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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Wizardry [1981]

On my last-played RPG, Rogue [1980], I wrote, "I have always considered the video game RPG in purely negative terms, and I don’t simply mean that I don’t like them." But that was a cowardly way of veiling the truth: I have always considered the video game RPG in purely negative terms largely because I …

Castle Wolfenstein [1981]

(Content warning: Nazis, genocide.) Wolfenstein is one of the longest-standing names in video games, typically trading off positions on Wikipedia's ranked list with Mario depending on which had the latest release. It has a much stranger path there than anything in that top tier other than arguably The Oregon Trail [1971]. The series lays pretty …

The Prisoner [1980]

(Content warning: torture mention.) In the 1300s, there was a game called Obligations. It was played in the early Latin Christian universities by the friars, the bishops, the Franciscans, the students and teachers and such, and its structure informed much of the underlying phrasing and logic of the century's theology and philosophy. Obligations is a …

Mystery House [1980]

Humans are such fragile meat, no? And they're past their expiration date... Life itself is proof of guilt.

Zork [1980]

As far as Popular Game History is concerned, Zork [1980] is the first and last text adventure game ("interactive fiction" sadly never fully filtering out to mass consciousness,) a cute stage-setting for the graphical adventure genre that completely superseded it on technical grounds. This is a perception deeply beholden to a progress narrative and commercial …

House Of Usher [1980]

Edgar Allen Poe's The Fall Of The House Of Usher [1839]'s first paragraph, carried by dizzied, wavering prose that later on gives easily into poetry, foregrounds it as a work of architectural critique firstly — Gothic of course being the vital architectural term — but one that understands the unit of the building as something …

Rogue [1980]

I have always considered the video game RPG in purely negative terms, and I don't simply mean that I don't like them. What I mean is that I have mostly perceived them as the phantom of tabletop RPGs, or more accurately, their exorcism. By taking the aspects of tabletop RPGs that computers can easily replicate, …

Colossal Cave Adventure [1977]

There is no other game of its era or the next one, all the way up to Super Mario Bros [1985], that is anywhere near as celebrated and long-lived as Colossal Cave Adventure [1975/77]. In 1995, Graham Nelson, author of Curses [1993] and of the Inform programming language in which he implemented the port I …

The Oregon Trail [1971]

(Content Warnings: Cannibalism, Genocide.) In these early days of gaming, it’s hard to walk in a straight line without tripping over “firsts.” Looking for the first this or the first that is a hook, it’s exciting to uncover, you feel like something recognizable of our present-day condition is emerging from the strange, foreign world of …