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Examining the Beginnings of the RTS Genre
Edge Magazine is running a story about the development of the real-time strategy genre. They credit Dune II: the Building of a Dynasty with establishing the basic concepts that led to more popular titles like Command & Conquer and the original Warcraft.
"[Westwood Studios co-founder Brett] Sperry describes Dune II's core challenge as 'combining combat, exploration and production at a particular pace and rhythm to make it all exciting and almost out of control. That was a key part of what made it so addictive.' Indeed, the experience was quite unlike more staid turnbased strategies, where success or failure rolled in slowly rather than rushing over sand dunes at the speed of an action game. 'You had to think and respond fairly quickly, and in realtime, or else your base and forces would all be overrun. And as we developed the game further, it became clearer how the pacing and battle scenario design were all a delicate balance.'"
TFA sounds more like; "Yeah, there was this really cool game a long time ago that did it right. Most of you probably never heard of it, so we are more 'leet' the you. It rocked! We hope we can do the same thing now, but better."
Yes Dune2 was kick-ass. (It still is too!) Most RTS now depend on who builds the most grunts the quickest, wins. That removes the whole 'S'trategy aspect of the game.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
There was an RTS on the Atari 800
(yes, REALTIME not turn based)
http://www.atarimania.com/zoom_frame.php?TYPE_IMG=D7&ID=1143&MENU=8&NUM_IMAGE=1
now expect a dozen comments here about how someone loved playing game X a long while ago.
enough said!
Stonkers, on the ZX Spectrum in 1984 was also RTS.
However, the 'modern' RTS genre (where production as well as combat was critical) probably started with Herzog Zwei on the Megadrive. Even the graphics style was carried forward through to Command & Conquer et.al.
[citation needed]
Nothing to go ape-shit over. Turn-based is better. X-Com was far superior gaming experience.
The original C&C was huge though not just for gameplay, but because it was one of the first games to use full-screen video, you could play as the baddies or goodies (each with their own very distinct units), had an awesome soundtrack, and to this day had the best setup program ever!
Oh, and for the NOD missions you could choose your ending.
They don't make them like they used to!
throw new NoSignatureException();
I'll give you a copy of the code if I can find it.
I was called grass lands, I wrote it when I was 15 at school and I'm now 32, only got played by friends at school.
Basically you build up a city and army and sent your army across to attack the opponents city. Which is exactly what a RTS is.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
That is the granddaddy
I had played Dune II on the Amiga, I think the biggest difference between that and later games is you had to click over on the actions buttons ("attack", "move", etc) instead of it being context-based on what you clicked on next (e.g., enemy = attack, ground = move to).
But in terms of influence the second I played C&C I felt that their whole concept of the Tiberium resource was taken directly from the Spice in Dune II. It almost even looked similar...
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
If I hadn't played that game, and hated the gameplay style when it first came out - I would have wasted hours and hours playing all its game-play clones.
The only RTSes that I've ever liked, were the ones that took cues for Dune 2's predecessor - Crescent Hawk Revenge... those being Mechcommander and Mechcommander 2. Real time play with no resources to worry about. Just units. And salvaged units between missions.
Actually scratch that - I did like Sins of a Solar Empire. But that one is dune 2 crossed with civ... and requires actual strategy... so does that count?
Dune II was probably the first game I was truly addicted too... first I pulled all nighters playing anyway.
There may have been previous real-time strategy games, but this was certainly the one that got the genre started. Not long after that, Blizzard released what was essentially a fantasy clone of Dune II with Warcraft. And once C&C and Warcraft II kicked in with online multi-player, the genre was huge.
I call bullshit. There was a game Nether Earth on ZX Spectrum, which was real-time strategy game, and had all the concepts as Dune 2, and even more.
In the game, you could build your own robots, you needed to capture factories to get parts for the robots, and you could even send robots to a mission and they worked by themselves depending on the orders you gave them. All this in 48kB of memory in 1985.
Herzog Zwei came before Dune II.
