1001 VIDEO GAMES
YOU MUST PLAY BEFORE YOU DIE GENERAL EDITOR TONY MOTT PREFACE BY PETER MOLYNEUX
A Quintessence Book First published in the UK in 2010 by Cassell Illustrated a division of Octopus Publishing Group Ltd Endeavour House 189 Shaftesbury Avenue London, WC2H 8JY www.octopusbooks.co.uk An Hachette UK Company www.hachette.co.uk This eBook first published in 2011 by Octopus Publishing Group Ltd Copyright © 2010 Quintessence All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the permission of the copyright holder. ISBN: 978-1-84403-681-3 QSS.VIDG This book was designed and produced by Quintessence 230 City Road London EC1V 2TT www.1001beforeyoudie.com Project Editor Helena Baser Editors Frank Ritter, Simon Ward, Terry Burrows, Tamsin Oxford Designer Rod Teasdale Production Manager Anna Pauletti Editorial Director Jane Laing
Publisher Tristan de Lancey
CONTENTS Preface Introduction Chapter 1: 1970s The Oregon Trail Pong Breakout Boot Hill Combat Space Invaders Adventure Asteroids Galaxian Lunar Lander Chapter 2: 1980s Battle Zone Defender Eamon Missile Command Rogue Tempest MUD Pac-Man Phoenix Zork I Warlords Centipede Galaga Donkey Kong Qix Scramble
Stargate Venture Ms. Pac-Man Frogger Gorf Ultima I Gravitar Joust The Hobbit Choplifter Robotron 2084 Dig Dug Miner 2049er Moon Patrol Mr. Do! Q*Bert Xevious Sokoban Tron Time Pilot Utopia I, Robot Archon Star Wars Chuckie Egg Dragon’s Lair Gyruss Mad Planets M.U.LE. Planetfall Spy Hunter
Crystal Castles Jetpac Juno First Lode Runner Manic Miner Tapper Track & Field Ballblazer Bank Panic H.E.R.O. Boulder Dash Bomb Jack Elite Kung-Fu Master Deus Ex Machine The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Hyper Sports Marble Madness Karate Champ Knight Lore Demolition Derby Lords of Midnight Jet Set Willy Pac-Land Paperboy Spy vs. Spy Bounty Bob Strikes Back Déjà Vu Summer Games II A Mind Forever Voyaging Commando
Yie Ar Kung-Fu Gauntlet Ghosts ’n Goblins Green Beret Gradius Mercenary Little Computer People Tehkan World Cup Super Mario Bros. The Bard’s Tale Fairlight Paradroid Skool Daze Tetris Trinity Alex Kidd in Miracle World Leader Board Alter Ego Arkanoid Darius Gauntlet II Salamander Bubble Bobble Kid Icarus Spindizzy Ikari Warriors Rebelstar OutRun Solomon’s Key Dragon Quest Defender of the Crown
Rolling Thunder Super Sprint 720° The Sentinel Thrust Space Harrier Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels Buggy Boy The Legend of Zelda World Games Super Hang-On Blasteroids NetHack A.P.B. Dungeon Master California Games International Karate + Double Dragon Head Over Heels Nebulus Oids Galaga ’88 Maniac Mansion R-Type Gemini Wing 1943 Operation Wolf Rainbow Islands Shinobi Xybots Sid Meier’s Pirates!
Wizball Carrier Command Forgotten Worlds Ghouls ’n Ghosts Laser Squad Impossible Mission II Power Drift Super Mario Bros. 2 Splatterhouse NARC Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders The New Zealand Story Exile Fantasy World Dizzy North & South SimCity Midwinter Minesweeper Final Fight Revenge of Shinobi Herzog Zwei Pang Populous Prince of Persia Strider Stunt Car Racer Wonderboy III: The Dragon’s Trap Chapter 3: 1990s The Secret of Monkey Island Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe ActRaiser
Klax G-LOC: Air Battle (R-360) Pilotwings Out Zone Powermonger Eye of the Beholder Bomberman Dr. Mario Columns John Madden Football Super Mario Bros. 3 Rampait Raiden Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon Smash TV Snake Rattle ’n’Roll Super Tennis Loom Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge Super Mario World Another World Super Castlevania IV Civilization Cruise for a Corpse Hunter Tecmo Super Bowl Mega Lo Mania Lemmings Star Trek: 25th Anniversary Sonic the Hedgehog The Legend of the Mystical Ninja
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past NHL Hockey Micro Machines Final Fantasy V Dragon Quest V Alone in the Dark Pinball Dreams Contra III: The Alien Wars Desert Strike: Return to the Gulf Cybernator Super Mario Kart Axelay Flashback Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis Mortal Kombat Sonic the Hedgehog 2 The Lost Vikings Virtua Racing The Incredible Machine Ultima VII Dune II Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting NBR Jam Myst Cannon Fodder Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle Doom Gunstar Heroes Ecco the Dolphin Daytona USA Return to Zork
Ridge Racer SimCity 2000 Syndicate Sam & Max Hit the Road UFO: Enemy Unknown Frontier: Elite II Plok Secret of Mana The Settlers The 7th Guest The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening Zombies Ate My Neighbors Virtua Fighter Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds Shadowrun Breath of Fire II Tekken EarthBound Doom II: Hell on Earth Earthworm Jim Final Fantasy VI Micro Machines 2: Turbo Tournament Tempest 2000 Little Big Adventure Gravity Power Monster Max Point Blank Puzzle Bobble Sensible World of Soccer Samurai Shodown II Uniracers
Sub-Terrania Super Punch-Out!! Super Metroid Beneath a Steel Sky Killer Instinct Theme Park King of Fighters ’94 Star Wars: TIE Fighter Worms Command & Conquer Alien Soldier Full Throttle BioForge MechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together Descent Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom Wipeout Virtua Cop 2 The Dig Yoshi’s Island Chrono Trigger The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis Return Fire Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery Sega Rally Championship Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo Duke Nukem 3D Command & Conquer: Red Alert
Civilization II Mario Kart 64 The Neverhood Guardian Heroes International Track & Field Nights Into Dreams GTI Club Rally Côte d’Azur Harvest Moon Marathon Infinity Quake Resident Evil Pilotwings 64 PaRappa the Rapper Time Crisis Saturn Bomberman Tomb Raider Metal Slug Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars Donkey Kong Country 3 Syndicate Wars The House of the Dead 2 Star Control 3 Super Mario 64 Wave Race 64 Wipeout 2097 Vectorman 2 Age of Empires Blade Runner Castlevania: Symphony of the Night Bushido Blade Final Furlong
Blast Corps Beatmania DoDonPachi Intelligent Qube Einhänder Dungeon Keeper Final Fantasy Tactics Fallout Final Fantasy VII Diablo GoldenEye 007 Gran Turismo Star Wars: X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter The Curse of Monkey Island MDK Myth: The Fallen Lords Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II Star Fox 64 X-COM: Apocalypse Snake Tekken 3 The Last Express Grand Theft Auto Ultima Online Quake II Interstate ’76 Total Annihilation Shining Force III R-Type Delta Banjo-Kazooie Burning Rangers
Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri 1080° Snowboarding Dance Dance Revolution Carmageddon II: Carpocalypse Now Cyber Troopers Virtual-On: Oratorio Tangram Body Harvest Xenogears Panzer Dragoon Saga F-Zero X Grand Prix Legends Radiant Silvergun Grim Fandango Half-Life Devil Dice Oddworld: Abe’s Exoddus Metal Gear Solid Street Fighter Alpha 3 Resident Evil 2 Sonic Adventure Wetrix Star Wars: Rogue Squadron Space Station Silicon Valley R4: Ridge Racer Type 4 StarCraft Thief: The Dark Project The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Driver Sega Bass Fishing Aliens Versus Predator Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings Bangai-O
Ape Escape Silhouette Mirage ChuChu Rocket Street Fighter III: Third Strike Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves Grand Theft Auto 2 Ferrari F355 Challenge Chrono Cross Silent Hill Freespace 2 Final Fantasy VIII Jet Force Gemini Front Mission 3 EverQuest Homeworld Mr. Driller SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters’ Clash Mario Golf Outcast Planescape: Torment Quake III Arena Rocket: Robot on Wheels Samba de Amigo Shenmue Seaman The Longest Journey Space Channel 5 System Shock 2 Faselei! Threads of Fate ISS Pro Evolution
Vib-Ribbon Team Fortress Classic The Typing of the Dead Chapter 4: 2000s Perfect Dark Baldur’s Gate II Banjo-Tooie Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes Deus Ex Diablo II Elasto Mania Excitebike 64 Grandia II Paper Mario Crimson Skies Giants: Citizen Kabuto Jet Set Radio Capcom vs. SNK: Millennium Fight 2000 Metropolis Street Racer Resident Evil Code: Veronica Final Fantasy IX Power Stone 2 Phantasy Star Online Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 Silent Scope 2: Dark Silhouette Skies of Arcadia Sin & Punishment The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask The Sims Vagrant Story Super Monkey Ball
Thief II: The Metal Age Sacrifice Animal Crossing Final Fantasy X Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance Commandos 2: Men of Courage Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec Black & White Tribes 2 IL-2 Sturmovik Devil May Cry Frequency Stretch Panic Mario Kart: Super Circuit Gitaroo Man Grand Theft Auto III Return to Castle Wolfenstein Max Payne Halo: Combat Evolved Silent Hill 2 Shenmue II Serious Sam Luigi’s Mansion Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy Maximo: Ghosts to Glory Ikaruga Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis Pikmin Advance Wars Golden Sun
RuneScape Super Smash Bros. Melee The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons/Ages SSX Tricky Star Wars Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader Uplink Age of Mythology Battlefield 1942 Burnout 2: Point of Impact Crazy Taxi 3: High Roller Dark Chronicle Metroid Fusion Metroid Prime Dungeon Siege Medieval: Total War Steel Battalion Eternal Darkness Jet Set Radio Future Soul Calibur II Kingdom Hearts The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven Disaster Report Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Medal of Honor: Allied Assault No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in H.A.R.M.’s Way Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Neverwinter Nights Panzer Dragoon Orta Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast Suikoden III
Shinobi Resident Evil Zero Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus Hitman 2: Silent Assassin Pokémon Ruby/Sapphire Ratchet & Clank Grow The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker Super Mario Sunshine Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos TimeSplitters 2 The Mark of Kri Eve Online Beyond Good & Evil Disgaea: Hour of Darkness Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly Call of Duty Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow Amplitude Donkey Konga Bookworm Wario World Freedom Fighters Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Flipnic Astro Boy: Omega Factor Midtown Madness 3 WarioWare, Inc.: Mega MicroGames! Viewtiful Joe Hidden & Dangerous 2 Jak II
Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga Geometry Wars Pro Evolution Soccer 3 Mojib Ribbon Zoo Keeper Metal Arms: Glitch in the System NBR Street Vol. 2 Kill Switch Ninja Five-0 Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time PlanetSide Railroad Tycoon 3 Rise of Nations Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner Samorost SimCity 4 Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic Tales of Symphonia Manhunt Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory F-Zero GX R-Type Final Gregory Horror Show Zuma Pool Paradise Half-Life 2 Bejeweled 2 Cave Story City of Heroes
Counter-Strike Source Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King Doom 3 Halo 2 EverQuest II Gradius V Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Far Cry Katamari Damacy Mashed Mario Power Tennis Mario vs. Donkey Kong Lumines Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes Metroid Zero Mission Metroid Prime 2: Echoes Def Jam: Fight for NY Ninja Gaiden Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door The Sims 2 Daigasso! Band Brothers Second Sight Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy Sly 2: Band of Thieves Ridge Racers Red Dead Revolver Rome: Total War Pikmin 2 Puyo Pop Fever
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures Torus Trooper Unreal Tournament 2004 WarioWare: Twisted! Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War Spider-Man 2 Transformers World of Warcraft Clubhouse Games Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow Battalion Wars Battlefield 2 Call of Duty 2 God of War Freedom Force vs. The 3rd Reich Civilization IV Chibi-Robo! Drill Dozer Darwinia Dead or Alive 4 Animal Crossing: Wild World Yoshi: Touch & Go Advance Wars: Dual Strike Golden Tee Live F.E.A.R Fahrenheit
Fable Fa Guild Wars Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance Garry’s Mod Devil May Cry 3 Meteos Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories GT Legends Guitar Hero Gunstar Super Heroes Fire Pro Wrestling Returns Killer 7 LEGO Star Wars Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time Mario Kart DS Jade Empire Rogue Galaxy Need for Speed: Most Wanted Project Gotham Racing 3 Nintendogs Tower Bloxx Trauma Center: Under the Knife Rebelstar: Tactical Command Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney We Love Katamari Silent Hunter III Shadow of the Colossus Psychonauts The Movies The Warriors
TimeSplitters: Future Perfect Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath SWAT 4 Ninja Gaiden Black Resident Evil 4 X3: Reunion Armadillo Run Line Rider Mother 3 Uno Gears of War Black Prey ArmA: Armed Assault Company of Heroes Bully Yakuza 2 Dead Rising DEFCON Eets: Hunger. It’s Emotional Elebits Elite Beat Agents Tomb Raider Legend Exit 2 Earth Defense Force 2017 Fight Night Round 3 Rockstar Presents Table Tennis Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories Art Style: Orbient
Final Fantasy XII Okami God Hand Flow GTR 2 Guitar Hero II Hitman: Blood Money Jeanne d’Arc Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 Just Cause Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops Gunpey Mercury Meltdown Naked War Slitherlink Gottlieb Pinball Classics Lumines Live Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends Medieval II: Total War Test Drive Unlimited OutRun 2006: Coast 2 Coast Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Double Agent The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess Viva Piñata Trauma Center: Second Opinion Slaves to Armok II: Dwarf Fortress Pokémon Diamond and Pearl Tony Hawk’s Project 8 Virtua Fighter 5 Virtua Tennis 3
Wii Sports Dreamfall: The Longest Journey Rayman Raving Rabbids Microsoft Flight Simulator X Ultimate Ghosts ’n Goblins Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation Crush BioShock Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Anno 1701: Dawn of Discovery Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift Crackdown Everybody’s Golf 5: World Tour Contra 4 Free Running FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage Crysis Flywrench E4 Final Fantasy IV Desktop Tower Defense Everyday Shooter MotorStorm Forza Motorsport 2 Halo 3 God of War II GrimGrimoire Colin McRae: Dirt Heavenly Sword Hexic 2 Hotel Dusk: Room 215
Mass Effect Odin Sphere Metroid Prime 3: Corruption Mercury Meltdown Revolution No More Heroes Pain Picross DS Professor Layton and the Curious Village Pac-Man Champ Ed Peggle Planet Puzzle League Puzzle Quest Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction Portal Quadradius Retro Game Challenge Space Giraffe Rock Band Singstar The Darkness S.T.R.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl The Witcher John Woo Presents Stranglehold Team Fortress 2 Super Mario Galaxy Super Stardust HD Supreme Commander Logan’s Shadow The World Ends with You The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune Wii Fit Wipeout Pulse Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box Unreal Tournament 3 Warhawk Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros’ Treasure World in Conflict Patapon Carcassonne Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts Audiosurf Auditorium Bejeweled Twist Afrika Critter Crunch Galcon Battlefield: Bad Company Bionic Commando Rearmed Mario Kart Wii Braid Burnout Paradise Buzz Quiz TV Castle Crashers Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution Cursor*10 Fable II N+ De Blob Echochrome
Fantastic Contraption Dead Space Fallout 3 Bangai-O Spirits Devil May Cry 4 Far Cry 2 Gears of War 2 Defense Grid: The Awakening Fatal Frame IV: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse God of War: Chains of Olympus Left 4 Dead Maboshi: The Three Shape Arcade Spelunky Age of Empires: Mythologies Grand Theft Auto IV Guitar Hero World Tour Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 Let’s Tap Tetris Party LocoRoco 2 Lost Winds Ninja Gaiden II Metal Bear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots Midnight Club: Los Angeles MotorStorm: Pacific Rift Race Driver: Grid S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky Resistance 2 Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 Pure World of Goo
Rez HD PixelJunk Monsters Top Spin 3 Rock Band 2 Saints Row 2 Sins of a Solar Empire Siren: Blood Curse LittleBigPlanet Space Invaders Extreme BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger Soul Calibur IV Wipeout HD Monster Hunter Freedom Unite Spore Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix Street Fighter lV Super Smash Bros. Brawl Valkyria Chronicles Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 Tomb Raider Underworld Reset Generation Trism Edge / Edgy Drop7 Trackmania: United Forever Trackmania DS Fieldrunners Mega Man 9 Art Style: Intersect Borderlands Bonsai Barber
Captain Forever Boom Blox Bash Party Canabalt Assassin’s Creed II Batman: Arkham Asylum Bit. Trip Core Gravity Crash Battlefield 1943: Pacific Demigod Rion: The Tower of Eternity Bayonetta Half-Minute Hero Fat Princess Forza Motorsport 3 Colin McRae: Dirt 2 Dead Space Extraction Eliss DJ Hero Death Tank Demon’s Souls Dissidia Final Fantasy The House of the Dead: Overkill Dragon Age: Origins Empire: Total War Crayon Physics Deluxe Flight Control Noby Noby Boy Flower F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin Football Manager 2010 GeoDefense Swarm
Fuel Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Grand Slam Tennis FIFA 2010 Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned Grand Theft Ruto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars Guitar Hero: Metallica Halo 3: ODST Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes Machinarium Halo Wars IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey Infamous Left 4 Dead 2 Killzone 2 Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure Lost Winds: Winter of the Melodias Little King’s Story NHL 10 MLB 09: The Show Race Pro Need for Speed: Shift One-Dot Enemies Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena Shatter UFC 2009: Undisputed WWE Smackdown vs Raw 2010 Swords & Soldiers
Fiants vs. Zombies Prototype Punch-Out!! The Path EyePet Rhythm Heaven Rolando 2 Resident Evil 5 Sin & Punishment: Successorto the Sky The Sims 3 Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor Skate 2 Uncharted 2: Rmong Thieves The Beatles: Rock Band Starship Patrol Scribblenauts Trine The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai Shadow Complex Red Faction Guerrilla You, Me & the Cubes Torchlight The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks Zen Bound Reflect Missile Space Invaders Infinity Gene Muramasa: The Demon Blade Zeno Clash Mighty Flip Champs Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 NBA 2K10
Cogs Wii Sports Resort A Boy and His Blob PixelJunk Shooter Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of war II Time Gentlemen, Please! Chapter 5: 2010s Max and the Magic Marker VVVVVV Mass Effect 2 BioShock 2 Army of Two: The 40th Day Heavy Rain Chime Neptune’s Pride Alien Zombie Death Contributors Picture Credits Acknowledgments
PREFACE
By Peter Molyneux, games developer When I was invited to contribute the foreword to this book I didn’t hesitate in saying yes, not only because it’s the work of some of the brightest talents in the field of game writing, but because it’s a celebration of what I believe is the world’s most engaging form of entertainment. Video games have been my favorite way to pass time since I first saw a dedicated Pong console among the toasters and TVs in an electrical retailer way back in the 1970s. Pong, made by Atari, is a simple game involving batting a square-shaped ball back and forth to the accompaniment of bleepy sound effects, but I was bewitched immediately, and knew that I had to have one of my own. So I got the console home, plugged it into a portable black-and-white television… and within half an hour became consumed by boredom. Ten minutes later I took the machine apart in order to see how it worked. It never worked again, of course. But I remained just as interested in playing games as I was in trying to decipher them. As the 1970s rolled around to the 1980s, video games had become a worldwide phenomenon. I began visiting pubs, not to drink beer but to play the arcade games you would always find there, nestled in corners. My visits to local cinemas were no longer about sitting down and watching the latest blockbuster movies but playing the arcade machines that lined the foyers. And of course I spent a lot of time in arcades, too. Nowadays most arcades—where they exist at all—have reputations for being seedy and anachronistic, but during their heyday they felt like magical places. Space Invaders. Asteroids. Defender. The incredible games during the early days kept on coming, and I played for hours at a time in these darkened spaces illuminated by alien spacecraft fizzing around cathode-ray tubes. I wasn’t good at any sport, and I had no interest in academic work, but here was something at which I could excel, registering my initials on hi-score tables with every session. Video games had become my life. I decided that I wanted to make my own. My first computer, in 1980, was a primitively powered Acorn Atom, but I couldn’t wait to set about writing my first program: a routine that would make a dot move across the screen. Task complete, I ran the code and there it was on the television: a moving pixel. In that moment the world around me seemed to become brighter, as if somehow God had descended from heaven. It was like listening to The Beatles for the first time; I wanted to share it with everyone. Television joined cinema as an activity that no longer held any interest for me as I launched myself into the world of making video games. I bought piles of magazines containing typein game listings that either didn’t work or failed to deliver on the promise of the far-fetched illustrations that surrounded them on the page. At first I was disappointed, and then inspired to work harder on my own creations. That was 30 years ago. My passion for creating video games hasn’t diminished since—and nor has my appetite for playing them. When I was presented with this list of 1001 games I was pleased to see among them many of my personal favorites from across the years. Games like Ultima, Dungeon Master, Dune II, Command & Conquer, Super Mario 64, Tomb Raider, Ico, Eternal Darkness, Metal Gear Solid, Half-Life, The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time, Halo and Uncharted 2. Age hasn’t been kind to some of the older entries within these pages, but even the clunkiest-looking examples contain themes or ideas that have been important within the context of gaming’s evolution, and to anyone with a serious interest in the medium, the list as a whole provides a fascinating illustration of the progress made since its formative years during the 1970s.
You can look at this book as a catalog of games you must play before you die, but you can also look at it as an illustration of social and cultural change in our world. There was a world before games, and a very different world afterward. In making unbelievably sophisticated technology understandable—and interactive—within seconds, the change they have brought about has been immense. Video games do a better job than any other electronic medium in making technology accessible (compare the user experience with grappling with a spreadsheet or word processor, for example), and their influence today can be found everywhere. Video games will continue to change the world. Right now we’re living in a particularly transformative age and undergoing more significant evolution than at any other time in gaming history. Consider the impact of social games via Facebook, the empowerment of players via user-generated content, the opportunities available to independent gamemakers, and the incredible diversity of options providing for downloadable content (once upon a time, getting hold of new games involved long waits between releases and then a trip to the store; nowadays, you can get new content piped into your home every day). Nintendo did a great deal to broaden gaming’s appeal with its DS and Wii consoles, and more recently Microsoft and Sony have moved further toward shaking things up, too. Microsoft’s Natal, in particular, by removing the traditional controller from the equation, represents an enormous step forward for gaming. As a consequence, it makes us designers really sweat—but it’s an immensely rewarding challenge. The world has changed by a degree I couldn’t have imagined when I first returned home with my Pong console, to the point that nowadays, no matter where you are in the world, no matter what your age or gender, you cannot say that video games aren’t for you. There are certainly plenty of examples for everyone within the 1001 collected here. Hopefully you’ll be as inspired by them as I have been throughout my gaming life.
Guildford, United Kingdom
INTRODUCTION
By Tony Mott When I mentioned to a friend that I was working on this book, his immediate response was: “You really think there are 1001 video games worth playing?” I couldn’t help but feel put out by his reaction. Of course there are 1001 video games worth playing. There are many more than that, in fact, but 2177 obviously doesn’t have 1001’s trim symmetry. (Also, 1001 is six fewer syllables to pronounce in a book store.) I don’t imagine that the editors of 1001 Books or 1001 Movies faced such cynicism, but of course the sort of preconceptions that tend to linger around video games do not afflict most other forms of media. Compared to television, literature or music, the lowly video game isn’t very widely understood. Perhaps we shouldn’t expect it to be. Though the earliest video games were conceived on devices such as laboratory oscilloscopes during the 1950s, the first commercial example did not appear until 1971. Books have been manufactured for many hundreds of years, while movies have their origins in the late 1800s. In comparative evolutionary terms, video games may have learned to walk, but they are still in the process of learning to feed themselves without smearing food into their hair. And, just as children are so often dismissed or chided by tutting adults, video games tend to be marginalized, often registering on the radars of social commentators only when it is time to serve up the latest round of condemnation. Over the years I have met many apparently otherwise sensible people who simply prefer not to engage with video games, preferring instead to believe that the world of gaming begins and ends with Space Invaders, a game that was released in 1978. In reality, of course, over the past 40 years video games have evolved to the point that the key trait that defined them in the beginning—their interactivity—is about the only thing the early examples have in common with today’s state of the art. 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die presents a vivid illustration of the progress made since the first Computer Space arcade cabinet was wheeled into an American bar in 1971, and I hope that in bringing together such a large number of video games this book proves to be an inspiration for all of us who make and play them. Nowadays there exist all sorts of books about video games, but to my knowledge there has never been one offering a critical collection as comprehensive as the one you’re holding in your hands. Many lists detailing the “world’s 100 best video games” have been published over the years—indeed, I’ve been responsible for a few —but 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die is a more ambitious collection. Some of the most talented names working in video-game writing today have produced the content within these pages, drawing on many years of experience and, in every case, deep-rooted passion for the medium, and I’m confident that we have assembled an incisive, trustworthy companion for anyone with an interest in video games. Why produce this book? On the one hand, it’s a celebration of video gaming, and serves as a guide to 1001 examples whose delights deserve an audience, but it’s also recognition of accomplishment. Not enough credit is given to the diversity that now exists within video games. They have evolved not only in predictable ways, exploring broader and more complex themes while their audio-visual fidelity has risen in line with the advance of technology, but in the way we interact with them, too. Now, via devices such as Microsoft’s Kinect, they can be played by simply standing in front of the television and moving your body. They can be played with keyboards, joysticks, and mice, via PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 joypad controllers, by prodding iPhone or Nintendo DS touch screens, or by waving a Nintendo Wii or PlayStation Move motion controller. You can even cut out
any kind of physical exertion and wear a headset that facilitates control directly from your brain. The only common thread, in fact, is the one at the center of all this entertainment: interactivity. A widening of perspective among those who make video games has brought about this variety. The true revolution within the medium didn’t happen with the release of Space Invaders, or, later, as a consequence of technology being able to render realistic-looking 3D worlds on our screens. It happened when video game companies began to look beyond the young male demographic that, a long time ago, they identified as their key consumer, and whose focus-tested makeup they dedicated their energies to feeding. Research has shown that the average video game player today is in his or her mid-thirties—and it is very often a “her,” with some studies suggesting that the gender split is in the region of 50:50. We have reached a point at which there are video games for everyone, regardless of age, sex, or strand of society. Where once video games were informed by pen-and-paper, roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons and sci-fi movie blockbusters like Star Wars, such staples no longer dominate the sales charts as they once did, and the form of the video game has evolved alongside the way we interact with it. In addition to embarking on monster-slaying quests and martial arts tournaments, the players of today’s video games can compete in cooking challenges, dance or sing along to their favorite tunes, get fit via exercise regimes, care for pets, manage farms, and explore the exotic world of hairdressing, to name but a few activities. Meanwhile the decision of game creators to put more power into consumers’ hands is having a profound effect on the relationships we have with our entertainment, giving life to a new world of usergenerated content. And all of this is increasingly happening against an online backdrop —the act of playing shared with friends (and strangers). Which brings us back to video gaming’s beginnings, when formative industry powerhouse Atari’s first release, Pong, was released as a two-player game predominantly because its designers believed that a game that encouraged social interaction would have a better chance of succeeding in bars across America. (They were correct: Pong was a minor phenomenon in the early ’70s.) Given that this book is dedicated to the history of video games, many of the entries within its pages fall into the category of “traditional” video game, but there are plenty more leftfield examples, too. In terms of organization, we have ordered them by year of release. Each entry details the game’s format, original release date, developer, and genre. Many games have appeared on three or more platforms, in which case its format is referenced as “various,” although in certain cases where a definitive version exists that should be played in preference to others, that is the only format noted. How to go about playing all of these games? Unlike other media, such as books, video games don’t tend to have long shelf lives. Instead, the traditional publishing model will see a game released with an attendant marketing push, at which point it has its opportunity to sink or swim. Sometimes a particularly profitable hit will be republished at a later date, but too few are given multiple bites of the cherry. More significantly, the devices on which we have played video games have been superseded by technologically superior hardware, and it’s only in recent years that backward compatibility—allowing GameCube games to be played on the Wii console that succeeded it, for example—has become a popular feature on console platforms. Even on a platform as ostensibly static as the PC, the evolution of operating systems mean that it can be a trial getting even a five-year-old game running on a brand new computer. Fortunately, enthusiasts around the world have worked hard to preserve video game history, and emulators exist that can resurrect on your PC’s desktop just about every home-gaming platform ever released—googling “emulators” will get you started. Elsewhere on
the Internet, eBay represents a treasure trove of old games and gaming gear. For PC owners, Good Old Games (www.gog.com) republishes many classics for the platform, each one downloadable from the site for $10 or less. On consoles, creators of classic Japanese arcade games, including Capcom, Sega, and Namco, have released various collections that bring together notable arcade hits from the 1980s, including the likes of Ghosts’n Goblins, Space Harrier, and Pac-Man, which run on many of today’s platforms. Then there are initiatives on the part of console manufacturers Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft; via their respective online gaming services users are able to purchase an extensive selection of legendary titles, including the standard-setting Super Mario World, the seminal Final Fantasy VII, and a galaxy of games that once lined the walls of video arcades the world over. With enough desire and persistence you should be able to track down even the strangest-looking curiosities featured within these pages. As Peter Molyneux notes in his preface, some of the older examples in this book are a little ragged around the edges, but don’t write off a game just because it looks like some kind of digital cave painting. The ships that sail the seas of 1982’s Utopia, for example, are hardly works of art— how could they be, consisting of so few pixels?—but the game as a whole is a key entry in the strategy game genre and counts among its progeny such all-conquering series as SimCity and Civilization. I would encourage open-mindedness throughout. After all, it’s the willingness to look beyond convention and expectation that has so energized the world of video games down the years, and continues to push it forward today. It’s not always easy. None of the industry’s big publishers foresaw Facebook or Apple’s iPhone as gaming platforms waiting to explode, but that is precisely what happened, shaking away dusty, old-fashioned paradigms in the process. The one constant in the world of video games is change, and the more prepared we are to embrace it, the better placed we’ll be to benefit. At some point in the future hopefully we’ll be able to document such change in a subsequent edition of this book.
1970s
• The first home video game console—the Magnavox Odyssey—is launched in 1972; 100,000 units are sold in the first year • In 1975 Atari releases the coin-op table tennis game Pong on a home console; it is called Home Pong • Pac-Man, Centipede, and other video games are first made available on home PCs such as the Tandy TRS-80 • Games are sold to players on floppy disk or cassettes, wrapped in plastic bags • Space Invaders and Asteroids are released in 1979, triggering the golden age of arcade games
Contents The Oregon Trail Pong Breakout Boot Hill Combat Space Invaders Adventure Asteroids Galaxian Lunar Lander
1970s
The Oregon Trail Original release date : 1971 Platform : Various Developer : MECC Genre : Edutainment
Millions of children grew up in the 1980s with The Oregon Trail installed on a classroom PC. Notionally presented as educational software, students learned almost nothing about the actual Oregon Trail—mostly that it was a place where you shot bears, forded rivers, and occasionally died of cholera. Yet for a generation, The Oregon Trail was a glorious Trojan horse that somehow made it okay to play computer games during school hours. It’s a solid turn-based strategy game in its own right, too. So while it may have been a terrible history lesson, it did teach kids how to make a game plan and manage the balance of risk versus reward. Surely that was more important than some dusty old pioneers, anyway. You begin in the city of Independence, where you choose your lot in life: farmer, carpenter, or banker. The cushier jobs may have more cash available to them, but even as a banker, the game is punishingly difficult. The pioneer life was no cakewalk, after all, so you have to manage resources carefully as your wagon lopes toward Oregon. Do you keep your family fat and healthy or starve them to stretch the food budget? Buy more bullets for hunting or grab a spare part in case of a breakdown? The long grind of the trail is broken up by landmarks, most memorably river crossings. It’s here that
many foolhardy players have met their demise by wading into eight-feet-deep waters just to save a buck on ferry fare. The Oregon Trail has seen countless ports and remakes since its 1971 debut, but the canonical version is probably the 1985 version for Apple II computers. It’s this edition, with color graphics that were remarkably detailed for the time, that most players remember as their first encounter with that strange beast known as “edutainment.” JT See all games from the 1970s.
1970s
Pong Original release date : 1972 Platform : Various Developer : Atari Genre : Sports
According to legend, shortly after the first Pong prototype was installed at Andy Capp’s Tavern in Sunnyvale, California, Atari received a phone call from the bar’s owner, who complained that the machine had broken. The engineer who’d built the game, Al Alcorn, drove to the pub to take a look. He found that the hardware was working just fine. The problem was an unexpected one: Patrons had fed so many quarters into the coin slot that the machine could take no more. An industry had been born. Pong conquered bars and arcades, and, eventually, living rooms too, with a dedicated home version. A game whose instructions can be summed up in one sentence, “Avoid missing ball for high score,” is easy for anybody to pick up and immediately understand. Players control one of two rectangular paddles along either side of the screen, trying to prevent the ball from escaping their side of the playing field, and sneak it past their opponent’s paddle on the other. As an electronic version of table tennis, Pong is simple and intuitive. Its lineage as a pub game is obvious—the rules are hardly different from those of foosball. Pong also demonstrates a subtle and important lesson of good game design, still applicable today,
which is that the little things matter. Depending on where the ball strikes the paddle, players can give it “English,” changing the angle of its trajectory to keep opponents off balance. Pong’s other unheralded accomplishment is its creation of credible artificial intelligence. Though playing against a human opponent is preferable, Pong’s computer-controlled second player is a worthy substitute. Good without being great, it’s capable both of great saves and boneheaded mistakes. Though, unlike Andy Capp’s customers, it’s still on top of its game at last call. MK See all games from the 1970s.
1970s
Breakout Original release date : 1976 Platform : Various Developer : Atari Genre : Action
Nearly four decades on and video games still regularly draw inspiration from Atari’s formative, blockbusting arcade game. In a very real way, Breakout defined the proto-vocabulary of its medium: taking the paddle and ball of Pong’s redacted approximation of table tennis and repurposing it into something unique, novel, and only possible in a video game. Conceptualized by Atari founder, Nolan Bushnell, and one of the company’s most influential engineers, Steve Bristow, the top third of Breakout’s screen is lined with bricks. You bounce a ball off these bricks to make them disappear, one by one, catching the ball on its rebound with a sliding paddle to prevent it from disappearing off the bottom of the screen. The skill comes in directing your shots in such a way as to hit the remaining bricks at the top of the screen, scaling up from Pong’s need to simply hit the ball to take into greater account the angle at which you strike it. Walls too must be used to bounce the ball around the play area, introducing yet more scope for strategy and showboating. Originally played on a black-and-white monitor in arcades, cabinet screens had strips of tinted acetate applied to give the impression of color. Increased difficulty was introduced to the game by
having the paddle shrink to half its size once the ball has broken through the top row of bricks and hit the top of the play area. The understated elegance of both the core idea and its execution ensures that Breakout remains a playable classic to this day. One of the cornerstones of the medium of sports games, its influence can be felt in countless contemporary titles from PopCap’s pachinko hybrid Peggle to Q-Games’ Reflect Missile. SP See all games from the 1970s.
1970s
Boot Hill Original release date : 1977 Platform : Arcade Developer : Midway Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
You could argue that Boot Hill is really just Pong redesigned by a John Wayne fan. Two players take on the role of cowboys on opposite sides of a Western backdrop lined with cacti and the odd wagon. Just as in Atari’s landmark bat-and-ball game, you can ricochet your shots off the top and bottom of the screen. Yet unlike Pong, with its famously concise instructions to avoid missing the projectile at all costs, the aim is to dodge everything your opponent fires at you. With only six shots in your revolver and a merciless time limit set on the action, the game is surprisingly realistic. Just as in a real-life gunfight, you’re torn between coming out blasting (and unwisely emptying your clip in a flash; there’s no reload) or taking your time and trying to plug your CPU or human opponent with a single, wellaimed shot. Designed by Dave Nutting, as a jazzed-up semi-sequel to his earlier Gun Fight (1975), Boot Hill builds on Pong’s simple projectile physics and lets you fantasize about becoming a quick-draw shooter. One of the problems of resurrecting retro coin-op games is that you can’t always recreate the tactile realities of their cabinets—emulation on a modern PC only goes so far. Back in the day, a large part of Boot Hill’s attraction came from its cabinet’s low-tech approach, which used mirrors to
project its monochrome action onto a hand-drawn overlay of a frontier town. Playing without it isn’t half as fun, especially since you don’t get to see Boot Hill itself—a graveyard where dead players are transported and turned into headstones while a funeral march blasts from the speakers. The graveyard is a cheap trick, yet it does nod to the high-stakes at risk in every Old West gunfight: bang, bang, you’re really dead. JRu See all games from the 1970s.
1970s
Combat Original release date : 1977 Platform : VCS Developer : Atari Genre : Shoot ’Em Up Anyone buying one of the seminal Atari VCS gaming consoles would find the Combat cartridge bundled as a part of the package. So from the five years following its launch in 1977, millions slammed the plastic wedge into their faux-wood-grained machines and thumbed away at rubberized joysticks, lobbing square electronic bullets at the person on the couch next to them. And yet the chunky tanks, jet fighters, and bombers eternally warring in Combat never quite managed to enter the public consciousness in the same way as Pac-Man, Space Invaders, or Mario. That’s because the enemy in Combat was us. It’s easy to forget that before games evolved into predominantly singleperson experiences, they were more usually player-versus-player contests. Combat is an early, vital example of the multiplayer shooter. Atari claimed that Combat was able to deliver twenty-seven different games, but back then the addition of a cloud, barrier, or different kind of bullet was considered dramatic enough to earn another tick on the back of the box. There are really only a couple different ways to play: with tanks or with planes. The most game-changing variation adds bullets that ricochet. The “tank pong” flavor transforms volleys into trigonometric contests, making a connected bank shot mandatory to score a hit. Game play itself is simple: Opponents tilt joysticks to jockey for position, aim, and fire. Hits score a point and put the enemy in a debilitating, momentary tailspin. The formula isn’t all that different from the kill, spawn, and repeat of the contemporary first-person shooter. The end result was the same in 1977 as it is today—when players are evenly matched and competition gets heated, the graphics and sounds fade into the background. It’s just you against them. GM See all games from the 1970s.
1970s
Space Invaders Original release date : 1978 Platform : Arcade Developer : Taito Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
Everybody knows Space Invaders. Almost everybody’s played it too, struggling through wave after wave after deadening wave of planet Earth’s least imaginative attackers; firing at endless wobbling drones, who track back and forth, getting ever closer until mankind is reduced to a single turret, scurrying around the bottom of the screen, taking its last few careful potshots from behind the slowly disintegrating shield. I f Pac-Man is about memory and Donkey Kong is all about story, then Space Invaders is fascinated with panic: the unshakable twitchiness that picks up as the last invaders evade your frantic shots; as the speed increases and the nasty little deep-space squids get lower and lower until you’re within touching distance of their mandibles. The game’s controls are simple to the point of being invisible, and the objective so direct that Space Invaders couldn’t help but be a classic. (It was so successful in Japan that the Ministry of Finance was forced to mint more of the 100-yen coins the arcade machine ate in such staggering quantities.) That said, Space Invaders does have a few subtleties in store—from the passing UFO that can give you a much-needed points boost (particularly if you’re using one of a handful of well-used
methods to predict its arrival), to the matter of locating the best places to aim and fire as you keep ahead of the descending horde. Sparse and monochromatic, Space Invaders is one of those games whose appeal younger generations will struggle to understand. At the time of release, however, this was nothing less than a full-blown phenomenon. Clones, such as Galaga, would go on to break bold new ground of their own, but without Taito’s humble mega-hit, video game history would most probably be unrecognizable territory. CD See all games from the 1970s.
1970s
Adventure Original release date : 1979 Platform : VCS Developer : Atari Genre : Adventure
All the early adventure games on home computers were purely text based. Players would type in commands, such as “go north,” “drink potion,” “throw rock,” “kill snake,” and subsequently be rewarded with a paragraph or two informing them of just how their plan had played out. You needed a keyboard to make them work properly. In other words—and unless you were a fan of computer fonts—there wasn’t much in the way of spectacle along the way. Everything relied on imagination—a dangerous foundation on which to build a business. In 1979, however, all that changed when Atari effectively ported Will Crowther’s legendary text adventure, Colossal Cave Adventure, to its VCS home console. Somewhat basic graphics replaced the time-worn prose, the VCS’s controller stood in for the keyboard, and a rather primitive—but wonderfully evocative—genre took its first baby steps toward the elaborate and florid fantasy worlds available to today’s players. A programming marvel at the time, the game fit into the space of just 4K (by way of comparison, the standard Google logo takes up 8K). Adventure also provided the gaming world with one of its first Easter eggs. Designer Warren Robinett, tiring of his years of anonymous toil spent at the coal-
face of game production, hid his name within one of the game’s rooms—a chamber that could only be opened by using a single-pixel key known as “The Dot.” Stiff as the challenge was, and slight the reward, it wasn’t long before someone had uncovered the secret and told everyone about it—proof that even in the early days of the genre, adventure games were already capable of generating real devotion in their audiences. Some things, then, never change. CD See all games from the 1970s.
1970s
Asteroids Original release date : 1979 Platform : Arcade Developer : Atari Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
Games these days tend to have complex stories; three-dimensional characters; and rousing, nearcinematic soundtracks. They start with a bang, pace themselves carefully for a big finale, and leave you wanting more—generally even teasing a sequel as the fireworks die down. They have epic drama, decent performances, and elaborately detailed worlds. Asteroids doesn’t, and never did. Asteroids has boulders, unforgiving physics, and very little else. Oh, yes. You play as a triangle. Despite such inauspicious details, Atari’s coin-op champion remains more than just a dusty curio today. At the time of release, the sharp laser-etched vector visuals and frantic rock-blasting explosions made it quite the looker, and it’s proved rather timeless in its simplicity, blinking out of the screen in the twenty-first century with a chic sense of stripped-back assurance a lot of modern games have tried, unsuccessfully, to emulate. More important, though, is the quality of the game play itself. Asteroids is still good for a sweaty half hour as you blast chunks of space matter into shrapnel, dodge the oncoming debris by boosting cautiously around the screen, and lie in wait for the points-heavy flying saucer that twitters through the mayhem every so often, just itching to be blown to pieces.
A stark hi-scoring compulsion, Asteroids is a lot smarter than it looks. Veteran Atari developer Ed Logg was something of a perfectionist, paying attention to everything from the heft of the game’s physics to the peculiarly memorable leaderboard font, and his craftsmanship shows in every facet of the game itself. These rocks may be made from nothing but light, but even now they remain entirely capable of bowling you over. CD See all games from the 1970s.
1970s
Galaxian Original release date : 1979 Platform : Arcade Developer : Namco Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
Galaxian was the first release by Namco, a former merry-go-round manufacturer whose later hits (perhaps you’ve heard of Pac-Man) would leave this debut in the dust. To the modern gamer, Galaxian looks like an evolutionary step that’s best forgotten: the missing link between the groundbreaking but rigid Space Invaders and Galaxian’s own successor, Galaga. On release, Galaxian was revolutionary, boasting a full-color display and replacing the clumsy aliens of Space Invaders with sharp-winged, sinister, yet vividly colored, ships. (The flagship enemy type became a minor icon and a bonus item in both Pac-Man and Dig Dug) Another significant advancement was in the movement of the enemy’s attack, the robotic to-and-fro motion of Space Invaders enhanced by squadrons of fighters unexpectedly peeling out of formation to dive-bomb your positions. Namco’s game even had a theme tune. Clearly it represented a step forward (something certain arcade operators recognized by making one game of Galaxian cost twice as much as what players expected to pay). But it didn’t step far enough. You’re still limited to just one shot at a time—and with so much happening on the screen, that limit feels unnatural. You have to plan every shot and watch every
attack, even as kamikaze line up for a crack at you. And even the dive-bombing mechanic feels limited next to the complex and graceful patterns that would emerge in Galaga, the sequel that endures as one of the most highly regarded classics of the golden age of video gaming. But Galaxian is still worth a credit or two, even if you’re not a history buff. With its appealing visuals and wellbalanced game play, Galaxian delivers a well-executed shooter game that, in truth, can only be faulted for what its maker hadn’t yet invented. CDa See all games from the 1970s.
1970s
Lunar Lander Original release date : 1979 Platform : Arcade Developer : Atari Genre : Flight Simulator Cold and actually rather serious in tone, Lunar Lander may sound like a knockabout sciencefiction romp, but this classic arcade game is tainted with a very slight whiff of education. In essence, Atari’s offering is a bare-bones physics simulator in which you balance fuel consumption, thrust, gravity, and momentum to land the titular spacecraft on a brightly abstracted moon, frantically recalculating your strategy on the fly, to avoid blowing yourself into pieces in the process. It may sound fairly dull, but—surprisingly—it isn’t at all. In its peculiar mixture of abstraction and precision, Lunar Lander actually feels real in a way almost none of its competitors ever have. Other space games may offer flashy nebulae, swift pirouetting craft, and intergalactic adventure filled with alien encounters and laser battles, but Lunar Lander is the only one to allow you to briefly lose yourself in the fantasy, that you’re genuinely onboard an Apollo mission, staring feverishly at the control panel, praying that you aren’t about to get your away-team buddies comprehensively pulverized before they get to plant their flags. And, in its own modest little way, Lunar Lander was forward thinking, too. Physics is now one of the great battlegrounds of modern gaming, a back-of-the-box bullet point in everything from shooters like Half-Life 2 to quirky puzzlers like Boom Blox. Lunar Lander got there first, when other games were still drawing childish mazes or trying to convince you that a large letter X was actually a racing car. Atari’s classic might be light on genuine fun, then, and a title that appeals to the more bookish, solitary manner of children, but it’s also an early indicator of the potential scope and quirks of games that the industry is only now reaching to embrace. CD See all games from the 1970s.
1980s
• Pac-Man is released in 1980, attracting players of both sexes to game arcades • Released in 1982, the Commodore 64 becomes the most popular US game platform • The Nintendo NES first appears in 1983; its US launch in 1985 is accompanied by the release of eighteen titles, including Super Mario Bros. • Home computer gaming overtakes the playing of games in arcades in 1984 • In the late 1980s dedicated sound cards improve the gaming experience • Nintendo releases the Game Boy handheld video game device in 1989
Contents Battle Zone Defender Eamon Missile Command Rogue Tempest MUD Pac-Man Phoenix Zork I Warlords Centipede Galaga Donkey Kong Qix Scramble Stargate Venture Ms. Pac-Man Frogger Gorf Ultima I Gravitar Joust The Hobbit Choplifter Robotron 2084 Dig Dug Miner 2049er
Moon Patrol Mr. Do! Q*Bert Xevious Sokoban Tron Time Pilot Utopia I, Robot Archon Star Wars Chuckie Egg Dragon’s Lair Gyruss Mad Planets M.U.LE. Planetfall Spy Hunter Crystal Castles Jetpac Juno First Lode Runner Manic Miner Tapper Track & Field Ballblazer Bank Panic H.E.R.O. Boulder Dash Bomb Jack Elite
Kung-Fu Master Deus Ex Machine The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Hyper Sports Marble Madness Karate Champ Knight Lore Demolition Derby Lords of Midnight Jet Set Willy Pac-Land Paperboy Spy vs. Spy Bounty Bob Strikes Back Déjà Vu Summer Games II A Mind Forever Voyaging Commando Yie Ar Kung-Fu Gauntlet Ghosts ’n Goblins Green Beret Gradius Mercenary Little Computer People Tehkan World Cup Super Mario Bros. The Bard’s Tale Fairlight Paradroid Skool Daze
Tetris Trinity Alex Kidd in Miracle World Leader Board Alter Ego Arkanoid Darius Gauntlet II Salamander Bubble Bobble Kid Icarus Spindizzy Ikari Warriors Rebelstar OutRun Solomon’s Key Dragon Quest Defender of the Crown Rolling Thunder Super Sprint 720° The Sentinel Thrust Space Harrier Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels Buggy Boy The Legend of Zelda World Games Super Hang-On Blasteroids NetHack
A.P.B. Dungeon Master California Games International Karate + Double Dragon Head Over Heels Nebulus Oids Galaga ’88 Maniac Mansion R-Type Gemini Wing 1943 Operation Wolf Rainbow Islands Shinobi Xybots Sid Meier’s Pirates! Wizball Carrier Command Forgotten Worlds Ghouls ’n Ghosts Laser Squad Impossible Mission II Power Drift Super Mario Bros. 2 Splatterhouse NARC Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders The New Zealand Story Exile
Fantasy World Dizzy North & South SimCity Midwinter Minesweeper Final Fight Revenge of Shinobi Herzog Zwei Pang Populous Prince of Persia Strider Stunt Car Racer Wonderboy III: The Dragon’s Trap
1980s
Battle Zone Original release date : 1980 Platform : Arcade Developer : Atari Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
When it was first released back in the dark mists of time known as 1980, Battle Zone’s sharp three-dimensional graphics were so astonishing and unprecedented that people who played the game started going a little bit crazy. Some of them made up impossible stories about the things they’d achieved within the tank fighter’s world, such as driving up the side of the erupting volcano that lurked, eternally, on the game’s horizon, and dropping inside to explore the mysterious caldera. Even if you weren’t an out-and-out fantasist, designer Ed Rotberg’s action game still had a lot of pleasures waiting in store for you. Its three-dimensional arena, filled with rampaging wire-frame tanks, was built from the smooth, unbroken lines of vector display units. That means that even today, the game has a clean, futuristic vibe that has barely aged, while the action itself, focusing on shooting at a variety of enemies and threats—ranging from speedy supertanks to nasty guided missiles to even the odd UFO—manages to be both twitchy and strategic in equal measure. Shooting things feels really good in such a stylish universe, and avoiding getting shot—moving out of harm’s way at the last possible moment—remains one of the great pleasures of the golden age of arcades. Such was the game’s overwhelming success that Rotberg received unrequited attention from an
unexpected source: the US military asked him to build a bespoke version of his classic game with more realistic physics as a tool for training army personnel. Despite such ambiguous offshoots, it’s this entirely harmless original that earned the developer a place in the history books and gave gamers everywhere one of their first genuine jaw-dropping graphical experiences. CD See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Defender Original release date : 1980 Platform : Arcade Developer : Williams Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
Like Donkey Kong, another arcade game that would change the industry’s formative landscape, initial reports on Defender, Eugene Jarvis’s space side scroller, suggested it simply wouldn’t catch on. With backward and forward movement, fire, smart bomb, and hyperspace, there were too many buttons, the enemies came at you in awkward strands of death, and the whole thing had no recognizable top or bottom. Play Defender like Space Invaders, as many arcade players initially would, and you’d be blown up from behind when an enemy you couldn’t even see wobbled out from behind the screen. Defender was, however, a marvel. Jarvis, who had grown up wanting to make pinball machines rather than arcade games, had understood that the player of tomorrow wanted something more than just predictable enemies to memorize and destroy by rote. They wanted ever-changing action, tricksy foes, and explosive options. They wanted something to protect—the tiny spacemen, in this case—as well as something to destroy. They wanted glowing spectacles as their enemies erupted into sprays of pixels. Most of all, they wanted the incredible levels of control that Jarvis’s game would offer. It came at a price, of course. Defender is hilariously difficult at first, with fledgling pilots
careering into a mutated alien, hyperspacing into the path of a bullet, or surviving long enough to lose all their spacemen and end up sucked into the nebulous and terrifying void. The result was a game that saw the future more clearly than most of its peers. Memory and repetition were never going to be enough to keep arcades busy for very long. Sooner or later, players would want something devious enough to really make them sweat. CD See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Eamon Original release date : 1980 Platform : Apple II Developer : Donald Brown Genre : Text Adventure
In the 1970s, the original adventure games passed freely from computer to computer, picking up contributions from geeks along the way. This early spirit of community paved the way to Eamon, Donald Brown’s text-based adventure series that combined stats-driven combat and head-scratching interactive fiction. Brown started the franchise by creating the tutorial adventure and the main hall, which served as the character’s home base. From there, players could swap floppies containing new adventures designed by Brown or by anyone else who cared to chip in. The Eamon community wrote almost 250 adventures spanning every genre and idiom. The quality of these adventures varied, but fans published lengthy newsletters that ran reviews and kept one another apprised of what was out there, while in the dark age of dial-up modems, new adventures were shared on bulletin boards. The game itself certainly feels quaintly from another era, but Eamon’s true legacy lies in the community that came together to build it. CDa See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Missile Command Original release date : 1980 Platform : Arcade Developer : Atari Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
The digital version of a game that schoolchildren play by scratching lines across the back of their notebooks, Missile Command demands spatial reasoning and ace timing. Nuclear missiles rain down on your cities. To stop them, you must counterstrike from one of your ground bases. Your defense missiles burst into a cloud, destroying anything caught in its radius. Fire blindly, though, and not only will you let a few warheads through, you’ll also use up your stockpile, leaving you open to total annihilation. As a piece of pop culture, Missile Command is perched between two eras. The premise can’t help but evoke American fears of Russian nukes. After all, just three years later, The Day After would teach a television audience what radiation sickness looked like. But the game’s giant trackball interface anticipates the dawn of mouse-driven computing: Modern players will feel right at home, rolling the cursor around the screen. Today, the game is a trying proposition, but players with a sharp eye can feel nostalgic for a time when we knew where the missiles would come from. CDa
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1980s
Rogue Original release date : 1980 Platform : Various Developer : Michael Toy, Glenn Wichman, Ken Arnold Genre : Strategy / Role-Playing
Rogue first appeared on college Unix systems in 1980. It contains infinite variety via a series of randomly generated, ASCII-rendered dungeons that must be explored in a bid to retrieve the Amulet of Yendor from somewhere beyond the twenty-fifth level—an unlikely achievement given the imposing difficulty of even the earliest dungeon layers. Practically no information is disclosed to the player, so every new game is a voyage of discovery, not just of the dungeon’s layout, but also of the monsters and items within. Progression to the deeper parts of the dungeon is such a rarity that there are inevitably new monsters to meet. Quaffing potions and reading scrolls along the way is always a calculated risk; you might discover that you’ve just gulped down a potion of strength (“You feel stronger. What bulging muscles!”), but if you’ve guzzled a potion of blindness (“A cloak of darkness falls”) you can kiss goodbye any chance of surviving to the later levels. Other obstacles include simple hunger, which can wipe out even the bravest adventurer; dead ends; and a cruel variety of traps. DM
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1980s
Tempest Original release date : 1980 Platform : Arcade Developer : Atari Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
Tempest was born from an ideas book and a nightmare. Hot off the success of Missile Command, Dave Theurer was browsing Atari’s book of game concepts and stumbled across the idea for a firstperson version of Space Invaders. He sketched out the concept, marrying it to the new technology of color vector graphics. The clincher, though, was the nightmare in which Theurer dreamed he was watching hideous monsters clawing their way out of a hole in the ground. The idea is simple: You are the pilot of the Claw, hanging at the top of a tunnel in space. Spinning around the edge, you fire at an array of fast-moving monsters coming at you from the hole at the center. Unique to Tempest was the game’s control system. You navigate by rotating the cabinet’s “paddle”—a weighty, smooth-moving dial that is both quick and precise. The controller makes the game thrillingly fast and fluid, allowing the player to strafe half the board with a flick of the wrist and then spin back to mop up survivors with a fearless, steel-nerved aim. CDa See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
MUD Original release date : 1980 Platform : Various Developer : Roy Trubshaw, Richard Bartle Genre : Adventure 1975’s Adventure popularised text-based fantasy in video games, largely by incorporating Dungeons & Dragons into a virtual world. Three years later, Roy Trubshaw, a student at Essex University in the UK, took that formula and added multiple players. The result was MUD (Multi User Dungeon), the first virtual world. There’s plenty to say about MUD’s history, but the salient facts are that in late 1980 its development and maintenance was taken over by Richard Bartle, another Essex University student, who went on to create many of the features that define MUD’s reputation. It would run in various forms until the late ’80s, its popularity greatly boosted when it became possible to ’dial in’ from external networks. The seeds of World Of Warcraft were sown here. MUD is a simple concept: your goal is to become a wizard (or witch). But the genius lies in its player-to-player interaction. For the first time, you could talk to other adventurers, squabble over loot, help each other out, and get into axe fights. To look at, the interface is almost identical to its precursor’s, and the scoring system is simple: pick up items, perform tasks, or defeat competing players for various amounts of points. But killing other players is the most rewarding task, imbuing this virtual world with a little survival of the fittest—despite the social structures created by players, rogues prospered. The world is more than just backdrop to the gameplay. By encouraging people to role-play their fantasy characters, the very bareness of the elements such as ’Large Mountains’ and ’Thatched Cottages’ became an advantage, an invitation to the imagination. And that is MUD’s legacy: the first game to realize not just how empowering a player’s imagination is, but how powerful it can be when mixed with the imaginations of others. RS See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Pac-Man Original release date : 1980 Platform : Arcade Developer : Namco Genre : Maze
He’s not the superstar he once was, but Pac-Man is probably still the most readily identifiable video game mascot—more universally recognizable than Mario, Sonic The Hedgehog, and Master Chief. The inspiration for Pac-Man’s simple yellow circle and its gaping mouth occurred—in the apocryphal yet charming story—when arcade developer Toru Iwatani took a slice out of a pizza and looked at the shape made by the remaining sections of pie. The story may well have survived because the world of Pac-Man is all about eating: he races through mazes, gobbling pills—not forgetting the special power pills that will allow him to turn the tables on the ghosts pursuing him—with no thought in the world except what he can chow down on next. And for the best part of a decade, audiences around the world couldn’t get enough of him. At the height of Pac-Mania, even his spooky enemies—Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde—were household names, and books that featured in bestseller lists taught players the most successful patterns for beating the game and earning the really big scores.
The patterns are important to mastering Pac-Man, in fact, and, arguably, one of the game’s weaknesses. Lacking any particularly inspiring AI, Pac-Man’s pursuers race around the maze, following predictable paths, meaning players can effectively beat the game through memory and timing rather than inventive reactions. It’s an exploit, for sure, but it doesn’t change the fact that Namco’s game is at its best (and most enjoyable) when played fast and loose, with players taking the risks on stretching a powerpill streak as far as it will go, making mad dashes for the high-scoring fruit, and racing through those eerily familiar mazes like a Pac-Man possessed. CD See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Phoenix Original release date : 1980 Platform : Arcade Developer : Amstar Electronics Genre : Shoot ’Em Up Of all the space shooters to follow in the footsteps of Taito’s legendary Space Invaders, Phoenix may be the creepiest. Whereas games like Galaxian rendered their foes as vaguely birdlike attackers, Phoenix took the next logical step: Your enemies can actually appear first as eggs, sidewinding down the screen and then hatching before your eyes into giant menaces that take multiple shots to bring down. Their eerie cries as they dive-bomb you from formation, and the shrieks as you pick off their wings, still cut right to the nerve. It is almost a letdown when, after four scenes of feathered hellbirds, you reach the boss—a giant battleship with an armored underside that must be progressively chipped away by your projectiles in order to get to the skinny little alien at its core. Designed by the otherwise forgotten producer Amstar Electronics, the game consists of five scenes—two that pit you against a formation of birds, two against the hatching eggs, and, finally, the boss fight against the mothership. While Phoenix’s boss encounter isn’t the most challenging, it can claim to have been the first. The game’s most interesting tactical innovation is a shield protecting against all forms of attack, but which takes several seconds to recharge between uses. A player can deal with the swooping birds by blasting away and then triggering the shield just in time for the enemy to crash into it. This makes the game more sophisticated than a simple nostalgia trip. Mention should also be made of the clever audio design—one of the earliest examples of a disturbing atmosphere seeping into the bright, simple violence of a video arcade game. In 2005, Phoenix was reborn for younger generations on Xbox, PlayStation 2, PSP, and the PC as part of the Taito Legends series. CDa See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Zork I Original release date : 1980 Platform : Various Developer : Infocom Genre : Adventure Of all the classics that Infocom produced in its early 1980s heyday, its first, Zork I, may be the worst possible place to start. A descendant of Colossal Cave Adventure, and originally bearing the drab name Dungeon, Zork I spent many years evolving on a mini-computer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Its commercial release is a hodgepodge of unrelated mythological references and fantasy signifiers, gated by puzzles both logical and loopy—finding your way through a maze by leaving a breadcrumb trail of objects? That’s sensible. Scaring off a cyclops by yelling “Odysseus”? That’s a little esoteric. Infocom’s later text adventures prized carefully crafted stories, memorable characters, and puzzles that were at least a little more sensible than the ones that greeted explorers who broke into the white house to discover a vast world underneath. At heart, Zork I is little more than a treasure hunt. But if anything saves it from feeling dated, it’s the charm and the humor that shine through every inventory item and room description. The writers didn’t just force you to bring a light into the caves, they invented a dark-dwelling monster—a Grue— to keep you in line. Grues would feature in many future Infocom games. Also noteworthy was the role of the Thief, gaming’s first major nonplayer character. He is an autonomous antagonist who moves through the world but plays a crucial role in your beating the game. Infocom remains synonymous with interactive fiction twenty years after the company closed its doors. The game reminds us that since the birth of computing, programmers have tried to bring adventure, fantasy, and the imagination of a Tolkien or a Gygax to the binary world. Zork I has the distinction of being one of the first milestones on that journey. CDa See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Warlords Original release date : 1980 Platform : Arcade, VCS Developer : Atari Genre : Shoot ’Em Up Long before Nintendo marginalized the once-ubiquitous D-pad with its N64 controller, Atari was providing smooth analogue input in classic paddle-driven arcade games such as Pong and Breakout. Building on those games’ defense and block-breaking mechanics, Warlords, despite not being a huge hit at the time, epitomizes the competitive party nature of the early 1980s arcade scene. Available in a four-player cocktail cabinet with color display, or a black-and-white two player upright unit, the game was ported to Atari’s VCS the following year. Its vociferous fans covet the arcade version, however, due to its superior graphics and smoother movement. That advantage soon becomes apparent once the dragon that flies around the screen during the attack sequence launches its first fireball. Each player must defend their corner of the screen, a task with which they are supported by a thick fort wall and moveable shield capable of catching the dragon’s expulsion and redirecting it at opposing players. Every successful hit chips away at the wall, gradually exposing the eponymous warlords; a single direct hit, and it’s game over for the unlucky defender. Additional fireballs are added to the chaos as players fall, requiring deft paddle work and a cool head to prevail. As if that wasn’t enough, the velocity of the fireball can be altered by the speed and direction it ricochets from the shield, leading to bluffs and double-bluffs as players do their best to outsmart one another. When only one contestant remains, a point is scored before the next fast-paced round begins. Warlords has been updated for today’s generation of gamers via an Xbox Live Arcade version, but it’s difficult not to lament the lack of paddle control and the pinpoint accuracy afforded by the original. BM See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Centipede Original release date : 1980 Platform : Arcade Developer : Atari Genre : Shoot ’Em Up So much of the early history of gaming is focused on space and war, subjects guaranteed to appeal to the young male audience that filled the arcades of the early 1980s. Centipede is the game that bucked the trend. It’s microcosmic rather than cosmic, it brings the conflict home, and it’s notable for being perhaps the first game to attract female players to the arcades. How did it do that? The obvious answer would be that it was designed by a woman. Dona Bailey was the only female programmer working at Atari at the time, and Centipede was her one and only game, created with Atari legend Ed Logg. But there has to be more to it than that. On the face of it, Centipede is a typical shooter, but with one key difference: Instead of a joystick, it’s controlled by a trackball, offering a much more intuitive method of moving about. It’s more direct, removing the layer of abstraction between the player and the action that the joystick puts in place, and allowing for precise movement in two dimensions rather than the one prevalent in other shooters of the time. In addition, consider the setting. Centipede isn’t about epic space battles, it’s about pest control in the back garden. The action is as intense as the fiercest shooters of its era, but the setting can be identified with from real life rather than from the cinema screen. Testosterone-fueled it isn’t. And it’s a closed system with its own internal logic that’s easy to grasp. It becomes about trying to create order from chaos, controlling the number of mushrooms, attempting to herd the centipede and preventing other garden invaders from doing too much damage. If you’d like, it’s gaming at its most down-to-earth, and beyond its appeal to the fairer sex, it’s also challenging enough to give the most hardened of players a tough time. A rare combination, indeed. JM See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Galaga Original release date : 1981 Platform : Arcade Developer : Namco Genre : Shoot ’Em Up Although thought of as a classic of the early arcade era, Galaga is essentially little more than a Space Invaders clone. Ships attack in waves, while a lone fighter must see them off with nothing but twitchy reflexes and a single fire button. And yet a few simple hops in technology made for a dazzlingly refined experience. Compared to Taito’s austere classic, Galaga is a deep-space fireworks display: Enemies whirl and jitter and course about the screen, as if attached to invisible Catherine wheels; lasers sear the air and stars slip past in a jaunty range of unlikely colors. If Space Invaders’ alien menace seems culled from the bottom of the sea, with their empty eyes and twitching tentacles, Galaga’s are from the nasty little world of insects: buzzing wasps and dragonflies, larvae and butterflies. And while Space Invaders’ meanies inch progressively lower in a slow back-and-forth descent that is easy to understand (even if it can be tricky to elude), Galaga’s seem ever impatient to burst from their original formations, zooming down like kamikaze, disappearing off the bottom of the screen, only to warp right back to the top, looping in and out of view until the player is forced to give in to overstimulated panic. It makes for a game with a lot more spectacle, but more options too: position yourself just right when a long line of baddies swoop in, and you can finish them all off without moving. But if you’re more dangerous, so is the enemy, with its tractor beams and the ability to wriggle out of harm’s way at the last second. So while there’s no doubt that Galaga remains heavily indebted to Taito’s classic, and to Galaxian, its predecessor, it has always had just enough novelty of its own to keep things fresh. It may have been following templates, then, but it wasn’t afraid to embellish their rules. CD See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Donkey Kong Original release date : 1981 Platform : Arcade Developer : Nintendo Genre : Platform
One of the more famous video game facts, Donkey Kong’s awkward title came straight out of a Japanese-English dictionary: The game’s soon-to-be-legendary designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, wanted stylish synonyms for the phrase “stubborn gorilla,” and his choices would initially land Nintendo in hot water with movie studios over the rights to another famous gorilla. Its design, however, came straight from the future: a blast of elaborate cartoon japery that set ablaze an arcade scene filled, for the most part, with aliens and space rocks, and where the most charismatic figurehead yet created was a yellow circle who appeared to suffer a crippling drug addiction. Miyamoto’s game had jokes when most other games didn’t even have characters. It had decent animation when other games had shimmering blips that just sort of wriggled around. And it introduced two characters who would dominate the gaming landscape for decades to come. In addition to Donkey Kong, we were introduced to a carpenter named Jumpman. Renamed Mario and given a career change—he becomes a plumber—he was already doing what would later make him so famous: leaping from platform to platform and dodging obstacles, in an endless quest to save Pauline, his kidnapped love interest.
At first viewing, Nintendo’s American team were pretty much certain that the game would destroy their ailing division, but, inevitably, the truth was that Donkey Kong would launch the toy maker into the global stratosphere. It may not be as character filled as Miyamoto’s later games—and Mario, at times, has a mean glint in his eyes as he races after his accomplice Yoshi—but the precision, the imagination, and the physics that would make the series great were all to be found here, for the first time, and it’s still good, simple fun today. CD See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Qix Original release date : 1981 Platform : Arcade Developer : Randy Pfeiffer, Sandy Pfeiffer Genre : Action
It makes sense that the writers of Futurama kept a Qix cabinet in their office. Taito’s arcade puzzler is mathematically minded—the kind of game that a robot (although one more sober than Futurama’s cigar-smoking Bender) might cook up. Players race to divide space, drawing lines and capturing territory by moving a diamond-shaped marker horizontally and vertically through an empty playing field. Levels are cleared when a predetermined percentage of territory has been claimed. And there’s a risk-versus-reward factor: slowly drawn lines are worth more points, but getting caught halfway through sketching a division means doom. The game’s titular enemy wreaks havoc with all sense of order. The Qix is a wavy, mercurial force that swoops and undulates like something (gasp) organic. Like an electronic specter, the Qix haunts the playing field, unconcerned with the player’s movement. It’s this force of nature that makes Qix interesting, transforming it from a contest between number crunchers into a struggle between the orderly and logical and the utterly unpredictable. GM See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Scramble Original release date : 1981 Platform : Arcade Developer : Konami Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
Often placed alongside other early side-scrolling shooters, Scramble isn’t about shooting so much as ducking and weaving. The mission is to fly through hostile territory to bomb an enemy base. Five stages lie in your way, with surface-to-air rockets, zippy UFOs, and even a comet storm waiting to stop you. Tall mountains and skyscrapers impede your progress as the course grows trickier and narrower, until you’re threading through tunnels on the way to your goal. Your jet is armed with two weapons: a front-firing gun and a vertical bomb that lobs forward in an arc. The bomb is difficult to control and even experienced players find themselves missing narrow targets on the ground while struggling to dodge comets. And on top of all this, you also have to contend with the jet’s limited fuel supply. While slower and more convoluted than some of its peers, the varied courses and challenges made Scramble an enduring hit on home systems, which has stuck around to the latest generation—a visually reimagined version on Xbox 360 via Xbox Live Arcade. CDa See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Stargate Original release date : 1981 Platform : Arcade Developer : Vid Kidz Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
Stargate was designed by Eugene Jarvis and Larry DeMar as a sequel to the hugely popular Defender, which, within six months of its launch, was one of the biggest coin-op earners in arcade history. But the commercial requirement for a sequel posed a question: In a market where the customer was always ready to defect to the latest novel craze, how did you follow a game that players still found so challenging? The answer was to make it even tougher. Although working with the Defender format, Stargate introduced fifteen different types of alien— some cruelly designed to unbalance techniques learned at length to master the original game. Also new, the central feature of the game field was the Stargate itself, which enabled the ship to warp from one side of the planet to the other, but behaved differently depending on the state of play. Stargate was featured in an episode of the US sitcom NewsRadio, during which studio manager Dave revealed that he failed his high school SAT exams due to his addiction to the game. Playing Stargate for the first or the hundredth time, you can understand his plight. MKu See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Venture Original release date : 1981 Platform : Various Developer : Exidy Genre : Dungeon Crawler
Crude graphics were a fact of life in the earliest video games, but few games looked as primitive a s Venture, which tried to conjure up a fantasy world with geometric visuals. Your dungeon is a rectangle, and it’s filled with other boxy rooms where treasure and monsters lie. The hero, Winky—a smiling circle with a bow and arrow—races between rooms, grabs the goods, and dodges a series of archetypal foes, from skeletons and snakes to two-headed ettins, all of them rendered as stick figures. The game looks so primitive that it lost almost nothing in the move from the arcade to home consoles. But for its limited technology, the game shows imagination: Each monster has a different gait, offers a new challenge, and, in a unique twist, the corpses themselves are toxic, spelling instant death you if you bump into them. The constant peril and fast pace convey a thrill beyond the graphics: Winky’s always on the move; linger, and the boss monsters will get him for sure. And while Winky never made it into the video game hero canon there is a charm and ambition about Venture that is timeless. CDa See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Ms. Pac-Man Original release date : 1981 Platform : Arcade Developer : Midway Genre : Maze The original Pac-Man may be the choice of purists, but there are plenty of arcade aficionados prepared to argue that Ms. Pac-Man is the superior game—even though it wasn’t even supposed to exist in the first place. The game started out at General Computer Corporation, a small outfit that reverse engineered the Pac-Man code and created a hack called Crazy Otto, featuring new mazes and other enhancements. The Otto character was simply Pac-Man with a crude pair of legs tacked on. But when American Pac-Man distributor Midway saw Crazy Otto, its execs were impressed enough to purchase the rights, replace Otto’s legs with a pretty red bow, and call it Ms. Pac-Man. Most of the tweaks in this semi-illicit sequel, such as dancing bonus fruits, are mild, although the use of four different maze designs introduced a variety lacking in the original. But the game play update that had a more significant impact for coin-op jockeys was an element of randomness programmed into the ghosts’ behavior. Rather than following predictable algorithms, as they do in Pac-Man, the multicolored ghouls in Ms. Pac-Man can surprise you. The upshot: players have to occasionally improvise instead of following a foolproof pattern. The most groundbreaking aspect of this game, though, is Ms. Pac-Man’s personality—in fact, she is one of the first video game characters to have one. Let’s face it: Pac-Man is an icon, but he’s got no charisma. The addition of that “Ms.” prefix made all the difference. Portrayed as an alluring minx on the cabinet art and in the in-game cut-scenes, Ms. Pac-Man may still be a two-dimensional sprite on the screen, but she has a little depth. Little wonder that, despite her shady origins, she ended up being adopted as an indispensable part of Pac-Man lore. JT See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Frogger Original release date : 1981 Platform : Arcade Developer : Konami Genre : Action
In theory, you should never lose at Frogger. The gaming world’s first frog superstar has a straightforward task: to get across a highway, and then a river—dodging vehicles in the first stretch, jumping across logs and turtles on the second. The surrounding world is oblivious to its struggle: The cars speed along on their own, and the alligators and poisonous frogs that patrol the river come and go regardless of where it hops. All you have to do is spot the path through the obstacles and complete it. If you find the right trail, you can make it in seconds. The whole thing should be a cinch, because only you can put yourself in trouble; the game hardly notices you’re there. That, however, is all easier said than done. Moving too quickly is one of the things that leads to mistakes. Panic is another. The obstacle course gets harder as cars speed up and sections of the river change their flow. You’re tempted to make a jump onto a turtle when you know it’s about to sink underwater—dragging you to your doom. And it’s easy to get impatient around the slow-moving cars, even though the game will count you as dead for hitting either the front or the rear. You’re led to make errors by fearing your own vulnerability, by your eagerness to grab that difficult far-left berth on the safe end of the board, or by the chance to grab a fly for extra points.
A monster hit of the coin-operated arcade era, Frogger anticipates the pleasure of platformers like Super Mario Bros., and it appeals to players who would rather keep themselves alive than kill everything else around them. The frog’s predicament draws the player into an environment that may be colorful and pleasing but is also full of threats. It’s a place where shiny opportunities are put there to tempt you off the safe path, and where mastering the world breeds ridiculous joy. CDa See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Gorf Original release date : 1981 Platform : Arcade Developer : Midway Genre : Shoot ’Em Up “Long live Gorf!” cries the Gorf arcade machine when you begin a game, thanks to its Votrax speech synthesizer chip. While the title’s legacy lives on, however, Gorf is one of the most frequently overlooked Space Inraders-inspired titles from the arcade heyday of the early 1980s. Gorf (which stands for “Galactic Orbiting Robot Force”) is likely passed over because what makes it so groundbreaking—it was the first game to feature distinct levels—also unfortunately makes it a jack-of-all-trades and master of none. Within its five missions, Gorf apes its contemporaries, with the first being a battle against slowly approaching, crab-walking invaders, and the third bluntly called “Galaxians.” The final mission distinguishes itself by featuring one of arcade gaming’s earliest bosses (the Flag Ship) before looping back to the first mission with the difference of increased difficulty. This multistage design at such an early point in gaming’s history unfortunately means that each of Gorf’s missions aren’t as polished as the precise, singular design of a competing title, such as Galaxian, and several aspects, such as mundane graphics and slightly vague collision detection, make the whole package feel rather less evolved. One unique aspect in particular, the “quark laser” (which allows the player’s spaceship to “cancel” its one shot allowed at any time and re-fire), feels like a quirk rather than a game-enhancing mechanic. But it’s all in the voice. Thanks to the flexibility of its speech synthesizer unit, Gorf’s robotic master can taunt the player with twenty-five different phrases, often directly referencing your current rank (gained by repeatedly beating a set of missions). The game is flawed, but Gorf draws you back, because you can’t let a machine insult you and then get away with it. Long live Gorf, indeed. MKu See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Ultima I Original release date : 1981 Platform : Various Developer : Origin Systems Genre : Role-playing A milestone in computer role-playing game (CRPG) history, the early days of Richard Garriott’s Ultima series were inauspicious. Originally designed for the Apple II computer, Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness was first self-published and sold in Ziploc bags. Popularity became such that by the time of the third installment, it had turned from a student hobby to a million-dollar industry. Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness takes place in the medieval-styled land of Sosaria. The two main characters are the protagonist—a character who the player creates at the start of the game—and the evil wizard, Mondain, whose Gem of Immortality makes him seemingly invincible. The player’s task is to overthrow Mondain. This is achieved by completing a series of quests—usually by venturing into a dungeon and killing monsters—which enables the player to acquire a time machine, go back into the past, and kill Mondain before he has discovered the powerful stone. In spite of its importance in the story of the CRPG genre, Ultima I now seems an impossibly dated and awkward game, in everything from setting to design. But back in 1981, it seemed to offer a groundbreaking level of imagination, enabling the player to take on new roles and explore entire worlds with freedom. The game was also a technical marvel, its top-down tile-based graphics allowing for the creation of large, colorful environments, even on a system with limited storage space. These top-down, thirdperson views alternated with dungeons viewed in the firstperson —Ultima I even included a space combat section. There were other graphically-rich video games inspired by Dungeons & Dragons out there—SirTech’s Wizardry, to name one notable example—but few can argue with Ultima I’s impact on the international CRPG scene, both as a commercial and an artistic prospect. MKu See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Gravitar Original release date : 1982 Platform : Arcade Developer : Atari Genre : Shoot ’Em Up The perfect game for anyone who thought that Asteroids needed more in the way of crash landings, Gravitar takes the same spin-and-thrust flight mechanic and expands it into an engrossing game of space exploration. Your ship begins in the middle of a cluster of planets, and sets out in search of fuel. As you get close to a planet, the perspective switches to the landscape and then zooms even closer as you get nearer to the ground, where your targets lie. And that’s where the challenge kicks in, because, as the title suggests, the main characteristic of Gravitar is that it is a game centered on the effects of gravity. Designed by Mike Hally (who later went on to design Atari’s hit Star Wars arcade game), Gravitar was a complete dud in the arcades. Indeed, units were often converted to run the Black Widow game, which used the same hardware. It wasn’t until the late 1980s that it was given a proper home release for the Atari 2600. It’s easy to see why Gravitar didn’t thrive in the arcade: This is a complex game that takes practice and finesse, and even Asteroids doesn’t prepare you for it. You can only move the ship by spinning and rocketing forward: to change direction, you have to spin, counterthrust, and then begin moving back the other way—which is far too many steps to deal with if you’re falling straight at the ground. And if you do manage to persevere over all of that, in later levels you’ll contend with invisible planets—so you can’t even see what you’re trying to avoid. Above all, the tricky flight mechanic is the best reason to give Gravitar another look. It’s fascinating as a larval space exploration game, as you learn how to switch perspectives from an open map, to an outer-space dogfight, to a raid on a planet. And even modern games rarely offer the chance to tackle thrust, fuel, and the inexorable pull of gravity. CDa See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Joust Original release date : 1982 Platform : Arcade Developer : Williams Genre : Action Arcade games of old often tended to be a little arbitrary in their choice of themes—I’m a yellow ball with a drug habit…. I’m an Italian carpenter with a girlfriend who’s been kidnapped by my pet gorilla…. You know the sort of thing. But Joust is spectacularly weird by any standard. It isn’t about days of old when knights battled for maidens outside of tottering fairy tale castles. It’s about days when they did all that riding on ostriches—and, in two-player games, on storks. It’s better than it sounds. Played on a series of platforms overlooking a pit of lava, Joust flings wave after wave of enemies (knights mounted on giant buzzards) at the player. The player’s task is simple: to ride at them and gore them with a lance. With a joystick to move left and right, and a button to take you into the sky in flappy little bursts, the game is simple to play but tricky to master, particularly when the waves increase in ferocity, and enemies start dropping eggs that spawn more powerful enemies if they are not destroyed. As surprising as it may seem, Joust was rather a popular game—so much so that a sequel, Joust 2: Survival of the Fittest, was released in 1986. But it’s safe to say that the audience’s expectations for digital entertainment have moved on a little since then, and—barring a global outbreak of brain herpes in the decision-making ranks of global entertainment corporations—this Williams classic is unlikely to get a further airing. Fans might, instead, want to track it down on both the Xbox 360 Live Arcade service and the PlayStation Network. Beyond that, this ostrich-battling sim is a poignant reminder of what we lost when the arcade dream faded: As games become more commercial and more mainstream, the scope for this kind of insanity is, inevitably, somewhat diminished. For shame. CD See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
The Hobbit Original release date : 1982 Platform : Various Developer : Beam Software Genre : Text Adventure
A familiar criticism of blockbuster novels is that they read like the recounting of a video game playthrough: someone travels to a location, solves a puzzle, or finds a clue that leads them to their next objective, and so on. For those authors or producers who adapt popular fiction into video games, however, the issue is more that the plots are somehow less engaging off the page—the developers and authors do not appear to know how to make their chosen medium as powerful as the original novel as a storytelling device. Not so in the case of JRR Tolkien’s 1937 novel or the 1982 computer game adaptation The Hobbit. A text adventure developed by the Melbourne-based Beam Software, every copy of The Hobbit was accompanied by the book, which, rather than serve as a “walkthrough” for the game, simply fired the player’s imagination with its rich descriptions and adventurous story. Enlightened by Tolkien’s vocabulary, gamers could play a text adventure that revolutionized the genre’s traditionally simplistic parser interface. Previous games generally allowed only verb-noun input, but The Hobbit allowed players to input advanced sentences, with pronouns, adverbs, punctuation, and more, allowing them to ask an in-game character about an object while using another object to perform a task—all within the
same sentence. More than that, characters had their own AI and would act on their own accord (famously, dwarf Thorin would forever be sitting down to sing about gold), and while that meant occasionally they could end up getting themselves killed (rendering the game unfinishable), Middle-earth was as full of life as Tolkien’s descriptions. The Hobbit was an open world of emergent game play before the concepts had even been imagined. MKu See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Choplifter Original release date : 1982 Platform : Various Developer : Brøderbund Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
Innocent civilians are a real hassle. When you’re not protecting them or shooting past them, you have to lead them by the hand to safety, all the time leaving yourself exposed to more danger—or at least more hassle. The “escort” mission is regularly one of the most aggravating parts of a game, but Choplifter, one of the first games to use the concept, actually makes it fun. In Choplifter, players fly a helicopter into enemy territory under heavy fire. Blowing up tanks, planes, and anti-aircraft artillery is easy; rescuing the civilians—who are huddled inside buildings in the middle of it all—is the hard part. Instead of mobbing you the second you land à la the fall of Saigon, they stroll up to the chopper like business travelers already on their second dry martini. And if you get shot down while you’re carting them back to base, they happily die by your side. A realistic (for its day, anyway) war zone combines with a plausibly awkward control scheme. The chopper’s front gun leans down, forcing you to pull back to aim at anything coming straight for you. And if you want to change direction or to switch to ground targets, you don’t use the joystick: you actually have to press a separate button to switch your orientation. Originally released for the Apple II computer, Choplifter was ported to most of the home systems
of its day, and Sega brought it to the arcade in 1985—one of the few occasions that a game has moved from home system to coin-op. And though it’s difficult to find nowadays, its legacy lives on—artgame designer Messhof’s The Thrill of Combat (2009) reimagines it populated by maniacs who murder civilians instead of saving them, for example; mercifully for the hapless citizens on the ground, the chopper in that game is even harder to handle. CDa See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Robotron 2084 Original release date : 1982 Platform : Arcade Developer : Williams Genre : Shoot ’Em Up In the early days of the arcades, only two things really mattered to most developers: separating players from their money extremely quickly, and simultaneously making sure they’d still want to come back for more later that day. No designers were quite as effective at this tricky task as Williams’s legendary Eugene Jarvis, whose first game, Defender, offered spectacle and swift deaths aplenty, along with some of the most forward-thinking game mechanics of the age. That said, he outdid himself with Robotron 2084, a pixelated bloodbath that killed off most new players in roughly fifteen seconds, leaving them stumbling back into daylight, pondering what had just happened and wondering where all their loose change had disappeared. Even if it wasn’t a compulsive masterpiece, Robotron 2084 would go down in history as the first twin-stick shooter, in which the player moves with one joystick and fires, in any direction, with the other. It’s simple in its premise, but tricky to master—and such a huge degree of control means that unscrupulous game designers can choose to fling enemies at you from all directions. And that’s precisely what Robotron 2084 does, introducing an entire ecology of deadly robots, some that are invulnerable to attack, others that spawn terrible minions that will run you over or shoot at you, and yet more that merely follow you around, hoping to overwhelm you with sheer numbers. With a final wrinkle coming in the form of human family members who need to be collected for score boosts, Robotron 2084 is the action game genre reduced to its brilliant bare minimum. It may not look like much nowadays, but few modern games can match it for sheer class. If you’re still on the fence, check out the fairly decent port available on Xbox Live Arcade. CD See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Dig Dug Original release date : 1982 Platform : Arcade Developer : Namco Genre : Maze
Video gaming’s preeminent cross between mining and mazes, Dig Dug casts you as a little chap with a pump who can effortlessly burrow through the ground. Each level starts with Dig Dug at the top of a solid block of earth containing two types of beasties: bespectacled red types known as Pookas or cute dragons called Fygars. You are then charged with searching out the monsters before either forcing them so full of air that they burst (a rather sadistic exercise lent an element of compulsion by having to tap the button multiple times to operate your pump) or dropping rocks on their heads. It’s a slower-paced affair than you might expect from an early 1980s arcade game, and the fact you can see the enemy positions and plan your route of attack adds a tactical element to proceedings —the final monster on each screen will make a dash to the surface for freedom, so you always have to bear in mind the order in which you attack enemies. And to make things even trickier, the mazes you create in the ground can turn against you as earth weakens, monsters escape, and rocks begin falling toward you. It’s frantic stuff. Dig Dug’s excellence shares more than a little common ground with Pac-Man : It’s the quick
switch between hunter and hunted. You start each level in total control and gradually relinquish a little of the initiative with each attack on the enemies before having to fight a frantic rearguard action. Finally, you have to close out each level by stopping the last monster from escaping—a moment that can crush even the most stouthearted of warriors. Now available on most of the download services, Dig Dug’s simplicity means that it’s lost little of its appeal. Fans may also want to check out the sequel, which adds tilted perspective to great success. RS See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Miner 2049er Original release date : 1982 Platform : Various Publisher : Big Five Software Genre : Platform
The most painful moment in Miner 2049er comes when you think you’re almost finished—and then realize that you missed a spot. Programmed by Bill Hogue, Miner 2049er is a platformer set in a radioactive future, where Bounty Bob searches level after level of an underground mine and “scrubs” the floor with his feet while ducking or crushing the irradiated monsters that prowl the depths beside him. While a series of girders form most of each level, Bob must also deal with slides, matter transporters, and moving platforms. Most important of all, to get to the next level, every single pixel must be scrubbed. As an early platformer, Miner 2049er had charm and clever level design. Across all ten or eleven maps (depending on your platform), no two were alike, and they combined the thrill of victory with the compulsive satisfaction of cleaning a map until it’s spotless. Okay, it’s practically homo erectus in a post–Super Mario Bros. world, but it was a milestone for its day. And after years in the wilderness, Miner 2049er has now returned to bedevil a new generation on mobile devices. CDa See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Moon Patrol Original release date : 1982 Platform : Arcade Publisher : Irem Genre : Action
One of the most awkward vehicles in gaming history, your vehicle in Moon Patrol is neither fast nor deadly. Its big tires roll hypnotically over the uneven ground, speeding up or choking back, depending on the obstacles you spot ahead. Meanwhile, the aliens that taunt you from above can be pegged with a gun that resembles a peashooter. Moon Patrol is the Thelonious Monk to the airborne shoot ’em up’s Charlie Parker: eccentric and plodding, and all the more brilliant for it. While the skyline of a lunar civilization rolls by via parallax scrolling—the first time a game used the technique—you’re focused on an obstacle course that challenges you on a gentle curve, gradually adding a greater number of threats. A more aggressive designer may have saddled the buggy with serious firepower, but get used to the controls, and you’ll find that you have exactly what you need to keep the peace and clear your path as you travel. The game ranks your times against the other ones posted at the arcade, bringing a sense of competition to one of the slowest driving games in history. CDa See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Mr. Do! Original release date : 1982 Platform : Arcade Developer : Universal Genre : Maze
The conceptual disconnect of a killer clown with a lethal bouncy ball and who loves to eat his dessert is probably nothing new to fans of Japanese games. At first blush, Mr. Do is a weirder, uglier cousin of the popular Dig Dug—lots of tunneling, taking out monsters, and, in this case, guarding pieces of food. But Mr. Do adds a few other wrinkles. In Dig Dug, the protagonist walks around with a bike pump and inflates his enemies to death; Mr. Do stars a clown who carries a large ball that he hurls down the tunnels at his enemies. This is tougher than it sounds, because the ball keeps bouncing until it kills something or comes back at you. The game has two modes: gatherer or hunter. In both modes you advance either by grabbing the fruits strewn before you or by killing the monsters—either with the ball or by causing boulder-like apples to fall on their heads. The ultimate goal is the dessert at the center of the screen. By the turn of the century, its status as a second-tier coin-op classic made it increasingly rare, and nowadays the arcade edition is hard to track down. CDa See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Q*Bert Original release date : 1982 Platform : Arcade Developer : Gottlieb Genre : Puzzle
Q*Bert works best if you don’t ask too many questions. It’s a game about a muppetlike thing with a tubelike nose who has to jump up and down a pyramid made up of colored cubes. The only thing we learn about his character is that he has a foul mouth: Every time he’s caught or falls to his death, he shouts a gruff curse via a speech bubble. The world had seen nothing like it—and consequently it was a monster hit in the arcades. Q*Bert appeals to the obsessive-compulsive gamer. The creature’s job is to jump on to every space on the pyramid, flipping its color. Floating platforms take you safely back to the top so you can start down the other side, while enemies spring from the top of the pyramid to keep you on the move. That’s about it, really. Q*Bert married an addictive set of new mechanics and an MC Escher–esque board to a character who would hold his own against Donkey Kong and Pac-Man for the affection of millions, earning merchandise, sequels, and a spot on a Saturday morning cartoon. But what was he, exactly? Sometimes it’s better not to ask. CDa
See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Xevious Original release date : 1982 Platform : Arcade Developer : Namco Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
Brainchild of Masanobu “EVEZOO” Endoh—Easter egg hunters can be rewarded in Xevious by heading to the far right as the first level starts and shooting to reveal the hidden message “NAMCO ORIGINAL program by EVEZOO”—Xevious is a landmark in its genre. It was the first shooter to feature a backdrop themed around something other than space. Instead, it plays out over detailed landscapes, and, as a result, has the unique feature that the player’s craft—the iconically named Solvalou—has two modes of fire. Ordinary bullets are fired for flying enemies, but the unheralded threat of gun emplacements and tanks must be dealt with by the Solvalou’s bombs, the aiming of which is aided by an on-screen crosshair. Though seminal, and still enjoyable, Xevious only holds true legendary status within Japan, and, despite its regular inclusion on Namco’s retro game collections, has never managed to capture the imagination of North American or European players. In retrospect, the game suffers from the lack of an ending and graphics that, while remarkable at the time, feature a dull palette and samey designs (nearly every enemy is a gray-colored geometric shape).
