R-Type [1987]

The first big question that, for me, looms over R-Type [1987] (and many arcade titles of its ilk) is a stupid, but fundamental one: why is there so much dang video game inside this video game? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48TyDnakXZE Dead Can Dance - Dawn Of The Iconoclasts [1987] R-Type is way longer than it seems to "need" …

Ys [1987/1989]

You may or may not have picked up on this if you're a regular reader, but I'm not good at playing video games. I'm kinda bad at them, with limited exception. Most titles, I muddle through with nothing more than bloody-minded persistence to try over and over again. I don't ever know first-hand what high-level …

NetHack [1987-2023]

NetHack [1987-2023] is a "Forever Game." I use that phrase a lot in casual conversation, and now is the time to pin it down and define it for future reference, even though it will mean repeating myself a bit. Theoretically, one can play basically any game forever: people can and do play Super Mario Bros …

The Warden Game [1987]

Content warnings: Rape, violence, terrorism. This game does not fit on this blog. There's a grand overarching historical scaffolding this blog relies on, a problematic grand narrative of tradition where ideas lead to ideas. This blog is in short about examining The Canon, for as uneasy as I am with that idea, with even other …

The Fool’s Errand [1987]

As wont as I am to call everything some kind of "adventure game", citing the enormous and cross-genre influence of Colossal Cave Adventure [1975/77], this is pointedly trying NOT to be an adventure game, for all its resemblance. You can tell, because it has an adventure game inside of itself, which exists to parody adventure …

Maniac Mansion [1987]

The following post is presented in the fabulous and rare FIRST-DRAFT-O-VISION. Normally I would either delete the irrelevant and pointless crossed out portions or rearrange and rethink them so they did amount to a point. Not this time, though! This time I gave up just to get something out. My high school English teacher said …

Leisure Suit Larry [1987]

You ever been to Las Vegas? I don't gamble — too cowardly — but I got a grandma who lives in Vegas. Strange place, you know. Probably my least favorite place in the United States. Most of it is a normal mid-sized American desert city, just with abnormally wide roads, I mean even by American …

Nakayama Miho no Tokimeki High School [1987]

Nakayama Miho no Tokimeki High School [1987] is not one for the ages. It was made in either 3 months or start from finish in 2 weeks flat, depending on which interview you believe, immediately after Hironobu Sakaguchi finished work on Final Fantasy [1987], and right before Yoshio Sakamoto, creator of Metroid [1986], moved on …

Takeshi’s Challenge [1986]

Sincere apologies for skipping around so much in 2022! I’ll get back to the rewind sometime but, honestly, I was getting burnt out something fierce due probably to the lack of variety and it was clear I was in no position to enjoy nor understand Reach For The Stars [1983]. That’s not good for anyone, …

Utopia [1981]

Utopia [1981] often gets cited as the first RTS, or as the first God Game. The Wargaming Scribe has completely and comprehensively dismantled the case for it as the first RTS in just the past few weeks, so I'll take it on it as the first God Game. In short... The Sumerian Game [1964-1967] and …

Eastern Front 1941 [1981]

(Content warning: Nazis. White supremacy, genocide, anti-semitism.) The first Game Developers Conference was held in 1988 in founder Chris Crawford's house. This is funny, if you know a little bit about both. GDC is about as inside-baseball as it gets and is I believe now owned by a marketing company and the cheapest tickets are …

Computer Bismarck [1980]

My dad and my grandpa love a movie called Sink The Bismarck [1960] and every few years they watch it together. Everybody else in my family hates this movie. That includes me. I think it's terrible in a really unique way, though. Sink The Bismarck takes extraordinary pains to drain its character interactions of any …

Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device [1947]

Apologies for the shuffled chronology here, but it is a war game and I was inspired. When Philo T. Farnsworth first demonstrated his all-electronic CRT television to anyone outside of the laboratory where it was invented, he said "here's something the bankers can understand" and turned it on to produce an image of a dollar …

Hamurabi [1968/1973]

(Content warning: Plague.) The Sumerian Game [1964-1967]/Hamurabi [1968/1973] [sic], as that dating indicates, has a particularly convoluted and amorphous release history that I'm going to have to spend the first few paragraphs here just walking through. There were more or less three variations by different authors, although I could expand that all the way into …

HUTSPIEL [1955]

It's important to remark that though I'm starting here, HUTSPIEL [1955] (one of those video games that only survives as documentation) is not even the first computerized wargame. Earlier attempts more closely resembled the classic "umpire" model of wargaming, ala Reisswitz's Kriegspiel [1824], where you give your instructions and communications to the umpire who is …

Dragon Quest [1986]

Let's start in the middle, when most of the plot, such at is, revolves around some guy named Erdrick. Erdrick is presumably dead, but he casts a long shadow. The player character is, they are told in Edrick's Cave, a descendant of Erdrick. A couple random townsfolk comment that they do not actually believe that …

The Legend Of Zelda [1986]

In a way, I could have started my project right here, except I wouldn't have known what I was looking at. The Legend Of Zelda [1986] is a consolidation of almost all dominant gaming paradigms from 1980-1984, all into one place, all right up against one another, sometimes simultaneously. It's a near-brilliant work of synthesis …

OutRun [1986]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDFYjKqg8M0 Koto - Jabdah (Instrumental) [1986] {Down the 5-lane freeway cruises a salmon-pink Ferarri Testarossa Spider at a ludicrous speed. We follow close behind as it bobs and weaves through intermittent traffic and wide curves, squealing its tires for some reason every couple of seconds. In its left seat sits a Dude, and on the …

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, …

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], …