HIstory of RTS Games

Spuggy writes "Gamespot has got an excellent article (in Two Parts) depicting the history of Real Time Strategy Games (From Dune II to the forthcoming Warcraft III and Emperor: Battle for Dune). They cover nearly every RTS release and categorize them by generation. The article even has a mention of the old Sega game Herzog Zwei, which was the first game to incorporate RTS elements." It's all about WC2 for me. What a game.

Comments

NATO Commander was one of the early ones.

[Zarhan]

Herzog Zwei? That's a new one.

Doesn't anyone remember NATO Commander? Published in 1984, for Commodore 64. It was an RTS. No mouse driven interface, but it was real-time. Brilliant game (of the era) about the good ol' red storm rising and NATO and Warsaw pact fighting it out in the central Europe.

Try it out on your C-64 emulator :)

Read the Second Part of the Article

[Spuggy]

[Repost from some of my Replies to other Comments]

Part 2 located here.

My fault for not posting it in the first place (hopefully they'll update it when they get a chance).

It will clear up a lot of the posts I am seeing about "They missed xxx!!"

Re:Recycled? Or an old lost article

[__aasfhc1949]

Hello jandrese:

The part II of the article is here: http://gamespot.com/gamespot/features/all/realtime _pt2/index.html.
It covers RTS from 1999 to the present.

Wow, what about even older RTSes

[Tjp($)pjT]

I played net-trek on PDP-10s, 11s and Vaxes in the late-70s. These had the features of RTS mentioned just with text based graphics. Multi-player realtime action with texty goodness. I played non-multiplayer trek in the mid-70s. Empire and multiplayer Empire (I particularly like XEmpire with its cool graphics and would love to find an old source drop of it!, particularly the networked varient with multi-player support). Not to mention some other single player RTS like Rogue and DND (not to be confused with Dungeon, the text script game). All of these had a running clock, items or status to recover, entity interactions, and many were multi-player networked games. And of course the trade based games.

Pre-Internet (with the capitalized I) on the Merit network was a game (that was banned _often_ by the system administrators) that created an adaptive universe to travel through (local copies of the universe were "patched" to have dimensional rifts when the local universe synced to a remote universe and the on-the-fly universe creation overlaped between the two universe, sometimes entire rifts winked out of existance (when sys admins quashed them :-) losing all that was in them at the time. I would love to find a copy of Galaxy!