Flawed it may be, but the game is full of secrets, and challenges players with enemies who act unlike any that came before. Some of the enemies choose to shy away from your bullets rather than rush toward them, and others are impervious and require deft ship maneuvring. Xevious also features one of the earliest video game bosses: a massive flying saucer, the Andor Genesis, whose core must be destroyed in order to proceed. Xevious might seem easy to overlook, then, but nevertheless it stands as a cornerstone in the evolution of the vertically scrolling shoot ’em up. MKu See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Sokoban Original release date : 1982 Platform : Various Developer : Hiroyuki Imabayashi Genre : Puzzle Sokoban is a beautiful example of how a simple set of rules can result in something extraordinarily complex. It’s a game that can be grasped in seconds: you’re a warehouse keeper, you need to move a collection of crates to marked points in the warehouse, and you can only push (and not pull) them one at a time. Such elegance. The only fly in the ointment is the fact that the warehouse was designed by a madman, or perhaps a sadist. Or, more likely, a sadistic madman. It’s the level design that makes Sokoban. Its warehouses are cunning fabrications of open areas, corridors, and bottlenecks, built to trick you into maneuvering yourself into a dead end. As each new level appears you stare at it in horror, wondering how the hell you’re supposed to get out of that one. An easy Sokoban level can be solved in a few minutes; the more complex ones can take hours or even days and require thousands of moves to complete. It’s a game beloved of AI researchers because while simple levels can be solved by brute force, the harder ones are (so far, at least) beyond the capacity of the machines, requiring humans to put those crates in the right place. Officially there are 306 Sokoban levels in existence, as made by the original publisher. Unofficially there are thousands; despite its global appeal, there have only been a handful of official releases outside of Japan. You’re far more likely to come into contact with one of the many clones made available for practically every format than anything created by original designer Hiroyuki Imabayashi. While attempts have been made to create clever variants, it’s one of those games that got it right the first time. There may be improvements in the graphics, but the best knock offs of Sokoban are effectively identical to the versions released in the 1980s. JM See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Tron Original release date : 1982 Platform : Arcade Developer : Bally Midway Genre : Action In the 1980s nerd flick Tron, Jeff Bridges plays Flynn, a video game designer turned video arcade owner, and in his first scene, we see him beating a (very dull) tank game while a crowd cheers on. A game for the film was inevitable, and while Tron’s two-dimensional top-down graphics don’t match the movie’s intensity, they nail its look and its most famous action sequences. The game offers four distinct challenges, and at each level, they get harder: Instead of one tank that’s three times stronger than you, you face nine, and so forth. You get to outmaneuver the tanks, throw your Frisbee-like disk at a viruslike infestation, and, best of all, race the light cycles, outrunning your opponents and penning them in with the trail you leave behind. The races are essentially like playing a competitive version of Snake, and the top-down perspective lacks the danger of the film’s close-up shots. But no matter; the thrill of playing chicken and then breaking away at a perfect right-angle never gets old. Tron is weakest when you’re not in a vehicle. The disk-throwing activities feel bland, and breaking down the rotating, rainbow-colored barrier to the Master Control Program block by block is sheer hard labor. But the tank levels take fast moves and clever tactics to beat, and the racing remains nail-biting today. In some ways, the game predicts the future of movie tie-ins: a set of activities that copy, however awkwardly, exactly what you saw on the big screen. But at least the cabinet helps translate the look of the film to the arcade, with neon lines inscribed on its side panels and a translucent blue joystick to steer your way. The upcoming sequel to both the film and game promises remarkable effects and breathtaking visuals, but just how will Tron Legacy compare to the simple tension and compulsiveness of the original? CDa See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Time Pilot Original release date : 1982 Platform : Arcade Developer : Konami Genre : Shoot ’Em Up For an uncompromising shooter, Time Pilot’s start screen had a way with words. “Play Time Pilot,” it cajoled, adding “please deposit coin and try this game.” It had no such manners once you did. One of the earliest games from Yoshiki Okamoto (responsible for many arcade classics, among them Street Fighter II), the most striking thing about the game is how effectively it manages to simulate dogfighting with the most basic of elements, as well as how unforgiving it remains to this day. No matter how many coins you insert, there are no “continues” allowed here—though you can earn extra lives, which becomes essential in the quite bewildering later levels. Moving through five eras, the game ramps up from World War I biplanes that barely shoot to 1980s jet fighters, eventually taking in UFOs (in that far-flung year of 2001) that seem to be flown by hyperactive lunatics. Apart from all the time travel, it’s simple stuff. A two-dimensional shooter that lets you move in any direction, Time Pilot provides you with an infinite stream of bullets (there are no power-ups) with which to destroy a specific number of enemies before an airship appears; destroy that, and you warp to the next era. Your craft always remains centered on the screen as you move. Neat little touches—like the number of frames of animation used as it turns, and the looping movements of enemy aircraft as they try to position themselves—make Time Pilot stand out among its jerkier contemporaries. It may not be regarded quite as fondly today as Okamoto’s 1942, but Time Pilot is still an enjoyable blast, and arguably improves upon its obvious inspiration, Asteroids. And it really should have been responsible for an alternate timeline of its own, where all games say please when they want you to play. RS See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Utopia Original release date : 1982 Platform : Intellivision, Aquarius Developer : Mattel Electronics Genre : Strategy Mattel’s Intellivision console never achieved the popularity enjoyed by Atari’s VCS (aka 2600) during the early 1980s, despite innovations such as controllers that have more in common with today’s joypads than the often primitive joysticks of the era, and the Intellivoice Voice Synthesis Module, which connected to the base hardware to provide (limited) vocal accompaniment to certain games. And the console deserves kudos for some of its software, too, notably Utopia, which helped to define the evolution of the god and sim genres that would later prove sensational additions to gaming worldwide. Utopia’s success was more modest. It was, after all, a strategy game released at a point when the key goal for home consoles was to emulate the noisy, fast-paced action of the arcades. Further limiting the game’s audience was its dependence on two players taking part, each one taking control of an island. The objective is to rule over your nation and ultimately accumulate more cash than your opponent. Farms can be purchased and put in place to provide revenues from crops, while trawling for fish delivers additional funds. The installation of factories, housing, hospitals, schools, and forts provides the deeper strategic content as you attempt to find that delicate balance between societal welfare and earnings potential. Such considerations may make Utopia seem like a dull game, but the interactions between players provide plenty of spark, most notably when one sends out a PT boat in pursuit of the other’s fishing vessel, or spends cash to create rebel uprisings within the opposing territory. The action, which plays out entirely in real time, transcends the limited presentation, and the intense competition it inspires is a hallmark that defines the best multiplayer games throughout history. TB See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
I, Robot Original release date : 1983 Platform : Arcade Developer : Atari Genre : Shoot ’Em Up Today, polygons serve as the fundamental building blocks for all but the most simplistic games, whether they’re running on high-end PCs or modestly powered mobile phones. But in the early 1980s they were more exotic artifacts, and only rarely seen. The appearance of Atari’s I, Robot in the arcades of 1983 was, therefore, something of an event. Originally titled Ice Castles, the game’s brightly colored, filled three-dimensional objects and terrains were a quantum leap beyond the wireframe spacecraft and landscapes of many traditional arcade machines. It presented solid-looking environments that felt like what they were supposed to be—visions of a far-off universe. Game history is littered with technologically pioneering games that fail to supply substance to go with their innovations, but I, Robot delivers an engaging challenge within its revolutionary alien playscapes. Your task, as Unhappy Interface Robot #1984, is to change the color of the environment from red to blue by simply maneuvering over it, an idea lifted from Q*Bert but realized here with more variation and depth, thanks to increasingly complex level design. Birds and other hazards, such as bombs and flying sharks, impede your progress throughout, and particular care must be taken to avoid leaping across gaps in the environments while the menacing eye of Big Brother is open; failure to do so resulting in instant, laser-administered death. I, Robot’s distinctive styling is underlined by its inclusion of an alternate play mode entirely separate from the main game. Select “Doodle City” at the beginning of a session and you can cycle through three-dimensional objects and manipulate them around the screen to “paint” abstract art. It’s not a concept other games rushed to follow, but then too few games are as boldly innovative as I, Robot. TB See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Archon Original release date : 1983 Platform : Various Developer : Free Fall Associates Genre : Fighting / Strategy
German Grand Master Emanuel Lasker observed that “chess is, above all, a fight!” Free Fall Associates clearly took this literally when it created Archon (Greek for “ruler”) by doing the unthinkable and building on chess’s rather sturdy foundations. Superficially similar, Archon is actually a very different game, arming both sides with differing but well-balanced pieces and adding a real-time battle system that informed many subsequent strategy games. After marching onto the board, each side’s pieces are placed in turn according to their movement range. The opposing armies represent light and dark, and a light/dark cycle affects certain spaces on the board, providing stat boosts to the units occupying a like square. A spellcaster is the kingequivalent and can use a variety of spells, such as healing, teleporting, or summoning monsters. And when two units occupy the same square, both are transported to a battle arena where they must exchange fire until one piece has lost of all of its energy. Obstacles phase in and out during the fracas, providing cover for the fleet of foot, and characters have varying speed, strength, and weapon attributes. A damaged unit remains damaged even in victory, so smart strategizing must be employed. Winning the game requires occupation of five power
points (squares immune to magic, which also offer health boosts), the destruction of all opposing pieces, or the imprisonment of the last remaining piece (achieved by using a spell that stops the unit from moving until the light/dark cycle changes). With Archon, two-player games can be fraught, fast, and highly enjoyable, thanks to the ability to turn the tides with the use of an underpowered piece. If chess is a fight, Archon is a bloody war. BM See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Star Wars Original release date : 1983 Platform : Arcade Developer : Atari Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
One of the first in an endless series of tie-ins to the Star Wars franchise, this particular version focuses on the final spectacular sequence of the original movie (or Star Wars: A New Hope, if you’re a more recent fan): the destruction of the Death Star. With vector graphics nailing the contours of the ships and landscapes, Star Wars leads you through three stages of the movie’s final battle: shooting down TIE fighters on your approach; skimming along the surface of the Death Star, while turrets and more TIE fighters gun for you; and finally, racing down the trench to shoot a target about as big as a womp rat. Instead of ducking lasers, you dodge slow-moving fire bursts, and you can choose between fending off the missiles or going after their source. And instead of lives, you get a shield that’s worn down every time you’re hit, which lets you keep flying to the bitter end, without interruption. And after you make your shot and blow up the Death Star, you get to do it again and again and again. Though it was by no means the first Star Wars video game—that honor goes to the VCS/Intellivision title Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back —it remains a fan favorite. The controller looks and feels like the one we saw in Luke Skywalker’s cockpit, and the Death Star does explode vividly before our eyes. In fact, it was the perfect way to relive the film for a generation of
kids who were as hooked on Star Wars as they were on, well, arcade games. Nowadays, movie tie-in video games are more often than not a terrible dog’s breakfast of scenes from the film and made-up activities, all shoehorned into a mediocre package. Star Wars chose the best piece of the movie and nailed it, and it delivers a finale that’s as exciting now as it was for its time. CDa See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Chuckie Egg Original release date : 1983 Platform : Various Developer : Nigel Alderton Genre : Platform
Manic Miner may get all the attention when gamers rake over the past, but the less-flashy Chuckie Egg, released the same year to a more muted response, is the better game. Yes, Manic Miner is great, but it’s also a game that insists you do things the right way, with little leeway for players who stray from the prescribed course. Chuckie Egg, despite its limited palette and cookie-cutter enemies, is a whole lot more free form and liberating; you don’t feel that you’re being pushed along a set path. Indeed, when you start the first level, there’s no blindingly obvious direction in which to go, just a load of platforms and ladders, eggs that need to be grabbed and deadly hens that, instead of following simple back-and-forth paths, roam unpredictably. Furthermore, your character moves with a speed and fluidity entirely unlike the leaden shuffling of just about all his platforming peers. Jumping is much more human in its execution: long, shallow leaps instead of miner Willy’s lofty parabolas. It feels more analogue, more connected with the real world than other platform games, and your inability to simply jump over enemies gives you a real feeling of vulnerability that translates into a very human sense of only just having got away with it each time you successfully conclude a level.
To top it all, once you complete the game’s eight levels, it loops back to the beginning and pulls the rug out from under you, releasing the caged duck that’s been watching over the action, allowing it to fly freely around the level and home in on you constantly like a sniper’s crosshair. The duck is an inspired touch that changes the game entirely and forces you to hone your skills even more keenly, and that’s what sets Chuckie Egg apart from the platform crowd: It’s about skill, not memorization. JM See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Dragon’s Lair Original release date : 1983 Platform : Arcade Developer : Cinematronics Genre : Adventure / Interactive Fiction
At first glance, it seemed like the dawn of a new era: Dragon’s Lair had done an end run around the chunky pixels and limited graphics processors of its day to deliver a genuine cinematic experience in the arcade. Using LaserDisc technology, the game delivered full-motion video sequences triggered by the player’s performance. The adventure game had reached a milestone—at least that’s the way it seemed. The game action is controlled with a joystick and a single button, and at every decision point your inputs will either earn you another scene or a fully animated demise. Not only does it look amazing, but Don Bluth’s animations put a screwball spin on the old story of a knight storming a castle to save a princess. Here, we have the exasperated Dirk the Daring putting up with trial after trial while the beautiful Princess Daphne—dizzy and flirty like a bubblier Marilyn Monroe—awaits his rescue. Yet for all its glitz, Dragon’s Lair is also a parlor trick. In truth, it’s barely interactive—and often unfair. Some scenes are easy to figure out: If you’re trying to catch the swinging rope, you wait until it’s in reach before you make your move. But in others it’s not clear what action you should take —or when you should take it. A split-second delay before you swing your sword or jump off a falling
platform may make the difference between survival and death, and only through trial and error can you get the hang of it. Still, the game does try to throw you a bone. If you flub one scene, it will move you on to another one, giving you a chance to see as much content as possible in a single play. And with enough practice, you can memorize all the steps to victory—a process that’s more satisfying, and less expensive, with today’s iPhone port of the game. CDa See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Gyruss Original release date : 1983 Platform : Arcade Developer : Konami Genre : Shoot ’Em Up Gyruss is a rare example of a tube shooter—a game in which your ship moves in a circle around the screen, firing at enemies in the center. Atari’s Tempest is the classic example of the genre, but Gyruss offers an interesting counterpoint. Where Tempest’s aesthetic is sharp and eerie, Gyruss is elegant; the various-shaped aliens fly in from the sides in graceful formations, like mutant synchronized swimmers. No gridlines clutter the screen, and the flight patterns are mesmerizing— soothing, even—at least until the enemy gets serious about shooting back. And even the 8-bit version of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor— pumping out in unprecedented stereo sound—was vastly superior to the hackneyed soundtracks blaring beside Gyruss in early-1980s arcades. Designed during his career at Konami by Yoshiki Okamoto, who had previously created Time Pilot and later worked on Street Fighter II at Capcom, the game is quite dizzying to play. The scrolling starfield of earlier space shooter games was rearranged for a three-dimensional perspective, so stars come into view at the center of the screen and fly outward, giving the impression of the player’s ship moving through space at breathtaking speed. With as slender a plot as any other golden-age arcade game, the simple aim of Gyruss is to shoot your way from the edge of the solar system back to Earth, defeating waves of attackers and other assorted objects that come your way between each planet. As slight as that may seem, it does give the gamer a sense of overall purpose. Gyruss has seen many modern ports, such as in Konami Collector’s Series: Arcade Advanced. It also received the slightly ignominious homage of appearing as a minigame within Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas—where it was renamed They Crawled from Uranus! CDa See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Mad Planets Original release date : 1983 Platform : Arcade Developer : Gottlieb Genre : Shoot ’Em Up Gottlieb was a pinball giant that tried its hand at arcade games with limited success, most notably the cartoony Q*bert. Less well known is 1983’s Mad Planets, a particularly manic shooter that did itself no favors by being a bit too far out there for it to gain widespread appeal. Instead of the usual aliens, you’re up against entire planets—planets that start small and weedy but quickly become massive, extremely dangerous, and follow crazy skewed orbits that would have had Newton scratching his head and going back to the drawing board. Things are tough from the start. Nowhere on the screen is there a safe haven, so to even things up a little, you’re given full freedom of movement—the whole screen is yours through which to maneuver, and a spinner enables you to turn and shoot in all directions. It may seem like a lot of freedom, but you need every degree of it because you are in almost permanent danger of a furious world slamming into you from any direction. The trick, learned early in the game, is to try to blast the planets when they’re small. But they evolve so quickly that a level can turn from a duck shoot to utter chaos inside a second. Furthermore, you have to mind just how you shoot them: If you’re not careful, you’ll just pick off their moons—and a moonless planet becomes a mad planet, glowing red and slinging itself around ever faster. It’s fast and it’s twitchy with a strange control scheme that makes it tricky to emulate and saw it almost untouched by home clones. Crazy Comets and Mega Apocalypse, both by Simon Nicol on the Commodore 64, were the only games to recreate the Mad Planets experience. Unique and rather special, if you can find the means to play Mad Planets properly, you’ll discover a tough, daft, and rewarding space oddity. JM See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
M.U.LE. Original release date : 1983 Platform : Various Developer : Ozark Softscape Genre : Strategy When Trip Hawkins first launched his fledgling Electronics Arts company, he approached publisher SSI with an offer for the rights to the business sim Cartels & Cutthroats. When he was turned down, Hawkins made a direct approach to Dan Bunten, the game’s author, who promised to produce a far superior original instead. Nine months later M.U.L.E. shipped as EA’s first product. A sophisticated multiplayer game, it not only launched what would soon become a multi-billion-dollar corporation, but is widely considered to be one of the most influential ever written. A detailed economic simulator with a focus on nonviolent competitive cooperation—a common theme for Bunten, who detested gaming’s obsession with killing—M.U.L.E.’s pioneering steps laid foundations for countless other titles. Up to four players are tasked with the management of a new colony on planet Irata in a scenario inspired by the Wild West. The simple purpose of the game is to amass the greatest wealth by balancing the supply and demand of four basic elements. This is achieved by configuring a Multiple Use Labor Element, which is programmed to harvest varying amounts of each element. Players buy whatever they need and sell what they don’t need of their own harvest, and try to stay in profit. The genius of M.U.L.E. is that, while victory is achieved through the accumulation of wealth, it is impossible for one player alone to harvest everything needed. The message is that collaboration and the well-being of the colony as a whole are a necessity or all players will fail. SimCity, Command & Conquer, and Viva Pihata all owe a great debt to M.U.L.E.’s innovations. Indeed, Will Wright dedicated The Sims to Bunten, who died in 1998, and even included M.U.L.E.’s theme tune as a hidden extra in his 2008 game, Spore. BM See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Planetfall Original release date : 1983 Platform : Various Developer : Infocom Genre : Text Adventure When Planetfall first shipped, sidekicks were rare. Floyd was a nonplayer character who tagged along with the player but took care of himself, proving amusing and also instrumental to the plot. Many gamers surprised themselves as they grew emotionally invested in an artificial life-form in an interactive fiction, who they only knew from text on a screen. When first-time author and soon-to-be legend Steve Meretzky mastered the delicate task of imbuing a functional resource with an endearing personality, he created a gaming milestone. Of course, the rest of the game is good too; it’s an Infocom text adventure coded at the height of the genre, by one if Infocom’s greatest talents. A science-fiction story with a lively sense of humor, it acknowledges its debt to Douglas Adams—don’t forget to grab your towel—but it also depicts in vivid detail a civilization on the brink of final destruction. The player gets to play archaeologist, and ultimately savior, by wandering the buildings and laboratories and deducing the function of each artifact, as well as translating the comically pig-Latinish writing left behind by a lost race. And the game follows a timeline right from the opening scenes, when the player is given a limited number of moves to flee a doomed spaceship and crashland on the planet. Take too long while you’re down there, and you may fail in your quest. The game had the advantage of being accessible to newcomers, with clear and logical problems that make for an easy introduction to text adventures. It’s one of the company’s best-loved games, instantly creating Meretzky’s reputation as a funnyman and storyteller—but the person who really became famous was Floyd, one of the first characters in gaming who felt like more than a name. CDa See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Spy Hunter Original release date : 1983 Platform : Arcade Developer : Midway Genre : Action
With its smart weapons, cool cars, and the persistent buzz generated by the slinky rendition of the Peter Gunn Theme pumping from the speakers, Spy Hunter was viewed as a very stylish game back in the arcades of the early 1980s. It was a title that played into any boy’s favorite fantasies—secret agents, nasty weaponry, and a driving license—and made the moment they started slotting in the coinage all but an inevitability. But make no mistake, it was the action as much at the perfectly poised presentation that kept those young punters coming back for more. In Spy Hunter, you play as a secret agent with a car that shoots bullets from the front grill, and you’re tasked with the admirably simple mission of tooling down an endless highway—conveniently, it’s a highway entirely without corners of any kind—fighting off a range of vehicular enemies, from stretch cars with machine-guns projecting from the sides, to buses with spikes in the wheels, and even the occasional helicopter, while upgrading your ride with smoke screens and oil slicks every now and then as you drive into the back of passing powerup vans. All of this was supercool, for sure, but Spy Hunter’s most magical moment comes when the game’s incomplete bridges force you to take your dream machine off-road—and it suddenly
transforms itself into a boat by passing through a convenient shack, taking the land-based battle directly to the waves. Uniquely suited to the obsessions of the 1980s, with its slick mixture of espionage and cars, Spy Hunter is a delightful, if not expensive, memory, for everyone who played it. It is also the subject of a frankly ridiculous PS2 title built around a movie starring Dwayne Johnson, although that game, thankfully, sank without a trace. CD See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Crystal Castles Original release date : 1983 Platform : Arcade Developer : Atari Genre : Action
For its day, Crystal Castles was awesomely ambitious: paths, bridges, ledges, and elevators decorate three-dimensional structures that are themselves laid out on an overworld map. The protagonist, Bentley Bear, conquers map after map by sweeping up gems as quickly as possible. Skeletons, witches, and animated trees plague Bentley’s steps, and if he spends too long on a level, a swarm of bees will show up and chase him. Thanks to the game’s trackball controller, it’s possible to move very quickly indeed: One swipe sends you skimming across the screen, grabbing all the gems that lie in your path. The design was certainly detailed: programmer Franz Lanzinger packed as much as he could into each screen—almost to a fault: Each of the thirty-seven maps feels crammed into view, and rendered in an unusual trimetric perspective that becomes quite disorienting in later levels. The controls are speedy but twitchy, especially when you try to take small steps or cover both sides of a broad path. The wide view also explains why none of the characters, who are actually quite cute, ever became arcade stars. But Crystal Castles is charming and engrossing, flaws and all. The level design is ingenious, with
semi-secret passages and sluggish elevators testing your reflexes, even as they tempt you to explore deeper. Unusually, beating the game will actually end it, instead of taking you back to the beginning—an innovation for the time, and another reason why it feels more like the story-driven platformers that would later come to the home market than a typical repetitive coin-op. It’s been ported many times to home consoles and has even sprung up on Atari’s official arcade web portal, where you can play a complete Flash version for free. CDa See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Jetpac Original release date : 1983 Platform : Various Developer : Ultimate Play the Game Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
The game that launched the company that would one day become Rare—UK development powerhouse and creator of franchises like Banjo-Kazooie and the excellent Viva Piñata—Jetpac is a compact title that casts a very long shadow indeed. Part puzzle game and part twitchy platformer, the player is dropped into the role of a lone astronaut, Jetman, who must use his spacesuit’s thrusters to blast himself around a series of simple planetary environments, collecting and reassembling the pieces of his ship, before loading it with fuel and subsequently roaring off into space. The real star of the game, though, is the simple yet extremely effective implementation of a physics model, tugging at you in a predictable and realistic manner as you race through the sky. Jetpac provides plenty of entertainment for even modern-day space explorers, but just in case we’d forgotten its simple charms, Rare—now a part of the mighty Microsoft corporation—released an updated (if slightly overcomplicated) version, Jetpac Refueled, for the Xbox Live Arcade platform in 2007. CD See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Juno First Original release date : 1983 Platform : Arcade Developer : Konami Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
In the early 1980s it was uncommon for Japanese game designers to take inspiration from the West, so Juno First is something of an unusual specimen. The high-intensity horizontally scrolling shoot ’em up is flipped 90 degrees to become a high-intensity vertically scrolling one. But to sideline Juno First as a clone would be an injustice, because this is a supremely accomplished action game in its own right. Its pseudo-three-dimensional presentation, sending waves of enemies into the combat zone from a far-off horizon, makes the action much more dynamic than that of other similarly styled games of its era, which feel static in comparison. Since the game scrolls in both directions, retreat from the incoming enemies is an alternative option to the all-out attack style of play expected of the genre. Juno First is a game in the classic high-score tradition, its intermittent bonus pods offering opportunities to crank up the points at an accelerated pace as your craft washes a spitting stream of laser fire across the screen. It will always live in the shadow of certain other examples, but to its modest fan base it remains a classic. TB See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Lode Runner Original release date : 1983 Platform : Various Developer : Douglas E. Smith Genre : Platform
With its clever melding of puzzling and action, Lode Runner is an eminently playable platformer. It was, however, revolutionary for another reason, as one of the first games to offer a level editor. Giving players access to the building blocks of Lode Runner’s game world wasn’t just a ploy to extend the game’s lifespan and popularity—it gave the gaming community a then-rare opportunity to fully digest the concepts at work in every gold-scrounging level. Lode Runners scenario is almost primal. Set in a series of ornate caverns—multilayered mazes connected by ladders and bridges—the protagonist is a gold miner able to dig holes through soft rock. All around, guards try to prevent him from nabbing all the area’s gold and escaping. The original game shipped with 150 levels, but the modders crafted countless more. And the fact that the chase, dig, nab, and run of Lode Runner feels infinitely replayable is surely a testament to the rock-solid original design. But the game’s longevity and timelessness also reflects well on us. Leave it to gamers to carry the torch, and they’ll illuminate depths you never imagined. GM See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Manic Miner Original release date : 1983 Platform : Various Developer : Matthew Smith Genre : Platform
Before Jet Set Willy and his frighteningly muddled mansion came Manic Miner, a far neater platformer, but with plenty of its own surreal touches and twists and an atmosphere every bit as thick with mysterious charm. Trapped deep inside the tunnels and rocky chambers of a mine, players must help Willy get back to the surface, navigating an increasingly complex series of twenty different rooms, all of which require a key to be located before the exit can be unlocked. The range of different screens takes the miner on a genuinely bizarre journey at times, while the inclusion of a countdown clock based around Willy’s ever-diminishing air supply only makes things more tense. Paving the way for Jet Set Willy, one of 8-bit computing’s most memorable games, Manic Miner remains a classic: taut, claustrophobic, and filled with designer Matthew Smith’s strange humor. At the time, it was also the first ZX Spectrum game to feature extensive in-game music, plucked, rather stylishly, from the copyright-free back catalogues of maestros Grieg and Strauss. CD See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Tapper Original release date : 1983 Platform : Arcade Developer : Marvin Glass and Associates Genre : Action
Tapper didn’t simply live in the corner of your local watering hole. The arcade cabinet, outfitted with faux wood trim, a brass foot rest, and a joystick topped by a tap handle, feels like an extension of your local bar. The game is a direct predecessor of Diner Dash. As the bartender, you pull drinks and slide them across the bar to your thirsty customers. Hurl one beer too many, and it’ll crash on to the floor. Once they’ve quaffed their ale, drinkers send their empties right back at you. Those too will drop to the floor if not collected. More generous beer guzzlers will leave tips on the table. But it’s risky to chase after this dough: Every moment you’re away from the tap is a moment a stray mug could tumble to the sawdust. The entire affair is colorful and slightly lurid. Tapper marked an early (and rare) instance where product placement was not just appropriate, but appealing. The Budweiser logo was prominent throughout. Maybe that’s why a second version of the game—sans references to alcoholic beverages —was created when the machine staggered to arcades. Amiable cartoon customers, caricatures of cowboys, punks, basketball players, and aliens, helped make the notion of brew-swilling that much
more attractive. And the nostalgic tinkle of a saloon piano and the satisfying crack of a frosty can of beer during the bonus round contributed additional auditory satisfaction. The introduction of the white-washed Root Beer Tapper a year later wreaked havoc with character motivation (what customer would freak out over the slow pour of a noncaffeinated soft drink?). However, the move away from alcohol was a wise, early example of the self-regulation that would typify the gaming industry’s approach to censorship. A case of better us than them. GM See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Track & Field Original release date : 1984 Platform : Arcade Developer : Konami Genre : Sports
When the earliest game designers turned their attention to the Olympics, they captured humanity’s greatest sporting event the only way they knew how: by making you mash buttons. Track & Field requires players to repeatedly tap buttons in order to make their athletes run, while another button unleashes an event-specific action—launching into the air for the long jump event, for example, or releasing a javelin. Button tapping is a crude way to enjoy activities that can sometimes look so graceful in real life, but it’s obviously a very physical one, which heightens the game’s appeal as a multiplayer attraction. Track & Field can be played solo, but it comes into its own with up to three fellow athletes attempting to set the fastest times, springiest leaps, and longest throws. The six events (100-m dash, long jump, javelin, 110-m hurdles, hammer, high jump) allow players to compete head-to-head via two sets of controls. The solo events are the most technical, as you propel yourself right up to the line and then hold the button just long enough to find the perfect angle of launch (45 degrees being optimum, although some players swear by pitching it slightly higher or lower). The head-to-head running events, meanwhile, with two players battering buttons simultaneously, have been known to
reduce overcompetitive types to exhausted wrecks—and arcade machines to disrepair. Track & Field shipped in time to harvest interest in the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, and from that very first coin-op, Konami built a franchise that continues to this day with the likes of New International Track & Field for the Nintendo DS, while its simple but remarkably effective design has influenced countless imitators during the intervening years. TB See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Ballblazer Original release date : 1984 Platform : Various Developer : Lucasfilm Games Genre : Sports Instead of trying to make a computer simulation of an existing sport with all the compromises that entails, with Ballblazer Lucasfilm Games invented a new sport altogether, one which played entirely to the strengths of home formats of the time. It keeps things simple: It’s a one-on-one game of football, only with hovercrafts, a floating ball, and moving goal posts. The controls are basic: The craft can be moved in four directions and can unleash a “force push” that can be used to launch the ball goalward, or to tackle and take the ball from the opposing player. Despite such limitations, however, Ballblazer works in three dimensions, thanks to a brilliant camera system: the hovercraft automatically faces whichever compass point is nearest the direction of the ball or, if you have control of the ball, the goal. It’s confusing at first, but once you adjust to the idea, it works amazingly well. The pitch may be huge and the graphics functional, but you always know which way to go, and this inspired piece of automation enables you to concentrate on getting to the ball, wrestling it off your opponent, and hopefully launching it between the posts. But that won’t happen often. Indeed, your early games will be scrappy affairs until you get a feel for how Ballblazer works. Once you crack it, it’s fluid and incredibly fast with an analogue feel and a physics model in which action has an equal and opposite reaction—as you’ll note when you get kicked back after unleashing a shot. It’s minimalistic and expertly balanced, so much so that when LucasArts tried to sex it up for a 1990s sequel (Masterblazer), the result was a complete mess. Best of all, if Ballblazer were to become a real sport, your gaming skills would transfer across to it effortlessly—something that possibly makes it unique among sports games. JM See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Bank Panic Original release date : 1984 Platform : Arcade Developer : Sanritsu Denki Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
There aren’t many video games about working in banks, probably because it’s difficult to identify the fun potential in advising customers on mortgage rates. Wind the clock back to the days of the Wild West, however, and you have a setting more suited to entertainment, as illustrated by the fast-moving, bullet-riddled world of Bank Panic. Panic is certainly the right word to describe what happens within the banks of Sanritsu Denki’s game. You assume the role of a lawman, seeing off bandits with your pistol, forced to consistently make split-second decisions. You’re faced with three doors at a time, and while you can see when one is about to open, you never know what’s going to be on the other side. It might be a regular customer looking to make a deposit, in which case you let them go about their business; it might be a gun-toting robber, in which case it’s time to unload; or, perhaps, it’s a boy wearing a stack of hats, which can be shot away to reveal a bonus. As the game progresses, the action becomes more complicated. Normal citizens are sometimes pushed aside by robbers, for example, turning a moment of relief into a scrabble to reach for the fire button, while other criminals turn up with two revolvers (requiring two shots to kill), and occasionally bank doors will be rigged with bombs that must be shot
before they detonate. All the action is played out to the background music’s repeated cycle of “Dixie,” the tempo of which speeds up frantically as the time runs down, adding yet another level of panic. With three fire buttons (one for each door) and some dirty tricks under its belt (beware the townsfolk who turn up wearing the same clothes as the bad guys, for example, or robbers who duck away from the door), Bank Panic is one of the most complex arcade games of its era, requiring intense focus. It’s also among the most enjoyable. TB See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
H.E.R.O. Original release date : 1984 Platform : Various Developer : John Van Ryzin Genre : Platform
Take a look at an Xbox 360 controller. Two clickable analogue sticks, a D-pad, two analogue triggers, and nine buttons. Now consider the Atari VCS joystick. One digital stick and a fire button. Not much to work with, and as a result, the designers of yesteryear were often forced to be extremely imaginative with their control schemes. If H.E.R.O.—a game in which you control a little man with a helicopter backpack, a laser gun, and a stash of explosives—were released today it would use a stick and three buttons, which would have been unheard-of extravagance back in 1984. Here we have left and right control movement, the up controls your helicopter backpack; down places explosives; the fire button activates your laser. Not a control is wasted. It’s an efficient and extremely elegant scheme befitting an ambitious game of underground rescue. Your job is to descend into a series of mine shafts to find trapped workers, a task made more hazardous by deadly wildlife and blocked passageways that require blasting. Danger is everywhere; even blowing up a harmless wall requires you to make a swift getaway once you’ve dropped your dynamite. Illplaced lanterns plunge rooms into darkness when you blunder into them, and life-
terminating water lurks at the bottom of many caverns. And just to add to the fun you have a limited supply of dynamite—indeed, later levels do their utmost to get you to waste dynamite so that you run out just as the end of the level is in sight, thus forcing you to wait for the power to run out on your backpack, lose a life, and restart the level. Harsh, yes, but it means you just do it right the next time, and it’s a small annoyance from a game that otherwise conjures an awful lot out of not very much at all. JM See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Boulder Dash Original release date : 1984 Platform : Various Developer : First Star Software Genre : Maze
Boulder Dash took the design of arcade titles Dig Dug and Mr. Do—which feature twodimensional maps and the player character tunneling through earth, avoiding enemies, and falling rocks (or, in Mr. Do’s case, apples)—and simplified it for home formats of the time. In doing so it created one of gaming’s most enduring franchises. Game play is simplicity itself. Taking the role of Rockford (a hero who, thanks to hardware limitations, looks more like a pixelated version of an anthropomorphic frog), the player tunnels around levels, collecting diamonds while avoiding tumbling boulders. Unlike Dig Dug’s Taizo Hori or Mr. Do, Rockford has no way to protect himself directly, so must use his wits to create a maze for his enemies, carefully timing chases to make sure they end up on the business end of a falling rock. Unusual in the video game industry as a title that has maintained the same rights holder since its inception—First Star Software still sells versions of the title to this day—Boulder Dash has received almost as many official sequels as it has clones, with often superb and usually wildly different ports to most home platforms, through Game Boy Advance to iPhone and iPod Touch.
Boulder Dash endures because unlike many of its contemporaries, it features no combat, and unlike other nonviolent titles, it allows players a variety of options to deal with threats: You create your own maze rather than simply navigate a predetermined one. It therefore requires a fine balance of on-the-fly puzzle solving and sharp reflexes, and ensures that any mistakes always feel like your own fault. As fresh and playable now as it was twenty years ago, Boulder Dash is a diamond well worth digging out. MKu See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Bomb Jack Original release date : 1984 Platform : Various Developer : Tehkan Genre : Platform
The year 1984 was an explosive one. The IRA tried to blow up Margaret Thatcher in Brighton. Hezbollah targeted the US embassy in Beirut. Ronald Reagan made an off-color, on-microphone joke about bombing Russia. Meanwhile, in video arcades, a pudgy red-white-and-blue superhero called Jack jumped and glided to the rescue, defusing screen after screen of explosive devices planted in famous tourist destinations like the Sphinx, the Acropolis, and Castle Neuschwanstein. Were the artists of video gaming imitating life or was it just coincidence? Nobody ever really knew what the true premise of Bomb Jack was supposed to be. But it’s so fast and furious, it barely needs a plot. All you need to know is that the fuses are lit. What are you waiting for? Get moving! In fact, it’s so manic that it’s only after several (dozen) tries that you realize the bombs will never explode. Instead, the burning fuses are part of the game’s secondary challenge: defusing the bombs in order to gain bonus points. Sounds easy. But when you’re besieged by mechanical birds, bouncing balls, and robots, dodging both enemies and the unexploded bombs, it’s no mean feat. Especially since the deliberately unforgiving jumping physics means you’ll have to work hard not to undershoot or
overshoot your target. Despite its international look, Bomb Jack is a thoroughly Japanese game. Its spring-heeled hero nods to Mario, as does its platforming. Its dodge-and-collect game play is straight out of Pac-Man, as is the siren triggered by its enemy-freezing power pills. Even its bombs are impossibly cute, more like ripe cherries than tools of asymmetric warfare. Maybe that explains its enduring appeal. There’s been no shortage of bombs in the world since 1984. If only they were all as inexplosive as Bomb Jack’s. JRu See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Elite Original release date : 1984 Platform : Various Developer : Ian Bell, David Braben Genre : Strategy / Shoot ’Em Up Few games have had the bravery to paint a portrait of such a vast, uncaring universe as is presented here in Elite. Created by Cambridge students Ian Bell and David Braben during the reign of Thatcher, this is a picture of merciless capitalism spread to the stars: a cruel galaxy cluster of market forces and sudden death, where squads of Vipers lurk in the next starfield, ready to gun you down; where running out of fuel light-years from a nearby planet spells certain death and where simply trying to dock your ship in an orbiting space station will probably kill you first, anyway. Elite started life as an experiment in three-dimensional starfields, and quickly became a game of galactic dog fighting. Braben and Bell found the results a little boring, however, and instead came up with the idea of trading to make the universe feel a little more alive: everything from basic crops to gems, to—if you’re willing to risk pursuit by the police—weapons and slaves (which fit into this entirely amoral economy). And finding the best exchange rate for the latest wares on which you took a high-priced gamble certainly adds an element of fiscal fear to the planets and nebulae through which you cruise. Elite is big as well as clever, however, with eight massive galaxies to jump between, all spun out of a smart programming trick that uses the Fibonacci sequence to generate its stars and stats. You could think of Elite as an economics sim with a bit of shooting thrown in, which makes it sound cold and rather distant. But it’s also epic, echoey, and filled with dazzling surprises and hidden adventures. No game before or since—except, perhaps, CCP’s luminous Eve Online—has dared to treat science fiction with such seriousness. No game has been quite so immersive in its handling of lasers, intergalactic rockets, and attack ships. CD See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Kung-Fu Master Original release date : 1984 Platform : Arcade Developer : Irem Genre : Fighting
Ostensibly based on the Jackie Chan movie Wheels on Meals (which was originally titled Meals on Wheels) and heavily influenced by wider Hong Kong action cinema conventions, Irem’s slick, repetitive martial arts coin-op is widely credited as the progenitor of the scrolling beat ’em up genre, preceding the likes of Renegade, Final Fight, Double Dragon, and Streets of Rage. The setup is ludicrously sketchy (beginning with the immortal scene setter: “Thomas and Sylvia were attacked by several unknown guys”), but also hugely influential. You are a kung-fu expert who must rescue your kidnapped girlfriend from the clutches of a gangster. To get her back, you fight through five floors of the pagoda-style Devil’s Temple, using the kick and punch buttons to dispatch incoming enemies. On the first floor, most enemies simply try to grab hold of you, necessitating a frenzied bout of joystick waggling. Later, there are leaping dwarf fighters, fire-breathing dragons, and deadly … moths. More important, each floor ends in a boss battle, ranging from a boomerang thrower to a magician, and bosses have their own energy gauges—a vital genre addition. Kung-Fu Master is a beautifully crafted example of the genre it helped to define. The controls are amazingly responsive, allowing for superfast fighting, and the addition of leaping and crouching
moves adds depth to the combat repertoire. Meanwhile, the driving soundtrack racks up the tension, and the roughly sampled yelps and cries bring some kung-fu movie authenticity to the proceedings. Numerous home-console versions followed, but it was the original that will be remembered— alongside the likes of Karate Champ and Karateka—as a groundbreaking martial-arts game. KS See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Deus Ex Machine Original release date : 1984 Platform : ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 Developer : Automata Genre : Action
Not so much a game as a bizarre multimedia experience, Deus Ex Machina requires players to control the early development of a biological accident: a mutant born within the mechanistic confines of a computerized Orwellian society. The “action,” such as it is, revolves around a series of abstract mini-games dealing with stages of the creature’s life: Players must first weld DNA and safely incubate the fetus; as a “child” it has to be protected from the police, and, later, from the rigors of old age. The on-screen activity tells only half the story, however. This ambitious project was conceived more as an enhanced concept album or prototypical interactive movie than a mere game. Coded by Andrew Stagg and scripted by early computer game entrepreneur Mel Croucher, Deus Ex Machina shipped with an accompanying cassette containing an ambient synth soundtrack and dialogue spoken b y Doctor Who actor Jon Pertwee, musician Ian Dury, and comedian Frankie Howerd. This was designed to be played in synchronicity with the game itself, providing a disembodied audio accompaniment. With lyrics merging adapted snippets of As You Like It’s “seven ages of man” speech with discourses on genetic experimentation and computer-age paranoia, it is a singular artistic
endeavor, obtuse and self-indulgent, but also weirdly hypnotic. Despite widespread critical claim and mainstream media interest, the game was a commercial disaster, in part due to Automata’s difficulties with retailers who weren’t sure how to deal with such a genre-defying product. Croucher was clearly undeterred by commercial difficulties: A couple of years later he came up with iD, a text-based curio in which the player converses with an entity living in their computer. KS See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Original release date : 1984 Platform : Various Developer : Infocom Genre : Text Adventure
Douglas Adams’s seminal sci-fi masterpiece, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, has taken many forms, from audio to books, to the small and large screens. When Adams teamed up with Infocom’s resident funnyman, Steve Meretzky, to turn it into interactive fiction, he kept the key plot points. Moreover, he stayed true to its tangents, its self-awareness, and its cruel, absurd humor. Hitchhiker’s Guide mocks the expectations of gamers who have played Infocom’s other hits. Negative feedback is brusque—“That’s not important; leave it alone”—and even the minor descriptions are hilarious (“The floor acts like a trampoline on an ice rink”). The game will lie to you about how to exit a room or not let you look around a room unless you beg; if you die, it may keep going without you and chide you if you try to struggle. “You keep out of this, you’re dead …,” it reminds you. There are puzzles, too, like the legendary inventory puzzle that scores you the language-translating Babel fish. What’s missing, however, are the characters—who fly by with little introduction—and the plot, which barely matters at all. It’s as if Adams no longer had patience for retelling his tale and wanted to get back to messing with the parser and refusing to let you move aft unless you insisted half
a dozen times. The game could be criticized as one of the few times Infocom let the puzzles and gags outweigh the story, but by 1984, the studio could get away with riffing on the genre it all but codified. Unfortunately, a sequel based on The Restaurant at the End of the Universe was never completed—but Douglas Adams would go on to make more games before his untimely death in 2001, including Infocom’s Bureaucracy and the graphic adventure Starship Titanic. CDa See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Hyper Sports Original release date : 1984 Platform : Arcade Developer : Konami Genre : Sports
Konami’s Track & Field proved to be an enormous arcade hit when it was released in 1984 thanks to massive novelty value and multiplayer appeal. It introduced the concept that button bashing translated into speed, pitted players directly against one another, and turned arcade gaming into a distinctly physical exercise. It was all a bit athletic, though, an issue that the sequel, Hyper Sports, addressed by widening its scope and providing a much more varied range of events. It’s still heavy on the button bashing, as illustrated by the opening swimming event, but then it gets into more gamer-friendly territory with a skeet shooting competition that’s purely about twitch reactions, rewarding accuracy with faster and higher-scoring targets, as well as fatter targeting reticules. Next comes a move to gymnastics with the long horse event, in which you’re back hammering the buttons to turn somersaults while attempting a perfect landing, then it’s a return to arcade shooting in the archery event. The Track & Field heritage is here in the way you hold down a button to set your elevation, but the moving target and accuracy bonuses introduce new layers of finesse. Finally, it’s back to Track & Field territory for the final three events—triple jump, weightlifting, and pole vault.
It’s a brilliant party game, and that’s due to offering a broader range of events than its predecessor; if you can’t win at the swimming event, you might still clean up at skeet shooting. If you’re good at everything, you can showboat by going for the hidden bonuses and actually attempt to complete the pole vault, one of gaming’s greatest tests. The game manages to combine mainstream appeal with hardcore hooks in a compact package—not a bad achievement at all. JM See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Marble Madness Original release date : 1984 Platform : Arcade Developer : Atari Genre : Action Marble Madness used a trackball rather than a joystick and buttons, and it was the first Atari arcade cabinet to use a Yamaha FM audio chip, but it’s a game that belongs in the history books for more than a simple string of design anomalies or firsts (and Missile Command beat it to the trackball, anyway). Marble Madness is colorful and loopy, a tense, often cruel action game that draws you back, defeat after defeat, with its wonderful levels and brilliant physics. It could be described as a simple maze game, if there was anything remotely simple about its mazes. But we should remember that designer Mark Cerny drew much of his inspiration from the “infinite architecture” of artist M. C. Escher, and in reality the mazes become tortured chunks of magical geometry, the bright oranges, yellows, and blues hiding the fact that this is a truly brutal battlefield you’re trying to navigate; each drop claiming hundreds of your glassy round brethren; each mean-spirited series of turns and loops tempting you to throw yourself into space with total abandon. For those who successfully beat each course, working around sadistic chicanes, hairpin bends, slides, funnels, and even the odd enemy, the only reward is more of the same, Atari flinging another killing ground at you, ready to soak up a few extra lives and steal even more of your money. Although there are only six levels in total, the time limits imposed force you into regular mistakes, and the sheer variety of ideas on offer in each environment makes the game seem vast and unpredictable. Proof that pretty, cartoony games often come with hearts as black as night, Marble Madness seems as good today as it ever has been, and its isometric style looks attractively retro, too. Track it down on one of Atari’s many best-of collections. CD See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Karate Champ Original release date : 1984 Platform : Arcade Developer : Data East Genre : Fighting
The fighting genre can trace its DNA back to two titles from the mid-1980s. Konami’s Yie Ar Kung-Fu takes the credit for introducing a range of characters with different fighting styles, and for giving each player a health bar that has to be gradually worn down. Data East’s Karate Champ is responsible for pretty much everything else. Bonus rounds as an aside to the main fight attraction? Karate Champ. An array of far too many moves to immediately get to grips with? Karate Champ again. The opportunity to play against real people rather than computer-controlled characters? You guessed it. Although Karate Champ contains the seed of a whole swathe of fighting games to come, it’s a first attempt that packs features that were discarded by its numerous progeny. There are no buttons to push, only two joysticks. You launch an attack by pushing the two sticks in their own directions simultaneously—up on the left stick and right on the right stick for a flying kick, for example—and then, if your timing and placement are spot on, your opponent goes down instantly. If not, then you’re wide open to him flattening you with his own counterattack. This game is not about wearing the other guy down. It’s about precision and daring, being able to make the right attack at the right time so that
the sensei awards you a full rather than a half point. Karate Champ has more to do with real martial-arts contests than street fighting, especially in its original Japanese incarnation. A US-focused remake transplants it from the dojos to a series of exotic locations, and has you fighting to win the girl instead of a karate competition, but the fights themselves (and the bull-punching bonus round) remain the same. In some ways it’s a historical curio, but in many others it’s the definitive template. JM See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Knight Lore Original release date : 1984 Platform : Various Developer : Ultimate Play the Game Genre : Action
Equipped with the Filmation three-dimensional graphics engine, Knight Lore was a groundbreaking British platform adventure. While isometric perspectives were not new to gamers, Knight Lore kicked off an avalanche of similarly styled titles, some of which were highlights of the genre. This is not to say that Knight Lore was lacking in highlights itself. Having been cursed by a “werewulf,” Sabreman—now in his third adventure—is beset by lycanthropy. He has forty days to work through a maze of chambers and corridors in search of the dying wizard, Melkhior. Along the way, Sabreman must collect the ingredients necessary for his cure. If he fails, he must forever remain a werewolf. Knight Lore presents a hearty challenge. In addition to the strict time limit, Sabreman must also endure his nightly transformation into beast form, making the game an action adventure that requires not only thought and good platforming skills, but decisiveness, too. At a time when gaming was all about homemade maps and tips traded in the playground, Knight Lore was a defining title. MKu
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1980s
Demolition Derby Original release date : 1984 Platform : Arcade Developer : Bally Midway Genre : Driving
Demolition Derby captures the stripped-to-the-bare-bones nature of its inspiration (drive around, smashing the heck out of others’ vehicles until only one remains operational) with no small amount of enthusiasm. It doesn’t overstretch itself in the visuals department, but it doesn’t need to: This is a game about cars ramming into one another (while keeping an eye out for damage-repairing screwdrivers and other bonuses), rather than negotiating complex tracks of curves and chicanes. The action is viewed directly from above, and the controls consist of a steering wheel and the ability to drive forward and backward. Successful play is all about hitting opponents with the rear of your car. What feels unusual to begin with quickly becomes second nature, and the appeal of this unique twist persists throughout. The game exists as a dual-control upright cabinet and as a four-player option. With friends taking part, personal grudges and alliances get brought into the game, but then ganging up on individuals feels almost par for the course in an activity as brilliantly lawless as this one. TB See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Lords of Midnight Original release date : 1984 Platform : Various Developer : Mike Singleton Genre : Strategy / Adventure
In the early 1980s, Mike Singleton was writing fantasy role-playing games. When he set out to develop a similarly epic computer version, there were no orthodox methods of displaying the vast worlds he imagined. So he decided to invent one. Lords of Midnight, a vast adventure set within a fantasy realm, featured a groundbreaking graphics technique called “landscaping.” It enabled the player to depict his surroundings from a first-person perspective. The plot follows Prince Luxor as he seeks to defeat the armies of the evil Doomdark. Skilled, strategic planning is needed as you prepare for each new engagement. At the end of each turn, darkness falls and Doomdark makes his move. The following morning, you receive a written report of the battles, victories, and defeats of the previous night. This kind of game may not be to everyone’s taste, but Lords of Midnight does make for an atmospheric and pleasantly cerebral experience. Amusingly enough, Singleton was said to have thought there was no way to defeat Doomdark: gamers, of course—as is their wont—proved him wrong. KS
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1980s
Jet Set Willy Original release date : 1984 Platform : Various Developer : Matthew Smith Genre : Platform
Matt Smith’s follow up to Manic Miner is a deeply unnerving and, frankly, rather sinister game. It’s a mysterious and darkly comic wander through a nightmarish mansion as Miner Willy is forced to tidy up his home before his furious wife will allow him to bed. The mansion itself is one of the greatest locations of any computer game. Starting in the bathroom, working through dining halls, kitchens, servants’ quarters, and into the garden, it’s memorable and oddly disturbing, filled with dancing razor blades, chugging saws, and nasty flying pigs. As in Manic Miner, Willy’s sprawling, leg-flailing jump is an instrument of pure platforming torture, as likely to carry you over your target or past it as it is to land you where you want to be. Due to a software bug in the original code, Jet Set Willy was actually unfinishable in its original format—a fact that seems genuinely to enhance the Kafkaesque brilliance of the game. Compared to most other home computer titles at the time—many of which were a bit nutty themselves—it’s a strange and singular feverish dream, a frightening 8-bit nightmare. CD See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Pac-Land Original release date : 1984 Platform : Arcade Developer : Namco Genre : Platform
While playing Pac-Land, it’s easy to envision an alternate history of video games, one where Namco’s mascot maintained his unquestioned dominion over gamerdom. When it appeared in 1984, the world was still in the grips of Pac-Mania. But the little, yellow pellet gobbler would soon be upstaged by other mascots. The Pac-Man franchise didn’t quite have the legs to maintain its success while making the jump to home consoles. But in Pac-Land, Pac-Man does have legs—literally—and he does an awful lot of jumping around. It’s a side-scrolling platformer that, in fact, came out a year before the debut of Super Mario Bros. And it prefigures that game in many other ways. Make no mistake, Pac-Land is not as good as Super Mario Bros. There are no bosses, the level layouts lack verticality, and the controls aren’t as satisfying. But it’s still solid fun, and of all the proto-Super Marios, it’s the Super Mario-iest. The titular character bounces from platform to platform with aplomb, sometimes encountering his wife and child, Mrs. Pepper Pac-Man and PacBaby. (Character design and theme song are lifted from the Saturday morning cartoon.) As he hops along, Pac-Man is besieged by endless waves of ghosts. Power pellets occasionally appear, allowing
him to gobble his foes, but it’s often easier to simply evade them and keep running and jumping. The historical value of Pac-Land is undeniable: If we study the hand-drawn look of the clouds and mountains in the background, the foreboding music that plays in dungeon areas, and the appearance of a multi-jump mechanic that recalls Mario’s underwater swimming, it’s hard to believe that the developers at Nintendo didn’t draw inspiration from several elements of the game. CB See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Paperboy Original release date : 1984 Platform : Arcade Developer : Atari Genre : Action
An odd experience by today’s standards, Paperboy is an ancestor of Grand Theft Auto: a game about a lone prole, struggling to stay afloat in a neighborhood turned treacherous. The player controls a hapless delivery boy who has to ride down the street delivering the Daily Sun—“the world’s most throwable newspaper”—but to the right houses, and preferably without smashing any windows. The street is pushed all the way to the right of the screen, which makes it easy to miss oncoming cars until they’re right on top of you. But it also affords you a better view of the neighborhood: robbers jimmy open windows, breakdancers bust a move where you’re trying to ride, a kid with a remote-control car comes gunning for your tires. The game is obsessed with death, or at least with Halloween, as hearses jerk out of the driveways in front of you and the Grim Reaper takes a stroll down the sidewalk. The lawns even sport tombstones with your initials on them. Feel free to knock them down for extra points. With an actual pair of handlebars for controls, the arcade version handles much the same as the crappy no-gears bike that a kid his age would be dying to trade. But the game’s biggest challenge lies in keeping customers happy. Following each day’s delivery, angry customers will cancel their
subscriptions; lose enough, and you’re fired. This idea of holding a neighborhood in the face of mortal danger would come back in games like Saints Row and numerous others in which a territory has to be maintained and defended. But, of course, the descendants of Paperboy swapped newspapers for handguns, and the price of losing became a lot bloodier than sitting on the curbside next to your wrecked bike, with a newspaper bag jammed over your head. CDa See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Spy vs. Spy Original release date : 1984 Platform : Various Developer : First Star Software Genre : Action / Strategy
With this wonderfully devious multiplayer game from veteran designer Mike Reidel, the violent monochromatic nemeses made the transition from the ink-smeared pages of Mad magazine to 8-bit home computers. There’s never been anything else quite like it: a title that makes ample allowances for direct combat between its players, but truly relishes indirect battle also, as two rival spies move around the same suite of rooms, laying traps for each other while collecting the necessary documents and money needed to flee the country via a small airstrip. It’s a brisk tactical challenge as players choose whether to carry all the items they’ve collected on their person—and subsequently risk losing them all if they get killed—or opt instead to stash their supplies somewhere, and booby trap the spot, gambling that their enemy will get his comeuppance while searching for them. The traps themselves are lavishly comic affairs, with deadly buckets of water on doors, automatic guns tethered to furniture, plump anarchist bombs, and—best of all—a massive spring that, if deployed correctly, can propel the hapless victim through successive rooms. In a clever twist, each trap also has a weak spot that will allow a spy to sidestep the effects if they’re carrying the correct
item, so half of the fun comes from keeping an eye on your rival’s screen and trying to remember which types of traps he has laid in store for you. Comic and sadistic, Spy vs. Spy makes perfect use of the source material. It’s a riotous, infuriatingly simple multiplayer classic that suggests a quirky direction that the genre has never really chosen to follow up. Remade rather elegantly for the Game Boy, there is also an Xbox update, but that is probably best avoided. CD See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Bounty Bob Strikes Back Original release date : 1984 Platform : Various Developer : Big Five Software Genre : Platform
In the family tree of video game genre, lines can be drawn from Bounty Bob Strikes Back to its predecessor, Miner 2049er, and to the vaunted Miner Willy series that took Big Five’s passion project as its inspiration. Though Bounty Bob Strikes Back may be one of gaming’s first true sequels, the real narrative lies in its development. Forged in the fires of the emergent 1980s technology that encouraged so much experimentation in video game development, the partnership of programmer Bill Hogue and designer Jeff Konyu caused a miniature media tidal wave, elevating the duo to temporary celebrity. Meticulously traversing splintered platforms, lighting them up for points, and treading on a few enemy heads along the way, Bounty Bob is filled with design ingenuity. Expositional details left behind by other miners pave the way for Bob’s journey back toward the heart of darkness he faced in Miner 2049er: the lurking Yukon Yohan. They are cursory details not easily identified in the archaic engine, but it’s a decision that belies a level of world-building coherence carried on by developers ever since. The use of Bounty Bob’s name in a sequel, and its underwhelming reception, leading ultimately to
its studio’s exit from the industry, could be argued as a small-scale harbinger of where the video game model would later lead. That isn’t to deny Bounty Bob’s quality: more detailed, dense, and challenging across its twenty-five levels, it’s superior to its progenitor in both looks and technical achievement. The implementation of vertical scrolling for level transitions was a minor revelation, and links sections into a singular chain, soldering coherence to Bounty Bob’s underground quest. It also seamlessly nudges users into continuous play—and, of course, some manic mining. DV See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Déjà Vu Original release date : 1985 Platform : Various Developer : ICUM Simulations Genre : Adventure
Apple’s computers have never enjoyed too much of a reputation as gaming formats, but rewind twenty years and the picture was at least a little different. Déjà Vu was the first of what was known as the MacVenture series—a collection of point-and-click adventures. In video gaming’s evolution, the legacy of the MacVenture concept is its exploration of the WIMP (window, icon, menu, pointing device) interface in the context of gaming, thus paving the way for the likes of LucasArts’s many adventure classics. Déjà Vu is set in 1940s Chicago and draws heavily from film noir motifs, its bold, monochromatic presentation comfortably suiting the themes. As private investigator Ace Harding, you begin the game by awakening in a bathroom stall, faced with bloodstains, a gun, and fresh needle marks. Oh, and of course you can’t remember a blessed thing. In fact, as hackneyed a device as it may be, your memory loss actually serves the interface well. Part of the joy of playing games is the expectation of the future, that sense of unknowing and subsequent desire to see what the next stage brings. Here, with each mouse click, another page in your story is turned over. Unlike the text adventures that preceded it, Déjà Vu has game play that is mouse-driven, which
makes it extremely simple to control, with no typing involved whatsoever. It’s difficult to remember a time when a single button would be sufficient to complete an entire game and, for that, Déjà Vu’s simplicity is a quaint reminder for anyone overwhelmed by the amount of buttons that appear on all modern game controllers. In fact, point-and-click adventures have been making a return in recent years, thanks to the rise of browser-based games that are a natural fit for the medium. JBW See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Summer Games II Original release date : 1985 Platform : Various Developer : Epyx Genre : Sports
The world may have first encountered athletics in video game form via the arcade, but it was a series of games for home consoles that presented more deeply considered representations of such pursuits. Where Konami’s Track & Field often focused on hammering buttons as quickly as possible in order to build up speed, Epyx’s Games series tended to explore finer nuances of control. Summer Games II represented an evolution over the original Summer Games, and included one more event, bringing the total to eight. The triple jump, high jump, and javelin throw hardly reinvented the sports game genre, but the rowing, equestrian, fencing, kayaking, and cycling events offered action that hadn’t previously been seen. While rowing requires rhythmic shifting rather than frantic waggling, it’s kayaking that presents the more satisfying water-based challenge, negotiation of the various gates throughout its convoluted course requiring a good deal of paddling skill. Equestrian is a more novel inclusion, albeit a less successful one, while fencing pushes the envelope even farther, introducing a layer of strategy not normally associated with multidiscipline sports games. Finally, if it’s a marathon challenge you’re after, cycling will fit the bill, requiring you to repeatedly rotate your athlete’s legs until you’re
convinced that something—either your wrist or the joystick—is going to expire. The attention to detail in Epyx’s animation gives terrific momentum to the various pursuits in Summer Games II, and, naturally, it’s as a multiplayer game that it really comes to life. World Games a nd California Games developed and polished the central formula, but with a group of friends involved, this second sunny outing provides ample challenge and reward. TB See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
A Mind Forever Voyaging Original release date : 1985 Platform : Various Developer : Infocom Genre : Text Adventure At the height of its powers, Infocom took a chance on its boldest game: an interactive story about the power of politics to crush lives, a personal story told from inside a computer, and a game with almost no challenge. A Mind Forever Voyaging casts the player as a sentient artificial intelligence in a laboratory. The government is about to roll out a radical set of policies called the Plan for Renewed National Process, and you are tasked with exploring a simulation of the future to assess how the Plan plays out. Across five decades, Perry, the human form inhabited by the AI, visits the fictional town of Rockvil, South Dakota, and tries to live an ordinary life: He buys some clothes, talks to pedestrians, and stops home to see his wife. But every decade, everything he sees gets worse. Perry can record his experiences and bring them back for evidence, but not everyone likes his report—and that’s when the game’s only challenge appears. But for most of the game, players explore Rockvil with nothing standing in their way, and the act of gathering research is as compelling as any riddlish Infocom puzzle. As a point-by-point critique of conservative policies released at the height of the Reagan era, the game makes a radical political statement: writer Steve Meretzky essentially warns us that the policies of the right will destroy the human race. A Mind Forever Voyaging never quite managed to raise the firestorm Meretzky had hoped, and today it’s remembered more for the richness of detail woven into Perry’s simulated world. The game forces you to witness cruelties both large and small, affecting those most precious to you. And even without a puzzle, the process of asking you to document these moments hooks you in a way unique to the medium. CDa See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Commando Original release date : 1985 Platform : Arcade Developer : Capcom Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
A chopper lands in hostile territory. Sandbags and rock outcrops shelter the enemy troops, and a formidable gate lies ahead. An endless army waits with guns, grenades, and even mortars, but the hero—Super Joe—is ready to take them on. Granted, he has an advantage: The other side fires the world’s slowest bullets, which are easy to dodge in moderation. The enemy grunts are also predictable and single-minded, while Joe can whirl around and fire in all directions to clear his way forward. Still, he does have eight stages to get through on one coin. A pioneer of its genre, Tokuro Fujiwara’s Commando is a top-down run-and-gun game, where the hero is always charged with advancing, but can also backtrack a little and spread fire at the enemy that tries to surround him. With bunkers and sandbag covers protecting your targets, the game introduced more tactics than previous shooters. Crucially, it incorporates secondary fire in the form of grenades that can be flung over the tops of bullet-stopping enemy barricades. The terrain and the challenges keep changing, and while the wartime setting is presented in a safe, blood-free manner, you will come across POWs waiting to be freed—as well as grueling trench warfare. And instead of giving you finite waves to beat, Commando keeps the attackers coming at a
pace that’s just short of frantic: Your only job is to keep pushing on to the end. It was a winning formula that inspired many ports, sequels, and knock-offs. Commando was followed by Bionic Commando, which was marketed as a sequel (even though, as a side-viewed platform-based game, it is very different in style), Mercs, and, in 2008, by Wolf of the Battlefield: Commando 3, which failed to make anything like the mark of the explosive original. CDa See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Yie Ar Kung-Fu Original release date : 1985 Platform : Arcade Developer : Konami Genre : Fighting
Although the more naturalistic Karate Champ preceded Yie Ar Kung-Fu by a year, it is Konami’s gaudy, quick-paced offering that many view as the archetypal fighting game. Wannabe martial-arts legend Oolong is pitted against a series of eleven progressively tough opponents, each with their own signature moves and weapons—from chains and clubs to razor-sharp fans and nunchaku (the latter wielded by a figure in a yellow tracksuit—a neat homage to Bruce Lee). It is this outlandish menagerie of characters, rather than Karate Champ’s austere sportsmen, that would influence the likes of Street Fighter and Fatal Fury. This was not the game’s only contribution to fighting game lore. Yie Ar Kung-Fu (or “One Two Kung Fu” to translate from Chinese) also popularized the use of health bars for each fighter, rather than hit points, and it brought in the use of bright, detailed scenic backdrops: The first five fights take place in front of a waterfall; the final six in the grounds of a temple. Furthermore, Oolong is able to make extravagant leaps around the game area—another staple element of fighting game design and a vital tactical maneuver. The player can call upon a range of attacks, accessible through combining the eight-way joystick
with the kick and punch buttons. Each opponent relies on a different combination of attack patterns that must be studied and memorized to discover weak spots. The game’s weakness is the inaccurate collision detection, which leaves players vulnerable at close range; and with no way to control the length of jumps, bouts descend into glorified leaping contests. But then, this was 1985, six years before the momentous debut of Street Fighter II. Yie Ar Kung-Fu may be a limited fighter, but its impact is uncontestable. KS See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Gauntlet Original release date : 1985 Platform : Arcade Developer : Atari Genre : Action
Long, long before the ravenous zombie hordes of Left 4 Dead, the ghillie-snipers of COD4, or the purple extraterrestrial pleasures of Halo, multiplayer gaming was all about Gauntlet: a top-down dungeon crawler, heavy on potions, keys, and ghoul battering, and satisfyingly light on just about everything else. It wasn’t bad, as it happens. Actually, it was amazing: a frenzy of shooting, magic attacks, treasure raiding, and—if played right—regular griefing—that could turn close friends into bitter enemies on the way from the entrance to the exit of each short level. Choosing from a range of familiar fantasy characters, players would band together in teams of four, then go pillaging assorted brown and gray rooms, unlocking doors to progress to the next chamber, and, very occasionally, stopping to lend someone a helping hand. It was brutal, unforgiving, and fairly simple stuff, but it was also magical in its immersion and immediacy, the atmosphere heightened by the game’s booming audio accompaniment: a series of somber musical pieces overlaid with the muffled tones of an unseen dungeon master offering such invaluable tips as: “Remember: don’t shoot food.” An arcade classic from Atari’s resident genius Ed Logg, numerous ports allowed you to relive the
excitement on home platforms, but it was never quite the same as when you were battling together with friends in the confines of a dingy arcade. Modern-day sequels have tried to recreate the magic, but the rowdy, cussing brilliance of Gauntlet is at its best in its original form, a happy accident of simple design and limitless mutual recrimination. These days, games have evolved to become prettier and more complex, but clunky old Gauntlet is still admirably fresh and immediate. CD See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Ghosts ’n Goblins Original release date : 1985 Platform : Arcade Developer : Capcom Genre : Action
It takes more than mere courage to cross the six realms of Ghosts ’n Goblins, over bottomless pit and grasping claw, into the waiting arms of Princess Guinevere. It takes patience, a fistful of change, and a preternatural ability to leap while you look, if not before. Tokuro “Professor F” Fujiwara’s platformer, in which the gallant Sir Arthur has to rescue his beau from the evil Goblin King, is notorious as one of the hardest coin-ops ever made. Whenever you press the button to make Arthur jump, legs askew and arms akimbo, you’re making a commitment. There’s no midair adjustment or reversal, double jumping or ledge grabbing. Instead, you can be guaranteed that if your timing (or spacing) is the slightest bit awry, the least you’ll lose is your trousers: one hit, and Arthur’s armor falls off, leaving only boxer shorts to protect his dignity; another, and he’ll disintegrate into a pile of bones: fall just a pixel short of a ledge, and you’ll vanish into water, lava, or off-screen oblivion. The game wants nothing more than for this to happen. While many of the harder side-scrolling coin-ops—notably fighters like The Ninja Warriors and Vigilante—have enemies flood in from the left and right of the screen, Ghosts ’n Goblins goes one step beyond. As birds swoop from the trees
and coffins rise from the ground, your enemies come from everywhere—often right under your feet. Each of Arthur’s weapons has a unique range and trajectory, some deliberately less favorable than others, meaning that even power-ups have to be dodged from time to time. Alongside Capcom’s emerging art style and penchant for epic boss battles, the difficulty of Ghosts ’n Goblins makes for a terrifically satisfying challenge, and one that also succeeds in its various home-conversion guises. DH See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Green Beret Original release date : 1985 Platform : Arcade Developer : Konami Genre : Action
The geo-political Cold War climate of the mid-1980s proved fertile ground for developers of action arcade coin-ops. With the threat of nuclear annihilation hanging in the balance, and one-man armies, such as Sylvester Stallone and Chuck Norris, on hand to save the day, rampant xenophobia was a theme that resonated just as well with audiences on the big screen as it did in dark, smoky amusement arcades. No surprise, then, that Green Beret was a big hit when it was released. Most military-themed coin-ops were to consign their commie bashing and POW rescuing to nonspecific foreign locales. Green Beret, however, was far less tactful; a gratuitous antidote to prevailing platform-game cuteness. Upon inserting a coin, the player is granted a glimpse of four squirming POWs roped up on enemy posts, soon to be served bullets for breakfast. Our green-clad hero proceeds to run horizontally through enemy military compounds, stabbing an advancing hivelike army of trench-coated bad guys with a knife. Along the way he picks up handy enemy weapons—flamethrowers, RPGs, grenades—to help sustain the frantic murder-thon.
As a precursor to Contra and other run-and-gun experiences, Green Beret is a twitch game par excellence—and a challenging one. Instead of cheap tactics, though, the game relies upon a constant barrage of enemy soldiers that eventually cause the player to lapse in concentration, each level’s onslaught climaxing with an ever-greater number of hell-bent adversaries. As such, Green Beret is unselfconsciously one note, an orgiastic killing spree tempered only by its crudely animated 8-bit facade. Green Beret enjoyed even greater mileage in its (slightly more parent-friendly) home computer editions. JB See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Gradius Original release date : 1985 Platform : Arcade Developer : Konami Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
In 1985, arcade fans—who were thoroughly used to chunky, garish 8-bit graphics—could have been forgiven for feeling something akin to religious rapture upon witnessing Gradius. Like having laser eye surgery of the pixel variety, game worlds suddenly emerged as beautiful beyond the imagination—and Konami’s artists were among the very best in the business. Although Gradius was the iconic shooter that rode this initial wave of transformation, its qualities were far more than just superficial. Above all, it has the distinction of introducing a weapon selection bar: By collecting glowing amber capsules that allow the player to cycle through the bar, new weapons are chosen by a power-up button on the cabinet itself. Individual weapons can also be powered up several times, and only the speed-up poses any kind of problem when activated in excess —as players would discover after getting too close to an erupting volcano. The key power-up among the five available is probably the “option” (or “multiple,” as the fuzzy announcer calls it), a yellow orb that follows behind your Vic Viper ship, unleashing the same force as its carrier. A series can be strung together in snakelike fashion, providing concentrated firepower with diligent positioning—particularly useful when dealing with boss enemies that require players to
“shoot the core.” Above all, Gradius afforded players the newfound luxury of being able to select what power-ups might suit the moment—a feature that would influence the entire shoot ’em up genre—while providing a previously unseen level of aesthetic and aural sophistication. Successive titles in the series naturally took this formula and ran with it, and the 1988 sequel—Gradius II—in particular shines brightly in the pantheon. JB See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Mercenary Original release date : 1985 Platform : Various Developer : Paul Woakes Genre : Action / Adventure
It is commonplace nowadays to hear developers boasting about fully explorable environments in which players are free to wander as they please. More often than not, however, these worlds are given their form and didactic function via an array of background narratives, cut scenes, mandatory objectives, and action choke points. Mercenary, on the other hand, builds a world and crashes the player on it. Everything else is up for grabs. The game has no options screen and no introduction. Instead, it begins in a damaged spacecraft hurtling toward the planet Targ. Postcrash, players emerge into a minimal world sparsely populated by wire-frame buildings and symbolic scenic objects. The programmer, Paul Woakes, constructed a fully three-dimensional environment with these basic graphical tools, even including a vast underground labyrinth of tunnels and rooms. Slowly, information is fed to the player via a computerized personal assistant named Benson: Two races are fighting to establish control of the planet—the peaceful indigenous Palyars and the invading Mechanoid army. As a soldier for hire, the player is able to take on missions for either side in order to save enough money to buy a spaceship and escape.
Mercenary is loaded with modern video game elements: a duplicitous mission structure, multiple endings, and a functioning economy. There’s also a sly sense of humor at work—the player is rewarded for destroying the Atari sign in the Commodore version (and vice versa). The game was an enormous critical success, dazzling reviewers and contemporary game coders alike with the completeness of its universe. For vision, technical brilliance, and sheer gall, it wouldn’t be significantly bettered until Deus Ex appeared fifteen years later. KS See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Little Computer People Original release date : 1985 Platform : Various Developer : Activision Genre : Life Simulation
Little Computer People is endlessly credited as the inspiration for The Sims, but it is extraordinary in its own right, especially within the limitations of its technology. It presents a crosssection view of a three-story house populated by a little man, who goes about the rather mundane business of living—eating, drinking, sleeping, watching TV, shuffling around with his canine companion—and leaves the player largely to their own devices. Besides sending enough food and drink to keep man and pup in good health, the player’s role is marginal. So long as they’re phrased politely, the computer person might listen to suggestions (“Please play piano!”); he might occasionally write a letter to express his satisfaction with his current state of affairs, or he might challenge the player to a game of cards. Most of the time, though, he’s just puttering about doing nothing in particular. Little Computer People is a digital goldfish bowl, expecting nothing more from its players than calm and patient inquisitiveness. For some, that’s too much to ask. What is unique and fascinating to Little Computer People’s fans is boring and pointless to its detractors. The game is based on the premise that these computer people do actually exist inside your
machine, and the software is just a lens through which to view them—the game’s manual and packaging are adorably stubborn in their commitment to the illusion. It is true, though, that no two computer people are the same. Each copy of the game generates its character uniquely, giving every player a slightly different experience—except the unfortunate souls stuck with the severely maimed cassette versions, which conjure a new character with every start up, removing all meaningful continuity from the game. KM See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Tehkan World Cup Original release date : 1985 Platform : Arcade Developer : Tehkan Genre : Sports
Some games create entire genres while others merely help to define them. Tehkan World Cup belongs in the latter category, but its significance shouldn’t be played down simply because it wasn’t the world’s first soccer game. There had been numerous soccer simulations before Tehkan’s game took to the field, but none that matched it in excitement for the gamer. Presenting a view on the action from directly above, Tehkan World Cup doesn’t get bogged down by convoluted animation or overcomplex controls. Instead, it’s all about translating the dynamism of soccer at its most free-flowing, an objective it achieves with the aplomb of a thirty-yard strike driven into the top corner of the net. The overhead perspective ensures that you’re never left in any doubt as to the precise position of the ball, and it also allows for a quicker pace than the often snail-like side-viewed football games of yore. Tehkan World Cup ’s view on the action necessitated a “tabletop” design for its cabinet, encouraging rivalry by allowing two players to compete head to head rather than side by side, which
enhances the game’s credentials in delivering the intensity of real-life sport. The distinguishing element its fans will hold up highest, however, is its trackball controller, allowing for considered and smoothflowing manipulation of the players. Here, dribbling around an opponent in order to set up a goal-scoring opportunity can be a silky art, indeed. On the downside the competitiveness triggered by the game, coupled with its control scheme, has resulted in countless playing injuries over the years in the form of skin pinched by madly spun trackballs, but to its legion of devoted fans, such mishaps are a small price to pay. TB See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Super Mario Bros. Original release date : 1985 Platform : NES Developer : Nintendo Genre : Platform
The problem with classics, by and large, is that they’re old. They usher in great changes and they redefine the landscape, but less influential games perfect the trends they started and end up being a lot more fun to play. For example, StarFox isn’t as ground-breaking as Asteroids as space games go, but anyone stuck in an elevator would undoubtedly prefer it as a means to pass the time. And yet, while Super Mario Bros. (originally an arcade game but consequently a title that became synonymous with Nintendo’s NES) did so much to define the side-scrolling platformer, twenty-odd years on it’s still one of the best there is. Its colors may seem a little muted by today’s standards, and its iconic plumber’s moustache lacks definition, but this has excellent enemy design; tricky, secretpacked worlds; and an unforgettable Caribbean-flavored soundtrack as Mario—and brother Luigi in two-player mode—set off to rescue their princess from the clutches of hunch-backed, twiddly-toed Bowser. Most of all, Super Mario Bros. has a sense of believable physics—something still missing from a lot of modern-day platformers. Set Mario running, and you’ll need time and space to get him to slow down; attempt a big jump, and you’re going to have to get a running start; bounce on an enemy, and
you may well need to fine-tune your landing while still in the air. All of which gives the game the precision necessary to allow for a cluster of tightly paced underground and overworld levels, with their gloriously destructible environments and famous powerups—like the growth mushroom and the fire flower. Super Mario Bros. is venerable, then, but not remotely rickety: a simple delight that can still give far more complex games a comprehensive run-around. CD See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
The Bard’s Tale Original release date : 1985 Platform : Various Developer : Interplay Genre : Role-Playing
In most role-playing games, bards are a niche class, a callow mix of rogue, healer, and playenhancement dispenser, prone to flowery dialogue and over-the-top bravado. They’re never as clever or as crucial as they think they are, but in The Bard’s Tale, they’re an essential piece of a party and one of the last lines of defense in a city plagued by an invasion. Skara Brae is suffering under the minions of the wizard Mangar, and it’s up to the last lame adventurers left within its walls to save the day. While the entire game takes place inside the city, Skara Brae offers streets, sewers, catacombs, and even a wine cellar. Diligent players mapped it all with pen and paper, exploring it in a straightforward dungeon crawl that competed head-on with major franchises like Wizardry and Ultima. Like Wizardry, it gave most of the screen to the player stats and commands, with a small window displaying the view a few steps in front of you. Ten different classes (including four kinds of magic users) brought depth to the character customization, and, in a cheeky move, the game even let you import your characters from its competitors. But the conceit of a bard who sang your triumphs and guided naïve young adventurers to victory gave the game more color and wit than the straight looting
and boss battling of other role-playing games. The Bard’s Tale inspired two sequels, and in 2004, InXile Entertainment even produced a complete re-imagining that brought the drunken bluster of the titular hero to consoles of the era, mocking the clichés of the genre without adding any new ones of its own. Meanwhile, Interplay, the game’s original developer, would redefine the role-playing genre in the late 1990s by publishing the first two Fallouts and Planescape: Torment. CDa See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Fairlight Original release date : 1985 Platform : Various Developer : Bo Jangeborg Genre : Adventure
With the release of Knight Lore in 1984, British game development studio Ultimate Play the Game raised the bar by such a margin that it immediately made all other home computer games look like antiques. How was it possible for hardware as seemingly primitive as Sinclair’s ZX Spectrum to cast such magical three-dimensional imagery across the screen? Surely this was the pinnacle of achievable software engineering feats on 8-bit systems. It wasn’t, of course, but it took another year for Fairlight to arrive and show Ultimate’s programmers a thing or two about graphical fidelity and associated game play complexity. Swedish programmer Bo Jangeborg had already built a reputation for pioneering work in the realm of home computer graphics by creating a powerful utility entitled The Artist, and his attention to visual finesse (along with the efforts of collaborator Jack Wilkes) furnished Fairlight with extravagant detail. An adventure played out in isometric perspective, the game sees you exploring an extensively proportioned castle in a bid to retrieve the Book of Light. Key to Fairlight’s appeal is its handling of objects. Unlike in other adventures of the era, many different types exist, they have their own physical properties, and they can be manipulated relatively freely within the game’s environments.
