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" …

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 …

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, …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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], …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Donkey Kong [1981]

(Content warning: Racism.) Donkey Kong [1981] is not only the start of a long-running genre-defining game franchise, but also the creation myth of an industry titan. It becomes overburdened with significance: I had to go and delete from Wikipedia the bizarre and preposterously incorrect claim that Donkey Kong was straight up the first video game …

Protected: Qix [1981]

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

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 …

Adventure [1980]

Taking stock of my Class of 1980, I have a mixed bag of diamonds-in-the-rough-at-best. Across the board, we see ambition and innovation that I think exceeds the actual quality of the work, the spirit of the Magnavox Odyssey [1971] more than its honed descendant Pong [1972]: Pac-Man is overstimulating, Rogue is understimulating. House Of Usher …

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 …