making it look much more realistic. Although I did not have the time to spend on it, I had a friend that spent weeks mapping the City and never did finish it completely.
Re:Finally! (Score:3, Interesting)
Star Control 2 is the pinnacle of 1990's game development, in my humble opinion. The developers at Toys for Bob are still inundated with requests to develop a new sequel. (Shame on you, Accolade. SHAME, SHAME, SHAME.)
Ur Quan Masters is a game that, with the developer's blessings, brings the original SC2 back to contemporary computers with refinements galore. Updated graphic engine for high-res displays, remixed music, and plenty of gameplay goodies.
My review of SC2 is here [longtailgamer.com].
Re:Darklands, Commander Keen, Hunter Hunted, etc. (Score:3, Interesting)
I like that it doesn't hold your hand the whole way. It's even possible to get the "bad" ending and have no idea that there are others, if you haven't read about it--especially since, given the bleak nature of the game, it doesn't seem implausible that they'd pick something that dark as the sole ending.
It's got more scares than most of the "scary" FPS games of the last decade (Doom 3 and Bioshock, I'm looking at you!), RPG elements that aren't heavy-handed or forced, spectacular atmosphere, a damn solid story, intense combat, a fun arsenal, and missions that invite comparison to Deus Ex and the Delta Force series in the freedom they allow. It's best exemplar of the features for which I play FPS games, and a reminder of how great they can be when they're not compromised to make them friendly.
It's the game that convinced me a first-person Fallout could actually work--which was unfortunate, since it raised my hopes for Fallout 3, which was a much worse game than either STALKER or the other games in the Fallout franchise.