Such excesses naturally come at a cost. It takes a moment for the game to conjure up its locations as you move between them, for example, and the action can slow to a crawling pace when everything heats up. Meanwhile, the combat, which involves a variety of enemy types, is basic. But such issues shouldn’t overshadow Fairlight’s triumphs. That few other 8-bit games attempted similarly ambitious agendas in its wake tells its own story. TB See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Paradroid Original release date : 1985 Platform : Commodore 64 Developer : Graftgold Genre : Action
A masterpiece of creative endeavor over the technical constraints of the Commodore 64 system, Paradroid enjoys a simple premise: You are in control of a robot beamed aboard an errant spacecraft whose crew has gone insane. The ship must be destroyed. Two key design elements lift Paradroid beyond the wealth of multidirectional shooters on offer at the time. First, enemy droids are only visible when in the control robot’s line of sight, leading to incredible tension with every freshly opened door or turned corner. Second, the player may gain control over any robot by ramming it, accessing its CPU, and overcoming its defenses via a circuitbusting minigame. In this way, participants become desperate robotic body snatchers, always scouring levels for new, more powerful hosts. Visually, Paradroid is filled with numerous beautiful and subtle presentational flourishes. And to complete designer Andrew Braybrook’s vision of an entirely robotic environment, the soundtrack comprises discordant bleeps and blips—a binary symphony for mad machines. KS See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Skool Daze Original release date : 1985 Platform : ZX Spectrum Developer : Microsphere Genre : Action
Like Little Computer People, Skool Daze is a predecessor of less “gamey” software. A school simulation, it casts you as the mischief-making scamp everyone secretly pretends they were, and tasks you with retrieving your school report from a safe in the headmaster’s office, thus avoiding expulsion. Rather difficult when you’ve got to get a little bit of the safe’s code from every other teacher in the school, all of whom have a beady eye out. The entire school is on-screen, viewed as a cross-section that makes it resemble nothing so much as an ant farm. The teachers and other pupils walk about independently and have their own routines, which you have to learn and exploit. But the teachers will notice when you don’t turn up to classes or misbehave in the corridors, so a good deal of time is spent pretending to be good while planning your assaults and raids. It might be the first game that demands you act rather than just play. Limited in its objectives but expansive in how they are achieved, Skool Daze amused many, but failed to inspire a glut of similar games. RS See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Tetris Original release date : 1985 Platform : Various Developer : Alexey Pajitnov Genre : Puzzle
When it comes to a game that practically anyone, in any corner of the globe, is likely to enjoy, Alexey Pajitnov’s falling-blocks classic is hard to better. To see Tetris in action is to understand instantly what has to be done—tidy everything up and clear whole lines of blocks before the distinctively shaped pieces fill the screen. Playing on the compulsion to make order from chaos, which appears to be hard-wired into the human brain, a quick five-minute round can so easily turn into a three-hour session. Games come and go, but few have the power to haunt both waking hours and dreams quite like Tetris. Designed by Pajitnov at the Academy of Science in Moscow, Tetris found itself embroiled in an international bidding war involving America, Japan, Britain, and the Soviet government. When Nintendo chose it as the ideal title for the launch of its new handheld console, the Game Boy, its place in the annals of video gaming was assured: We can equally imagine that Nintendo’s little gray box might have found its way into fewer homes without this simple blocky pleasure wedged in the cartridge slot. CD See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Trinity Original release date : 1985 Platform : Various Developer : Infocom Genre : Text Adventure
One of Infocom’s boldest experiments, Trinity is a puzzle game with elements of fantasy, concerning one of the darkest periods of modern history: the creation and testing of nuclear weapons. At the start of the game, the player is happily wandering through Kensington Gardens, among the mothers and prams. Suddenly a missile bearing a hammer-and-sickle motif hangs in the sky: World War III has begun, and everybody’s about to die. But before that happens, a roadrunner leads you to a mysterious white door—a way out and an opportunity to change history. The rich, florid writing contrasts with the gravity of the situation. You end up trading origami with a little girl seconds before the bombing of Nagasaki, or wandering in woods so confusing that words begin to turn backward. Reality and fantasy, terror and laughter are contrasted: the dread of a freshly built bomb shelter, and the brilliantly dark humor of a coin found in the mouth of a corpse that bears the words “Not transferable.” A mix of the wondrous and the horrifying, this is a thought-provoking and literary accomplishment. CDa
See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Alex Kidd in Miracle World Original release date : 1986 Platform : Master System Developer : Sega Genre : Platform
If you had a sleek black Sega Master System instead of a bulky old NES in the late 1980s, Alex Kidd was probably your Mario—or at least you told yourself he was. And yet, while this perky hydrocephalus may not have left the mightiest imprint on posterity, for a certain kind of social outcast, the very mention of Miracle World is enough to thrust one back into the smoky depths of Proustian reverie. While it’s certainly no Mushroom Kingdom, Miracle World isn’t a bad playground: There are bikes and aircraft to ride, shops to visit, octopode to fight—when it comes down to it, Alex Kidd can grow a fist every bit as large as his head, which is extremely handy for taking on the local wildlife— and a surprisingly wide range of environments, from rocky canyons to magma-filled volcanoes, to explore. The music that chugs brightly from the Master System’s limited sound chip is among the best the platform ever delivered. There’s even a band of hand-headed foes ready to pop up at unlikely moments and engage you in fierce bouts of Rock, Paper, Scissors (and intrude into your nightmares from that point onward)—a horribly random piece of game design that, luckily, you can cheat your way past if you remember the special combination of button presses to reveal your enemies’ thoughts.
It’s all very colorful and fast-paced, and while it doesn’t have the same sense of inertial physics that makes Mario and his gang such a pleasure to throw around, it’s still got some nicely designed levels and a wicked difficulty curve. But as an example of 1980s platforming craftsmanship, Alex Kidd in Miracle World is charming and zippy—if ever so slightly forgettable. As a rare glimpse into Mario’s forgotten competitors, however, it’s a brilliant find, and well worth tracking down. CD See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Leader Board Original release date : 1986 Platform : Various Developer : Bruce Carver, Roger Carver Genre : Sports
Golf just isn’t sexy. And yet some golf games are without question the best and most appealing sports sims in existence. Why? It’s all because of Leader Board, a game whose appeal lies principally in its presentation. Abandoning the top-down view forced on other games by hardware limitations, Leader Board renders its course in minimalist three dimensions. It’s slow to draw on a Commodore 64, but that’s a small niggle; the beauty of it is that it puts you right in the game instead of viewing it from overhead. Watching your ball sail into the distance, praying that the wind won’t catch it too hard, quietly punching the air when it plops down right next to the pin … It’s something that works so much better in three dimensions—even the most basic 3-D. It really is a step toward virtual reality and the feeling of being there. Besides its three-dimensional appeal, Leader Board is also notable for setting the standard for the way in which golf games are still played today, with its power bar and snap meter adding an arcade-style touch to what is an intrinsically pedestrian game. Press the joystick button to start your backswing, press it again to set your power and begin your forward swing, then make a third press to
set the difference between straight down the middle and hooked or sliced into the rough. It’s simple and brilliant, and has influenced every successful golf game since. Eventually the game spawned numerous sequels down the line, incorporating replicas of the world’s most famous golf courses. But there’s something special about the original’s island courses and the constant threat of losing your ball in the water. Vitally, it’s a title that lends itself equally well to both intense multiplayer competition and absorbing single-player sessions. JM See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Alter Ego Original release date : 1986 Platform : Commodore 64, Apple II Developer : Activision Genre : Role-Playing Billed as “a role-playing game about life,” Alter Ego is the apotheosis of idiosyncratic 1980s gaming development. Released in both male and female versions, the goal is to guide a virtual human personality through the seven stages of life, achieving emotional, vocational, and physical balance in the process—or just experimenting in order to create the most psychotic monster the process allows. Alter Ego could be viewed as a glorified Myers-Briggs psychometric questionnaire. At each stage of life, the player is presented with a map of icons representing experiences in various categories; clicking on these produces a series of multiple-choice questions designed to gauge the moral proclivities of the developing persona. As a baby there are the fundamental building blocks of social interaction—should you cry to get your mother’s attention or gurgle contentedly? In those awkward teen years, what do you do if a group of friends want to get drunk on a school night? And what of the balance between work and love? Notions of sex, suicide, and drug abuse are also deftly explored. The game keeps a life score based on the player’s choices, and the pithy commentary following each moral vignette hints at the wisdom (or otherwise) of the selected actions, proving intriguing insight into theories of human development. Critically lauded at the time (though not a commercial success), it was an interesting attempt to bring “realism” to the text-based adventure format of the day. The field of social and psychological simulation would later reach the mainstream via EA’s massively successful Sims series. But since Alter Ego is now available not only as a fan-produced online game but also an iPhone app, those reared on Will Wright’s vision of an interactive soap opera can now discover The Sims’ altogether darker, more troublesome progenitor. KS See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Arkanoid Original release date : 1986 Platform : Arcade Developer : Taito Genre : Action
Audacious makeovers of classic arcade games were big business during the mid-1980s, giving life to Blasteroids (Asteroids with powerups and a boss battle), Pac-Mania (a colorful isometric Pac-Man), and, most notably, Arkanoid. Atari’s Breakout had done much of the legwork, putting a 90-degree twist on Pong and building a wall of destructible bricks above the player’s bat. But Arkanoid, coming a decade later and during the popularization of scrolling shoot ’em ups, had all kinds of new ideas. First was the preposterous notion that the bat, now a rather posh affair with flashing tips and a metallic sheen, was actually a spacecraft called the Vaus, flung from a doomed mothership (Arkanoid) into a parallel dimension full of—you guessed it—destructible bricks. Lurking behind thirty-two screens’ worth of those was DOH, a fortress resembling a Moai statue from Easter Island. Enough of a hit to warrant more than a dozen ports and three major sequels, Arkanoid was a game for the powerup generation. Striking certain bricks would yield a capsule which, if caught, might widen the Vaus, equip it with lasers with which to simply shoot bricks, bring multiple balls into play, or make the existing ball “stick” (the player could then catch and launch it at will). Opposing
spaceships would wander into play, diverting the ball at their own expense. And the multicolored bricks had different values, some awarding more points, others indestructible. Like Breakout before it, Arkanoid used an analogue dial to control the bat. Unwieldy to the firsttime player, it was vastly superior to the home alternative: digital movement via keyboard or joystick. The Nintendo Entertainment System devised its own solution, a bespoke “Vaus Controller”—a knob connected to a potentiometer—only supported by one other game: Chase HQ. DH See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Darius Original release date : 1986 Platform : Arcade Developer : Taito Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
“WARNING! A huge battleship is approaching fast!” To the underwater explorers of Darius that signals the arrival of something large, scaly, and probably very hard to kill … and agony if you’ve just lost all your power-ups. By 1986, state-of-the-art visual gimmickry was seen as the most effective way to draw in the coin-op punters. Beyond just cranking out bigger and faster sprites than the 8-bit titles of previous years, the focus was now on offering experiences so sophisticated they would be impossible to recreate in the home—short of wheeling heavy arcade cabinets into the living room. Taito’s aquatic side-scrolling game arrived in an oversized cabinet that housed not one, but three monitors. And because they were cleverly overlapped and reflected onto vertical mirrors set far back, the effect was a vivid widescreen panorama framed by expanses of blackness. This impressive sight was bolstered by a stunning attract mode that promoted its simultaneous—not to mention coin-gobbling— two-player mode, and a punchy electrosynth soundtrack (by Zuntata, Taito’s cheesy in-house game
Muzak band). Those who succumbed to Darius’s slippery charms encountered the shoot ’em up equivalent of an extreme boot camp. Equipped with only missiles, bombs, and an energy shield, the player’s Silver Hawk ship might look the part, but its default firepower is rudimentary and power-ups are slow to accrue. Which becomes especially acute when dealing with the game’s coup de grâce—an entourage of ingenious robotic fish bosses. Taito may have lacked ambition with its core mechanics, but Darius’s submerged parallax worlds and bizarre cast of inhabitants remain deep-sea wonders to this day. JB See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Gauntlet II Original release date : 1986 Platform : Arcade Developer : Atari Genre : Action
Despite its many levels and an insatiable appetite for coins that meant your game was only over when you ran out of cash or the arcade-owner pulled the plug, 1985’s dungeon romp Gauntlet left gamers hungry for more. Arriving just a year later, Gauntlet II was unusual for a coin-op in terms of how successfully it shook up the mechanics of the original without weakening its essence. The crucial change is that instead of selecting one of four fixed characters, players in Gauntlet II can choose to be any character class they like, with multiple instances differentiated by color. You and your friends can head into battle with red, blue, and green wizards and an elf if you want, but you’ll need to work even more tightly to defeat hack-and-slashing Grunts without any comparable heft in your party as you have configured it. Gauntlet II also toys with team balance by introducing “It” levels, which see tagged players attract all of the enemies on-screen. Among harmonious parties, a nimble elf might take on the role of It and rely on well-placed peers to defeat the enemies he lures away—but on a Saturday night with strangers, anything can happen. The game’s fire-breathing dragon demands teamwork to overcome,
however. Other notable additions include ricocheting shots, invisible walls, acid blobs, and more magical potions that permanently upgrade your character. The tension between life-force, on-screen action, and pocket money is, of course, inevitably absent in the home versions, with their generous continues, as is the interaction with passersby. Ironically, for a game that anticipated the team-based possibilities that emerged with networked PCs, the quintessential Gauntlet II remains marooned at the end of a pier in a previous decade. OB See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Salamander Original release date : 1986 Platform : Arcade Developer : Konami Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
Salamander is a peculiar, troublesome sequel. Conceived as a follow-up to Konami’s Gradius, it takes the staples of power-ups, core-destroying boss battles, beautiful and intricate level design, and a quite intimidating difficulty level, and does its own thing with them in such a way that it becomes more a spin-off than a sequel. At first it looks like a straightforward follow-up, but then you chain your first enemy wave and are rewarded straight away with a multiple; you realize that Salamander has dispensed with the Gradius power meter and simplified the upgrade system, relieving you of the need to keep an eye on the meter and hit the “select” button to grab what you want. This makes it relatively easy to quickly tool up, surrounded by multiples and laying waste to everything ahead of you. Then in the blink of an eye you make a mistake, and it’s all taken away. No restart; the level surges inexorably forward, and a new ship spawns instantly, giving you a second’s window of opportunity to grab dropped multiples, but with your weapon upgrades lost. This happens a lot. Salamander is tough and exacting, often surrounding you with hazards and
forcing you to learn each level by heart if you’re to get to the end with anything more than a single cannon. You can force your way brutishly through the entire game by adding credits that translate instantly into extra lives, but with practice it is possible to weave your way through the insanity on a single life. It’s a brilliant innovation that inspired the whole Danmaku/bullet-hell genre. Gradius quickly returned to its original template, occasionally borrowing Salamander’s features, but in the history of the shoot ’em up it’s Salamander, the troublesome spin-off, that’s had the farthest reach. JM See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Bubble Bobble Original release date : 1986 Platform : Arcade Developer : Taito Genre : Platform
Before Super Mario Bros., there was plain old Mario Bros., a game in which the brothers jumped around a static screen of vertical platforms, dodging enemies and occasionally working together to clear the screens. Nintendo and Shigeru Miyamoto soon left this design behind to revolutionize the platformer, but Taito didn’t forget it. In 1986, Bubble Bobble took the basic idea of Mario Bros.— which was a pretty decent game in its own right—and made a classic out of it. The premise is delightfully simple: two dinosaur brothers, Bub and Bob, have to clear each screen of enemies by trapping them in bubbles, which can then be popped with a touch. As every good boy knows, of course, this not only kills an enemy but converts them into point-scoring fruit. If it isn’t done quickly enough, then the baddies will escape in an enraged form. There’s no more to Bubble Bobble than this, taking place over a variety of different levels. But the push-and-pull dynamic created by its capturing, popping, and running wasn’t only distinct from the period’s usual offerings, but could be shared simultaneously with another player. The spritework is simple but characterful, and the surreal world it creates is a big part of Bubble
Bobbie’s charm. It also masks the difficulty: This is an arcade game, and after a few easy screens, it lets you know exactly what that means (although the later console conversions would tone down the challenge somewhat). For all that it’s a great game inspired by a merely good one, Bubble Bobble was not, in itself, hugely influential—with the possible exception of the magnificent sequel Rainbow Islands. Between them, perhaps, they simply managed to perfect the formula. RS See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Kid Icarus Original release date : 1986 Platform : NES Developer : Nintendo R&D1 Genre : Platform
At a time when every game from Nintendo was destined to become a multidecade franchise, Kid Icarus was something of an aberration. Although the platformer had a half-hearted quasi-sequel on the Game Boy in the early 1990s, bow-wielding angel Pit was essentially a one-hit wonder, left behind while Mario, Link, Samus, and the rest went on to greater things. That says more about the fickle fortunes of the game business than it does about Kid Icarus, which deserves a place in the pantheon of 8-bit classics. But the main reason that Kid Icarus has fallen short of icon status can be attributed to one simple factor: Its extreme difficulty. Only an elite minority of players manage to make it past the first of four worlds. The story: Palutena, the Goddess of Light, is losing her war against the evil Medusa. Her only hope is Pit, who, on the surface at least, doesn’t seem well suited to the job. With his semifunctional wings and puny arrows, he seems outmatched by the Eggplant Wizards, Pluton Flies, and Sirens sent to dispatch him. The game demands a virtuoso performance. If you kill too few enemies or fail to explore all of the rooms in Kid Icarus’s nonlinear levels, you can miss out on crucial upgrades, making the rest of your journey that much more difficult.
Whispers of secret passwords—like “Icarus fights Medusa angels”—spread quickly after Kid Icarus was released, granting players quick access to souped-up weaponry and later stages. These passwords won’t work on the modern Wii port of the game, though, and maybe that’s for the best. Because Kid Icarus surely ought to be hard. If Pit can’t be memorialized on cereal boxes and Happy Meals, he can at least be remembered as the hero who has to defy impossible odds on the path to victory. JT See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Spindizzy Original release date : 1986 Platform : Various Developer : Paul Shirley Genre : Action The 1984 coin-op Marble Madness inspired a short-lived craze for rolling-ball adventures, and this beautifully minimalist example is one of the finest—even if programmer Paul Shirley claims to have been more influenced by Ultimate’s isometric three-dimensional adventures, including the likes of Knight Lore and Alien 8, rather than Atari’s trackball favorite. As a trainee cartographer working for a galactic exploration firm, the player is thrown into space to map a newly discovered planet, Hangworld. The terrain is not encountered in person, though; a remote-controlled vehicle—GERALD—is instead sent in. What follows is a 386-screen isometric puzzler in which GERALD must be carefully navigated along narrow pathways, steep slopes and ramps, avoiding water hazards and long falls, and running across picture icons to open up new pathways. The controls are subject to inertia and momentum, making accurate navigation a tricky counterplay of acceleration and reverse movements. And, with a timer ticking down, speed and accuracy become paramount. The level design is ingenious, providing a range of spatial challenges, within the tight construct of an effectively figurative landscape that the player experiences one screen at a time. The addition of trampoline and lift spaces adds to the range of movements on offer, as does the ability of GERALD to switch between three physical states—pyramid, gyroscope, and ball—all of which handle slightly differently. The Spindizzy experience is ultimately more austere and cerebral than Marble Madness, and its witty scenario recognizes and renders explicit something important about the nature of adventure gaming: It is, in a sense, all about cartography. KS See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Ikari Warriors Original release date : 1986 Platform : Arcade Developer : SNK Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
The Sylvester Stallone blockbuster Rambo II: First Blood was arguably a step in America’s healing process after the debacle in Vietnam: the beefy action star, shirtless and sporting a bandana wrapped around his head, tore through Southeast Asia with a machine gun on a quest to save the POWS that America forgot. Ikari Warriors openly copies the characters and even the look of Rambo, but reimagines it as a light-hearted buddy action flick. Two players can work together to charge their way through the jungle, avoiding slow-moving enemy fire and tossing grenades to clear the way. Water hazards, bridges, and bunkers complicate your path, and blowing up enemy emplacements can reveal POWs—and, more important, weapons caches allowing you to rearm for the fight ahead. One of the many games inspired by Capcom’s Commando, Ikari Warriors supports co-op play between two pals at the same cabinet, and the rotary joysticks allow you to move and strafe in different directions. The game limits your bullets as well as your grenades, forcing you to ration your mayhem. The obstacles and sharp corners throughout the levels give the enemy more hiding spaces, but players get a special weapon in the form of tanks, which are bulletproof and can wreck ferocious havoc on the enemy—at least until they run out of fuel.
Wisely, the game downplays the political context, remembering Rambo the way that kids of the day did—as a wicked awesome action flick in which tons of dudes get wasted. But the team behind this game was more radical than you might have suspected: SNK followed up Ikari Warriors with the game Guerilla War, which starred Che Guevara and Fidel Castro—though, sadly for Englishspeaking Marxists, the names were cut during localization for the West. CDa See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Rebelstar Original release date : 1986 Platform : ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC Developer : Julian Gollop Genre : Strategy
Ranked the “second best game in the world ever” in 1992 in a list of the top one hundred Spectrum games published by Your Sinclair magazine, Rebelstar is the second title in a long-lived series that began with Rebelstar Raiders. Designed and programmed by Julian Gollop in machine code, it adds a single-player mode and greater depth to its BASIC-coded, two-player-only predecessor. The aim of Rebelstar is to break into a moon base and destroy a computer intelligence before your opponents—who are computer-controlled defensive operatives—can locate and destroy your squad of raiders. While the game could be criticized as short—it features only one map—it more than compensates with its design. Offering play that couldn’t be recreated by any tabletop war game, along with a clean, sci-fi graphical style, it sees your units struggle with morale, interact with their surroundings, and use terrain for cover. In an important twist, too—and one that would come to define Gollop’s subsequent
titles—units are also be able to “opportunity fire” during their opponent’s turn. As one of the first turn-based tactical games not aimed at the war-gaming community, Rebelstar marked an important milestone. With a well-designed interface and AI offering eight possible levels of difficulty, the game helped introduce the format to a wider audience, and would grow in popularity with Gollop’s subsequent titles—before being overtaken by the vastly different lineage of Japanesedeveloped turn-based tactical games. Rebelstar remains a very playable tactical experience in both its single-and multiplayer modes. It also serves as a great reminder of the clarity of some of the classic designs from the 8-bit era. MKu See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
OutRun Original release date : 1986 Platform : Arcade Developer : Sega-AM2 Genre : Driving
The fanfare accompanying the launch of some classic games may be difficult to comprehend several decades later. OutRun is most definitely not one of these titles. Boasting unforgettable design and expertly tuned game balance, AM2’s assured masterpiece is the consummate exhibit in an oversubscribed genre. A technical showcase of its time, OutRun’s sprite-scaling abilities have aged gracefully while its aesthetic—vibrant, colorful renditions of fifteen uniquely themed routes that fly past at triple-figure speeds—is yet to lose its appeal. It’s a similar story when it comes to the game mechanics. The routes are arranged in pyramid fashion, so that any successful journey passes through five stages. The overall route is controlled by the player, the road splitting in half at the end of each stage. This is an interesting feature as the two options offer different levels of intricacy—the left always proving to be the easiest segment. This means that the player takes dynamic control of the game’s degree of difficulty, which when racing against the clock becomes a vital strategic aspect. Not that anyone of sane mind would ever resent having to persist in trying to conquer OutRun’s many twists and turns while weaving wonderfully between its heavy same-way traffic and keeping the Testarossa away
from the treacherous roadside obstacles (and, in doing so, ensuring the happiness of the blonde babe in your passenger seat). Supported by what is undoubtedly the best soundtrack to grace a driving game—who hasn’t hummed “Splash Wave” or “Magical Sound Shower” during a rare traffic-free section of their daily commute?—AM2’s title combines all of its supreme elements to deliver one of the purest and most joyous experiences in video gaming. JDS See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Solomon’s Key Original release date : 1986 Platform : Various Developer : Tecmo Genre : Puzzle
Solomon’s Key is a particularly vicious wolf in extremely fluffy kitten’s clothing. It looks like a simple enough platform game with an utterly straightforward mission—grab the key, avoid the monsters, nab the gems, get to the exit—and it even seems determined to make things extra-easy for you, giving you the ability to create your own blocks to jump on. You can destroy blocks, too— especially handy if there are monsters on top of them, because they’ll immediately fall to their death. How hard can it be? How hard can it be, indeed. The first screen is an easy introduction, giving you the opportunity to get a feel for how it all works, encouraging you to build staircases to get to the key, revealing that some blocks have bonus gems hidden behind them and releasing a fairy that becomes a one-shot weapon if you catch it. After that, the gloves come off, and Solomon’s Key reveals itself as an especially sadistic puzzler. While you have impressive capabilities, each level is constructed to make using them effectively as difficult as possible. Some monsters destroy any blocks that are in their way, some follow the contours of whatever blocks they come across, and some just sit there and spit out fire.
When you mix them all together, you get a game where each level’s a minefield of split-second timing and lateral thinking. And just to make things extra-exciting, it’s all done against the clock. You might need time to think and get your head around a level, but Solomon’s Key isn’t giving it to you. It’s rock hard and cruel and capable of tricking you into a position where you can’t actually complete a level, but the design is solid and brilliantly executed. Better suited to home formats than the arcade, it’s not impossible—it just doesn’t suffer fools gladly. JM See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Dragon Quest Original release date : 1986 Platform : NES Developer : Enix Genre : Role-Playing
Even if you have never played the original Dragon Quest (known as Dragon Warrior outside of Japan), you have surely felt its influence. Any console role-playing game—or any game that boasts “RPG elements”—owes an enormous debt to Dragon Quest, which took the core design of tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons, and translated it to the TV screen. Hit points, experience points, random enemy encounters, leveling up—Dragon Quest may not have invented all of these mechanics, but it established them as video game standards. Your character, who can be named anything you like as long as it fits within four letters, is a descendant of the great hero Erdrick. Just your luck, that means you’re the only guy who can retrieve a Ball of Light from the Dragonlord and save the kingdom. As usual, you’ll fight increasingly difficult monsters to make it to the final boss. In Dragon Quest, though, the fighting is different from anything that had come before. Split-second reflexes are irrelevant. When you’re choosing battle commands from a menu, it’s careful strategy and calculated risk that come to the fore. And while the baddies get tougher, so do you, through the leveling system that slowly invests your hard work in a battletoughened character.
This is a homely game. Its interface is simplistic, its story is clichéd, and its world is tiny. Yet when it was released, it was a revelation. With complete freedom of movement across the land and potential for danger at every step, the adventure offered a boundless thrill. It may be difficult for modern gamers to understand how fresh and exciting Dragon Quest seemed in the mid-1980s, but playing this game, which grew the roots of an entire genre, remains a rewarding rite of passage for any RPG fan. JT See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Defender of the Crown Original release date : 1986 Platform : Various Developer : Cinemaware Genre : Strategy
Released before Commodore’s Amiga hit mass-market penetration with the release of the A500 model, Defender of the Crown was the first title released by Cinemaware, a company that would—as its name implies—become known for its heavily cinema-inspired titles. A simple Risk-style game that is set in the Middle Ages, Defender of the Crown casts the player as one of four Saxon lords attempting to conquer England by marching armies across the country to capture counties, raise funds, and ultimately wipe their opponents off the map. The title distinguishes itself by offering home computer graphics that were astonishing for 1986: Though not fully utilizing the Amiga’s power, it was the first home title to feature colorful, highly detailed graphics with a consistent art direction. This helped to transform action features, such as jousting tournaments and castle raids, into near-cinematic experiences for the home gamer. Though a landmark title, the original release of Defender of the Crown was marred by being rushed to completion, several near-finished features—deeper strategic options, more locations, and different catapult ammo for castle siege sections—being dropped. But following its massive popularity, these omissions would find themselves reinstated in many of the game’s ports—most fully
in the Atari ST version. While Defender of the Crown is childishly simple to play and offers—even in its most fully featured version—fairly limited replayability, the title began a drive toward productions that were conspicuously not only about game play, but equally about creating an interactive cinematic experience—an aim that would reverberate from one end of the industry to the other. MKu See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Rolling Thunder Original release date : 1986 Platform : Arcade Developer : Namco Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
For a game that’s all about marching from left to right while slaying scores of identical enemies, Rolling Thunder has a surprising edge. Not the shameless viscera of the original Ninja Gaiden, perhaps, where the abandoned hero is disemboweled by a descending circular saw, but a cut above the usual bad dudes and hoodlums. With stylized anime characters, sinister music, and a damsel in obvious distress, it’s a standout from a time when Namco and Sega jostled for control of the world’s arcade floors. Rolling Thunder is the undercover arm of Interpol’s secret espionage units. You take control of agent Albatross; your mission, to locate and rescue a missing female operative, Leila Blitz, who has been captured by Geldra, an evil, criminal society trying to conquer the world from a secret New York base. Headed up by Maboo—part shaman, part hobgoblin—Geldra’s private army has an endless supply of troops to defend against any slick moves that Albatross might have up his sleeve throughout the ten mighty levels of the game. Should he fail, the fate of the world is left to the imagination—unlike Leila’s, which flashes across a giant video screen between levels. Explicit by even today’s standards, this was many gamers’ introduction to the sometimes
salacious world of Japanese anime. Beating the movie version of Akira by two years, it was more than just an 1980s equivalent of Jet Grind Radio or Killer7, taking unsuspecting Westerners by storm. Culture shock aside, Rolling Thunder owes a lasting uniqueness to its transitional game play, its ammo closets, not to mention its immense difficulty—a hangover from 1983 hit Elevator Action—and its controls and looks, which inspired a whole new generation of propulsive, accessible action games. DH See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Super Sprint Original release date : 1986 Platform : Arcade Developer : Atari Genre : Driving
You know you’re not dealing with a serious racing game when you’re offered only one pedal with which to control the speed of your vehicle. In fact, you wonder why Atari bothered to build Super Sprint’s cabinet with an expensive steering wheel rather than simply going for a joystick—but then you take the wheel in your hands and start throwing the game’s cars around the tracks, and it all makes sense. Super Sprint is a supremely fluid driving game, its Formula One-styled machines smoothly tracing lines through each complex track layout like ice cubes propelled across a glass tabletop. The steering wheel is a key factor, but the game’s carefully engineered animation and keen sense of speed is what keeps you feeding in the coins. You can also soup-up your car by collecting loose spanners laying on the track—these can be exchanged for performance-increasing boosters, such as improved traction and acceleration. If you’re after a racing game that will get the competitive energies flowing, then you need look no further than Super Sprint. TB
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1980s
720° Original release date : 1986 Platform : Arcade Developer : Atari Genre : Sports
The first skateboarding game didn’t just offer tricks and half-pipes: It encouraged players to stick around and try to build a career. Racing from one skate park to the next, dodging traffic, players had to make enough money to reach the next level. Where a home game expects you to linger, searching for hidden secrets, the intention of 720°, as a coin-op, is to keep you moving. Take too long, and you’ll hear the game’s famous catchphrase —“Skate or die”—followed by a pack of killer bees that will sting you to death unless you scramble to the next skate park. And if you don’t have the cash to keep going, it’s game over. The game benefits from a simple but effective control system. With just two buttons and a joystick, gamers tackle four different events, pulling off tricks on the halfpipe, threading through the gates on the slalom, or setting a speed record on the downhill course. The moves are simple next to today’s byzantine skate titles, but the action is thrilling, and the concept was proven: 720° gave birth to the extreme sports genre in gaming. CDa See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
The Sentinel Original release date : 1986 Platform : Various Developer : Geoff Crammond Genre : Strategy
Chess with added paranoia is how some think of Geoff Crammond’s unique strategy game. A mysterious being known as the Sentinel is rampaging through the galaxy, landing on worlds and absorbing their energy until nothing remains alive. To fight back, a synthoid robot is created, also capable of sucking energy from environmental objects. It must seek out and absorb the terrible Sentinel, and then move on to the next ailing world. Crammond used mathematical skill rather than design flair to create the game’s endless, stark, flat-shaded, polygonal landscapes. The Sentinel itself is also suitably eerie, towering above like an Orwellian CCTV god. If it senses your presence, it begins to drain your synthoid of energy, so you need to stay out of its line of vision. For some, The Sentinel is an early antecedent of the stealth adventure. By coincidence, the 1998 sequel—The Sentinel Returns—appeared the very same year as Metal Gear Solid. By then, however, gamers were no longer interested in abstract studies of surveillance state paranoia: They wanted to hide in boxes and blast soldiers. KS
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1980s
Thrust Original release date : 1986 Platform : Various Developer : Jeremy Smith Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
While a student at Imperial College in London, Jeremy Smith created one of the most important titles in the history of physics-based gaming. The plot is typically brief for an 8-bit home computer title. Players must pilot a small craft through a series of cavernous alien landscapes, stealing fuel pods that will be used to power fighter ships in a galactic rebellion. The visuals are beautifully minimal; just solid cave walls and planet surfaces combined with the vector-based ship and enemy gun turrets. The hook is the precise physics modeling—the craft is subject to inertia and momentum and is piloted though simple controls enabling thrust and rotation in either direction. Thrust is a game about concentration, forethought, and the ability to react with measured grace to the physical challenges thrown at your tiny ship. The game has inspired dozens of fan-made adaptations and was a crucial prelude to Smith’s later project, Exile, a more comprehensively modeled physics-based arcade adventure and among the finest 8-bit games ever made. KS See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Space Harrier Original release date : 1985 Platform : Arcade Developer : Sega Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
Space Harrier looks as psychedelic today as it did when it first landed in the arcades. Back in 1985, it created plenty of surprise with its innovations. It’s all about creating a big experience: The player climbs into the hydraulically powered cabinet, takes a seat, and immediately becomes immersed in a wild third-person shooter. You are a Flash Gordon-like figure who flies through the so-called Fantasy Zone on a multipurpose rocket slung under his arm. Usefully, it doubles as a gun, which fires at the surreal characters you find zooming in your direction. Armored UFOs, flying rocks, one-eyed mammoths, and other outlandish flora and fauna fill each of the eighteen levels on the way to some seriously epic boss fights. To the modern eye, the strangest feature of Space Harrier is the pseudo-three-dimensional graphics system that struggles to give it a convincing sense of depth. Driven by Sega’s patented Super Scaler technology—the same kit that also powers After Burner and OutRun—it presents flat sprites that get larger the closer you get to them, while a checkerboard landscape emphasizes your velocity. Simply hitting a tree will knock you out, and you steadily earn points simply for staying alive. With
each wave, the player gets a better handle on the game’s odd perspective. The only way to fend off an enemy is to get right in front of it and shoot, even as the enemy fire flies straight for you. Space Harrier is to the three-dimensional shooter genre what the zoetrope is to the motion picture: awkward and nostalgic, but the splendor of the images and the pace of the action merit another look. (And be sure to do so in its original arcade form, because the various home conversions, though often cleverly programmed, are poor reproductions of the real thing.) CDa See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels Original release date : 1986 Platform : NES Developer : Nintendo Genre : Platform
Familiar and mysterious at the same time, Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels was the secret sequel to the original Super Mario Bros. that wasn’t released outside of Japan during the reign of the NES. The reason for this is simple: it was deemed too tricky for non-Japanese audiences (but we did get the lovely Super Mario Bros. 2 to make up for it). The Lost Levels is hard. But more precisely, it’s simply rather unfair. The game may use the same sprites, tiles, and control scheme as its magical predecessor, but somewhere along the lines it’s learned a handful of dirty tricks, too, which whittle away at some of the enjoyment. Mushrooms come with a new poisoned variety, which has to be evaded as it skates along the ground, magic invisible blocks are more than typically necessary to get through some of the game’s more dastardly challenges, and the wind has a nasty habit of playing up on occasion to ruin your careful precision jumping. The levels are also often gratuitously cruel in their layouts: Piranha plants abound, sudden drops are often dauntingly wide, and the enemy count has been massively dialed up. It’s still fascinating, however, not least because there’s a weird thrill to be found in seeing the game’s familiar faces and locations twisted to such evil ends, and, inevitably, it’s a rare player who gives up in frustration
without fighting their way through to the final castle. Unavailable in the West until its inclusion on the SNES’s Super Mario All-Stars compilation, the black sheep of the family is increasingly being welcomed into the fold, a sign, if nothing else, that Nintendo’s innate sense of balance and fairness hasn’t always been quite so rock solid. Pick it up now on the Wii’s Virtual Console, but don’t complain if it makes you cry. CD See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Buggy Boy Original release date : 1986 Platform : Arcade Developer : Tatsumi Genre : Driving
Although ported to various home formats, the best way to experience Buggy Boy is via the original deluxe arcade cabinet and its panoramic three-screen display. The colorful graphics, exotic locales, and genuine sense of speed were a challenge to OutRun, and while Buggy Boy isn’t revered in quite the same way as Sega’s classic of the same year, it remains a key title in the racing genre’s timeline. Introducing jumps and banked curves, Buggy Boy doesn’t tether the player to the track like other racers, and the vehicle’s constant bouncing reinforces the sense of driving off-road, not just on different-colored tarmac. Five tracks are available, of which all but one are point-to-point. A clock ticks down to as you drive, but time can be added by completing the stages that make up each course or driving through the buggy-width time gates. While racing lines are important, they are confounded by a litany of obstacles along the way: colliding with smaller detritus will send your vehicle skyward or onto two wheels; crashing into anything larger will result in a tumble, and the need to shift from “Hi” to “Lo” gear in order to pick up speed again.
Players yearning for even more to think about can attempt to collect flags. Each one yields a few points, but when picked up in a specified sequence, bonus points are earned for a short period. A hidden football, if found and hit, pushes the score even higher. Tracks mostly consist of three lanes, but are occasionally constricted by tunnels or bridges. Thankfully, roadside signage provides just enough warning to get in lane. But Buggy Boy couldn’t be farther from freeway delays, and thanks to its diversity, responsive handling, and focus on fun, is far more than just another racing game. BM See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
The Legend of Zelda Original release date : 1986 Platform : NES Developer : Nintendo Genre : Action / Adventure
The Legend of Zelda has its own legend, as it so happens; a story that suggests that Shigeru Miyamoto came up with the idea for Link’s epic adventure while opening and closing the drawers of his desk, and daydreaming that each one contained a separate tiny garden. We should probably be grateful, then, that he didn’t have a staple gun or hole punch handy, or else the history of gaming might have turned out very differently. Regardless of whether the anecdote is apocryphal or not, it certainly makes sense of Zelda’s wonderfully simple structure. An action RPG in which brave adventurer Link, clad in green and wielding a sword and a shield, must venture into dank dungeons, defeating bosses and finding helpful items on his quest to rid the land of the evil Ganon, Zelda has a map divided into an orderly arrangement of individual game screens, each one holding a cave entrance, a rocky maze, a bundle of enemies to smack about, or some other delightful treat. Players progress through the dungeons in turn, picking up health hearts and the gadgets they’ll need to defeat the bosses, and that will, in turn, open up more of the map for them, allowing them to explore farther into the world of Hyrule. From this one title—delightful and balanced as it is—would spring one of the richest founts of
tradition and lore in modern gaming: a series of polite yet gripping and intricate adventures, each one adding a handful of new elements while reveling in the structures of the past. Over the years, Zelda titles have become renowned as the cleverest, most beautifully crafted adventures in all of gaming, and it’s dazzling to see so many of the series’ finest ideas present in this first title—however Miyamoto came up with the idea. CD See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
World Games Original release date : 1986 Platform : Various Developer : Epyx Genre : Sports
The third original title in the immensely successful Games series, which includes Summer, Winter, and California flavors. Just like the titles that preceded it, World Games is a selection of mini-games playable in their entirety sequentially, as a bespoke selection, or individually (usefully, practice is also an option). But whereas its forebearers offer a fairly predictable selection of events from their respective seasons, World Games collects a surprisingly disparate group of disciplines, each of which represents a different country of origin. The events on offer are: Russian weightlifting, French slalom skiing, Canadian log rolling, German barrel jumping, American bull riding, Mexican cliff diving, Scottish caber tossing, and Japanese sumo wrestling. The game really shines when played with friends, and up to eight can compete, choosing the country they wish to represent at the beginning before taking turns to go for gold. The only exceptions to the turn-based structure are sumo wrestling and log rolling, which pit two players against each other simultaneously. The different disciplines require mastery of various methods of control, and players must remain on their toes if they are to win across the board. The imagination with which the sports were chosen is equally applied to presentation, every stage
introduced with a short history of the event and a culturally themed tune (the bagpipes are particularly worthy of note). And the graphics are brimming with charm: fail at the caber toss, and the heavy log will hammer your Scotsman into the ground; fall into the water in Canada, and a shark’s fin will circle your anxious lumberjack. World Games has lost little of its appeal in the years since 1986 and can still give modern party titles a run for their money. BM See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Super Hang-On Original release date : 1987 Platform : Arcade Developer : Sega-AM2 Genre : Racing
When Hang-On appeared in 1985, it represented Sega producer Yu Suzuki’s coming-of-age as a video game designer, an almost unconscious decision to become a fearless forward thinker in the arcade game space—with immersive cabinet and game designs—and even the home game space (with the sadly ill-fated Shenmue series). In light of this, Super Hang-On may feel like a footnote in Suzuki and gaming’s history—a mere sequel to his breakthrough title two years before. Indeed, Super Hang-On’s arcade mode looks almost exactly the same as the original Hang-On, but does feature racing tracks of varying lengths, located in different continents. Split up into stages (passing each adds time to the in-game countdown clock), Africa is the easiest and shortest with six stages; Asia features ten; the Americas fourteen; and Europe is the hardest course with eighteen. Each track is a tightly designed course that also features a variety of backdrops to keep things visually interesting. As with Suzuki’s 1986 hit OutRun, players have a choice of four musical tracks that will play during the race, and each stage has an individual ending. So far, so typical for a time and market that had already been greatly expanded by Suzuki’s work in the field. But detractors overlook the importance of iteration. By taking the lessons learned by the
original Hang-On and OutRun, Super Hang-On was arguably the definitively playable Yu Suzuki racer until Virtua Racing appeared in 1992. The title also benefits from some of the best home ports of any of Sega’s racing titles, with the Sega Mega Drive in particular featuring the ability for the player to upgrade bikes between races. Super Hang-On may be a footnote, but it leaves a lasting impression. Mku See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Blasteroids Original release date : 1987 Platform : Arcade Developer : Atari Games Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
The history of Atari is a tale of numerous, different companies selling the brand name among one other in a long and convoluted gaming relay. The part that we’re interested in here is the Atari Games of the mid-to late 1980s, the arcade division that passed from pillar to post until an employee buyout provided the opportunity to reclaim the initiative and again become an arcade powerhouse. This was an era that oversaw the production of a succession of hit titles, including Gauntlet, Super Sprint, and Marble Madness. And Blasteroids. Notable in being a rare title in the Atari Games stable to be based on a game from the brand’s first golden age, Blasteroids closely observes the feel of the original Asteroids classic and then heaps innovation on top of it. Minimalist vector outlines are thrown away in favor of great, huge chunks of digitized rock, tumbling through space. Your ship can morph between three different configurations—from slow and mighty through to speedy and weedy—and flying saucers drop power-ups when destroyed. But it’s no longer enough just to survive; you now have an energy meter that drops when you fire your thrusters or take a hit, and you’re dead when it hits zero. You get a small energy boost when you complete a
level, but you’ll also have to find red asteroids that’ll release power crystals once destroyed. Throw in boss battles, extra asteroid types, a strategic map-based approach that enables you to choose your battles—not to mention a two-player mode in which both ships can dock to become a turreted mega-ship—and you have a potentially overloaded game with all the tricks in the book applied to it. Blasteroids never feels like that, though. Sure, it’s tough, but it reveals its secrets slowly and gives you a chance to settle into them. JM See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
NetHack Original release date : 1987 Platform : Various Developer : Various Genre : Role-Playing NetHack may have started off as a simple version of the classic ASCII-graphics title Rogue. Players set off to explore a series of randomly-generated dungeons, fighting monsters and collecting items—but over the years it has become something much more elaborate and fascinating. A true ghost of the Internet, NetHack has been knocking around the web since 1987. During that time, everything from its appearance to its feature sets have been in a state of constant flux, but that same core feeling to the experience has never changed. After selecting a character from a range of archetypes, players descend into NetHack’s fifty-level dungeon (viewed from a simplistic top-down perspective), on the trail of a glitzy trinket—the Amulet of Yendor—which lurks, allegedly, on the final floor. What happens next depends on you, as the game slowly reveals its tactics and secrets. (Although it’s safe to assume that it’ll probably involve monsters and potions at some point in the proceedings.) Although NetHack is well over twenty years old, it’s precisely because of its open-source nature that it’s still being worked on, both by groups of isolated enthusiasts making their own versions in the equivalent of a board game’s house rules, and, more thrillingly, by the NetHack DevTeam—a loose collective of coders and secret geniuses who release regular updates for the official version itself. With two decades of accumulated lore, inside jokes, and tips piling up in the darker corners of the Internet, NetHack is definitely one of a kind: both a huge world of magic and murder to discover and a fascinating and complex community to engage within. Tracking it down today isn’t difficult—the dungeons are waiting, a mere Google search away. Getting yourself out again may prove a lot trickier. CD See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
A.P.B. Original release date : 1987 Platform : Arcade Developer : Atari Genre : Action
Cop dramas have always been popular on TV and at the movies, so it should be no surprise to find the format transfer happily to the games console. You begin your career in A.P.B. as Officer Bob, a rookie whose boss doesn’t trust him to arrest anything more dangerous than a traffic cone. Get through basic training, and you’ll soon have your daily quota of perps to pull over—mainly the regular riffraff and litterbugs. Life is good (the donuts are easy to find), but then you get your big shot: a chance to catch a drug-trafficking hippie, the target of an actual all points bulletin. And that’s where the game really takes off, because as corny as A.P.B. may look to today’s Need for Speeders, it really knows how to pull off a high-speed chase. Coming well after the end of the arcade craze, A.P.B. used a lengthy career mode and a flashy cabinet, replete with flashing police lights, to lure kids away from their Nintendos. The characters come straight out of a bad cop show, with nemeses, like Sid Sniper and Freddy Freak, and a boss who literally breathes fire at you if you rack up too many demerits. Casual offenders can be stopped by aiming a reticule at them and hitting them with your siren, and it moves farther out the faster you go, making it easy to pick off perps while you’re racing down the road. Your reward, however, is that
if you do a good enough job, your boss will let you carry a gun. The driving experience is certainly breathtaking. Making full use of the tall, vertical-scrolling display, roads split and run parallel, with shortcuts and sharp turns everywhere. Bang into too many innocent cars, and you’ll lose your job. Catch your target, and you can take him back to the station and “beat” out a confession. Your education as an officer is complete. CDa See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Dungeon Master Original release date : 1987 Platform : Various Developer : FTL Games Genre : Role-Playing
The computer role-playing game has gone through many phases of development, but it made a leap to real-time three-dimensional action as early as 1987, with the release of Dungeon Master. The Atari ST version came first, but it was soon converted to almost every platform of the day. The game has inspired many imitators, and is regarded as perhaps the era’s finest accomplishment in the RPG genre. Presenting the player with a small window into the game world, Dungeon Master is played from a first-person perspective. Action is delivered frame by frame, rather than being a real-time-mapped three-dimensional space as in the post-Doom era. Nevertheless, this design represented a colossal leap forward in presentation and interaction—particularly in the way that the mouse drives the action through clicking on various icons (representing everything from movement to the various powers the characters have in their inventories). This influential approach was to remain popular until technology enabled gaming platforms to freely render 3-D environments in the mid-1990s. Dungeon Master is notable for being remarkably free-form in the way it allows players to approach the action. The game takes place in a series of dungeons or underground tunnels, but the
route through is nonlinear. Players are able to go away and explore other areas if they encounter monsters that are too dangerous or puzzles that are too difficult. This kind of open-ended design was incredibly fresh in 1987, and it remains significant today. Perhaps the most important thing about Dungeon Master, though, is the way in which it changed the thinking behind how RPGs should work, moving away from text-based commands and stats and into an era where the user interface became the engine for interaction. JR See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
California Games Original release date : 1987 Platform : Various Developer : Epyx Genre : Sports
In the dreary, backward Britain of the 1980s, when the most exciting thing imaginable was either a computer game or a trip to the sandy beaches of the United States, Epyx’s California Games was a ray of genuine sunshine: a brace of cool, West Coast sports to be enjoyed by players living under the gray skies of British resorts and industrial towns, combined with a generous chance to bask in the rays of sun that burst forth from the computer monitor. Compilation games being in vogue at the time—Epyx had already released collections entitled Summer Games and Winter Games, while action titles like Beach Head and Raid Over Moscow would often play out as a series of levels each with their own bizarre mechanics and rules— California Games allowed players to indulge in a little rollerskating, BMX riding, and half-piping, as well as more traditionally Californian activities, like surfing. Other offerings were a little stranger —the entertainment factor in a good old round of “footbag” can be rather disconcertingly hard to isolate, regardless of where you happen to be in the world at the time—and suggest that the ideas might have been a little thin on the ground when the idea of this particular games package was pitched.
This is still a very generous title, though, and a few of its sports—surfing, in particular—are among the best included on any Epyx compilation. You’re most likely to play California Games today as a middle-aged character searching for a doorway back to your wasted youth, and, the truth is, between the Mario & Sonic Olympics titles and Electronic Arts’s fare, there are now far more competent selections available for those not riddled with melancholy nostalgia. But where were they back in the 1980s, eh? CD See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
International Karate + Original release date : 1987 Platform : Various Developer : Archer Maclean Genre : Fighting
The original International Karate was a polished but rather uninspired take on the fighting game genre. Indeed, it was so similar to 1984 arcade hit Karate Champ that Data East attempted to sue for copyright infringement. On the surface, International Karate + is nothing out of the ordinary. The sequel does, however, feature some very useful innovations. Foremost is the superfast joystick scanning, coupled with some wonderfully smooth and exact animation, a combination that provides fast and responsive combat. Programmer Archer Maclean famously set about creating the game’s dynamic backflip animation by physically tracing the movements of a background dancer from a video of the film Grease. The game’s coup de grâce, however, is the addition of a third fighter, either controllable by the computer or, better still, another player. Suddenly, there’s a whole new group melee feel, upsetting the traditional one-on-one dynamic. And for the first time since Datasoft’s 1984 platformer Bruce Lee, two friends could gang up on the AI fighter—a surprisingly therapeutic experience. KS See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Double Dragon Original release date : 1987 Platform : Arcade Developer : Technos Genre : Fighting
Taking their cues from Hollywood, the arcade brawling games of the Reagan era packed as much camp villainy, swift justice, and superhuman muscle into their action as a few thousand pixels would allow. Double Dragon has all the key ingredients: the hard-working American heroes, the invasion of home soil by a predatory force, and a winsome civilian caught in the crossfire. It has comic-book kingpins and chain-wielding thugs, who between them resemble a tryout for a seventh member of the Village People. A spiritual sequel to Renegade—an earlier Technos beat ’em up—Double Dragon introduced features like beating an enemy with their own weapon, beating an enemy being grappled by your friend, and just beating your friend to waste money. “Friendly fire” in this two-player co-op game was an instant hit while the ability to turn grapples into throws and combos would create an appetite for games like Ninja Gaiden and Final Fight. Hugely popular, Double Dragon produced two arcade sequels and numerous ports. Just don’t mention the movie, or its immortal line: “Eat some fist, butthead!” DH See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Head Over Heels Original release date : 1987 Platform : Various Developer : Ocean Genre : Action
A genuine curiosity, Head Over Heels is a fabulously challenging isometric mind boggier. What’s more, it’s an idea that’s barely been revisited since its first flush of unlikely success on 8-bit home computers in the 1980s. The adventure begins as we meet the two quirky lead characters, Head and Heels, who are interplanetary spies, sent on a dangerous mission to free the prisoners of a mysterious space emperor. The task is a difficult one, but the spies aren’t entirely powerless: Head has a mean jump and can shoot enemies with donuts, while Heels can climb on furniture and carry objects. To succeed, however, the two must work together. What emerges over the course of this tricksy little game is a kind of single-player cooperative mode of action, as Head and Heels combine, often literally, to navigate a range of tricky environments. It’s as bizarre as it sounds, and just as brilliant, and while the original game is hard to get running these days (at least without some very old gear) the coding collective Retrospec has developed a freeware remake to run on most operating systems. CD
See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Nebulus Original release date : 1987 Platform : Various Developer : John Phillips Genre : Platform
Way before tower defense games became the strategy puzzler of choice for the casual gaming crowd, the 8-bit world was wowed by tower destruction. One odd little alien named Pogo is to blame. A bug-eyed, froglike critter of indeterminate origin, Pogo destroys the tower if he reaches the top of it. Two major obstacles stand in his way: weird enemies and the clock. Pogo makes his way up these vertical towers by hopping up ledges, disappearing through doorways to avoid enemies or to find a new route, and steadily gaining altitude with each move. In a flash of design inspiration, Pogo remains positioned in the center of the screen and the circular tower itself rotates as you “move” left and right. The illusion of Pogo moving is matched by expert use of parallax scrolling, adding a three-dimensional depth to the tower that makes the overall visual quality a huge standout, given that the core creature and tower designs are very simple. The Pogo concept has been recreated on numerous platforms, but always retains the core game play challenge that has proved enduring and endearing. RSm See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Oids Original release date : 1987 Platform : Macintosh, ST Developer : FTL Games Genre : Shoot ’Em Up In many ways, FTL’s Oids is much more than just an exceptionally playable gravity-based game. It’s one of the last bastions of a different gaming age, one in which game ideas seemed more innocent, unconcerned with the commercial considerations so prominent in today’s titles. A much-loved creation, yet barely known outside of the ST and Mac fraternity, Oids requires you to pilot a V-wing starfighter, using thrust and direction change alone, within the perilous confines of a series of planets. Your mission is to rescue an enslaved android race, who have been scattered across the galaxy and forced to work in far-flung galactic factories. As if negotiating the landscape isn’t tricky enough—anything other than a carefully executed landing on flat ground will result in death by explosion—the factory owners have installed nasty defense systems. Luckily, your ship comes equipped with guns and a shield. (Watch out, though—the shield consumes fuel, and if you use too much, you’ll have to waste valuable mission time searching for more.) Once the enemy threat has been dispatched, a single bullet will destroy the factory where the Oids are being held. Happy to see you, once you’ve found a safe place to land, they’ll climb aboard. Take off, rejoin your mothership, and then it’s on to the next planet. The concept is as simple yet accomplished as the gorgeous, economical visuals, presenting you with an irresistible game mechanic that cleverly contrasts careful and considered navigational sections with moments of intense action. It’s a powerful mix, and one that delivers a supremely addictive experience. In a particularly welcome touch, once you’ve exhausted the game’s challenges, the built-in level editor effectively guarantees a lifespan as infinite as the universe. JDS See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Galaga ’88 Original release date : 1987 Platform : Arcade Developer : Namco Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
Take an old title, rework it with improved audiovisual content and refined game play, and then repackage it for a different audience. It’s a popular idea nowadays, but hardly a new one: Galaga 88 is an early example of this principle, a game from 1987 that takes a six-year-old vision and enhances it in just about every way. Thankfully, Namco doesn’t tinker too much with the nuts and bolts of the player’s craft: You can still move only left and right, and your only offensive option is a single fire button. However, at the game’s outset, you’re given some interesting options. You can take a single ship into play, or use up two of your lives and take a pair of them into battle in tandem—thereby ramping up your firepower (although simultaneously providing the enemy with a bigger target). It’s even possible to transform into a supersized version. The action plays out against backdrops that contrast with the original game’s simplistic starfields by presenting attractions such as nebulae, planets, and space stations. But it’s what happens in front of them that makes the real difference. A broader range of enemies assembles before you in each wave, and although they are more colorful and cuddlier-looking than before, they also prove to be deadlier.
The sequel also introduces scrolling levels, featuring asteroids and destructible crystal formations, and an ultimate boss enemy whose defeat brings the game to an end. Yes, Galaga ’88 is considerably more of a challenge than the original. It really is difficult to dislike any game whose bonus stages involve their enemies maneuvering on to the screen in time with a neat little tango number—“That’s galactic dancin’!” we’re told by the onscreen text—but Galaga ’88 has much more to offer gamers than cheesy Latin music and synchronized aliens. TB See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Maniac Mansion Original release date : 1987 Platform : Various Developer : LucasArts Genre : Adventure
Maniac Mansion ushered in a new era for adventure games. It was the first title to make use of the venerable SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) engine, the scripting language developed by LucasArts that enabled designers to create large parts of the game without having to write in the same language as the game’s source code. This helped to create a more visually attractive game and friendly gaming experience. Maniac Mansion was also a significant influence on the development of the adventure genre by daring to suggest that such games did not have to be solemn, worthy, and plodding. In fact, they could be witty, personable, and rich with smart pop-culture references. Heck, they could even mimic haunted houses from teen movies and feature japes involving chainsaws and mysterious hamster deaths. Local hero Dave Miller has been drawn to a strange spooky mansion on the outside of town to rescue his kidnapped cheerleader girlfriend, Sandy Pantz. But he’s unaware that mad scientist Dr. Fred is inside, struggling with his own deranged family and a mean alien meteor with an attitude problem. So Dave explores the house trying to uncover its secrets—and trying not to get killed by
members of the grotesque cast, such as Fred’s lovable son, Weird Ed. Furthermore, the only way he can reach Sandy is by answering a series of neat—often rather smart—lateral-thinking puzzles. Witty, clever, and filled with odd little secrets to discover as you explore, Maniac Mansion may not be as openly hilarious as the Monkey Island series that followed, but remains a very significant step in the history of the adventure game genre, and is as evocative and atmospheric today as it was back in 1987. CD See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
R-Type Original release date : 1987 Platform : Arcade Developer : Irem Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
R-Type is one of the most enduring shoot ’em ups for one simple reason: People don’t just play it to shoot things. Never shy of a little transdimensional mischief, it makes time and space for the things most others leave out: story, character, and themes. Loved by game historians more than players—it’s mercilessly hard and fundamentally flawed—each level is a landscape work of art. To survive, the player must learn to fight fire with fire. The Bydo, a biological weapon abandoned in space, has evolved into an empire bent on our destruction. With a simple order to “strike off and defeat” the threat, your job is to pilot two units: the R-9 Arrowhead, a curvaceous space fighter, and the Force, a chunk of Bydo flesh encased inside a loyal sphere. Detachable, indestructible, and matched to the player’s up/down movements, this iconic specimen is the center of the entire series. In fact, it’s so important that later levels leap in difficulty if you die, leaving you to claw back your arsenal despite waves of enemies and obstacles. Some of the formations are deceptively intricate, others frighteningly so, while most favor a single route and plenty of trial and error. Weather the storm, though, and the rewards are everywhere. Form and function combine beautifully in R-Type, whether in the deadly hypnotic tail of the Dobkeratops, or a third stage focused
entirely on the dodging and dissection of a Bydo battleship. R-Type also features one of the video game genre’s greatest soundtracks, full of percussive effects and chip-tune anthems. But its genius lies in its use of screen space and resources, the parallaxscrolling backdrops, choreographed sprites, and bouncing neon lasers giving every pixel a chance to shine. In a gaming version of the Louvre, it’d be first upon the wall. DH See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Gemini Wing Original release date : 1987 Platform : Arcade Developer : Tecmo Genre : Shoot ’Em Up When was the last time you approached a waterfall and were confronted by a giant, green, mutated walrus that proceeded to spit what looks like pulsating Maltesers at you? It’s the sort of encounter that only belongs in video games, and it feels quite at home in Gemini Wing, one of the most distinctive and vividly realized shoot ’em ups of the mid-to late-1980s arcade scene. A title that could be described as a “cooperative shooter,” Gemini Wing allows two players to pilot their slightly portly-looking planes through a series of vertical-scrolling levels filled with strange creatures. Your enemies appear in forms that bring to mind elements from the natural world, such as woodlice, trilobites, and even the egg shells of skate fish (but in color schemes that give them a distinctly alien appearance). Unusual for a game of its mechanical styling, Gemini Wing offers only one type of primary armament, but it goes some way toward compensating with its approach to dealing with secondary attacks. You collect one-use attacks from the playfield by maneuvering over them, causing them to chain behind your craft. Use one up and the next one moves into position. Stacking up a chain of significant length is an empowering sensation, and it’s quite a wrench when you take a hit and see your precious baubles disperse in all directions—especially when your supposed comrade quickly moves in to suck them up. Today, for raw action thrills Gemini Wing doesn’t stack up so well against the superfast delights of, say, Geometry Wars, but then that doesn’t have a weapon that works like some kind of windscreen wiper constructed of fire, nor a giant blue airship whose rear section spews forth a spinning skull with three eye sockets. If only all games had such personality. TB See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
1943 Original release date : 1987 Platform : Arcade Developer : Capcom Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
The year that the war ground on may have been 1943, when rationing continued to bite down hard, construction work on the Pentagon was completed, and the Japanese forces were driven back from Guadalcanal, but it’s a whole lot more enjoyable if you think of it as this snappy little verticalscrolling blaster from Capcom, released for the delight of the arcade-going public in 1987. The sequel to Capcom’s cracking 1942, 1943 is set in the Pacific as the player fights off waves of oncoming enemies to take the battle to the heart of the Japanese fleet. Once again, victory depends on mastery of standard and special attacks, as you take down spinning, cycling, warping, and flipping waves of oncoming aircraft and ground troops, fighting elaborate boss battles and collecting brilliant power-ups. The health system has been modified somewhat, but the game remains as challenging as ever, and overall success is still as unlikely. (Although the introduction of two-player cooperative action evens out the odds a little, especially during the larger boss confrontations.) Like its predecessor, 1943 is now considered one of the kings of the one-credit play-through challenge, popular among a particularly hardcore group of the game’s enthusiasts. Having created the arcade iteration, Capcom handled a home version for the NES, but a vast and
unwieldy range of ports across different platforms range wildly in terms of quality and degrees of fidelity. Faced with such a compromised muddle, if you’re itching to restage the Battle of Midway in entirely unrealistic terms today, you’ll probably want to hunt down the mighty Capcom Classics Collection—a generous PS2 and Xbox compilation—which features this game, along with many other greats, and has some rather delightful menus to boot. CD See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Operation Wolf Original release date : 1987 Platform : Arcade Developer : Taito Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
To clear up a common misconception, Operation Wolf is not a light-gun game. A gun game, yes, but not one with any real connection between the barrel and the screen. It’s the mount on the cabinet that does the work, using the gun’s spatial positioning to determine the path of the crosshair. The two get mistaken because (a) no one honestly cares how a gun game works so long as it shoots where it’s supposed to, and (b) Operation Wolf feels so damn right when you’re anchored to the machine. The first of four games in the series, Operation Wolf bears the closest resemblance to the god of 1980s action, Rambo: First Blood Part II. Tempting as it is to say you shoot guys, lots of guys, there’s a tiny bit more to it than that. Following your attempt to free hostages from a South American POW camp, it scrolls sideways through six environments as countless goons assault the screen, coming at you with knives, helicopters, rockets, and rifles. Along with a handy grenade button on the controller, however, you have plenty of support items to level the odds. Well, almost … The instructions tell you: “Main items—magazine, mortar rocket, and power drink—appear by hitting coconuts, condors, chickens, etc.” Needless to say, the “etc.” tends to be those nasty armed foreign chaps.
With a fierce recoil action on the gun controller itself, the novelty of Operation Wolf in 1987 was huge. Add the bonus of big, detailed, fast-moving sprites, and you have a game that consoles and home computers simply couldn’t copy, even if just about all of them tried. (Incidentally, if you thought that blowing away illdefined bad guys was a strictly 1980s phenomenon, you might want to check out 2008’s Rambo coin-op, with its “computer graphics and real movie pictures.”) DH See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Rainbow Islands Original release date : 1987 Platform : Various Developer : Taito Genre : Platform
Following the success of the brilliant Bubble Bobble, Taito’s Fukio Mitsuji produced an even finer sequel. Rainbow Islands is one of those games that has helped define what people think of when they picture vintage platform games: blue skies, bright colors, elaborate bosses, and cute animals. This was jumping and running at its best, and it’s as much fun to play today as it was back when it was released. Game play takes place on a series of islands, each of which is sinking rather swiftly into the sea. This is vertical platforming taken to extremes, and there are a few neat twists thrown in, besides the direction of the scrolling. Much of the fun revolves around the player’s ability to generate the titular rainbows, solid platforms of color that can then be used either to access hard-to-reach spots or triggered to fall on enemies. Besides that, the game’s ten islands—three of them are hidden and don’t appear until you have completed the first seven—are riddled with secrets and power-ups, meaning that while the waters may be constantly rising beneath you, you’re constantly being tempted to investigate strange areas and pull off elaborate platforming stunts to reach anything that looks even remotely promising.
Bright and goofy, such was the success of Rainbow Islands that a number of further Bubble Bobble arcade games appeared in the 1990s, such as Bubble Symphony and Bubble Memories. Taito also ended up porting it to just about any format on which it might run, and continues to squeeze the last drops out of the license to this day, with DS sequels that mess around with the basic concepts. If you’re after the original, however, it’s probably best to sit back and hope that it turns up on the Nintendo Wii’s Virtual Console at some point. CD See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Shinobi Original release date : 1987 Platform : Arcade Developer : Sega Genre : Action
On the surface, Shinobi looks like just another example of the video game industry doing what it does so frequently—repackaging proven formulas; in this case, wrapping up Namco’s Rolling Thunder in ninja outfits, replacing the bullets with shuriken. Scrape beneath the veneer, however, and what emerges is one of the finest action games of the mid-1980s arcade scene. As Joe Musashi, you’re out to rescue kidnapped children from the sinister Zeed organization. The game takes place over five areas of side-scrolling action, each broken down into individual levels and rounded off with show-stopping boss encounters. What makes Shinobi better than other similarly themed games of the era—Ninja Spirit and Ninja Gaiden, for example—is the variety of its enemies and environments, and its play mechanics, which are as sharp as one of Mushashi’s throwing stars. You set out in cold fear of getting anywhere near your adversary, relying on launching projectiles and hiding behind crates. But slowly, as you begin to learn their techniques and movements, your confidence grows, and you begin to get up into their faces and unleash killing blows at close quarters. Over time, the assassin’s garb comes to fit you more comfortably.
Crucial for an arcade game, Shinobi has great over-the-shoulder appeal, never more so than when you let loose ninja magic, creating a kind of smart bomb that eliminates nearby threats while filling the screen with dizzying visual effects. Strictly rationed, the temptation is to save such attacks for boss encounters, but a true Shinobi master will make no use of them at all, preferring instead to let the traditional tools of the trade do the talking. It’s that kind of game, all about showing what you can do, and therefore a natural fit for the proving grounds of the arcade. TB See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Xybots Original release date : 1987 Platform : Arcade Developer : Atari Games Genre : Action
The grandfather of all modern third-person shooters, the sci-fi-themed Xybots offers threedimensional mazes for one or two players to explore, with an unusual control scheme that, in its arcade setting, features joysticks that can be twisted left and right to direct the player’s viewpoint. Thanks to its unusual interface, Xybot’s play isn’t as flowing as contemporary third-person shooter gamers would expect, with the game trading on the fear its clunky controls would engender. Designed by Ed Logg, the legendary designer behind the Gauntlet franchise, Xybots was originally intended as a Gauntlet title, and it retains many of the aspects for which the fantasy series is known, from confusing mazes with keys and hidden paths to the stress of a health bar that is constantly being depleted. As in Gauntlet, this—combined with unorthodox controls—creates a game where speed and decisiveness are all important, and one that is best played cooperatively, so that two adventurers can watch each other’s backs. Of course, with two players taking part, the valuable coins strewn across the maps can become flashpoints for disagreements, as can the big bonus awarded for being the first to exit the level. Maybe too advanced in design for its time, Xybots suffers from a cluttered layout in which each
play window takes up only a quarter of the screen (the rest given over to the map and player information). This feels especially limiting when only one player is taking part. There’s also a harsh requirement on skill that can feel like a cheap attempt to get more of your money. But when played with two, this is a much-refined take on the Gauntlet design that heralded the joy of co-op shooters such as Gears of War long before three dimensions became a standard. MKu See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Sid Meier’s Pirates! Original release date : 1987 Platform : Various Developer : Microprose Software Genre : Action / Adventure
Billed as an “action adventure simulation” Sid Meier’s Pirates! has everything from sea battles and swordfights to trading and treasure hunting. Along the way, the player’s character, who starts life as a lowly privateer, must buy a ship, build a crew, and set out to make a fortune on the open sea. As the character ages, retirement looms—the open-ended goal is just to earn as much money and as many titles and honors as possible before dropping anchor for the final time. For a game of its era, the sheer variety of activities is dazzling. One moment the player is controlling a small sloop following the winds around the Caribbean islands, the next minute the action moves onboard a rival ship, for a two-dimensional beat ’em up-style sword fight with its captain. As with all Sid Meier titles, the setting is copiously researched and packed with historical detail. Players can select from six periods, beginning in 1560, with the Spanish in full control of the region, and culminating in 1660, with the Dutch, English, and French in ascendance. Each features different ships, based closely on craft of the time, and all present different challenges to the player. Importantly, the game includes several elements that would later provide the foundations of Meier’s magnum opus, Civilization. Notably, the game world is effectively randomized at the start of
every session, ensuring that players must always spend time exploring the geographic, economic, and political natures of their new environment. Furthermore, the four nations represented in the game are —like the tribes of Civilization—in a constant state of diplomatic flux, shifting from peaceful relations to war and back again in an unending political dance. But Sid Meier’s Pirates! is a key Meier title in its own right; absorbing, varied, and historically fascinating. KS See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Wizball Original release date : 1987 Platform : Various Developer : Sensible Software Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
Wizball has one of gaming history’s least promising introductions, throwing you into a world where you appear to be a bouncing anthropomorphic cabbage (the titular Wizball) whose only controls are rotation and fire. Your only way to get around seems to be to change the angle of your bounce by your rate of spin—and that’s maddeningly hard. Even with static adversaries in place at the start, it’s still horribly easy to spin too fast and smash into the enemy, wasting one of your three lives. A little practice, and you’ll soon be good enough to get those first two vital power-ups that enable you to actually control your ball properly, which makes it easier to get the Catellite power-up you need to actually play the game. It’s a trial by fire, but at least it ensures that you have a feel for the game before you get properly into it. Once you’re past that first hump, however, Wizball reveals its purpose and shows itself as a unique piece of gaming. Your task is to restore color to a number of monochrome worlds by combining the forces of Wizball and Catellite. You hunt down herds of colored blobs, shoot them, and then send out the Catellite to capture their released sploshes of color. Each world, however, only features one blob of color, so you need to travel around to gather other hues that can then be mixed up
in the right quantities to create the color you need. That’s all well and good, but your task is plagued by waves of more typical shoot ’em up bad guys. And they can ruin everything for you with a single shot. It’s hellishly tough, the stuff of smashed joysticks, but it’s easy to forgive Wizball because it’s such a neat concept, beautifully presented. It tests your patience and skills to the very limit, and rewards you in abundance. JM See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Carrier Command Original release date : 1988 Platform : Amiga, ST Developer : Realtime Games Genre : Strategy
A vanguard of both three-dimensional graphics and realtime strategy, Carrier Command is a lasting highlight of the 16-bit era, a time when genres were as fluid as the sea. The year is 2166, and nuclear weapons tests have created an island chain full of untapped energy. Hailing this “economically miraculous discovery,” scientists build two robotic aircraft carriers to deploy command centers on the islands, using fleets of land, sea, and air vehicles to defend them, if necessary. The scenario no one predicts: that they’ll be defending them against one another. The technically superior ACC Omega has fallen into the hands of STANZA, a terrorist organization, its software hacked in order to conquer the archipelago. With neither time to pay the ransom nor a viable nuclear option, the good guys order the ACC Epsilon to take its own territory, turning the area into a warzone. Facing a technologically superior enemy, success in Carrier Command means more than just a direct confrontation, so at your disposal you have a number of amphibious Walrus vehicles and Manta planes that can be deployed against the enemy. Carrier Command was revolutionary in 1988, stressing the unique values of units and territories
in realtime against a relentless AI opponent. With an interface well up to the task, controlling not just the field units but the Epsilon’s weapons and repair system, it gave direct control over all its threedimensional vehicles. Its most delectable feature, though, besides the topical premise, remains the ominous presence of a genuinely superior foe, stalking the game without handicap or respect for the lazy or impetuous. And, as ever, victory over a more powerful enemy always tastes sweeter. When it comes to the speed chess of the RTS, Carrier Command is a grand master. DH See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Forgotten Worlds Original release date : 1988 Platform : Arcade Developer : Capcom Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
You could say that “forgotten world” pretty accurately sums up the scrolling shoot ’em up genre, where so much effort has gone into such unfashionable areas as spaceships and science. Forgotten Worlds, though, is fondly remembered for bucking that trend at almost every opportunity, thus dooming itself to be a whimsical one-hit wonder. Taking a handful of ideas from 1985 shooter Section Z, it rapidly became known as “the one with bosses as big as the screen”; an empire built on sand if ever there was one. But when it’s designed by the artists at Capcom, it’s a gimmick that you’d rightly line up to see. As much a flagship for the newly released CPS arcade board, the game ditches the spaceships of other games, instead having its heroes fly unaided, buoyed only by their obscene muscles, daft haircuts, and giant shoulder pads. These Nameless Ones face a wild array of enemies and environments, from Egyptian gods and temples to a dragon reclining in the sea. Unhindered by cockpits or reality, the Ones can, in the arcade version, fire using an eight-way joystick. Much was made of the eight bosses, such as the mighty War God—“even BIGGER than the screen!” went the ads. Yet they are the easiest parts of the game to master. Exploitable and artificial,
they’re about as animated as the average theme park dinosaur. But they do award Zenny points for a quick win, and these come in very handy at the game’s most significant novelty: a shop. It’s here, courtesy of an oddly out-of-context female shopkeeper, that your skill is rewarded with a colorful selection of new weapons, peaking early on with the all-powerful napalm launcher. Quickly adopted by numerous shoot ’em ups on computer and console, this is the game’s real legacy. DH See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Ghouls ’n Ghosts Original release date : 1988 Platform : Arcade Developer : Capcom Genre : Platform
How do you follow up something like Ghosts ’n Goblins, a hit arcade platformer from 1985 most notable for its monstrous difficulty? If you’re Capcom’s Tokuro Fujiwara, the answer’s obvious: You wait a couple of years and remake it—bigger, better, and more difficult than ever. The familiar opening level suggests straight away that you can expect more of the same. Like its predecessor, Ghouls ’n Ghosts never ever tires of finding new ways of killing you. It gives you that one armor-shedding chance before you’re stripped to your boxers; one slip, one mistimed jump, one glance in the wrong direction when there’s something erupting directly beneath you, and it’s instant skeletal death. It gleefully presents you with treasure chests that might contain special treats, but it’s more likely to be a spectral magician who’ll turn you into a duck or a wizened old man if you don’t kill him quickly enough. It teases you over and over again, letting you nearly reach the end of a stage before idly swatting you from existence. It rewards you with new weapons and a special suit of gold armor that equips you with a charge shot, and then it slaps you straight back down again. And should you have the sheer dogged dedication necessary to reach the end, Ghouls ’n Ghosts has one final insult
for you: It sends you right back to the beginning to find the ultimate weapon needed to even qualify for the final battle. A gothic pantomime of cruelty, it’s built to separate the men from the boys—and then mock them both, anyway. It demands perseverance and excellence; otherwise, it’ll kill you over and over again, leading you to question your own gaming abilities. But think how sweet that victory will be should you reach the very end. JM See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Laser Squad Original release date : 1988 Platform : Various Developer : Mythos Games Genre : Strategy
The first installment in Julian Gollop’s Laser Squad series came hot on the heels of the Rebelstar titles, appearing in the same year as the Aliens-inspired Rebelstar II. As a result, Laser Squad is visually quite similar to the designer’s previous titles, expanding upon the concepts laid down by the original Rebelstar by adding three scenarios, each with its own difficulty levels and squad selections. A further four were availabe if you bought the expansion packs that were available by mail order. As in Rebelstar, play is turn based and supports one or two players, with the use of an “actionpoint” system, allowing players to carefully allocate their characters’ behavior across a turn via options such as moving, turning, and shooting. Characters could also make use of cover, pick up items, and fire on their opponent during their turn. While in retrospect Laser Squad suffers for its similarity to Rebelstar, gamers in 1988 saw it as further refinement to a great design. Ported at the time from the ZX Spectrum to a vast array of home computers—including the Amiga, Atari ST, Amstrad CPC—and in 1992 as an updated version for the PC, Laser Squad brought Gollop’s action-point system to more gamers than ever before. Though the graphics remain starkly functional, the easy-to-use interface makes it feel more like an action title than
a war game, meaning the tactical nuances of the title—carefully managing your action points to protect your squad while still driving toward your objective—could be picked up by osmosis rather than by reading the manual. Laser Squad’s highly playable range of missions represented the peak of the genre until UFO: Enemy Unknown five years later, and even today they offer up an addictive challenge. MKu See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Impossible Mission II Original release date : 1988 Platform : Various Developer : Novotrade Genre : Action
Programmed not by the original game’s creator, Dennis Caswell, but by Hungarian code shop Novotrade (which would later create the Ecco the Dolphin titles), Impossible Mission II tinkers very little with the formula that ensured its predecessor’s success. Once again evil genius Elvin Atombender wants to destroy the world, and once again the athletic Agent 4125 is dispatched to stop him, a task that involves searching the objects in every room of Atombender’s lair while avoiding the robotic home help. This time, however, the base is much larger, organized into a series of eight towers: The player must locate portions of a numerical code in each building before gaining access to the next; at the same time there’s a musical sequence to collect and assemble to unlock the culminative control center. Additionally, rooms now contain an array of robots alongside the familiar security guards, including the clawed bot, which attempts to push the agent from platforms, and the “pestbots,” which ride the lifts in each room, stalling the player’s progress. The greater threat is balanced out, though, in the form of collectable bombs (which can also blow holes in the floor) and motion-sensitive mines. As with the original, a timer runs throughout the game, so success relies on quickly ascertaining the correct route through each room to search all
possible items. While providing a more significant—and graphically varied—challenge, Impossible Mission II lacked the sheer impact of its famous predecessor. The character animation was no longer revolutionary, and the memorable speech synthesis mostly gone—although the original’s famous scream does make a startling return at the obtuse and rather abrupt finale. KS See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Power Drift Original release date : 1988 Platform : Arcade Developer : Sega-AM2 Genre : Driving
Power Drift was an attempt by Sega to create a cabinet as fast as the game inside it. At only minor risk of rectal injury or returning your lunch, players would be shunted in violent sync with the visuals of Sega’s Y-Board hardware, which used advanced sprite scaling to create a sense of speed. And yet Power Drift is one of the less-remembered moments in the career of industry legend Yu Suzuki. It deserves better. With all the motion-blurred trickery and heft of modern racing games, it’s easy to forget just how fast and smooth Power Drift is. Running at an uncommon sixty frames per second, with cars that handle like they’re driving on butter, it’s a case of catching up with the action first and only then worrying about the race. (It also featured another of Sega’s classic soundtracks, each game circuit having its own theme tune.) Notoriously hard to emulate, Power Drift only properly arrived in homes with the near-perfect Dreamcast port. Part of the highly recommended Yu Suzuki Game Works collection, it’s the only official release to capture both the frame-rate and full-screen tilt effect while cornering. DH
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1980s
Super Mario Bros. 2 Original release date : 1988 Platform : NES Developer : Nintendo Genre : Platform
This is a bit confusing: Super Mario Bros. 2 isn’t really Super Mario Bros. 2. The real sequel to Mario’s first side-scrolling adventure was deemed too difficult for audiences outside of Japan, and only appeared years later, as The Lost Levels. The Western Super Mario Bros. 2 is actually a reskinned version of the quirky Japanese platformer Doki Doki Panic. And it shows: In the course of this beautifully drawn adventure, Mario rides magic carpets and fights a range of creatures who seem somewhat removed from the Koopas and Goombas of the Mushroom Kingdom. Gone, too, is Mario’s ground-pounding attack, replaced with a system that sees him pulling vegetables out of the earth and hefting them at his enemies. It’s an incredible journey, and one that can also be played as Luigi, Toad, and Princess Peach, each having their own special gimmicks. Super Mario Bros. 2 might feel a bit unlikely as a Super Mario game, even if you didn’t know its tortured history, but it remains a marvelous adventure, one that introduced its own cherished characters and mechanics into the established world of the Mushroom Kingdom. CD
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1980s
Splatterhouse Original release date : 1988 Platform : Arcade Developer : Namco Genre : Fighting
Capturing all of the idiotic gore and nonsensical plotlines of the finest 1980s slasher flicks, Splatterhouse is the video game equivalent of renting Friday the 13th Part VI: tawdry, gruesome, but worryingly compelling. Rick and Jennifer are two students who find themselves in the remote mansion of mad Dr. West. Jennifer vanishes; Rick awakes in a dungeon wearing a mask that gives him extraordinary physical powers. Rick must rescue his girl by exploring the house and grounds, kicking, punching, and slashing all and sundry. The horror styling is applied with exuberant Grand Guignol excess: rotting bodies hang from walls, vomiting gore; flaccid skeletons slouch, impaled on spears; hideous mutants crawl across the screen … And you can always pick up a meat cleaver to decapitate troublesome incoming zombies. Like its movie inspirations, Splatterhouse was subject to moral hand-wringing when it transferred to the home entertainment market, and some elements were censored. But the plot retains its shocking sting in the tail, and, even watered down, it remains a horror favorite. KS
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1980s
NARC Original release date : 1988 Platform : Arcade Developer : Midway Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
With Robotron 2084, designer Eugene Jarvis created the twin-stick shooter, a subgenre of the action game that continues to be popular. Equally violent and fast-paced, NARC tapped into the start of another craze: the war on drugs that had begun to fascinate Reagan’s America. Ostensibly a simple side-scrolling shooter, in this game cool cops Max Force and Hit Man fought through varied ranks of street scum to take down drug lord Mr. Big. The game play was simple, but NARC looked unlike anything else at the time: a glossy urban shooter that reached unprecedented levels of violent realism. It now seems rather charming, the game play’s sheer delight in righteous slaughter giving the whole experience a pleasantly humorous kick. And it features a memorable final boss, as you whittle Mr. Big down to his skeleton before shooting out individual vertebrae. NARC may have lost its power to dazzle, but it remains a brilliant example of 1980s arcade exuberance. If you want to play it now, avoid the loathsome 2005 PS2 and Xbox ports—these have little of the original’s wit or aplomb. CD
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1980s
Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders Original release date : 1988 Platform : Various Developer : LucasArts Genre : Adventure
Zak McKracken isn’t the wittiest or most atmospheric of the early LucasArts point-and-click adventure games, but it’s certainly the most ambitious. Indeed, it’s no less than a globe-trotting new age mystery that takes its hero everywhere, from the streets of San Francisco to the temples of the old Mayan stomping grounds in Central America, and on to the shifting dunes of Mars. A tabloid journalist whose regular gigs include choice assignments, such as interviewing threeheaded squirrels and covering UFO sightings, Zak is an appealingly ordinary man. Togged out in his conventional 1980s regular-guy uniform—thin tie and tight slacks—he lives in a grubby apartment, has to remember to undertake the simplest domestic chores (like paying the phone bill and washing the dishes), and even has to keep track of his own finances while he jets about the game’s world. That may not sound like much fun, but money equals freedom in the Zak McKracken universe, and if your cash card ever runs too low, the game has some uniquely entertaining ways of topping it up again— with a lottery win cobbled together by the most unlikely of sources. Zak McKracken pulls together all manner of new age mysteries and conspiracy theories to create an exciting plot that omits almost nothing: the face of Mars gets a thorough exploration, as do African
shamen and the Bermuda Triangle. An excellent game in its own right, while Zak never got a legitimate sequel, a cluster of fan projects have popped up over the years. Although the tabloid hack will never be quite as popular as Guybrush Threepwood and his pirate friends or The Day of the Tentacle geeks, Zak has a unique following all of his own. Mostly in Germany, as it happens. How curious. CD See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
The New Zealand Story Original release date : 1988 Platform : Various Developer : Taito Genre : Platform
The arcade may have been a hotbed of innovation in the shoot ’em up and beat ’em up categories across its history, but it hasn’t offered too much to fans of scrolling platform titles since the arrival in 1985 of Super Mario Bros. This makes it unsurprising that The New Zealand Story, a cutesy platformer created by Taito in 1988 (following the success of single-screen platformers such as Bubble Bobble), would find most of its success in the form of home conversions. And yet the title is something of a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Despite the generally held belief that it’s simply a straightforward scrolling platformer, from the very first level The New Zealand Story proves to be something much stranger indeed. Starring a small kiwi bird that has to rescue his kiwi pals, the game features floating enemies that spawn randomly across the screen, complex mazes of platforms and spikes that require pixel-perfect jumps (unless you steal floating enemy vehicles), and the ability to constantly shoot projectiles. It feels like a combination of an extremely hardcore shooter and an occasionally clumsy platformer, and the unusual design extends to parts of the game where death can transport you to levels set in heaven and an ice-encased boss who has to be killed from within his own gut after he’s swallowed you up.
