Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
"I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different." ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jnr.
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. 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 series (especially 4-6), Duke Nukem (especially 2--I'm not talking about the 3-D Dukes here) and Hunter Hunted 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 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 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.
No mention of the BBS games of yore ? When I think of unsung heroes I think of Seth Robinson, creator of Legend of the Red Dragon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legend_of_the_Red_Dragon
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
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...
Wizard of Wor (1981), 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) 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) 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 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. ;)
--- To err is human... Am I more human than most ?