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 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 …

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 …

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 …

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], …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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, …

Berzerk [1980]

Not too close, not too close. I'm too big for where. Am I a knight? Right through the neck please. Hercules for a moment, then lament the blue brush. There's no room and there's no rooms. Gives green around the gills. KILL IT. The base place intruder. Regular 6-point figures trace the forever now and …

Pac-Man [1980]

Since Space Invaders [1978], the game in the arcade has become more clear: it's all about managing and producing tension. If Space Invaders was a jazzed-up marching band tune, Pac-Man is an Alfred Schnittke all-out orchestral assault. It could not be a starker contrast to the stately Lunar Lander [1979], in its loud poison-frog colors …

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 …