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The Unsung Heroes of PC Gaming History
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.
Not Tradewars 2002?
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
MMOs are so popular these days, but MUDs, the text-based progenitors of MMOs started it all off, and are still quite active, with literally decades of their content built-up and still being added.
I spent a while earlier this year exploring a new MUD, picked it out of a list of hundreds.e
Don't let them get in the way of a good article.
"Escape Velocity is a precursor to Elite in many ways"
Yes, I can see how a 1996 release is a precursor to a 1984 one.
"In addition to a rich storyline, [Elite] used 3D wireframe graphics."
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.
"For a start it used a truly elegant programming hack to create over 200 different worlds to explore while using 32kb of memory"
(1) IIRC, there were 1024 worlds in Elite.
(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. We've largely stopped doing it this way, but only because we don't have to any more...
had the opportunity to experience on a computer. im not even saying 'game', mind that, im saying 'the best shit'.
it was SO good that in a good 1-2 weeks of the 1 month duration i played it for the first time, i really lost the track of space/time continuum. when i got off the game at times to drink, or eat, and saw my family members, it felt like i was not there and i was in a dream instead.
it was SO good.
fortunate for you people who didnt catch up with it in 1992, that they made it open source http://sc2.sourceforge.net/
note - while playing do NOT turn on voice acting at any point. it will kill your experience. the aliens, cultures pack much more punch when you do dialogues in text.
maaaaan. i wish i could really forget the game and play it all over again.
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Zork, Ultima 3-7 and Ultima Underworld and the original System Shock, maybe as well the Pinball Construction Set which was the first game with an in place graphical editor.
The 50 or so citations on the wikipedia article tend to indicate what most older gamers probably already know - that Elite has been a touchpoint for space games for the last 20 years or more. Who in the world can forget the damn game when it comes up constantly in game reviews and top X games lists?
While they do appear on some niche top ten lists sometimes, they are often forgotten. Thief was a radical departure from the traditional shooting game, making shooting the last (and usually deadly) option you should consider, a shift few games have made since. System Shock was one of the first fully 3D games and its sequel one of the first true RPG/FPS hybrids, paving the way for Deus Ex.
Abuse , a 1996 DOS sidescroller, continues to rank high on my list of all-time favorites, for three reasons:
1. The gameplay was some of the fastest and most addictive in its day, with frightening sound effects, amazing art direction, interactive and destructible levels, and dynamic lighting that changed depending on the player's and enemy's actions.
2. The player control system, using both the keyboard (movement and object interaction) and the mouse (aiming and shooting), had little to no equal in my DOS games library. I could run forward and shoot plasma rounds behind me, or fly in any direction and drop grenades in any independent trajectory.
2. The level editor, with its intuitive link-based object system, taught me about binary triggers, logic gates, and AI long before I picked up my first computer engineering textbook. Extraordinarily-complicated systems could be created in short order with just a little practice. I still edit and play custom levels using DOSBox to this day just because of the editor.
It's a shame that Crack dot Com, Abuse's parent company, fell off the face of the earth shortly after (even despite Bungie taking up the Mac version). Fansites still exist, and there used to be much talk about Abuse 2, but this game has largely been relegated to the history books in lieu of today's keyboard-mouse FPS games.
I think that Dune 2 had a big impact on Strategy games. The title was the first to really lay down the foundations for games like C&C (and don't we all wish Westwood was still making C&C?!). All the modern games that stem from that style are around today, mostly because of the success of Dune 2. imho.
A mix of tactics and arcade shooting, graphics way ahead of its time (including proper animated 3D star fields) and a novel level system not directly related to points make this a standout game. In many ways, the Elite for the Atari 8bits inasmuch as people bought Atari 800's to play it. Amazingly, it all fits in an 8K cartridge. Even more amazingly, the guy who wrote it did 60-70% of the code based on the chip specs (he designed one of them) as no complete machines existed. When he finally got an assembler and final hardware, it more or less compiled/ran first time.
As an aside, it's depressing how the Atari 8bits are so often airbrushed out of history. Many games that are always cited as C64 originals were actually inferior ports from the Atari 800 originals although to be fair the inferiority was mainly due to games back then being designed around the hardware's strengths and limitations. C64 games that were ported to the Atari 800 generally sucked pretty badly too as the C64 had better sprite handling.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Tiger Mission the first vertical shmup? Does Space Invaders not count?
Ghosts 'n Goblins is from 1985, Donkey Kong from 1981 and I'm sure that wasn't even the first platform game. Hell, Super Mario Bros predates the release of GnG by about a week.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Just to mention a true PC RPG classic that no one else cared to remember.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betrayal_at_Krondor
It seems odd that they never listed Myst! It set quite a few benchmarks for story and visual quality.
Advanced Power Management? Arbitrage Pricing Model? Asociación Puertorriqueños en Marcha?
Help us clueless ones, please.
You are welcome on my lawn.
1. Rogue
2. Moria
3. Nethack
4. Angband
Without them, no Diablo, nor any of the 3D rogue-likes that followed
5) Dune II
First real RTS, and as far as I am concerned, one of the best, so many after that were mere imitators, and before you get on the feature bandwagon, I played Dune II on the Amiga 500. Probably before you were born, if you are actually arguing with me. And yes, Warcraft 2 was awesome, but it would never have existed were it not for Dune II. No, really.
Probably one of the earliest examples I can remember of a game with 'mouse look'. A well made first person RPG, completely non-linear with tons of quests, various factions to befriend or go up against. Even had some decent physics for '92, objects could bounce and roll, also had some limited dynamic lighting.
The whole thing was far more advanced than Doom which came out a year later.
Excuse me while I hunt you down like the dog you are for forgetting the likes of:
CIV
MOO
X-COM
Also I am pretty sure all the of those game series belong mention when talking about hero's of the PC gaming history!