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| Action Game Classics |
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Computer Gaming Classics October 2000 • Vol.8 Issue 10 |
 Action Game Classics Follow The Progression Of Games From Spacewar To Quake II | ||
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Classic Role Playing Games: Discover The Games That Created The Craze Strategy Game Classics: Take Your Turn Playing These Timeless Games Adventure Game Classics: The Evolution Of Interactive Fiction Flight Simulator Classics: Classic Titles Took Game-Playing To A Higher Level Sci-Fi Sims: Classics That Took Gameplay Beyond Infinity Classic Sports & Driving Games: Popularity Grows For Underdog Genres Computer action games are one of the most demanding applications you can run on your home computer. For this reason, the driving force behind play quality is not the skill of the programmer or the operating system but rather the power of the hardware. Throughout the short history of computers, every time there has been an advance in computing power, there has been a comparable advance in action game quality. Computer action games came into being before there were home computers. They began life on university mainframe computers. Because this method of delivery only lent itself to a small audience, the games soon migrated to standalone arcade games. Next, the games came to your home with consoles that connected to your television set, and some of the first games for these consoles were action games. Later, when a home computer became everyday household equipment, programmers also wrote action games for them. To give you an idea of how the action game progressed with each different method of delivery, we have researched some of the action classics of computer gaming. The progression of technology from Spacewar to Quake II is phenomenal. Early Games. For each game delivery method, someone wrote an action game. The first action game, and one of the first computer games, was Spacewar, which was developed in the 1960s at MIT and played on MIT's mainframe. In Spacewar, two spaceships with limited fuel fight each other. The concept of using a computer to simulate fighting proved to be a phenomenal one, and the game's concept ended up being one of the most copied in gaming, and one that programmers still use today. Another early game, from 1972, was Hunt the Wumpus (better known as Wump), which was developed at the University of Massachusetts. The player in Wump had five arrows to use for hunting and killing the Wumpus creature. The next adventure/action game was Adventure (also known as ADVENT and Colossal Caves), which also was released in 1972. In it, the player explored caves and looked for treasure. In 1977, Infocom releases the best-known, text-based game: Zork. Arcade & Console Games.
In 1971, Nutting Associates released Computer Space, the world's first coin-operated arcade videogame. Like so many after it, it was a clone of Spacewar. The game flopped, but the concept of an arcade action game was to become a popular one. However, in 1972, Magnavox released the first home gaming console, the Odyssey, giving the arcade videogame some competition. (In the meantime, Atari released the second arcade game: Pong.) In 1974, Kee, a subsidiary of Atari, released the first true action arcade game: Tank. Instead of battling spaceships like in Spacewar, it had battling tanks. In 1975, Exidy released an arcade game called Death Race, where players tried to drive over running gremlins. This was the first action game to be protested by parents, and it was eventually pulled from the market. The next year, to avoid protest with the release of Super Death Chase, the game had the driver running over ghosts and skeletons instead of gremlins. This whole incident proved to be a precursor of things to come, with parents and politicians protesting the graphic content of action games and gaming companies using strategies like ratings to quell the protests. The year 1975 also sticks out in action gaming history because the home Atari console came to market. In addition, Midway Games released Gun Fight, the first arcade game to use a microprocessor. The microprocessor allowed better play and more options. In 1976, Atari released the Breakout arcade game. Not only was this a very addictive game, the prototype was designed and built by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, who eventually founded Apple Computer. (Microcomputers might not exist were it not for action games.) In 1977, the Atari VCS (Video Computer System) cartridge-based system was released. The same year, Cinematronics released the Space Wars arcade game, which is another clone of Spacewar. The game had positions for two players, making it the first two-player action game. It was also unique because it had many options from which the players could select. The killer game Space Invaders, from Atari, took over in 1980. The game was for Atari's VCS system, and Space Invaders became so popular that people would buy the VCS just to play the game (much as people would later buy a PC just to run Word). The VCS was eventually renamed the 2600, and more than 200 games were produced for it. In 1985, Nintendo released its NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) in New York. Nintendo released it nationwide the next year, and the console-based gaming industry changes forever. Unlike the Atari system, the Nintendo system has advanced over time, and, even today, it is an advanced action game platform with some very exciting games. Computer-Based Games. Due to the limitations of early personal computers, the first games were text only and had no sound or graphics. In 1977, however, 15-year-old Richard Garriott wrote a text game called Akalabeth for the Apple II. In Akalabeth, the player scrolls through a landscape of ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) symbols, completing quests and battling creatures. An update, released in 1980, was called Ultima, and an adventure game franchise was born. In 1980, On-Line Systems (later called Sierra On-Line) released Mystery House for the Apple II. It was the first computer game to use graphics. In 1984, it released King's Quest, which was the first game that let the player walk around a graphical environment. It was a major hit. Then, in 1986, came Space Quest, which is one of the first space-based action games for personal computers. Its main character, space janitor Roger Wilco, became the first game personality. (Not until Lara Croft would gaming have such a well-known personality.)
PC Action Games. The history of PC action games really begins in 1991 with the release of Catacomb 3-D. This was the first 3-D game and was the precursor to Wolfenstein 3D. In 1992, Wolfenstein 3D was released and computer action games changed forever. Some of the innovations included: •The use of a graphics engine. •Looking at the environment through the eyes of the main character. •The ability to move in two dimensions. •The size of the enemies in the game. Overall, it is impossible to overestimate the impact of Wolfenstein 3D on action games. It was a FPS (first-person shooter) action game, and its popularity has caused FPS games to remain popular to this day. The next year, DOOM was released. It took Wolfenstein 3D out of Nazi Germany and put it into a futurist space environment. Its biggest improvement was its ability for gamers to connect together and play a multiplayer version. DOOM and FPS games became so popular that many companies licensed the DOOM engine for their own games. by Ronny Richardson |
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