Almost anarchically strange—the kiwis are wearing sneakers, and one is seen puffing on a sly cigarette during the intro—The New Zealand Story gives the impression of a game developer messing about to see what would happen, but who somehow ends up with a superbly playable and challenging title. It’s an unusually distinctive arcade game that shouldn’t be overlooked in favor of Taito’s betterknown works. MKu See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Exile Original release date : 1988 Platform : Various Developer : Peter Irvin, Jeremy Smith Genre : Action / Adventure
Exile is a title that can be compared to Nintendo’s Metroid series, as it presents the player with a system of alien caverns populated by unusual life forms to be explored through puzzle solving and combat. However, it’s not quite that simple. While the Metroid games feature the gradual unlocking of new powers through the discovery of upgrades, carefully pacing and ordering the experience, Exile instead presents players with the full range of their abilities at the very beginning of the game. Rather than create an ordered experience, Exile is a simulation disguised as a two-dimensional actionadventure. The world has its own consistent physics, requiring players to carefully navigate their surroundings using a jetpack that accurately struggles against gravity, wind, and its own inertia. Objects are just as physical, too: in one challenge you’re required to put out a fire with a glass of water, but how to keep water in a glass when you’re careening around on a jetpack? As a simulation—and one that heavily taxed the powers of early home-computing hardware —Exile doesn’t explain anything, expecting Newton’s laws to speak for themselves through play. Though this means the game takes hours of work on the player’s part to get to grips with, there is no significant penalty for reckless exploration and spontaneous experimentation; any deaths simply result
in the game’s protagonist being warped back to the last spot designated as a teleport location. Though ported multiple times—with the definitive iteration considered to be the 1991 Amiga version, even over the graphically superior 1995 CD32 version—Exile is a title that deserves to have a spawned a legacy of action adventure titles in its wake, yet none materialized. Perhaps it was already simply too perfect. MKu See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Fantasy World Dizzy Original release date : 1989 Platform : Various Developer : Andreuu Oliver, Philip Oliver Genre : Action / Adventure
The eponymous egg-shaped hero of the Dizzy series was, like Nintendo’s Mario, a product of technical limitations. Developers Philip and Andrew Oliver wanted to create a character with which players could empathize, and that meant drawing one with big, recognizable facial features. But due to the sprite limitations of 8-bit home computers, this called for a model based entirely around the face—hence, an egg with arms and legs. As for animation, it was easier to make him somersault in the air rather than leap—hence the name Dizzy. A star was born. By the time publisher Codemasters released Fantasy World Dizzy, the series was already a major success. Here we find Dizzy captured by an evil wizard and slung into a dungeon. He must escape if he is to rescue girlfriend Daisy from the sorcerer’s tower. For this installment, finding and using objects is the focus of the game play, hence the design of the more robust inventory screen, which would remain intact for the rest of the series. The Oliver twins, through their clever use of proprietary graphics techniques, were able to tease comparatively rich and detailed environments out of formats such as Sinclair’s ZX Spectrum— everything from dank castles to leafy tree villages. At the same time, the daft text conversations with
other characters, not to mention some bizarre design touches, continued the Pythonesque tradition of many British games of the 1980s. At one point Dizzy falls down a well and ends up in an upsidedown version of the world; in another section he’s able to pick up and use a hole—an allusion to the film Yellow Submarine. This is Philip Oliver’s favorite Dizzy title and, bursting with ideas and exhibiting a mastery of 8bit hardware, its popularity extends far into the gaming world. KS See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
North & South Original release date : 1989 Platform : Various Developer : Infogrames Genre : Action / Strategy
The American Civil War was surely not the most pleasant of wars. Wedged uncomfortably close to the nasty delights of industrialization, it was a muddle of shelling and gunpowder, in which people got their faces burned off, or were accidentally run through by their own side’s sabers; it was a conflict in which troops were regularly trampled under horses, and that nice Kevin Costner almost had his leg lopped off and went to live with the Native Americans. North & South tells a slightly cheerier story. A mixture of cold strategy and fast-paced battles, Infogrames’s classic is based on a Belgian comic called Les Tuniques Bleus. This means that verisimilitude was never going to be that high on the agenda. That said, beyond the chummy cartoon faces and quirky animated asides (you can tickle the photographer on the main menu screen by goosing him with your mouse pointer), it’s still a smart tactical challenge all the same. North & South operates in two modes. There’s the overworld view, in which you move troops around a map of the United States, staking out territory and pincering your enemy. There’s also a battle mode that allows you to race through stripped-down skirmishes more personally, pushing around a range of infantry, cavalry, and cannons.
The story moves at a pace while excellent audio and visual presentation give the whole thing a sheen of polish missing from many other games of the era. The ending sequence, in which weary troops march home, the war over, set new standards for animation at the time of its release. Taken as a whole, North & South, while not particularly deep, makes for a pleasant arcade strategy experience even today—if you can track down an original and coax it back to life, that is. CD See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
SimCity Original release date : 1989 Platform : Various Developer : Maxis Genre : Strategy
Not yet a legend, Will Wright, was working on the environments for Raid on Bungeling Bay— Brøderbund’s simple war zone shoot ’em up for the Commodore 64—when he had an epiphany: He realized that he was more interested in designing the cities than blowing them up. That urge led him to design a simulation program, where players could build and manage a city—that would be the game. At a party in 1987, Wright met producer Jeff Braun, who saw the potential in a game that, as he later told the New Yorker, would pull in “megalomaniacs who want to control the world.” Braun and Wright founded development studio Maxis, and made millions from this simple “God game.” The most radical feature of the game is its most basic premise: You don’t get to win at SimCity— but you’ll derive constant satisfaction from playing it. The rules are clear and the results are immediate: build a useful road, and people will drive on it; draw a power line to your new industrial park, and the businesses will come. When things go wrong, it’s usually easy to figure out why—and, of course, sometimes the player is the city’s worst enemy. Taking a mature, finally tuned city and unleashing Godzilla on it is a rite of passage for many gamers. After all, you can learn as much from destroying something as from building it.
Maxis continues to ship sequels and expansions to the franchise, and SimCity paved the way for The Sims, by a wide margin the biggest seller in PC history. The latest editions of SimCity are so granular that they let you open espresso shops or tinker with universal healthcare. But newcomers should start with the original model: getting the fundamentals of a city right is still the most satisfying way to play God. CDa See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Midwinter Original release date : 1989 Platform : Various Developer : Maelstrom Games Genre : Action / Role-Playing
Open-world titles might be in vogue today, but their roots go way back to games such as Elite and the legendary Midwinter. Mike Singleton’s epic first-person role-playing game is remarkable. Set on a fictional island in the wake of a post-nuclear winter, the scale of the game is epic, covering hundreds of square miles. It also features thirty-two playable characters, all of whom have different skills and allegiances. Starting out alone on a snowmobile, the task for you as the player is to recruit all thirty-two into a network capable of preventing the tyrannical General Masters from taking control of the island of Midwinter. The strategic breadth of the game is impressive by any standards, with a wide range of vehicles and weapons available. Sniper rifles, planes, skis, and bombs—there’s a catalog of possible tools for your budding insurgency. The game itself, however, is low-key, and played in firstperson through a set of snow goggles. It’s a remarkably intimidating experience. And entirely unforgiving. You start out in the most dire situation: hunted, alone, and very likely to come to a sticky end. The chances are you would succumb to the treacherous environment, even if the enemy troops didn’t get you. The game never really lifts from this moment-to-moment crisis management, even once you’ve begun to recruit
your allies. Everything about Midwinter is surprising, given its 1989 vintage. The eco-disaster plot; the human characters given to each of the agents; the cast of thousands that make up the rest of the island; the immense, fractally generated terrain—it is daunting, and inspiring. Few games have ever aimed this high, and fewer still have achieved such heights. “A modern Midwinter” is a phrase you hear regularly on the lips of wishful gamers. One day it will happen. JR See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Minesweeper Original release date : 1989 Platform : PC Developer : Microsoft Genre : Puzzle Minesweeper is the video game that adults who have day jobs and responsibilities and families and mortgages and who really don’t care for video games in the first place are likely to find horribly addictive. It’s a classic Windows “Easter egg” that gives the player a simple task: to clear a small gray grid of a series of mines, deducing their various locations by reverse engineering the numbers written on adjoining squares. If we’re being totally honest, Minesweeper is not a particularly attractive game. Perhaps part of its appeal to nongamers is due to the fact that this potent little time waster looks a bit like a calendar or a calculator or some other legitimate productivity software. But it is nonetheless powerfully addictive: a gently taxing challenge with a near-instantaneous restart, meaning that you can be straight into your next game seconds before vowing to give up entirely and go to lunch. Minesweeper is capable of providing enormous tension, each click of a square feeling as if you’re clipping through a bomb detonation wire. But it’s also kind of like doodling: something for your hands, and a peculiarly absent part of your mind, to do while you answer phone calls, browse spam e-mail, or print out those invoices for accounts. Furthermore, even though it’s unlikely to win any awards for graphics, presentation, or plot, it’s likely to keep you playing long after the most cinematic titles have started to gather dust in the cupboard. A stalwart of every Windows operating system right through to Windows 7, whenever you turn on your computer, Minesweeper will be there, lying in wait for you; and whenever you prepare to shut the PC down for the night, you’re never more than a tempting click away from a few more wasted hours. CD See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Final Fight Original release date : 1989 Platform : Arcade Developer : Capcom Genre : Fighting History is full of decisions that may not have seemed momentous at the time but yet had untold ramifications. For example, Capcom electing to change the name of its side-scrolling beat ’em up from Street Fighter 89 to Final Fight (after arcade operators argued that the game was quite unlike Street Fighter, which featured fixed locations and one-on-one battles) arguably opened the door for Street Fighter II to be developed—something that may never have otherwise happened. Of course, that’s not the only reason Final Fight is remarkable, because in its own way it revolutionized a genre. While the foundations of the side-scrolling beat ’em up were laid earlier in the 1980s, it was Capcom’s decision to focus on simple controls ( just two buttons: attack and jump) and concentrate on creating a title with dazzlingly large and detailed sprites that set Final Fight apart in the then-crowded arcade marketplace. The plot sees Mike Haggar, ex-wrestler and now mayor of Metro City, on a quest to save his kidnapped daughter. Joined by her boyfriend, Cody, and his ninja buddy, Guy, we embark on one of the most celebrated—not to mention violent—two-player experiences in arcade history. Make no mistake, Final Fight is simplistic in the extreme, and a progenitor of the defining design of many 1990s arcade games where skill isn’t as important as your ability to put cash into the cabinet. However, with enough money on hand, it reveals itself as a slight but consistently entertaining video game version of the most popular action flicks of the time. If you still question Final Fight’s importance, simply look at the dominance of the side-scrolling beat ’em up titles in Capcom’s arcade output for the years that followed—all the way to Battle Circuit in 1997. MKu See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Revenge of Shinobi Original release date : 1989 Platform : Mega Drive Developer : Sega Genre : Action The first outing for the Shinobi brand on the newly launched Sega Mega Drive platform following its popular appearance in arcades in 1987, Revenge of Shinobi wastes little time in slicing into the action. You play ninja master Joe Musashi on a quest to save his kidnapped fiancée, Naoko, and exact revenge on Neo Zeed, the criminal conglomerate responsible. Its agents populate the game’s eight environments liberally, only too keen to fall satisfyingly to your combat and shuriken-throwing skills, or witness, in awe, the devastating power of your ninjutsu magic. The hour may be serious, but along the way you can’t help but notice the graphical splendor as you run and somersault your way through the platform-based levels. An early example of 16-bit brilliance, the realization of the game’s environments is both lovingly detailed and effortlessly distinct, beginning with a Japanese forest and progressing through memorable US-based locations before finally ending at Neo Zeed’s marine stronghold. Good as the visuals are, both for the hardware and the period, one element that has barely dated is the control mechanic. It’s razor sharp, with Joe responding to every request in a consistently dependable manner while the apparent limitations of his offensive options—ninjutsu, attack, and jump —disappear without a trace upon play. The action runs at a blood-pumping pace, with end-of-level bosses punctuating your progress in reassuringly predictable fashion. Revenge of Shinobi didn’t revolutionize its genre—modern gamers will find little to surprise them here—but it does represent a finely honed example of its type, one that remains extremely capable in spite of two decades of breathtaking technological advancement. JDS See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Herzog Zwei Original release date : 1989 Platform : Mega Drive Developer : TechnoSoft Genre : Strategy In 1989, before the emergence of Command & Conquer, Warcraft, or even Dune II, Herzog Zwei quietly invented a genre. Developed by Japanese shooter specialist TechnoSoft, the game arrived from nowhere, established the template for some of the most successful titles of the next decade, and then retreated back into the shadows. The obscure name didn’t help the game’s profile (it’s a sequel to the equally inexplicably named MSX title, Herzog), but more than anything, it was authentically and counterproductively ahead of its time. Herzog Zwei is remarkable for birthing real-time strategy almost fully formed. Red and blue armies battle for domination on scrolling maps filled with bases (three per side, including the allimportant home base, and three neutral installations ripe for capture) by constructing and deploying a variety of fighting units. In contrast to later PC point-and-clickers, Herzog Zwei employs a central control unit to organize the battle, a transforming carrier jet for hauling regular units to their positions or back to base for repair, and it becomes a stand-up fighter robot on land. At first glance this gives the game a deceptive actionblaster bent. The transformer re-spawns once destroyed, and it’s tempting to rely on it as a central attacking force—something that no doubt confounded many players during Herzog Zwei’s poor initial reception. The groundbreaking truth of the game reveals itself slowly, a mix of strategy and resource management, in which players select not only units of differing costs and utilities but assign them tactical roles valued according to their complexities. Mix in variable terrain and a compelling splitscreen two-player mode, and you have the silent inception of a game play revolution. ND See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Pang Original release date : 1989 Platform : Various Developer : Mitchell Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
Developed by Mitchell (better known as the developer of Puzz Loop), there’s a strange quirk in Pang’s reputation as an essential video game. Its design is, in fact, identical to Cannon Ball, a 1983 Hudson Soft title for the Japanese MSX home computer format, right down to the distinctive twirling rope that follows the player’s harpoon shot. That means that Pang’s central conceit alone is not ultimately its distinction, though it remains remarkable that it is one of the few classic designs that has not been further aped. A combination of Galaxian and Asteroids— but featuring a pair of jolly, super-deformed heroes in safari suits, traveling across the world—play features a one-dimensional plane of movement (left and right across the bottom of the screen) as you fire harpoons into the sky in an attempt to destroy falling balloons (seemingly of extraterrestrial origin) that are in the process of attacking famous world landmarks. To add a little spice into the mix, the balloons divide each time they are shot, one large balloon able to crowd the sky with eight smaller offshoots—each of which bounces lower and lower—if shots are not carefully timed and managed. Pang’s success is that it is as polished and accessible as an arcade game has any right to be.
Featuring a bright, pleasant, and regularly interesting level design and play, in which failure is always the player’s fault—often from simply trying to destroy too many balloons too quickly. Pang really gets interesting when tackled in two-player mode. Like its spiritual predecessor Bubble Bobble, this is a game about working together—not just playing alone on the same screen—in order to succeed. It may well be inspired by an earlier title, but played with a friend, it comes into its own. MKu See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Populous Original release date : 1989 Platform : Various Developer : Bullfrog Productions Genre : Strategy
Populous, the ground-breaking sim that is literally about breaking ground, has a lot to say about God. It’s not easy being God, apparently. You’re hidebound by your followers, tied to their whims, and liable to run out of the juice you need to be truly godly if they get too heavily distracted or suddenly start dying. But it’s also a lot of fun: lowering and raising the ground, shaping your minions’ culture, and generally giving everybody a hard time. If there had been “God games” before Populous, Bullfrog’s offering made them all irrelevant. Reducing the Almighty’s influence to a floating pointer hovering over the landscape, Populous was the perfect deity for the Windows generation: God as multitasker, middle-manager, a being who monitors his manna levels and divides his holy wishes into discrete chunks. Much of the game suggested that a god’s primary role was as a landscape gardener, in fact, who put considerable effort into smoothing out the peaks and valleys of his green and pleasant land to give his followers somewhere to build settlements. It was a beautiful game for the time, too—real-time land deformation being an idea that has only recently come back into vogue as shooters like Red Faction Guerrilla and Battlefield: Bad Company
look for something snappy to mark them out from the crowd. But the game’s real legacy lies in the genre that grew up around it. Even before designer Peter Molyneux and his team threw genuine, if basic, morality into the mix with Black & White, the ideas developed in Populous were being tweaked and repurposed by a hundred other PC teams. Fittingly, given the subject matter, you may love or hate the results, but many would argue that the influence of Populous can be seen everywhere. CD See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Prince of Persia Original release date : 1989 Platform : Various Developer : Brøderbund Genre : Platform
Prince of Persia is an enigma. How could an unforgiving twitch platformer, one that arguably owed more to Mega Man than to Super Mario Bros., cast itself as a romantic adventure? And what is the Prince of Persia doing at the bottom of a Persian dungeon? Is a time limit a boon or a curse? And just how do you kill a skeleton? There’s no doubt that the visual presentation of Prince of Persia seems dated, but the style remains: this was an early example of motion-captured animation in games, demonstrating the personality that could be projected through a few simple frames. The game’s creator, Jordan Mechner, has since posted online the videos he took of his younger brother running, leaping, and falling to help bring life to his creation—a beguiling look behind the scenes that’s all the more astonishing for the fidelity of its realization in-game. The task is simple: escape the dungeon, stop the evil vizier, and save the girl. It’s a nearimpossible quest that few players succeed in, thanks not only to the precision required for the game’s most basic leaps and the learning curve for its daunting dueling system, but to the harsh time limit of one hour—always ticking, always unforgiving, nearly always ending the bravest of attempts.
And why do you keep on trying? Because in spite of the game’s mechanical difficulty, the prince is at once the perfect cipher and a vivid personality, his stumblings and dashes as much yours as his; the blank face and anonymous white clothing an invitation to identify that few players would turn down; his daunting quest rendered all the more poignant by his all-too-human feats of exertion. The barest of narrative outlines but a simplicity of purpose that speaks to the most jaded heart. RS See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Strider Original release date : 1989 Platform : Arcade Developer : Capcom Genre : Action
Not all of Capcom’s mascots were destined for long and lasting careers. Some, like Strider Hiryu, were so bound to the world of two-dimensional games that three dimensions simply couldn’t do them justice. A PlayStation game, a few cameos in all-star fighting games, and that was it—the legacy over. But like a self-destructive author or rock star, perhaps it’s better that way. Strider, certainly, is too brilliant and virile a specimen to age with any dignity. Able to hook onto walls and ceilings by mere touch, scaling them as quickly as if he were on foot, Strider—or Spider as he begs to be known—is a hard act to follow. In a memorable opening mission, he swoops from a robot glider, onto the rooftops of Kafazu (a fictionalized USSR), while bright yellow searchlights probe a starry sky. The year is 2048, and Mother Russia has evolved into quite a spectacle. Metal Cossack dwarves patrol giant mosques, intruders are left to fight posing superathletes, and the Soviet parliament can more than fend for itself—ministers somersaulting out of their chairs to form a kind of ouroboros; in this case, a giant steel millipede waving a hammer and sickle. In a level as wide as it is tall, action rarely moves in the direction you expect. So it continues through Siberia, the Amazon, and the skies, across flying fortresses and snow-
capped mountains, and finally up to the enemy stronghold: the Third Moon. The levels are works of art, the enemies are works of art, and so is Strider, flashing his sword in a great arc, sliding under traps and cartwheeling over bullets. To experience the game now, rather than Strider II (an unrelated European-made “sequel”), or even the decent Strider 2 for the PlayStation, look for Cannon Dancer, the spiritual follow-up by creator Kouichi Yotsui. DH See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Stunt Car Racer Original release date : 1989 Platform : Various Developer : MicroStyle Genre : Driving
An offbeat driving simulator, Stunt Car Racer is perhaps designer Geoff Crammond’s most beloved game. It followed 1986’s The Sentinel, his sole experiment away from realistic simulation. This is a racing car game with a difference. Players drive on elevated race courses that are more akin to large rollercoaster tracks, except that there are no rails to keep their cars attached and there are dangerous gaps that need to be cleared. But unlike in other games based on precarious racing conditions, falling off the track isn’t catastrophic, merely leading to lost time as a crane hoists the car back into place (although a succession of nasty falls, slams, and scrapes can eventually wreck your ride). Featuring eight varied tracks and a full league mode, the game presents a captivating challenge, with clean, bright graphics only marred by the functional design of the opponent cars, which are little more than boxes on blocky wheels. Crammond’s physics programming ensures that the car handling feels perfect, even when leaping over a hill at 230 mph, and the addition of a turbo-boost mechanic means that no race—even after a few spills—ever feels like a lost cause, remaining thrilling to the end.
Fast, fun, and endlessly playable, what keeps Stunt Car Racer in many gamers’ minds to this day was the surprise inclusion of the ability to link up two Amigas (or Atari STs). Those with the drive to lug a home computer (and associated TV) over to a pal’s house found probably the best two-player racing fun available until Super Mario Kart three years later. Even now it offers something special. Crammond planned a 2003 sequel, Stunt Car Racer Pro, which sadly never saw the light of day, depriving a new generation of gamers a unique experience. MKu See all games from the 1980s.
1980s
Wonderboy III: The Dragon’s Trap Original release date : 1989 Platform : Master System Developer : Sega Genre : Platform
Wonderboy was always thought of as the pudgy, oddly thuggish alternative to Link or Mario, a platforming—and sometimes light RPGing—cipher who struggled to cling to any sense of his own identity for too long. Surprisingly, however, Wonderboy III was a genuine milestone in video game design. A vast rolling epic of an adventure, players could explore the outer reaches of a genuinely enormous map more or less as they wished, without sensing too many invisible walls or artificial barriers along the way. It was a triumph, all the more astonishing given the generally weak titles that preceded it. For 1989, Wonderboy Ill’s scope was something of a revelation: a platforming game with the real depth and persistence of an RPG. Fall into the sea, and you’d end up on the seabed; soar into the sky, and you might find a doorway nestled in among the clouds. The sense of freedom and exploration on offer is almost unrivaled outside of the rarefied world of the masterful Zelda series. Wonderboy Ill carves up its world into areas that are only accessible once you’ve changed into the correct animal form. As part of the dragon’s curse for defeating him in the previous adventure,
Wonderboy has developed shapeshifting capabilities, and can now switch between lizard, lion, mouse, fish, and hawk incarnations, each one with its own set of unique skills. Played today, the game’s limitations and frustrations are a little more obvious: Wonderboy III is something of a slog, and its colorful fantasy worlds lack much in the way of character. That said, however, the sense of the future it promised is still there to be seen, each doorway promising to take you somewhere new, each wishing well beckoning you to plunge in and see what lays at the bottom. CD See all games from the 1980s.
1990s
• In 1991 Sonic The Hedghog increases the popularity of the Sega Mega Drive • Increasingly powerful computers and cheaper processors usher in 3-D graphics in video games • Real-time strategy games, such as 1992’s Dune II, develop into a major new genre of video games • Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), such as 1997’s Ultima Online, build international online communities • Critics name The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, released in 1998, as the highestrated video game of all time • Consoles, such as the Sega Dreamcast, include a built-in modem for online play
Contents The Secret of Monkey Island Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe ActRaiser Klax G-LOC: Air Battle (R-360) Pilotwings Out Zone Powermonger Eye of the Beholder Bomberman Dr. Mario Columns John Madden Football Super Mario Bros. 3 Rampait Raiden Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon Smash TV Snake Rattle ’n’Roll Super Tennis Loom Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge Super Mario World Another World Super Castlevania IV Civilization Cruise for a Corpse Hunter Tecmo Super Bowl
Mega Lo Mania Lemmings Star Trek: 25th Anniversary Sonic the Hedgehog The Legend of the Mystical Ninja The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past NHL Hockey Micro Machines Final Fantasy V Dragon Quest V Alone in the Dark Pinball Dreams Contra III: The Alien Wars Desert Strike: Return to the Gulf Cybernator Super Mario Kart Axelay Flashback Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis Mortal Kombat Sonic the Hedgehog 2 The Lost Vikings Virtua Racing The Incredible Machine Ultima VII Dune II Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting NBR Jam Myst Cannon Fodder Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle
Doom Gunstar Heroes Ecco the Dolphin Daytona USA Return to Zork Ridge Racer SimCity 2000 Syndicate Sam & Max Hit the Road UFO: Enemy Unknown Frontier: Elite II Plok Secret of Mana The Settlers The 7th Guest The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening Zombies Ate My Neighbors Virtua Fighter Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds Shadowrun Breath of Fire II Tekken EarthBound Doom II: Hell on Earth Earthworm Jim Final Fantasy VI Micro Machines 2: Turbo Tournament Tempest 2000 Little Big Adventure Gravity Power Monster Max
Point Blank Puzzle Bobble Sensible World of Soccer Samurai Shodown II Uniracers Sub-Terrania Super Punch-Out!! Super Metroid Beneath a Steel Sky Killer Instinct Theme Park King of Fighters ’94 Star Wars: TIE Fighter Worms Command & Conquer Alien Soldier Full Throttle BioForge MechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together Descent Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom Wipeout Virtua Cop 2 The Dig Yoshi’s Island Chrono Trigger The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis Return Fire Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery
Sega Rally Championship Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo Duke Nukem 3D Command & Conquer: Red Alert Civilization II Mario Kart 64 The Neverhood Guardian Heroes International Track & Field Nights Into Dreams GTI Club Rally Côte d’Azur Harvest Moon Marathon Infinity Quake Resident Evil Pilotwings 64 PaRappa the Rapper Time Crisis Saturn Bomberman Tomb Raider Metal Slug Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars Donkey Kong Country 3 Syndicate Wars The House of the Dead 2 Star Control 3 Super Mario 64 Wave Race 64 Wipeout 2097 Vectorman 2
Age of Empires Blade Runner Castlevania: Symphony of the Night Bushido Blade Final Furlong Blast Corps Beatmania DoDonPachi Intelligent Qube Einhänder Dungeon Keeper Final Fantasy Tactics Fallout Final Fantasy VII Diablo GoldenEye 007 Gran Turismo Star Wars: X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter The Curse of Monkey Island MDK Myth: The Fallen Lords Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II Star Fox 64 X-COM: Apocalypse Snake Tekken 3 The Last Express Grand Theft Auto Ultima Online Quake II Interstate ’76
Total Annihilation Shining Force III R-Type Delta Banjo-Kazooie Burning Rangers Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri 1080° Snowboarding Dance Dance Revolution Carmageddon II: Carpocalypse Now Cyber Troopers Virtual-On: Oratorio Tangram Body Harvest Xenogears Panzer Dragoon Saga F-Zero X Grand Prix Legends Radiant Silvergun Grim Fandango Half-Life Devil Dice Oddworld: Abe’s Exoddus Metal Gear Solid Street Fighter Alpha 3 Resident Evil 2 Sonic Adventure Wetrix Star Wars: Rogue Squadron Space Station Silicon Valley R4: Ridge Racer Type 4 StarCraft Thief: The Dark Project The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
Driver Sega Bass Fishing Aliens Versus Predator Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings Bangai-O Ape Escape Silhouette Mirage ChuChu Rocket Street Fighter III: Third Strike Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves Grand Theft Auto 2 Ferrari F355 Challenge Chrono Cross Silent Hill Freespace 2 Final Fantasy VIII Jet Force Gemini Front Mission 3 EverQuest Homeworld Mr. Driller SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters’ Clash Mario Golf Outcast Planescape: Torment Quake III Arena Rocket: Robot on Wheels Samba de Amigo Shenmue Seaman The Longest Journey
Space Channel 5 System Shock 2 Faselei! Threads of Fate ISS Pro Evolution Vib-Ribbon Team Fortress Classic The Typing of the Dead
1990s
The Secret of Monkey Island Original release date : 1990 Platform : Various Developer : LucasArts Genre : Adventure
One of the sadder truths about video games is that not many of them manage to be particularly funny—or, rather, not many of them manage to be intentionally funny. Whenever comedy in games is being discussed, however, one title always comes top of the list: The Secret of Monkey Island. LucasArts’s swashbuckling adventure game is repeatedly, elaborately, and inventively hilarious; a deviously plotted pirate romp with a twisty narrative, a memorable cast of idiots, and regular stabs from a rapier wit. It’s not just the best comedy game ever made—it’s the best by a couple of nautical miles. Guybrush Threepwood has come to Melee Island, somewhere in the Caribbean, to break into the pirating trade—a quest that will lead him to partake of the famous Three Trials, gather together a crew, buy his own boat, and discover the eponymous secret that lurks on mysterious Monkey Island. Along the way, he meets some vegetarian cannibals, tetchy local saucepot Governor Marley, and LeChuck, the terrifying ghost pirate with a love for the governor and a fatal weakness for root beer. From the insult-based swordfights to the asides poking fun at the limitations of computer games, The Secret of Monkey Island keeps the jokes coming thick and fast. More important than that,
perhaps, is the game’s sense of atmosphere. Few game worlds are as memorable as this, from the rickety boardwalks of Melee Island, trapped in a perpetual midnight, to the bubbling, lava-riddled underworlds of LeChuck’s hellish HQ. Many years after its release, Monkey Island’s status as a classic hasn’t dimmed the edge of its wit, and serviceable updates—featuring an option to play with the original graphics—can be found on Xbox Live Arcade, the PC, and even Apple’s iPhone. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe Original release date : 1990 Platform : Amiga Developer : The Bitmap Brothers Genre : Sports / Action
Less controversial for its subject matter than for its title, which is coincidentally the name of an illegal drug cocktail, Speedball was a collision of ice hockey, Australian rules football, and Rollerball, the fictional blood sport from the 1975 James Caan movie. Two heavily armored teams would literally fight over a steel ball, bouncing it off the walls of an enclosed field until someone tossed it into their opponents’ goal, often by hobbling the keeper. While the first game featured little else, most of its variety coming from half-time shop items, like bribing the officials, its sequel upped the game entirely. The year is 2105 and a new version of Speedball has risen from the ashes of the original, which has moved underground after descending into anarchy. The sport now occupies a gigantic colosseum hosting nine-person teams, with bumpers, rails, targets, and gates, like those of a pinball table. There’s even a kicker that electrifies the ball, making it untouchable to opposing players. A pointsbased scoring system means you can win without scoring a goal; high points are awarded for crippling players and forcing on substitutes. Into this arena steps the Brutal Deluxe, the worst team in history. Your team.
A grandstanding effort from all concerned, notably pixel artist Dan Malone and sound designer Richard Joseph, Speedball 2 forges an identity lacked by its predecessor. Its action is louder, faster, and even more violent, yet disciplined thanks to the Amiga’s favored one-button control scheme. Matches move in unpredictable ways because of the different scoring methods, not to mention randomly placed coins that come in handy on the transfer market. Often described as one of the greatest multiplayer games ever, and not without reason. DH See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
ActRaiser Original release date : 1990 Platform : SNES Developer : Square Genre : Action / Strategy
Sometimes a straightforward action game isn’t enough. And sometimes, to really get to the heart of the fun, you have to blend a simple adventure game with the tenets of a city building god sim. ActRaiser may not be as famous as Square’s other more traditional games, such as the successful and million copy-selling Final Fantasy series, but in its mixing of genres it ensures that there’s nothing else quite like it. Players are cast in the role of the Master and tasked with rebuilding an entire civilization by working through side-scrolling stages, lopping away at enemies with a sword and tackling bigger and bigger boss monsters. You also have to take a break now and then in order to switch to a top-down perspective, so you can convince tiny followers to build roads, houses, and other such important structures, and generally smarten the whole place up a bit. It’s tempting to see the game as God of War meets SimCity, but ActRaiser has a peculiar spirit all of its own, and one which, with its focus on deities and civilization, has landed the title in hot water with religious groups over the years. More of a curio than a smash hit, ActRaiser also confused as many players as it delighted. It’s easy to see why this occurred; as much fun as the whole thing is, the
mix of genres is not handled in the slickest of manners. That said, this particular muddle of distinctive game types must have had something magical to it. The sequel, which dropped the city building aspects, has little of the original’s charm and appeal. Whether ActRaiser’s the kind of thing that you’ll lap up or spit out is something you can discover with ease these days. You only need to spend a few moments downloading this strange and willful title through the Wii’s Virtual Console service to experience the game for yourself. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Klax Original release date : 1990 Platform : Various Developer : Atari Genre : Puzzle
A conveyor belt of dominoes tumbles toward the foreground, ripe for the picking by those willing to harbor the color-coded “klaxes” and rack up points by storing as many as possible. Klax is a cocktail of genre influences, closest in its one-hundred level, scroll-and-conquer structure to Space Invaders, but with an overall tempo that whiffs of a stern solution mixed from equal measures Connect Four and Columns. Klax’s stop-and-start momentum is a microcosm for the means of overall progression, with users able to skip levels in variables of five and ten—a neat ploy promoting replays and enticing gamblers and egotists into the fires of a delineated learning curve. The currency of Klax is the high score rivalry of classic arcade leader boards. Dissipated though it is in home versions across a variety of systems, the essence of its addictive mechanics remains intact all the way to Nintendo’s Game Boy and even to Microsoft’s Xbox (it is a part of new licensee Midway’s Treasures collection). Viewed as retro classicism, the block colors of the Commodore 64 era paint Klax’s backdrops as nostalgic portraits of artistic, indulgent reveries. The variety of the settings—from forests to the hands of God himself—are the hook for the game
play’s line and sinker. Such visual flamboyance is a symptom of the period but here plays a more important role, transfiguring the arcade cabinet into an ethereal kaleidoscope wherein the rigid rules of David Aker’s programming are instigated. Influential beyond its years, glimpses of Klax can be spied in everything from Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s Rez to Jeff Minter’s Space Giraffe. The psychedelic effects of depth of field—however illusionary—are a legacy the game can claim with pride. DV See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
G-LOC: Air Battle (R-360) Original release date : 1990 Platform : Arcade Developer : Sega Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
When the book comes to be written about contributions to the world of arcade gaming, one company’s achievements will stand above all others. Though it is known to many as the creator of countless console games, Sega has been committed to the coin-operated amusement market since the 1970s, and its innovations over the years are among the most notable in their field, from the spritescaling hardware that powered revolutionary 3-D games in the ’80s to the networked game centers populated by many thousands of dedicated players across Japan. And, though it has a lower profile than many of Sega’s famous productions, G-LOC: Air Battle deserves credit for its innovation—or at least it does in one incarnation. Like many arcade cabinets, G-LOC: Air Battle was manufactured in several different iterations in a bid to appeal to arcade owners with varying budgets, but it’s only the superdeluxe version of GLOC: Air Battle that earns a place within these pages. Designed by Yu Suzuki, the genius behind so many Sega hardware innovations (such as Hang-On’s full-sized motorcycle), the R-360 model of the game is the most ambitious coin-operated video game ever conceived, and, as a result, is closer to a fairground attraction than it is to its pixelated contemporaries.
Climb into the cabinet, carefully (and securely) strap yourself in, and prepare to be spun through the 360 degrees implied by the name. Other Sega machines tilt you left and right and spin you around; the R-360 version of G-LOC changes the rules completely, flipping and rotating you in accordance with your joystick inputs. Underneath it all is a limited update of the After Burner games, but when you’re having so much fun just trying to hold on to your breakfast, such concerns matter little. TB See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Pilotwings Original release date : 1990 Platform : SNES Developer : Nintendo Genre : Flight Simulator Dreamy and beautiful, serene and well-mannered, Pilotwings is the SNES launch title most likely to see you drifting off into a strange, damp-eyed reverie at the merest mention of its name. It wasn’t as colorful and perfectly poised as Super Mario World, and it didn’t have the huge monsters of the imported Ultraman brawler, but it was a genuinely different kind of experience. A game that, even two decades after its release, remains frustratingly hard to classify, and has a strange magic that is irritatingly difficult to explain. It’s not strictly a flight simulator, even though it’s almost exclusively a simulation of flight. Flight sims are engineers’ games, filled with dials and switches and vectors and difficult landing approaches to Chicago O’Hare with low visibility and a cloud bank moving in. While Pilotwings has all of these elements in its own way, it doesn’t feel like an engineer’s game, but rather a poet’s. A dash through the clouds, looking at the scenery—a wonderful, technically amazing introduction to flight that has been built for delight rather than precision. Whatever it is that makes this title special, there’s a lot of it to enjoy, with all manner of different challenges involving plenty of different planes. Rocket packs join more traditional aircraft on the runway, and there’s even a mode in which you drop out of the cockpit for a little target-based parachute jumping. Updated once for the N64, Pilotwings seems so perfect for the playful software lineup of the Wii that it’s hard to believe that there’s nothing in development over at Nintendo’s HQ. Whatever happens, we’ll still have Pilotwings on the SNES, a wonderful way to lose an afternoon or two, even if it’s still hard to decide exactly what type of game you’re really playing. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Out Zone Original release date : 1990 Platform : Arcade Developer : Toaplan Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
Though better known as the developer of Zero Wing, inspiration for the infamous “All Your Base” Internet meme, Toaplan was one of the great shoot-’em-up studios from the late 1980s until its bankruptcy in 1994, at which point it spawned further shooter genre specialists such as Cave (DonPachi) and Takumi (Giga Wing). Out Zone is one of Toaplan’s more unusual releases. Though it is a vertically scrolling shooter, with its eight-way directional shooting it has more in common with run-and-gun games, such as Commando and Ikari Warriors. However, players can pick up a three-way shot that locks their character’s view forward, changing the title into a more traditional shooter—albeit one in which the screen only scrolls if the player moves forward (players are driven onward by a constantly depleting energy bar refilled by collecting power-ups). This dual nature allows tactics to be switched while playing. Since the situation on the screen can change rapidly, it’s an important consideration and one that puts Out Zone well above its predecessors. Featuring Toaplan’s renowned graphical style—full of incidental details and brightly colored brushed metal that make otherwise mechanistic enemies and locations feel warmly organic—Out
Zone is a strikingly gorgeous experience, one that keeps you playing even in the face of its extreme difficulty. It features complex and mazelike levels that require careful maneuvering while simultaneously avoiding enemy attacks. Out Zone often rewards memorization more than raw skill, but a variety of Easter eggs (such as cameos from other Toaplan games) offer rewards. It is a superlative shooter, and its maker deserves a place in gaming history more for its work here than as the studio behind a particularly awkward piece of mistranslation. MKu See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Powermonger Original release date : 1990 Platform : Amiga Developer : Bullfrog Productions Genre : Strategy
Powermonger was both the spiritual and the technical successor to Bullfrog’s breakthrough title, Populous. It uses the same engine as Peter Molyneux’s original god game, but here to more earthly effect. Gone are the earthquakes, volcanoes, and terraforming, sacrificed for a more intimate experience that sees you conquering 195 lands by amassing and expanding an army led by captains you recruit by pillaging. And what a land. Molyneux may have been inspired to invent the god game genre by wreaking havoc on ants’ nests as a child, but here he and his team took care to make the world’s inhabitants seem human. They go about their daily lives as fishermen, farmers, and foresters oblivious to you, but you can click on them to discover their name, sex, age, allegiance, and even their hometown, a decade before The Sims popularized the convention. So engrossing was the world that it was easy to overlook some developer trickery. Like Populous, the three-dimensional terrain occupies only a limited portion of the screen, with the rest given over to the extensive user interface. The camera view features eight levels of zoom and can be rotated by ninety-degree turns, remarkable for the game’s era.
While you command troops and need to secure ongoing food supplies, it would be a stretch to say that Powermonger invented the real-time strategy genre, but in ordering your captains to march around the land securing villages, it’s another missing link. One lovely touch is that your orders to distant captains are delayed according to how far away they are by carrier pigeon. Powermonger, something of a forgotten classic and a pioneering title, even supported a twoplayer mode via a null cable. The path to Black & White begins here. OB See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Eye of the Beholder Original release date : 1990 Platform : PC Developer : Westwood Studios Genre : Role-playing
Dungeon Master got there first, but Eye of the Beholder was bona fide Dungeons & Dragons. Fresh from the success of its Gold Box games, publisher SSI commissioned Westwood Associates in a bid to emulate the immersive atmosphere and critical success of Dungeon Master. Taking the firstperson perspective of Dungeon Master, Eye of the Beholder applied it to the official Dungeons & Dragons rules and the Forgotten Realms campaign setting. Compared to the Gold Box games, the campaign in Eye of the Beholder is light on story, with just the flimsiest of yarns sketched out. The story begins in the seminal Forgotten Realms city of Waterdeep, where our party of four intrepid adventurers (generated from the official selection of statistics, races, and character classes) are hired to investigate some sewers, only to find themselves trapped by a landslide and forced to find an alternative way out. This shortfall in narrative was more than compensated for by the unprecedented levels of action that followed. Compared to the staid, statistic heavy, turn-based affairs of the Gold Box games, the Beholder series (or Black Box games) were characterized by frantic, real-time point-and-click combat that was perfectly suited to the game’s hack-and-slash, dungeon-looting adventure.
The ending might have been an anticlimax (later versions added an actual ending animation), but the authenticity of the Dungeons & Dragons rules, the Forgotten Realms setting, and the first-person perspective made the quest an epic one. It also paved the way for subsequent first-person Dungeons & Dragons games such as Dungeon Hack, Ravenloft: Strahd’s Possession, and Menzoberranzan, all equally interesting in very different ways, if not quite as excellent as Eye of the Beholder. DM See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Bomberman Original release date : 1990 Platform : PC Engine Developer : Hudson Genre : Action
With more than sixty titles under his belt, Bomberman still might not boast the recognition factor of Mario, but he’s come a long way, especially for a character with such inauspicious roots. Unlike most classics that have a foundation of originality or brilliance lurking at their core, the original was surprisingly bereft of genius at birth. Conceived back in 1983 as a simplistic Japanese MSX title and then ported to the ZX Spectrum as Eric and the Floaters, the game later found a home on the NES. But with fifty repetitive, find-theexit levels, and no multiplayer mode, it didn’t amount to much. In fact, without multiplayer, many would later argue this wasn’t really Bomberman at all. That would all change, however, in 1990 when the bright sparks at Hudson Soft and NEC collaborated on a multitap adaptor for the trailblazing PC Engine console. Plugging the peripheral into the console’s only joy pad socket allowed up to five players to compete, unleashing the game’s potential and generating a sense of steadily mounting panic and fun that the original title simply lacked.
Subsequent iterations of the series have grown ever more complex—some to their benefit, others not so much—so it’s refreshing to consider the simplicity of PC Engine Bomberman. Navigate labyrinth-like maps, drop bombs, take out your opponents, and try to be the last Bomberman standing. There are obstructions to be demolished and power-ups to be collected (such as speed-ups and the ability to kick bombs in the direction of opponents), but the rules were pretty simple back then. While Bomberman fans might squabble endlessly over which version offers the most engaging action, the simplicity and purity of the PC Engine original is where it all began. JB See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Dr. Mario Original release date : 1990 Platform : Various Developer : Nintendo Genre : Puzzle
In Nintendo’s rush to create a Tetris clone unencumbered by the legal disputes of the original, it seems nobody stopped to ask a few fundamental questions. For example, when did this world-saving plumber type find the time to acquire an MD? Perhaps the reason no one raised such pressing issues is that they were too busy playing Dr. Mario. Instead of the blank slate that begins most Tetris games, each level of Dr. Mario is contaminated with red, yellow, and blue viruses. Mario attacks them by way of double-sided capsules, each half colored either red, yellow, or blue. Stack like colors atop or next to one another to eliminate them; match four or more in a row and they disappear. One major difference between Dr. Mario’s capsules and Tetris’s tetrominoes is that the coins of Dr. Mario’s realm are much more maneuverable. The result is a greater focus on agility: if you want to succeed, you’d better master split-second reactions. For a Tetris knockoff, Dr. Mario is remarkably original. The game spawned a thriving branch of the falling block puzzle genre, and without it there might have been no Lumines and Bejeweled. JT
See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Columns Original release date : 1990 Platform : Various Developer : Sega Genre : Puzzle
While Columns bears all the hallmarks of a Tetris clone—the narrow well of the game’s playing field, the endless rain of falling blocks, and the fondness for abstract, arty backdrops—the final product actually works very differently. It relies on color matching, spatial awareness, and pattern rearrangement, and brings physics into play as unused tiles collapse to fill empty spaces. To Sega owners in the early 1990s this was their Tetris, and the good news is that it’s a decent game in its own right. It may have lacked the frosty austerity of Alexey Pajitnov’s masterpiece, but it had new features and managed to feel like a panicky, brightly colored kind of cerebral challenge. Match-three titles have a history all of their own and the basic mechanics remain a cornerstone of the puzzle world, but Columns will always be special, its sparkling game pieces serving as a living embodiment of the glitzy sheen Sega employed, while its somewhat unpredictable high score rushes keep players tapping away into the night. Columns ended up ported to just about everything, so you should have no real trouble tracking it down. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
John Madden Football Original release date : 1990 Platform : Mega Drive Developer : Park Place Productions Genre : Sports
Hustling a sport as complicated as American football into the limitations of a late-1980s 16-bit console may seem a daft idea, but that didn’t stop Electronic Arts. Admittedly, this wasn’t the first such representation of the sport, but the decision to display the action as though looking down from behind the quarterback position was a masterstroke. It enables a beautifully economic method of displaying the hundred-odd plays, while doubling up as a masterful triple “passing window” option that shows the various receivers once in play. The clean menu-driven system is a control method that has been tailored to incorporate just three buttons, and an attention to the core elements of US football that guarantees levels of depth that you don’t associate with the jerky yet undeniably charming visuals. An exciting facet of one of the most successful video game series of all time is the action that takes place on the field. Although clearly basic by today’s standards, the first Madden still plays a mean game of American football. It might be more of a history lesson nowadays, but it’s hardly a boring one. JDS
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1990s
Super Mario Bros. 3 Original release date : 1990 Platform : NES Developer : Nintendo Genre : Platform
After the strange dreamscapes of Super Mario Bros. 2, the third installment in Nintendo’s greatest series is a sprawling adventure. And this is one of the NES’s most ambitious games, a beautiful nonlinear platformer in which you’re often given a choice of which levels to explore next. It’s full of surprise power-ups, too, from the frog suit, which allows Mario to leap farther than ever and swim smoothly underwater, to the racoon suit, which allows for a nifty tail attack and a short burst of flight. Even when it isn’t doling out unexpected treats, the game bends its own rules, sending you off on levels that scroll up and down as well as left and right, and chucking in gigantic enemies like the hideous gulping fish. If you survive, you’ll be rewarded with one of the most menacing final acts of any Mario game before or since. Facing off against Bowser’s entire family before taking the fight to the big man himself, this is a colorful journey where a new idea lurks around each corner, and the perfect 8-bit primer for the series’ staggering leap into the 16-bit age with Super Mario World. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Rampait Original release date : 1990 Platform : Arcade Developer : Atari Genre : Strategy “Ready! Aim! Fire!” Three words that lie at the heart of so many video games, but delivered by a speech sample before battle in Rampart in such a way that for a moment you feel like you can detect the whiff of gunpowder in your nostrils. This is a game centered on the old-fashioned method of blowing things up—with cannonballs. Rampart’s setting isn’t the thing for which it’ll be remembered, however, because it is a delicious and inspired fusion of Tetris and strategy war gaming. In single-player mode you first pick a castle, and then place cannons beside it. Then the game advances into its attack phase, and you move your crosshairs over the approaching ships, attempting to rain enough blows upon them to ensure that they don’t make it ashore. All the while, they’re returning fire, knocking holes in the walls of your battlements, and it’s only when the round is over that you realize how much work is to be done. It’s here that the Tetris element comes into play as you’re given a succession of randomly selected blocks of different shapes and sizes with which to patch up your compound, and even expand farther to encapsulate other castles and increase your presence on the battlefield—if you’re quick enough. More castles equals more cannons to play with, after all. Rampart is a game of juggling. Do you focus on shoring up what you have in order to consolidate your position or do you instead go for territory, running the risk of not completing a boundary around your position, thus losing it? A fine diversion for one, it comes into its own with (up to three) multiple players, its mix of controlled aggression and fast-moving defensive tactics making it a unique and addictive strategy game. Though it has been ported to many home formats, the trackball-driven original is the definitive iteration. TB See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Raiden Original release date : 1990 Platform : Arcade Developer : Seibu Kaihatsu Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
Shoot ’em ups have always had a problem with identity. As a genre in which games rarely have more plot than casting the player as the one remaining spaceship against an invading fleet, it becomes hard to distinguish them for anything but their mechanics. Perhaps the reason vertically scrolling shooters have in recent times resorted to more and more extreme bullet hell trials. Raiden, produced in 1990 by Seibu Kaihatsu, a Japanese developer unknown other than for creating the series, does not distinguish itself with its wafer-thin plot. Nor does it distinguish itself by its graphics, which are clean, functional, and attractive, but hardly remarkable even when compared to its contemporary competition. When taken as a straightforward challenge to get to the end, it can be assumed to be the same as any pocket-change devouring title from the arcades in the early 1990s. However, for players who are willing to put the effort in, Raiden offers a lot. While Raiden is difficult, it is a perfectly balanced difficulty. Never needing to shower the screen with bullets, it’s a glorious treat for high score chasers since it doesn’t rely on the complex mechanics of the shooters that followed; no bullet shaving or careful combo management here. Instead it simply required that it be played well and cleverly, with bonus points to be found in hidden medals and by avoiding the use
of bombs. Any risks the player needs to take are amply rewarded, and though the title features a small number of weapon power-ups, they are among the most satisfying in shooter history. So perhaps Raiden doesn’t obviously distinguish itself in the long list of arcade shoot ’em ups for its graphics, its background story, or its mechanics. However, its design is a masterpiece, a thoughtfully balanced experience for the discerning player. MKu See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon Original release date : 1990 Platform : Various Developer : Microprose Software Genre : Management Simulation
Popular since the “carpet railways” that followed the rise of steam engines in the mid-nineteenth century, model railways are an enduring pastime for railroad enthusiasts, but since legendary game designer Sid Meier published Railroad Tycoon, you have to wonder why. While this 1990 title is graphically basic, even for the time (and admittedly a fetishistic level of detail is a requirement for the average model railway builder), the game provides something no model railway could—a well-designed representation of the competition between companies in the early days of the railroad. Like Sid Meier’s other famous designs (most notably Civilization), Railroad Tycoon doesn’t restrict the player to a certain scenario. Instead, you are able to choose your individual difficulty level and location, including the United States, England and Wales, and continental Europe. Via the process of carefully laying your tracks and stations to maximize your profit (paying attention to the rule of supply and demand) and the buying and selling of stock, Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon offers a light take on the reality of running a business, but it’s continually captivating without ever overwhelming the player.
Though the title suffers from a highly dated interface, even those with no interest in the rise of locomotion can quickly find themselves playing the role of a railroad tycoon with aplomb. Perfectionists can work on improving their stations while those looking for glory can attempt to have the fastest trains going the farthest distances first. The ultimate pleasure of the game is in building a successful rail network, perhaps crushing opposing companies in the process, and then simply watching your own model railway work with clockwork precision. MKu See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Smash TV Original release date : 1990 Platform : Arcade Developer : Williams Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
For a game with a single, simple premise—kill everything on-screen—Smash TV’s components can be evaluated in a surprising number of ways. You can, for instance, ponder the satirical message in a setting that presents a futuristic game show in which contestants are locked in a sequence of studios and asked to win their freedom by blasting whatever enters each room. You can discuss the game’s flippant attitude toward its presentation of violence, which shocked a not-inconsiderable number of parents upon release (how times change). And you can certainly consider Smash TV’s astonishing ability to directly target a primal, kill-or-be-killed mentality at the heart of any player. Or you could grab the controls to shoot first and ask those questions later. Shooting is all you need to know about Smash TV. You’re either on your own, picking up power-ups and weapons to gun down your foes, or you bring a friend along for the ride. In either scenario you’re guaranteed a brutal orgy of frantic, merciless killing. As the levels progress, so does the massacre, and it doesn’t take long for the screen to be drowning in enemies, with you following the momentary path carved by your bullets while desperately hoping for a respite in the assault. This only really comes once you reach the end or—
more likely, considering the game’s level of difficulty—run out of lives. Both outcomes matter little because you will find yourself returning to Smash TV purely for a dose of nonstop, fully focused fun. Sure, the sprite-based aesthetic hasn’t so much lost its charm— because it never really possessed any—as aged considerably, but you’ll have to search long and hard to find as addictive and rewarding a game mechanic these days. JDS See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Snake Rattle ’n’Roll Original release date : 1990 Platform : Various Developer : Rare Genre : Platform
In 1954, Atlantic Records’s first president, Herb Abramson, told rhythm-and-blues musician Jesse Stone to write a song for blues shouter Big Joe Turner. One of Rolling Stone’s 500 greatest songs of all time, “Shake, Rattle and Roll” was a hit whose fiery facade overlaid a highly sexual anthem about a man who has “been holdin’ it in, way down underneath.” It’s hard to say where that song’s lurid nature plays into this title. Perhaps it’s the snakes. There are two of them, Rattle and Roll, and they have to eat Nibbley Pibbleys to make themselves grow longer. Okay, so there’s nothing sexual about Snake Rattle ’n’ Roll. It’s pitched somewhere between Marble Madness and Q*Bert as you navigate a checkered, multilayered game environment, dodging bad guys and collecting power-ups. But there is a touch of the blues: The game’s composer, David Wise, would later do the thumping percussion of Donkey Kong Country, and in this game it’s Wise’s ragtime riffs that give some musical bombast to an otherwise anodyne game. Nowadays, Rare may be most famous for its original properties such as Banjo-Kazooie, Killer Instinct, and Perfect Dark, but the late ’80s were not always kind to the UK studio, its output from the period including lackluster licensed titles such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Double Dare.
Snake Rattle ’’n’ Roll was one of the few original titles produced during the period and a sign of the off-kilter perspective the company would later bring to the Nintendo 64, on which it enjoyed some of its biggest successes. Just a year later the studio created one of most memorable, strangest, and trickiest games of the period in the form of Battletoads, but Snake Rattle ’n’ Roll is the more innovative title. JBW See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Super Tennis Original release date : 1991 Platform : SNES Developer : Tokyo Shoseki Genre : Sports
The best tennis game ever? A contestable claim now, perhaps, but back in 1991, at a time when the competition was considerably more straightforward, it’s a statement that couldn’t be easily challenged—even if things had obviously moved on since Pong. Mirroring the simplicity of the era, Super Tennis is magnificently pure, brilliantly simple. You get to choose between singles, doubles, or circuit play (in which one player goes through tournaments with the aim of climbing up the world rankings), then you select one of the twenty charming, caricatured players, each offering different attributes, and finally you select the court to play on (clay, grass, or hard). In play, it’s the precision of the control method that most impresses, with players responding beautifully to directional input while the button-based moves allow for as comprehensive range of shots as even the most demanding of digital tennis players will require. Add in an opponent (or partner) and the full pace of the action reveals itself, with remarkable, titanic rallies serving up one of the best two-player console experiences to be had, regardless of the system. Where progress has taken its toll is most evident in some of the game’s technological merits (the SNES’s Mode 7 has long lost its ability to inspire awe, for instance), but it’s not affected the game’s
mechanics. If it no longer is the best tennis game ever made, it unquestionably prepared the court for the fine releases that followed. If you were to put it up against them now, Super Tennis certainly still has the ability to take a couple of sets, pushing things to a long-fought, very close tie. As such, it should be no surprise that, despite its age, it remains an immensely playable and addictive example of the genre. JDS See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Loom Original release date : 1991 Platform : Various Developer : LucasArts Genre : Adventure
Loom is the LucasArts adventure that slipped through the cracks. It was the esoteric, rather serious fantasy title that didn’t have crowd-pleasing comedy elements like insult swordfights, tabloid reporters, or talking meteorites. In fact, it was all pretty calm and cerebral: a haunting tale of another world, told in a way that made it both more imaginative and more unwieldy than its famous siblings. It doesn’t even have the SCUMM engine’s most distinctive feature, the verb list that traditionally dominates the bottom half of the screen. Loom presents its players with a musical stave before sending them off on an epic quest as Bobbin Threadbare—amazingly not a name selected for its comedic potential—in a struggle to save his whimsical fantasyland from an unknown shadowy menace. That’s where the stave comes in. Most actions in Loom are achieved by playing simple pieces of music, each with their own power to affect the game world, instead of piecing together object-oriented sentences for the on-screen avatar to then enact as with other LucasArts titles. The system is not entirely dissimilar to that which Nintendo would employ in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, but it’s far more complex in Loom, and rather than provide a rhythmic
backup to a standard adventure control scheme, it pretty much replaces it wholesale. A fascinating experiment, Loom may be more famous for its sales pitch inserted into the opening bar scene of The Secret of Monkey Island, but it’s well worth tracking down in its own right. While it’s almost inevitable that all of LucasArts’s back catalog will one day make its way to the iPhone in some legitimate sense, the best means of playing this today is by downloading it via Steam. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge Original release date : 1991 Platform : Various Developer : LucasArts Genre : Adventure
Although the first three Monkey Island games—boy, did the series lurch downhill after that— hardly represent your typical blockbuster trilogy, this second installment conforms to the “darker second act” pattern of series, like Star Wars, The Matrix, and Indiana Jones. Washed up in yet another rickety pirate burg, Guybrush Threepwood, still not quite the mighty pirate he wants to be, is off in search of the treasure of Big Whoop. It’s a journey that will take him across a delightfully broad sweep of buccaneering clichés, solving devious puzzles and meeting quirky eccentrics along the way, including his very own parents. Inevitably, Guybrush has done what every lonely, insecure male does at a certain age: He’s grown a beard, making him look a little like Kenneth Branagh, and it’s a good match for the slightly more adult tone of this second adventure. The voodoo elements are dialed up for some gentle comic horror and the puzzles grow in intricacy; with one example involving a telescope and a picture of a parrot requiring some prolonged effort and rumination, while others—getting a bucket from a man whom, it turns out, doesn’t actually own it in the first place—simply revel in the series’ delightful tendency toward elaborate wordplay. Using beautiful hand drawn artwork for the backdrops and featuring some of the best animation in
any adventure game of the era, LeChuck’s Revenge is a fascinating and sneaky puzzle game. It may not have the memorable challenges and classic structure of the first installment, or the rubbery cartoon exuberance of the third, but it’s another winner all the same. It’s yet more proof that if you want something done properly, don’t get anyone named Guybrush Threepwood to do it for you. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Super Mario World Original release date : 1991 Platform : SNES Developer : Nintendo Genre : Platform
If there are cigars and then there are Montecristo cigars, you could argue that there are twodimensional platformers and then there’s Super Mario World: a decoction of everything Nintendo’s brightest stars had learned or invented in the world of 8-bit consoles, transformed for the increased scope of the 16-bit world. With the Sega Mega Drive starting the next generation console race early, Nintendo found itself on the back foot, and its heavily hyped SNES needed an absolute belter of a launch title to show that it was still the company to beat. Super Mario World was on hand to fulfill all expectations. It was a beautiful redesign of the Mario universe with gigantic sprites, hundreds of enemies, new backgrounds, superb bosses that utilized the console’s Mode 7 graphical effects, and a suite of new power-ups. One of these, Yoshi the dinosaur, popped out of a colorful egg early on in the game and would become both a staunch ally, a weapon, and a killer ride in the process. With Mario’s cape allowing him to take to the skies, the stage was set for one of platforming’s most vivid and expansive adventures ever, delivering a wealth of different continents riddled with myriad memorable secrets. Finding yourself on the spectral Star World for the first time is an
enthralling experience, while the addition of stages with more than one exit, each leading to different lands, builds on the nonlinear breakthroughs of Super Mario 3. With the series’ best music and most of its greatest single levels, everything that has happened since—even the glorious madness of Super Mario 64—can occasionally feel like a step backward. Mario had always been a wonderful adventurer’s companion, but this was never going to be an easy act to follow. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Another World Original release date : 1991 Platform : Various Developer : Delphine Software Genre : Platform
Another World is one of the great 16-bit video games, wildly experimental and a feast for the senses. Having worked as an artist and animator on point-and-click adventure Future Wars, creator Eric Chahi became captivated by Dragon’s Lair—specifically, its port to the Commodore Amiga. Visuals made possible by LaserDisc were being faithfully reproduced on floppy, albeit at the cost of huge memory consumption. Believing he could avoid that pitfall by using vector lines, Chahi imagined a science fiction game that fell somewhere between two of his favorites: Karateka (the first game by Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner) and Impossible Mission. In a process he describes as “educational improvization,” he spent two years fulfilling his vision. An intensely cinematic game which features no dialogue or in-game text, Another World is beautifully established by its intro, which Chahi completed without any real idea of how the game should actually play. On a stormy night, physicist Lester Knight Chaykin arrives at his underground laboratory, the heart of which is a giant particle accelerator. He passes a routine full-body scan, sits himself down at the computer, and sets his experiment in motion. These details are important, because never had a game portrayed its story with such evocative full-screen animation. As the particles begin to collide, a bolt
of lightning strikes the lab, causing an accident that sends Lester to a barren alien world full of strange and dangerous creatures. Lester is abducted and most of the game charts his escape. With surprisingly varied action, involving perilous jumps and a multifunction firearm, Another World is inventive at every turn. More important, though, its art and animation get more enchanting with time. DH See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Super Castlevania IV Original release date : 1991 Platform : SNES Developer : Konami Genre : Platform / Action The specter of Count Dracula looms over every Castlevania title, but the best games in the series understand that we’re really there to visit his house. When Castlevania games fail, as in threedimensional installments like Curse of Darkness, it’s because Dracula lives in a boring old stone castle. In better installments, Castle Dracula is itself the enemy, a terrifying and disorienting house of horrors that only stout men of courage dare to enter. Super Castlevania IV, one of the series’ stone cold classics, is quite brilliant. Its most indelible sight is the vertigo-inducing spinning hallway, in which Simon Belmont hops from one free floating block to another while the castle’s cylindrical walls rotate around him at a dizzying speed. The visuals come at a cost, however, as the Super Nintendo hardware strains to keep up, and when an enemy appears on-screen, the action slows to a crawl. But the stakes are clear: In this castle, nowhere is safe for you to venture. Other areas are less flashy, but equally as diabolical, from a muddy underground cave with falling stalactites to a sprawling clock tower with gnashing gears that can help or hinder Simon. Super Castlevania IV is a buffed-up version of previous games. Its linear levels are marked with ghoulish big and mini bosses that are a who’s who of classic movie monsters. Simon can now crack his whip in eight directions, which is helpful against the series’ most vexing recurring foes, the disembodied Medusa heads that travel along the trajectory of a sine wave and are way too good at knocking Simon into pits. There are power-ups that strengthen and lengthen the whip. After this game, Super Castlevania IV was due for a shake-up, which came in the form of Symphony of the Night. But it’s not to say that Super Castlevania IV is stale, only that Konami could never top it. MK See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Civilization Original release date : 1991 Platform : PC Developer : Microprose Software Genre : Strategy
Want to make a PC gamer of a certain vintage cry? Whisper “Civilization” in his or her ear. There are any number of reasons why the tears might flow, but it’s likely because more sleep, weekends, jobs, and relationships have probably been lost to Civilization than any other game. This seminal strategy experience is vast. Beginning with just a settler wandering a hostile world 4,000 years before Christ, you found first a city and, through your choices, a civilization capable of defeating all its rivals or of sending a spaceship to distant Alpha Centauri. Blocking your path is terra incognito, barbarians, and rival civilizations, and the tools at your disposal run the gamut from trade and diplomacy to all-out hostilities. You decide what civilization you’ll play, choosing from the Mongols, the Romans, and other past and present contenders for the title of global superpower. Your choice affects trivial matters such as the names of your cities or the colors of your forces: Civilization’s genius is that this decision does not determine the paths your people follow. The technology tree does that; a brilliantly conceived flowchart of human progress that has been
copied by most strategy games in Civilization’s wake. By researching, for instance, the wheel, you can unlock further related technologies, such as transport or vehicular combat units. Few areas of human endeavor are ignored, but since you can only research one thing at a time, your civilization is shaped by the order of the choices you make. With day-to-day tasks ranging from war to farming to transport planning to developing the Wonders of the World, the demands on the player are immense. What’s incredible, then, is how the game manages to make time disappear as you play. If you’ve a fortnight to kill, then set it aside to play Civilization. OB See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Cruise for a Corpse Original release date : 1991 Platform : Various Developer : Delphine Software Genre : Adventure
The French development community was in its element on the Commodore Amiga, and few companies were keener than Delphine. Despite being keen to adventure beyond the point-and-click title, this Paris outfit went on to create a trilogy of such games that ended with its distinctive but flawed seafaring title Cruise for a Corpse. Powered by the second evolution of Delphine’s Cinématique engine, it follows the exploits of Inspector Raoul Dusentier, a guest aboard a 1920s cruise ship who becomes embroiled in a murder investigation. His host has been killed and each of his fellow guests has a potential motive. So, in the finest tradition of Agatha Christie, he has to learn their stories and test their alibis. Cruise for a Corpse’s clock advances as you stumble upon items and conversations, few of which you’ll find through obvious signposting or logical deduction, but never mind … The game is known for an interface that traded a verbal parser system for a contextual cursor, and for its early use of vector technology. The climax, meanwhile, is one of the best early displays of polygon-based game graphics. DH
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1990s
Hunter Original release date : 1991 Platform : Amiga, ST Developer : Activision Genre : Action / Adventure
Paul Holmes’s game was generations ahead of its time, and is rightly considered the granddaddy of the increasingly fashionable sandbox genre. Taking place on a series of islands occupied by a dictator, the player is cast as the eponymous hunter, a behind-the-lines espionage expert with nothing but his wits, and whatever can be commandeered, to rely on. Bicycles, jeeps, trucks, boats, helicopters and even a wind-surfing board can be appropriated and used against the enemy. The buildings dotted around the islands can all be entered, and often yield items of value (as well as the occasional washing machine mid spin cycle), while larger hangars might conceal a tank with which to wreak havoc. Destroyed landmarks remain that way, providing a possible tactical advantage later on; enemy uniforms can be stolen and worn; and the local residents will often give up useful information if bribed. The game provides a story, and even missions, but the real joy here is using your own tactics, improvising on the fly; and knowing that your experience is distinct from other players’. BM See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Tecmo Super Bowl Original release date : 1991 Platform : NES Developer : Tecmo Genre : Sports
For a small, dedicated subculture of fanatics, video game American football begins and ends with Tecmo Super Bowl. Boasting a full complement of twenty-eight NFL teams and a customizable playbook, Tecmo Super Bowl was a revelatory upgrade of the crude gridiron simulators that preceded it. Yet the game play was still simple enough to allow a casual football fan to catch on after a few minutes. Thanks to a fast pace, it’s possible to play four quarters of football in about twenty minutes and, given the game’s ability to simulate an entire pro season, the allure of a marathon session is strong. Before every down, both players secretly choose from a menu of eight plays—four runs, four passes —furtively cupping their hands over their controllers to keep the other guy from peeking. The one aspect of football that Tecmo Super Bowl captures perfectly is gamesmanship. The action on the field may not be realistic but the psychological warfare is spot-on. That’s why loyal communities continue to play Tecmo Super Bowl online, hacking the original cartridge data each year to reflect present-day NFL rosters. JT
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1990s
Mega Lo Mania Original release date : 1991 Platform : Various Developer : Sensible Software Genre : Strategy
The birthplace of Sensible Software’s famous “little people” graphic style, Mega Lo Mania is a surprisingly reserved title from the otherwise madcap developer. A real-time strategy, or god, game in the vein of Populous, Mega Lo Mania allows the player to select one of four deity-type figures and battle against other gods for control of twenty-eight islands across ten epochs of time. Technologies range from rocks and sticks to flying saucers and laser turrets. Though the player is unable to control units directly, Mega Lo Mania’s play is cleverly nuanced and highly strategic. With a clear and succinct design, bolstered by a streamlined and intuitive interface, Mega Lo Mania is still playable in a way that many other real-time strategy titles fail to be, making it unfortunate that the game’s planned sequel, Mega Lo Mania II, never saw the light of day. Though it’s never likely to be visited again (Sensible Software was absorbed by Codemasters in 1999), Mega Lo Mania is an intriguing dead end in the god game genre that deserves to be played by both fans of Sensible Software and real-time strategy games. MKu See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Lemmings Original release date : 1991 Platform : Various Developer : DMA Design Genre : Puzzle
Few games other than Tetris can claim to have appeared on as many formats as this historic action puzzler. Dave Jones, the founder of DMA Design, claims to have lost count at twenty, and that was before the numerous PlayStation and mobile iterations were added to the list. Famously, the idea was conceived almost by accident, when artist Mike Dailly was experimenting with the animation of tiny characters in an 8 x 8 pixel grid. Programmer Russell Kay saw the results and pronounced: “There’s a game in that.” And there certainly was. At first glance, perhaps, Lemmings looks like a standard late-1980s platformer, its sparse yet neat visual style presenting teeny, teeming sprites. But it is, in fact, a masterpiece of sandbox design, allowing players endless ways to complete each level. Over a vast series of levels, the player must guide a set number of tiny lemming characters from the entrance to the exit, avoiding hazards such as lava pools and large falls. Instead of directly controlling the critters, however, there is a range of eight skills that can be designated to individuals via a point-and-click interface. The builder skill, for example, allows a lemming to construct a staircase across a chasm, while
bashers, miners, and diggers all create differently angled holes in platforms to create new routes. It is up to the player to decide how the available skills should be used to solve each level. Press coverage at the launch was very enthusiastic, and 55,000 copies flew from shop shelves on day one (impressive at the time). The ensuing conveyor belt of sequels and conversions led to subsequent sales of more than fifteen million units. Alongside contemporaries such as Worms and Populous, it’s a defining work in the British game design canon. KS See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Star Trek: 25th Anniversary Original release date : 1991 Platform : PC Developer : Interplay Genre : Action / Adventure
Here’s a made up but patently true statistic: Eight out of ten Star Trek fans prefer the formularized soap of The Next Generation to Captain Kirk planting kisses and cardboard rocks on badly costumed aliens. Shame on them, really, and the hardware dominated video games they inspired—all firstperson shooters and space combat sims. Not even 2009’s hormonally charged movie reboot has rekindled interest in the original series, leaving a pair of outdated point-and-click affairs, 25th Anniversary and Judgment Rites, as the finest Trek games to date. One of the first games released as a CD-ROM “talkie,” 25th Anniversary arrived at just the right time to feature the voices of William Shatner (Kirk), Leonard Nimoy (Spock), and the late DeForest Kelley (McCoy). Gaudier than even a Blu-ray version of the show’s velour jumpsuits, it’s hard to imagine a broader use of 256-color VGA graphics. Faithful from the start, it divides its time between the captain’s chair and away missions, even finding room for disposable cadets and their fateful red uniforms. Split into seven clearly defined episodes, it toyed with TV conventions long before Alone in the Dark.
Celebrity voice-overs are often hit or miss affairs. The good: Ghostbusters, Heavenly Sword, and later the Grand Theft Auto franchise; the bad: Connery in From Russia With Love and Eliza Dushku in Wet; and the ugly: Henry Rollins in Mace Griffin: Bounty Hunter. But the crew of the Enterprise clearly relish their return to duty, restoring the chemistry the game can’t put on-screen. The script strikes just the right balance of jeopardy, comedy, and diplomatic hand wringing that makes up for an awkward interface. 25th Anniversary is a giddy delight for fans, not to mention anyone tired of gaming’s trend toward sobriety. DH See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Sonic the Hedgehog Original release date : 1991 Platform : Mega Drive Developer : Sega Genre : Platform
It’s easy to write off good old Sonic as Sega’s simple response to Mario—fast where the tubby plumber is plodding, filled with impatient attitude where Nintendo’s mascot is cheerily serene—but Yuji Naka’s original design has since proved to be something of a classic. Spiky and blue and decked out in a snappy pair of running shoes, Sonic is a legitimate video game behemoth in his own right, powering through the famous checkerboard hills of the Green Zone without a care in the world. He has become something of a video game icon. Even now, the speed can be astonishing at times. All Sonic needs is a gentle nudge and he’s off, disappearing into the far edge of the screen, and momentarily out of sight, as he bounces through elaborate levels that have more than a little in common with pinball tables. One level, in fact, even appears to have been built inside an actual pinball table, and it’s telling that Sonic feels entirely natural pinging off buffers and disappearing down metal tubes only to pop out somewhere else a millisecond later. When the action slows down, as in the more thoughtful Marble Zone, with its deadly pools of lava
and gentle block puzzles, or in the watery mires of the crystalline Labyrinth Zone, things inevitably begin to drag somewhat. However, a suite of hidden features, plus excellent boss battles, and some irritatingly catchy theme music more than make up for any slow spots in the game. In fact, Sonic has never been better than he is here, right back at the beginning of it all, before his charmless family and friends began to intrude and the advent of 3-D gaming knocked the confidence out of him. Play Sonic the Hedgehog today on Xbox Live Arcade, or in dozens of different collection sets, to get a real taste of yesterday’s idea of the future. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
The Legend of the Mystical Ninja Original release date : 1991 Platform : SNES Developer : Konami Genre : Action / Adventure
A series with a long and varied history in Japan, The Legend of the Mystical Ninja remains a strange rarity in the West. It’s a beautiful and funny action/adventure game that emerged with the birth of the SNES and remains a shining example of everything the 16-bit era promised, and eventually delivered upon. The Legend of the Mystical Ninja is a two-player cooperative title that incorporates platforming, fighting, and exploring elements that deliver a truly entertaining gaming experience. Each stage is broken down into a series of different events. The first is a town exploration mode that is usually followed by a platform adventure section. However, variations abound with lavish bosses intruding into the environments and certain levels performing almost like piggyback vehicle speed runs. Weapons and moves are also brushed up generously throughout the riotous course of the tumbling adventure. At the time of its release the sheer number of activities that players could engage in was quietly astonishing. Putting your head through funny statues served little game play value, but made the world feel richer and more interactive. Touches like these are what make a game so much more memorable.
Even the music is among the best on the console, a series of lilting, Eastern-flavored tunes that will stick in the memory long after the ageing cartridge has been consigned to the attic. The Legend of the Mystical Ninja is a great game for those enjoyable moments when gamers reminisce about the good old days of video gaming. The Legend of the Mystical Ninja is vivid, silly, and great two-player fun. And, of course, if you really enjoy it, there’s always eBay as a means of tracking down the rest of the series. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past Original release date : 1991 Platform : SNES Developer : Nintendo Genre : Action / Adventure
The reason the SNES has such a towering reputation among gamers—even those who were too young to have bought one originally—is because Nintendo’s most treasured franchises all received updates that count among their respective series’ best. Mario was arguably never greater than he was i n Super Mario World, Samus Aran never beat Super Metroid for either style or substance, and A Link to the Past remains one of the most complex and confidently constructed Zelda games of all time. Awoken in the middle of the night, young Link makes the perilous journey to Hyrule Castle, where he witnesses a staggering cataclysm that threatens to reopen an ancient door between two worlds. The boyish hero finds his homeland shattered into two separate dimensions: a light world—where the grass is green, trees are cute little bulbs of leaves, and the villages are neat and tidy—and a darker world, made from deserts and gnarled clumps of rock, where hideous malformed monsters trample the earth, and the smart little royal castle has been replaced by an ominous-looking pyramid. These two realities fit together like clockwork, the game’s best puzzles relying on a manipulation of both environments to progress. A Link to the Past is filled with simple genius: complex dungeons
that are a high watermark for the series, dazzling bosses, and a superb lineup of useful gadgets. From the world-shattering eruptions of the main plot to the sleepy discovery of the traveler camped beneath a bridge, A Link to the Past has so many moods, and so many brilliant ideas, that it’s almost impossible to beat. Ocarina of Time, the long-awaited sequel, would just about manage that feat, but it remains a very close call. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
NHL Hockey Original release date : 1991 Platform : Mega Drive Developer : Park Place Productions Genre : Sports For most essential sports games, the defining factor that makes them so interesting is simply that they were first, or best, at representing their chosen sport in the video game format. Not so for Electronic Arts’s 1991 entry into the otherwise underrepresented ice hockey genre. What sets NHL Hockey apart from its peers is a perfect implementation of a feature that would come to dominate the multiplayer sports game experience for the fiercely competitive player—the instant replay. No game has made the instant replay as integral and as exciting. Scoring a goal in ice hockey is a challenge. With a crowded rink and large goal keepers, each goal—followed by that iconic siren—is a thrill that you want to experience again and again. You only have to watch one of the most famous scenes of the 1996 independent film classic, Swingers, to observe the power of NHL Hockey’s instant replay on the male competitive dynamic. A bold Trent (Vince Vaughn), having scored on Sue’s (Patrick Van Horn) beloved LA Kings, forces him to watch the goal again and again until the argument explodes into physical violence. The power of the replay is undeniable. Though the original NHL Hockey was awkwardly localized outside of North America as EA Hockey and offers little in the way of options, other than playing single games or playoffs, the title remains as playable as it always was. The movement of the players on the ice was the first to feel right, and frequent fights ensured that every match was full of action (fights would be removed by NHL ’94). Like Sensible Soccer, NHL Hockey is a peerless two-dimensional representation of its sport. Even if you have to unpack your Mega Drive to play it, the instant replay of the first goal you score against a friend is going to be worth it. MKu See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Micro Machines Original release date : 1991 Platform : NES Developer : Codemasters Genre : Driving / Racing Before the arrival of the eponymous video game, Micro Machines were tiny model cars designed to be bought cheaply and then repurchased fairly regularly when the originals got sucked into the guts of a passing vacuum cleaner or lost, tragically, down the murky back of the sofa. Many people don’t remember that now, and are far more likely to equate Micro Machines with Codemasters’s brilliant little racing game for the NES platform. And “little” is, rather suitably, the operative word for this particular outing. Micro Machines takes the toys’ diminutive statures and sets races in a range of delightfully Swiftian settings, all riddled with the familiar trappings of domesticity. There are garden paths, with huge tufts of grass and rocks to skirt around, breakfast tables with tracks marked by lines of cereal crumbs, and even school desks, where notebooks and pens are waiting to trip you up. Add to this a range of different vehicles that allow you to experiment in ways that you might not have expected, and you have a hugely entertaining title. Smart art design wouldn’t have been enough if the game wasn’t up to the challenge, however. The racing experts at Codemasters also crafted a smart and visceral racer, where your forward momentum is as likely to steer you off route and into disaster as it is to carry you over the finish line, while devious courses are just itching to trip you up as well as simply look cute. The idea stuck, and Micro Machines would be a feature of the gaming landscape long after the NES had been filed away in the attic, with titles—including the Europe and Australia-only Micro Machines Military—for everything from the Sega Mega Drive to the N64. All of those are very playable today, of course, but none of them, somewhat inevitably, have quite the freshness of this original 8-bit classic. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Final Fantasy V Original release date : 1992 Platform : Super Famicom Developer : Square Genre : Role-Playing It was ten years before the fifth Final Fantasy received an official English language release, although fans painstakingly did the work of translating the game’s thousands of lines of dialogue themselves years earlier despite the threat of litigation. Their efforts show the affection fans of the series, and its associated genre, have for this Super Famicom title, which is still widely regarded by many employees of Square Enix (as Square is known today) as one of the best Final Fantasy games. After the plot-heavy previous game, Final Fantasy V shifted its emphasis on to the battle system, giving the heart of this Japanese role-playing game (RPG) a severe overhaul. Principal among the game’s innovations was the introduction of the Active Time Battle System, which, in measuring the amount of time you take to input a command during a battle, intensified the pressure at the core of the Japanese RPG experience. Its influence can be seen in almost all subsequent Final Fantasy games, including the thirteenth title on the PlayStation 3. Moreover, the game radically broadened the scope of the job class system, allowing players to set up their band of warriors in whatever way they saw fit, making for far more dynamic and flexible battles. With twenty-two job classes, each with its own strength and weakness, the game can be played as offensively or defensively as players desire. So successful was Final Fantasy V’s job system that it went on to inform many other esteemed Square Enix titles, most notably Final Fantasy Tactics. While part five’s story may be far more simplistic than that featured in the games immediately preceding and following it, it’s a functional tale that drives players toward the jewels of the experience—its battle system and associated character development trees. SP See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Dragon Quest V Original release date : 1992 Platform : Various Developer : ChunSoft Genre : Role-Playing Dragon Quest V brandishes many of the tropes that make the Japanese RPG so divisive. With traditional random battles that punctuate every journey across the game world, and a simple fairy-tale story of a mysterious baby who the player guides through boyhood to maturity in a series of sequential chapters, the game’s framework does little to broaden the scope of the genre. But despite this, the fifth title in Japan’s favored RPG series fizzes with creativity. In part this is due to the delicate balance of humor and tragedy that infuses the story, courting cliché at all times, yet somehow evading it by way of thoughtful twists on well-worn themes. Perhaps most significant, however, is the game’s monster-hunting submechanic, an idea that directly begat Pokémon and its legion of imitators. By the midway point of the game it’s possible to recruit almost any monster encountered in a battle, bringing them into your four-man-beast party to do battle against their own kind. Every monster in the game has its own elaborate development tree, ensuring that even the smallest, most insignificant foe can, in time, be turned into a powerhouse. The freedom the system affords players was unrivaled at the time of release and, even today, it represents one of the high points for a flexible party system. While playable on Nintendo DS through a recent remake, complete with a graphical overhaul, there is no escaping the game’s maturity, and many of its choices in style and design will seem anachronistic to contemporary players. But for those to whom J-RPGs are stories as much as anything else, Dragon Quest V’s breezy approach is both fresh and deserving of ongoing attention. The game was popular upon release, spawning a manga comic, and even scoring a release for Kōichi Sugiyama’s soundtrack. SP See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Alone in the Dark Original release date : 1992 Platform : Various Developer : Infogrames Genre : Survival Horror The fixed camera, the early 3-D graphics, the dreamlike sense of only partial control—the origins of survival horror can indeed be traced to Alone in the Dark. While it’s true that Sweet Home, a 1989 movie tie-in for the NES, had just as direct an influence over Resident Evil, the use of polygonal characters over prerendered backdrops was even greater. This technological breakthrough, one of the first and most important of the 3-D era, would, in one way or another, come to define Capcom’s series for more than fifteen successful years. Even Resident Evil 5, a game that promised a break from the so-called “tank” control scheme, feels haunted by it. The similarities begin early, players choosing one of two characters, a man or a woman, before braving the game’s story. Edward Carnby is a private investigator sent to recover a prized piano from an antique dealer’s loft. Emily Hartwood is after it too, but only to recover a hidden suicide note from her late uncle Jeremy. Both paths lead to Derceto, a haunted mansion in rural Louisiana, where the truth is protected by monsters, booby traps, and hidden manuscripts, all inspired by the Cthulhu Mythos, the universe created by American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. The mix of zombies, mutant wildlife, escape scenario, and puzzle solving will strike an even louder chord with Resident Evil fans—as will the game’s promise of “a paralyzing sense of personal danger”—though the lack of military themes gives it a more domestic weapon set. The lack of textures for its polygons, meanwhile, creates what’s rightly been called an “origami” look, its models evolving from those of Flashback and Prince of Persia and never quite blending into the backgrounds. The years have been kindest to the fixed camera system, a gimmick made convention by its use elsewhere. DH See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Pinball Dreams Original release date : 1992 Platform : Various Developer : Digital Illusions CE Genre : Pinball
Pinball Dreams appeals to two different types of nostalgia at once. Obviously, it’s catnip for pinball wizards who grew up on the machines of the 1970s, when the tables were simple and digital video displays were unheard of. But the game also stirs fond memories among the many fans of the Commodore Amiga, a home computer platform whose salad days were the late 1980s and early 1990s. The original Pinball Dreams was so popular on the Amiga that Commodore packaged a copy with some of its later models. Alas, the Amiga is dead, but Pinball Dreams is timeless, with ports on a slew of other platforms—most recently Apple’s iPhone and Sony’s PSP. The game consists of four different machines—Ignition, Steel Wheel, Beat Box, and Nightmare—each of which mimics pinball design from the early arcade era. Some of the designs have aged better than others. The neon graffiti and clumsy lingo (“rock da house!”) of the musicthemed Beat Box feels awfully quaint nowadays, while the primary reds and blues of Ignition’s rocket launch still look as sharp as ever. Navigating the terrain—ramps, spot targets, and, of course, that maddening gap between the flippers—is no picnic on these punishing tables, but with a little persistence, you will discover
yourself making surprisingly accurate shots. Of course, the success of any pinball game ultimately rests on its physics, and Pinball Dreams gained fame largely because it was the first game to feature a ball with some realistic heft. No, it’s not quite the same as playing at the arcade, but it comes mighty close. And given the impracticalities of lugging an actual table on the subway (not to mention it’s murder on your back), Pinball Dreams is a solid option for the pinball fan with a long commute. JT See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Contra III: The Alien Wars Original release date : 1992 Platform : SNES Developer : Konami Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
Praise the lord for fans of rather banal testosterone-soaked side-scrolling shooters, because with the third game in the Contra series, Konami finally made something special out of its tired old merc stereotypes. Still playing as Lance and Bill, the bulging offspring of Steven Seagal and John Rambo, Contra III: The Alien Wars tossed away the previous games’ human enemies and Reagan-era politics in favor of a balls-out cosmic battle of death rays, with an entire alien invasion force lining up to be wasted by the simple combination of running and gunning. It’s still a side-scrolling shooter for the most part, but now you’re as likely to be jumping from rocket to rocket, blasting something ugly and green as you are to be on a jet bike or even, on the odd occasion, in your own size-16 standard-issues. Occasional top-down sections provide opportunities to show off the SNES’s Mode 7 graphics, with enemies barreling into and out of the screen toward your psychopathic grunts, as well as introducing a puzzle edge to the environments—but only a very slight one. It’s not the longest of games (a runthrough takes no more than two hours), but within its limits Contra III does everything it can to knock your socks off, as well as your head. There are bosses that
take up half the screen, entire levels involving climbing huge structures, fast and deadly vehicles, and a brilliant assortment of alien-slaying guns that constantly interchange. It tells its own story that more than a decade later, when Konami finally decided to make Contra IV, its developer, Wayforward Technologies, ended up including so many ideas from the Alien Wars that the follow-up feels more like a tribute than a sequel. Not the smartest game you’ll ever play, but a hell of a lot more fun than most. RS See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Desert Strike: Return to the Gulf Original release date : 1992 Platform : Various Developer : Electronic Arts Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
Ah, the good old days. In Desert Strike you’re briefed by Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf about a “psycho madman” called Kilbaba, who the artists didn’t even try to make unlike Saddam Hussein, and then let loose in a digital version of Iraq with an Apache attack helicopter. Desert Strike took at least one idea straight from Defender, but its isometric perspective and tactical weapon set, not to mention the latitude in how to approach mission objectives, created an action game that verged on the strategic. Its greatest touch is the momentum of the helicopter itself: The controls are intuitive and responsive, but the vehicle has its own mass and has to be shepherded as well as sent in with guns blazing. A central objective is always to rescue stranded soldiers, which sees you tipping back and forth above them, lining up your ladder and silently begging for the little trooper to grab it, before slamming the nose down and speeding away with GI Joe hanging on for dear life. You’re a savior as well as a destroyer in Desert Strike, a one-man army waging an entire war as well as a rescue mission. Electronic Arts would go on to make four sequels to Desert Strike, which crescendoed from
Jungle Strike in 1993 to Nuclear Strike in 1997 (a follow-up titled Future Strike has been hinted at for some years), but despite their competence, none approached Desert Strike’s simplicity of attack and rescue: tilt forward, tilt back. Its forbidding orange landscape populated with helpless sprites and SCUD missile launchers was pop warfare at its early ’90s finest: low on politics and as iconic as it is dumb. If there’s a place in heaven for old war games, Desert Strike lies peacefully under a headstone inscribed “Best game that never featured Wagner in its soundtrack.” RS See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Cybernator Original release date : 1992 Platform : SNES Developer : NCS Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
Cybernator was the kind of game that gave Western game developers sleepless nights. It captured everything Japanese designers did so right: futuristic, robotic space warfare featuring an inspired synthesis of platforming, shooting, jet-packing, and robotic fisticuffs. The hybridized game play included some truly novel features. Star of the show was undoubtedly the player’s mecha—a lumbering war machine endowed with realistic weight, gun recoil, and inertia. With a machine gun, flamethrower, fist, and shield on hand, lesser designers could have overwhelmed the player. But thankfully NCS had the foresight to lock the directional gun (or shield) of the mech so that it’s possible to jump in one direction while firing in another. Cybernator’s Western translation was tainted by a butchering of its original content, and as a result it lacks some of the gravitas of its Japanese counterpart. But the game still stands as a testament to progressive arcade game design, and only its lack of levels detracts from what is a muchunderrated classic. JB See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Super Mario Kart Original release date : 1992 Platform : SNES Developer : Nintendo Genre : Driving
Imagination has always been a cornerstone of the Mushroom Kingdom, but it took a special flight of fancy to create Super Mario Kart. Taking the chirpy Italian plumber out of side-scrolling levels and thrusting him into the competitive world of the racetrack was a brave decision and one that had serious—mostly positive—repercussions for the franchise. Super Mario Kart was the moment that Mario became a jack-of-all-trades, a mascot who could be slid into any kind of game. And yet Mario looks very much at home in a kart, and that is perhaps because he’s brought so much of his world with him. From the piranha plants popping up in the road to official race starter Lakitu and the other racers riding alongside Mario (including favorites such as Luigi, Yoshi, and Donkey Kong), this is an intelligent and creative use of the Nintendo world. The game is also a genuinely great racer, with the SNES’s trademark Mode 7 graphics allowing for environments that rotate smoothly around the vehicles and a tidy range of power-ups available to alter the outcome of the race. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Axelay Original release date : 1992 Platform : SNES Developer : Konami Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
Axelay was the first classic Nintendo 16-bit shoot ’em up. Whereas early SNES shooters, like UN Squadron and Gradius III, had been full of slowdown due to embarrassing technical issues, Axelay was a star performer from the outset: a shooter engineered from the ground up with a complement of speed, special effects, and coin-op-quality aesthetics to win over doubters of the SNES platform. While its power-ups were fairly conventional, Axelay is perhaps best remembered for the pseudo-3-D distortion on its vertical levels, as well as an array of detailed side-scrolling space stations, futuristic cities, and snugly configured underwater caves. There was also a full suite of impressive bosses—such as the memorable ED-209-inspired robot walker—and an atmospheric soundtrack punctuated by trademark Konami commentary samples. Axelay’s only real flaw is that there simply isn’t enough of the game—just six levels—to sustain longevity. But as an example of early ’90s home gaming ascending into the realms of arcade quality, most would agree that it is an experience well worth savoring. JB See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Flashback Original release date : 1992 Platform : Various Developer : Delphine Software Genre : Action / Adventure
Reportedly the best-selling French game of all time, Flashback was a phenomenon when it debuted on Commodore’s Amiga in 1992, and it remains a fascinating experience today. It’s a science-fiction action adventure set in the year 2142, viewed side on, like traditional 2-D platform games, and is in a sense “realistic” as the character explores the world in a manner consistent with him being a normal human being. Flashback is not a game where the skills of platforming are the payoff, however. The rewards here are in carefully exploring the rich environments and figuring out what you need to do in order to progress. As in traditional point-and-click adventure games, the solutions are often obscure, meaning that patience and experimentation are rewarded as much as skill and finesse with a joystick. All this technical and game design cleverness would be for nought if the game didn’t have a decent story at the heart of it, and Flashback’s tale of alien infiltration and forced amnesia is superb. It juggles action with atmosphere and delivers a game that is both intriguing and tense. JR See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis Original release date : 1992 Platform : Various Developer : LucasArts Genre : Adventure
While Indiana Jones’s return to cinema languished in development hell for nearly twenty years until Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was released in 2008, the series received what many consider to be his “true” fourth adventure in the form of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis in 1992, a mere three years after the good doctor rode off into the sunset at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Designed by Hal Barwood (who had previously worked with Steven Spielberg on The Sugarland Express) and Noah Falstein, the game has everything an Indy fan could expect—double-crossing Nazis, international travel, mysterious artifacts, and, of course, a love interest who at times proves more trouble for Jones than his enemies—wrapped up in LucasArts’s SCUMM adventure engine while it was at the height of its powers. Unlike other graphic adventures of the time, which tended to offer one static solution, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis gives players the choice of following the Fists path (a lighter, more action movie-like experience), the Wits path (lots of problem solving), or the balanced Team path (which features love interest Sophia Hapgood throughout). This allows you to tailor your game to
how you see Indiana Jones—a lover, a fighter, a mild-mannered archeologist—as does a well-written story with a wide variety of dialogue options, giving the player a strong sense of authorship over their play, though it is possible to get stuck (and even die) on some of the trickiest puzzles. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis is the rare example of a game that succeeds where installments in the original film series failed, and is a glorious and still-playable tribute to a character who endures. MKu See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Mortal Kombat Original release date : 1992 Platform : Various Developer : Midway Genre : Fighting
It may be one of the most popular arcade games of all time, but the biggest myth about Mortal Kombat is that it’s a classic. This is a game that rode a wave of notoriety like few others, and despite its manifold flaws, manages to retain devotees even now. And, to be fair, Mortal Kombat does have a little substance beyond the gore. The “photorealistic” visuals were pioneering, though their impact was rather spoiled by the fact that all seven fighters move and attack in very similar fashions. The fighting system was the first to include “juggling,” by which opponents can be repeatedly struck while in the air, and this was the first fighting game with an unlockable secret character, Reptile. Then there are the fatalities. At the end of the fight, when your opponent is beaten, they stagger in front of you waiting for the coup de grâce. What shall it be? Liu Kang turning into a dragon and eating them? Sub Zero freezing their body to shatter it with an uppercut? Sonya’s deadly kiss? To teenagers at the time of the game’s release, the combinations were the key to bragging rights. To Senators Joseph Lieberman and Herb Kohl, who headed a US government inquiry into “video game violence and the corruption of society,” they contributed to all future video games being rated in the region via
the formation of the Entertainment Software Rating Board. In terms of violence, it’s a silly game rather than a bloodthirsty one, and the character design stands the test of time in a way that the combat doesn’t. Despite its limitations, Mortal Kombat retains a certain charm today, but it is a cultural landmark rather than a classic video game. For a brief while in the autumn of 1992, though, it seemed like the most important game in the world. RS See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Sonic the Hedgehog 2 Original release date : 1992 Platform : Mega Drive Developer : Sega Genre : Platform
Mario games tend to be wildly different from one outing to the next. Sonic, although speedier on foot, has had a far more gentle evolution, and Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is everything a well-handled sequel to a hit game should be: more of the same, a little bit prettier, a little bit bigger, and a little bit more intricate. If several of the first Sonic game’s levels seemed like out-of-control pinball machines, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 only takes that further, with a couple of zones that act more as spectacle, in which the player can steer a little bit but often has to rely on luck. The game is staggeringly fast and a whirling, complex delight to watch. Areas feel bigger and more inventive, and boss fights, although fitting into the same basic mold, often feature a clever twist or two. The bonus stages have gotten perhaps the biggest graphical upgrade, turning from a spinning headache-inducing 2-D maze to a kind of psychedelic 3-D-effect luge in which Sonic runs into the screen, collecting rings as he goes. Granted, it looks a little outdated today, but in the early ’90s, it presented the serious prospect that 16-bit graphics might simply struggle to ever improve on it. Then there’s Tails, Sonic’s ally, a fox with two tails. On the plus side, he allows for two-player
action, which the game handles with remarkable assurance, and barely a drop in the ever-important frame rate. On the minus side, Tails opened the floodgate for the influx of Sonic’s loathsome extended cast, the absolute nadir of which is Shadow the Hedgehog, who inexplicably got his own wretched game on the GameCube, PS2, and Xbox. For the time being, however, with the first of many sequels, it was just Sonic and Tails—the world was in balance, and all was good, clean, fast-moving fun in Greenhill Zone. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
The Lost Vikings Original release date : 1992 Platform : Various Developer : Silicon & Synapse Genre : Puzzle / Platform
The company behind The Lost Vikings might not sound familiar, but that’s because it changed its name shortly after the release of this title. Silicon & Synapse had turned into Blizzard Entertainment by the time of the release of what is considered its breakthrough hit, Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, beginning the inexorable journey toward World of Warcraft. However, Silicon & Synapse is arguably the more interesting company. Counter to Blizzard’s later tendency to plagiarize setting and design from the likes of Warhammer and Dune II, The Lost Vikings is an entirely original idea. Starring Erik the Swift, Baleog the Fierce, and Olaf the Stout as a set of Vikings who find themselves kidnapped by an alien race and lost in the mists of time, the player’s aim is to use each of the trio’s unique abilities (Erik can run and jump, Baleog can fight enemies and shoot arrows, and Olaf the Stout can use his shield to block attacks, or as a platform or parachute) to complete levels. As a puzzle/platformer that has rarely been cloned, The Lost Vikings has much to offer interested gamers. While too often mistakes can lead to the death of one of the Vikings (each has only three hit points) and thus require that the entire level be restarted, each stage is an intriguing challenge in and
of itself, similar to the Lemmings titles. Once the solution is found it can be a little trying to move each Viking toward it—the characters have no personal agency—but players are regularly rewarded with humorous back-and-forths between the three in their in-game dialogue. Level themes never stray too far from platform game classics, but The Lost Vikings’s continually intriguing puzzle design enshrines it as a still-captivating treat. MKu See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Virtua Racing Original release date : 1992 Platform : Arcade Developer : Sega Genre : Driving
To play Virtua Racing is to understand why 3-D gaming was never merely a possibility, but an inevitability. Although it wasn’t the first racing game to attempt three-dimensionality (that honor goes to Atari’s Hard Drivin’, released three years earlier), it was perhaps the first to treat polygons not as a graphical gimmick but as an opportunity to expand the boundaries of traditional driving games. Virtua Racing employs technology in service of the game play, not at the expense of it. Consider one of the game’s many innovations, the “V.R. View” system, which allows players to switch between four different camera angles on the fly. It sure looks neat, as your perspective swoops from behind the wheel, all the way back to a high and wide shot, all in one smooth motion. Which viewpoint you choose impacts how you drive. Inside the car, you get the best sense of your car’s handling, but less time to react to the course and to other racers. Up high, you can see more of what’s ahead and what the other cars are doing, but you’re disconnected from the tactile feel of your vehicle. You may prefer one perspective to the others, or switch between them depending on the situation. Virtua Racing was advanced for its time and played on the 16-bit Sega Genesis via special polygon-pushing hardware called the Sega Virtua Processor soldered into the cartridge itself. The
home version was expensive when first released, though today it can be had cheaply from various online resellers, while an even more faithful version for the ill-fated Sega 32X includes two brandnew tracks. The arcade version is definitive, but play Virtua Racing in any flavor and you’ll understand everything that follows it. It’s like witnessing the discovery of fire. MK See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
The Incredible Machine Original release date : 1992 Platform : Various Developer : Dynamix Genre : Puzzle
Emergent game play and physics-based interactivity may seem like fresh concepts, but it was The Incredible Machine that really introduced these major game components almost twenty years ago. Without doubt inspired by the ridiculously elaborate contraptions imagined by cartoonists Heath Robinson and Rube Goldberg, The Incredible Machine tasks players with inventing their own devices to carry out a series of simple actions. On each level an objective is given, ranging from popping a series of balloons to launching rockets to re-housing goldfish. A range of “useful” components is provided in an inventory box, and these can be dragged and dropped onto the game space to construct the relevant machine. Basketballs, torches, and pulleys all figure—as do mice, cats, and monkeys on bicycles—and all can be variously combined to complete the tasks. The beauty of the game is its accurate simulation of gravity, inertia, and other vital physical processes. Just as important, there is no one way to complete each level, an emergent approach that encourages endless experimentation. The game also comes with a sandbox mode in which users are free to construct their own machines from scratch.
The game was a huge success on the PC (later appearing on the Mac and 3DO console), and creators Kevin Ryan and Jeff Tunnell would carry on to oversee two sequels, as well as a range of spin-offs, before their company, Dynamix, was dissolved in 2001. The series would surface again in 2007 as a mobile adaptation, courtesy of Vivendi. Two years later, Tunnell bought back the rights and further titles are planned. After a decade-long hiatus, the machine is finally being switched back on. KS See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Ultima VII Original release date : 1992 Platform : PC Developer : Origin Systems Genre : Role-Playing
Ultima VII marks the last game in Richard Garriott’s series that could be called a success. Once again, the player visits Britannia as the Avatar, hooking up with old friends, like lolo and Katrina. Once again, Lord British is in trouble and the land needs saving. But Ultima VII improved the interface and offered a more fluid experience than previous editions. As soon as players enter the game’s world, they must use the mouse for almost every action. They are tasked with investigating a murder scene—a messy, ritualistic affair—and every object in the stable, however mundane, is clickable. From there, the same continental landmass and major cities of the past Ultimas will greet you, but the improvements give you a fresh perspective. With a mystery to solve, players spend much of the game hunting for clues and secrets, and talking to everyone in sight. On top of the main plot lies a philosophical debate: The player learns about a Fellowship that is undermining the Avatar’s teachings and pushing the values of unity, trust, and worthiness. You discover that the Fellowship is a cult that perverts the values it teaches; but it’s a thoughtful cult, and it fits Garriott’s tendency to bring abstract values to his stats-based role-playing. The game sold and reviewed well. But for Origin, the writing was on the wall: The company was
sold to Electronic Arts, and jabs at the parent company abound. For example, the names of two traitors in the game begin with the letters E and A. Ultima VII saw two expansions and a part two (Serpent Isle), but the next chapter, Ultima VIII, was glitchy and incomplete, and critical bugs frustrated what should have been a triumphant end to the franchise with Ultima IX in 1999. Technical problems are unfortunately one of the legacies of Origin’s great fantasy series. CDa See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Dune II Original release date : 1992 Platform : Various Developer : Westwood Studios Genre : Strategy
While it does a decent enough job of pleasing fans of the source material, history probably won’t remember Dune II for the ease with which it threaded itself into the terrifyingly complex sciencefiction world established in Frank Herbert’s weighty bestseller. Its worth to gamers—even those who would have trouble picking a genuine sandworm out of a police lineup—is as a title that helped solidify an emerging genre, establishing the framework for the games that would follow. The genre in question was real-time strategy, the hugely popular PC-centric war games in which the player acts as a commanding officer, building up forces and then dispatching them across the battlefield. Like almost all the RTS games that would swarm and multiply in its wake, Dune II revolves around harvesting resources (spice, in Herbert’s fiction) to building the battle units necessary to lead one of a handful of opposing factions—galactic houses in this case—to victory in separate campaigns. It’s easy to point out the things that Westwood Studios did first: Dune II was the first RTS to use full mouse control, to have elaborate tech trees, and to put such a prime focus on resources. But harder to classify are the things it simply did better than anyone else. Mostly, it comes down to the
maps themselves: Dune II’s battlefields are tight, varied, and built for replaying, encouraging both unimaginative players and gifted strategists to experiment and discover the most interesting ways of examining situations. Command & Conquer might be Westwood’s most successful series, but so much of the good stuff started here, and even if you simply view it as an unofficial opening skirmish in the endless war between the Nod and the GDI, Dune II is well worth tracking down today. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting Original release date : 1992 Platform : Various Developer : Capcom Genre : Fighting
In 1991, Capcom released Street Fighter II: The World Warrior, and fighting games would never be the same again. With charismatic protagonists; grade-A audiovisual standards; and tight, supremely nuanced game play that married traditional combat with extravagant special moves, it went on to become a worldwide phenomenon. And, like so many phenomena, it spawned sequels. Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting is the most intriguing of the permutations that Capcom’s one-onone beat ’em up would see before it was finally given a major update in the form of Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers (1993). Shortly after the release of 1992’s Champion Edition, the hunger for Street Fighter II products was so great that Chinese pirates had begun to operate sidelines in black-market upgrades to Capcom’s arcade boards, their most infamous work being Street Fighter II: Rainbow Edition. Greatly increasing the speed of play and adding many additions, such as homing projectiles and fireball walls, these illicit reworkings reduced game play to an unbalanced mess, but still they found lucrative audiences. Hyper Fighting was Capcom’s attempt to stem the tide of such unlicensed modifications,
increasing the speed of vanilla Street Fighter II, offering a new range of alternate colors for each character and, most notably, tweaking characters to fine-tune their abilities, as well as add new special moves, such as Chun-Li’s fireball and Dhalsim’s teleport. The game represents the peak of the Street Fighter II series, offering a selection of speed options and unparalleled level of balance that made unlicensed products, such as Rainbow Edition, essentially obsolete. Such considered updates mean that Hyper Fighting remains hugely enjoyable to this day. MKu See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
NBR Jam Original release date : 1993 Platform : Various Developer : Midway Genre : Sports
The catchphrases are legendary: “He’s on fire!” “Is it the shoes?” “From downtown!” You’re apt to hear all these and more during a single game of NBA Jam, and if you need proof of the game’s cultural currency, walk up to somebody, say any one of those statements, and see how they react. Most likely, they’ll respond with the immortal, “Boom shakalaka!” NBA Jam is the game of basketball as seen through a funhouse mirror. It uses real NBA teams and superstar players, such as Charles Barkley and Patrick Ewing, although that’s about where similarities to the real thing end. (One notable omission is Michael Jordan, whose likeness was too pricey for Midway to license.) Teams take each other on in games of two-on-two, which leads to fast-paced, high-scoring games without a lot of passing or strategy. The game’s true inspiration is to exaggerate the sport’s traits beyond the limits of credulity. When a player hits three buckets in a row, he’s said to be on fire, and from that point until the other team scores, he won’t miss a shot, and the ball will scorch the net. The centerpiece of the game is its monster dunks—players can jam it in with a variety of long-distance tomahawks, behind-the-back moves, and aerial somersaults that take them outside the frame, each one lustily narrated by a Marv
Albert soundalike. NBA Jam’s sense of fun knows no bounds. Fourth-quarter dunks have the effect of shattering the glass. A bevy of unlockable secret characters creates hilarious match-ups. Between the various arcade and home versions of the game, it’s possible to play as actors, mascots, athletes from other sports, and even President Clinton. Slick Willie throwing down a baseline jam on Hakeem Olajuwon’s head? Boom shakalaka! MK See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Myst Original release date : 1993 Platform : Various Developer : Cyan Worlds Genre : Adventure / Puzzle
The empty and enigmatic game Myst emerged into a world filled with noisy platformers, sidescrolling shooters, and brawlers, and clearly had other things on its mind from the beginning. This was a game about exploring rather than simply progressing to the far right side of the screen, about musing over scenarios rather than memorizing combos, and it was a lonely adventure suited to late evenings spent in front of the PC, perhaps with a printed-out FAQ to help when the whole thing got a bit too obscure. Critics said Myst was nothing more than a vaguely interactive slide show, and on the surface, at least, their attacks have a point. Players explore the game’s mysterious island setting by clicking on a series of beautifully rendered vistas, selecting their next location, interacting with many of the dormant machines, and piecing together—or failing to piece together—a complex backstory that leaves plenty to the imagination. By tightly controlling the interactivity, Myst’s developers ensured that they could put as much of their time as possible into making the game look good, and, for a good while, Myst appeared to be a bright shining gift from the future: a serene, poised, and complex vision compared to the pixelated firestorms that were taking place on other consoles.
The years have not been particularly kind, however. Myst’s brand of gentle interactivity have turned out to be something of a creative cul-de-sac, and despite the success of sequels like Riven, the game’s developers eventually closed down their operations. Fortunately, this does not diminish the strange power of the original—a curate’s egg, albeit a real money spinner at the time, and a journey to a land that games will probably never return to again in such a grand and openhanded manner. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Cannon Fodder Original release date : 1993 Platform : Various Developer : Sensible Software Genre : Strategy / Action
Back in the early ’90s, Sensible Software was a true maverick of the UK development scene, churning out 2-D classics like Sensible World of Soccer and Mega Lo Mania, all loaded with anarchic humor. With its pinpoint level design, detailed visuals, and tasteless jokes, Cannon Fodder provided the quintessence of the developer’s approach. Combining elements of the shoot ’em up and realtime strategy genres, Cannon Fodder requires gamers to guide a group of up to eight soldiers through seventy-two areas, shooting enemy soldiers, blowing up buildings, and rescuing hostages. Soldiers are directed via a point-and-click interface rather than direct control, and can be split into three separate squads in order to complete more tactically demanding levels. The group management elements are deceptively complex, allowing the sharing of key weapons between squads and tactics, such as holding areas or surrounding enemy emplacements. The brilliance of the game lies its nondidactic sandbox design, where players could roam at will. Players are given the tools to complete each level (including grenades, rocket launchers, and various vehicles, as well as the odd “supa dupa” power-up), but there are multiple routes to victory, echoing
the emergent, open-ended approach of contemporaries such as Lemmings and Dune II. But Cannon Fodder will also be remembered for its singular sense of humor. Beginning with a theme tune entitled “War Has Never Been So Much Fun,” and ending each level by showing the graves of fallen comrades, the game is a sniggering satire on the glorification of war, with an underlying pacifistic message. Acclaimed by critics, Cannon Fodder is also revered by fans as one of the defining 16-bit computer games. KS See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle Original release date : 1993 Platform : Various Developer : LucasArts Genre : Adventure
Ron Gilbert’s Maniac Mansion of 1987 was an enjoyably atmospheric point-and-click adventure game with a lovely B-movie feel. Day of the Tentacle, its brilliant sequel, is an absolute A-list smash. Dazzling, 1950s-styled artwork and some wonderfully elastic character animation helps propel a team of hapless nerds through some of the most elaborate, fiendish, and satisfying puzzles of any LucasArts game before or since, and there’s a joke—generally brilliantly played—lurking around almost every corner. But Day of the Tentacle’s main trick isn’t leveraging the familiar characters and setting. Rather, it comes from the game’s time-travel plot, with temporal fluxes (characters travel back and forth through the future, sitting on top of toilets as they race to stop the purple tentacle from ruling the planet) providing some mesmerizingly brain-blasting puzzles, often requiring you to manipulate the same locations in a handful of different eras, trying to keep track of any possible repercussions your actions might lead to in other time periods. Cut down a tree in the past, for instance, and you’d best be prepared for it to zip out of existence in the future; change the design of a statue while it’s still being carved and, years later, you can perhaps twist the dusty results to your own ends. With a cast that
features mummified corpses and addled teens, as well as finding enough room to cram in cameos from America’s Founding Fathers, every few minutes of progress herald a new surprise, and every fresh twist sends the story somewhere you hadn’t expected. Long before LucasArts succumbed to the dark side and devoted itself to exploring the fringes of the Star Wars universe, it’s worth remembering the studio was capable of stuff like this: intricate, colorful, and endlessly original. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Doom Original release date : 1993 Platform : Various Developer : id Software Genre : First-Person Shooter
It may surprise you, but modern video games owe a lot to Doom. No, really! A few years ago a report concluded (in a masterful stating of the obvious) that the first-person shooter was the “most attractive” genre for publishers, based on revenue opportunities (ie, the likelihood of making money), and it certainly feels like every other game today is some variety of first-person shooter: Halo, Call of Duty, Resistance, Far Cry, BioShock, and Battlefield 1942 are just some of the best. Doom was the first best. It wasn’t the first, of course, but it was the first to feel like a shot of adrenaline, straight to the heart. Banished to a marine base on Mars, the nameless hero soon finds himself the last man standing, battling hordes of demonic enemies. The object of the game was simple: shoot everything that moves and keep moving through wave after successive wave of every variety of infernal evil; survive a nightmare voyage to hell and back. Its appeal was visceral and obvious, from the increasingly bloodied face of your character avatar to the BFG, the weapon at the apex of the food chain. It’s kill or be killed. “If only you could talk to these creatures,” concluded one early review that missed the point. Or
did it? Doom’s great strength lay in its relentless pursuit of immediate thrills. It was a masterpiece of design that went straight for the kill with a relentless, sharklike efficiency. But the game’s legacy is just as important as its predatory instincts. Doom popularized a perspective that has since been used for everything from cowboys and Indians to horror in space, from talking to people face to face, to shooting them in it. That Doom laid the foundations for games as fundamentally different as BioShock and Modern Warfare is perhaps its greatest and lasting achievement. DM See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Gunstar Heroes Original release date : 1993 Platform : Mega Drive Developer : Treasure Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
If it’s a Treasure game, you can guarantee lots of bullets. Gunstar Heroes isn’t the company’s finest shooter, but it is a supremely accomplished side-scroller that’s as much about adventure as it is about enemies, a blast ’em up that bothers with characters, and home to some of the finest spritework of the 16-bit era. There are several types of weapon, all of which can be combined to create new types of gun, a nice idea that in practice means there are two real possibilities if you want the best armaments. The basic enemies aren’t particularly engaging in combat, though it is fun to hit them and watch them flee and panic. What makes Gunstar Heroes is the sensational design of some of its bosses— several of which can still surprise you with their ingenuity and tactics nearly twenty years on—and the general incompetence of the enemy army implied in the little vignettes of animation and asides that occur throughout levels. You’ll blow up a train and it’ll stay on the tracks as it bursts into flames, disappearing off the screen and reappearing with enemy grunts panicking and clinging on to their dear leader for dear life, only to be imperiously tossed aside as he makes his escape. Or you’ll be in a ferocious battle with an impervious foe until you finally crack him and he sheepishly hands over his
crystal, bursting into tears at his failure. These details explain why Gunstar Heroes, even if it is not Treasure’s finest moment mechanically, remains special for so many grown-ups who were once Mega Drive owners. It’s a game that doesn’t just want you to play with it, but laugh at it, and it has enough room in its structure for variations that ensure repeat playthroughs throw up things you won’t have seen before. RS See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Ecco the Dolphin Original release date : 1993 Platform : Various Developer : Novotrade Genre : Action / Adventure
Stylish, painterly, and calm, Ecco the Dolphin was the cartridge you used to plug into your trusty black Mega Drive to convince naysayers that video games weren’t all about shooting things, driving things really fast, or generally setting the world on fire. Ecco the Dolphin was everything most games weren’t: graceful and rather mature, filled with tinkly ambient noises and a protagonist that, as a bottlenose dolphin, is probably an endangered species by now even if he wasn’t back in 1993. That’s not to say Ecco the Dolphin was a mere sop to one’s worried parents. Developer Novotrade International’s game is an intricate platformer in its own right. Its tangled undersea spaces are probably best described as mazes, with a fierce, often rather nasty, difficulty curve as players pilot their lithe avatar through rambling and evocative networks of tunnels, ramming enemies out of the way, uncovering secret passages, and keeping an eye on the air gauge so as to avoid suffocating. Beneath the astonishingly elegant animations lurked a bitterly addictive game design that revels in the cruelty and unpredictability of nature—or at least it certainly felt that way when you were ten years old and more used to the cute ice-cream worlds of most traditional action games. Amazingly, Ecco the Dolphin was a success. Despite breaking most of the rules of what made a
hit, Novotrade created one of the few Mega Drive titles to sell enough to put it up with Sonic the Hedgehog. And, as with the Sonic series, sequels and ports followed, some of which were pleasant enough, none of which captured the rare spirit of the original. Despite the sales, developers struggled to follow in Ecco the Dolphin’s wake, which is why this strange, gentle, melancholy game stands out all the more. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Daytona USA Original release date : 1993 Platform : Arcade Developer : Sega Genre : Driving
The first time you successfully drift around a turn in Daytona USA, it all makes sense. First, steer into the curve. Then hit the brakes—you’ll learn how hard you need to push on the pedal—and correct against the turn just so. You’ll find yourself sliding sideways at high speed, your car in a delicate equilibrium between spinning out and bolting off the course, poised to explode onto the straightaway. Realistic? Not exactly, but so natural that any other racing game you play afterward will feel stilted and awkward. Among its many technical innovations, Daytona USA is credited as a pioneer of texture-mapped polygons, giving its 3-D models a more organic look than those of Sega’s earlier efforts, Virtua Racing and Virtua Fighter, with their plain, flat-shaded polygons. Texture mapping is used to great effect here, framing the racetracks with lush greenery, imposing cliff walls, and varied cityscapes. Up to eight competitions can be networked locally for epic in-person battles, which is where drafting— riding the slipstream behind another player’s car to create a slingshot effect out of turns—can really make a difference. Daytona USA also has its share of infamy. During its attract mode and on the Dinosaur Canyon
racetrack, you are subjected to a cheesy, lounge-style song called “Let’s Go Away,” sung in English by a heavily accented Japanese man. You won’t be able to get it out of your head. A disastrous home version for the Sega Saturn in 1995 is reviled for its choppy frame rate and flickering polygons. In 1996, Sega would rectify the situation with Daytona USA Championship Circuit Edition, which sports improved graphics, truer handling, and three new racetracks. More faithful to the arcade original—except for its instrumental-only version of “Let’s Go Away”—the Championship Circuit Edition is the definitive home version. MK See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Return to Zork Original release date : 1993 Platform : Various Developer : Infocom Genre : Adventure “You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.” So begins seminal 1980 text adventure Zork. Infocom followed up with two sequels and various related projects, but it wasn’t until 1993 that loyal fans were able to venture into their beloved world more tangibly. Return to Zork begins behind the very same white house that adventurers encountered thirteen years earlier, but this time, instead of a description, the building is rendered on-screen by the game’s charming painterly graphics. Although somewhat overshadowed by Myst (which Return to Zork actually predates by a few months), the game was part of an early wave of titles that took advantage of the increased storage capacity of CD-ROM. While the DOS release resembled a first-person take on Sierra On-Line’s adventures, albeit steeped in Zork folklore, the optical versions contain a great deal of the digitized actor footage and better-quality audio that was then fashionable. The performances themselves are rather cheesy, but this only adds to the surreal atmosphere the game so successfully conveys. The player is also able to specify their mood in order to alter the way in which they interact with in-game characters, an innovation way ahead of its time. Zorks famously flexible text parser is transformed into a similarly open point-and-click interface, which allows a great many more actions than its contemporaries, and most adventures since. However, the game does nothing to prevent the wanton destruction of key items by the player (nor alert them to their significance), leading to unwinnable game states that will frustrate all but the meticulous. Regardless of this, the richly detailed world delivers a genuine adventure that is enhanced by the game’s mischievous sense of humor. BM See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Ridge Racer Original release date : 1993 Platform : Arcade Developer : Namco Genre : Driving
In these days of commonplace high-definition displays, it’s difficult to fully convey the impact Ridge Racer’s visuals had when Namco drove its creation into arcades around the globe. Simply put, it was the most graphically advanced video game the world had ever seen, with texture-mapped polygons moving at speeds the human eye had difficulty interpreting, and featuring a number of elements that have gone on to become driving game clichés (helicopters, jet plane, roadworks —Ridge Racer had them all). While you were still trying to assimilate the graphics, the cabinet tugged incessantly at your leg, demanding your urgent attention. One look at the three-pedal setup signaled the inclusion of a clutch, handy for navigating the six-speed gear stick next to the seat. It’s difficult to think of many arcade games that scream “Play me!” as insistently as Ridge Racer, and fewer still that have made it impossible for young men to walk past and not slot in a coin, misguidedly hoping to impress their accompanying girlfriends. Thankfully, the game is too demanding to enable a quick glance at your spectator’s undoubtedly bored and grumpy face. Rendered using a first-person view (an unusual approach for the time), the
experience is relentless, even if its limitations seem pronounced nowadays, with little in the way of handling nuances, intrusive AI competitors, and nonexistent crash dynamics. That said, one area that remains mostly intact is the power-sliding mechanic, which, although absurdly exaggerated, is still able to convey much of the original thrill and exhilaration felt by those who experienced the remarkable intensity of Ridge Racer the first time around. As history lessons go, you’re unlikely to find many that will prove this exciting. JDS See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
SimCity 2000 Original release date : 1993 Platform : Various Developer : Maxis Genre : Management Simulation
The march of technology might frustrate developers who have to keep reinventing the wheel and consumers who must periodically shell out for new hardware, but it sure makes game evolution pretty. Consider SimCity. The debut title, released on PC in 1989, was a landmark—a cornerstone in showing what games could do, a missionary converting sceptical non-gamers to the cause, and a time sink without peer. But graphically, you’d think you were designing a circuit board. In contrast, SimCity 2000, released just four years later, enables you to build a living, breathing metropolis that looks as good as it feels to create and manage. Instead of a top-down plan, you’re given a diametric view of your growing city, which means skyscrapers tower over parks and older parts of town look quaint yet ripe for development. This pseudo-3-D perspective also enables the developer to add elevation to the terrain, so your exclusive uptown neighborhood really can look down on its neighbors. The attention to detail is fabulous, ranging from a factory’s construction graphics to the run-down disrepair of urban decay.
The core game play, in which you designate and hook up residential, commercial, and industrial zones, remains in place, but you can now add special institutions, such as prisons, hospitals, and zoos. The transport options are more compelling, there are many ways to generate power, and there’s deeper management of your city’s fiscal affairs. Like any good Will Wright game, there’s also plenty of Sim silliness. Disasters range from fires and tornadoes to an attack from a monster. Newspaper stories vary from the useful to the bonkers. And if your arcologies are sufficiently hi-tech, you’ll be rewarded as they blast off into space. OB See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Syndicate Original release date : 1993 Platform : Various Developer : Bullfrog Productions Genre : Strategy / Shoot ’Em Up
Peter Molyneux’s Bullfrog Productions had made business sims before, but none were quite like this. Most featured spreadsheets and financial year reports. Syndicate had a heavier focus on nasty weaponry and industrial espionage. The game, created by Sean Cooper, is a gritty isometric future noir in which corporations fight one another for influence and market share, taking boardroom rivalries to the streets with a variety of brilliantly unpleasant guns and explosives, and bringing a new, rather literal, meaning to the phrase “hostile takeover.” Influenced by Blade Runner and the works of William Gibson as much as Businessweek magazine, Syndicate’s mix of urban grime and neon sleaze may initially remind players of Shadowrun. Rather than a complex RPG, it’s something a little harder to describe: a squad-based tactical game in which players run their own corporation and use a team of four characters to destabilize competitors, recruit the local populace, and generally cause futuristic chaos. We did mention it involve guns—lots of guns—right? With weapons research and development being essential for players if they want to keep abreast of the rivals, Syndicate has the artillery to back up its obvious brains. Some of the game’s weapons (the phenomenal Gauss Gun, for example)
have found their place in gaming history, and allotting funds for research is just one of a series of ancillary factors players have to keep in mind while ruling the streets. Syndicate was originally designed to have a multiplayer component that was, heartbreakingly, taken out at the last moment. What remains, however, is a beautiful night-time vision of a meanspirited future. It is downloadable today for a reasonable fee via the PlayStation Network. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Sam & Max Hit the Road Original release date : 1993 Platform : Various Developer : LucasArts Genre : Adventure
The number of scripted video games that reliably and intentionally make you laugh can be counted on one hand. That’s one finger for Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle, one for Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, one for Maniac Mansion, one that doubles for the first two Monkey Island games, and a thumb for the funniest of all point-and-clicks, Sam & Max Hit the Road. Made by LucasArts at the height of its powers, this was based on a comic by artist, author, and lead game designer Steve Purcell. Known as the Freelance Police (which apparently frees them to uphold and break the law, often at the same time), Sam and Max are private detectives doomed to investigate the maddest corners of American society. Sam, a talking dog in a suit and tie, is a Philip Marlowe type with an ambivalent position on human suffering, especially when it’s inflicted by his partner, Max, a “hyperkinetic rabbit-type thing.” In Sam & Max Hit the Road, Bruno the frozen bigfoot has escaped from a local carnival, taking Trixie the Giraffe-necked Girl with him. With breaks for mini-games and trips to the toilet, the search for clues leads to tourist spots like The World’s Largest Ball Of Twine, Gator Golf Emporium, and the Celebrity Vegetable Museum.
The strike rate of gags in Sam & Max Hit the Road at least compares to classic cartoons like The Ren And Stimpy Show and The Tick, its humor skewed equally toward adults and mature teenagers. Driving home the jokes are the wonderfully animated characters, the chemistry between its voice actors, a synchronized jazz soundtrack, and puzzles that actually relate to dialogue and situation. Surely the most quotable game of all time, it’ll be remembered long after its recent comeback via a scattershot series of 3-D episodes has been forgotten. DH See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
UFO: Enemy Unknown Original release date : 1993 Platform : Various Developer : Mythos Genre : Strategy
Many games struggle to make players identify with the digital puppets they’re asked to play with, even if they’re presented center stage, motion-captured, and voiced. And yet some of the most cherished characters in gaming are the randomly generated soldiers of UFO: Enemy Unknown. Each was merely a 2-D collection of pixels attached to a few basic statistics and a name drawn from a distinctive list of pan-European monikers, yet most players have heartfelt stories to tell of narrow escapes and last stands. Giving you the role of commander of X-COM, a force devoted to combating extraterrestrial threat, UFO: Enemy Unknown is a combination of strategic resource management and turn-based tactical battling. On one hand, you’re building bases around Earth to shoot down UFOs, developing research capabilities, investigating spacecrafts, and creating more powerful weapons. On the other, you’re directing small squads of soldiers to investigate crash sites and putting them in considerable danger while you’re doing so. With the difference between life and death a single turn, you quickly begin to value each and every one of your fighters, nurturing them into exquisitely skilled warriors capable of snap-shooting a
gray in the head at fifty paces. When they die—and with no in-mission saves at your disposal, they will—you’ll miss their talent badly. Almost completely freeform, progression in the game is entirely in your hands. The objective of each crashsite mission is up to you, whether you want to capture a commanding alien for interrogation or gather materiel to use or sell for funds. It’s this responsibility that’s behind the strength of the bonds you form in UFO, and the reason why it remains a landmark in video games. AW See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Frontier: Elite II Original release date : 1993 Platform : Various Developer : Gametek Genre : Strategy / Shoot ’Em Up
Remember that thing about space being “really big”? Well, only a few games have managed to portray that with any kind of accuracy. One of these games is Frontier, sequel to the classic openended space game, Elite. Once again you are thrown in at the deep end of intergalactic adventure, with no plot, no quest, and no game-given direction. You have to decide what to do with your spaceship, although money is mostly found in trade of one kind or another, legal or otherwise. There are a number of variables to consider as you formulate your approach, such as the Cold War state between two powers of the galaxy, and the political conditions of the planets you travel between. Frontier features an accurately modeled galaxy and physics that are leaps beyond those of Elite. You start out in one of a handful of solar systems— including our own—and you are able to work your way out from there. The game’s physics model means you’re able to slingshot around the gravity wells of stars and large planets, just as real craft would do if they were navigating such spaces. The level of detail is, for the time the game was released, utterly spectacular. You are able to take off and land on the surface of planets, seamlessly soaring through the atmosphere, into space and the
beyond, even using hyperdrive for interstellar travel. Planets and space stations both provide for trade and ship maintenance, and you’re no longer confined to a single, steadily upgraded craft as you were in the original game. A variety of different craft, suitable for different purposes, are instead made available. Newtonian physics mean that the game’s combat is astonishingly complex—your craft and the enemy ship orbit each other until one manages to connect with lasers and destroy the other. Challenging stuff. JR See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Plok Original release date : 1993 Platform : SNES Developer : Software Creations Genre : Platform
The 1991 release of Sonic the Hedgehog started a stampede as companies competed to release platform games with cooler, more “radical” mascots than Sega’s. By 1993, gamers were sick of it, meaning that a title like Plok—a “cutesy” 2-D platformer with a strong lead character—was doomed. This is a tremendous shame, as Plok was—and still is—a fantastic platform game with great ideas that simply found itself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Designed by the legendary Pickford brothers, who had been working on their idea for more than five years by the time of release, Plok stars a strange hooded character with the ability to throw his limbs (used to attack enemies and even turn on switches). Plok finds his favorite flag stolen and embarks on a quest to get it back—a quest with a fair few twists and turns—and if that sounds odd, the game only gets weirder and weirder still. A rare platformer with a compelling plot, albeit a totally bonkers one, Plok plays well despite its level of difficulty, and its unique graphical style pairs well with a highly impressive soundtrack by Tim and Geoff Follin. MKu
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1990s
Secret of Mana Original release date : 1993 Platform : SNES Developer : Square Genre : Role-Playing / Action
If Final Fantasy saw its developer Square raise the bar for what players would come to expect from turn-based role-playing games, Secret of Mana is the A-list company’s subsequent assault on the realm of action-based RPGs. The result is a fast-paced, witty, and extremely beautiful adventure that blends frantic fights with careful exploration and some genuinely extraordinary 16-bit art. The plot concerns a war between Earth dwellers and gods over control of resources, but the game is most famous for its interface: an elegant command system of menus that lets you cycle quickly through all of the options available to a selected character—an extremely influential design in the world of RPG. Similarly trailblazing, the party system allows for extensive three-player dungeon crawls, an option that really brings the game to life. This is a title built with genuine cooperation in mind. Aside from the glorious cover art, new standards were set by the dazzling soundtrack by Hiroki Kikuta and by Akira Ueda’s masterful background art. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
The Settlers Original release date : 1993 Platform : Various Developer : Blue Byte Genre : Strategy
The idea is simple: create a functional kingdom able to fund enough of an army to take over the map. However, where most real-time strategy games lean on the military side of the equation, reducing the financial side to mining some useful ores, The Settlers expands the economics into a main concern. It’s easy to win when you have armies, but making an army is a process involving hours of play. It’s not just ensuring you have enough miners, iron smelters, and blacksmiths to get your swords, it’s about efficiency: working out a road system so that the workers carrying all the resources don’t bottleneck hopelessly, creating catastrophic failure at the far side of your network. The joy is the satisfaction of a well-balanced accounts book. It’s much more fun than doing your taxes, however, because it sells the idea with charm (the characters are adorable) and scale—the 66,000 characters The Settlers can handle is still impressive. Later versions of the game sped up the pace somewhat, but for proof of what can be made entertaining in a game through pure craft, the original remains an inspiration. KG See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
The 7th Guest Original release date : 1993 Platform : Various Developer : Trilobyte Genre : Puzzle
Spearheading the “interactive movie” boom of the ’90s, The 7th Guest coupled live-action sequences with pre-rendered 3-D. Rated as unsuitable for children for its horror and sexual innuendo, it was reportedly made with just $35,000, Super VHS cameras, and an improvised blue-screen technique. With sequel The 11th Hour, the game sold more than two million copies and earned over $100 million. Welcome to Stauf Mansion, home of a reclusive toymaker whose dolls cursed their owners to horrible deaths. Six unknowing guests were invited to the stay the night, solving a number of fiendish puzzles and learning terrible secrets. None would escape, leaving the player’s amnesiac character to retrace their footsteps in the game. The game’s pre-rendered nature leaves little scope for adventure. Instead, each location you visit features one of the aforementioned puzzles, such as a word puzzle hidden inside a telescope. Fullmotion video clips, meanwhile, give detailed—and impossibly hammy—accounts of your ill-fated predecessors, each played by a real-life actor. Well, a real-life person, at least. DH
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1990s
The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening Original release date : 1993 Platform : Game Boy Developer : Nintendo Genre : Action / Adventure A stranger washed up on a beach, a mountain capped with a giant egg, and a gentle quest to locate eight magical instruments—Link’s Awakening is not just the first Zelda game to wedge its epic adventures onto the tight screen of a handheld, it is also the first to leave the rolling fields and forests of Hyrule behind, ditching the titular princess, the evil Ganon, and the beautiful Triforce. Link travels to mysterious Koholint Island, where he quickly discovers that he must awaken the slumbering Wind Fish if he can ever hope to escape. Despite the superficial changes, it’s another wonderfully comforting adventure, however, Link’s Awakening’s overworld and muddle of dungeons quickly conforming to the eternally fertile Zelda template, with the rich cast of bosses and memorable items providing all the necessary adventure and threat you might expect. While the game features fetch quests a lot more heavily than other titles in the series, it also has its fair share of innovations, including a feather that allows Link to jump, breaking up the overhead action with some rare side-scrolling sections unseen since Zelda II, and—rather curiously—occasionally blending some of the minor characters from the expansive Mario universe into the mix. Originally a standard Game Boy title, Link’s Awakening was re-released for the color version of Nintendo’s handheld in the form of Zelda DX, and those players who upgraded were rewarded with a special additional dungeon to hack through. Either way, this is a marvelous adventure, and although it’s the first of the Zelda games on handhelds, it’s also, in a strange way, one of the truest to the original source material. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Zombies Ate My Neighbors Original release date : 1993 Platform : Various Developer : LucasArts Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
It’s of little use having one of the best game titles ever conceived (although, disappointingly, silly censorship truncated it to just Zombies in Europe) if you haven’t got the play experience to back it up. But spend just a few seconds in either lead character’s sneakers, and you’ll know this B-movieinspired cute and colorful parody is dangerously contagious. The structure follows standard run-andgun principles, with levels requiring clearing of enemies (and, in this case, victims saved) before access to the next stage is allowed. However, as the title suggests so vividly, the content is far from standard fare, with the undead and their pals—werewolves, mummies, vampires, giant ants, and massive demonic babies, to name just a handful—liberally populating the game’s fifty-odd stages. If the enemies are far-fetched, just wait until you see the arsenal at your disposal. From plates to squirt guns to crucifixes, while also passing through more obviously offensive options, the zany selection is a key contributor to the cheeky humor at the (very human) heart of ZAMN. The settings, too, reflect LucasArts’ creative abandon, beginning with some generic examples of suburban life (backyards, a mall) rendered in the game’s endearing visual style, before leading to
more inspired and fiend-related examples that are best left discovered through play. Regardless of the enemies, weapons, or environments, the core game mechanic doesn’t falter, while the addition of limited puzzle elements brings a welcome dynamic into an already hugely entertaining package. Whether played alone or in co-op, it is brilliant fun and a 16-bit experience every gamer should unearth. JDS See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Virtua Fighter Original release date : 1993 Platform : Arcade Developer : Sega Genre : Fighting
Quarter-circle forward. Charge back for two seconds, then forward. Forward, down … downforward? You almost need a PhD to understand how to play some fighting games. Even once you know the moves, you’re still apt to be pounded into a fine paste by someone who has far more time to practice than you do. Sega’s Virtua Fighter, by contrast, is simple enough for any newcomer to pick up. With only three command inputs—punch, kick, and defend—it relies more on timing and reflexes than mastery of joystick machinations. Which is not to suggest that Virtua Fighter lacks depth. On the contrary, its eight combatants all possess different fighting stances and styles, rare for an era in which many games filled out their rosters with palette-swapped duplicates that were functionally identical. Winning a match with the burly wrestler Wolf Hawkfield requires a fundamentally different approach than it does with the lithe Sarah Bryant, and the beauty of the game is that you can begin to figure out why that is by the way it feels to move different fighters around the arena. The combat is, by video game standards, realistic. Characters don’t throw fireballs, or teleport, or spit acid. They fight hand-to-hand, probing for openings to deliver quick, devastating strikes. The
special moves are there, such as counterattacks, combos, and parries, but they follow the flow of the fight, instead of dictating it. As one of the earliest games to make the leap to fully three-dimensional graphics, Virtua Fighter looks downright primitive to modern eyes. The characters are blocky, and the backgrounds devoid of detail. But it all moves with fluidity, grace, and speed, and establishes the template that future 3-D fighters would follow. MK See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds Original release date : 1993 Platform : PC Developer : Looking Glass Technologies Genre : Role-Playing
How can a game with such broad horizons feel so claustrophobic? Sporting a 3-D first-person view that represented the technical pinnacle of the time, Ultima Underworld Il’s free-form roleplaying drama echoed that of Doom and provided the bedrock for the game series, which its developer, Looking Glass Technologies, would come to be celebrated for: System Shock and Thief. Opening in a castle sealed in impervious black rock by the omnipresent Ultima antagonist, the Guardian, your task is to free the fortification and its inhabitants. Your only route is down into sewers and caves until you find a strange crystal that allows you to teleport into alternate dimensions. But as varied and ambitiously creative as they are, each is enclosed and confined, a reflection of both the castle’s dark predicament and the technological limitations of the time. In the Prison Tower, you must infiltrate a goblin-run jail in order to free its prisoners, while in the Pits of Carnage you enter a gladiatorial society in which you must duel to progress. The World of Talorus is an abstract but strictly hierarchical world of alien energy beings. In the Scintillus Academy, you must pass a magician’s practical exam. Though each focuses on challenges such as puzzle solving, combat or exploration, the scenarios allow a variety of approaches. Locations of
objects and conversations are subtly randomized and you usually have the choice to take your own approach, from talking to killing, looting to levitation. It’s a freedom complemented by a magic system in which you construct spells using runes and language rules (for example, cause/life/matter casts Create Food). Like the rest of the game, it presents a logical and flexible system that rewards experimentation in spades. AW See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Shadowrun Original release date : 1993 Platform : Various Developer : Beam Genre : Action / Role-Playing
FASA Corporation’s cyberpunk RPG Shadowrun was once a pen-and-paper game, then it was an isometric action-RPG for the SNES, and then—sadly—it was a cruelly hobbled online-only multiplayer, first-person shooter for both the PC and Xbox 360. While there’s no real disagreement over which version was the most disappointing, the SNES incarnation was certainly the very best of the bunch. Thrusting players into a mysterious urban world of corporate overlords and renegade hackers, players find themselves in the natty leather boots and trench coat of Jake Armitage, a murky wheeler and dealer who has been double-crossed on a recent mission and awakens in a morgue with no memory. Quickly finding himself in the thick of a murderous conspiracy, he has to find out who he is and why people want to kill him, while leveling up, getting better gear, and generally sticking it to The Man—whomever that might turn out to be. Even by modern gaming standards, Shadowrun is an astonishingly stylish product, with moody character art, a great soundtrack, and a game world broken up into various pools of light shining out of the seedy and oppressive darkness. An excellent script and surprisingly unfiddly combat system
that uses magic and more traditional forms of weaponry only add to the immersion. Shadowrun, in all its forms, is a venerable RPG series with clever features and a real sense of depth, and while even the most recent game had its fair share of beleaguered fans lurking somewhere on the ravages of the Internet, it’s the thought of one day getting a sequel to this SNES title—a complex narrative experience that revels in such a smartly realized universe—that is really enough to set even a nonhacker’s mind on fire. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Breath of Fire II Original release date : 1994 Platform : SNES Developer : Capcom Genre : Role-Playing
Breath of Fire II is an RPG great on a console crammed full of them. Released on the SNES, it joins the likes of Secret of Mana, the Final Fantasy series, Chrono Trigger, and the original Breath of Fire at the very top of its chosen genre. It takes place 500 years after the end of the original game to tell the story of Ryu Bateson, a blue-haired boy hero on a quest for justice, which is launched when his friend is framed for a crime he didn’t commit. The game picks up the day/night cycle from its predecessor, which sees the world and its inhabitants transform with every sunset, and it features the turn-based, random encounters that are a staple element of the Japanese RPG genre. Picking the right formation is a crucial part of combat strategy, while another key feature is each character’s special ability, such as Ryu’s dragon transformations or Bow’s fusion form as a giant, cannonball-launching mech. One of the best things about the game is the way the world is gradually opened member has a unique skill that they can use outside of the normal course of play, hunting skills, for example, unlock different mini-games. But the ability to swim or allows the party to access more of the increasingly vast game world, and it’s
up. Each party so fishing and bridge chasms the pacing of
exploration that is one of the game’s greatest strengths. Another is the way the game prefigures the Dark Cloud series by giving you the ability to build your very own town, choosing its architectural style, and gradually filling it with non-player characters that can help you on the main mission—a mission with multiple endings, depending on how effectively you steer Ryu and friends on one of the classic quests of 16-bit storytelling. DM See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Tekken Original release date : 1994 Platform : Various Developer : Namco Genre : Fighting In a time when 3-D fighting games were worldwide hits, Tekken grabbed the title of arcade, and, subsequently, console fighting champion. The first PlayStation title to sell a million units, the game continued the legacy of brawlers as a video game staple. Part of Tekken’s appeal is its intuitiveness. Namco’s commands are examples of great game design—simple to learn the basics, difficult to master over time. Each button corresponds to each limb of the figher, so understanding the relationship and appropriate command comes almost automatically. Using only a modicum of skill, it’s possible to make a good deal of progress, which certainly makes Tekken a rewarding and extremely playable game. In addition to the smooth finish of Tekken’s texture-mapped 3-D characters, the personalities of its characters give the game a distinctive edge. Namco infused each fighter with an elaborate backstory that contorted over time with each subsequent sequel. The plot revolves around Heihachi Mishima, the owner of a multinational corporation and creator of the King of the Iron Fist tournament. His son, Kazuya Mishima, returns to defeat and humiliate his father for his attempt to test his offspring’s mettle during childhood by throwing him off a cliff. Then there’s judo expert Paul Phoenix, Kazuya’s only equal, and King, a Mexican wrestler raising money to fund an orphanage. The plotlines have spun off in many directions since, but it was the initial decision to present such a charismatic roster of fighters that makes the game stand out. That, and its finely honed core game play, which has a realistic fighting style praised by the martial arts community. The reviews upon release were positive, and it has since spawned six sequels. It is, as the announcer so definitively says, a “KO.” JBW See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
EarthBound Original release date : 1994 Platform : SNES Developer : HAL Genre : Role-Playing
EarthBound remains one of those titles that is name-checked by the video gaming cognoscenti more often than it’s actually been played, and that’s a crying shame, as the game behind the reputation is utterly brilliant. A quirky, comical RPG set in the real world rather than a mythical yesteryear filled with dragons and fairies, EarthBound is vivid, colorful, and consistently surprising, filled with memorable enemies and beautiful Americana-influenced backdrops, and centered on a brave band of backyard heroes setting off on the most unlikely of quests. In Japan, the Mother series of games—of which EarthBound is the second installment—is a massive RPG franchise, up there with the likes of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. In the West, however, the titles have had a harder time making their mark. The first game was translated but never released—it lives on as a full-time Internet rumor, going by the name of EarthBound Zero— and the third, and most recent, game is available in a very gray sense via loving fan translation. Only EarthBound itself made it across intact, which is still something to be thankful for, as the series’ oddball foibles (in the original Mother, the first enemy character to bring the player under attack takes the form of a humble table lamp) hardly make for bestseller material.
Which is strange, really, as the overworld is charming and interesting, the characters are utterly adorable, and the battle system is so refined that you have the option of dropping out entirely and letting the game handle all conflicts automatically. Regardless of its lack of success on Western shores, EarthBound continues to exist in some corner of the gaming landscape where it’s always midnight in the suburbs, where aliens lurk in the darkness, and adventure awaits around every bend. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Doom II: Hell on Earth Original release date : 1994 Platform : Various Developer : id Software Genre : First-Person Shooter
In Doom II there is a power-up that lets you punch something so hard that it explodes. Rarely has a sequel got it so right, but then rarely has a sequel had to do so little. The improvements over the original Doom are refinements, really: new weapons, including a magnificent double-barreled shotgun, more levels, and more monsters. Doom II also saw id’s relentless experimentation at its best, creating levels that were all one big setpiece, battle royales that threw caution to the wind, and even moments of downtime amid the carnage—the first signs of what the FPS (first-person shooter) genre refers to as pacing. It helped that it was built on the bones of the greatest FPS of the early ’90s, and it also helped that it was made in double-quick time, id moving with the breakneck speed and effortless ingenuity of a developer not only at the top of its game, creatively, but at the height of its productivity. John Romero, one of gaming’s lost, great, white hopes, was steadily alienating himself from the rest of id’s small team, which culminated in his head being mounted on a stick behind the final boss, the Icon of Sin. When the player thought they were killing the final boss, they were killing Romero. Lead coder John Carmack, meanwhile, became fully absorbed in the stunning 3-D engine destined to replace Doom’s
and make Quake possible. By the time Doom II was finished, the seeds for id’s destruction were sown. Yet the game itself wasn’t just an immense successor to Doom, but the first FPS that could be played online. The LAN death matches of Doom were, thanks a peer-to-peer networking client known as DWANGO, now countrywide death matches. Next to that, the super shotgun is the least important aspect of Doom II’s legacy. Even though it does make a fantastic mess. RS See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Earthworm Jim Original release date : 1994 Platform : Mega Drive Developer : Shiny Entertainment Genre : Platform / Shoot ’Em Up
When he asked a man from Hong Kong for millions of dollars, David Perry was the hotshot programmer behind games like Disney’s Aladdin and Global Gladiators, an award-winning platform game made for McDonald’s. The man in question ran Playmates, a giant of the toy industry, looking to break into video games. Perry’s Shiny Entertainment—a dream team of developers from Britain and the US—proposed something quite original. Enlisting the help of Doug TenNapel, creator of acclaimed Nickelodeon series Catscratch, Shiny came up with Earthworm Jim, an American hero with a spacesuit and ray gun who, true to his name, was a great deal longer than wide. Sensing the opportunity to make a multimedia juggernaut, Perry convinced Playmates and Universal Studios to handle merchandising and a cartoon show, solving the Catch-22 of needing one to justify the other. Strongest of them all, though, remains the game. Animated using techniques familiar to TV rather than 16-bit console games, Earthworm Jim exploded with character. Jim and his fellow cast members—Professor Monkey-for-a-Head, Evil the Cat, and Bob the Killer Goldfish, to name but a few—were first drawn with pencils, then scanned, flood-filled with color and shrunk to create
sprites. LaserDiscs of Tex Avery cartoons were used as inspiration, and the team was forced to express all its ideas as sketches. The result is about as close to an interactive cartoon as you’ll find, its action as smooth and exaggerated as its looks. Clearly made by people thinking on their feet, it has you launching cows into space one minute and riding giant hamsters the next, all while enjoying a responsive form of early run-and-gun. Not bad for a guy with no arms or legs. DH See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Final Fantasy VI Original release date : 1994 Platform : Various Developer : Square Genre : Role-Playing
For a series often ridiculed for its predictability, Final Fantasy VI is a wholly surprising entry. Despite sharing many conceptual similarities to its namesakes—from its towns, dungeons, music, and battle system—in many ways the game bucks its own conventions. Unusually for a J-RPG (Japanese role-playing game), the game features a large ensemble cast instead of a single protagonist, with your control switching between each throughout the game. Moreover, each of the controllable personalities you encounter has a completely distinct and unique way of behaving in battle, not to mention its own fully fleshed out back-story to uncover. Without doubt, Final Fantasy VI’s story is atypical of the series, crammed with visual jokes and witty oneliners. It suffers none of the bloated anime excesses that so often drag down other titles in the genre. Each character enjoys its own believable motivations, flaws, and quirks, which infuse the narrative with richness. The plot keeps the fantasy metaphysics to a minimum, instead focusing on politics and empire building, a decision that again helps the game to feel more grounded and earthly. The engaging setpieces, which walk a difficult line between profundity and comedy, push you onward, and the reduced emphasis on grinding your character through battles helps to keep the game interesting and
exciting for those usually turned off by the genre’s protracted play arc. Battles, while more orthodox than the story, are still wonderfully inventive, individual character traits making the combat constantly exciting. For those who missed it on the SNES, Square Enix’s Game Boy Advance re-release comes highly recommended, with a new translation that irons out some of the original’s creases. SP See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Micro Machines 2: Turbo Tournament Original release date : 1994 Platform : Mega Drive Developer : Codemasters Genre : Driving / Racing
While the original Micro Machines established the winning high concept behind Codemasters’ miniaturized racing series, it was Micro Machines 2: Turbo Tournament that tuned things to perfection, and drew a much wider audience. Naturally, the game includes a new range of vehicles to race and household locations to speed around, with the level of scenic detailing raised considerably since the days of its NES predecessor. The toolshed table, complete with dangerously elongating drill bit; the sand pit scattered with discarded spades and dropped ice cream; the pinball table and its pesky flippers—all of these are rendered in Codemasters’s once-trademark style, with chunky sprites and comic-book color palettes. Although the sequel adds depth to the single-player experience via the new league and time trial options, the key appeal of the game remains its enthralling multiplayer mode, which sees participants being temporarily removed from the race if their vehicle falls too far behind the leader. Recognizing this appeal, Codemasters shipped the game with its J-Cart technology—essentially a customized cartridge complete with two extra joy pad ports, allowing four-player sessions and even an eightplayer party mode. Mega Drive owners lapped it up.
Micro Machines 2 is a defining lesson in how to make a real game out of a children’s license. It’s all wrapped up in the cheeky humor that characterized Codemasters throughout the 8- and 16-bit eras (there’s even a race around a toilet seat). The courses, superbly designed to reward skillful, experienced players, include shortcuts and neat little features, like the sponge ferry in the kitchen sink level that allows players to bash one another into the dishwater. There are no sponge ferries in Gran Turismo. KS See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Tempest 2000 Original release date : 1994 Platform : Jaguar Developer : Llamasoft Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
Jeff Minter’s updating of David Theurer’s classic vector-based shooter took the basic elements of the original and turned them into something new. An audiovisual synthesis par excellence, pressure mixed with pleasure, and a basic core of blasting lots of enemies. The visual style—everything from feedback to the spectrum of rainbow colors—sets the agenda. You’re blasted with strobing lights, pulsing shades, and scattering particle effects. The soundtrack is a succession of relentless dance beats punctuated by sound effects that sync with the mechanical elements, helping you follow what your eyes can’t quite glean from within the landscape. For all the aesthetic pleasure, Tempest 2000 is also the most finely honed shooter ever made by the man who makes nothing but finely honed shooters. Throughout the course of seventy levels, its difficulty spikes up and then smooths out, lets you relax a bonus round before throwing you back into the mix with maddening new elements. Tempest 2000 remains a white-hot moment; it is no wonder that some still prize the Atari Jaguar today. RS See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Little Big Adventure Original release date : 1994 Platform : Various Developer : Adeline Genre : Action / Adventure
Developed in France but set in a vibrant world of pure imagination, this prototypical actionadventure title was like nothing else in 1994. You play Twinsen, a Quetch whose nightmares see him labeled insane but will ultimately save his planet’s inhabitants. This seemingly cute planet is effectively a police state, and its strange inhabitants include Grobos, who look like elephants; Rabbibunnies; and the ancient Spheroids with their distinctive ball shape. The world is rendered in isometric 3-D and is partially free-roaming as unlocked areas can be accessed at will. Standard stuff now, but radical at the time. What endures more than Little Big Adventure’s technical achievements is the world itself. The essential polygonality of the characters is wonderfully realized in 3-D, the rich environments and music providing a palpable sense of place. Rarely have today’s action adventures conjured the otherworldliness and drama of the innocuously titled Little Big Adventure, with its toy-town figures, charming sampled speech, and colorful environs. OB See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Gravity Power Original release date : 1994 Platform : Amiga Developer : Bits Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
In a certain time and place, Gravity Power was the second greatest game of all time. Its time and place was on the dying Commodore Amiga format in the mid ’90s, specifically in the readership of UK magazine Amiga Power. This specially commissioned version of Gravity Force 2 takes the “Power” in its title from the magazine. With Gravity Force 2, it wasn’t about budget, it was all about the experience. You pilot a ship and attempt to fight your opposition while hindered by gravity. This element makes the twisted levels as much a threat as the bullets or bombs of your opponent. The strength is a simple core allied to a mass of levels, expanded by a function allowing you to design your own. Some stages marry high speed with perilous drops into lakes. Others are painfully intricate. Gravity Force 2 was released via the shareware model, by which customers were able to upgrade to an improved version. Gravity Power is the full shareware version, with a few tweaks and extra levels. Sit and play it in two-player mode, and right there, right then, it won’t be the second best game. It’ll be the best. KG
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1990s
Monster Max Original release date : 1994 Platform : Game Boy Developer : Jon Ritman, Bernie Drummond Genre : Adventure
A dastardly human named King Krond has turned up on Max’s planet and banned all music, which is the setup for more than 600 rooms full of the best puzzles this niche genre would ever see. Starting with nothing, you gradually acquire equipment for Max, incuding a pair of boots that let you jump, a force field, and lightning. The locations are filled with spikes, conveyor belts, and blocks, and arrangements of these basic elements are the meat of Monster Max’s world. Within these considerable limits, Monster Max is nothing less than a mini-masterpiece. The variation it manages to squeeze from simple principles is remarkable, and the game rarely threatens to go stale. A special mention, too, to Bernie Drummond’s work on the visual style: the Game Boy was hardly what you’d call a processing powerhouse, yet Monster Max and his world positively ooze identity. The robots, traps, and monsters complement the daft plot perfectly, and even give an occasionally sinister air to its excesses, while few who made it to the end will forget the cathartic, exhilarating thrill that ended the adventure. RS
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1990s
Point Blank Original release date : 1994 Platform : Various Developer : Namco Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
In the ’90s, light gun gaming was dominated by macho shoot-outs, like Virtua Cop and Time Crisis, featuring wide-shouldered gangsters and slick hyper-choreographed violence. And it was just then that Point Blank came along, unapologetically returning us to the campy, garish funfair roots of the genre. Arriving first in the arcade before transferring to PlayStation, it’s a frantic collection of shooting mini-games, none of them involving animated human targets (though the odd cardboard ninja is encountered). Players choose a skill level, then start blasting through myriad wacky stages, either alone or alongside a friend. (You have to love the fact that the guns provided with the coin-op cabinet are blue and pink.) Some challenges are specifically designed to test speed, like having to blast a car with fifty holes or shoot all the bouncing balls within a time limit. Others concentrate on accuracy, like targeting a single leaf falling from a tree using just one bullet. The defining element is the sheer and imaginative variety of the tasks. It’s a surreal parade of daft ideas embracing everything from squawking chickens to leaping skeletons, all wrapped up in brash, kawaii visuals. And to provide uniformity, two bizarre characters named Dr. Dan and Dr. Don
regularly appear, usually imperiled by incoming tanks or by tribesmen with flaming torches. In the PlayStation version and its sequels, this comedy duo take on a more central role, enlivening the cut scenes and intros with silly slapstick routines. Recently exhumed for the DS, Point Blank is a formative example of the game that all the family can play, as enjoyable and challenging to hardcore Namco fanatics as it is to complete newcomers—a rare achievement. KS See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Puzzle Bobble Original release date : 1994 Platform : Various Developer : Taito Genre : Puzzle
A video gaming rule: Objects of the same color, when placed together in combination, will eventually reach critical mass and disappear. Puzzle Bobble is often described as a melding of various other puzzlers. In reality it is an original. A mass of colored balls descend relentlessly from the top of the screen. You control a cannon at the bottom of the screen, which fires colored balls that can be bounced off walls at angles, and stick where they hit on the approaching mass. The genius of Puzzle Bobble (aka Bust a Move) lies in the player gradually building their own doom. It’s rare that the screen fills with balls, thanks to simple gravity. It’s your own missed shots and bad calculations that leave strange cornices hanging where there should be none, creating new obstacles as you try to rid yourself of the old ones. All Puzzle Bobble players can remember experiencing that moment when the anger became too much and, in a fit of desperation mixed with pique following a bad shot, they fired several volleys of balls in a desperate and foolish attempt to improve their situation. It never does. A neat touch lets you get rid of any number of balls by removing their connection to the mass, meaning that bad shots can, with enough patience, turn into good ones. But this is a game
where calmness is in short supply, captured in the little figures of Bub and Bob near the cannon, who become panicky as the mass of multicolor frog spawn inches closer and closer. It will always hit bottom, and it will always be game over, because that is how puzzle games work. But somehow you just can’t help returning to them again and again. Needless to say, playing head-to-head against a friend delivers the maximum opportunity for delight and frustration. RS See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Sensible World of Soccer Original release date : 1994 Platform : Various Developer : Sensible Software Genre : Sports
Originally released for Commodore’s Amiga in 1994, Sensible World of Soccer took the already amazing match play of its predecessor, Sensible Soccer, and wrapped it up within a more comprehensive management game than had ever been seen before. It was the sheer size and scope that immediately impressed. For the first time, there were thousands of real-world teams, populated by even more thousands of real-world players, and an inexhaustible range of tactical options for virtual managers to pursue during the course of their twenty-year careers—from sitting back and shouting from the sidelines (well, the sofa) to getting hands-on and taking control of matches. Compared to the photorealistic fakers and divers of today’s football games, Sensible World of Soccer has a certain retro appeal, but in truth it isn’t much to look at: tiny little pixely blobs pass for players who speed around simple 2-D fields that are basic blocks of brown or green. The great strength of the game lies in its speed and attention to detail: the way those pixely blobs move around the field with real intelligence, the way the ball bounces and moves realistically, the way you can curl shots into the top corner with a sweet dab of after touch. And all this via just one button.
It is a credit to the game’s programming that the flat, unadorned rectangles that pass for fields actually take on real-world handling characteristics with surprising subtlety. Soggy fields hold the ball up, while the ball skids and bounces across freshly laid turf. And it is nothing less than remarkable how those tiny little stick men have the capacity to take over your brain and convince you that you are playing a real, live game of soccer, more so than in many fully 3-D successors. DM See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Samurai Shodown II Original release date : 1994 Platform : Various Developer : SNK Genre : Fighting
In the early ’90s, arcade manufacturer SNK was set on besting Street Fighter II at its own game. Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting would be fussy, awkwardly different attempts, and each would fail to capture arcade-goers’ imaginations. SNK decided to try a different tactic, allowing an internal group of developers, known as Team Galapagos, to create a one-on-one fighting game that, rather than feature a contemporary streetfighting tournament, was set in feudal Japan, armed its characters with bladed weapons, and decreased the emphasis on special moves. That title was the original Samurai Shodown. Though imperfect—and not just because of the egregious misspelling of “showdown” (the title is called Samurai Spirits in Japan)—Samurai Shodown would become immediately popular. It had tense and deeply tactical play, attacks needed to be carefully timed to avoid revealing deadly weaknesses, and every single factor that made the original a success would be improved upon in the sequel. Generally considered the peak of the series, Samurai Shodown II’s modifications—some new
characters, a few more special moves and defensive options—are subtle, and the title retains the simplicity of execution that makes the Shodown games’ weapon-based combat so satisfying. Featuring more detailed graphics and responsive controls, it is among the most accomplished fighting games of the mid ’90s, with groundbreaking features, such as parrying, and a wealth of Easter eggs. Indeed, the only thing that lets Samurai Shodown II down is its English translation, which is so bad you’d think it was intentional. Fortunately, a refined, balanced design can’t be lost in translation. MKu See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Uniracers Original release date : 1994 Platform : SNES Developer : DMA Design Genre : Racing The studio is now known as Rockstar North, but from its founding in 1988 until 2002, it was called DMA Design. The celebrated Scottish developer was responsible for a remarkably broad range of games, from puzzlers like Lemmings to open-world action games like Grand Theft Auto. Less famous, however, is its first game for console and Nintendo, Uniracers. Not because it wasn’t good. Known as Unirally in the UK, Uniracers’s side-viewed unicycleracing-cumplatforming moves both fast and beautifully smoothly, set on glossy, colorful tubular tracks that curve and cross like Möbius strips in abstract space. Uniracers also features a stunt system, which grants speed boosts for chains of twists and turns that you try to get your eager little unicycle to land correctly. Played in two-player split-screen mode, it’s riotous, each contender desperately attempting to eke an extra stunt out of each jump. The unicycle is displayed using pre-rendered CGI sprites—the in-vogue style of the time, since it came out around the same time as Rare’s Donkey Kong Country—and it displays enormous character, wobbling in place before the start of each race, leaning forward as you boost, the seat looking back as a competitor approaches from behind, and bowing when you win. But that very character would be the reason why Uniracers isn’t as well known today as it should be. In 1994, Pixar was still to release Toy Story, the film that would push it to mainstream acclaim; already wielding considerable power, Pixar made a legal claim alleging that Uniracers’s unicycle had plagiarized the star of its 1987 animated short, Red’s Dream. DMA Design and publisher Nintendo lost the resulting court case, and Nintendo never created more than the game’s initial run of 300,000 carts. AW See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Sub-Terrania Original release date : 1994 Platform : Mega Drive Developer : Zyrinx Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
Alongside asteroids and invaders from space, another threat to gamers throughout the years has been inertia. Gravitar, Thrust, Exile, and Bangai-O all task the player with metering out power and piloting their ship through a contorted maze of tunnels (often while wresting control from gravity’s inexorable pull). Zyrinx produced one of the best examples of the genre in Sub-Terrania, a game that makes no concessions to underprepared players, delivering a sizeable challenge over its ten atmospheric levels. The plot concerns an attack by aliens on an underground mining colony. You are the lone pilot tasked with defeating the aliens, using an experimental attack ship. While the game borrows many elements from predecessors (gravitational effects, finite fuel supplies, and the need to rescue stranded miners, for instance), it also innovates, adding features like fuel-saving mining rails to ride and submodules that allow your craft to travel underwater. But even with these aids in place, the game’s difficulty surprised players and critics alike, making Sub-Terrania a perfect envoy for Sega’s positioning of the Mega Drive as the console of choice for the hardcore gamer. The game’s fairly perfunctory visuals serve as a simple mechanism to communicate feedback to
the player and compare unfavorably to some of the bolder graphical experiments of the era. They do have a charm of their own, though, evoking the biological horror school of game art made popular by Psygnosis. And, accompanied by the moody in-game music, players determined to beat the game will not soon forget them (much as they may wish to on failing level eight for the umpteenth time). One for the brave, then, but the rewards are proportionally increased for those willing to put in the extra effort. BM See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Super Punch-Out!! Original release date : 1994 Platform : SNES Developer : Nintendo Genre : Sports
Perhaps only Nintendo could have turned boxing into a funny cartoon and created such an evocative title with mangled English. Super Punch-Outll’s greatness is in making fighting predictable, basing its entire system around the moment in boxing when one participant figures out the other, and so boils pugilism down to basics. Simplicity of attack: one button punches with the left, one with the right, aiming for the head if you’re pressing up and to the body if you’re not; plus, a separate button for a superpunch. Simplicity of defense: to block, high push up; to duck, press down; to swerve, press left or right; to defend the body, do nothing. Simplicity of purpose: learn your opponent’s attack patterns and how to counter. To some, Super Punch-Out!! is a glorified series of quick-time events: Once you know how an opponent works, they can’t touch you. To others, that’s the whole point. You might know exactly how to put Bear Hugger, a fat lumberjack with an invulnerable gut, flat on his back, but you’ll still get in the ring and do it again. You know what Mr. Machoman’s going to do every time his trainer shouts, exactly how to alternate the blocks when Piston Hurricane tries his Hurricane Rush, and when to hit Bald Bull to put him down in one.
In part, Super Punch-Outll’s attraction lies in its colorful personalities, their little tics and taunts as they try to outfox and outpsyche the coldest opponent they’ll ever face. And the comic moments when they cheat outrageously, followed by the surprised expression when, realizing that the game’s up, they crumple in defeat. But more than all of that, it’s something that goes right to the heart of why victory feels so good in any field: because you’ve put the hours in to be this good. You’ve earned it. RS See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Super Metroid Original release date : 1994 Platform : SNES Developer : Nintendo Genre : Platform / Shoot ’Em Up
While Mario and Zelda generally head off on chirpy, colorful adventures filled with allies as well as enemies, the Metroid series plumbs darker reaches. Taking its inspiration from deep-space horrors rather than the squishy delights of Saturday morning cartoons, the Metroid games provide a bit of balance to Nintendo’s first-party catalog—complex, rather frightening stories that hinge on a feeling of being lost or trapped. As with so many SNES updates to classic NES series, Super Metroid retains the basics—the moody exploration, the unfolding game world, the backtracking, the upgrading and transformations into the morph ball—and adds such a layer of imaginative polish and graphical beauty that the whole thing becomes completely transcendent. Plunged into adventure on the mysterious planet Zebes, where Samus must hunt for a stolen Metroid larva, Super Metroid conjures some of the spookiest, loneliest, and downright frightening platforming levels ever created. The sense of being deep underground and far from help is palpable, and, despite the vivid design, the game’s sense of creeping dread can be overwhelming at times. The map is huge and complex, filled with secrets and hidden corners, while the power-ups constantly change the feel of the game. This is a completionist’s dream, a trek to the
hundred percent mark coupled with a rich, involving story. It’s also become something of a speed-run favorite, as players race to complete the epic adventure in as short a period as possible, harvesting as few of the game’s powerups as they can. But if this is your first time on Zebes, you should probably take your time. Slow down, check out every dingy corridor, and revel in one of video gaming’s most completely immersive fantasies. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Beneath a Steel Sky Original release date : 1994 Platform : Various Developer : Revolution Software Genre : Adventure
Of all the games produced by UK studios year upon year, the most quintessentially British might forever be Beneath a Steel Sky. Simultaneously delicate, sophisticated, campy, and melancholic, it’s also a great interactive comic book. Its point-and-click action, peppered with cut scenes by Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons, make it one of the most fondly remembered and revisited of the early ’90s adventure games. Set in a bleak vision of tomorrow’s Australia, it tells the story of Robert Foster, a plane crash survivor raised from childhood by tribesmen in the Outback, known here as the Gap. A smooth talker trained in robotics and survival, he’s abducted by stormtroopers sent from Union City, a domed metropolis run by an omniscient computer. His tribe is annihilated, leaving him with no one for company but Joey, a robot companion he keeps stored on a circuit board. Fleeing his captors after their helicopter crashes inside the city, his escape takes him through a web of factories and skyscrapers, with the city’s eccentric population giving him few of the answers he’s looking for. With its Yorkshire-accented jobsworths and Americans lumped with UK slang and references to Doctor Who, Douglas Adams, and Joy Division, Beneath a Steel Sky is as incongruous a game set in
Australia as you’re likely to find. But its inspirations, which range from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to dystopia fiction and Nietzsche, are universal. The same can be said of its backdrops, which represent Union City in the same painstaking detail as anything from LucasArts or Sierra On-Line. Though the game was made freeware in 2003, the 2009 iPhone version is an essential purchase, featuring excellent touch controls, preserved dialogue, remastered music, and “motion comic” cut scenes that refresh this early Revolution gem. DH See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Killer Instinct Original release date : 1994 Platform : Various Developer : Rare Genre : Fighting
Nintendo has long been known for its family-friendly attitude. Its participation, therefore, in the mid-’90s struggle for head-to-head fighting game supremacy was unexpected, the competing titles of the time generally vying to be as gratuitous and outlandish as possible. Rare’s Killer Instinct remains something of an anomaly for the company—a no-holds-barred fighting game that lists among its cast of characters: a salivating werewolf, a shape-shifting alien, a sword-wielding skeleton, and, of course, a scantily clad lady of exotic provenance, all committed to beating the pulp out of one another. Lacking the chesslike depth of Street Fighter II and the shock tactics of Mortal Kombat, Killer Instinct distinguishes itself in two ways. First, with its pre-rendered graphics, which lend its visuals a fullness and heft that real-time 3-D games would spend years trying to match. Characters look Plasticine-like and shiny, akin to moving action figures, which is oddly fitting given their caricatured designs. They fight against backdrops that have depth and detail, not like the uninvolving barren and static arenas found in Killer Instinct’s contemporaries. Second, with the inclusion of nearly endless combos, each one celebrated by an announcer who
sounds like a proud parent, Killer Instinct positions itself as a flashy crowd-pleaser. Combos aren’t accomplished on a one-to-one basis with the player’s actions. Instead, a relatively simple control input can unleash an absurdly long string of attacks. It is actually possible to start a fighter’s devastating “ultra combo” and walk away from the cabinet for high-fives, your character pummeling some poor sucker all the while. Hey, what good is a fighting game if it doesn’t let you humiliate your opponent? MK See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Theme Park Original release date : 1994 Platform : Various Developer : Bullfrog Productions Genre : Management Simulation
Theme Park is yet another management sim, but one that comes with a vital difference: what you’re managing is actually quite interesting. Bullfrog’s classic game puts you in charge of your own pocket Disneyland equivalent, a nexus of cotton candy and lines. Starting with a free plot of land and a few hundred thousand dollars, it’s up to you to start laying out paths, placing concessions, hiring staff, and saving up for the best rides as you work your way steadily toward untold riches. So while at heart you’re working out profit margins and trying to tilt the supply/demand curve in your favor, it all feels a little more fresh and exciting than if you were nudging out rivals in the garment industry or controlling the assets of an enormous international bank. Bullfrog’s skill with amusing little features helps: Entertainers waddle around your grounds, dressed as giant animals; fast-food stalls look suitably sugary and slick; and the rides, which, if you’re playing one of the more advanced iterations of the game, you can click on for a quick cinematic, are suitably preposterous in their loops and dips and sudden curves. Or you might prefer the bouncy castle, the tree house, or the Ferris wheel. Ported to almost everything—a recent version landed it on the DS, with mixed results—and as
influential in the management genre as Bullfrog’s own Populous was for god games, Theme Park is clever and colorful, streamlined and quietly sardonic. When Electronic Arts bought out Bullfrog, the publishing giant inevitably rode this rather charming slice of Britishness into the ground, but if you’ve got a yearning to plug through some spreadsheets and yearly accounts, and a sharp desire to calculate just how much salt to put on your fries, Theme Park is definitely the game you’ve been waiting for. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
King of Fighters ’94 Original release date : 1994 Platform : Various Developer : SNK Genre : Fighting
The first title in a successful, award-winning series of fighting games that would see yearly releases until 2003—and continue to see regular releases thereafter—King of Fighters 94 combines the fighters of SNK’s Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting franchises (plus a few original characters) into a team-battle-based 2-D fighter that would become the company’s flagship product. Created to attract and combine the audience of SNK’s differing fighting franchises, King of Fighters 94 was the first one-on-one 2-D fighter to feature team play. Players select a group of three fighters—each combatant battling after the other until defeated or victorious—to enter the game’s fictional tournament. Unlike later King of Fighters titles, King of Fighters 94 restricts players to choosing preset teams that (supposedly) represent different nations and introduces players to characters that would become iconic in their own right, such as posterboy Kyo Kusanagi. Indeed, no matter what your taste in fighting games, you’ll probably find something to like here. Though the title is considered by many fans to be obsolete in the face of the many updates the series has seen since its introduction—and, as the first title in a crossover, it suffers some balancing issues—King of Fighters 94 is a highly playable fighter that presents a good introduction to the series
for players who would be otherwise confused by the vast quantity of characters and fighting styles on offer in later versions. Featuring classic SNK art and music with some highly challenging AI, this is the title that finally distinguished SNK’s street-fight-themed output from Capcom’s, creating a popularity that would endure long after similar games were abandoned by most competitors. MKu See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Star Wars: TIE Fighter Original release date : 1994 Platform : PC Developer : Totally Games Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
It was perfect symmetry. Before making Star Wars: TIE Fighter, designer Lawrence Holland of Lucasfilm Games created a suite of World War II dogfighting games, including Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe. For Star Wars ’s space dogfights, George Lucas looked to The Dam Busters and 633 Squadron for inspiration. When Holland was asked to think about creating a space combat game, he quickly realized that he and Lucas were already looking squarely at the same sources. The result was a series of games that represent some of the best film tie-ins ever created. The secret is in the subtle blend of strict adherence to Star Wars lore and a willingness to design imaginatively on top of them. Immediately striking are the intense, twisting dogfights against star fields streaked with beams of bright, green and orange laser fire, as well as the iconographic lines of Star War’s distinctive spacecraft. But the meat lies in one of gaming’s most beautiful mechanics: your craft’s power system. Demanding that you delicately balance your finite energy supply between lasers, engines, and shields, you are continually asked to think about how to approach each situation. Dump all your power into engines for speed, and you’ll risk running out of lasers and having no protection when you meet trouble.
Star Wars: TIE Fighter, which has you fight for the Empire, features smoothly shaded fighters and meticulously designed missions. And though you might assume you’d always want to fight for the plucky Rebellion, the game’s vision of dark political intrigue oozing below a veneer of mundane bureaucracy is gripping. It remains a terrible thrill to pilot a craft as fragile and feather-light as a regular TIE. Showing Star Wars from the dark side resulted in one of the most enthralling visions of its universe. AW See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Worms Original release date : 1995 Platform : Various Developer : Team 17 Genre : Action / Strategy
Unassuming even by the standards of its own day, the basic visuals of Worms overlay a lot of big ideas. A turn-based combat game in which teams of four try to kill one another with an assortment of “wacky” weaponry, and a design that allows for utter chaos as much as it does for meticulous planning. It also features the Beatles in annelid form, a reverence for wind speed, a selection of closecombat moves perfect for bragging rights, and the option to commit suicide. Four teams battle it out, with players taking their turn under a time limit, to prevent things from becoming too labored, and every game is different, thanks to the battlefield being randomly generated and fully destructible. Missiles create huge craters, players begin to cravenly tunnel out hidey-holes, and mines take out a good chunk of the ground, as well as worms. By the end of a round, the environment is always unrecognizable from its initial form. The formidable armory is stocked with the typical missiles, grenades, and shotguns, but it’s objects like the bungee rope, humiliating finishers like the dragon punch, and random nonsense like a bouncing, exploding sheep that make it memorable.
Unpredictability is the key quality of Worms, alongside colorful little touches, such as the ability to name your own team, push players into the water, or the gravestones that mark a fallen warrior. Worms’s greatness comes down not just to the combination of these elements, but to the simple fact it was designed to be played within half an hour with a few friends, a lot of chatting, and plenty of laughs. It may even be one of the first games to recognize just how social gaming can be. RS See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Command & Conquer Original release date : 1995 Platform : Various Developer : Westwood Studios Genre : Strategy
Widely considered the quintessential real-time strategy video game, Westwood Studios’s epic used the latest PC technology to expand and popularize its predecessor, Dune II, laying the groundwork for more than just sequels and spin-offs. The plot centers around Tiberium—a fiercely contested alien resource slowly infecting an alternate 1995. In the blue corner: the Global Defense Initiative (GDI), which with its real and hypothetical hardware is the game’s United Nations. In the red corner: the Brotherhood of Nod, a bizarre but no-less-dangerous cult led by a charismatic terrorist called Kane. In a structure adopted by almost every RTS (real-time strategy) game since, each features its own full-length campaign, encourages its own approach, and is crucially dependent on local Tiberium. Most of Command & Conquer’s battles turn upon a well-prepared, decisive push that breaks the enemy line and ruins its mining operations, paralyzing its ability to repair and rearm. Nicknamed the “tank rush,” it usually involves a large number of on-screen units commanded as one or more groups, a feature made possible by the game’s greatly improved interface and performance, and competently defended by the opposing AI. Other missions involve just a single special-ops unit with a sneakier
objective, or the survival of a group in which no one is expendable. Sprinkled in between are the knowingly cheap and playful live action cut scenes that became a series hallmark, especially as it entered Cold War spin-off series Red Alert. The beloved cut scenes made a lauded comeback in 2008’s Red Alert 3, with a quite stupefying and eclectic cast, ranging from Tim Curry and Jonathan Pryce to MMA legend Randy Couture and Jenny McCarthy. DH See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Alien Soldier Original release date : 1995 Platform : Mega Drive Developer : Treasure Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
Treasure, so the story goes, once plotted a graph of the excitement a gamer experiences when playing one of their games, and discovered that the high points were invariably to be found during the boss battles. If that’s the case, Japan’s best-loved boutique developer concluded, then why not make a game that consists primarily of boss battles and not a lot else? Alien Soldier was the prime beneficiary of this train of thought, being a side-scrolling run-andgun shooter that, in many ways, represents the pinnacle of Treasure’s exemplary work throughout the Sega Mega Drive era. With thirty-one bosses spread throughout its twenty-five levels, it’s also one of the most exciting and intense experiences in the canon, a machine-gun volley of sprites that the hero, Epsilon Eagle, must dodge through and shoot down. There are only two levels of difficulty in Alien Soldier— Supereasy and Superhard—but the truth is that the game is extremely challenging no matter which is picked. The principle difference between the two is the loss of soft saves and continues in the latter option. Far less accessible than Treasure’s earlier classic, Gunstar Heroes (1993), Alien Soldier nevertheless features a similar multipleweapon combination system, one that must be carefully learned and mastered if you’re to have any
hope of making it through the game. Released toward the end of the system’s life, Alien Soldier is now one of the Mega Drive’s most expensive titles as it enjoyed only a small print run and never even made it to American shores. A few bugs were introduced into the English-language version, ensuring that the Japanese release is the premium edition. Today, it is also available to play on Nintendo Wii’s Virtual Console. SP See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Full Throttle Original release date : 1995 Platform : PC, Mac Developer : LucasArts Genre : Adventure
The lure of the open road is a persistent theme in Western culture. Video games got in on the action with Full Throttle, one in a long line of superb adventure games from the LucasArts factory. Steeped in motorcycle culture and set in a cartoon version of the American southwest, it’s a paean to rugged individualism. Our hero, a barrel-chested, gravel-voiced biker named Ben, is cut from a familiar, antiheroic cloth. The leader of an outlaw gang called the Polecats, he rigorously follows his own code of honor and ethics, but when someone pushes him, he pushes back. The pusher, in this case, is a corporate executive named Adrian Ripburger. Ripburger frames Ben for murder as part of his dastardly scheme to turn the world’s last motorcycle manufacturer, Corley Motors, into a maker of minivans (the horror!), sending Ben on a quest to clear his name and find the true heir to the Corley throne. As with all LucasArts adventure games, most of the game play in Full Throttle takes the form of (occasionally obtuse) puzzles, but, as befits Ben’s bulldoglike attitude, they’re more straightforward than usual. Empty gas tank? Siphon some fuel. Locked door? Kick it down. The game is also heavy on the action, with Ben partaking in motorcycle duels on desert highways and competing in a hilarious,
fiery demolition derby. The strong script, by Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman, and the sterling voice work, notably Roy Conrad as Ben and Mark Hamill as the slimy Ripburger, lend the proceedings depth, humor, and pathos. It’s a quintessentially American story: After thwarting the moneyed elite, Ben turns his back on safety and security, and rides off into the sunset, because, baby, he’s gotta be free. MK See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
BioForge Original release date : 1995 Platform : PC Developer : Origin Systems Genre : Role-Playing / Puzzle
BioForge’s original working title, Interactive Movie I, should give you an idea of Origin Systems’s cinematic ambition and the high hopes held for this game. Set in an unrecognizably distant future, where religious extremists believe mankind can only evolve through cybernetic implants, the player takes the role of a cyborg that wakes, suffering from amnesia, in a devastated research station on an alien planet. While the setup—a ruined location where everyone who isn’t dead is insane, and the player has to piece the plot together through reading notes and logs—has been used before and since, BioForge remains unique in its decision to tell its tale via specifically cinematic presentation, using thirdperson controls paired with fixed camera angles to carefully direct the player’s experience. Playing a Frankenstein’s monster, the game’s tanklike controls and clumsy combat feel more like intentional touches than awkward side effects of the technology, and though the game suffers when experienced nowadays, due to its fixed 320 x 200 resolution and mere 256-color palette, it featured many unique graphical touches for the time, such as single-skin texture-mapped characters with skeleton-based animation.
No longer technically stunning, BioForge’s strengths lie in its intelligently designed play, where the player joins the amnesiac protagonist in not knowing what to do. Rather than being led by the hand, the game encourages players to explore and experiment and find their own solutions to most puzzles. Unlike the majority of “interactive movies,” BioForge told its own story in its own unique way, expecting players to use their individuality. What better definition of an interactive movie could there be? MKu See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
MechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat Original release date : 1995 Platform : Various Developer : Activision Genre : Action / Strategy Hailing from the line of popular Battle Tech tabletop games, MechWarrior 2:31st Century Combat not only had to satisfy hardcore fans of a decade-old franchise, but, as a marquee PC game for publisher Activision, it had to make the case for two relatively unproven technologies: 3-D graphics and Internet play. MechWarrior 2 succeeds on both counts, balancing an accessible control scheme with the deep customization that devotees demand, all packaged in a sterling presentation. You play a soldier for one of two warring clans, Wolf or Jade Falcon, fighting in armored vehicles called mechs. Mechs are nominally humanoid in appearance, and pack devastating firepower. As fantastical as the conceit is, it’s grounded by the mundane portrayal of mechs. In a world exhausted by war, conduits of destruction operate like old jalopies. Mechs can only carry limited ammunition. They overheat. They lose limbs, and stagger along like cripples. All this makes victory in MechWarrior 2 more a matter of strategy than of reflexes. Players need to carefully consider their builds before each mission. Whether battling another player on a direct connection or fighting several foes in the single-player campaign, it’s most important to neutralize your opponent’s strength. Against a fast-moving, high-jumping mech, take out its legs. Against a slowmoving, high-powered mech, try to destroy its weapon pods. When faced with a mech on the brink of destruction, players will automatically eject, but a manual override gives you the option to go down with the ship. Though game play is unaffected either way, pride keeps many a pilot flailing in a broken, smoldering mech, even after all hope of recovery is gone. MK See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together Original release date : 1995 Platform : Various Developer : Quest Genre : Role-Playing
The place of Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together in gaming history is assured. Hironobu Sakaguchi, the chairman of Square at the time, was so impressed by the developer’s work on this game that he hired the entire team to come and work on Final Fantasy Tactics, a game with which it naturally shares a number of similarities. A chess-like tactical RPG, Tactics Ogre also launched the career of designer wunderkind Yasumi Matsuno, who went on to create other classics in the canon, such as Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy XII. The seeds of this success are all clearly visible in this game, which debuted on the SNES and combined a grand historical setting, full of Shakespearean knights and political intrigue, with a deep and involved combat system. Battles, played out on an isometric field, were innovative for deciding each character’s turn, based on their speed statistic (in the past, each side would take turns to move all of their characters at once). And, for the first time, Tactics Ogre introduced a full branching storyline to the tactical RPG genre, with multiple routes through the narrative that ensure the player always feels as though their successes and failures play a vital role in the story’s progression. Thanks to its ingenious story; grand, evocative soundtrack; and some groundbreaking mechanics
that updated and upgraded a somewhat crusty template, Tactics Ogre frequently makes the Hundred Best Games of All Time lists, and was voted the seventh greatest game of all time by readers of Japan’s leading gaming magazine, Famitsu. Tactics Ogre should be considered nothing short of a masterpiece, even disregarding the fact that it was the catalyst for so many great titles in subsequent years. SP See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Descent Original release date : 1995 Platform : Various Developer : Parallax Software Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
The shameful secret of many early 3-D games is that they didn’t actually take place in three dimensions. Oh, they gave the illusion of depth of field, but it was a ruse. In the early days you could never aim along the Z axis, or walk beneath where you’d been before. The arrival of Interplay’s Descent, a dizzying corridor shooter that brought full 3-D to the masses, was like receiving a radio signal from an alien civilization: It changed everything we thought we knew. I n Descent, players pilot a small hovercraft through complex tunnel systems, attempting to eradicate a computer virus that has infected automated mining equipment and turned it hostile. The tropes are familiar for first-person shooters of the era: floating icons represent weapon and shield upgrades for your craft, hostages can be rescued by touching them, and advancing through the levels is mostly a matter of finding colored key cards and their corresponding doors. There’s no sense of an ingame narrative unspooling or that the player’s actions have consequences that will be felt later. What Descent does have, in spades, is dizzying and devious level design. The tunnel networks are disorienting, to say the least. With environments composed largely of monochromatic walls, and a ship that can turn and spin in any direction, it’s challenging enough to keep track of which way is up,
never mind which way you’re going. At the end of each level, players trigger an autodestruct mechanism and must race against a timer to escape the mine. This is not easy. Fortunately, the play control is excellent (as long as you’re using a joystick). Ships drift and tilt with a naturalistic feel, which led to possibly apocryphal tales of vertigo and motion sickness among early players. Perhaps that was intended as praise. MK See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom Original release date : 1995 Platform : Various Developer : Origin Systems Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
Wing Commander is like TV’s Battlestar Galactica played out through the eyes of fighter pilots, only with more World War II-style dogfights. Capital ships are the cities, aces their champions, and the vacuum in between is where the fate of the galaxy unfolds. Plots are uncovered, patrols are ambushed—it’s always “quiet, too quiet”—and deaths are avenged by Gatling guns and missiles. The narrative is unbroken throughout, the banter moving from the cockpit to the mess hall and back again, creating a sense of camaraderie amid the drama. Over the next nine years each of the games marks a turning point in noninteractivity, be it the groundbreaking animated cutscenes of Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi, or the reallife actors and blue screens of Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger. The format stayed the same but the balance of resources shifted, the player needing ever-greater hardware while games demanded spiraling budgets. At a then-unheard-of $12 million, Wing Commander IV’s topped the lot. Set during the aftermath of the Terran-Kilrathi War that preoccupied games one to three, The
Price of Freedom is the second to star Mark Hamill and Malcolm McDowell. Filmed at broadcast quality using actual sets, its B-grade drama spanned six CD-ROMs and had to be downsampled (until a later DVD release) to play on hardware available at the time. It’s a remarkably literal attempt to bring games and movies together which, like many of the interactive movies of the ’90s, learns the pitfalls the hard way. It’s actually hard to suspend disbelief when so much of what you’re seeing is real, and even harder to withhold judgment of its writing and direction. DH See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Wipeout Original release date : 1995 Platform : PS1 Developer : Psygnosis Genre : Racing It’s easy to forget that Wipeout, a PlayStation launch title in the West from Liverpool studio Psygnosis, entered the slipstream of popular culture two whole years before the first Grand Theft Auto. An elegant and sophisticated racer in its own right, it gained added lift from a seminal licensed soundtrack and cutting-edge look, courtesy of now-defunct design studio the Designers Republic. The futuristic setting and challenges of races like Silverstream (made in Greenland out of manmade crystal) and Terramax (on Mars) were accompanied by radical, contemporary tracks by the Chemical Brothers, Leftfield, Orbital, and others. Cutting edge music paired with fun, original, sci-fi concepts contribute to making this a pure adrenalin rush shot through with electronica. The game was so slick, in fact, that even an early concept video was enough to feature in Hackers, the Angelina Jolie movie about high-school cyberpunks and Internet terrorists. Even without the mock-consumerist imagery plastered over its billboards and cover art, the sense of movement in Wipeout—racers piloting needlelike hovercraft which skimmed corners as if on a breeze—was unmistakable. Its 3-D ships and raceways, grounded in pseudoscience and real-world locations, defied comparison with that previous example of the antigrav racer, Nintendo’s F-Zero. Not even fourteen years’ worth of sequels and imitators have rendered the first game entirely obsolete. While its soundtrack remains the series’ best, its status as a weapons-free game of breakneck races and time trials has made it the envy of its successors. Now full of modes, power-ups, and visual experiments, there’s no going back for Sony’s loyal series—which gives its 1995 debut a unique and lasting purity. DH See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Virtua Cop 2 Original release date : 1995 Platform : Arcade Developer : Sega Genre : Shoot ’Em Up The citizens of Virtua City don’t need a police force, they need an army. Due process? Not in a town where heavily armed gangsters are outnumbering civilians three-to-one. Criminals lean out of windows, swarm on motorcycles, and swoop through the air on jet packs. Law enforcement is about who can fire the most bullets. As one of three members of Virtua City’s finest, your job is simple: pull the trigger until peace is restored. The light gun shooter has always been a popular arcade genre, but until Virtua Cop came along, they were staid affairs, creeping along predetermined paths, with cookie-cutter enemies popping up in predictable places. Virtua Cop 2 doesn’t rewrite any of the rules—you still fire offscreen to reload and find weapon upgrades inside breakable crates and barrels—it just polishes them to a diamondlike shine. Virtua Cop 2 whisks players through a series of thrilling action sequences. The camera never stays in one place for too long, whooshing down city streets and up the sides of buildings. Swiftly moving set pieces aboard a subway train and on the highway are the closest you’ll get to starring in an action movie. Particularly rewarding is blasting the tires of an enemy sedan and watching it flip end over end. Though the game is short, with only three levels, plus a Proving Ground mode, a few smart design decisions keep each play through feeling fresh. Every level offers branching paths, so you won’t see the same sights over and over. And because the enemies react dynamically, depending on where you hit them, you get a real sense of immersion in the game world. Shoot a baddie in the knee, and his leg buckles. Shoot him in the arm, and he drops his weapon. Shoot him in the crotch, and—well, you’ll find out for yourself. Everybody aims for the crotch. MK See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
The Dig Original release date : 1995 Platform : PC, Mac Developer : LucasArts Genre : Adventure A strange and demanding puzzler to rival Loom or Myst, The Dig is LucasArts’s most divisive game. Based on an idea by Steven Spielberg, with effects by Industrial Light & Magic and dialogue by writer Orson Scott Card, it frequently breaks out of the orbit of the world of the point-and-click, gravitating toward “hard” sci-fi and Hollywood production. To critics it’s muddled, humorless, and distracted, while fans agree that you would think that if you lacked the required attention span. As ever, the truth lies somewhere in between. Opening with that classic shot of a stargazing observatory, the game sends a team of astronauts to investigate Attila, an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. Cracking it open with nuclear warheads, the unlikely trio of Boston Low (by-the-book survival expert), Ludger Brink (laconic superstar geologist), and Maggie Robbins (feisty reporter and linguist) venture inside, only to discover a starship that blasts them back to its distant home world. As weird and wonderful as anything in recent groundbreaking games or movies, this utterly alien planet gives little away, requiring close inspection and lateral thought to explore and escape. Most of The Dig’s puzzles are of the lock/key variety, but with the locks and keys strewn about in the form of odd geometric treasures, murals, and machines. Symbols demand meanings and connections must be made, but the usual signposts are nowhere to be found. Voiced by Robert Patrick, an actor who excels at playing deceptively hardboiled servicemen, Low is no Indiana Jones, while this new world is no Monkey Island. There’s a straightness to The Dig that jars with its wondrous music and scenery, much of which you’ll visit a few times too many. Nevertheless, it’s a bizarre and courageous oddity. DH See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Yoshi’s Island Original release date : 1995 Platform : SNES Developer : Nintendo Genre : Platform If you want to know just how staggeringly confident the 16-bit era Mario designers had grown in their own magical abilities to mint fun from simple pixels, look no further than Yoshi’s Island. In this Mario “prequel” the plumber himself is restricted to the role of babbling infant, while Yoshi, the series’ trusty dinosaur companion, restores kidnapped babies to their rightful parents long before the real adventures have even begun. Just as the Mario series was settling into its delightful conventions, then Yoshi’s Island came along to offer perhaps the most imaginative platformer yet, a charming kind of relay race in which each chubby little bulb-nosed dinosaur takes a turn piggybacking Mario and Luigi through one of the game’s brilliantly imaginative stages, before passing them on to the next participant. Levels include ski runs, glittering mines, and the requisite fiery dungeons, and new gimmicks are thrown in to keep you on your toes and the action entertaining, such as destructible lumps of clay, squishy ground that will suck you in if you’re not careful, giant enemies that swoop in from the background, and Yoshi’s main skill, the ability to eat most smaller foes and transform them into eggs to be subsequently used as ranged weapons. It’s a visual departure for the series, too: a hand-drawn paper-and-crayon affair that makes the game look like a magical pop-up book filled with butterflies, strange watery demons, and glinting cardboard coins. And, sadly, it’s a dead end. While the game received a streamlined sequel of sorts in the form of the N64’s Yoshi’s Story and the DS’s brilliant Yoshi Touch & Go, the original was never bettered, and never, truly, advanced upon. Check it out now by tracking down the Game Boy Advance version, or look out for its appearance on Wii’s Virtual Console. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Chrono Trigger Original release date : 1995 Platform : SNES Developer : Square Genre : Role-Playing
Chrono Trigger leverages that most underutilized of game-play mechanics—time itself—to create a tightly controlled RPG that feels expansive, imaginative, and genuinely era defining, and the result, although one of the most strangely organized of all classic RPGs, is also one of the most widely loved. Chrono Trigger is, quite simply, a slice of genuine magic: one of the best Japanese role-playing games on a platform—the SNES—that was hardly short of fantastical brilliance in that department. It all kicks off at the Millennial Fair with a disastrous test-run for a crackpot inventor’s teleportation device. From this humble opening, a massive time-hopping adventure quickly unfolds, traveling back to the distant past, and forward to the irradiated future with its dusty raceways and empty factories. Today, players are as likely to name check the game’s many quirks—most notably the fact that the final boss was accessible from a fairly early point in the game, should the player be interested in trying their luck on a battle—but Chrono Trigger is actually all about the moments: the first sight of the grim future of a land you’ve already explored in its vibrant glory days, a trip to a mysterious
church where some very sinister nuns are knocking around, and a devastatingly moving conversation with a little robot. Everyone leaves Chrono Trigger with their own favorite memories, of course, and it’s the charm of the game that it manages to balance the epic with the intimate so well. After several sequels, add-ons, and even unofficial fan-made remakes, the good news is that following the release of the DS version, a title that was once an import-only experience for European players is now to be found on the shelves of your local game store. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis Original release date : 1995 Platform : PC, Mac Developer : Bruderbund Software Genre : Edutainment
In the ’90s, educational games were defined—for the worse—by a suffer-through-dinner-to-getyour-dessert style of game play epitomized by the Math Blaster series: The game would walk students through the same kind of math or spelling problems they struggled through in school, while bribing them with a reward of simple action games. Other educators rebelled at the scheme, and The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis, designed by Chris Hancock and Scot Osterweil, works off a completely different lesson plan. Players meet the Zoombinis, a race of fuzzy creatures who lead happy lives until they’re enslaved by their nemesis, the Bloat. They escape and make their way to a new homeland, and getting them there entails solving logic puzzles that are presented with almost no clues; players have to experiment their way through matching and grouping puzzles that get harder with every level. For example, a given rope bridge is allergic to Zoombinis who have a certain characteristic—say, the ones who wear rollerskates—but only through careful observation will you figure out which ones. The kidfriendly visuals coated puzzles that grew mind-boggling as you advanced through the levels, but every time the fun lay in the learning—and teamwork in the classroom was always encouraged.
The game was a hit that spawned two sequels, but even today, few others have followed its lead. Educational games have yet to get a serious foothold in schools; the Math Blaster paradigm remains common, and grown-ups and kids can both see through it. But video games can still teach problem solving, deduction, and teamwork, suggesting that the genre has potential—and classics like this game provide the case study. CDa See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Return Fire Original release date : 1995 Platform : 3DO Developer : Silent Software Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
There’s something particularly curious about how the use of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” in a game immediately lends it an added sense of substance. Given that Return Fire also throws in Rossini’s “William Tell Overture,” Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” and Holst’s “The Planets,” you’d expect the game disk and accompanying documentation to be made of uranium. Aptly, there is weight—in a historical context, at least—to Silent Software’s experience, which essentially offers a vehicle-based game of “capture the flag” set within a number of increasingly complex landscapes. Focused almost exclusively on a two-player dynamic (a single-player mode does exist, but the lack of genuine AI opposition makes the experience not worthy of great exploration), opponents have four units of varying abilities—helicopter, tank, support vehicle, Jeep— and must use these to scour the land, locate the enemy flag, and return it to their camp (alternatively, the annihilation of their rival also works). The appeal comes from working out strategic approaches that will outclass those of your counterpart, and adapting your machinery to whatever your preferred tactics are—not necessarily a common feature of games of the era. The aforementioned exclusively classical soundtrack (delivered in surround sound), combined
with once-impressive camera work and explosive two-player split-screen action, ensured Return Fire’s status as a must-have 3DO title upon release. Fifteen years of game evolution and the necessary distance and detachment from an ill-supported, struggling format results in it being difficult to conjure up quite the same excitement over the game, but it retains a simplistic appeal. A decisive strategy game in grand, stirring trappings. JDS See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness Original release date : 1995 Platform : PC, Mac Developer : Blizzard Entertainment Genre : Strategy
Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness won’t be the most advanced RTS title a fan of the genre has played these days, but it may be the most fondly remembered. It will also be among the funniest. Where its main rival, Command & Conquer, was partly renowned for its live-action cut scenes, Warcraft II was better known for its protagonists’ corny one-liners. This humorous bent extends to the game visuals, with the orcs in particular having an endearing cartoon quality, somewhat reminiscent of the Games Workshop Warhammer franchise that allegedly inspired the series. That influence, plus Dungeons & Dragons and a splash of Tolkien, is writ large across the plot, which involves an almighty scrap between humans and orcs, and their allies, such as gnomes, elves, trolls, and goblins. Blizzard tells a decent story, but in terms of game play, the races make no real difference. Each side’s units are almost entirely identical aside from visuals, with only a few spells setting them apart. Similarly, a few hero characters turn up as the campaign mode rolls along, but while they’re almost all tougher than the common arrow fodder and help develop the narrative, they’re not a big feature of battle. The upside to this simplicity is that Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness is arguably the best-tuned
RTS game of its vintage, especially in multiplayer. All the genre staples are here—gold and wood as resources, successively more advanced buildings and units as you traverse the technology tree, and fights that easily degenerate into a mob rush—and done with bags of charm. The naval and airborne units are a particular treat. Without the success of this game there’d be no World of Warcraft. For that fact alone it deserves our respect or admonishment, depending on how your last raid fared. OB See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery Original release date : 1995 Platform : PC, Mac Developer : Sierra On-Line Genre : Adventure
Full-motion video ushered in an exciting new era of game making, taking advantage of CD-ROM technology and providing a new outlet for actors to display their craft. The concept of bringing Hollywood into homes with full player interactivity sounded a death knell for traditional movies. This was the future. For about five minutes. As quickly as they were heralded as the next big thing, FMV games became the butt of jokes. Still, after the phenomenal critical success of the first Gabriel Knight adventure, the second game jumped on the FMV bandwagon and gave the format credibility with a compelling game experience, supported by excellent performances from the cast. Filmed using blue screen technology, the actors— notably Dean Erickson playing Gabriel and Joanne Takahashi as his research assistant, moral compass, muse, and sounding board—were then superimposed on static backdrops that the player interacts with to search for clues and information. The game has budding novelist Gabriel traipsing to his ancestral home in Germany after reports of a werewolf attack. But this is no simple monster hunt as Gabriel’s investigation and Grace’s research leads to revelations about King Ludwig II and the composer Wagner. Heady stuff. But also smart and
engaging stuff, wrapped as it is in a game play mechanic that manages to invoke a real sense of danger and trepidation. This game’s tremendous storytelling, exposition, and true adventure blend with excellent use of the era’s hardware, for an experience that, for reasons that remain unclear to adventure fans, went out of vogue. The game further elevated designer Jane Jensen’s profile as one of the most creative storytellers in the industry. RSm See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Sega Rally Championship Original release date : 1995 Platform : Arcade Developer : Sega Genre : Driving
In Sega Rally Championship, you may be racing other cars to the finish line, but your toughest opponent is the road itself. Narrow, winding streets challenge your reaction time with sudden hairpin turns. Shifting road conditions affect your car’s handling as you go from slipping and sliding across a slick, muddy off-road section to screaming over the cobblestones of a European mountain town. There are small jumps, too, but instead of giving you an aerial thrill, they’re terrifying hazards. Take one at anything but the perfect angle, and upon landing you’re liable to spin wildly out of control, or worse. The cars—your choice of a Toyota Celica or a Lancia Delta—have a real sense of weight and momentum. At times they feel like a willful steed, one you need to wrangle and finesse to get it to go where you want. Drifting is key, but it’s a matter of constantly correcting against your car’s inertia throughout the turn rather than locking it into the optimal angle at the start. For an arcade game, this is surprisingly deep. Because the game follows the rally circuit model, it progresses through linear segments instead of repeating laps around perfectly maintained professional raceways. You’ll zip through several distinct
stages, each overstuffed with challenges. To help navigate is your co-pilot, heard but not seen, who calls out each upcoming curve in a chipper tone of voice: “Easy left!” “Medium right!” Occasionally, he seems unsure of himself, and, worryingly, adds the word “maybe” to his directions, although it sounds for all the world as though he’s calling you “baby.” Nonstop and demanding, Sega Rally Championship is a more rigorous and exacting racing experience than Sega’s prior efforts, Virtua Racing and Daytona USA. MK See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars Original release date : 1996 Platform : Various Developer : Revolution Software Genre : Adventure
Straying from the tongue-in-cheek LucasArts heritage of the point-and-click genre, Revolution Studios fabricates a tangible world of mystery rooted in historical fact with the Broken Sword video game series. Everyman protagonist George Stobbart leads an immersive narrative that draws threads of classic crime stories into a tapestry of animated adventure, journeying from thriller to character drama with ease. The physical travels of Stobbart and journalist Nico Collard, as they race to solve a murder shrouded in conspiracy, underpins the title’s other main draw: its locales. The interactive backdrops o f Broken Sword create both an intricate sense of place and the lure of the unknown. The Paris opening, the most layered and attractive, awash with autumnal hues, sets a bar that subsequent scenarios cannot quite reach, though. Additionally, for all the faithfulness to architecture and nuances of the picturesque, the puzzles themselves occasionally verge on incoherent (using a cat to obtain an essential object, for example)—an inherent foible of the genre, perhaps, but no less a confounding frustration. The high level production values aren’t limited to visuals. Television and film composer
Barrington Pheloung’s score punctuates Broken Sword’s slow burn with sparks of orchestral grace. It’s the juxtaposition of the quiet, contemplative investigation and creeping, cued diegetic sound that conjures the conspiratorial atmosphere and makes it stick long in the memory. More than a puzzle quest for answers, Broken Sword is a key example of informed, engrossing virtual tourism to be filed alongside the likes of Myst. Visually stimulating in motion and rewarding in practice, it is a measured, captivating story intelligently and beautifully told. DV See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo Original release date : 1996 Platform : Various Developer : Capcom Genre : Puzzle
Don’t let the name fool you. Not only is there no un-Super or non-Turbo version of Puzzle Fighter II, there isn’t even a Puzzle Fighter I. It’s a riff on Capcom’s endless Hyper, Turbo, and Championship Street Fighter II variations throughout the 1990s. It may have started as a goof, but Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo is a genuine achievement, fusing gem swapping puzzle mechanics with an innovative head to head battle system as deep and rewarding as the fighting games it happens to lampoon. Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo is even presented like a fighter. When play starts, you and an opponent choose to play as a highly stylized, anime-inspired version of a combatant from Capcom’s Street Fighter or Darkstalkers series. Each player has a grid on either side of the screen, into which pairs of colored gems drop. To clear a gem, place a same-colored crash gem adjacent to it. It will not only destroy that gem, but all gems of the same color that it touches. The loser is the one whose part of the screen fills with gems first. The fun starts when you realize you’re not simply racing to clear your own screen faster than the other guy. Clear your gems, and you’ll drop some onto your opponent’s board, as your characters slap
each other in the middle of the screen. Place like colors in rectangles of two-by-two or greater, and they’ll form devastating power gems. The bigger the power gem, the more counter gems it will drop on your opponent when you destroy it. A Puzzle Fighter match is a series of back-and-forth maneuvers, with players teetering on the brink of destruction before unleashing an endless chain that drops a screenful of gems on an opponent. Rematches are mandatory. A joke? Please. Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo is serious business. MK See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Duke Nukem 3D Original release date : 1996 Platform : Various Developer : Apogee Software Genre : First-Person Shooter
By the end of the 2000s one of the biggest legends, and one of the biggest jokes, in gaming lore was Duke Nukem Forever. This was purported to be the latest chapter in a historic franchise, and is now a game that nobody expects ever to see the light of day. Why did anyone care in the first place? Blame the nostalgia on Duke Nukem 3D, one of the first classics of the first-person shooter genre and a lighter, crasser alternative to the clenched jaws and hellspawn of Doom and Quake. Duke’s opening quip sums up his philosophy: “It’s time to kick ass and chew bubble gum. And I’m all outta gum.” From the seedy side of Los Angeles to a riff on Mission: Impossible, he scours the streets for aliens, shooting up a porno store and fighting bad cops, who actually look like pigs, and when he runs out of bullets, a boot in the butt works too. But Duke’s world is more than a shooting gallery. There are secret locations and weapons hidden throughout the game, requiring a measure of forethought and some interest in exploring levels thoroughly. Don’t miss the RPG that’s hiding in the first scene. Duke Nukem 3D was also an early favorite for multiplayer deathmatches over LANs and the Internet. Shortly after the game’s release, the Total Entertainment Network service matched players
up online for a fee, and it was enormously popular. The game offered up inventive and entertaining play, and levels like “Spin Cycle,” with its moving walls and confusing surfaces, still hold up well against modern titles. Reissues on the iPhone and Xbox 360 keep the legend alive, and Duke was arguably an influence for 2009’s Eat Lead: Matt Hazard, a send up of action franchises that last beyond their prime. Even with its dated graphics, it’s still worth a yuck. But act fast: You’ll definitely want to get caught up before the sequel comes out. CDa See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Command & Conquer: Red Alert Original release date : 1996 Platform : Various Developer : Westwood Studios Genre : Strategy
Real-time strategy games tend to be fairly serious sorts of experiences. They’re about war, for one thing, which is already serious enough, and they’re generally enormously taxing and demanding, requiring players to take in an entire battlefield’s worth of information, to isolate threats very quickly, and react to devastating changes on the fly. So it’s no surprise that Command & Conquer is a fairly serious real-time strategy game. Series offshoot Red Alert, however, really isn’t. Red Alert is a counterfactual real-time strategy, turning on the notion that Einstein went back in time to kill Adolf Hitler when he was still a nobody (already, things are becoming fairly unserious), only to return to his own time to find the Allies hard at war in Europe, fighting against a massive Soviet war machine that has sprung up in the absence of Nazi Germany. It could happen. What’s less likely to happen, however, is the development of some of the units that Red Alert lets you mess around with. These include science-fiction standards like Tesla Coils, capable of zapping troops in a flurry of electricity. Subsequent games would take this concept further until, in Red Alert 3, you were firing armored bears at enemies or dispatching tanks that transformed into jet fighters.
That said, despite the wobblier sets and campier acting, Red Alert remains serious about being a game. Factions and units are well balanced, maps are clean tactical spaces, and the user interface sets the genre’s standard. With the series getting loopier and loopier with every installment—the cover for the third in the series presents the prospect of Russian shock troopers in hot pants—Red Alert remains a necessary antidote to the glum world conflicts of the main Command & Conquer plotline, providing an explosion of color in a heavily cratered landscape. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Civilization II Original release date : 1996 Platform : PC, Mac Developer : Microprose Software Genre : Strategy
Civilization might have been the game with which Sid Meier made his name, but he wasn’t involved in the creation of the sequel. Nevertheless, it built on the foundations laid by his groundbreaking original to make the march of human progress even more absorbing and addictive. Once again players negotiate the tricky waters of human history by taking a single tribe of nearsavages and turning them into a technologically advanced civilization, ready to leave the planet and depart for outer space. If Civilization II can be said to have a goal, it is to either subdue all of your competing empires or to launch a spaceship to Alpha Centauri by the year 2020. But, as ever, the journey is more interesting than the destination, and the real objective is to simply manage the many, and sometimes conflicting, demands of growing a civilization from scratch. You have to deal with combat scenarios; learning diplomacy; the development of technology; managing the geographical expansion of your empire; the ever increasing size of the population; and ensuring the happiness of your people. In short, you have a lot of balls to juggle and they’re all in the air at once. It’s both compelling and demanding, a unique combination that makes the game completely addictive.
One of the brilliant things about Civilization II is the ease with which the scope of your struggles shifts, from the small scale and local at the outset, to planet spanning problems by its end. Early in the game your concerns are exploring the planet; by the end you are managing its conservation. Indeed, while the educational aspect of the game can be overplayed, its environmental message seems sound enough: The game deducts points from polluters. If only the real world were quite so civilized. DM See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Mario Kart 64 Original release date : 1996 Platform : N64 Developer : Nintendo Genre : Driving The N64 version of Mario Kart has had more than its fair share of detractors, but while it may not have the pixelated charm of the original entry in the bestselling series, it’s still a genre classic in its own right. This is a game that is all too possible to lose entire evenings to, even now. Leaving behind the flat Mode-7 driven tracks of old, Mario Kart 64 features full threedimensional graphics delivering fantastical hills, bumps, jumps, and even the odd tunnel as you speed around the twisting courses. While giving the game a pleasantly bouncy feel, such features also play with your visibility, meaning that it’s more important than ever that you learn the routes and pin down the hazards and shortcuts as quickly as possible. The tracks themselves are a great haul. Toad’s Turnpike marked the first appearance of other nonkart traffic in a Mario Kart game while the beautiful Royal Raceway let you duck out of the main course to explore Peach’s castle. Each level has a bundle of features for players to enjoy along with a lovingly detailed design to back it up. Not all roads are classics, however. Rainbow Road is smartly crafted but a bit of a slog, while the less said about Yoshi Valley, with its confusing mess of alternate pathways, the better. Overall, though, these levels offer up a new and exciting dimension to this successful franchise. The most important new addition comes in the form of four-player support. The screen is divided into quarters, so all players can see themselves and their opponents simultaneously, leading to some of the most heartfelt video game cursing of all time as Mario’s colorful world turns dirty as the power-ups go off. All of them are a treat to use, but a well-timed lightning bolt when a competitor’s about to take a jump can be particularly effective. If you’re looking for hours of racing fun, look no further. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
The Neverhood Original release date : 1996 Platform : Various Developer : The Neverhood Genre : Adventure
Point-and-click adventures exist in an odd space in the video game universe. Some of the most beloved and appreciated games of all time reside under that banner, yet few of them achieve the kind of commercial success that their innovation and quality deserves. Count in that number The Neverhood, an original, inventive adventure starring Klaymen on a journey through a weird and wonderful world, accompanied by a funky soundtrack. Designed by artist and animator Doug TenNapel (who also created Earthworm Jim for Shiny, and boasts an impressive résumé packed with popular graphic novels), the claymation art style provides a distinct backdrop for the puzzles and story evolution. Finding a way to each new location by pointing and clicking through puzzles is a reward in itself as you work to reveal the next part of a story in which Klaymen aims to awaken Hoborg, the creator of the Neverhood itself. All good yarns need a compelling villain, and in Klogg, The Neverhood has a doozy. Klogg has wrested the crown from Hoborg and it’s up to Klaymen to recover it. What he does with the crown, however, is a choice that leads to one of three different endings. The journey is packed with interesting locations and getting to know the ducklike Klaymen and his sidekicks all adds to the
charm. And charm really is a big factor in The Neverhood’s appeal, with well-written gags that buck the impression that the game is more suitable for kids. It’s not; it’s a truly imaginative journey through a world in which Klaymen has to understand his own origins and purpose. That’s achieved by playing disks on TVs dotted around the world, each narrated by a character called Willie Trombone. It’s easy to get lost in The Neverhood, which makes that final, concluding decision that much more compelling. RSm See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Guardian Heroes Original release date : 1996 Platform : Saturn Developer : Treasure Genre : Fighting
Japanese-style factory Treasure isn’t short on beloved games, but few have captured the imaginations of the studio’s audience quite as thoroughly as Guardian Heroes, a side-scrolling beat ’em up with colorful character designs, a great fighting system, and some very special additions to the format. Fan sites dissect the game’s characters, fights regularly break out over the best tactics for winning its battles, and the art work is among the greatest that Treasure has ever created. Colorful and complex, it often seems to stand as a symbol for the company as a whole. Guardian Heroes tells the story of four warriors who stumble upon a magical sword filled with ancient powers, and the Golden Warrior it subsequently wakes from the dead. Foremost among the game’s many innovations is the inclusion of this nonplayer/undead hero who will fight alongside you as you plow through the game, covering your back when you need it the most. Elsewhere, Guardian Heroes includes smart additions from other game styles, such as experience points, which can be spent to evolve your character, and a bizarre multiplaned battlefield, which means that the game blends three-dimensional and two-dimensional spaces in its combat. If that wasn’t enough, the story itself throws up branching paths, offering a great deal of delicious replayability.
Released for Sega’s 32-bit Saturn, a console whose peculiar innards have proven rather hard to emulate consistently, Guardian Heroes today may prove an expensive chore to track down. Advance Guardian Heroes, a sequel—in itself something of a departure for Treasure’s willful iconoclasts— was released for Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance, but, as smart as it is, it can’t hold a candle to the original game. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
International Track & Field Original release date : 1996 Platform : PS1 Developer : Konami Genre : Sports
Sometimes the things from which we expect the least are the ones that most surprise us. On paper, a remake of Konami’s 1980s Track & Field games for the PlayStation generation doesn’t seem worthy of much attention. Excellent as those early arcade hits were, gobbling up pocket money almost as quickly as players became able to tap those two run buttons, by the mid-1990s the focus had sprinted to the brave new worlds afforded by the arrival of three-dimensional gaming. Not one to buck the trend, International Track & Field hopped, stepped, and jumped toward it, keen to embrace the three-dimensional space along with its contemporaries. The irony is that there are few examples from the era that do so as confidently and as competently as this reworking of a classic coin-operated title that few people cared to revisit. Aside from convincing animation and the atmosphere of a full stadium, multitap compatibility enables a crucial element: four-player action. On your own, the game’s eleven events will hold a certain appeal for as long as it takes to break most of the world records. But add in three competitors—previously not possible in the game’s earlier incarnations—and mix in head-to-head events such as the hundred-meter sprint alongside traditionally individual challenges (javelin, long jump, etc.), and International Track & Field
transforms into one of the most intensely competitive arenas. While the graphics were reworked in line with the increased processing power of new hardware, Konami wisely refrained from updating the three-button setup of the original Track & Field. This means the focus on the game experience is uncommonly pure. The only drawback is the number of joy pads you’ll go through. JDS See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Nights Into Dreams Original release date : 1996 Platform : Saturn Developer : Sonic Team Genre : Action
If you’ve ever dreamed that you could fly, then playing Nights Into Dreams will feel instantly familiar. You control an impish figure named Nights, who dresses as a court jester and soars through the air with a casual grace. Capturing the freewheeling sensation of flight, not as it is in real life but in the imagination, Nights Into Dreams is more about the joys of the immediate experience—swooping toward the ground, turning a loop-the-loop—than about pursuing ordinary video game objectives. Those objectives are there, of course. They’re just not the focus. To advance, Nights must collect a specified number of orbs from each level within a time limit. It’s easy enough for anybody to progress from one level to the next, but at the end of each stage, players are given a letter grade based on the speed and style with which they completed their goal. By linking together stunts and flying through floating gates in pursuit of the orbs, Nights can rack up style points while advancing through the story. What little challenge there is comes from trying to achieve that elusive A ranking. The story’s frame, about two children, each of whom experiences humiliation at school and then falls asleep to troubled dreams, provides the impetus for each level. Through the avatar of Nights, they will learn to overcome their fears—after the obligatory boss fight, that is. The game’s insistence
on the treacly narrative is a misstep, but one that’s easy to overlook amid the pleasure of flying. A shortened, Christmas-themed version of the game, with a Santa-styled Nights dashing through the snow to collect holiday ornaments, is rare but not impossible to find. The Yuletide makeover suits the game so well, it’s just a shame that it’s only two levels long. MK See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
GTI Club Rally Côte d’Azur Original release date : 1996 Platform : Arcade Developer : Konami Genre : Driving
For a game that introduced something of a revolutionary concept to the already crowded driving game genre, GTI Club Rally Côte d’Azur had a surprisingly short-lived appearance in the arcade circuit of the late 1990s. But while it might have burned through its tank of gas faster than most, it nevertheless left a lasting impression on those who witnessed its cheeky, screechy arrival on the scene. Who could forget the colorful (and then excellent) visuals depicting a small but feisty selection of European hot hatches and the tight, twisty, atypically busy nature of the game’s Mediterranean setting? Not to mention a game cabinet that’s the size of a small shop and includes a hand brake for negotiating those pesky 90-degree turns. As important as those elements proved, they merely provide support for the game’s central premise of a free-roaming environment that leaves you the choice of chancing new routes in the hope of discovering the shortcuts that will enable you to beat your seven opponents. Combined with the necessity to avoid civilian traffic (or else witness some great crash sequences) and the devilishly strict time limits of checkpoint-based play, the game experience emerges as an intense cocktail of
constant frantic steering and countless near-misses. What it isn’t is a lesson in vehicle dynamics. Even for its era, the handling model is surprisingly basic, offering little in terms of player feedback other than exaggerated (but thoroughly artificial) body roll and an almost imperceptible level of road holding. In this particular case, however, that really doesn’t matter. Because as proof of the importance of delivering a carefree, universally enjoyable, and charm-ridden central concept, GTI Club Rally Côte d’Azur still takes some beating. JDS See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Harvest Moon Original release date : 1996 Platform : SNES Developer : Natsume Genre : Role-Playing
Who do you want to be in a game? A spaceman? A soldier? A knight on a perilous quest? Okay, how about a farmer? You know, tilling the land, tending the livestock, looking after crops, and basing your life around the relentless ticktock of the passing seasons and trudging through the wintery snows to milk cows. Not so keen? Are you sure? Harvest Moon is a farming simulation, but a farming simulation in which the nasty bits of farming, such as wrenching chicken’s heads off and putting bolts through cows’ brains, are dialed back a bit to make way for a gentle anime depiction of the countryside lifestyle in all its buttery glory. In this delightful title you get to feed and look after your animals, water your crops, milk your cows—and talk to them while you’re at it—and other such farming activities in the most timely manner imaginable in order to maximize your farm’s potential. Unlikely as it sounds, this calm and pastoral agenda will inevitably weave a strong spell until you’re so gripped by the game that you can’t escape it. A time management exercise at its heart, Harvest Moon is capable of dressing its bare clockwork up in such an entertaining manner that you don’t really mind being rushed around or sent on a series of what are, essentially, some rather
thankless tasks. Fans certainly don’t seem to care as they buy handfuls of very similar sequels by the bucketload and ensure that, even today, every season of the gaming calendar has a Harvest Moon release or two. While recent games are perhaps only for the hardcore pretend farmer, however, the original was a strange treat anybody could enjoy, and it’s now available, inevitably, on the Wii’s Virtual Console service. So, before you shrug off the idea of becoming a farmer, why not give this unusual game a try? CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Marathon Infinity Original release date : 1996 Platform : Mac Developer : Bungie Genre : First-Person Shooter
Long before Master Chief’s fight began, Bungie was focused on another titanic struggle. The Marathon trilogy shares some of its mythology with the Halo universe (and indeed with the previous release, Pathways Into Darkness), but allusions are subtle, as mysterious as the alien races they reference. If any relationship with Halo is certain, it is the shared attention to detail with which both series’ realities are constructed. Marathon Infinity, the final part of the story, is widely considered to be the pinnacle. While sharing an engine with the second game, Marathon Infinity transformed the first-person shooter with its nonlinear, branching framework. The convoluted plot (best understood by playing through the first two games in advance) involves a search for a reality in which the chaotic and malevolent “W’rkncacnter” entity is not released. To achieve this, the player explores several different timelines, some of which contradict the events of earlier games, and each of which is followed by a dream sequence. The actions you take in the dream determine whether you find yourself in a new timeline or return to one already visited. These existential considerations are far in advance of the more typical “shoot everything” first-person shooter narrative.
Multiplayer games are fought on bespoke maps rather than emptied single-player levels, and a variety of play types are offered in addition to the basic death match. But it’s the democratic stance on creation that most impresses—Bungie includes Anvil (a physics-and-graphics editor) and Forge (a map editor) with the game. Due to its Mac exclusivity, this astonishing series was somewhat overshadowed by its PC-focused peers, but now that freeware versions are available on Linux and PC, there is no excuse for anyone not to attempt a Marathon. BM See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Quake Original release date : 1996 Platform : PC Developer : id Software Genre : First-Person Shooter
Despite being a pioneer of full three-dimensional graphics in the first-person shooter genre—or perhaps because of it—Quake is a master class in level design. It’s brightly confident in its grasp of space and solidity; even the difficulty and episode selection is its own memorable environment. The game crams in jumping puzzles, a secret area, and is also capable of moonlighting as an unlikely death match arena. In fact, if you pick any of Quake’s two dozen or so levels, you’ll find the critical path is less a line than a rabid dance lesson. Chiseled into rock or beaten out of metal, Quake’s forbidding angles remain unique, haunted by the ghosts of the games it could have been as id’s hotheaded designers quarreled between dark, fantasy role playing and science-fiction shooter. Though it was the instigator of the “brown corridor” visual treatment, there’s art and intention to the oppressive monotone. Its disconnected areas are thick with a sense of place, of eye-catching incidental detail, stranded in crushing blacks: vaults hemmed with silver crosses, the massive embossed metal Jesus, charnel house window settings for apocalyptic stained glass. All anchored by one of the great pre-music game collaborations between developer and
composer. Nine Inch Nails’ frontman Trent Reznor’s bespoke soundscape is at turns deafening, oily, and pitiless, and never less than part of Quake’s texture. Aural cues sound out environmental hazards and forewarn of enemies well enough to play blind—or in a blind panic from the frenzy of its eldritch cage matches, its too close combat. In a Quake level, Always Run isn’t a toggle, it’s a commandment, and the numerous strengths within this title turn a game that should have been a “what if?” into a “this is.” BS See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Resident Evil Original release date : 1996 Platform : Various Developer : Capcom Genre : Survival Horror
People have argued for a long time about where and when the survival horror genre got its start. Some stretch it as far back as the esoteric claustrophobia of Impossible Mission on the Commodore 64, while others would argue that games had to get clever before they got scary, and that Irrational’s System Shock 2 is the first game really capable of generating fear as well as simple surprise. But for most, the genre begins here, in a big scary mansion with some ropey full-motion video acting. A haunted house story wrapped up with an unlikely tale of corporate wrongdoing, Resident Evil is almost a shooter. A couple of things stop that from feeling like the most accurate of classifications, the first being the cumbersome controls, making moving about a bit of a chore and aiming accurately a panicky frustration. On top of that, the game flings both enemies and ammunition at you in a far more limited manner than a standard action title would. This game is about staging fights and enforcing the hording of resources rather than allowing players to let rip with everything they have. It’s also about making you jump. From the sudden appearance of a zombie when you least expected one, to the moment that dogs leap through a window at you, Resident Evil is heavily scripted, certainly, but it has the power to shock you at least once. It may have taken until the fourth
installment for the series to get really clever, but so much of that promise is already evident at the start of the franchise, despite the hackneyed story, horrible voice work, and simplistic puzzles. Like a zombie film that’s past its prime, Resident Evil might be more endearing than frightening these days, but those strange, shuffling zombies have cast long shadows indeed. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Pilotwings 64 Original release date : 1996 Platform : N64 Developer : Nintendo / Paradigm Genre : Flight Simulator
The serene world of Pilotwings got a cartoonish makeover for this much-loved sequel, with the full force of Nintendo’s new N64 console thrusting the dreamy flight simulation into the new era of three-dimensional graphics. With a lovable cast, a sharpened structure of challenge missions, and medals to give shape to your progress, this is certainly a more focused game. The missions return to the special mixture of different vehicle challenges that made the first Pilotwings so endlessly replayable. While there’s a decent range of different objectives, from photographing certain sights to even blowing up targets with missiles, the bulk of the game hinges on the greater possibilities for exploration that came with the improvement in hardware. Mountains now rise out of the ground, and the landscape dips down from the hills to the sea’s edge. Another sequel would be lovely, but it doesn’t seem to be much of a priority for Nintendo at present. However, it is more likely that Pilotwings 64 may finally joins its SNES predecessor on the Wii’s Virtual Console service. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
PaRappa the Rapper Original release date : 1996 Platform : PS1 Developer : NanaOn-Sha Genre : Music
This unlikely game did much to shape some of the bestselling genres of today. It’s a pioneering rhythm action title in which players beat each level by matching on-screen prompts while music dictates the pace. With utterly lovable visual stylings by the renowned artist Rodney Greenblat, NanaOn-Sha’s strange little game tells the story of PaRappa, a hip-hop dog who longs to win the heart of his best friend, Sunny Funny. The cast is a memorable collection of freaks and nerds, while PaRappa’s musical mentors, from Chop Chop Master Onion, owner of the local karate dojo, to Instructor Mooselini, PaRappa’s long-suffering driving coach, are some of the best characters in all of video games. The songs are utterly perfect. PaRappa will leave you humming its rhymes unexpectedly, years after you last fired it up, transporting you back to this truly unique world. Sequels were forthcoming but nothing can compare to the first time you see PaRappa’s flimsy world in motion, and nothing can compete with the first time you pick up the controller and ace a song: U Rappin Good. CD
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1990s
Time Crisis Original release date : 1996 Platform : Arcade, PS1 Developer : Namco Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
Light gun games are inherently limited, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be innovative. Time Crisis took the genre forward with a blindingly simple idea that is now a standard. It let you take cover. Previous games in the genre simply demanded you be quick enough at shooting enemies that they couldn’t shoot you. Time Crisis’s cabinet has a foot pedal that, when depressed, causes your hotshot secret agent to duck behind the scenery and reload. Of course, with this being a coin-operated game, that’s where the Time bit of the Crisis comes in. You’re subject to an initially lax, but increasingly punishing, time limit that’s topped up in fractions as you clear each area of bad guys. The plot’s a classic: shoot lots of guys wearing sunglasses as they try to shoot you, then shoot their bosses when they turn up. And thanks to its innovations and unfussy presentation, Time Crisis remains a excellent blast today, though sadly its sequels don’t quite have the same purity of purpose. An excellent conversion to the original PlayStation sealed the game’s breakout success. RS See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Saturn Bomberman Original release date : 1996 Platform : Saturn Developer : Hudson Soft Genre : Action
With beautifully produced anime sequences and intricate visuals, Saturn Bomberman proclaims a new generation of fun for the 32-bit era. Graphically, this is the apotheosis of the two-dimensional Bomberman titles, boasting a wonderful selection of highly detailed maps and the playable character roster straying from the usual colored bombermen to a selection of cult Hudson Soft icons. The game is based on a story that entails players traveling through a series of stages and face a number of boss battles. The addition of two-player cooperative play is a neat extra, and there’s the standard battle mode, supplying eight stage designs and the usual chaos in which everyone attempts to incinerate everyone else. The key addition for the Saturn release, however, is the legendary ten-player battle option, which utilizes two multitap peripherals and a widescreen display format. When the game was launched, Japanese and US players were able to compete online thanks to Saturn modem add-ons. As for the rest of the game, timeless more or less sums it up neatly. KS See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Tomb Raider Original release date : 1996 Platform : Various Developer : Core Genre : Action
It’s all too easy to pin the initial success of Tomb Raider on the unlikely physique of the game’s heroine, upmarket explorer Lara Croft but, in reality, sex had been used to sell video games—largely with mixed results—for some time before her appearance in the mid-1990s. Tomb Raider succeeds because it is, quite simply, a wonderful platformer with a genuine sense of adventure. It is an eradefining classic that did a lot to move running and jumping into a convincing three-dimensional world, while reveling in the kind of intricacy many two-dimensional action titles couldn’t incorporate all that easily. Rich girl Croft is a modern-day Indiana Jones, a seasoned adventuress with a fondness for motorbikes, crop tops, and shooting the legs off endangered species. Although she heads off on her outings with a gun strapped tightly to each thigh, in reality Tomb Raider ’s always been about quiet exploration rather than lining enemies up in your sights. This is a good thing, as it happens, because the shooting is pretty primitive. Instead, Croft’s missions to locate mysterious artifacts play out in massive underground spaces, where ancient machinery needs coaxing back to life, and secrets lie around every corner.
The first installment was arguably the best—a fast-paced jaunt taking in jungles, Egyptian sphinxes, and the creepy pyramids of Atlantis. Distinct enough in its quiet, lavish environments to ensure that nothing else felt like it at the time, this series has been tirelessly copied since its first release, but still rarely bettered. While Croft has certainly done her bit for its profile—getting the game, famously, on the cover of the Face magazine—in reality, creator Toby Gard and his team of designers are the real heroes of these legendary stories. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Metal Slug Original release date : 1996 Platform : Arcade, Neo Geo Developer : Nazca Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
War is perhaps gaming’s most visited theme, yet few titles approach the horrors of the battlefield with such style and humor as Nazca’s seminal side-scrolling shooter, Metal Slug. The cartoonish sprite visuals, rendered with a craftsman’s skill that makes other similarly themed, two-dimensional games of the time look primitive, show off the Neo Geo hardware’s awe-inspiring capabilities. But it’s in the colorful animation and character of the graphics, and the tight controls, that Metal Slug’s wonder is to be found. You leap through powdery ice caverns, drive bouncing tanks (the titular Metal Slugs) through rivers, and watch as European towns scroll by in glorious parallax behind the action. Shirtless, bearded hostages salute when you free them from their binding ropes and shackles, while enemy soldiers spring to attention from languishing against a lamppost when you stumble into view, before disintegrating into a pile of warm ash when lit up by a flamethrower. As a result, Metal Slug is arguably the most expressive and characterful war game yet made, balancing carnage and sight gags with rare success. Slower and more deliberate than Contra, its inspiration, Metal Slug eschews predictable enemy
patters for a more dynamic assault on the player. Born in the arcade, the game presents a nearinsurmountable challenge to the first-time player, but as you hone skills and build muscle memory, learning to juggle grenades, weapons, and your melee knife, so comes mastery. The series would blossom, with multiple sequels of scaling ambition, but the first game is perhaps the most enduring, with its tight focus and masterful level design winning out over the gimmicks that would come to define the (many) later games in the series. It’s a game still well worth playing. SP See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars Original release date : 1996 Platform : SNES Developer : Square Genre : Role-Playing
Nintendo’s mascot meeting Square’s talented role-playing game superstars in the final Mario game released on the ageing SNES? Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars was bound to be an epic undertaking, even before you consider that it represented Mario’s first steps in a genre that seemed the ultimate antithesis of his happy-go-lucky platforming norms. Even before too many details had emerged, this was clearly going to be a fascinating experiment, and the results would have a lot to prove. Happily, Super Mario RPG lives up to the hype. With its overworld playing out as a kind of isometric platformer, with the bright colors and familiar cast fans of Mario would come to expect, the battle system is a clever synthesis of turn-based moves and action elements that add a nice sense of twitchiness to the role-playing traditions. Things really start to get in gear once you’ve got a decent party journeying with you. The kidnap-heavy plot of a typical Mario game has little problem coming across to the world of role-playing games, and neither does the mixture of outdoor sections broken up with the grim and gothic indoor environments.
All in all, it’s rather a neat match, with only the somewhat ugly, rendered, three-dimensional character models showing the game’s age, appearing shiny and rather synthetic to modern eyes. As an experiment in the transposition of genres and temperaments, Super Mario RPG is a roaring success. As a sign of what was to follow, Square’s title opened the door for the likes of the Paper Mario console series and the handheld console’s wonderful Mario & Luigi adventures—and for that fact alone we should probably be eternally grateful. If you haven’t had the chance to explore this game, do it now. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Donkey Kong Country 3 Original release date : 1996 Platform : SNES Developer : Rare Genre : Platform
Donkey Kong Country was the first game that Rare developed using a Nintendo trademark character. It’s a visually stunning platformer that set an extremely high technical standard that would become the developer’s trademark. For a publisher as traditionally conservative as Nintendo was at that time, allowing a British development team to take one of its original icons and give him a threedimensional makeover, an extended family of other Kongs, and a whole new platforming game was a radical move. It was the sequel, Donkey Kong Country 2, that enjoyed the most profuse praise, but this is the biggest and most fully featured game in the series. Released just after the Nintendo 64’s arrival, it suffered from a crippling lack of attention at the time. It also pushed Donkey Kong well out of the starring role, making way for two of Rare’s own creations, Dixie and Kiddy, which didn’t exactly help the game to gain exposure in the market. Its structure and control is superbly fluid, and it imbues its beautiful side-scrolling levels with adventurous spirit. An open overworld design allows you to deviate from the set paths and sequences of levels that usually constrain the genre, and gave Donkey Kong Country 3 an excellent sense of
place and individuality. That element of exploration carries over into the levels themselves as well. Instead of forcing the player to simply collect things, the game often puts a puzzle between you and the desired trinket. Donkey Kong Country 3’s looks are still striking now, thanks to the strange character design and, especially, the fluidity of the animation. It’s a creative and unconventional two-dimensional platformer, and the series sparked a relationship between Nintendo and Rare that resulted in some of the best games of the following ten years. KM See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Syndicate Wars Original release date : 1996 Platform : Various Developer : Bullfrog Productions Genre : Strategy
Syndicate Wars is one of those games that begins with the player in a position of relative strength, before screwing it all up for you. Leader of the EuroCorp network, ruler of the world, and generally the smartest man on the futuristic street, you’ll quickly find that your global network of dubious power is being threatened. This threat is in the form of the emerging Church of the New Epoch, a rival group with very different designs on the future. All of which is an excuse for some pleasantly complicated doubledealing and corporate violence, of course—this being Syndicate and all. Keeping the four-man squad basics of the original game, Syndicate Wars provides all the tweaks you might imagine from the third —and, for the moment at least, final—installment in the series. Maps are considerably bigger and substantially prettier than before, nonplaying characters flocking the streets are more numerous, and the animations and explosions look a lot more cinematic than before. Vehicles are also incorporated into the mix, adding a little variation to the game’s missions. And, following its omission from the first game, LAN (local area network)-based multiplayer makes its first appearance. Willing players could now lug their PCs to friends’ houses so that they could face
off in the name of Keynesian economics and corporate loyalty. Cementing Syndicate’s reputation as one of the gaming world’s more moody and stylish cutthroat entertainments, Syndicate Wars is now a lot older, and rumors have been circulating that Electronic Arts, the entirely legitimate megacorporation that owns the license, is thinking of creating a sequel. Great days, indeed, as surely there’s no time like the present to return to the future. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
The House of the Dead 2 Original release date : 1996 Platform : Arcade Developer : Sega Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
There can be few things in life as thrilling as shooting a zombie in the face. What fortune, then, that Sega would bring to life an entire franchise around just such a premise. An evolution of the on-rails light gun shooter format, The House of the Dead games differ most instantly from the more structured and controlled nature of their predecessors through considerably heightened levels of tension. Other than the obvious advantage of the thematic content, they do this by increasing the speed of play, along with the number of targets on-screen—so the typical attack structure of the genre is still employed, but the frenetic pace at which enemies appear creates a more natural flow to the action. Rhythm, along with atmosphere, is something The House of the Dead 2 manages better than most of its contemporaries. The relentless onslaught of shuffling rotten flesh intent on munching on your fine features, combined with suitably disturbing visuals, menacing sound effects, and swift camera work, engineers moments of genuine panic. Helpfully, stress is alleviated through unintentionally comedic interludes provided by dreadful cut-scene voiceovers. But the intensity of the action is such that one empty clip into the next level is all it takes for the soothing effect to have worn off.
A game of this type needs to provide an unflagging experience or risk losing a player’s interest to a competing arcade cabinet. The House of the Dead 2 is expertly built around the premise of commanding your attention from the first shot. It’s unquestionably as shallow, as silly, and as shortlived as every example of the on-rails shooter genre before it or since, but when it comes to providing pure cathartic thrills, you’ll find few able to match its calibre. JDS See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Star Control 3 Original release date : 1996 Platform : Various Developer : Legend Entertainment Genre : Strategy / Shoot ’Em Up Like any good interstellar battle, Star Control 3 faced insurmountable odds. Outgunned by the intensely loyal fan base of the first two games and created without any input from original developer Toys for Bob, it was clear from the outset that the project would require bold helming. Despite the aforementioned devotees citing several misgivings (most notably with the pseudo-3-D space battles and digitized Henson-esque puppets used during conversations), the game was a critical success and is the most fully realised Star Control title. Picking up roughly where the second game left off, you must lead an alliance in the fight against the Eternal Ones, a mysterious race who consume the energy of all sentient life every eon. To protect themselves from such a fate, the Precursors genetically modified themselves into six-legged cowlike creatures, but were trapped in this form when the robots they built to return them to their original form malfunctioned. Humans, in their quest to locate the legendary Precursors, have discovered this tasty beast and, unbeknown to them, are consuming their goal. The delirious plot belies a complex strategy game in which diplomacy is equally as important as maneuvering, with each new race you encounter a potential ally or enemy. But there are also real-time space battles, a brilliantly involving adventure game, and a colony management side-quest with which you can feed your war machine. The combination of so many different genres is usually a bad idea, but here they gel into a coherent whole that can consume many hours of your life. The Hyper Melee mode, meanwhile, provides an opportunity to hone piloting skills against the computer or a friend. While the confrontation clearly resulted in casualties, Star Control 3 is a worthy successor to its forebears. BM See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Super Mario 64 Original release date : 1996 Platform : N64 Developer : Nintendo Genre : Platform
Mario would seem to have come to the end of his natural life as games embraced the third dimension. Nintendo’s mascot was getting on a bit, and he was so emphatically linked to the suddenly rather tired world of two-dimensional scrolling that many fans suspected either retirement or, worse, irrelevance awaited him on Nintendo’s new console, the N64. In fact, neither was the case. Mario’s first three-dimensional adventure saw the plumber as trailblazing and trendsetting as ever, showing competitors how it’s done, and throwing analog controls into the mix (a little push forward to walk, a push all the way to run) to create an adventure no one would forget in a hurry—particularly Mario’s rivals on other platforms. Certain things had to change. Rather than a long travelogue quest heading from the left side of the map to the right, Super Mario 64 introduced Peach’s castle as a hub from which other levels would be accessible once enough stars had been collected from the game’s various challenges. The means of entering these themed levels—leaping through paintings—is still a genuinely magical piece of design. The worlds found beyond, all of which have room enough for a handful of different tasks, are masterpieces of thrifty imagination, providing the space for a coin hunt one minute and a boss fight the
next. Like the hub itself, the levels become nonlinear arenas, and from the mountainous peaks of Cool, Cool Mountain to the tangle of pathways that make up Big Boo’s Haunt, Super Mario 64 almost feels more like a theme park than a series of themed courses. No matter where exactly it’s getting its inspiration from, however, Super Mario 64 remains one of the most influential—and one of the best —video games ever made. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Wave Race 64 Original release date : 1996 Platform : N64 Developer : Nintendo Genre : Racing
Let’s be honest, nobody ever fell in love with Wave Race 64. Despite hailing from the same stable as Super Mario and company, this Jet Ski racing game with its four identikit riders just doesn’t have the personality for that. The annoying announcer and late-1980s arcade-style visuals don’t help either. Superficially, Wave Race 64 is even a bit—whisper it—annoying. Yet the game made a splash on release and, unlike many other older games, it’s still worth checking out on its own merits, irrespective of its historical value (which isn’t much; the game spawned no great lineage of Jet Ski titles). It’s all about the realistically modeled water, and the joy of steering your craft upon it. The N64’s innovative control stick had already proved that analog was the future, thanks to the fine control it afforded Mario in his N64 debut, but Wave Race 64, itself a very early game for the console, was an even more convincing demonstration. As you steer your bouncing craft across the choppy surf or pull a hairpin turn, you can almost see the old twodimensional, on or off era sinking beneath the waves. The game is structured as a conventional racing game, albeit all at sea. In most races, you need to beat your fellow skiers around an island in various weather conditions, while also steering your craft
past navigational buoys. Correctly passing a buoy boosts your speed, and at maximum power you really fly. Championship, Time Trial, and Stunt modes round out the package, and the mandatory twoplayer mode is also good fun, despite the somewhat restricted view afforded by the split-screen implementation. Wave Race 64 remains one of the best water-based games you can play—although admittedly that’s a genre with limited competition. OB See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Wipeout 2097 Original release date : 1996 Platform : PS1 Developer : Psygnosis Genre : Racing
The second title in Sony’s answer to Nintendo’s F-Zero series, Wipeout 2097 is arguably the best of the bunch. While the original was perfectly entertaining, it made its impact as much for its cultural baggage—clubby music and graphic design from the hip Designers Republic agency—as for its game play. Wipeout 2097 retains the cool look and feel of the original, but the game is more fully developed, its weapons and courses more varied. Set 101 years on from the game’s year of release, this is science-fiction racing that packs a punch. The race craft hover above the track and are rather delicate things, handling like a razor blade when you’re in the zone and like a bathtub at sea when not. You’re offered a choice of models with different attributes for acceleration, handling, and shield power. Finding and holding the racing line without bringing your speed down is made harder by the elaborate courses, which include vertiginous drops, jumps, ninety-degree bends, and tight tunnels that seem impossible to navigate when you first encounter them. Complicating matters are the weapons you and your opponents can deploy. The pick-up powered arsenal includes the likes of the Quake Disruptor, which sends a powerful shockwave along the track, and the hit-and-miss Autopilot. Craft can be
completely destroyed if they take sufficient damage from either weapons or collisions—a particularly anticlimactic way to lose a race. It’s easy to forget how distinctive the Wipeout games were at the time. They represented console games jumping up a generation, even if the trappings look rather superficial against modern titles. But there’s nothing shallow about Wipeout 2097’s game play, which remains perfectly and consistently playable today. OB See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Vectorman 2 Original release date : 1996 Platform : Mega Drive Developer : BlueSky Genre : Action / Platform
Arriving late in the Mega Drive’s life, the second Vectorman game found itself able to benefit from advancements in programming techniques for its host system and can therefore lay claim to being one of the better-looking examples of 16-bit technology. But with the majority of the gaming public having by that time progressed on to the subsequent generation of hardware, the audience that welcomed it was limited. That explains Vectorman 2’s relative obscurity, but it says little about its merit as one of the finer platform games of its era. An obvious element is its aesthetic styling, with impressively crisp, detailed graphics and a level of animation rarely seen for its time (a benefit of using prerendered 3-D models), but the visuals are also supported by suitably muscular sound effects and a score that ably matches the action. And plenty of action there is too. The game drops you in it from the start—literally, because you parachute down to Earth’s surface—and the pace never lets up as you blast through twenty-five meticulously designed levels populated by mutated insects, better firepower, inventive power-ups, and, predictably, a number of collectable items. Crucially, the controls are as accomplished as the
action, responding perfectly to joy pad input and thereby making it difficult to blame the game for your mistakes. The one shocking factor of revisiting Vectorman’s danger-filled world is its level of difficulty. Older games are generally more difficult than new examples, but in this case the experience is brutal, and until your brain adapts to the game’s unforgiving nature, it can take considerable effort just to make through the first level. Persevere, however, because a terrific platforming experience lies beyond. JDS See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Age of Empires Original release date : 1997 Platform : PC Developer : Ensemble Studios Genre : Strategy
While advances in video games are typically characterized by leaps in technology or game play innovation, lateral crossover is also important. Like some novel technology concocted in one of its temples, Age of Empires crossed two existing game play templates and boiled down the result to produce a new branch in strategy gaming. The first parent was Civilization, Sid Meier’s brilliant 1991 title. Devotees loved it, but its complexity and turn-based mechanics put off many more. By the mid-’90s, real-time strategy offered a more accessible way for armchair generals to marshal their forces. The bestselling strategy games —Command & Conquer and Warcraft —and their copycats were science-fiction or fantasy affairs. What Ensemble Studios (including designer Bruce Shelley, who worked on Civilization with Meier) did was meld Civilization’s historical trappings and empire building idea with the genre’s game play and pretty graphics. The result, Age of Empires, was an approachable take on dictatorship with enough historical finery to satisfy all but the most bookish rulers. Assuming leadership of one of a dozen peoples, from the Greeks and the Babylonians to the Japanese Yamato civilization, you guide your race from being
hunter gatherers through several transitions to create a dominant Iron Age culture. The twelve civilizations are divided into four main groups, each one with its own distinctive architectural style. The emphasis is on military progression, though victory conditions include building a Wonder, such as an Egyptian pyramid. On the fighting front, dubious artifical intelligence, later patched, let things down. Still, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and Age of Empires launched a globe-conquering franchise that eventually sold twenty million units. OB See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Blade Runner Original release date : 1997 Platform : PC Developer : Westwood Studios Genre : Adventure
Westwood’s Blade Runner proves that you don’t have to follow the script to make an authentic movie tie-in. Not, at least, when the movie’s better known for its looks and symbols than its words. The developer of Command & Conquer wasn’t known for its point-and-click adventures, either, which perhaps explains its avant-garde approach to this one. A necessary approach, it would emerge, that captured not just the Los Angeles of 2019 but the leg work, paperwork, and luck required to police it. Hero Ray McCoy, a rookie on the trail of mutinous android replicants, is a more spirited cop than Harrison Ford’s Deckard. Working out of the same cylindrical skyscraper as featured prominently in the movie, McCoy’s puzzle solving has more in common with a Police Quest game than the average point-and-click. Rather than find illogical key-and-lock pairings for random objects, he has to pixel hunt for clues, feed them into some familiar forensic tools, and ask the right questions of the right people. Leads turn into new locations on the map, suspects coming and going in nonlinear real time. What results is a game of lucky breaks and chance encounters that boasts a whopping thirteen different endings.
Blade Runner used a proprietary voxel-based engine to create stunning portrayals of locations such as Animoid Row and Hotel Bradbury, along with gadgets like the ESPER 3-D scanner and Voight-Kampff profiler. By rotating dozens of voxels to match actual polygonal data, the game legitimately claimed to use “real-time 3-D graphics,” even though it made no use of threedimensional hardware. Steep CPU requirements led to cutbacks in the game’s character models, prompting many to complain that they lacked the detail of the world around them. DH See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night Original release date : 1997 Platform : Various Developer : Konami Genre : Action
Even in 1997 Castlevania: Symphony of the Night was an anachronism. With the gaming world’s eyes firmly focused on Lara Croft and her jaggy curves, few were interested in two-dimensional games whose sprites appeared antiquated when set against Sony’s new three-dimensional horizons. While Symphony of the Night represented the first time Konami combined the series’ classic brand of side scrolling, occultish violence with character development, it was nothing that hadn’t been explored by Nintendo’s Super Metroid some years before. Yet Symphony of the Night remains today as one of the finest action-adventure games in the canon, a title that has far outlasted its contemporary rivals of the day, thanks to its enduring core. Playing as Alucard, the conflicted son of Dracula, you work your way through a sprawling gothic castle, uncovering new nooks, crannies, and hellish bosses while in search of the arch vampire. The ingenuity of the design reveals itself slowly, as Alucard discovers new abilities that, in turn, open up whole new areas of the game. Slowly, previously unreachable places become familiar as you chase breadcrumb trails of rewards, revealing the full map of the castle as you do so. Matched by one of the great orchestral soundtracks of video games, the visuals perfectly suit the
theme. Konami’s use of color and architecture lends every area of the game its own character and ambience, yet manages to maintain a coherent whole. The ingenuity of monster design is unmatched, either in the series’ subsequent titles or its close rivals. And the game’s final twist reward (unlocked after what you suppose to be the final boss), turning the entire castle on its head so every floor becomes a ceiling and each doorway becomes a ledge, is peerless. SP See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Bushido Blade Original release date : 1997 Platform : PS1 Developer : Lightweight Genre : Fighting
Bushido Blade’s great innovation was simply to make a fighting game seem more like fighting. This was the first game to face up to the truth that few people walk away from a katana strike to the stomach. It’s perhaps understandable that this approach didn’t catch on. But Bushido Blade chooses to embrace this physical reality, and, in raising the stakes of every fight so high, succeeds in raising the intensity of the combat to a fever pitch. The need for caution is emphasized by the game’s health system, which isolates each part of the combatant’s body so that a glancing blow to the arm will render that limb limp and useless. Take a stab to the leg and you will be forced to fight on bended knee, unable to run or manoeuvre, and a blow to the head or torso will call forth a crimson fountain and end both the match and your life. Bushido Blade’s maverick approach failed to inspire other fighting game developers to follow suit, and, indeed, a lackluster sequel revealed that perhaps the idea had already seen its ideal realization. For that reason, it remains the tensest fight to be had in video games. SP See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Final Furlong Original release date : 1997 Platform : Arcade Developer : Namco Genre : Racing
In the late 1990s the coin-operated market was being eaten alive by the graphically powerful 32bit consoles. Manufacturers increasingly turned to novelty installation machines to tempt gamers back into the arcades. This horse-racing simulation provided one of the most compelling and entertaining examples. The player sits on a small plastic horse, grabs the metal hand rail, and rocks backward and forward to propel their on-screen steed. A whip button teases out a few extra bursts of performance, while the reins can vaguely steer the horse. Each steed has a limited amount of stamina, and players need to judge this correctly to avoid burning out before the final sprint to the finishing line. To add a little strategic depth to the experience, there are six horses to select from, each with a different racing style. For several years, Japanese arcades were bustling with businessmen letting off steam by frenziedly riding Namco’s plastic mares against one another. A Wii version was shown off at the annual E3 video game show in 2006, but has since failed to come to fruition. KS
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1990s
Blast Corps Original release date : 1997 Platform : N64 Developer : Rare Genre : Action
From a deceivably simple concept—that of clearing a path for a lorry carrying nuclear nitroglycerine with a tendency to detonate should the vehicle come into contact with any obstruction —bursts forth one of the highlights of the Nintendo 64’s line-up, Blast Corps. As a member of the team expected to level every obstacle in the payload’s path, your role is to jump in a number of vehicles with wildly varying demolition abilities and rush around ensuring a clear and safe path. While there’s undeniable fulfillment in the relentless destruction, you soon have to rely on brains as well as brawn, with later levels introducing puzzle elements that add disproportionately to the already tense challenge. The game remains remarkably refreshing. Rare got the formula right first time. Sure, it can get repetitive, the controls take some familiarity, it’s difficult, and a number of the vehicles can be frustrating, but there’s very little about Blast Corps that requires fundamental changing. That’s possibly why no other developer has really bothered to revisit the premise, much to the gaming world’s loss. JDS
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1990s
Beatmania Original release date : 1997 Platform : Arcade Developer : Konami Genre : Music
Konami’s Beatmania, billed as a DJ game, was the first of the Japanese company’s rhythm action games, closely followed by Dance Dance Revolution, Guitar Freaks and Drummania. In reality, the similarities between the game and the gear from which it draws inspiration are loose. Players use their left hand to press buttons in time with the descending markers on the screen. Meanwhile, the right hand spins a sturdy turntable every now and then, usually to trigger a rewind or scratch sample in the music itself. The Beatmania experience is a strange amalgam of turntablism and one-handed piano playing, a curious hybrid that had to carve out its own audience. As streams of tiny markers filter down the screen and you tap the keys to trigger the relevant samples in the music, the principle of the music game is visible in its most raw and telling form: Simon Says for a digital generation. Despite being in its thirteenth iteration in arcades, Beatmania has been superseded by music games that allow for more expression on the part of the player, but its legacy is visible in the success of every contemporary music game. SP
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1990s
DoDonPachi Original release date : 1997 Platform : Various Developer : Cave Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
Bullet hell. DoDonPachi exemplifies the term better than any other shoot ’em up, providing a snowstorm of fiery pixels to both simultaneously dodge and eliminate. It’s a merciless assault on the senses and reactions, about as far from the careful, precise shots of the genre’s formative classics as it’s possible to travel. But nevertheless, the principle remains the same: shoot the spaceships while avoiding being shot yourself. Where the DoDonPachi experience differs from its traditional inspirations is in the size and fury of the bullets traded between player and opponent. Here the emphasis is on pattern memorization and reactions, the game demanding its player to discern enemy from friendly fire, and react accordingly in split-second decisions. The effect is then heightened by power-ups that turn what starts off as a trickle of bullets (laser or scatter shot) into a flowing river of rapids. Neon splashes of color and a confetti of score tokens light up every enemy grazed by your bullet spray, resulting in a screen that is soon enveloped in a blaze of hot, mesmerizing pixels. As a game born in the arcades, high-score play is encouraged. This is achieved via a simple combo system that records the frequency of your takedowns and matches a score multiplier to the
stream of hits. Perhaps more than any other shoot ’em up, DoDonPachi has inspired the recording of thousands of high score attempt videos, circulated throughout Japan in DVD collections. The constant barrage of shifting bullet mazes reaches its climax during the game’s hulking boss fights, where the stream of patterned bullets shepherd you inexorably around the screen. DoDonPachi is the acme of bullet hell shoot ’em ups, a twitch workout to leave your thumbs blistered and your mind frazzled. SP See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Intelligent Qube Original release date : 1997 Format : PS1 Developer : Sony Genre : Puzzle Upon its release, Intelligent Qube (aka Kurushi) did something rare for a puzzle game: It felt important. That’s unusual because so many video games with puzzles at their core often feel fanciful. You play them for challenges, but questions of larger importance—such as why we’re performing a particular action at all—are fleeting. Intelligent Qube dire and epic. Set on a gray, modular game board suspended in an infinite black space, the character you control must strategically avoid and remove cubes that approach in successive waves. The act of constant flight makes the game play harried. Even at rest, the man in green trousers at the center of it all bounces repetitively, either in expectation of the next round or in exhaustion from his constant flight. But it’s the other elements of Intelligent Qube that give the game its gravity. The soundtrack, from Takayuki Hattori (the composer of two Godzilla films), is haunting with its sharp vocal arrangements and triumphant brass. The cubes roll after you with a powerful and resounding thud as you flee. And most players will distinctly remember the authoritarian, disembodied voice that says “Perfect” or “Again?” at stages during the performance. Even varieties of cubes, such as Advantage and Forbidden, add a particular seriousness to Intelligent Qube, placing you as the director of a moral compass where you decide which cubes should be captured and which should be banished to the dark space below. The end result is something more akin to the many boss battles of the Final Fantasy franchise rather than something in the flighty genre of puzzle games. Many action-driven brainteasers were made for Sony’s original PlayStation, and Intelligent Qube stands among the most memorable of them all. JBW See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Einhänder Original release date : 1997 Platform : PS1 Developer : Square Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
Nobody expected much from Einhänder, a side-scrolling shoot ’em up on an unsuitable console at the wrong time, from a Japanese role-playing game developer with no prior (or subsequent) experience in the genre. As Japan’s premier producer of fantasy role-playing games, Square was an expert at lavish, narrative-led epics, games just about as far from the twitchy, reaction-based arcade blaze of a futuristic shoot ’em up as it’s possible to imagine. Likewise, Sega’s Saturn, while it was less commercially successful than the PlayStation, had already established itself as the genre’s natural home. Few developers would dare release a shoot ’em up on Sony’s console. Yet somehow Square crafted an exquisite, thoughtful, rollercoaster ride of a spaceship game. It is a game that consists of hulking multipart bosses, enemies that must be taken apart piece by piece. The spectacle of these battles is heightened by a dark, brooding aesthetic with purple cloudy skies bisected by forked lightning, and dark tunnels punctuated by neon dots. Enemies jump from the foreground to the background and monsters are animated to look like oversized animals, their approaches and retreats defining safe areas of screen space. The game takes its name from the grappling arm that hangs underneath your ship, which allows
you to grasp at weapons dropped by downed enemies. These attachments have limited ammunition, a brave decision that introduces an element of resource management to the otherwise entirely reactionbased rhythm of play. Following the game’s release and modest success, the team was disbanded and redeployed to other projects, ensuring that Einhänder’s bright, brilliant excursion into new territory has never been repeated. SP See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Dungeon Keeper Original release date : 1997 Platform : PC Developer : Bullfrog Productions Genre : Strategy
It took two decades for PC developers to realize that fantasy role-playing gamers could be wicked too. Savvy pen-and-paper dungeon masters had known since the 1970s that designing dark lairs stuffed with evildoers to kill off their friends was at least as much fun as questing for treasure and maidens, but it took the ever quirky brain of designer Peter Molyneux to bring the concept to PC. Dungeon Keeper was an inversion of everything gamers knew about subterranean adventuring, from Rogue to Gauntlet to Diablo. Instead of dark passages to explore and traps to avoid, in Dungeon Keeper your imps dig your tunnels or mine gold to fund your hero-impaling traps. Instead of slaying monsters, in Dungeon Keeper you lay out the floor plans of the perfect abodes to attract vampires or demon spawn to your underground realm. Get it right, and waves of adventurers will perish at your minion’s hands (and then perhaps swell the ranks of your skeleton army). Dungeon Keeper is first and foremost a real-time strategy game. You extract resources, breed chickens to feed your monsters, and move along a technology tree that unlocks ever more outlandish dungeon dwellers. It’s the humor that really makes the game. From slapping creatures with your disembodied hand to the bemused narrator who can’t fathom why anyone wouldn’t want a River of
the Damned for a High Street, Dungeon Keeper has black comedy by the bucket of blood load. Some reviewers found its graphics dated while others thought the game peaked too early, but most are still waiting for an update. Molyneux later developed the idea of being evil in the Black & White games, but it is Dungeon Keeper that offers the purest, darkest, and certainly the funniest way to play as one of the bad guys. OB See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Final Fantasy Tactics Original release date : 1997 Platform : Various Developer : Square Genre : Role-Playing
Today Final Fantasy spin-offs are everywhere, but in 1997, the idea of a title bearing the family name that wasn’t part of the mainline series was unthinkable. Not only that, but Final Fantasy Tactics, a historical and tactical role-playing game, bears few resemblances to its namesakes, save for a few Chocobos and oversize broadswords. Nevertheless, it emerged not only as one of the best titles in the series, but also of all time. A beautifully balanced and executed turn-based strategy game that matches its grand narrative with deep, rewarding mechanics. Battles take place on three-dimensional isometric fields that are overlaid with a grid. For each unit’s turn, you move a certain number of squares (depending on the character’s class and clothing) before executing an attack on an enemy unit. If your unit is a knight, you’ll need the target to be in an adjacent square, but if you’re controlling an archer or mage, you can use ranged attacks from afar. Every action, from a sword swipe to drinking a potion, earns experience points (to level up your character) and job points (to increase their abilities in their chosen specialization). It’s a classic system the likes of which will be familiar to fans of Disgaea et al, but rarely have these mechanics felt as solid and workable as they do here.
