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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.
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.
They're talking about the original NWN, the AOL game. Which had a very large following and was one of the first graphical MMORPGs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neverwinter_Nights_(AOL_game)
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.
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...
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
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.
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 ?