One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say. - Will Duran
No offense, I'm not singling you out, but that is exactly the kind of attitude that has made the RTS genre utterly stagnant for so many years. A game like Pikmin makes most other RTSes look creatively bankrupt. There is so much room for innovation in the genre, but nobody seems to have the vision or intestinal fortitude to break the mold and move forward in new and interesting ways. Most RTSes feel like Dune 2.5 next to Pikmin. Shigeru Miyamoto looked at everything that all RTSes have in common and determined that those were the features that needed the most change in order to create a truly new game experience. I wish more developers would adopt that sort of design mindset, a philosophy which in retrospect seems incredibly obvious. Yet year after year, across all genres, we only see tiny incremental refinements of preexisting games because most mainstream developers refuse to embrace risk.
+0 Meh
I want to plug one of my favorite mods, it's called Empires and it's a mod for Half Life 2
It's a RTS/FPS and it's a lot of fun.
In some ways it has more depth to it than the old Battlefield series, but it feels a bit unfinished ATM.
Seriously check it out and the new version should be coming out soon.
Team Yankee (1990)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Yankee_(video_game)
and
Powermonger (1990)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powermonger
though the former is really real-time first-person squad combat a la Space Hulk.
It definitely seems like a strategy game in real-time. But Im not sure it has any of the other characteristics typically associated with an RTS, notably any sort of production to pace the game.
Common Sense isn't as Common as people think...
1988 saw the release of Modem Wars for the C64 and DOS. Most of the elements of RTS were there as well as network play.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem_Wars
Savage 2 always seemed very interesting and rather inventive, combining RTS with FPS, but I'm not much of a gamer and have never really gotten into the game. Can anyone here who has played it regularly comment? (It has a native Linux client.)
Put identity in the browser.
I just thought this was a good time to remind people that for the 12th aniversary, Westwood started giving away C&C I gold edition free. I can't find the download on their website any more, but gamespot has it mirrored.
A quick Googling shows that it came out 2 years before Dune 2. It is also the game most listed in the gaming world as the founder of RTS.
Well, time to Google Edge Magazine and see if in their history of heavier than air flight they list the DC 3 as the plane that started it all.
In 1989, Westwood released a little-known game called "Battletech: The Crescent Hawk's Revenge." This game developed a lot of the ideas that would later be polished in Dune 2 and, in my opinion, deserves more credit for really kicking off the genre than Dune 2 does: Dune 2 really just took the same ideas and refined them into a more successful game.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BattleTech:_The_Crescent_Hawk's_Revenge
Never played much pikmin, but i think you fail to say it's an RTS.
it's as much RTS as the three viking game.
Unix has, XBattle RTS released in 1991 networking by using X11.
Yet year after year, across all genres, we only see tiny incremental refinements of preexisting games because most mainstream developers refuse to embrace risk.
And because gamers don't want something different. We want the same game (roughly), not a "truly new game experience".
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Pikmin sounds like it has more in common with Lemmings rather than any rts game.
Also, it's almost impossible for games to break out of their genre mold these days. Companies would rather follow a proven formula that leads to a mediocre game than risk failure to produce something truly new.
Yes and my wife and I both played Cytron Masters an even earlier game on an Atari. I looked it up in Wikipedia and it is listed as RTS. Someone below mentions Modem Wars and that was definitely RTS. It is so often that these origins types of articles completely miss the earlier examples.
In the early 90's Infocom released the Crescent Hawk's Revenge. It was an RTS, no resource harvesting or manufacturing but it played out in real-time as you moved your units around and shot at stuff. Extremely primitive by today's standards but fun back in the day. That game royally kicked my ass.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Yes, it is shear genius how the man can "cloak" an established genre so well that it becomes unrecognizable [as an RTS]. (No that's not sarcasm)
Not to mention the genius of making it work with a gamepad as controller!
Actually I'm pretty sure that Miyamoto was growing a lot of hallucinogenic cacti and other wacky flora in his garden prior to coming up with the concept for Pikmin.
It's a good game; from an FPS perspective.
However, the one problem with the RTS side is that you are commanding real people. These real people will get frustrated with you if you're still learning, will go off and do their own thing if they don't have confidence in you, and are generally more difficult to control.
On the other side, when it DOES all go amazingly to plan, your troops will love you forever.
I must be new here...
If the game has finally settled on a combat system, (it's been overhauled twice,) and if you can ignore some of the community or play with friends, Savage 2 is a very fun game.
I've been playing first Savage and now Savage 2 every now and then, great for a quick battle.
You have to compare Savage 2 to the original Savage, and although the graphics have gotten much better the gameplay hasn't changed a lot. Which is good in a way, but the additions are evolutionary, not revolutionary.
The original Savage however was truly original, as this combination of RTS and FPS hadn't been done before. It makes you think how the combination of game genres could lead to other original enjoyable games.
This sig is intentionally left blank
Impossible and chicken-shit are not the same thing. 80% of all commercial releases fail. Monumental risk is already there no matter what kind of game you make. Why not make something that distinguishes you from the crowd? Personally, I'd rather fail making something different, than fail where others have succeeded.
And Pikmin is nothing like Lemmings (or Three Vikings mentioned elsewhere). It has far more in common with traditional RTSes like Age of Empires.
+0 Meh
Excellent multiplayer action with network play was really addictive as well. These games could last a lot longer as a human was always a better opponent.
The second version out in around 200 or so added 3D graphics and was good to play as well, but it suffered from a lot of AI bugs and things IIRC, and to be honest I never actually completed that game.
Another RTS game I am reminded of was Total Annihilation. Never really got into that either but my friend would play it constantly and it was a good game to spectate.
Before savage was "Allegiance" a rts / space flight combat game with an enormous learning curve. I believe allegiance is also freeware and is worth taking a look at if you like that style of game.
Food, wood, troops, upgrades to village tech. 1990.
Didn't RTFA for some reason... I think I got caught up in the comments here. I had to put this together from what I learned from the comments:
More information on RTS history at WP.
RTS means you send units out to some location and let them sort it out while one plans the bigger picture of the war -- not the individual battles.
RTT is where you send units out to some location and micromanage each battle out. Most of the "RTS" games are really only RTT.
Also, Herzog Zwei predates Dune II and better qualifies as one of the first RTT games.
Savage 2 looks interesting, but Wikipedia incorrectly notes it as "the first RTS/FPS game". Natural Selection 1.0, a modification for Half-Life, was released a year earlier, with betas released far before that. I would change the article, but likely some WikiNazi will come along and revert my "vandalism". do:
Love sees no species.
. . .was a great game.
Actually, I've found Pikmin to be quite boring. And I don't see it as a strategy game so much as a puzzle game along the lines of Lemmings.
I fail to see where it provides such a dramatic level of innovation over other RTS games.
As if a genre is defined by production units, sorry you are mislead. :-)
Problem is nowadays that if a game has 100 clones it becomes a genre. But it still is not in my opinion it simply is 100 clones or copies of a game.
This goes for shooters almost 10 - 15 years the entire so called genre simply was a copy of castle wolfenstein 3ds game mechanics!
So basically it simply was 100 copies of castle wolfenstein 3d and that was not even the first shooter
I bet you like burning ants with a magnifying glass, too! ;)
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
I usually think of a game genre as defined by two influential games rather than just one. The first one is the game that made all the game developers sit up and realize that the genre was going to be huge. The second one is the game that made the consumers take notice.
RTS: Dune 2 for developers, C&C for players
FPS: Wolfenstein for developers, Doom for players
MMO: UO for developers, EverQuest for players
By looking at the differences between the first game and the second game you can figure out what matters most to the consumer in each genre. For example, developers went gaga over Wolfenstein but consumers didn't get on board until Doom. Clearly it was the graphics that made the difference.
What about Nether Earth on the Sinclair Spectrum, released in 1987?
Real-time strategy and was even in isometric 3D, although units only moved in 2D. You could even design your own vehicles from a range of parts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nether_Earth_(game)