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" …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …