Castlevania [1986] + Dark Castle [1986]

Just from reputation, I expected to have to turn around and eat my words from the Super Mario Bros [1985] post, the ones about how it inaugurated a new kind of thoroughgoing consideration towards player onboarding which quickly became gold standard. But instead, I saw it more or less confirmed. The gameplay begins with a …

Alter Ego [1986]

By 1986, Activision had evolved from making sure Atari console game designers got paid and credited (as we saw with Pitfall [1982]) into probably the leading commercial purveyor of Art Games for computers. It made a lot of sense at the time for them to acquire fellow traveler Infocom, although by the beginning of 1987 …

A Mind Forever Voyaging [1985]

(Content warnings: My suicide attempts. Racism against black and Asian people. Animal cruelty. Police brutality. Fascism.) Continued. Around these parts it feels like the world never even started. That's by design. Trust me, I've helped build these rows of tract housing at a remove from the cities. Not even suburbia, which is immediately adjoining a …

Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego? [1985]

The genre of the "detective game" predates the video game, but it suits the medium like two gears meshing. The narrative impetus to piece together discrete units of information in some systematized way or another suits the computer. Though the genre likely peaks here in the 1980s, it's a perennial genre that never really goes …

Ultima 4 [1985]

So there I was, seven or eight layers deep in a dungeon, when I start losing hit points in all my party members every time I take a step. I'm not poisoned, that's easy to tell... turns out I've been down there so long exploring that I'm starving. Oh shit! I check the map to …

Super Mario Bros [1985]

Despite being such a big nerd over music, I have barely discussed video game music outside of my post on Space Invaders [1978]. Nevertheless, throughout the early 1980s it steadily expanded from the beachhead, bringing video games from a medium where some or many games had no sound at all or only rudimentary sound effects, …

1984 playlist

On games of 1984: I covered five British games all in a row, four of which were science fiction, which was pretty much just a coincidence. The games independently caught my fancy and only when setting up my slate for 1984 did I realize what had happened. I definitely ended up overemphasizing the 80s British …

Tower Of Druaga [1984]

If Tower Of Druaga [1984] came out today, there is little doubt in my mind people would call it a Roguelite. By dint being a somewhat-clunky top-down dungeon crawler where to attack randomly-placed enemies you gotta walk right into them until they die, it feels a lot more Like Rogue [1981] than, say, Spelunky [2008], …

Tetris [1984]

What can you say about Tetris [1984]? Nothing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6mPHfJTpYk Marek Biliński - Po Drugiej Stronie Świata [1984] I know it's different for everyone, but me, I think in full sentences. Even simple things, like hunger or pain or sensing temperature, are mediated through concrete and often surprisingly verbose language. It's not that I can't imagine …

King’s Quest [1984]

The most infamous puzzle in King's Quest [1984] is the Rumpelstiltskin puzzle. Schematically, this puzzle is strikingly identical to the hideous Odysseus puzzle in Zork [1980]: Based only off knowing the general milieu of reference material (fairy tales here, Ancient Greek mythology there) and a loose aesthetic association (between Rumpelstiltskin and a hut made of …

Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy [1984]

Here, we reach an important milestone for this blog: This is the first game I've written about that I've actually played before. When I was a kid (I think somewhere from age 10 to 13) I nearly completed this game, without even saving. When I was an even younger kid (think 4 to 7,) The …

Deus Ex Machina [1984]

Three off-the-beaten path early 1980s Art Game picks in, and a typology is beginning to emerge. Deus Ex Machina [1984] is largely, through probably not intentionally, a different spin on Lifespan [1983]. What both share in common with The Prisoner [1980], besides the obvious self-identification as art, is that their reflections on the medium has …

Elite [1984]

(Content warning: Slavery.) THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE On August Tenth, 1675, at precisely 3:14 PM, John Flamsteed laid the first foundation stone to renovate Greenwich Castle into The Royal Greenwich Observatory. Who laid the second, the third, the fourth and so on are, strangely, not so well-specified — those would have been, I can …

Jet Set Willy [1984]

This is the first sequel in my blog, which gives me an opportunity to think about sequels in general. In the medium of video games, one of the basic mechanisms of "hype" is that video game sequels are popularly expected to be better than the previous game, whether or not this hypothesis bears out. This …

Ant Attack [1983]

The opening screen. Now here's something: A game that's in grayscale on purpose. The ZX Spectrum is famous for its garish color schemes, and Ant Attack [1983] flaunts that up front, with a title screen that has the name of the game written in a color cycle on a background of hot pinks, blues, and …

Lode Runner [1983]

"Fun" isn't the right word for how it feels to play this game, or honestly, most video games. Fun is when you share a laugh with a friend, or kick a rock down the street a couple times for no reason, or sing karaoke. Feelings like frustration and even achievement have no place in pure …

Dragon’s Lair [1983]

So flagrantly sexist in such a basic and obvious way that it frankly makes me feel like a bit of a simpleton to point it out. It's barely even an observation. Princess Daphne spends the whole game as the Platonic ideal of a damsel in distress, occasionally crying out "save me!" Where her predecessor Pauline …

Lifespan [1983]

There's a YouTube playlist I quite like called "Art Games Have Always Existed." I only have one problem with it: "Always" is a big word. It's the foundational premise of this blog that all games are art and it's high time we started treating them all like it, but the "art game" is something entirely …

Portopia Serial Murder Case [1983]

(Content warning: Police abuse, suicide. Spoilers for Portopia.) While both Colossal Cave Adventure [1975/77] and The Portopia Serial Murder Case [1983] are nostalgic reveries of a real location from the author's life crammed into the computer, Portopia must abridge its Kobe City. It's not as geographically exacting, instead compressing locations into composite sketches and eliding …

Deadline [1982]

(Content warning: Suicide, racial stereotyping. Spoilers for Deadline.) I've realized in the process of my research that, even though I tried to sell its importance pretty hard, if anything I undersold the importance of Colossal Cave Adventure [1975/77]. It's not just the championed ur-text of the adventure-game niche — it's probably the most influential video …

Robotron 2084 [1982]

Text version, for legibility and slow connections.Music: Front 242 - U-Men (Instrumental) [1982]

Robotron 2084 [1982]

The screen is enclosed by rainbow flashing that snaps open and shut like a curtain between levels. There's one sound channel but it's overloaded with buzzing and bipping and screaming. There's dozens of robotic enemies closing in on you from all sides, and their colorshifting teletextural bullets travel faster the further they are away from …

Q*Bert [1982]

It's hard to tell what Q*Bert [1982] is. It's literally at a 45 degree angle to other games. It seems at first like it's going to be a puzzle game, but it never gets off the runway and introduces an actual puzzle. It forgoes even as much narrative contextualization as Pac-Man [1980]. Instead of words, …

Sokoban [1982]

The puzzles we've seen in Colossal Cave Adventure [1975/77] and its immediate children aren't puzzles in the sense that a jigsaw puzzle is. They're either lock-and-key dependencies, mapping, or wordplay. In most cases, solving these puzzles relies not on putting together what you know, but on what you don't know: how do I get past …

ET [1982] + Pitfall [1982]

The Video Game Crash Of 1983 wasn't. It wasn't a video game crash nor even "the Atari Crash," it was a crash of the entire North American consumer computing industry, from Atari to Radio Shack to IBM. Every American computing firm fell prey to, yes, offering a slate of sub-par products, many with confusing naming …