Despite attracting widespread praise from the video-game press for its plot, soundtrack, deep and involving game play and intricate art from Akihiko Yoshida, the game was only a niche hit outside of Japan, not making it to European shores until the superlative PSP re-release, subtitled War of the Lions. For this remake the game’s dialogue underwent a much needed re-translation from the original Japanese and, for this reason, the more recent version is recommended. SP See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Fallout Original release date : 1997 Platform : Various Developer : Black Isle Studios Genre : Role-Playing
Fallout casts the player as a young, naive adventurer born into an America that’s been ravaged by nuclear war. When the underground Vault, where you grew up, loses its GECK—a chip that makes water drinkable and life possible in this wasteland—you’re chosen to leave and search for a replacement. You have no idea what to expect and no one to guide you along the way. It’s easy to set off the wrong way and stumble into a situation far beyond your abilities, but poke around enough and you’ll find clues in strange places. For example, a key clue in the story lies hidden in one of dozens of houses in the ruined part of a city. Character development and combat entail lots of numbers and painful trade-offs. Unlike a fantasy game, where magic and swordplay are equal pursuits, investing in mental exercises, like science and diplomacy, makes you considerably weaker than if you bet everything on learning how to aim a pistol. Even then, mastering small arms doesn’t transfer to the big guns you find later on. The turn-based battles, which use action points to allocate your moves, force you to consider each step and every blow. This doesn’t get tedious because few of the battles are easy. But just as memorable is the style, which harkens back to America in the 1950s, when the nation
was at its post-war height while living in fear of a nuclear standoff with the Soviets. In Fallout’s future, of course, it’s the Chinese who lob the bombs, and while the Geiger counters have settled down by the time the game starts, the people remain in anarchy. The image of the Pip Boy, the grinning, iconic figure who appears in your handheld computer, sums up the situation. You’d better smile, because how much worse can it get? CDa See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Final Fantasy VII Original release date : 1997 Platform : PS1 Developer : Square Genre : Role-Playing
Final Fantasy VII may, apocryphally at least, be the most returned-to-the-store video game of all time, but there’s no denying it’s among the most important. Before its arrival on Sony’s PlayStation, the Japanese role-playing game was a curious niche to many Western players—a weird, offshoot of the Tolkien-esque role-playing games that, themselves, were something of an acquired taste. But Final Fantasy VII delivered one of the most technically arresting titles of the era, complete with 330 CG maps and forty minutes of full-motion video representing more than two years’ work by more than one hundred full time team members at a cost of more than $45 million. With these recordbreaking statistics, the world’s attention was grabbed, and the game’s chosen genre was forcefully booted into the mainstream. Set within a steampunk world threatened by the pollution of big business corporations, Final Fantasy VII’s themes were previously untouched by the medium and maintain the series’ advancing curve of maturity. In making the player’s iconic character Cloud Strife complicit in a terrorist attack, the narrative finds a quick stride that is maintained over its course.
Today, the game looks dated. The shift between squat polygonal characters to prerendered movies is jarring, lacking the visual consistency of the simpler sprites of the former games in the series. But despite this, the iconic characters and evocative setting of Midgar have been resilient to the medium’s ensuing technological advances, and the calls for a remake are loud. Players interested in a different point of view are encouraged to try the PSP spin-off Crisis Core, a game that helps to round out the narrative, albeit via an altogether different style of game. SP See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Diablo Original release date : 1997 Platform : Various Developer : Blizzard Entertainment Genre : Action / Role-Playing
If it’s an Excel spreadsheet you’re engaged with, clicking on things can be kind of boring. If it’s Diablo, however, the same simple mechanic magically turns out to be utterly enthralling—possibly because, unlike with Microsoft’s fine suite of productivity software, everything you click on in Diablo rewards you in some lavish, palpable manner. Enemies explode in bursts of blood or collapse into rickety piles of bone, brave warriors race nimbly to the spot indicated and await your command, and loot—lovely, lovely loot—disappears straight into your inventory for another of Diablo’s unlikely sounding pleasures, stat comparison, and item management. Diablo isn’t just a pretty isometric dungeon crawler, it’s the best pretty isometric dungeon crawler. A simple—often almost gloriously brainless—trek through gloomy caverns filled with monsters and treasures, all of which you interact with through single stabs at the mouse and a few carefully timed hot keys. Blizzard’s technicians spent a lot of time and money working on the procedural generation of the game’s subterranean spaces, meaning that items, enemies, and geography would be different each time you loaded the game up, and the pleasures of exploration would, theoretically, never have to end. The result truly is a game that seems to keep on giving.
By today’s standards, Diablo’s classes, characters, and teetering piles of rewards are actually rather shallow, but the game still exerts a wonderful fascination each time you return to its caverns. It’s so simple that practically anyone can learn the basics, and so rich and textured that even seasoned pros will find themselves coming back for more. To this very day, its basic skeleton-smacking formula has barely been improved upon. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
GoldenEye 007 Original release date : 1997 Platform : N64 Developer : Rare Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
You could argue that the title of Best James Bond Game ironically sits with three games that aren’t actually about James Bond: Metal Gear Solid 3, Modern Warfare 2 , and No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy In HARM’S Way . Less debatable, though, is the holder of the title Most Important Console First-Person Shooter. Before GoldenEye 007, an adaptation that played fast and loose with the 1995 movie, many would struggle with even the idea of such a thing. Unlike contemporary Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, GoldenEye 007 proved that joy pad controls were not a disability. Both games featured precision aiming thanks to the N64 analog stick, but Rare knew best how to use it. Reveling in the lack of hyperkinetic PC controls, it made a game in which every shot felt like something handmade. Hit a shoulder, and an enemy might pirouette to the floor; the groin—a natural favorite—and they’d fold and keel over; the head, and they’d drop as if hit with a polearm. Games like Virtua Cop got there sooner but, to borrow a phrase, nobody does it better than Bond. In single-player mode, GoldenEye 007 features a rarely emulated difficulty method that switches objectives at each level, making it highly replayable even now. But the game’s split-screen support
for up to four players, as much a testament to the N64’s hardware layout, was the proof of concept for all console multiplayers. When games like Halo try to capture that feeling via Xbox Live, what they are referring to is the sight of your armchair buddy being dropped by the Golden Gun, one of umpteen weapons and modes that kept this game going for years. Culling gadgets and characters from the entire Bond universe, GoldenEye 007 pounced on every opportunity its license could afford. DH See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Gran Turismo Original release date : 1997 Platform : PS1 Developer : Polyphony Digital Genre : Driving
Admittedly, at the time, part of the appeal of Gran Turismo was how recognizable the cars were. Other games would set you racing in souped-up monsters with elaborate spoilers and engines so tweaked they approached science fiction, but while Gran Turismo had plenty of that, it also had compacts and family hatchbacks. It had the kind of cars your dad drove, as well as the kind of cars he wished he did. And while it didn’t allow you to smash them up (damage modeling remains, to this day, something the Gran Turismo series won’t go in for much), it would allow you to pop the hood and meddle with the engine. Prior to making the defining racer of the PlayStation era—apologies here to Ridge Racer— Gran Turismo’s developer Polyphony Digital made a cutesy bouncing cartoon racing game called Motor Toon Grand Prix. It was an enjoyable piece of fluff, but it was absolutely nothing compared to the game that would make the studio’s name. Lavish, detailed, and rather grown-up, Gran Turismo would change the marketplace and give other developers something to aim toward for years. A true driving simulation title in a world of arcadey racing games, Gran Turismo was still nippy around the track and handy in frantic multiplayer battles. The true addictiveness that really allowed
players to get sucked in was the mixture of new cars you unlocked throughout the course of the game and the realistic way you could fiddle about with their engines and handling. It also helped that at release, it was the best-looking PlayStation game ever made, a fact driven home by its dazzling replay mode. Play it today, and you can pick out the individual elements that transformed the way racing video games would be made forever more. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Star Wars: X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter Original release date : 1997 Platform : PC Developer : Totally Games Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
Upon release in 1997, Star Wars: X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter was undoubtedly one of the biggest disappointments of the year. For fans who had eagerly devoured both X-Wing and TIE Fighter, immersing themselves in those titles’ strong campaign modes, to be greeted with a game that featured no campaign mode at all was a shock. Of course, few can say they weren’t warned, but the reaction was so immediate and so extreme that LucasArts and developer Totally Games quickly released an expansion (the ironically titled Balance of Power) in order to redress the situation. But by concentrating on what the game was missing, people overlooked what it had. Star Wars: X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter is a space combat game that uses the well-respected design that powered the previous X-Wing titles, offering tactical nuance via the ability to switch power between shields, lasers, and engines, and exciting dogfight-based play. This format makes the game a multiplayer experience as accessible as the first-person shooter titles that ruled the online arena at the time, but that failed to convincingly mark out a place in history. The game ultimately represents a cul-de-sac in the multiplayer gaming space, one that titles such as Crimson Skies tried, but didn’t quite succeed, in extending.
Players who ignore the game based on its legacy are missing out on some of the best multiplayer combat potential ever seen in a game. Star Wars: X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter ’s flight model remains a blend of arcade-style thrills and simulation that nothing else has ever touched, and played against others it offers all the tension from the very heights of the Star Wars saga. Just ask the dedicated community who continue to play the game to this day via home-brewed game clients and other such hacks. MKu See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
The Curse of Monkey Island Original release date : 1997 Platform : PC Developer : LucasArts Genre : Adventure
Guybrush Threepwood’s third pirating adventure—the first to be made without the input of series veterans Ron Gilbert or Tim Schafer—isn’t widely considered to be a classic. While it can’t quite live up to the mordant wit of the original two games, it remains a sharp and pithy Caribbean adventure in its own right. Threepwood’s quest is to free his beloved, the generally furious Governor Elaine Marley, from the spell of a cursed ring that has transformed her into a gold statue. This sets in motion the charming idiot’s most irreverent and wide-ranging adventure. This is a game that finds the time to parody everything from the foibles of Shakespearian actors to the intricate web of conspiracy theories surrounding the President Kennedy assassination—a brilliant sequence involving, rather predictably, banjos, flint-lock pistols, and a rubber tree. The island where the game’s fabulously clever final act unfolds is as creepy and evocative as anything the series had previously created, while the very last sequence, which is set on a rickety rollercoaster moving through various animatronic dioramas depicting the great points from the series, was as fitting a close to the trilogy as could be realistically imagined.
The game is also the graphical highpoint for the series, employing a lavish cel-animated style that meant the finished product resembled an upmarket Disney cartoon, with elegant characterizations and trippy swirls of distant clouds. The game’s final retail installment, the three-dimensional Escape from Monkey Island, would ditch this approach entirely, along with most of the series’ elaborate punning brilliance. True fans of the series might want to draw the line after this outing—a witty send-off and a fond reminder of so many years of hilarious adventure. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
MDK Original release date : 1997 Platform : Various Developer : Shiny Entertainment Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
After playing MDK, you might ask why all games aren’t like it. You’ll almost certainly wonder why barely any are. The developer of MDK took the three-dimensional platform model introduced by SuperMario 64 and went the opposite way of everyone else. Instead, Shiny Entertainment made a short, sharp, and hilarious shock trooper that might have been the vanguard for welding the madcap innovation of the 8-bit era with the three-dimensional intelligence demanded by the PlayStation generation. Even at the time, MDK was misunderstood, often willfully. Did those three letters stand for “Murder, Death, Kill”; or “Max, Dr, Kurt” (the heroes); or “My Dear Knight” as emblazoned on the Japanese box art? Was it a platformer or a shooter? Was it serious or a joke? What did you expect when the game manual was an extract from the diary of a senile astronaut? It isn’t that complicated. Earth is being scooped up by giant Minecrawlers from space. As the hero Kurt, you parachute in from orbit, leap, drop, run, and gun your way through various bizarre arenas—all realized using a glorious software engine—destroy the lot, then ride the resultant energy stream back to base. If all you have to do is call in your dog to mount a bombing raid, or use the
addictive sniper scope to shoot a grunt while he’s picking his nose—a mode copied by every threedimensional shooter that followed, but never to such amusing effect—then what is so complicated about the game? MDK was only half a dozen levels long, but they are among the most inventive levels you’ll ever experience. Perhaps other developers didn’t follow MDK because, for all its wacky inexplicableness, they appreciated how high it set the bar. OB See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Myth: The Fallen Lords Original release date : 1997 Platform : PC, Mac Developer : Bungie Genre : Strategy
The real-time strategy game blueprint is set in gaming lore. Third-person perspective, build trees, resource management, skirmishing, and then chucking everything you’ve got at the other guy. So how did a developer, better known in the ever decreasing circles of Macintosh gaming, approach a genre dominated by powerhouses like Westwood Studios and Electronic Arts? By self-publishing a tactical war game that wrote its own unique set of rules and was powered by a revolutionary new threedimensional engine. Dwarves lobbing Molotov cocktails is a good way to get your new game noticed. One precision strike can decimate an enemy army. But getting into position, aiming correctly, and assessing the current climate conditions are the strategies needed to manipulate this environment. Dwarves walk slowly, meaning you need to send them surreptitiously to their target, and hope they don’t meet mean, melee-focused troops on the way. What if it’s raining? It could douse the flames. What if the targets are wading through water? What if they’re marching across a hill? The slope of that hill could send a lobbed bomb hurtling past a targeted enemy, only to fizzle in a puddle. That’s just a sliver of the new considerations that this original real-time strategy game evoked in
the minds of gamers building personalized armies where every single unit can make a huge impact on the battle. On the face of it, the tightly managed unit numbers and small scale of the battles implies skirmish rather than vast battleground devastation. But the attachment you feel toward that lone pyromaniac dwarf and his cohorts adds a resonance to each encounter that focuses your tactical decisions on preserving each individual. RSm See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II Original release date : 1997 Platform : PC Developer : LucasArts Genre : First-Person Shooter
Imagine the pressure. The original Dark Forces successfully coats a Doom-like first-person shooter with the veneer of the Star Wars universe, it delights gamers, sells well, and a sequel goes straight into production. The anticipation for the next installment of Kyle Katarn’s adventures was through the roof, and LucasArts delivered a stunning shooter experience that integrated role-playing style, Jedi power progression, and story choices into a more traditional run-and-gun action product. And it introduced lightsabers. Oh, yes, the lightsabers. Building a system that would fluidly switch to a third-person perspective when Katarn draws out the big stick proved to be a significant technical hurdle that was executed perfectly. Katarn’s story as a former Imperial officer turned mercenary takes a huge leap forward when he uncovers the Force. Now he can learn new Force powers and choose whether to follow the Light or Dark path on a quest to find his father’s murderer. It’s a gripping progression that invests the player with an important role in this post-Return of the Jedi storyline. Even after the single-player plotline is exhausted, it’s easy to replay, choosing different Jedi powers and experiencing the story from the other side. Then you can take those skills
online in a multiplayer mode that pits Light against Dark Jedis in classic four-player match-ups. This package set a new ambition bar not just for all future Star Wars games, but for first-person shooters in general. As three-dimensional graphics cards were gaining a foothold, this game was one very good reason to join the revolution, if you hadn’t already. For fans of the series, all it takes is for that famous score to start playing, and the chills run down their spines. RSm See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Star Fox 64 Original release date : 1997 Platform : N64 Developer : Nintendo Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
The original Star Fox (known as Starwing in the West) was a proof of a concept for Nintendo’s Super FX technology, a cartridge chip that allowed the aging SNES to throw around threedimensional polygons in a way the machine’s original designers never dreamed. The N64 sequel, however, had even greater ambitions. It wanted to take a band of furry pilots and create a space opera. You can reel off influences, because the game isn’t shy of doing so itself. The final level’s a trench run straight from Star Wars, complete with a cheesy moment where Fox’s father returns, while Independence Day provides the visual inspiration for a quite brilliant mothership battle. The original may have suggested a wider universe than existed in its corridors, but Star Fox 64 goes there, moving from the bottom of the ocean to planets composed of lava, stopping off for dogfights in threedimensional arenas and races through psychedelic wormholes. You’ll be chasing down a train in a tank one moment and engaged in a laser ballet with robotic monkeys the next. And of course it’s made by Nintendo, so the list of brilliant little touches goes on and on; The camaraderie with the rest of your team, moaning about maneuvers one minute and diving into the heart
of danger to help one another the next. The Rumble Pak, making this the first console game ever to include force feedback, now an industry standard. The multiple paths through the game, dictated by your successes and failures. The bosses that taunt you relentlessly, the distended plasticine face of ultimate villain Andross, and General Pepper’s shocked “Whaaaaa?” when he received the bill for your services at the very end. Nintendo’s band of furry pilots and their remarkable space opera have a place in many hearts. RS See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
X-COM: Apocalypse Original release date : 1997 Platform : PC Developer : Mythos Genre : Strategy
UFO: Enemy Unknown (aka X-COM: UFO Defense) is a valuable thing, a nexus of almost every traditional game genre. While first sequel X-COM: Terror from the Deep is essentially the same game with an underwater theme, follow-up X-COM: Apocalypse strives to be a true sequel, replacing the turn-based combat with real-time skirmishes. The core remains a tense, frightening hunt for an implacable, otherworldly foe through labyrinthine levels, with a backdrop of rapid technological progress aimed at finding a way to cut off this alien menace at the source. The game is not as coherent as its predecessors, being a strange hybrid of action points and realtime combat that never quite finds a natural rhythm, but it still seems remarkably novel: a last gasp of offbeat invention before strategy games largely polarized into Civilization derivatives and Command & Conquers excessive spawn. X-COM: Apocalypse is a beautiful blend of base building, alien hunting, and science-fiction role-playing. Tantalizingly, Irrational Games, the creator of BioShock, is currently working on an official X-COM “reimagining.” AM See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Snake Original release date : 1997 Platform : Various Developer : Nokia Genre : Puzzle
Snake falls into that strange category of games you don’t really think of as games, titles you barely notice you’re playing, and that hardly force you to really concentrate on what you’re doing in the first place. The premise is a staggeringly basic one: maneuver a snake around a blank space, without hitting the wall or running it into the folds of its own body, collecting various treasures along the way. The more treasures you pick up, the longer the snake’s body grows, and the harder you have to work in order to keep it alive. It all works faultlessly, too; an effortless mix of simple ideas and mindless controls that mean you’re almost always left with only yourself to blame when things go wrong. The genius lies with putting it on mobile phones, reigniting a basic game on a platform where mechanical and narrative directness are far more important than graphics, complex power-ups, and elaborate back stories. Snake, like Tetris, will probably still be around in some form or another when the sun flickers out and Earth whispers off into the farthest corners of space. CD
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1990s
Tekken 3 Original release date : 1997 Platform : Arcade, PS1 Developer : Namco Genre : Fighting
The first Tekken, thanks to an arcade-perfect conversion, was one of the titles that helped establish Sony’s PlayStation as a new force in the gaming industry. Though all of the basic elements were there at the start, it was the series’ PlayStation swansong, Tekken 3, which established a formula Tekken has retained to this day. The initial roster of ten characters soon blossomed into more than double that number after a few plays and included characters that would become stalwarts. Then there were the multiple extra modes crammed into the package. Tekken Ball was beach volleyball played with punches and kicks, while Tekken Force was a side-scrolling beat ’em up that persists in the series to this day. Tekken 3 also set a visual standard on the PlayStation that few titles could match, while luxuriating in the surreality of its characters and the King of Iron Fist Tournament itself. Tekken 3 built on solid foundations in a way few expected and almost all of its additions became foundations for the later games. So much so that it’s easy to forget that it remains a cracking fighting game. RS See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
The Last Express Original release date : 1997 Platform : PC, Mac Developer : Smoking Car Productions Genre : Adventure
Five years, $6 million, and one development studio at the breaking point (developer Smoking Car Productions was forced to close its doors directly after release), The Last Express is Jordan Mechner’s magnum opus. An overlooked graphic adventure that deserves a place in the annals of video game history for its innovation rather than its status as one of the industry’s biggest commercial failures. The player takes the role of Robert Cath, a fugitive doctor on the run, who takes the train to meet with an old friend only to find the friend killed in his berth. Played in an accelerated real time, where events are constantly occurring and nonplayer characters use artificial intelligence to perform to their own agendas, The Last Express chugs along to one of several endings. A gorgeous and complex experience, it features rotoscoped art inspired by the historically appropriate Art Nouveau style while the Orient Express is an accurate representation of how the train existed in 1914. Released with little publicity, and now out of print, The Last Express could be the greatest game never played. MKu
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1990s
Grand Theft Auto Original release date : 1997 Platform : Various Developer : DMR Design Genre : Action
Don’t tell anyone, but Grand Theft Auto, the violent crime game that shocked parents everywhere, landed its Scottish designers in the tabloids, and even managed to get angry—not to mention entirely uninformed—questions asked in Parliament, is basically harmless, old pinball dressed up with some comedy cop murder. It’s pinball that makes sense of the top-down view and roadkill game play, and pinball that Dundee-based DMA Design fell back on when it was trying to make sense of the sandbox world it’d created. How to provide a sense of progression and an eventual target to aim for in a nonlinear game in which players can do as they please? Task everyone with earning a million points, that’s how. The murderous urban themes may have snagged the media’s attention—and, in all truth, there is a slight shudder of delight to be found in running someone over with their own ride after you’ve yanked them out of it—but it was the delicate details that made the first Grand Theft Auto such a pleasure: the gentle differences between one vehicle and the next, the moment when you discover you can get on board the train and travel by rail (or blow it to pieces), and the way the music blaring from the radio depends on what kind of car you get into.
Even in such early days, Liberty City was a charismatic playground, with broken bridges to leap, skyscrapers to swerve between, and a chain of Hare Krishna to mow down for, perhaps, the gaming world’s most unusual bonus. Subsequent games may have brought three-dimensional graphics, a sharper focus on character, and increasingly cinematic storytelling, but the two-dimensional debut was a surprisingly intoxicating mix. This rich and provocative game was a gangster version of Marble Madness, a Goodfellas with ball-bearings. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Ultima Online Original release date : 1997 Platform : PC Developer : Origin Systems Genre : MMORPG The history of online role-playing games starts with niche, text-only multi-user dungeons (MUDs) populated by early hackers and anyone else who could figure out how to get on Telnet. In the mid2000s, the genre finally stormed the mainstream, thanks to World of Warcraft , which made rolling an elf and joining a guild as quick and easy as miniature golf. But somewhere in between, Ultima Online ruled the roost. Building off the franchise of Richard Garriott’s two-dimensional Ultima games, Ultima Online brought thousands of players to the challenge of a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG). Griefers and gankers, cratering game economies, houses you could buy (or sell or break into), extreme role-playing, and emergent narratives—it all happened here, and informed every online game to come after it. The designers strove to make a living world, and skills like “forensic examination” and “begging” suggest the social interactions that are rewarded alongside the questing and the killing. Compared to modern games, settling in to Ultima Online is about as easy as flying a bomber. Characters start weak and slowly improve their skills to the point where they can seriously tackle the world. Newer, friendlier software clients have launched and faded over the years, and while the standard top-down experience is cluttered and confusing, you’ll have plenty of time to get used to it. Newcomers are encouraged to steer clear of combat and grind before they try anything risky. Today, the game still claims about the same number of players as in its heyday, with a rich community and deep role-playing. Just as multi-user dungeons never really went away, Ultima Online fills a niche between the intimidatingly free role-playing of the old days and the glossiness of modern massively multiplayer online games. CDa See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Quake II Original release date : 1997 Platform : Various Developer : id Software Genre : First-Person Shooter
The most anticipated PC release of its day, Quake II’s nominal sequel status was merely a result of its developer’s difficulties in trademarking preferred titles for the project. Sick of having alternatives rejected, id Software settled on reusing the Quake name. But aside from the genre and similarities between the arsenal and power-ups, the two games are unrelated. Instead of Quake’s happily incoherent mash of dark fantasy and hi-tech, Quake II wields something resembling a narrative. The player is in the role of Bitterman, the one surviving soldier of a disastrous counteroffensive on an alien homeworld. Though the game little troubles itself with this plot, beyond presenting a compelling impetus to gun down the cybernetic terrors known as the Strogg, it set a benchmark for the first-person shooter’s advances in ambient narrative. The player clambers out of his shattered droppod into a ruined chamber. Electronics spark and smoke. Bodies of less successful marines slump in corners. Though its atmospheric aspirations were shown to be relatively crude within a matter of years, Quake II was a marked step, introducing nonlinearity to its levels, which were structured around hubs
(better explored by the revolutionary Half-Life less than twelve months later). The game shows its flair for gunplay, too, and it’s the heft and sound of Quake II’s weaponry that is its most lasting triumph. Single-player mode was not its only draw. Quake II came with a slick netcode that, in terms of quality of service, remained unsurpassed for several years. Early patches brought bespoke death match levels, many recognized as classics today. Sustained by a lively modding scene, Quake II became the most popular online game of 1998. Though eclipsed by its successor, Quake II remains significant in the history of multiplayer gaming. MD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Interstate ’76 Original release date : 1997 Platform : PC Developer : Activision Genre : Driving / Shoot ’Em Up
While games have done well at referencing their visual history to offer retro appeal, few offer the sense of cool that pulls from deeper cultural reference points than early 8-bit titles. Truly inspired or just lucky, Interstate ’76 draws from the deep well of creativity found in 1970s television shows and exploitation films, creating a game that succeeds in offering an authentic and thrilling experience, outstripping even the attempts of filmmakers such as Quentin Tarantino to recapture the vibe of the era. Opening with TV series-style credits, with main characters assigned to fictional actors against bombastically funky music (the score, composed by Arion Salazar, is a consistently clever pastiche of 1970s funk standards), Interstate 76 stars Groove Champion, a race driver turned reluctant vigilante after his sister is killed. Inheriting her 1971 Picard Piranha (the in-game equivalent of the iconic Plymouth Barracuda), Groove is guided by his sister’s partner, Taurus, a vigilante with an Afro as large as his fondness for poetry, across Texas in a quest to discover what led to her death. It’s plotted (intentionally) like a B-grade road movie, but Interstate ’76 isn’t theme alone. As the first vehicular combat game in full three dimensions, it defined a genre in which it has never been
bettered. A full damage simulation system and well-designed weapons eased the difficulty of navigating a car while shooting at opponents. With tight game design and simple but clean graphics, it hasn’t grown to look or feel archaic—something perhaps aided by the decision to render all of the game’s characters using flat-shaded, untextured polygons. A striking look that anticipates the celshaded visuals of games such as Killer 7, it completes a title that feels dated in the right ways. MKu See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Total Annihilation Original release date : 1997 Platform : PC Developer : Cavedog Entertainment Genre : Strategy
The mid-1990s was the golden age of real-time strategy games. Sales boomed, and every few months saw a new challenger to the stranglehold achieved by Westwood Studios’ Command & Conquer and Blizzard’s Warcraft. Stepping onto this battlefield—with little fanfare—came Cavedog’s science-fiction romp Total Annihilation, with two largely identical armies scrapping it out in a 4,000-year-long war that players were lucky enough to be invited to. Savvy reviewers quickly realized Total Annihilation was a surprise treat, bringing graphical effects more usually seen in shooters to the genre, and adding several new innovations to its palette. The most important was the unsexy-sounding ability to queue commands for units, such as patrolling via waypoints or constructing defenses. Stacking orders doesn’t just free the player to do something more interesting, it fundamentally changes play, since complex bases with elaborate defensive structures can be planned out in just a few clicks. Key to any battle is the commander unit, who can construct buildings and units, as well as fight in their own right. Starting with the commander, a game of Total Annihilation involves unlocking a standard real-time strategy technology tree, but one that is very well balanced so that advanced units
don’t dominate early ones, and any potential attack has a counterattack. Graphically, the game was a delight at the time, even if it did lag when things got hectic. An underlying physics engine enables units to explode into real pieces, and while the battlefield is two-dimensional, it does include height data. Despite eventually picking up a vast number of awards, however, the game didn’t annihilate the competition. Perhaps it should have. OB See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Shining Force III Original release date : 1998 Platform : Saturn Developer : Camelot Software Planning Genre : Role-Playing
Released during the death throes of Sega’s Saturn, Shining Force III was delivered in three chapters, but only the first volume was released outside of its native Japan. Had the Saturn fared better, perhaps Sega would have published the rest of the story, but as it stands Scenario I is still one of the most enjoyably accessible strategy role-playing games around. The Shining Force series’ distillation of more complex turn-based strategy RPGs like Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics allows the player to focus purely on positioning and attacking, rather than become mired in stats, battle conditions, and defensive considerations. This means faster, tighter combat and more room for those coveted tactics. Shining Force III adds secret areas (which require strategic division of your potentially twelve-strong force), statistic boosts for favored weapons, and a brilliant friendship system. Any characters who unite on the battlefield, perhaps to attack the same foe, build a friendship that yields beneficial effects whenever they are subsequently in proximity. The game introduces three-dimensional battlefields too, and while the Saturn is not known for its three-dimensional capabilities, the aesthetic is genuinely charming, full of bright colors and big-eyed, anime-inspired characters. It’s not a purely cosmetic touch, though, since the viewpoint can be rotated
and the battle-grid system freely navigated—both features that come into play during the campaign. The localization is uncommonly good and even the somewhat flat voice acting can’t dull the engaging plot’s energy. A wonderful soundtrack (by Motoi Sakuraba, composer of Star Ocean’s) completes a package that deserved a far larger audience than it reached. BM See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
R-Type Delta Original release date : 1998 Platform : PS1 Developer : Irem Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
The core R-Type Delta experience, piloting the titular aerospace fighter along a razor’s edge margin of error, has always been a little too brainy for its own good. Standing apart from contemporaries’ increasingly arcane play styles and score multipliers, the series is defined by unflinchingly rigid pattern memorization. While the fourth installment retains the purity of its predecessors, it expands the width, if not the depth, of player agency. Reading Delta’s fixed tempo and honing the R-Type player’s sixth sense for anticipating that one innocuous bullet that costs it all is only half the game. The rest opens up to juggling and prioritizing weapons, superweapons and throttle, snatching back the moments between telegraphed oblivions. It’s every bit a contemplative shooter, with austere production design pushing the series further toward an almost lyrical thematic density, a haiku ’em up fully realized in 2004’s concluding R-Type Final. R-Type Delta’s stages are studies in isolation: abandoned cities, arctic stations, the frigid depths of water or space. Like a deep-sea nature documentary, it’s more appallingly fascinating than attractive, with enough deliberate contrasts between metal and flesh, safety and mutation, to do Cronenberg proud. The game embraces polygonal 3-D with the same aloof genius, capturing the
malicious momentum of obstacles plunging down underwater channels or spiraling in zero gravity. Sinister and self referential—the moments leading up to its finale even twist back to the introductory ship’s select screen—R-Type Delta stands alone, but enriches the entire sweep of its series. If 1987’s exhortation to “Blast off and strike the evil Bydo Empire!” was once narrative enough, here R-Type Delta finds a context and delivery of its own. BS See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Banjo-Kazooie Original release date : 1998 Platform : N64, Xbox 360 Developer : Rare Genre : Platform
The Nintendo 64 was the machine that saw Rare’s last golden era, a time when it could pick a genre and make a masterpiece. Banjo-Kazooie may have been its boldest effort, nothing less than an attempt to outshine Super Mario 64 on its own platform. It didn’t, of course, but it got closer than it had any right to. Banjo’s a bear and Kazooie’s a bird who lives in Banjo’s backpack, and they’ve got to knock old witch Grunty for six by collecting jigsaw pieces (“Jiggies”) as well as all sorts of subsidiary items, such as “Musical Notes” and “Mumbo Tokens,” to aid them in their efforts (Banjo-Kazooie marked the start of a period when a platformer wasn’t a platformer without a museum of largely pointless collectables to be found). In truth, the character design is nothing special, but its bright and unthreatening world lent a particular charm in its smaller touches—the garbled gibberish of the characters’ voices, for example, and the neat hints of exertion in Banjo’s animation. In size it certainly rivals Mario’s most famous 3-D adventure and uses plenty of that game’s ideas to good effect, as well as throwing in a smattering of its own. The nine nonlinear worlds are never short of ambition. There’s the underwater Clanker’s Cavern, the sprawling Mad Monster Mansion,
and, along with the usual fire and ice worlds, the levels are always huge affairs, with intricate reworkings of their elements. In the hunt for Jiggies, the heroic duo, too, have plenty of surprising abilities that unfurl over the adventure’s course. Banjo-Kazooie falls short of Super Mario 64 only in terms of imagination, which is no unforgiveable sin, and remains a monument to the days when Rare almost single-handedly carried the Nintendo 64’s third-party offering. RS See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Burning Rangers Original release date : 1998 Platform : Saturn Developer : Sonic Team Genre : Action
The irony of Burning Rangers, a game about high-tech firefighters, is that it showed up too late to save the Sega Saturn. The ill-fated console was running on fumes by 1998, having been crushed in the marketplace by Sony’s PlayStation. Burning Rangers was a product of Sega’s own Sonic Team development studio, the group responsible for the Sonic the Hedgehog phenomenon. If anything could rescue the Saturn, it would be this. Burning Rangers is a fun and unique game, not least because of its premise. It plays like a typical third-person shooter in many ways, except that your opponent is a highly unpredictable and ravenous fire. Dousing the flames generates crystals, which are a resource that can then be used to teleport victims to safety. As with the rings in Sonic the Hedgehog, crystals in Burning Rangers are your lifeblood. Getting scorched will cause you to lose all the crystals you’re carrying, but you can scoop them back up. As long as you’re carrying at least one, you won’t die. With only four levels, Burning Rangers is short, but elements of randomness keep additional play throughs feeling fresh, by positioning both victims and fires in different locations. Flames explode from unlikely places, signaled by a sound cue you will come to fear. Although navigation can be
difficult in the absence of a mini-map, light platforming elements ease the pain somewhat, with acrobatic moves like double-jumps and air dashes. Plus, a split-screen multiplayer mode offers an entertaining change of pace. Burning Rangers arrived to hype but few sales, and before long the Saturn would be dead and buried. That leaves Burning Rangers as just another historical footnote for a console rife with them. MK See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri Original release date : 1998 Platform : PC Developer : Firaxis Games Genre : Strategy
The game’s tagline says it all: “The future of mankind.” After Sid Meier’s Civilization series had told the history of mankind and its struggle to reach the stars, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri picked up where it left off, depicting the new colonial challenges presented by the human race’s restless need to seek out new, ever more distant territories. In truth, mankind’s future seemed eerily similar to its past. This is, in essence, old wine in new, space-age bottles. The challenge is to settle a planet by exploring the world, gathering and managing resources, developing technology, and vying with rival factions by means of combat and diplomacy. The world is depicted in isometric view, overlaid with a grid that divides the terrain into units to be controlled and exploited. Except now, instead of settlers and spearmen, there are terraformer modules and psionic warriors. Indeed, combat is one of the areas that expands on the original, allowing players to customize the default units, tinkering and tweaking to produce ever more cutting-edge battle technology. Another area of expansion is the emphasis on social engineering, which, along with quotes from historical philosophers and artists as varied as Machiavelli and John Milton, perpetuates the
creators’ preoccupation with political philosophy. Any highbrow aspirations, though, are softened by the sci-fi setting, which comes complete with alien artifacts, mysterious monoliths, and a vast hive mind that makes possible a new victory condition to add to those from the Civilization games: In addition to subduing all of your rivals through conquest, economics, or diplomacy, colonists can also achieve transcendence, leaving their material bodies behind to reach a new plane of existence. DM See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
1080° Snowboarding Original release date : 1998 Platform : N64 Developer : Nintendo Genre : Sports
Video games offer experiences that are literally magical in that they allow you to try things out that you could never do in real life: shooting at cowboys from a speeding stagecoach, speeding through deep space with a talking frog for a wingman, or immersing yourself in the speed and splendor of snowboarding with no danger of caving your head in against a rock. For many virtual extreme-sports enthusiasts, snowboarding might begin and end with Electronic Arts’s brilliantly exaggerated SSX series, but 1080° Snowboarding represents a different approach. Dialing down the elaborate caricature of the sport, 1080° Snowboarding is a stylish downhill racer. Built by the team that made Wave Race 64 and produced by Shigeru Miyamoto, the game benefits from some handsome frosty mountain ranges, a robust world that can zip by at a real pace, and a cluster of trick and race modes that bring real life to the limited range of slopes. At the time of its release, several reviewers became upset with the cheating AI, which was capable of blasting along next to you no matter how well you rode the mountain, but, in truth, the rubber-banding largely serves to keep a thrill of excitement alive when you would traditionally be on your own up front, with no particular sense of urgency.
Yet, despite playing it relatively straight when it comes to presentation, it’s the tricks and stunts that carry the game. Watch a seasoned pro at work on the slopes, and 1080° Snowboarding becomes a hair-raising spectator sport as riders chain moves together, using every inch of the environment to their advantage as they plummet downhill. Classy and lithe, the game is everything you want from a snowboarding experience—and, best of all, it won’t land you in a Swiss hospital at the end of it all. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Dance Dance Revolution Original release date : 1998 Platform : Various Developer : Konami Genre : Music
Up, down, left, right. Few contemporary video games manage to pare their interactivity down to four sparse directional inputs. But then, few video games are played with one’s feet. Your first time with one of the formative and most enduring music games to come out of Japan’s rhythm-action boom era is likely to be an awkward tussle of limbs, neither graceful nor particularly enjoyable. Bundled with a plastic dance mat peripheral, the aim is to time your dance steps with the onscreen stream of instructions that move in rhythm with the music. Each input is judged for its accuracy —good, great, perfect—with the best scores reserved for those who manage both meticulous timing as well as physical dexterity. As with all video games, with repetition comes muscle memory. The only difference here is that your whole body is the muscle that must be trained, especially challenging at the game’s highest difficulty levels, accompanied with dizzying arrow indicators, which require you to move your torso in such a way to prepare for the next action. The core mechanic is nestled within bright, neon Japanese presentation, with garish and loud
visuals to match the sucker-punch electronic soundtrack. Dance Dance Revolution’s mechanics inspired a slew of real dancers to create routines around its songs, usually at lower difficulties, where the space between inputs is sufficient for freestyling. Conversely, others prefer to steady themselves on nearby furniture and let their legs flurry about beneath them, kicking at “perfects” in a dazzling display of speed sight-reading. Whatever your approach, when first starting out, be sure to clear away the ornaments and possibly draw the curtains. SP See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Carmageddon II: Carpocalypse Now Original release date : 1998 Platform : PC, Mac Developer : Stainless Genre : Driving
The idea of the car as a weapon has been punted about in both cinema and gaming for many years, but it reaches its logical apex in the Carmageddon games. Carmageddon means thinking of your car not as transport, but as a high-speed battering ram. The second game in the series is the best, being filled with both an astounding level of violence and some genuinely entertaining challenges. There are ten levels in total, and each is a race that can be won either by completing the actual race, killing all other cars, or killing all the pedestrians on a given level. It is, of course, this level of violence that sets the Carmageddon II: Carpocalypse Now apart from its many peers. The streets through which the player races are filled with pedestrians, all of whom are viable targets. In many regions these were not people, but zombies, with one particularly sensitive market going as far as making them nonhuman aliens. A subsequent “blood patch” was distributed via the Internet, allowing people with the zombies version of the game to restore the original human pedestrians, and the red blood gore effects that went with them. The effect is a game that is comically hideous, with corpses bouncing and splattering around the simplistically rendered cities as you careen across the pavement, putting savage dents in your deformable ride.
It goes without saying that gratuitous violence gets boring if it’s not tied to an interesting game, and it’s certainly to the credit of this game’s team that they managed to make the game a worthy challenge and fun to control. Jumps and stunts rely entirely on player skill, and hunting down zombies in the wide-open maps gives you the completist urge for replay that is common to so many games with open-ended objectives. JR See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Cyber Troopers Virtual-On: Oratorio Tangram Original release date : 1998 Platform : Various Developer : Sega Genre : Action
Before Capcom’s Steel Battalion was released with a controller that made a mockery of practicality, the most complicated cockpit for virtual robot pilots was the twin sticks of Sega’s Virtual-On games. Available for both the Saturn and the Dreamcast, they were the only way to replicate the complex, precise input required to master the controls of the gargantuan gladiators featured in the original coin-op. Virtual-On might have looked like a standard beat ’em up with robot fighters instead of humans, but the reality was very different, conjuring up a unique blend of tactics and action. Oratorio Tangram is the sequel to Cyber Troopers Virtual-On , and its improved balancing makes it the more popular choice among gamers drawn to the dizzying future-tech designs of the Virtuaroids that duke it out in Sega’s robot arenas amid a riotous blaze of colors. Each Virtuaroid is a masterpiece of visual invention, from the MBV-707-G Temjin to the RVR-42 Cypher (those hard-topronounce names bolstering the game’s pseudo-tech appeal). More than just decorating the game’s sumptuous arenas, though, each Virtuaroid also makes very different demands on their pilots. Some are suited to keeping things on the ground; others are better in the air, and choosing the right
Virtuaroid is the key to success in a game with a nearly vertical learning curve. That learning curve and the complicated control scheme prevented the game from achieving mass market appeal, but its justifiable cult following was rewarded by the unlikely decision to re-release the game in 2009 on the Xbox 360 via its Live Arcade service; the only thing missing is the ability to save your color schemes on the Dreamcast’s Visual Memory Unit, to use in the coin-op. DM See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Body Harvest Original release date : 1998 Platform : N64 Developer : DMR Design Genre : Action
There was one game that all the staff at DMA Design wanted to work on—and it wasn’t Grand Theft Auto. Body Harvest—a nonlinear, adult-themed sci-fi shooter—was developed and earmarked as a potential N64 launch title, which was a considerable honour. Set in a nightmarish future, Body Harvest sees the player control an augmented supersoldier sent back in time to foil a series of invasions by man-eating alien insects that have destroyed humanity. The plot spans a hundred-year period and takes place in more than five countries. Employing a hierarchal system, the alien beings all have different roles that players must learn in order to knock out the attack waves as the invaders track their human targets. Although each stage presents the player with set puzzles and objectives, the essentially nonlinear structure allows plenty of exploration and experimentation. The game’s status as a prototypical openworld adventure is further cemented by the inclusion of various vehicles, which can all be attained and driven freely through the environment. Players are even able to shoot and/or run over human passersby. The fact that side missions can be picked up by conversing with locales would prove to be a highly influential addition.
Sadly, though, with its sluggish frame rate, poor draw distance, and frequent clipping issues, Body Harvest never quite looked like the revolutionary step forward it actually was. When Nintendo failed to comprehend the charm beneath the wanton destruction and decided not to handle the game, thirdparty publishers eventually released the title to a public who remained largely ambivalent, despite the good reviews and praise for its originality that it had garnered. KS See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Xenogears Original release date : 1998 Platform : PS1 Developer : Square Genre : Role-Playing
A convoluted science-fiction project with a multi-million-yen budget or the most ambitious RPG ever conceived? When it comes to Xenogears, there are many who would argue it’s both. With a back story stretching back for ten thousand years, penned by four scriptwriters and taking in untold forgotten battles, species, and technologies, the mythology is on a rare scale, contending with accusations of it being little more than a result of the awkward marriage of giant robots to overwrought philosophical posturing. Xenogears is one of Japanese role-playing games’ most interesting and challenging stories, its multiple battle systems and irresistible parade of set pieces outstretching most other games by their sheer creativity and spirit. The game’s cast is broad and fascinating, and protagonist Fei Fong Wong (named after the legendary Chinese hero Wong Fei Hung of Guangdong), who was abused by his surrogate mother from a young age, is a tortured and sympathetic lead. The game successfully marries the local with the intergalactic, examining how changes to the grand narrative of the universe affect those in small communities. By the game’s end its themes have grown to encompass philosophy, religion, and man’s
relationship to the divine. An exquisitely realized battle system and well-executed explorative elements give soul and purpose to the story. But this is a game brought to its knees by scale. Unfortunately, the second half of the game descends into extended cut scenes, limiting the amount of interactions as its developer desperately sought to tie up the loose ends of the story before the budget ran out. Despite this, Xenogears remains a triumph of world-building endeavor, a high point for both its developer and medium. SP See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Panzer Dragoon Saga Original release date : 1998 Platform : Saturn Developer : Team Andromeda Genre : Role-Playing
Following up “dramatic shooting games,” as the first two Panzers were dubbed, with a four-disk RPG might not seem like a logical continuation. But in-house Sega developer Team Andromeda always had weighty aspirations for its ancient-futurist series. The original 1995 Panzer Dragoon and its superb sequel, Zwei, had already done much to fabricate a rich and surreal universe, having the benefit of creative insight from esteemed visionary comic artist Moebius. However, the added game play depth that fans had craved all along finally crystallized in Panzer Dragoon Saga, particularly in terms of the story delivery, exploration, and its epic, sweeping battle system. Compared to the cliché-ridden excesses of many RPGs, Panzer Dragoon Saga’s narrative unfolding is unusually restrained and surreally evocative, containing a huge amount of detail about the world—much of which could be accessed by simply targeting an object or person either while on foot or mounted on the dragon. Visually speaking, Panzer Dragoon Saga is almost the stuff of legends. Sega’s Saturn mostly fell
short in its realization of 3-D worlds, but the expansive environments to be explored here are as huge as they are diverse, including canyons, forests, deserts, and subterranean ruins. Inevitably, only the prerendered FMV now seems crude by comparison. Audio was also an area that excelled, and the game features full voice acting for every character, as well as a memorable score. Many aspects of the game impress above and beyond even the best RPGs produced nowadays. English-language copies of Panzer Dragoon Saga are rare and often command extortionate prices on eBay. Such is the price of perfection. JB See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
F-Zero X Original release date : 1998 Platform : N64 Developer : Nintendo Genre : Racing
F-Zero X is racing at its absolute bare essentials: speed, tight handling, and the element of danger. Its courses aren’t really racetracks at all, but rather looping, corkscrewing, abstract planes, suspended in space. The racers aren’t hugely detailed vehicles with walls of stat screens and customization options. Instead, the vehicles are superfast hovercars comprised of no more than a few polygons. The aesthetic is spartan, the game play unforgiving. It’s the racing game as a concept piece. The learning curve is absolutely brutal. Surviving on the track with twenty-nine extremely aggressive racers is nearly impossible, until you get the feel of the very precise controls. The game constantly encourages you to flirt with danger, to sacrifice some of your health bar for a speed boost or to bash another racer off the edge of the track. It wants you to tread the knife’s edge between success and failure, between flying past the finish line or exploding on the guard rails after taking a corner too quickly. That’s assuming the course even has guard rails; racers frequently fly off into infinity on hairpin corners. Having so many opponents in view at once makes F-Zero X aggressively competitive; Death Race, one of the game modes, capitalizes upon this by turning the systematic destruction of everyone
else on the track into a main objective. The AI encourages rivalries with particularly aggressive competitors. It’s a generous game, too, with layers of difficulty levels, courses, and vehicle unlocks offering a perpetual challenge. The lack of graphical detail on the racers and courses was necessary to preserve the game’s frame rate and sense of speed, but this minimalism actually lends the game a strange, angular beauty. KM See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Grand Prix Legends Original release date : 1998 Platform : PC Developer : Papyrus Design Group Genre : Driving
The late 1960s proved a magical era for Formula 1. Drivers had to delicately wrestle with fourwheeled vessels able to achieve speeds that far outran the mechanical tolerance of the components that created them. It was a time when changing gears required the use of the clutch and letting go of the steering wheel, and when losing control of the car and leaving the circuit would see you soon slowed down by a wall, a tree, or a crowd of spectators. Few games capture that danger—and excitement—as convincingly as Grand Prix Legends. Still one of the highlights of the sim-racing scene, the game recreates the 1967 season and offers you a seat in one of the period’s machinery—Lotus, Ferrari, Cooper, etc.—to pit your skill against Clark, Brabham, and others as you tackle the likes of Monza, Monaco, and the infamous Nürburgring Nordschleife (in the days when it was actually lethal). Unlike the cars, progress—even for those possessing considerable virtual-driving ability—is atypically slow. The handling model is sufficiently detailed to accurately portray the behavior of a 1967 F1 vehicle, meaning mere mortals will find initial stints behind the steering wheel hugely intimidating. More than almost any other sim-racing title before or since, therefore, Grand Prix
Legends deflates egos faster than a blown Goodyear. Then again, despite the spins, despite the crashes, despite the challenges, you’ll keep putting the laps in. Because when you’re sitting in the graphically simple cockpit, enveloped by the neck-hairraising scream of a V12 at full throttle and battling nose-to-gearbox against historic adversaries while expertly executing four-wheel drifts around perilous strips of tarmac, there are few other virtual spaces you’ll want to be in. JDS See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Radiant Silvergun Original release date : 1998 Platform : Arcade, Saturn Developer : Treasure Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
I n Radiant Silvergun, Treasure sought to evolve the top-down shoot ’em up into something altogether different. There are no weapon pick-ups in the game; instead, all six of the craft’s weapons are installed from the start, each triggered by a different combination of buttons and each with its own properties ideally suited to specific situations. As you defeat the swarms of enemies, the weapon you are currently using grows stronger, forcing a decision on whether to spread your power across all of the options or just focus upon your favorites. Every enemy craft in the game is also assigned a color with score bonuses to be achieved by chaining together like-colored enemies or destroying them in particular orders. Underneath this highlevel strategy, the game is also one of the finest shooters ever made, the relentless stream of exciting boss battles and dizzying graphical effects broadening expectations for what is possible in the genre. Pseudo-sequel Ikaruga chose to focus more fully upon the color-coded puzzle element, but for the more rounded package, Radiant Silvergun is essential. SP See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Grim Fandango Original release date : 1998 Platform : PC Developer : LucasArts Genre : Adventure
Manny Calavera is a travel agent in the land of the dead, a skeletal smoothie who provides his recently deceased customers with a one-way ticket to the Ninth Underworld. When he begins to suspect that there might be more than meets the eye to Meche, his latest client, he finds himself embroiled in a heady brew of dastardly corruption and connivance that will set him on an epic fouract quest. Almost every aspect of Grim Fandango is refreshingly ambitious, from the snappy references you have to be cine-literate to grasp, and the elegant unspooling of smart plotting (which regularly hops forward leaving yearlong ellipses), to the fact that LucasArts was struggling with its first attempt to recreate the static world of adventure games in three dimensions, its characterful 3-D models moving against prerendered backdrops. In every aspect it’s a success, with smart design, devious puzzles, lovely art, and a truly memorable cast of characters. Grim Fandango is fashionable nowadays, but it is truly worth the love it gets—whether the people talking about it have genuinely played it or not. CD
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1990s
Half-Life Original release date : 1998 Platform : Various Developer : Valve Corporation Genre : First-Person Shooter
In the first-person shooter world of biceps and crewcuts, one of the greatest heroes is a skinny twenty-seven-year-old physicist named Gordon Freeman. Freeman’s a scientist, not a soldier, and that’s how the game presents his world: calmly and analytically. Deep in the Black Mesa Research Facility, an experiment has gone wrong, triggering a resonance cascade, rupturing the border between our world and a much scarier one. While the rest of the staff panic, hide, or die of their injuries, Freeman arms himself to make his way back to the surface, shooting his way through head crabs, barnacles, and other alien critters, as well as navigating the obstacle course left by the wreckage. While Half-Life is a solid shooter, it shines most of all in its style. The game avoids cut scenes, because they would rob Freeman of the chance to make his own observations, scientifically critiquing and reveling in exposition. From the surprises at the surface to Freeman’s trip to the beyond at the climax, don’t miss the chance to see Black Mesa, the incubator where a legend was born. CDa
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1990s
Devil Dice Original release date : 1998 Platform : PS1 Developer : Shift Genre : Puzzle
The Yaroze initiative was an early and pretty much unprecedented experiment in user-generated content. It consisted of a cut-down development kit for the PlayStation, which allowed hobbyist programmers to create games for a fraction of the cost of a professionally developed title. Most of those games were little more than rough-edged experiments. Some of them, however, were more successful, such as Devil Dice. Probably the best puzzle game on the PlayStation, Devil Dice was so successful that it spawned a couple of sequels, and would later be dusted off for the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable. Like all the best puzzle games, it is the essence of simplicity. It consists of a 3-D grid covered with dice. The object of the game is to flip those dice, one face at a time, in order to match the dots. Match the dots and the dice will disappear and the points will rack up. It’s wrapped up in a structure that contains all of the play modes that you could possibly need, including a pregenerated puzzle mode and a frantic multitap mode. Diabolically addictive. DM See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Oddworld: Abe’s Exoddus Original release date : 1998 Platform : PC, PS1 Developer : Oddworld Inhabitants Genre : Platform
What a difference a save makes. Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee, lauded as much for its artistic vision as for extending the twilight of the 2D platform genre, had one crucial flaw in many eyes: It was difficult, and yet it had fixed save points. With the addition of a quick-save for this sequel—officially a bonus spin-off in the Oddworld mythology—everyone could love Abe without restraint. The quick-save debate is a reminder that even games as concerned with setting and narrative as Abe’s Exoddus can’t drop the ball when it comes to mechanics; these are interactive experiences, not movies. Happily, in virtually every respect, Abe’s Exoddus surpasses your expectations of platform gaming, drawing you into a world where you can perform a wide range of actions, yet you’re far from invulnerable. Indeed, you’re always a moment from death. The back story and game play options are extensive. As Abe, you’re freeing your fellow Mudokons from enslavement in a factory that uses their tears and bones to brew a potent drink. You can direct Mudokons using “gamespeak” to pull levers or attack enemies, or you can possess those enemies—Sligs, Slogs, Glukkons, and suchlike—to turn their weapons against them.
But this is to scratch the surface. Any game where you seize control of your farts to deploy them as an explosive device has hidden depths. In Abe’s Exoddus it seldom pays to shoot first, and it’s usually best to talk. Abe’s Exoddus has a depth of expression and a rich environment missing from most games of its ilk. Just as Little Big Adventure uses isometric 3-D to build a more vibrant game world, so the 2-D cartoonish Abe’s Exoddus features harrowed faces and shrugging protagonists that make Lara Croft look like a mannequin. OB See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Metal Gear Solid Original release date : 1998 Platform : PC, PS1 Developer : Konami Genre : Stealth
When designer Hideo Kojima brought his Metal Gear series to PlayStation, he did more than just kick-start the most popular stealth franchise in gaming history. He began a conversation that continues today, sharing his fears of nuclear holocaust, his distrust of the industrial-military complex, his love of movies like The Guns of Navarone and You Only Live Twice , and his sympathy for soldiers discombobulated by war. “Ghosts of the battlefield,” he would call them, putting a fresh slant on the tired old cliché of the video game action man. Retired special agent Solid Snake has been dispatched to Shadow Moses, a remote fortified island in Alaska. His mission is to quell an uprising staged by FOXHOUND, a terrorist cell in control of the island’s secret: a walking nuclear doomsday weapon called Metal Gear Rex. Little does Snake realize that its mastermind, codenamed Liquid Snake, is actually his genetic twin, part of a government project to breed the ultimate soldier. His lieutenants, furthermore, are psychopaths and assassins with their own twisted agendas. The government calls them traitors, but can anything be that simple in this new world order? If you think that sounds convoluted, wait until it gets going. Kojima isn’t a man to use five words
when fifty will suffice and didn’t make a game to be played only once. The threads established here would multiply tenfold in games to come, as would the options for combat and stealth. Officially a “sneaking” game, Metal Gear Solid is fast and relatively forgiving; escape often as simple as hiding under a cardboard box. Intensely cinematic with its reaction shots and cut scenes, it’s more fondly remembered for toying with that illusion: one boss’s weakness being a quick change of controller port. DH See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Street Fighter Alpha 3 Original release date : 1998 Platform : Various Developer : Capcom Genre : Fighting
Presenting characters from every iteration of Street Fighters main series that preceded it, along with many new ones and three different fighting styles for each, Street Fighter Alpha 3 was arguably the definitive Street Fighter title until the surprise appearance of Street Fighter IV in 2008. While purists might prefer the balanced nature of Street Fighter Alpha 2, and competition players overlook it in favor of Street Fighter III: Third Strike, Street Fighter Alpha 3 offers an unprecedented variety of play for those who cherish the context of the Street Fighter universe as much as its design. Players are able to choose between A-ism (based on the previous Street Fighter Alpha’s play style), X-ism (based on the simpler style of Super Street Fighter II Turbo) and V-ism (a custom combo mode first explored in Street Fighter Alpha 2). With combos and special moves flashier than ever, matches are a sight to behold, though they never tip over into the sometimes confusing showiness of the Marvel vs. Capcom series. Street Fighter Alpha 3 belongs in any fighting game fan’s collection due to its perfect expansion
on the backstories of many beloved Street Fighter characters. Fighters face various opponents with which they’ll exchange story-driven dialogue, while an individual ending (which, unlike those of Street Fighter IV, tends to make at least some sense) rewards extensive play with all characters— even those who provide strange comic relief, such as female wrestler and Zangief fan, R. Mika. As a bonus, the worlds of Capcom’s various combat-focused series are further intertwined, with the appearance of Final Fight’s main character, Cody, as a playable fighter, following the appearance of Guy and several other Final Fight villains from previous games. MKu See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Resident Evil 2 Original release date : 1998 Platform : Various Developer : Capcom Genre : Survival Horror
Resident Evil perfected the survival-horror genre with a feeling of creeping dread quite apart from the grisly reality of the undead. Resident Evil 2 had a hard act to follow, but did so spectacularly: Where else to go after a localized biohazard, after all, but the metropolis? Raccoon City is as corridor-based as Resident Evil’s mansion, but it creates a flawless impression of something much bigger: Cars piled up to block side roads, doors are desperately barricaded with whatever was at hand, while every room reeks of abandonment. You blast your way to a police station full of undead employees, through it to a byzantine complex of sewers and industrial works, eventually ending up in the inevitable “other” secret lab. Resident Evil 2 is a B movie in concept, but in video games that doesn’t have to be a hindrance. There’s a neat tale about the dangers of obsession buried beneath the groaning monsters you fight every step of the way, but this is about thrills: running battles with an encroaching horde; the lickers and their prehensile, stabbing tongues; and the hideous teeth-and-gristle mass of the bosses. Your first play is only half of it: this unlocks a B game, which casts you as the character you
didn’t choose first time around. This scenario reuses the game’s environments to spectacular effect: You missed all of the real action the first time around, it turns out, including the thudding, terrifying presence of Mr X., an unkillable beefcake in a trenchcoat, whose sole purpose is to kill you at the very first opportunity. Resident Evil 2 became a best-seller and its focus changed the series for good: quiet scares were out, building-smashing pyrotechnics and huge globs of goo with fangs were in. Forget your brain— it’ll only get eaten anyway—and lock and load. RS See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Sonic Adventure Original release date : 1998 Platform : Dreamcast Developer : Sonic Team Genre : Platform
Designer and producer Takashi lizuka went to Sonic creator Yuji Naka with a pitch for a new kind of game for Sega’s hedgehog icon: a Sonic RPG with an expansive story, a wealth of characters, and, for the first time, 3-D visuals. It is the concept that would eventually evolve into Sonic Team’s flawed masterpiece. Sonic Adventure places the familiar platforming experience within a seamless action-adventure format, complete with exploration and narrative elements. Sonic still gets to charge around primarycolored landscapes at immense speeds, but players also gain control of other characters, such as Big the Cat (whose fishing mini-games divided the Sonic fan base) and a robot named Gamma. On the periphery of the adventure, there are mini-games for different characters, and the Chao— cute critters that can be reared and cared for like virtual pets. Sonic Adventure is also one of the few titles to support Dreamcast’s Visual Memory Unit with a dedicated game, Chao Adventure, through which the pets can be trained while the player is on the move. But the highlights are found within the eleven action stages that take place in vast, twisting
environments, loaded with trademark Sonic Team detail. From driving bumper cars in Twinkle Park to legging it down the side of a skyscraper on Speed Highway, the game brilliantly captures traditional Sonic elements. Some levels, especially Lost World, were rebuilt dozens of times as the programming team fought with transference to a 3-D world, and although the erratic camera shots pose issues, its dynamic setup, which cuts between views as Sonic runs, is a clever piece of engineering designed specifically to recreate the old feeling of speed. KS See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Wetrix Original release date : 1998 Platform : Various Developer : Zed Two Genre : Puzzle
A slant on the classic model of spatial puzzle blocks in both aesthetics and principle, Wetrix inspected the new era of three-dimensional space with a scientist’s eye for conundrum and a trickster’s eye for challenge. Both gift and curse, its isometric viewpoint lends the world-sustaining mechanics of holding your water (and then evaporating it for points) an element of informed guesswork. The range of pieces the user juggles, from landscape-altering Uppers and Downers to earthpuncturing Bombs, leads to a game of climate—rather than riot—control. A calculating user can control and extend sessions in a way the twitch tactic immediacy of Tetris rarely allows for. The descending pieces coax a level of self-flagellation, leading to a lesser-of-two-evils approach to progress that imbues Wetrix with a pervading sense of survivalist’s dread. Challenge mode and handicaps take the concept a step further, forcing improvisation and prayers for Rainbows (worldsaving gifts from the heavens). The split-screen multiplayer, however, allows the user to wreak vengeance with the very tools of destruction that have been the bane of the single-player campaign. The game world itself, suspended as it is on an axis in wallpapered game space, allows the art to
pepper the private oasis/hell with some stellar flourishes. Smoothly rendered textures and effervescent particle effects layer the often punishing risk-reward loops of interaction with a deceptive, attractive innocence. Though ports were made—most notably to Sega’s Dreamcast—Wetrix was never more at home than on the Nintendo 64. It showed that Nintendo’s machine, both in physical design and theory, could challenge and change old systems of play. DV See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Star Wars: Rogue Squadron Original release date : 1998 Platform : N64, PC Developer : Factor 5 Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
The Death Star trench run is one of the earliest and most thrillingly memorable video game experiences, thanks to Atari’s 1983 vector-graphic coin-op classic. Fifteen years later, LucasArts enlisted Factor 5 to bring the attack on the Death Star back to life, along with Beggar’s Canyon, the Battle for Hoth, and a host of other encounters drawn from the rich history of the Star Wars universe. The result is one of the definitive video game versions of that universe. It follows on from the magisterial brilliance of the X-Wing and TIE Fighter series but tailors the experience for a console audience. For most of the game, it puts you in control of Luke Skywalker, sitting in the cockpit of his X-Wing—and A-Wing, Y-Wing, Snowspeeder, V-Wing, and, if you’re skilled enough to unlock them, the Millennium Falcon, TIE Interceptor, T-16 Skyhopper, AT-ST, and (just in time for its first appearance in the movies) the Naboo Starfighter. One of the things that the game gets so right is the way it fulfills the wishes of Star Wars fans, serving up items, vehicles, technology, planets, and people drawn from the farthest reaches of the galaxy, raking through twenty years of detail and exploring beyond the celluloid edges of George Lucas’s “lived-in” universe. Every chapter opens with the famous opening crawl and continues to recreate, precisely, the
sights, sounds, and action of all the major battles between the end of A New Hope and the start of The Empire Strikes Back. Thanks to the Nintendo 64’s memory expansion pack, it also displays a higher resolution for the utmost graphical fidelity. More than anything, though, Star Wars: Rogue Squadron captures the feel and sensation of flying one of those Incom T-65s through a series of intense do-ordie dogfights. Saving the galaxy has never been so much fun. DM See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Space Station Silicon Valley Original release date : 1998 Platform : N64, PS1 Developer : DMA Design Genre : Action / Platform
What about if, instead of talking to the animals, you could just take them over? Space Station Silicon Valley ’s setting is a facility in the year 3000, filled with robotic approximations of Earth creatures—mice with wheels, foxes with rocket packs strapped to their underbellies, and steampowered hippos. And you’re a microchip that can control any of them—if they’ve been incapacitated. In essence it’s a robotic recreation of the battle between hunter and hunted, with the delightful twist that here, at the right moment, you can switch sides. This simple formula is the basis for a puzzling platformer that demonstrated the riotous imagination of DMA Design at its best. Gentle jumps might take you to one objective, a sheep’s coat puffing out to slow your descent, while in the next moment you’re roaring up a ramp and then arcing over a lake (it’s never a good idea for electronics to get wet, after all). You’ll be zigzagging in and out of teeth and claws, but soon returning with teeth and claws of your own to exact revenge. Working out what to do is often the entire challenge, before crashing rudely into the ecosystem and actually pulling it off under the bewildered whiskers of those around you. Leagues ahead of its time in concept, Space Station Silicon Valley suffers only from some basic
failings in checkpoints and controls. For such a cuddly concept, it’s brutally tough at times, and you’ll be pursued throughout certain levels with the relentlessness only a mindless piece of programming can muster. But the bonkers, and genuinely amusing, plot helps keep your interest through even the worst of its excesses, alongside a quality you often don’t find in more widely acclaimed games: You just don’t know what lies around the next corner. RS See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
R4: Ridge Racer Type 4 Original release date : 1998 Platform : PS1 Developer : Namco Genre : Driving
While the Ridge Racer series can be criticized for an overly controlled approach to handling and general game mechanics, it’s equally important to recognize that the fundamentals of such an approach can create essential game experiences. R4: Ridge Racer Type 4 is one such example. The game is a notable entry into the Ridge Racer lineage because, while adhering to Namco’s passion for order and control, it manages to integrate its elements in an almost entirely harmonious manner. From a technical perspective, the graphics are some of the best on the system (and their distinctive Gouraud-shaded look and delicate lighting continues to impress, even if the darker setting is a little at odds with the typical Ridge Racer aesthetic), the eight circuits designed to showcase as many polygons as they can get away with. Further substance can be found in the game’s main mode, which structures race meetings as a series of rounds, while, bravely, the handling model offers an option that provides an alternative to Ridge Racer’s signature power-slide-obsessed approach. By today’s standards the handling feels like something of an acquired taste, but there is a layer of
depth and predictability in R4: Ridge Racer Type 4 that is noticeably absent from the previous Ridge Racer games. What is consistent with the series is an exceptional sense of style and presentation, which, again, still stands up today. There are eight visually thrilling tracks and while the 300-odd cars available to unlock is a misguided excess on the part of the developer, R4: Ridge Racer Type 4 can at least reverse into its garage, confident that it still delivers a thrilling and uniquely arcadelike four-wheeled blast. JDS See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
StarCraft Original release date : 1998 Platform : PC Developer : Blizzard Entertainment Genre : Strategy
Defensive pop-culture creators often boast of being “big in Japan,” but StarCraft was the first Western game to pin its success on South Korea. There was something about this real-time sci-fi strategy game that touched a nerve, making StarCraft a staple of the country’s multiplayer PC cafés, which were emerging in the late 1990s, leading to the sale of 4.5 million copies in the territory. It also helped to establish Korea’s professional gaming scene. Of course, with more than 11 million sales worldwide, StarCraft is one of the best-selling PC games anywhere. Yet while initial reviews were overwhelmingly positive, it’s fair to say that few commentators at the time, at least in the West, foresaw StarCraft being quite the enduring success it proved to be. Despite the isometric graphics, the game isn’t especially impressive, and less successful rivals have an edge in RTS innovation, particularly in terms of unit control and resource management. But StarCraft has a very special trick up its sleeve: three completely distinct and playable races. The Terrans (humans), the Zerg (nasty, swarming aliens), and the Protoss (less numerous psychic philosopher warriors) all have their own units that don’t just look different but play differently, too.
For instance, as the Zerg you can burrow underground and attempt to overwhelm your opponent with sheer numbers, while as the Protoss you have fewer troops, but more powerful weapons at your disposal. Upon release, no race was blatantly overpowerful, and Blizzard has maintained this balance with occasional patches that address rush tactics and other foibles. The combination of diversity and balance is extremely difficult to achieve, and it has underwritten StarCraft’s long shelflife as a multiplayer staple, in Korea and beyond. OB See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Thief: The Dark Project Original release date : 1998 Platform : PC Developer : Looking Glass Studios Genre : Stealth
It started as a communist zombie game. Then it was a Dark Age of Camelot game, based around a revisionist reading of the Arthurian mythos, with Mordred as the hero, Merlin as a time traveler, and Guinevere as a butch lesbian. The result is a proto-steampunk fantasy that’s one of the most seminal PC releases of the late ’90s and arguably the most important game in the development of the stealth genre. Thief: The Dark Project splits such honors with its peer, Metal Gear Solid, but where Hideo Kojima’s game provided the general techno-thriller tone and aesthetics for series like Splinter Cell, with a few exceptions, they all lifted mechanics from Looking Glass Studios’s game. It was to the stealth experience what Asteroids was to the arcade shooter: stepping away from the digital mechanics of its forebears and embracing a more analog system. So rather than simply offering cover opportunities in a binary fashion—on or off—the game overlaid its environment with layers of shadow and light. Due to the protagonist’s supernatural thieving skills, the darker the shadow, the more invisible he is to the guards. The question swiftly becomes not whether you’re hiding but whether you’re hiding well enough. Add a series of tools to skew those odds—from water arrows to
extinguish torches, to something as simple as crouching—and you have something from which you can hang an entire game. It’s telling that where Metal Gear Solid regularly turned to violence, Thief: The Dark Project kept faith in its core tenet: avoidance. It proved that you could make a game where the majority of your time was spent crouching in a darkened corner, scared to even look at the guard inching down the corridor, and still be as compelling as the most action packed of epics. KG See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Original release date : 1998 Platform : N64 Developer : Nintendo Genre : Action / Adventure
An astonishing lifetime-spanning adventure, a reinvention of Hyrule that feels utterly new yet intensely appropriate, and a massive journey that returns, elegantly, to conclude where it began. Reinventing The Legend of Zelda for the complex world of the N64 was a massive undertaking and from the moment Link takes his first melancholic trot through the thin mists of Hyrule Field, it’s clear that Nintendo is more than up to the task. It is an adventure that rarely disappoints. What’s staggering is how much the development over-delivers, with a combat system that invented left-trigger targeting and puzzles that play out with a temporal twist as Link moves between time periods to progress the plot in much the same way as he once dipped between light and dark worlds. It’s a design choice that elevates the game into something truly moving, too, as the child becomes a man, and has to fit into a grown-up world in which everything has gone awry. And then, of course, there is also Epona, the most wonderfully personal of all video game vehicles. Link’s horse may be a necessary testament to the fact that Hyrule had become unwieldy and vast, but the relationship that’s formed is so gentle, caring, and genuine, that she starts to feel like a
real animal long before you realize just how useful she’s become. And in a game that has so many wonderful moments—a massive ghost racing into the horizon, a spooky rider erupting from a gloomy painting—Epona’s is perhaps the best at capturing the elation that only Zelda can provide, with that game-changing leap over the fence of the Lon Lon Ranch, sending you out to explore a world that— you can’t help but suspect—will never be the same again. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Driver Original release date : 1999 Platform : Various Developer : Reflections Interactive Genre : Driving
For those who grew up watching 1970s US cop shows on television—where cars with absurdly bouncy suspension lean their way around the streets and navigate ninety-degree corners by breaking into long, lazy powerslides—Driver is the embodiment of everything that made those programs so attractive. In short, it’s all about screeching tires. The star of the game, then, is not Tanner, the undercover NYPD detective trusted with bringing down the criminal gang he’s infiltrated and whose McQueen-like demeanor you incarnate. Rather, it’s the vehicles he’s in—which include heavyweights of the era such as the Chevrolet Chevelle, the Dodge Charger, and the Ford Gran Torino, as well as a classic quartet of US cities: Miami, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco. What you do in those open-world environments doesn’t alter massively. Whether you’re driving a getaway car, tailing another, or providing a glorified taxi service, the action tends to follow an A-to-B or A-to-B-to-A pattern. Also consistent are the frequent police encounters, but unlike the missions, which can feel repetitive and suffer from unrefined, difficult spikes, being pursued around a landscape built as an homage to classic TV car chases (Driver includes a Director’s Mode, enabling personalized replays to be savoured) rarely gets tiring.
Snaking masterfully through civilian traffic, throwing a muscle car sideways, hoping it’ll make the turn, and noticing one of your hubcaps trying valiantly to overtake you, or charging down alleyways and smashing through cardboard boxes with an entire precinct hot on your bumper, Driver is the sort of experience that will bring a smile to the faces of all who play it, regardless of the decade in which they were born. JDS See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Sega Bass Fishing Original release date : 1999 Platform : Various Developer : Sega Genre : Sports
Messing about with maggots or making up doses of foul-smelling bait; reconnaissance trips that involve nothing more than baiting the water without any sight of a fishing rod; getting up in the dark early hours to sit in the rain for hours on end … Fishing can be a boring, pointless recreational activity. That much is beyond dispute. And yet, thanks to a lucky historical accident that fused an obsessive preoccupation with fish with Sega’s uncanny knack for making some of the world’s best electronic entertainment, fishing forms the pretext for an experience that defies all logic and reason to provide some of the strangest thrills in the history of video games. Sega Bass Fishing ranks alongside the likes of Seaman, Typing of the Dead, and Samba de Amigo as one of the marvelous oddities that the Dreamcast unleashed on a seemingly uncaring world. For anyone lucky enough to dip their rod into Sega’s superbly teeming waters, it was all too easy to become hooked—unless you were playing with an unofficial rod. (Unofficial rods were generally rubbish.) With Sega’s official fishing-rod peripheral, however, fishing all of a sudden became fun. Showcasing amazing graphics and fluidity, this is a challenging and pleasurable experience. Pick your
lure, cast your line, and then wrestle with whatever virtual freshwater denizen happens to swim your way. The art of landing those tantalizingly elusive big fish is all in choosing the right type of lure and manipulating it with just the right teasing motions before reacting to the superbly judged vibration feedback in your rod. It is to real fishing what Crazy Taxi is to real driving: a superb reimagination. And that probably was, and is, Sega Bass Fishing’s greatest achievement: the transformation of fishing. Still pointless, perhaps, but now less boring. DM See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Aliens Versus Predator Original release date : 1999 Platform : PC, Mac Developer : Rebellion Genre : First-Person Shooter
How ironic that the species best served by Aliens Versus Predator is the one left out by its title: us. The Colonial Marine campaign, set on the same planetoid LV-426 as Ridley Scott’s movie and James Cameron’s sequel, is one of the most terrifying survival horrors ever made, not to mention the best of more than thirty adaptations of Fox’s towering franchises. Actually the second of Rebellion’s stabs at the license—the first, a similarly structured game for Atari’s Jaguar console, has long been considered a collector’s item—it’s no less effective today. The monsters may be “coming out the goddamn walls,” but the devil’s in the details. The rattle of the pulse rifle, the urgent pop of the motion detector, the screech of the xenomorphs. By getting those right, Aliens Versus Predator wins half the battle right away. In fact, it’s perhaps the only series entry after the movie Aliens to observe its golden rule: that you should only see the aliens in the seconds before the kill. In the utterly oppressive corridors of the isolated, desolate colony, it has you shooting at shadows the rest of the time. The other two thirds of the game are pure role-play and wish fulfillment, adding two kinds of stealth to its feature list. The predator campaign, which visits three planets, including the third
movie’s prison colony, Fiorina 161, lets the weapons—the blades, plasma caster, and cloaking device—define the role, meaning you’re always outnumbered but never outgunned. The xenomorph, meanwhile, lets you marvel at this ultimate killing machine from the inside. Its dizzying ability to climb every surface provides a liberating, demanding control system while its field of vision, complete with fish-eye effect, gives you a great impression of speed and a unique perspective. DH See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings Original release date : 1999 Platform : PC, Mac Developer : Ensemble Studios Genre : Strategy
Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings is a perfectly measured real-time strategy game that followed the success of Microsoft’s first Age of Empires title. It’s set in the Middle Ages, but it’s inspired by the real thing rather than obsessed with it: the historical environment provides atmosphere and setting rather than a straitjacket. It offers a pretext for the thirteen playable nations, and for the technology progression within the game, allowing players to build towns, raise armies, and advance from one age to the next. Those nations are drawn from all over the globe, from the Britons and Celts to the Goths, Mongols, and Japanese, and those ages range from the Dark Ages at the start of the game to the Imperial Age by its end. Throughout them all, across several single-player campaigns and potentially never-ending multiplayer contests, the object remains the same: gather food, wood, gold, and stone, and use them to build your civilization, harvesting enough resources to support a population big enough to sustain an empire. Many of the game’s innovations in interface design and streamlined control found their way into various subsequent RTS titles: being able to spot idle builders so you can set them to work, for
example, or the ease with which units can be grouped together and put in formation to grant armchair generals more nuanced control over their armies. Such was the overwhelming critical acclaim and its popularity on the PC and Mac that the game was even the unlikely recipient of a home-console port, appearing on the PlayStation 2, and a handheld version on the Nintendo DS, as well as a spin-off released in 2000. But it is the 1999 computer game that is the definitive version, going down in history as one of the most outstanding examples of the RTS genre. DM See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Bangai-O Original release date : 1999 Platform : Dreamcast Developer : Treasure Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
When Bakuretsu Muteki Bangaioh was released for the N64—in extremely limited numbers and only in Japan—it was a unique fusion of tiny sprites, odd characters, and fruit, wrapped up in what was ostensibly a retro-styled shoot ’em up. But it was the game’s worldwide Dreamcast release as Bangai-O that perfected its idiosyncratic blend of giant but tiny robots, millions of massive explosions, and unprecedented profusion of fruit. At its core, Bangai-O is a frantically intense shooter in which players pilot the titular giant robot across forty-four levels, free to fire in entirely different directions, destroying scenery and picking up fruit for extra points. But it is a shooting game that plays like a puzzle. The first part of that puzzle is picking the right payload: firing off homing missiles in wide open spaces, but switching to bouncing bullets in narrow spaces or for firing around corners. The second part is picking the right path through levels that are a smorgasbord of different designs, from bullet-hell bombardments to big boss battles and from complicated mazes to screens full of cascading blocks. There is one level in which you light a fuse and race it to the end of the level; others in which you encounter bosses that don’t fight back.
But the final and most thrilling part of the puzzle is the explosion meter, and it was this that was changed from the N64 to the Dreamcast. In the N64 game, you charged your bombs by picking up fruit, whereas in the Dreamcast game you charged your bombs by unleashing explosions and flying close to them; the more explosions, the faster your bombs recharged. It opens up an entirely new dynamic of high-stakes risk and reward, an insane mixture of damage and speed, exhilarating and nail-biting in equal parts. DM See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Ape Escape Original release date : 1999 Platform : PS1 Developer : SCE Japan Studio Genre : Platform
Hardly a video game colossus today, Ape Escape’s monkeys were briefly the closest thing Sony had to a Sonic or Mario—a mascot that made younger console fans very excited—and this charming and colorful platformer also belongs to the limited number of titles that have, over the years, brought about hardware innovations. Ape Escape requires two thumbsticks to control—a design that is now standard (except on the rule-breaking Wii, of course, and the somewhat hobbled PSP, with its single analog nub), but back in 1999 it meant anyone who wanted to sample this game’s peculiar charms had to buy a new controller, the DualShock. It was probably worth the investment, mind. Not only would the DualShock quickly become Sony’s weapon of choice, but the game that ushered it in was masterful and distinctly clever. An evil monkey in a brain-enhancing hat has traveled through time, sending out minions in a rather predictable bid to take over the entire world. It’s the player’s job, somewhat inevitably it must be said, to dash back and forth through the eons to capture all the evil monkey’s agents and save the day. Heavily caricatured historic periods, from the age of the dinosaurs through to the modern day,
make for an elegant arrangement of levels, while the mechanics make good use of the controller’s extra real estate, with the sticks divided between moving and aiming weapons. Ape Escape is colorful, fast-paced, and fun, filled with humor and pop-culture references, and the structure mixes up the chasing down and catching of monkeys with the regular appearance of plentiful gadgets. The game’s legacy includes some spin-offs and cameo appearances in everything from Little Big Planet to Metal Gear Solid. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Silhouette Mirage Original release date : 1997 Platform : PS1, Saturn Developer : Treasure Genre : Action
It’s not the first time that the struggle between light and dark had been literalized and used as inspiration for a game’s underlying mechanics, as anyone who’s marveled at the interplay between The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past’s light and dark worlds can attest. And in terms of Treasure’s own output, Silhouette Mirage’s approach wasn’t to be the last time the developer explored the idea, with Ikaruga using black and white to distinguish (and swap) between safety and danger in a potent shoot ’em up/ puzzle-game crossover. But Silhouette Mirage was perhaps the first platform game to apply the principle to its genre, and the resulting concoction of disparate influences is quite unlike anything else in gaming. The core conceit is that every enemy is classified as either Silhouette (blue) or Mirage (red). When facing the right-hand side of the screen, your character, the diminutive world saver, Shyna, embodies all the properties of the Silhouettes, only able to damage the strength of an opponent, not its health. But when facing left, she’s a Mirage, equipped to damage an enemy’s health, but not their strength. By electing to use up a little of your own Spirit Gauge, you can switch the controls, so that facing right turns you Mirage and vice versa. And so a complex yet satisfying, directionally aware
puzzle game emerges. Unfortunately, while Shyna is a maneuverable avatar, the platforming element is uninspired, and the fussy rules can make for a slow-moving experience at first. But the boss battles bristle with creativity, and the game rewards those who can master its complexities. The game was tinkered with for its Western release, and the changes ultimately did more harm than good; therefore, the Japanese original remains the best option. SP See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
ChuChu Rocket Original release date : 1999 Platform : Dreamcast, Game Boy Advance Developer : Sega Genre : Puzzle
Before online gaming involved millions of people around the world energetically shooting one another in the face while sprawled on their couches, it was this: the eternal fight between cat and mouse, played out on pastel-colored mazes where a single wrong decision could see your cutesy, squeaking charges delivered right into the maw of a strangely abstract orange death machine. The Dreamcast came with a modem port, and, unless you were brave enough to face the space-age grinding and endless collegiate typing of Phantasy Star Online, you were probably going to end up playing this: a rather delightful puzzle game in which you place a handful of arrows on the ground to guide your mice to safety in a rocket. Just like real life, then. The multiplayer mode was genuinely frantic, as everybody rushed to guide cats into rival paths while keeping their own whiskered friends safe, but lasting online interaction came in the form of sharing the devious new maps you’d built for yourself with the level editor. It was ChuChu Rocket’s major selling point, certainly, but the game remained sufficiently delightful to provide hours of fun, even with the phone unplugged. Inevitably, however, broadband carriers blew open the barriers for the kind of games that could fit comfortably down a wire, and quirky oddities such as ChuChu Rocket were replaced with
fragfests, death matches, and the endless delights of voice-chat griefing. While nobody’s complaining too much when there’s the likes of Halo, Killzone 2, and Call of Duty 4 to enjoy, a look back at the online of yesteryear, especially when it’s as cheeky and characterful as this, is still enough to give you pause (or perhaps paws). If your Dreamcast’s in the loft, incidentally, you should still be able to track down the GBA port. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Street Fighter III: Third Strike Original release date : 1999 Platform : Various Developer : Capcom Genre : Fighting
There’s a reason for that subtitle. Capcom is well-known for milking its fighting franchises with remixed versions and re-releases, but talk of commercial considerations tends to overshadow the benefit to the games. They get better. Street Fighter III: Third Strike was third time lucky for Capcom and Street Fighter, proving to be the ultimate refinement of the game many consider the pinnacle of the 2-D brawler. Of course, those people are usually really good at it. Whatever their relative merits and failures, there is one crucial difference between Street Fighter III: Third Strike and its illustrious predecessor: This one’s not for beginners. The smooth, flowing animations are built for relentless combos and countercombos, with a new parry move introducing a level of tactical depth relished by gaming experts (and responsible for the game’s most famous moment: a seamless streak of fifteen parries from Daigo Umehara to survive a super combo from Justin Wong, before comboing into his own super—look it up on YouTube). Plus, there’s a new roster designed to knock players out of their bad old Street Fighter II habits. Few people wanted to kick the habit, of course, and Third Strike even lost a little of its resolve by restoring Chun-Li to the character select screen (only Ken and Ryu had originally survived the
cull, and even then only after focus-group tests). By almost any standards Third Strike is a success, yet it falls short of its predecessor in terms of recognition and sales. But that only matters to Capcom. For players, it’s an unquestionably brilliant 2-D fighter, capable of breathtaking beauty and brutality, and featuring character design of the highest order. It is a great game in its finest form, endlessly rewarding those with enough time on their hands to learn its dizzying intricacies. RS See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves Original release date : 1999 Platform : Various Developer : SNK Genre : Fighting
Perhaps the most highly regarded of fighting games on the hardware most highly regarded for fighting games, Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves is SNK’s crowning achievement in the genre. Released late in the Neo Geo’s life, it pushes its host system in ways previously thought impossible, painting the ballet and drama of the one-on-one fighting genre in tasteful yet exuberant 2-D visuals. A flock of pigeons scatters in a clapping of feathers at the toll of a giant bell in the background of one arena, while a train clatters past a sunset-drenched station in another. Yet the game’s primary innovation was not visual but mechanical, scrubbing away the long, exclusive move lists of the company’s King of Fighters series, and giving all of Fatal Fury: Mark of the Wolves ’s character roster the same set of inputs. By reducing and normalizing the vocabulary of interactions, players can easily switch between fighters, knowing that they can pull off the moves of each without the need to adapt inputs. Of course, being able to pull off a screen-filling special move is less important than knowing when to pull off the move in a match, so while the game is accessible, its depths, as with the very best fighting games, are near unfathomable. Although it is an arcade game at heart, concessions have made the player’s journey through the
game more comfortable: defeat in battle gives the option to continue the match at a lower difficulty, with a full “special” meter, or with your opponent at a quarter of his or her health. While the original cartridge would have set consumers back hundreds of dollars, SNK has since ported the game to Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network, from which it can now be downloaded at a bargain price. A rumored sequel is reported to still be in the planning stages. SP See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Grand Theft Auto 2 Original release date : 1999 Platform : Various Developer : DMR Design Genre : Action
Grand Theft Auto 2 has been unfairly marginalized by the success of both its predecessor and successor. Keeping the top-down view of the first Grand Theft Auto game, it has been judged by history as a minor iteration on an old formula, before the series’ dramatic leap into 3-D—an evolutionary dead-end. But its innovations are far from insignificant. As with its forebear, Grand Theft Auto 2 launches the player as a free agent in a sprawling open city, full of lucrative criminal potential. Yet the sequel breathes life into its pedestrians. They get on buses, hail down taxis, and even get into fights with local gangs. The gangs, too, present an important step, albeit not in a direction that Grand Theft Auto III would wholly follow: Multiple missions are on offer from the three competing gangs in the area, and each one, when successfully completed, will increase the favor of that gang and decrease that of its competitors. The player must keep juggling the esteem of each so as not to get gunned down when straying into their territory. Perhaps the game’s greatest misstep was to set the game not in contemporary America but in a tongue-in-cheek near-future dystopia, the cyberpunk trappings of which undo some of the game’s
efforts at building a credible living city. Nonetheless, the game’s world still exemplifies the developer’s penchant for biting (and sometimes puerile) humor, with its cast of pervert scientists and vengeful Hari Krishnas. Save stations are churches with flickering signage, and they only work if you have the required donation of money. This is a city gone to seed, shot through with corruption—an atmosphere mirrored in the permanent dusk and gloomy neon lights of the graphically superior PC version. MD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Ferrari F355 Challenge Original release date : 1999 Platform : Various Developer : Sega Genre : Driving
Yu Suzuki’s love of Ferraris is evident throughout his notable career at Sega, and his devotion led to one of the most striking video game dedications to a single subject: Ferrari F355 Challenge. Beginning with sweeping views of Ferrari’s Maranello headquarters and the lustrous curves of the 355 Challenge itself, the game was built and tuned for the arcade. But Ferrari F355 Challenge also features a sensibility for simulation that few other arcade games have ever attempted. Indeed, next to Sega Rally, which converted the technicalities of dirt track driving into sweeping drifts, with the driving aids off (surely the only way to play) it feels almost impossible to master. Just finishing a race is achievement enough. It’s most certainly not about flooring the accelerator and pumping the brakes hard—you’ll only spin out. There’s even a fine art to simply launching the car well at the start of a race. And yet Ferrari F355 Challenge maintains all the trappings of time limits and extends: the supremely cheesy Sega “Game over, yeah!” sample as you fail another checkpoint, and minimal options for play beyond single races and a championship mode. Indeed, you can’t save during a championship in the console versions, and it’s then that you start to see why the arcade game is
actually a perfect fit for an exacting simulation. A three-screen cabinet version enables players to use the screens as side windows, giving them the sensation of driving in a real car. It’s all part of a unique, intense experience. Arcade games don’t hold your hand. They make you fight for their rewards, and as a result, you rarely regret failing to complete them. You’re there more for the ride than the win. As good as driving a real F355 Challenge? Not quite, but near enough. AW See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Chrono Cross Original release date : 1999 Platform : PS1 Developer : Square Genre : Role-Playing
The producers of Chrono Cross insist that they did not consider the game a sequel to 1995’s Chrono Trigger , one of the most beloved RPGs on the Super NES. Yet Chrono Cross has always been overshadowed by its 16-bit forebear, which isn’t entirely fair and doesn’t do it justice. True to its makers’ protestations, Chrono Cross is, indeed, an entirely different game. It inherits a fascination with time and scattered story elements from Chrono Trigger , but from there it crafts a distinctive, surprisingly emotional experience that deserves to be appreciated in its own right. While collecting shells on the beach for his girlfriend, seventeen-year-old Serge falls into an alternate dimension. Serge learns that in this second reality, he’s dead, having drowned ten years earlier. In fact, he’s only alive because an interdimensional traveler rescued him from drowning, creating a time rift that allows Serge to complete a fated quest to save the world. And then it gets really confusing. Serge switches bodies, characters meet alternate versions of themselves, monsters spawn outside of time, etc. Chrono Cross’s complicated story does make sense, but it just might take a couple play throughs to catch it all. The notion of repeat play might sound tedious, but Chrono Cross is less of a slog than most
RPGs. There are no random battles—every enemy is out in the open, so you can avoid them if you want. And there’s no need to grind, because character leveling is capped at reasonable levels. It’s worth passing through the tropical world of Chrono Cross a second time, too, to bask in the game’s moving soundtrack. It’s a unique mix of Celtic, Mediterranean, and modern Japanese influences, exemplifying the fact that Chrono Cross isn’t just unlike Chrono Trigger , it’s unlike any other console RPG before or since. JT See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Silent Hill Original release date : 1999 Platform : PS1 Developer : Konami Genre : Survival Horror
Don’t even consider exploring the foggy town of Silent Hill if you lack the following: a desire to be genuinely scared, a strong heart, a fridge stocked with your favorite comfort food, and an economical energy tariff that means it won’t be too expensive to leave all the lights on for a week after you play it. This is one disturbing game. While other survival horror games make you jump, the hero usually comes packing a shotgun, which means that you rarely feel too threatened. In contrast, Silent Hill makes you feel almost physically as well as spiritually naked. This would be the game that Resident Evil’s monsters would play when they were of a mind to spook themselves. The lighting plays a big role. Most of the time you can only see as far as your weakly powered flashlight allows, and using it creates more lurking shadows. (You can’t even access the game’s cheery tourist-style maps if the light’s too bad.) Then there’s the noise of scuttling beasts in the darkness, and the radio that emits static when monsters are nearby; a warning sign, but hardly a reassuring one. Your character, Harry, is physically frail (he pants for breath after running) and his ineptitude with weapons increases the sense of vulnerability.
The game environments are disturbing too, playing on residual fears of disease and death with old hospitals, abandoned wheelchairs, and a deranged nurse who inhabits both this world and its hellish flip side, known as the Otherworld. The plot pulling it all together is somewhat silly and overcooked, but it’s a testament to the sense of loneliness the game induces that you’ll actually feel sorry for the characters who have to live on in Silent Hill when you turn off the PlayStation and go outside for some fresh air and sunlight. OB See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Freespace 2 Original release date : 1999 Platform : PC Developer : Volition, Inc Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
The subgenre of the “fantasy simulator” was once a quiet mainstay of the PC gaming scene, with numerous titles that approached science-fiction situations with the seriousness of intent associated with simulating real-world events. While its roots stretch back into the ’80s and were more formalized with Origin’s Wing Commander games, it only grew to full adulthood with LucasArts’s Star Wars: X-Wing . It wasn’t just fighting dogfights as you would in 1983’s Star Wars arcade machine, it was controlling a “real” fighter, complete with throttle and shield controls. It was a genre about treating your fantasy worlds as if they were real, thereby allowing you to immerse yourself into them with sometimes alarming sincerity. It was a niche whose development ground to a halt with the release of Freespace 2, which was rapturously reviewed and commercially ignored. Everything since has either stepped back toward being a plain arcade-style game or an attempt to recreate the freeform space-trading of Elite. To return to Freespace 2 shows what we lost. It’s a clear predecessor in tone to the reboot of Battlestar Galactica and the darker science-fiction of the Mass Effect games, putting you firmly in the middle of a genuinely epic intergalactic war. The key concept is scale. Battleships seem to fill the vacuum,
exchanging supernova-bright laser beams, creating an undeniable spectacle. In 1999 no one had seen anything like it, and no one has seen anything like it since. A sign of the depth of the game’s influence lies in its still-existent playing community, who’ve been working on the source code since it was released to the public in 2002, keeping it up-to-date with the march of technology and, via modifications, bringing their favored science-fiction worlds to brilliant life. KG See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Final Fantasy VIII Original release date : 1999 Platform : PS1 Developer : Square Genre : Role-Playing
What do you do when you’ve just made the world’s most successful RPG? Why, you make a sequel that has nothing to do with it, and then try out a new visual style for good measure. Such was the context for Final Fantasy VIII, which from the first released screenshots was subject to all sorts of criticism in Japan for its move toward more humanoid characters. Not only that, it had the temerity to be the most complex series entry yet, shifting focus from the ragtag army of Final Fantasy VII to a mere six characters and encouraging the player to craft the team they desired from a huge number of options. The basics are the same as ever—turn-based battling, leveling up, and traveling from place to place in a vast world—but on top of this is a daunting web of skill trees and combat choices, far beyond Final Fantasy VII’s Materia system. Final Fantasy VIII is also an epic story cramming in as much full-motion video as possible, following Square’s rigid approach with its Final Fantasy series. All the emotional high points and even basic plot points are there for the player to look at rather than touch. It’s hardly a ruinous quality, but it does represent rather a dead-end for the narrative possibilities of the medium. Nevertheless, Final Fantasy VIII’s production values are such that it’s one of the few PlayStation
titles to stand up today. Square’s secret isn’t the performance it eked from Sony’s aging machine, but the beautifully vivid world it created using it: universities with glass-blown arches and vast gardens, cherry blossoms cascading onto leather jackets, and space-age technology servicing atavistic ends. The story of Squall, Seifer, and Rinoa is a long and winding one with plenty of digressions—just how the game turns out, funnily enough. RS See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Jet Force Gemini Original release date : 1999 Platform : N64 Developer : Rare Genre : Action
Despite Rare’s legendary technical mastery of Nintendo systems, which gave us some of the bestlooking games of their era, nobody would deny that the developer’s art direction and character design can be a bit hit and miss. For every likeable Banjo the Bear there’s a wild-eyed, staring Tiptup the Turtle; for every garden full of almost edible, lovable piñata animals, there’s a bland, Vaselinecoated nightmare like Perfect Dark Zero. Jet Force Gemini is one of the developer’s real artistic triumphs, set in a strangely gorgeous, abstract, and mature sci-fi universe painted largely in purple, green, and blue. Splitting the action between run-and-gunners Juno, Vela, and their armored dog, Lupus, Jet Force Gemini borrows from the third-person shooter, platformer, and occasionally the first-person shooter, commanding all three genres with skill and obvious experience. The three threads of the story are eventually woven into one, leaving the player to explore each level with every character to reach previously inaccessible treasures. That Rare humor is there, too: The two main players in the universe are called King Jeff and evil Prince Barry, and Rare’s unofficial mascot, Mr. Pants, is hidden tastefully on a hard-to-find wall in
one of Juno’s levels. Unfortunately, Jet Force Gemini is hampered by a genuinely terrible endgame. It is late-’90s kleptomaniacism of the worst kind, forcing the player to collect far too many spaceship parts and rescue every single one of the cuddly Tribal natives hidden within the level before allowing any progress to be made—a task made especially arduous by the fact that a stray laser blast could accidentally murder the cute little fellas. But such faults can be forgiven on the strength of what comes before. KM See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Front Mission 3 Original release date : 1999 Platform : PS1 Developer : Square Genre : Strategy
The Front Mission series takes a genre that Japan has made its own and ties it to a Japaneseinvented future technology. It’s a turn-based strategy game, in which big bipedal robots duke it out across mostly urban environments, overlaid with grids that show you how far you can fire and move. Front Mission 3 was the first game in the then-five-year-old series to get an English-language release, and if you can manage to stop sniggering at the decision to call the giant robots “wanzers” (taken from “wanderung Panzer”, the German phrase for “walking tank”), you’ll find a staggering amount of tactical strategy here to sink your teeth into. In keeping with all of the games in the Front Mission series, that strategy is enveloped within a complicated storyline featuring the fractured politics of militaristic and futuristic nations vying for supremacy. Set in 2112, Front Mission 3 depicts events as a lowly test pilot gets caught up in a national conspiracy and a branching campaign that recounts events from both sides of the story. A fictional email system and websites that prefigured games like Grand Theft Auto IV and .hack allow players to unlock various secrets while learning more about the fictional world in which the game is set.
Beyond the Byzantine diplomacy and richly imagined game world, however, part of the pleasure is in fiddling with your wanzer’s parts: tailoring the payload and optimizing its construction before missions by fitting legs, arms, body, shoulder weapons, backpacks, and so on. But the main thing is the battles themselves, in which your newly decked-out behemoths blast the enemy’s wanzers, destroying them entirely or simply disabling their weapons and forcing them to surrender. DM See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
EverQuest Original release date : 1999 Platform : PC Developer : Sony Online Entertainment Genre : MMORPG
In the 1990s, role-playing games already had a solid and devoted fan base, with opportunities to imagine great fantasy worlds while acting out the life and times of any class, race, or even sex of choice. By late in the century, multi-user games of increasingly cutting-edge visuals were braving the fledgling Internet. It wasn’t until the arrival of EverQuest, however, that the entire experience of online role-playing was elevated and thrust into the true 3-D age. Requiring a quick, consistent Internet connection and an expensive 3-D graphics card, EverQuest occupied a niche of a niche in 1999. But such technology is used to its full potential, the classic fantasy world of Norrath coming to life in a way that captured gamers’ imaginations and kept them coming back for more … and more … and more for a surprisingly long time. Oh, sure, the svelte elves aren’t outfitted to survive sprawling plains, mountains, and cavernous dungeons, but hell if they don’t lure leering players to unload a few precious gold pieces to aid a fawning damsel in undress. Or you can take on a noble paladin role, vanquishing this and dispelling that; or skulk with the rogues; or cast with the mages; or so many other options that the world experience appears endless. You explore, learn trades and skills, as well as languages and even a
whole new shorthand vocabulary (including the oh-so-appropriate moniker, EverCrack). No doubt building a world and game mechanic from scratch brings attendant teething problems, imbalances, and even straight-up breakages, but between the zone exploration, the ambition, and opportunity for socializing with fellow gamers, the overall experience compels any RPG fan to commit for a long, long haul. RSm See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Homeworld Original release date : 1999 Platform : PC, Mac Developer : Relic Entertainment Genre : Strategy
Homeworld occupies a unique position in the PC canon. Rarely has a game—let alone a studio’s debut—unified innovations in game play, storytelling, graphics, and even music, to create such a compellingly playable package. The big idea was to send the point-and-click mechanics of a real-time strategy into orbit—and the outcome is as initially daunting to play as it surely was to develop. Stripped of the familiar 2-D baseline of terra firma, you attack and defend from any direction, feeling your brain expand as you grasp the basics of three-dimensional tactics. It’s not just that the battleground has expanded in volume. Without an earthly landscape of rivers, hills, and ruins, the clashes are all about the fleet’s ships and their position, down to the arc of fire of a particular turret. Think naval warfare, only with frigates that can fly and dive. Players who master the initially daunting game play are rewarded with a brilliantly structured storyline where action and plot dovetail as in a great movie. Combined with traditional genre mechanics of extraction, construction, and researching new technologies, Homeworld feels far more personal than the typical rape-and-pillage RTS .
It also looks just as good as it plays. Without all that mud and mountain to draw, the engine can be devoted to ships and special effects to create scenes from a space opera that were unmatched for years to follow. The New Age soundtrack backs up this unearthly action perfectly. Few games can boast equally excellent single-and multiplayer modes, but Homeworld’s online play was strong enough to attract thousands of players in the early days of broadband. Even after official online support was discontinued, die-hards have continued to explore this uniquely different RTS. OB See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Mr. Driller Original release date : 1999 Platform : Various Developer : Namco Bandai Genre : Puzzle
I f Mr. Driller wasn’t quite so colorful, cute, and friendly, it would be hard to avoid the realization that this is basically a game that revolves around the quite morbid and nasty concept of being buried alive; a game about fighting for every last breath as your air runs out. It certainly doesn’t feel like it, though. The game’s relentless descent as you forge ever deeper into the ground might bring a slight twinge of claustrophobia to some of the more sensitive players out there, and, undeniably, a certain kind of panic inevitably sets in when your oxygen meter starts to run perilously low. But such murky horrors are masterfully undermined by the art department on a regular basis as you blast through layer upon layer of what looks like syrup, icing, custard, and sorbet. Mr. Driller might freak you out if you’re the sort of person who prefers to take the stairs rather than the elevator, then, but it’s probably the players on diets who should really watch out. A race to get as deep underground as possible, Mr. Driller is effortlessly simple and addictive, each new game inching you a little bit closer to your goal as you duck falling debris and cut your way through the puzzly shapes a little more efficiently than the time before. Over the years, Namco Bandai’s unlikely mascot has seen himself ported to almost every console and platform under the sun,
and from the chirpy delights of this first outing, it’s not at all hard to see why. It almost never came to be, however. Originally created unofficially, development was suspended amid higher priority projects. Eventually the game, known then as Dig Dug 3, won through with its charm and innovation, and a miniature (and renamed) classic was born. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters’ Clash Original release date : 1999 Platform : Neo Geo Pocket Color Developer : SNK Genre : Strategy
The Neo Geo Pocket Color is as cult as a game system can get, and with good reason. Despite being released at exactly the wrong time—directly before manufacturer SNK was purchased by Aruze, and drastically remodeled—the system was streets ahead of the contemporary Game Boy Color. Although only eighty-five games were released for the system, no more than a handful were anything less than very fine indeed. The crowning achievement of the Neo Geo Pocket Color system is undoubtedly the SNK vs. Capcom titles, with SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters’ Clash being one of the earliest video game representations of the collectible card game (CCG) popularized in the 1990s by Magic: The Gathering. It’s also one of the most successful because, rather than try to replicate the complex and lengthy rules of a physical CCG, it takes its cue from the Pokémon series and has the player on a quest to be the best card fighter around by winning tournaments and playing pick-up games, via a simple RPG where frequent card battles allow you to win new cards and fine-tune your deck. The rules of the core card game are simplistic: Players have up to three cards to use to attack, defend, or perform special attacks. It is imperfectly implemented (certain cards are far more powerful
than others), but battles remain captivating thanks to the amazing range of cards, with characters from both SNK and Capcom represented through gorgeous “superdeformed” artwork. Due to the quick length of card battles, it’s perfectly designed as a pick-up-and-play title, and arguably the only NGPC game more essential is its sequel, which was never released outside of Japan—though a fan translation can be found by the dedicated. MKu See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Mario Golf Original release date : 1999 Platform : Game Boy Color Developer : Camelot Software Planning Genre : Sports
As Mario’s unlikely shadow career as the world’s most versatile sportsman evolved with the gloriously playable Mario Kart games, golf was perhaps the most likely candidate for further expansion. The rolling hills of the Mushroom Kingdom would be an ideal location to sink a few holes. Golf games already had an established formula to riff on—Nintendo had already made a couple of stand-out entries—and Mario’s crazy cast of friends and enemies would probably look delightful in plaid slacks, polo shirts, and funny little hats. Who knew it would turn out as well as this, however? Camelot’s game has (exceedingly light) elements of an RPG as you explore the local clubhouse, learning the ropes, setting up matches, and making friends, but it’s also a smart, calculated golf sim for one or more players. It may be easy to play but Mario Golf is filled with variables that affect play, as well as charming, rich details, such as a suite of brilliantly structured courses; nice physics and ball effects; and a lovely, comprehensive leaderboard made for keeping track of your best shots and bragging about them to your friends. Visual and aural feedback is absolutely great too, as you might expect, and the whole thing basks in the warm glow of the Mario universe—even though you spend rather a large part of the game unlocking a range
of characters who aren’t the famous plumber. Some of Mario’s later excursions into sports have seemed a little tired at times as the branding, special moves, and general gimmickry became increasingly desperate and shrill, but here, on the Game Boy Color, the whole thing meshes perfectly together, and Mario is as at home on the emerald greens with a putter and sand wedge as he is dressed as a racoon and soaring over a gaggle of Koopa Troopas. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Outcast Original release date : 1999 Platform : PC Developer : Appeal Genre : Action / Adventure
Outcast is another fallen soldier in the pantheon of excellent games that flopped on release. In this case the failure was sufficient to eventually bankrupt its developer, which ran out of money before it could finish the sequel. Chalk another one up to the great video game-buying public’s lack of discernment? Not quite. Outcast’s main problem was of its own making. The developer employed a technically brilliant software rendering engine instead of relying on the 3-D hardware acceleration that was just coming into its own. The payoff was the beautifully realized world of Adelpha, with its undulating hills, villages teeming with alien citizens, and visuals festooned with bloom effects, lens flare, translucent and reflective water, and much more that was impossible in concert on the 3-D cards of the day. The downside was that you needed to have bought a new PC with a top-of-the-line Intel processor in the past month or two to run the thing. Those who hadn’t couldn’t confidently buy it. Given that PC games had about six weeks to prove themselves, the game was doomed. Ironically, if you try to run Outcast on a modern PC, you’ll need patches to slow it down, which
means even today few people experience this engrossing adventure. As former US Navy Seal Cutter Slade, you travel to a parallel universe as an escort for three scientists, only to become separated and drawn into the ongoing civil war of the Talan—humanoid creatures with manifest spirits (called “essences”) that shape their talents and their culture. Outcast’s cities bustle with life, the AI is fantastic for its vintage, the flora and fauna plausible, and the weapons are to die for. Well worth the effort, both for the doomed developer and for anyone who samples its creation. OB See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Planescape: Torment Original release date : 1999 Platform : PC Developer : Black Isle Studios Genre : Role-Playing
Planescape: Torment was created using BioWare’s Infinity engine, and presents a drama that, though epic, is fundamentally human in scale. Quite an achievement when you consider that the game straddles entire dimensions as it follows its heavily tattooed, blue-skinned, amnesiac, immortal, and sometimes amoral protagonist. This Nameless One—his quest being for identity and understanding— is the entire point of the game. He is the focus of a much more intimate portrait of humanity than the simple conflict-resolution of other RPGs. If he dies during the course of the game, he is simply sent back to a slab in the mortuary with no further consequence other than the sacrifice of another being from the multiverse to sustain his unnatural lifespan—although their return to haunt him provides a very poignant reminder that this is a game in which every choice might have unexpected consequence. But the immortality of its protagonist is more than just an inspired piece of game design on which to hang a fiendishly clever quest structure. It is also an inspired narrative element, used to pose provocative questions about how life should be lived. Planescape: Torment confronted the player with moral choices well before it was fashionable to do so in gaming.
It is also full of wit and invention, from the magical tattoos that power up the Nameless One, to the creative interpretation of the normally half-redundant alignment system. Evocatively named locations, like the Fortress of Regrets, house remarkable sights and sounds, such as the Nameless One’s sidekicks: talking skulls, succubi, pyromaniacs, and even a stranded fragment of a hive mind— a perfect metaphor for how this most cerebral of games defied convention and refused to follow the crowd. DM See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Quake III Arena Original release date : 1999 Platform : PC, Mac Developer : Id Software Genre : First-Person Shooter
Nothing says “I killed you” like the rail gun in Quake III Arena. Introduced in Quake II, this weapon takes a long time to charge and then spends it all with a single shot, drawing a perfect line from the barrel to the center of the crosshair. If there’s a body in the way, it explodes, and a smug little icon appears on the HUD. Two bodies: too bad for them. Of course, everyone else knows exactly where the user is and that their weapon’s now empty, but it’s a small price to pay for such a show of perfection. It’s also one of several reasons why the game is such a mainstay of the professional multiplayer scene. Happy to be the one minimalist, geeky (typical map name: Q3dm17), exclusively hardcore shooter left in the world, it’s also one of the most balanced. Responsible for grooming e-sports thoroughbreds like Jonathan “Fatal1ty” Wendel and John “Zero4” Hill, it promotes frightening levels of expertise and has, over a decade, rewarded them with lucrative prize tournaments. Not just a perfectionist’s game, then, but a game demanding perfection. Touted as the ultimate refinement of the death match, it must be the only sequel to dump its predecessor’s single-player mode and even then keep its multiplayer largely unchanged. Beyond some famously efficient netcode,
its biggest advance is its engine, one of the first to usher in complex, rounded environments and immensely popular among games of the time, going on to power several classic RPG series. And the refinement continues. Having returned with even subtler upgrades in Quake IV, these classic modes and weapons are the cornerstones of Quake Live, the free-to-play browser-based version which, as ever, focuses purely on the game play. DH See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Rocket: Robot on Wheels Original release date : 1999 Platform : N64 Developer : Sucker Punch Productions Genre : Action / Platform
Rocket: Robot on Wheels is not the only game to have sunk without trace in the vast sea of 3-D platformers around the turn of the century. It works clever physics-based puzzling into the usual template of large, colorful, collectible-filled worlds adjoining a central hub. It displays inventiveness in the sheer quality and variety of its challenges, but lacks the cartoonish visual flair of, say, BanjoKazooie. Playing a uni-wheeled maintenance robot in a theme park gone wrong, the idea is to collect enough tickets and machine parts to get things up and running again. As more and more of the theme park is restored, rides and giant machines gradually open up to interact with. The fairground theme allows for some cute little mini-games to show off the game’s physics engine: throwing balls to knock colored cats off shelves, playing tic-tac-toe with a chicken, lobbing things into targets. Building your own roller coaster—and then riding it, in first person—is far more ambitious than what most platformers of the day were shooting for. There’s the usual steadily expanding arsenal of abilities, bought with liberally scattered trinkets. Rocket’s tractor beam can grab and grapple objects and enemies in puzzles, which gives the game its
unique feel, rather than the setting or more traditional platforming. It has ideas that are ahead of its time, such as hauling blocks around to make stepping stones and ladders, for instance, and a generous helping of vehicle challenges. Rocket: Robot on Wheels is a technically excellent, energetic platformer, but oddly it lacks the personality and spark of later Sucker Punch games. Nonetheless, it deserves to be more than a curiosity. With more of a marketing push it might have been one of the N64’s real successes. KS See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Samba de Amigo Original release date : 1999 Platform : Arcade, Dreamcast Developer : Sega Genre : Music
While gaming remains in the midst of an epidemic of peripherals—plastic guitars, drum kits, skateboards, and DJ turntables—it’s worth remembering that this trend first showed its head back in the glory days of Sega’s ill-starred Dreamcast console. Back then, the whole thing was a little more unpredictable and lovable: bass fishing games gave us rods and reels that could also be used for Soul Calibur matches, endless on-rails shooters dished out elaborate weaponry, and the fun-loving Samba de Amigo created a game that was controlled entirely with a pair of maracas. The result is one of the most joyful games in Sega’s extensive and cheery catalog, a classic, primary-color rhythm-action title that unfolds hilariously as you guide Amigo through a suite of classic—and frankly not-so-classic—Latin standards by shaking high, low, and in the middle of the screen in time with the pumping, shimmying music. It’s exhausting, but when played in a party atmosphere, it’s also utterly brilliant. Samba de Amigo is a shyness-shattering smart-bomb capable of getting even the most nervous of performers to make glorious fools of themselves in front of their friends. Samba de Amigo turned up again in a few other games over the years due to Sega’s love of the
back-catalog cameo, and the original title was remade for the Wii by FPS specialist Gearbox (the studio is home to long-term fans of the game, making it something of a labor of love), but Nintendo’s Remotes are not precise enough to make the experience entirely workable (and, besides, they aren’t maracas). All of which means that the original version is also the best: a rare synergy of game and hardware that cannot help but raise a smile. Track it down on eBay before inviting some friends over. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Shenmue Original release date : 1999 Platform : Dreamcast Developer : Sega Genre : Action / Adventure
For better or worse, Shenmue’s most prominent legacy is probably the Quick Time Event. Is there any big-budget action video game today that doesn’t feature one? But Shenmue broke so much new ground, it’s difficult to know where to begin. Perhaps with Yu Suzuki’s decision to create an RPG to be released on the Sega Saturn. Somehow, during its convoluted development, it morphed into the groundbreaking notion of an RPG set in the real world, and was released on the Saturn’s successor, the Dreamcast. It took some of the most cutting-edge currents in gaming and created many of its own: the day/night cycle and variable weather (based on actual weather records); vending machines and convenience stores that dispense all sorts of in-game power-ups and collectable geegaws, from dried squid to Sonic the Hedgehog key fobs; copies of real-world coin-op cabinets that house entire games such as Space Harrier; a multitude of mini-games, from playing darts to racing forklift trucks; the chance to trade items and compare scores over the Internet; and the winding roads and small parks of a convincingly realistic Yokosuka. Now that our eyes have been spoiled by the polygonal perfection of today’s software, it is
impossible to convey how closely these crude and blocky approximations approached reality. Shenmue recreated the real world with a graphical verisimilitude that has since been eclipsed, but contains an attention to detail that has never been rivaled. It was all too easy to find yourself overawed by modern technology, amazed that a game could contain so much. If that sounds strange now, it is a measure of Shenmue’s paradigmatic impact on the entire video game industry and the alluring depths of Ryo Hazuki and his strangely unhurried quest to avenge his father’s murder. DM See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Seaman Original release date : 1999 Platform : Dreamcast Developer : Vivarium Genre : Life Simulation
As Microsoft seeks to usher in a new era of interaction via the speech-recognition capabilities of its Xbox 360 peripheral, Natal, it’s easy to forget that Sega pioneered the technology at the beginning of the new millennium. Its approach was to give players a fairly grotesque fish with a man’s face to converse with, one who was eager to discuss everything from politics to reproduction to the relative merits of gangster rap. In terms of its systems, Seaman works a little like a Tamagotchi, a virtual pet for you to nurture and care for from gurgling infancy as a tadpole right through to cynical middle age. The Seaman experience is measured in days and weeks, not hours. To begin with, you merely interact with the temperature and air quality of the water tank, until the egg inside hatches to release a clutch of molecular creatures. Eventually, after another couple of stages of evolution, the formative Seaman begins to create syllables of speech and, as you interact with him via the bundled microphone attachment, starts to form commands and sentences, with every stage of progression detailed and explained by Leonard Nimoy’s voiceover. As the experience progresses, you raise insects with which to feed your Seaman, but the
Tamagotchi element of the game always plays second fiddle to the conversations it facilitates. While not without its foibles, the speech recognition is enormously impressive and, through your conversations, the illusion that your Seaman is gaining intelligence and understanding about your tastes is maintained. Best played in short bursts, to avoid ennui or repetition, Seaman ably demonstrates the wonders and limitations of nurturing a virtual conversationalist. For that, it is to be celebrated, if not mimicked. SP See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
The Longest Journey Original release date : 1999 Platform : PC Developer : Funcom Genre : Adventure
The Longest Journey throws players into the deep end Immediately. The scene opens, and an old woman tells two peasants in funny hats about “the Balance.” A girl in her underwear dreams of standing on a precipice, haggling with a tree to save a dragon’s egg. The dream ends, we find that we’re in the future, and nobody tells us what’s changed. But we do know that we’ve met our star, April Ryan, and that she’ll keep a level head and snarky wit no matter how fantastical the journey. The Longest Journey marked the end of an era: it’s the last of the great, brain-busting graphic adventure games, a genre thought dead until Telltale Games and the casual space resurrected it in a simpler, more accessible form. The challenges that players will noodle through are considerable, but the story that rewards them is worth all the sweat (or cheating): The Longest Journey is the first in a planned trilogy set in a sci-fi/fantasy fusion dreamed up by Ragnar Tørnquist, who swears he’ll finish the story even if he has to resort to pen and paper to do it. April Ryan is a starving student in the hip neighborhood of Newport. But we come to find out that she’s also a Shifter, charged with maintaining the balance between the world of technology and its magical counterpart. Tørnquist isn’t the first to mix magic and science fiction, but his particular
vision is dark, contemporary, and full of memorable characters. He and his team deserve praise for making a world that’s edgy and contemporary, but still charming; April and her Newport pals use adult language and have adult conflicts, but one of her sidekicks is a talking crow. This mix of charm and despair propelled the game to a sequel, Dreamfall—a simpler and less satisfying experience, but one you’ll be impelled to play, just to see what happens next. CDa See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Space Channel 5 Original release date : 1999 Platform : Dreamcast Developer : United Game Artists Genre : Music
Space Channel 5 is another of those games (see: Dead Rising) perhaps better described in court. In an action that would ultimately cost her more than $600,000 in her opponent’s legal fees, Lady Miss Kier, singer of ’90s retro-funk band Deee-Lite, accused Sega of stealing her image to craft Ulala, a ditzy Barbarella type with smooth moves, fabulous outfits, and a penchant for making other people jive. Both personas wore pink hair, platform boots, knee socks, miniskirts and distinctive makeup, and appeared in works depicting “vivid graphics, groovy dance moves, a futuristic setting and an overall party feel.” Protected by the First Amendment, Sega won the case. Devised by Rez creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi for an elusive “female casual” market, Space Channel 5 introduces Ulala as an outer space news reporter armed with two ray guns and a microphone. The guns fire “groove energy,” which is useful when a race of diminutive aliens, the Morolians, invade the galaxy and start making everyone dance —badly. Rather than control Ulala, players have to follow her directions to keep the party going, using direction controls to copy her moves and press buttons to shoot. Do well, and Ulala’s troupe gets bigger; don’t, and it gives up.
With nothing to fall back on but Simple Simon Says, Ulala’s numbers throw it all at the screen and speakers. The soundtrack is as uplifting as they come, using Ken Woodman’s “The Mexican Flyer” as a launchpad before blasting off into joyous instrumentals. Its sets and characters take that famous Sega palette—something the Dreamcast hardware seemed designed to reproduce—back to the ’60s for a kitsch makeover. And, as for its queen of the galaxy, she makes you wonder if the plaintiff had a point —she is, for lack of a better word, deee-lightful. DH See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
System Shock 2 Original release date : 1999 Platform : PC Developer : Electronic Arts Genre : First-Person Shooter
They don’t want to hurt you, the twisted freaks that rush at you aboard the deserted spaceship Von Braun, but their will is no longer their own. Their bodies have been hijacked by a malevolent alien life-form called the Many, and they retain only enough of themselves to be horrified by what they see themselves doing. So they wail, “I’m sorry!” They beg you to kill them. And they’re just about the only company you have in the whole dismal place. System Shock 2 pushes a lot of the player’s buttons, not least in the suffocating sense of isolation it imposes. You awaken on the abandoned ship with no friends and no hope, surrounded by ghouls and a trigger-happy automated security system. When a lone voice comes across your radio, asking for help, you give it unquestioningly, for the human connection if nothing else. This is a theme that System Shock 2 designer Ken Levine would revisit in BioShock, and the reveal in this game is no less shocking—just less famous. System Shock 2 purposely hobbles the player. Prior to the action, you can choose to play as one of three classes of character: the resilient soldier, who’s only good with guns; the hacker, who can reprogram the ship’s security systems for his own ends; and the psychic, whose telekinetic abilities
can be devastating if used correctly. Each has his usefulness, though you’ll more often find that each has critical weaknesses. Weapons and equipment break down as you use them, which leads to one quandary after another: Should you use your most powerful weapon now and risk being without it later, or try to find a less obvious solution? It can get a little complicated, but the result is a highly influential FPS horror game—unrelenting, unforgiving, and unforgettable. MK See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Faselei! Original release date : 1999 Platform : Neo Geo Pocket Color Developer : Sacnoth Genre : Strategy / Role-Playing Released mere weeks before the untimely demise of SNK’s outstanding Neo Geo Pocket Color handheld, very few copies of Faselei! actually reached the shops. As a result, this military-themed strategy RPG is one of the most collectible titles for the system, its value compounded by scarcity and, perhaps more important, quality. Drawing some inspiration from Square’s Front Mission series, Faselei! gives its player control of a handful of mechanized soldiers, the hulking bipedal combat mecha familiar to any fan of Japanese esoterica. These Toy Soldiers, as the game colloquially refers to them, must be maneuvered around a gridded, chesslike environment as you work to take down enemy military squadrons. The game’s unique feature is in charging players with anticipating enemy moves by programming their units before each turn. Each mecha has a limited number of command chips that can be taken into a match, such as “walk forward,” “turn left,” “turn right,” “fire primary weapon,” and so on. The command chips you take into each battle must be chosen beforehand, meaning that you have to balance offensive and defensive options carefully, ensuring that you will be able to move and attack in the desired ways. Want the ability to fire a secondary or tertiary weapon? Then you may need to do so at the expense of being able to move backward. Since each unit can be equipped with diverse and unique additions on top of their programmable chips, the game provides generous scope for customization, a crucial component in making the player feel as though their choices are meaningful in any SRPG (strategy role-playing game). A unique, inspired take on a classic genre, Faselei! is well worth the considerable effort it may take to hunt down a copy. SP See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Threads of Fate Original release date : 1999 Platform : PS1 Developer : Square Genre : Action / Role-Playing Threads of Fate has the distinction of being perhaps the only video game to be renamed for English-speaking audiences because its original Japanese title, Dew Prism, sounded anti-Semitic (try saying it aloud). A bright, colorful game, there are few dark themes in this, Square’s most gentlehearted action-RPG of the PlayStation era. Its story is told through the intertwining lives of two young protagonists, Rue and Mint, whose distinct personalities and abilities provide the necessary friction for both the game’s mechanics and storyline. Rue’s strength is primarily channeled down the shaft of his ax, but it’s in his ability to assume the form and traits of defeated foes that the game’s designers drew keenest inspiration for Threads of Fate’s puzzles. Choosing the most appropriate form to overcome an obstacle or greater foe constitutes the basis for most of the game’s distinct challenges. By contrast, when playing as the treasure-obsessed princess, Mint, you can interact with the world by manipulating her twin hoop weapons and choosing from a selection of spells. The visuals play to the PlayStation’s strengths and, released late into the system’s life, Square uses color and stylization to great effect, making this one of the best-looking titles of its time. The platforming and combat work in concert through the game’s exquisite 3-D environments, and while the journey can feel almost roller coaster-esque in the carefully considered use of camera direction, it’s one worth taking. Indeed, the manner in which the storyline carefully entangles the threads of its protagonists’ separate journeys is masterfully handled, and the joyful tone and humor that peppers the broader narrative make this one of Square’s best stories, one that delights in the telling as much as the tale. SP See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
ISS Pro Evolution Original release date : 1999 Platform : PS1 Developer : Konami Genre : Sports Until the release of ISS Pro Evolution in 1999, the history of football games at Konami was tangled and complex. Early home system efforts led to the development of the International Superstar Soccer series for the SNES at Konami’s Osaka studio, KCEO. ISS, as it was known, first appeared in 1994 as a like-for-like competitor to Electronic Arts’ FIFA Football, and was built on a similar combination of accessibility and fast-paced arcade action. While ISS was a success, Konami’s second series not only eclipsed its previous effort but went on to set the standard for football games for a decade and more. A year after the release of ISS, Konami instructed its Tokyo studio, KCET, to develop what became Winning Eleven. The intention was to offer a more realistic experience than its sister game, more concerned with tactics and passing than crowd-pleasing spectacle. For Western gamers, it took some time for the difference to become obvious. While the two series ran side-by-side in Japan (as Jikkyou World Soccer and Winning Eleven), in the UK they were marketed as confusing cross-breeds, with Winning Eleven games branded as “Pro” versions of their ISS counterparts. Even so, by the time Winning Eleven 4 arrived on UK PlayStations as ISS Pro Evolution, KCET’s more measured and challenging game was so superior to everything else on the market that gamers responded by dropping the “ISS” and referring to the game simply as “Pro Evo,” a change Konami would later make official. In addition to the crisp tactical game play (one-two passing, faked shot cutbacks) that set the series apart, the game features the first appearance of the Master League manager mode, a triumphant time sink of transfer windows and team-building that ensured ISS Pro Evolution remained in a different league to its competitors. ND See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Vib-Ribbon Original release date : 1999 Platform : PS1 Developer : NanaOn-Sha Genre : Music Vib-Ribbon proves that less is more, coaxing a staggering amount of character out of a handful of skittish white vectors on a black backdrop. It manages to take the simplest of mechanics and spins them into a game that feels incredibly immediate and intense. Sony’s game is tiny (so small, in fact, that it can be loaded in its entirety into the original PlayStation’s miniscule onboard memory in one go), but it’s a title you’ll play again and again, an aging classic that you’d be wise to ensure is always within reach of your control pad. The game is simple: Vib-Ribbon comes with a number of songs, all of which translate into basic assault courses for Vibri, the game’s rabbit hero, to navigate. Each kind of obstacle, generated from the music track itself, is overcome with a press of one of the controller’s buttons. Simply put, VibRibbon is a test of recognition and reflex skills—and one that gets distinctly tricky as obstacles start to blend two different kinds of attack. You suddenly realize that you really must learn your control mappings. It’s much more entertaining than it may sound, and the real brilliance kicks in when you realize you can remove the original disk and insert your own CDs. A world of possibility opens up with the ability to sculpt courses from pop classics, blues standards, and even—although the results always turn out to be rather weird—classical music. If you’re after a challenge, try hard rock. Subsequent games tried to take Vib-Ribbon’s strange charms and apply them to other art forms, but the results have never been as coherent and delightful as they are here, and their presentation never quite as ingeniously understated. An underground classic with a genuine mainstream appeal, Vib-Ribbon is so slight, and so utterly perfect, that it could well prove to be timeless. CD See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
Team Fortress Classic Original release date : 1999 Platform : PC Developer : Valve Corporation Genre : First-Person Shooter
Every legend begins somewhere, and before Team Fortress 2 there was Team Fortress Classic . The game began its life in 1996 as a modification for id Software’s Quake, but John Cook and Robin Walker’s design finally felt at home as part of the fledgling Valve Software empire. In a quirk of history, Team Fortress 2 was actually in development before Team Fortress Classic , but in the process of making development tools for Half-Life mod-makers, Valve chose to test its tools by making Team Fortress Classic entirely within them. As in its better-known sequel, Team Fortress Classic pits two teams against each other in a battle to capture the flag, control territory, or escort an objective (in this case a very vulnerable VIP). Each team has a range of classes—scout, sniper, soldier, heavy weapons guy, demo man, medic, pyro, spy, and engineer—and each of these has at least one unique weapon. It’s here that Team Fortress ’s most iconic level, the capture-the-flag-based 2fort, made its mark. With two mirror-image bases facing each other and separated by a moat, it presented clearly all of the potential of team-based multiplayer. Multiple entrances to each fort are suited to different classes and tactics, and, by being heavily weighted toward defense, the level required incredible team
coordination to pull off a win. As a modification—and one without the eight-year development process—Team Fortress Classic is less tight in both design and play than its sequel, with classes featuring redundant weapons and less finely tuned differences. But to many it remains supreme—so much so that dedicated fans have remade it using Half-Life 2’s engine with the name of Fortress Forever. To this day it remains one of the ten most-played Half-Life mods of all time. MKu See all games from the 1990s.
1990s
The Typing of the Dead Original release date : 1999 Platform : Various Developer : WOW / Smilebit Genre : Action / Edutainment
The House of the Dead is, of course, Sega’s visceral, bloody, light gun horror series. Hammy voices and superbly stilted dialogue sustain the B-movie atmosphere as you frantically pepper the screen to survive Sega’s relentless zombie slaughterhouse. Who’d have thought that one of the franchise’s most successful and memorable entries would consist of watching gobs of undead flesh and blood spatter across the screen while you blow apart the shambling hordes of zombies by typing out random words and phrases on a keyboard? And they really are random: “I’m dating the head cheerleader,” you might type while playing The Typing of the Dead, before digressing into an extended discourse on health and safety measures or financial prudence. At times these phrases are thought-provoking—”Don’t blame yourself” (“For what?” you might think before casually reducing another reanimated corpse to a pile of blood and guts with your rapid-fire sixty-words-per-minute delivery). Most of the time they’re just plain surprising. Pretty much all of the time, however, they are even more insane than the seemingly randomly thrown together nonsequiturs that passes for the actual cut-scene script. These cut scenes are almost exactly identical to the light gun originals, except that instead of carrying guns, our intrepid undead
eliminators are now carrying keyboards. Whoever it was who took the decision to convert Sega’s zombie-filled slaughterhouse legend into an extended touch-typing tutorial is a genius of a particularly unhinged sort. Apparently untroubled by logic or judgment, they have come up with one of video gaming’s most unexpected, idiosyncratic— and yet still utterly compelling—forays into entertainment. DM See all games from the 1990s.
2000s
• The Sims, first released in 2000, becomes the best-selling PC game ever • Released in 2000, the PlayStation2 (PS2) becomes the world’s best-selling game console • World of Warcraft, released in 2004, becomes the world’s most popular MMORPG with more than 11.5 million subscribers • Call of Duty 2, released in 2006, is the first Xbox 360 game to sell 1 million units in the US • Nintendo’s Wii console, with its wireless, motion-sensing, handheld pointing device, is released in 2006, enabling sporting and other physically interactive games
Contents Perfect Dark Baldur’s Gate II Banjo-Tooie Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes Deus Ex Diablo II Elasto Mania Excitebike 64 Grandia II Paper Mario Crimson Skies Giants: Citizen Kabuto Jet Set Radio Capcom vs. SNK: Millennium Fight 2000 Metropolis Street Racer Resident Evil Code: Veronica Final Fantasy IX Power Stone 2 Phantasy Star Online Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 Silent Scope 2: Dark Silhouette Skies of Arcadia Sin & Punishment The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask The Sims Vagrant Story Super Monkey Ball Thief II: The Metal Age Sacrifice
Animal Crossing Final Fantasy X Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance Commandos 2: Men of Courage Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec Black & White Tribes 2 IL-2 Sturmovik Devil May Cry Frequency Stretch Panic Mario Kart: Super Circuit Gitaroo Man Grand Theft Auto III Return to Castle Wolfenstein Max Payne Halo: Combat Evolved Silent Hill 2 Shenmue II Serious Sam Luigi’s Mansion Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy Maximo: Ghosts to Glory Ikaruga Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis Pikmin Advance Wars Golden Sun RuneScape Super Smash Bros. Melee
The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons/Ages SSX Tricky Star Wars Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader Uplink Age of Mythology Battlefield 1942 Burnout 2: Point of Impact Crazy Taxi 3: High Roller Dark Chronicle Metroid Fusion Metroid Prime Dungeon Siege Medieval: Total War Steel Battalion Eternal Darkness Jet Set Radio Future Soul Calibur II Kingdom Hearts The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven Disaster Report Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Medal of Honor: Allied Assault No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in H.A.R.M.’s Way Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Neverwinter Nights Panzer Dragoon Orta Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast Suikoden III Shinobi Resident Evil Zero
Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus Hitman 2: Silent Assassin Pokémon Ruby/Sapphire Ratchet & Clank Grow The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker Super Mario Sunshine Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos TimeSplitters 2 The Mark of Kri Eve Online Beyond Good & Evil Disgaea: Hour of Darkness Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly Call of Duty Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow Amplitude Donkey Konga Bookworm Wario World Freedom Fighters Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Flipnic Astro Boy: Omega Factor Midtown Madness 3 WarioWare, Inc.: Mega MicroGames! Viewtiful Joe Hidden & Dangerous 2 Jak II Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga
Geometry Wars Pro Evolution Soccer 3 Mojib Ribbon Zoo Keeper Metal Arms: Glitch in the System NBR Street Vol. 2 Kill Switch Ninja Five-0 Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time PlanetSide Railroad Tycoon 3 Rise of Nations Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner Samorost SimCity 4 Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic Tales of Symphonia Manhunt Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory F-Zero GX R-Type Final Gregory Horror Show Zuma Pool Paradise Half-Life 2 Bejeweled 2 Cave Story City of Heroes Counter-Strike Source Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat
Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King Doom 3 Halo 2 EverQuest II Gradius V Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Far Cry Katamari Damacy Mashed Mario Power Tennis Mario vs. Donkey Kong Lumines Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes Metroid Zero Mission Metroid Prime 2: Echoes Def Jam: Fight for NY Ninja Gaiden Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door The Sims 2 Daigasso! Band Brothers Second Sight Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy Sly 2: Band of Thieves Ridge Racers Red Dead Revolver Rome: Total War Pikmin 2 Puyo Pop Fever Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay
RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures Torus Trooper Unreal Tournament 2004 WarioWare: Twisted! Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War Spider-Man 2 Transformers World of Warcraft Clubhouse Games Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow Battalion Wars Battlefield 2 Call of Duty 2 God of War Freedom Force vs. The 3rd Reich Civilization IV Chibi-Robo! Drill Dozer Darwinia Dead or Alive 4 Animal Crossing: Wild World Yoshi: Touch & Go Advance Wars: Dual Strike Golden Tee Live F.E.A.R Fahrenheit Fable Fa
Guild Wars Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance Garry’s Mod Devil May Cry 3 Meteos Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories GT Legends Guitar Hero Gunstar Super Heroes Fire Pro Wrestling Returns Killer 7 LEGO Star Wars Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time Mario Kart DS Jade Empire Rogue Galaxy Need for Speed: Most Wanted Project Gotham Racing 3 Nintendogs Tower Bloxx Trauma Center: Under the Knife Rebelstar: Tactical Command Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney We Love Katamari Silent Hunter III Shadow of the Colossus Psychonauts The Movies The Warriors TimeSplitters: Future Perfect Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory
Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath SWAT 4 Ninja Gaiden Black Resident Evil 4 X3: Reunion Armadillo Run Line Rider Mother 3 Uno Gears of War Black Prey ArmA: Armed Assault Company of Heroes Bully Yakuza 2 Dead Rising DEFCON Eets: Hunger. It’s Emotional Elebits Elite Beat Agents Tomb Raider Legend Exit 2 Earth Defense Force 2017 Fight Night Round 3 Rockstar Presents Table Tennis Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories Art Style: Orbient Final Fantasy XII Okami
God Hand Flow GTR 2 Guitar Hero II Hitman: Blood Money Jeanne d’Arc Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 Just Cause Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops Gunpey Mercury Meltdown Naked War Slitherlink Gottlieb Pinball Classics Lumines Live Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends Medieval II: Total War Test Drive Unlimited OutRun 2006: Coast 2 Coast Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Double Agent The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess Viva Piñata Trauma Center: Second Opinion Slaves to Armok II: Dwarf Fortress Pokémon Diamond and Pearl Tony Hawk’s Project 8 Virtua Fighter 5 Virtua Tennis 3 Wii Sports Dreamfall: The Longest Journey
Rayman Raving Rabbids Microsoft Flight Simulator X Ultimate Ghosts ’n Goblins Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation Crush BioShock Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Anno 1701: Dawn of Discovery Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift Crackdown Everybody’s Golf 5: World Tour Contra 4 Free Running FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage Crysis Flywrench E4 Final Fantasy IV Desktop Tower Defense Everyday Shooter MotorStorm Forza Motorsport 2 Halo 3 God of War II GrimGrimoire Colin McRae: Dirt Heavenly Sword Hexic 2 Hotel Dusk: Room 215 Mass Effect Odin Sphere
Metroid Prime 3: Corruption Mercury Meltdown Revolution No More Heroes Pain Picross DS Professor Layton and the Curious Village Pac-Man Champ Ed Peggle Planet Puzzle League Puzzle Quest Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction Portal Quadradius Retro Game Challenge Space Giraffe Rock Band Singstar The Darkness S.T.R.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl The Witcher John Woo Presents Stranglehold Team Fortress 2 Super Mario Galaxy Super Stardust HD Supreme Commander Logan’s Shadow The World Ends with You The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune
Wii Fit Wipeout Pulse Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box Unreal Tournament 3 Warhawk Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros’ Treasure World in Conflict Patapon Carcassonne Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts Audiosurf Auditorium Bejeweled Twist Afrika Critter Crunch Galcon Battlefield: Bad Company Bionic Commando Rearmed Mario Kart Wii Braid Burnout Paradise Buzz Quiz TV Castle Crashers Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution Cursor*10 Fable II N+ De Blob Echochrome Fantastic Contraption Dead Space
Fallout 3 Bangai-O Spirits Devil May Cry 4 Far Cry 2 Gears of War 2 Defense Grid: The Awakening Fatal Frame IV: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse God of War: Chains of Olympus Left 4 Dead Maboshi: The Three Shape Arcade Spelunky Age of Empires: Mythologies Grand Theft Auto IV Guitar Hero World Tour Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 Let’s Tap Tetris Party LocoRoco 2 Lost Winds Ninja Gaiden II Metal Bear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots Midnight Club: Los Angeles MotorStorm: Pacific Rift Race Driver: Grid S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky Resistance 2 Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 Pure World of Goo Rez HD PixelJunk Monsters
Top Spin 3 Rock Band 2 Saints Row 2 Sins of a Solar Empire Siren: Blood Curse LittleBigPlanet Space Invaders Extreme BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger Soul Calibur IV Wipeout HD Monster Hunter Freedom Unite Spore Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix Street Fighter lV Super Smash Bros. Brawl Valkyria Chronicles Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 Tomb Raider Underworld Reset Generation Trism Edge / Edgy Drop7 Trackmania: United Forever Trackmania DS Fieldrunners Mega Man 9 Art Style: Intersect Borderlands Bonsai Barber Captain Forever Boom Blox Bash Party
Canabalt Assassin’s Creed II Batman: Arkham Asylum Bit. Trip Core Gravity Crash Battlefield 1943: Pacific Demigod Rion: The Tower of Eternity Bayonetta Half-Minute Hero Fat Princess Forza Motorsport 3 Colin McRae: Dirt 2 Dead Space Extraction Eliss DJ Hero Death Tank Demon’s Souls Dissidia Final Fantasy The House of the Dead: Overkill Dragon Age: Origins Empire: Total War Crayon Physics Deluxe Flight Control Noby Noby Boy Flower F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin Football Manager 2010 GeoDefense Swarm Fuel Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
Grand Slam Tennis FIFA 2010 Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned Grand Theft Ruto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars Guitar Hero: Metallica Halo 3: ODST Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes Machinarium Halo Wars IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey Infamous Left 4 Dead 2 Killzone 2 Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure Lost Winds: Winter of the Melodias Little King’s Story NHL 10 MLB 09: The Show Race Pro Need for Speed: Shift One-Dot Enemies Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena Shatter UFC 2009: Undisputed WWE Smackdown vs Raw 2010 Swords & Soldiers Fiants vs. Zombies Prototype
Punch-Out!! The Path EyePet Rhythm Heaven Rolando 2 Resident Evil 5 Sin & Punishment: Successorto the Sky The Sims 3 Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor Skate 2 Uncharted 2: Rmong Thieves The Beatles: Rock Band Starship Patrol Scribblenauts Trine The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai Shadow Complex Red Faction Guerrilla You, Me & the Cubes Torchlight The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks Zen Bound Reflect Missile Space Invaders Infinity Gene Muramasa: The Demon Blade Zeno Clash Mighty Flip Champs Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 NBA 2K10 Cogs Wii Sports Resort
A Boy and His Blob PixelJunk Shooter Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of war II Time Gentlemen, Please!
2000s
Perfect Dark Original release date : 2000 Platform : N64 Developer : Rare Genre : First-Person Shooter As the spiritual sequel to GoldenEye 007, a title that forever changed the direction of first-person shooters on consoles, things were never going to be easy for Perfect Dark, especially taking into consideration the absence of the official James Bond license. Add the departure during production of many of the talents who made GoldenEye 007 great, and a protracted development period, and Perfect Dark felt like a failure even before it was released. There are several aspects of Perfect Dark that make it seem like an ill-fated mistake. A plot that featured a war between alien races, masked as an industrial-espionage conflict between research companies on Earth, was dull—even to an audience that had just suffered the trauma of the tradedispute-heavy Phantom Menace in the cinemas. The characterizations, from Lara Croft-alike Joanna Dark to comedy alien sidekick Elvis, meanwhile, are misjudged. But to concentrate on these flaws would be to miss out on one of the most technically impressive titles available on the N64. Offering high-resolution graphics and Dolby Surround Sound, if at the cost of requiring a memory expansion pack, the title pushes the hardware to its limits and, sometimes uncomfortably, beyond. However, Perfect Dark beat the PC-based Deus Ex by a matter of months in offering locations that actually felt like the real world, creating a complete and compelling experience that made up for the deficiencies of the plot. Later in the year 2000 a version of Perfect Dark was released for Nintendo’s new Game Boy Color. While there is some crossover in characters and locations, the two games are very different entities. Far more engaging is the 2010 Xbox Live Arcade revival of the original game, which delivers a smooth frame rate that enhances the imaginatively engineered multiplayer modes. MKu See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Baldur’s Gate II Original release date : 2000 Platform : PC Developer : BioWare Genre : Role-Playing
In 1988, SSI’s Gold Box series redefined the Western idea of the RPG genre. They took the single most important set of pen-and-paper rules—Advanced Dungeons & Dragons—and tied them to an epic series of campaigns that spanned entire continents and several games, breathing life into Gary Gygax’s legendary creation. Running out of steam in the early 1990s, however, the D&D franchise was left to languish. Until, that is, BioWare created Baldur’s Gate . The effect was like stepping through the rainbow, like moving from black-and-white to color. Baldur’s Gate was teeming with life in a way that no other RPG had ever been. Where the Gold Box games had provided hack-and-slash gaming supported by blocky graphics, Baldur’s Gate offered would-be adventurers an abundance of quests and meaningful interactions across huge playing areas; across intricately detailed, beautifully rendered isometric recreations of a completely convincing fantasy medieval world. The transition between Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn was every bit as pronounced. The sequel may have streamlined the interface, but it bulked out the playing experience. Like the Gold Box games, players could import their characters and items from a previous game, and
as those characters grew in power, so the game changed to reflect their newfound influence. Building up their own strongholds and followers, they were free to lead their own way through a labyrinthine plot that weaved together divergent and mutually exclusive subplots and quests—indeed, some subquests were as weighty and complex as the entire first game. As far as gaming goes, it’s a satisfying complexity that has yet to be eclipsed. Indeed, Baldur’s Gate II is probably still the pinnacle of the Western RPG. DM See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Banjo-Tooie Original release date : 2000 Platform : Various Developer : Rare Genre : Platform
Banjo-Tooie is one of the biggest, best-looking, and most representative examples of the 3-D platformer boom at the end of the 1990s. It may not be the best: its predecessor, Banjo-Kazooie, has imagination and new ideas that Banjo-Tooie does not. Instead, it builds on established foundations, booting the player into even larger, more colorful, self-contained 3-D worlds stuffed with even more trinkets, shinies, and treasures to assault your peripheral vision. That’s not to say it isn’t an ambitious title. Thanks to its bewildering melange of different game play elements, moves, and collectibles, Banjo-Tooie is a much more expansive game than BanjoKazooie, often to the point of overcomplication. The levels themselves are large enough to need warp pads to navigate, but are more sparsely populated than those of its predecessor. Each contains a bizarre shoot-’em-up section that seems to exist purely to show off Rare’s muscle with the N64’s technology, as if the sophisticated lighting effects and vast open levels left anything to be proved. Banjo-Tooie might be bloated, but it’s irrepressibly imaginative, full of mini-games, characters, and ideas. It handles with clout compared to Mario’s tight, agile acrobatics, and the game’s world is drawn in broader, more colorful strokes. Each level hides a secret transformation, turning Banjo into
a weird selection of alternative forms, from a detonator to a washing machine to a tiny dinosaur: Banjo-Tooie isn’t exactly sophisticated humor, but it is unique—if not downright weird. Banjo-Tooie has resurfaced on Xbox Live Arcade with smoother looks, although with operation slightly altered to fit with the Xbox controller. But it still retains the sheer oddity of the original. KM See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes Original release date : 2000 Platform : Various Developer : Capcom Genre : Fighting
One of the best things about Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes is its ability to literalize arguments. Captain America might look tough, but you know that one dragon punch would have him seeing stars and stripes. The Hulk? He can get angry all he wants, but there’s no touching Mega Man. Hardly clever, but very big, this smooshing-together of comic-book heroes and video game’s toughest fighters is light-years ahead of its predecessor for the simple reason that it fully embraces the concept, building a spectacular light show of attacks, tag teams, and hundred-hit combos that leave the ground far beneath. The game advances the two-on-two action of its predecessor to three-on-three, with teams switching between their members to recover and surprise the opposition with assist attacks. It also introduces the ability to force an opponent’s next character into the ring with a snapback attack that, if unblocked, sends the current opponent flying out of the ring, to be replaced. Of course, there’s a fight system as deep as you’d expect from Capcom, but the combos and team-ups are always subservient to the spectacle—the comic pows and whams and that upwardly ticking combo counter are the MSG of fighting games, and they are poured on relentlessly.
Let’s emphasize once again the sheer scale of Marvel vs. Capcom 2: There are fifty-six fighters on show, ranging from Ryu to Spider-Man and Dr. Doom to M. Bison, and even the arenas are wider than the original. The game itself is a blur of hypercolor and crashing blows, quick tags, knockbacks, and desperate escapes; in slow motion the depth of interplay and counterplay at its beating heart is clear. Marvel vs. Capcom 2 is nothing less than the ultimate fighting game—for true believers. RS See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Deus Ex Original release date : 2000 Platform : PC Developer : Ion Storm Genre : First-Person Shooter / Role-Playing
When Deus Ex first arrived on the scene, much was made of its hybrid qualities. An unusual concoction for its time, the game combined RPG-style character development, first-person combat, and player choice. In the wake of Fallout 3, BioShock, and the like, it’s hard to recollect the novelty of Deus Ex, which speaks volumes as to how it has continued to define and overshadow gaming. You are J. C. Denton, a new nanotech-powered United Nations antiterrorist recruit. When a pandemic sweeps the globe, its cure in the hands of a select few, your suspicions become aroused. Are your pay masters really safeguarding the interests of the public? Where has this plague come from and who benefits from distributing its cure? Deus Ex takes a kleptomaniac approach to conspiracy fiction, assembling a greatest hits of millennial paranoia: men in black, Illuminati, Templars, and dastardly corporations all tumble into the pot to boil alongside hushed-up alien landings, sinister gene-splicing experiments, the ruthless rise of cybernetics, and self-aware AI. The route chosen by the player to navigate these issues is brilliantly problematic. The game remains a yardstick for branching narrative paths, avoiding the common good/ evil polarity. Ironically, given the game’s title, Deus Ex’s near-future dystopia offers no easy resolutions, every
decision a tragic compromise between deeply imperfect ideologies. The game also exemplifies selfexpression, spoiling the player with different means of tackling any objective. But whether sneaking through air vents or blasting mechs with EMP grenades, it’s really about how those little choices build into our larger fears of secretive oligarchies, tyranny, and anarchy—and, more terrifyingly, whether there is really any better alternative. MD See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Diablo II Original release date : 2000 Platform : PC Developer : Blizzard North Genre : Action / Role-Playing
The genius of Diablo was in the ransacking of the archives. It took the ASCII RPG classic Rogue and turned it into an isometric point-and-click adventure. And just as Rogue had spawned an entire genre (known as “Roguelike”), in which a solitary hero would go off in search of loot and reputation, so Diablo unleashed a stream of action-RPG clones in which Rogue’s turn-based dungeoneering was given a real-time makeover and fancy graphics. Diablo reduces the RPG to its barest essentials: that lone hero trawling through ever deeper dungeons, clicking on things until they die, and then picking up the loot. There are essentially just three different combat strategies: magic, melee, and ranged combat, each one reflected by the three core classes in the original game (warrior, sorcerer, and rogue). Blizzard North took those basics and polished and pared them with supreme skill, from the easy and intuitive design of the interface to the judicious balance between progress and reward. Diablo II is constructed from these solid foundations. Designed with multiplayer in mind—and executed with Blizzard North’s customary online flair —Diablo II features a number of important additions: mercenaries and hirelings to help during
missions; five new character classes to replace the old ones; and even a secret in-joke level, filled with hellish, halberd-wielding bovines—which was a reference to the spurious Internet rumors of a secret cow level when the original was launched. In truth, Diablo II was a success, and it is cited by the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s fastest-selling computer game, because of those things that made the original a success: the pareddown simplicity with which it retells the hero’s quest. DM See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Elasto Mania Original release date : 2000 Platform : PC Developer : Balázs Rózsa Genre : Motorbike Simulation
It’s hard to credit Elasto Mania’s continued popularity from a brief play. Graphically the kindest thing you can say about it is that it has a naive charm. Furthermore, the first play can all too easily prevent you from persevering. The controls are basic—accelerate, brake, shift your weight back and forward, change direction—and at first they feel ludicrously twitchy. Simply accelerating without flipping over backward takes some learning. And the game’s physics are not so much real world as dream world. Everything seems to happen in an almost nightmarish slow motion, the air seems thick and soupy, gravity isn’t quite right, and your bike has a certain unsettling elasticity to it. Initially, this is all quite off-putting. Except that it works—and it works astonishingly well. The peculiar physics, married to levels that at first sight seem plain impossible, encourage you to explore the subtleties of the controls and take your bike beyond the limits of its expected capabilities. Soon you are confidently showboating away with wheelies, somersaults, and tricks that involve balancing a wheel on a platform. Ten years down the line, players are still finding new ways to shave precious milliseconds from the speed records through exploiting the peculiarities of Elasto Mania’s physics.
Until recently it was a genre unto itself; that is, until RedLynx seized the initiative with its increasingly popular Trials series, taking the concept and making it bigger and faster and shinier. But its pace and instant-restart mentality make it a complementary title rather than a replacement; Elasto Mania is more thoughtful, less linear, and a whole lot loonier than the brash young usurper. It’s eccentric and hard to get to know, but if you put the time and effort in, it’ll reward you magnificently. JM See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Excitebike 64 Original release date : 2000 Platform : N64 Developer : Left Field Productions Genre : Racing
The original Excitebike appeared in 1984 on the NES, a perfect piece of pixel simplicity. The sequel, released sixteen years later, bears almost no resemblance at all, except that both titles represent a straight-up dedication to entertainment in their respective eras. Looking back at both of them now, the geometrical precision of the original is a more obvious sign of genius than the muddy, fuzzy brown screens of the sequel, which owe more to the technical limitations of the host console than to the off-road environments of many of the racetracks. It’s only when you pick up the controller and start to play Excitebike 64 that its virtuosity becomes apparent, thanks to a handling model that carefully blends the impression of real-world physics with the hyper-reality of exaggerated handling. The key to its brilliance lies in the perfect balance between the effect of terrain on bike handling, and the effect of the rider’s weight as the bike barrels through the air as you steer, slide, and turbo your way to victory around twenty-odd off-road tracks. There’s more to it than that, of course. The game comes with a track editor that adds an almost infinite variety to the action. You can save your best times as “ghosts” to race against in the future,
and you can unlock special bonuses, including a randomly generated desert level and the original, bare-bones NES game. And there is an entire stunt system that capitalizes on the game’s perfectly weighted aerial handling characteristics. Above all, however, the thing that stands out in Excitebike 64, just as it had done in the original all those years before, is Nintendo’s customary polish. Perhaps for that reason, it remains the high point in the video game output of developer Left Field Productions. DM See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Grandia II Original release date : 2000 Platform : Various Developer : Game Arts Genre : Role-Playing
To anyone raised on the frequent moral choices, free-form questing, party building, and brown textures that typified the Western RPG, Grandia II must have seemed like something from another planet. Its vibrant cartoon-styled characters, contrasting against bright blue skies, probably resembled luminescent aliens, and its lengthy, often moralizing cut scenes might have been incomprehensible to anyone raised on dialogue boxes alone. It is a game that embodies the differences in design philosophy between the two schools of RPG thought: a linear story—often adolescent and twee— plays out in cut scenes punctuated by bouts of exploring that serve mainly to house a battle system that is both intricate and rewarding. The original Grandia, on PlayStation and Sega Saturn, solved one of the most commonly criticized features of Japanese RPGs by including random encounters, but representing enemy presence before they appear, making it possible to avoid confrontation. It featured an equally dynamic set of combat rules. In all other respects, it was an archetypal Japanese RPG, as was the sequel, Grandia II. It took a similarly pioneering approach to combat, introducing a limited amount of movement that allowed far greater tactical complexity than the static schemes used by more
traditional RPGs. The game recounts the tale of pouty teenaged mercenary Ryudo, who is given the task of protecting the songstress, Elena, as she embarks on what turns out to be an unexpectedly perilous journey. Quite rightfully, the game earned a much-coveted platinum award from Japan’s weekly Famitsu magazine, and a legion of devotees. To anyone raised on a diet of Western RPGs, it’s among the best places to begin sampling the delights of Japanese RPGs. DM See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Paper Mario Original release date : 2000 Platform : N64 Developer : Intelligent Systems Genre : Role-Playing
Legend of the Seven Stars, Square’s attempt at bringing the world of Super Mario Bros. into the format of an RPG, showed that there was sometimes more to the famous plumber than simply running and jumping. Nintendo returned to this idea with Paper Mario, showing there was sometimes less to him than three dimensions as well. It’s a dazzling conceit. Perhaps it was even some kind of Christmas present to everyone who felt Mario had lost something in the midst of his—admittedly almost flawless—transition to 3-D environments. Paper Mario sends our hero back—sort of, anyway—blending his chirpy twodimensional form with a vibrant 3-D world and setting him off on a ridiculous and sprawling quest, this time in search of mysterious Star Spirits, which he needs to defeat a strange artifact that has rendered his pesky, perennial arch enemy, Bowser, invincible. The visuals are a confident treat—particularly given the often grim end products of Nintendo’s 64-bit console—and developer Intelligent Systems puts on plenty of new spin as you explore a strange new Mario world, meeting new partners and fighting strange new foes in the game’s turnbased battles. Beyond the novelty, though, this remains a rich RPG with all manner of interesting
items to discover and stats to tweak. Paper Mario was released on a cartridge and quickly became something of a collector’s item. However, now it can also be played on the Wii, this time via the magic of the Virtual Console. Four years after Paper Mario, a sequel emerged for the GameCube platform. Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is still relatively easy to find on secondhand websites and will work on the Wii if your GameCube has been banished to the attic. CD See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Crimson Skies Original release date : 2000 Platform : PC Developer : Zipper Interactive Genre : Flight Simulator / Shoot ’Em Up
It’s not entirely fair that flight sims seem to be considered universally dull by the uninitiated, but neither is such a viewpoint completely without foundation. Crimson Skies breaks ground by injecting the flight simulation model with adventure, prioritizing entertainment over realism, and heart-inmouth dogfights over the precise execution of landing procedures. It creates its own middle-ground between arcade aerial shooter and flight simulation. Set in an alternate-reality version of the 1930s, Crimson Skies follows the roguish adventures of Nathan Zachary, lovable philanderer, sky pirate, and general scallywag; think of him as a 1930s version of Han Solo. It has great voice talent and an irresistibly fast-paced plot, well enhanced by self-referential and period-appropriate wireless broadcasts and pilot chatter. Crimson Skies is more concerned with pulling off improbable maneuvers and shooting down other planes than the limitations of aerodynamics, but that doesn’t mean it’s not satisfying and skillful to control. The planes are actually quite difficult to fly, especially in the constrained areas that the game encourages you to navigate in order to dissuade pursuing planes. The dogfights also allow players the opportunity to exhibit their handling skills. But no concessions are made to realism where
it might detract from that essential feeling of daredevil showmanship. The game also charmingly produces a scrapbook of your aerial achievements, rewarding every mission, stunt, and particularly daring exploit with an extra newspaper clipping or photograph. This feature, along with the extensive plane customization, encourages players to form the kind of personal relationship with the game that makes it stick in the memory. KS See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Giants: Citizen Kabuto Original release date : 2000 Platform : PC Developer : Planet Moon Studios Genre : Shoot ’Em Up / Strategy
Sometimes it’s good to find a game that can’t be summed up in just a few words. It usually means that despite being odd, it’s still good enough to have earned a commercial release. This seems to be the case with Giants: Citizen Kabuto, a game that manages to cram huge variety into its three-part structure, and be massively entertaining while still managing to wrong-foot you with its strangeness. Giants: Citizen Kabuto is unusual in that it is a third-person shooter that combines real-time strategy elements. In the game, you control a single character from one of three humanoid races—a different one in each of the game’s three phases—either to complete the story or to participate online in multiplayer matches. The first part of the game features tiny jet pack-equipped Meccaryns as they attempt to establish an island base, first through combating the local fauna and then through real-time base building and resource gathering. This mixture of gunplay and exploration is highly engaging—both fun and challenging. The second phase of Giants: Citizen Kabuto focuses on the Sea Reaper. She has a different set of
attributes, such as casting spells or summoning fireballs in combat. Completing this part of the game is necessary to take on the final role—Kabuto, the island’s resident beast. Kabuto rampages across the island, eating animals to stay strong and wreaking damage in moments leading up to a surprising conclusion—and one that would be a shame to spoil. What this description fails to capture, though, is the game’s humor. Giants: Citizen Kabuto is filled with stupid jokes and brilliant ideas. From sniper rifles to giant body slams, it’s rich with inventive game mechanics while also being lewd, beautiful, and highly engaging. JR See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Jet Set Radio Original release date : 2000 Platform : Dreamcast Developer : Smilebit Genre : Action
The tireless pursuit of realistic graphics was given pause by Jet Set Radio, an astonishing game that spearheaded the use of cel-shaded 3-D. With a name derived from the acetate sheets used in traditional animation, this complex process applies solid fills and black outlines to 3-D objects, creating a cartoon look that has continued to mature in games like Street Fighter IV, Okami, Viewtiful Joe, and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. The kids are not all right in the game’s day-glo version of Tokyo. From the nightclubs of Benten to the telegraph wires above bustling Shibuya, gangs of kids on Rollerblades fight an endless turf war. Their weapons, spray cans; their victims, anything flat enough to provide a canvas. Shop windows, construction equipment, playgrounds, buses, and even the back of Captain Onishima, the Magnum-waving chief of police—nothing is safe. Switching between members of an up-and-coming gang, the GGs, the player has to master the art of the seamless grind, using the scenery to reach higher and harder tagging spots. And while all of this is going on, pirate DJ Professor K keeps the gangs jumping to exuberant local sounds. This medley of J-pop and electro-funk isn’t the only upbeat thing about Jet Set Radio. With a carnival atmosphere
that makes even storm drains look flash, the game is a love-letter to shinjinrui, Tokyo’s real-life “new race” of hip young radicals. The baffling mix of respect and defiance, fashion and rebellion is unmistakably Japanese, which may explain why the game flopped when released in America. For a more fitting US alternative, check out the violent, nihilistic, and ham-fisted Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure , the video game debut of fashion designer Marc Ecko. DH See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Capcom vs. SNK: Millennium Fight 2000 Original release date : 2000 Platform : Arcade, Dreamcast Developer : Capcom Genre : Fighting Though SNK’s King of Fighters series has never quite gained the traction that Street Fighter managed, the concept behind Capcom vs. SNK: Millennium Fight 2000 is still instantly understandable. This is the two biggest 2-D fighting game developers pitting the pick of their rosters against each other. This wasn’t the first game in the series, but it was the first to be an arcade game, which is, of course, its natural home. The big decision was to adopt the SNK control system of four buttons (light/hard punch, light/hard kick) rather than the six buttons used by Capcom games, but the collision system and physics resemble Street Fighter much more closely, so it’s a hybrid rather than a choice. But the rival companies don’t shy away from going toe-to-toe: At the start of the game you can choose which “groove” you want to play in, Capcom or SNK, and this will affect the kind of super attacks your characters can perform. There was even a new structure for fights, one that remains unique: a team battle in which you have to fill four slots, with each character being worth a certain number of blocks. (Cammy is one block, for example; Ryu and Terry Bogard are worth two; Rugal is three blocks; Akuma or lori are four.) It’s a more obvious tactical leaning toward team battling than any other game allows, and it lets players state their intentions before the round has begun. Does it need to be said that beneath all these layers, this is a brilliant fighting game? Bringing together the best of each company, with a refreshing lack of preciousness about their characters and systems, Capcom vs. SNK: Millennium Fight 2000 is one of the very best in the series, and just a big beautiful rumble in its own right. RS See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Metropolis Street Racer Original release date : 2000 Platform : Dreamcast Developer : Bizarre Creations Genre : Driving Development diaries for Metropolis Street Racer provide a unique insight into the rigors of prelaunch console development. Written throughout 1998 and 1999 by developer Bizarre Creations, months before the arrival of the Sega Dreamcast, they describe informal head-scratching sessions with fellow developer Argonaut, awkwardly timed demos for Sega VIPs, and the monstrous task of texturing a game set in three real-world cities. Metropolis Street Racer was a massively ambitious game for its time, featuring enough urban real estate to host 262 tracks. Still released before Grand Theft Auto III and The Getaway, it maps textures from more than 40,000 photographs to its extruded 3-D cityscapes, creating more than fifteen square miles of London, Tokyo, and San Francisco. Fictional radio stations add cultural backdrops, but the challenge is actually to blank these out while navigating the freakish hairpins, roundabouts, and chicanes of races taking place in venues like St. James’s Park, Admiralty Arch, Shinjuku, and Fisherman’s Wharf. Providing the blueprints for Xbox exclusive Project Gotham Racing, Metropolis Street Racer would bring a new philosophy to driving games: “It’s not about how fast you drive; it’s about how you drive fast.” And this is how you earn kudos—a currency based on your style and precision that unlocks more cars and tracks. The Project Gotham Racing series would tweak it extensively, but what sets Metropolis Street Racer apart is its penalty system: When the race is over, kudos are deducted for mishaps; joker cards double your wins and losses, encouraging you to gamble on your own skill. Later Project Gotham Racing games weren’t nearly so severe, but lost something as a result. DH See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Resident Evil Code: Veronica Original release date : 2000 Platform : Various Developer : Capcom Genre : Survival Horror The Resident Evil series has experienced many false starts. A near-complete version of Resident Evil 2 was junked, several versions of Resident Evil 4 were abandoned, and Resident Evil Code: Veronica was originally intended to be the series’ third title. Eventually it became an exclusive Dreamcast launch title. It may have missed the launch by a year, but it just might be the best “old” Resident Evil there is. It inherits many flaws from the first three games, with plenty of backtracking and a definite clunkiness in combat. Within the template, though, it also adds a great deal: This is the first title in the series to feature environments rendered in real-time 3-D, while the ability to continue after dying (rather than depending on manual save points) is something the series always needed. Still an attractive game in spite of its age, Resident Evil Code: Veronica ’s scope and pacing also deserve a mention. It ties up countless loose ends from previous games, brilliantly pulls the rug out from beneath the player halfway through, and never stops pushing forward. The storyline serves up melodrama and sumptuous cut scenes, but with a surprising knack for horror. Suddenly finding yourself watching a home movie of two young children torturing dragonflies is a shuddering experience. There’s a whole lot more to be shocked by, too. Your zombie foes are all individualized and show up in varying states of decay. Hunters return as gorillas with claws. Your ally is transformed into a mindless hulk that has to be taken down. It’s all harrowing stuff. Resident Evil Code: Veronica shows the limitations of the original Resident Evil template, but also, at its frequent best, just how powerful it can be. RS See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Final Fantasy IX Original release date : 2000 Platform : PS1 Developer : Square Genre : Role-Playing Knights, castles, princesses, and a quest for honor: Final Fantasy IX was nothing if not a return to the series’ formative themes. After two preceding titles set in steampunk fantasy worlds and one set within the ups and downs of a high-school drama, Hironobu Sakaguchi was keen to make the ninth game in his misleadingly titled series a celebration of its earliest days. For fans who grew up with the original Famicom games, the gesture was not unappreciated, with the lighthearted dialogue; bright color scheme; and light, fantasy tale modernizing the classic formula while retaining its charms. For those players who came to Final Fantasy after the world-conquering popularity of the series’ seventh title, however, the response was lukewarm, its cutesy graphics and superdeformed characters a far cry from the angsty teenage drama of the recent titles. The game may have been a graphical triumph, released as it was toward the end of the original PlayStation’s life, but its whimsical visual style failed to wow audiences taken by the gritty realism of Final Fantasy VIII. It failed to sell as well as either of the preceding games in any territory. Deviating from the customizable character options of the previous games, Final Fantasy IX returned to a stricter job system, defining characters in their roles without room for deviation. Ironically, then, its stylized approach means that the game has aged rather better than its more popular predecessors, retaining much of its charm and appeal but shunning realism. With a likable and enduring cast, a whimsical storyline, and a rich and vibrant world to explore, Final Fantasy IX remains an appealing proposition for contemporary players. SP See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Power Stone 2 Original release date : 2000 Platform : Arcade, Dreamcast Developer : Capcom Genre : Fighting
One of the reasons that older gamers mourned the loss of the Dreamcast was that it signaled the demise of arcade gaming culture. Sharing the NAOMI hardware of its latest coin-ops, Sega’s console gave hope that things were not about to change for the worse and that the tenets of fast fun and bright, attractive graphics were not about to sink into a brown and green bog of realistic war games. No matter how sober and pretentious things got, there would always be a place for Power Stone, right? Wrong. While reports of fun’s demise have been greatly exaggerated, Power Stone does represent a lost pleasure: a party game made with all the character and zeal of a “proper” triple-A title. Simply a game about killing your friends with toy weapons in amusement park locations, it now resides on the PSP in the shape of a largely forgotten port. Making a swift transition from arcade to living room, Power Stone 2 is a fantastic pick-up-andplay multiplayer game, supporting four participants over its predecessor’s two. Choosing from such characters as Edward Fokker (boxer and fighter pilot) and Rouge (fire-breathing fortune-teller), players can rely on traditional fighting styles if they want, but it’s more enjoyable to use the environment, pick-ups, and power stones; three of the latter will unlock special “power fusion”
moves. Of the ten stages, one delightfully features an airship that slowly disintegrates while coasting above the clouds. When the last of its platforms and turrets falls away, the fight continues in freefall, players swooping into melee attacks while keeping an eye for life-saving umbrellas. Crashing into the ground, it concludes in a multitiered temple with a respawning tank. Gimmickry all the way, then, but of the highest possible caliber. DH See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Phantasy Star Online Original release date : 2000 Platform : Dreamcast Developer : Sonic Team Genre : Action / Role-Playing
When Phantasy Star Online was released in 2000, it wasn’t the first online console game. The Dreamcast itself had Chu Chu Rocket and Quake III Arena, while earlier consoles had embraced online gaming to varying degrees of success. But Phantasy Star Online was the first that felt like it really worked—and the first online game to adopt a console design sensibility, transforming it through the prism of online connectivity to create something truly original, something that probably couldn’t have existed on a PC alone. Taking inspiration from massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) that were in abundance on PCs at the time, Phantasy Star Online took the connectivity and community of the genre but brought a more tightly contained, console-style adventuring. It also provided superbly realized action-RPG mechanics: customizable characters in teams of four fought their way through sci-fi settings to battle colossal bosses and save the planet. The real masterstroke, however, was the way in which communication and cooperation were set at the heart of the experience: selecting from a multilingual phrase book enabled gamers from all over the world to play together. (Finally realizing Sega’s noble British ad slogan: “We all play games,
why don’t we play together?”) Indeed, if you were lucky enough to play the game close to its release, before the cheats moved in, you could find yourself receiving tribute from high-level Japanese players, who would greet low-level newbies by simply dropping gifts at their feet. And that’s the biggest difference between Phantasy Star Online and the po-faced competition on the PC: the game was actually fun—whether or not the lobby areas were decked out with huge hearts on Valentine’s Day. DM See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 Original release date : 2000 Platform : Various Developer : Neversoft Genre : Sports
Now and again, something comes out of nowhere and plants itself so firmly on the gaming landscape that it becomes difficult to imagine a time when it didn’t exist. And this what happened with the Tony Hawk series. Grinding their way from obscurity to a multiformat, multimillion selling phenomenon, the Tony Hawk games rolled in at just the right time, capturing—helping to push, even—a resurgence in skateboarding while riding the crest of the PlayStation wave. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 remains a series highlight, taking the core components of its predecessor —including the revolutionary control system that brilliantly transplants an infinitely complex pastime onto the eight-button, twin-stick layout of a Dual Shock joy pad—and decking everything out with a “bigger, better, more” attitude. Embarking on your newfound career as a virtual pro skateboarder, then, you get to enjoy larger play areas, a considerably extended trick repertoire, a greater number of mission-based objectives, and, perhaps most notably, an expertly refined set of game mechanics. It is this combination of
enhancements that marks out Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 as the skateboarding game of its generation and even, perhaps, the title that best encapsulates the all-encompassing nature of the PlayStation era. Today, competition comes not from later versions of this game but from EA’s rival Skate series. In such company Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 ’s more extreme, more exaggerated nature may jar. But the comparison is also unfair. More so than the titles that followed, this one embraces its arcadelike temperament with a view to providing an absurdly entertaining ride. And, judged on those terms, it’s certainly a mission statement that still holds up today. JDS See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Silent Scope 2: Dark Silhouette Original release date : 2000 Platform : Arcade Developer : Konami Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
Some games lose little in the transition from arcade to home format; others fall so far short that you wonder why the decision was made to attempt the transfer in the first place. In the 1980s, many of the calamitous conversions could be attributed to home systems simply biting off more than they could chew. (Few who played games during the period won’t have memories of the crushing disappointment of playing home versions that had little in common with the originals they’d loved so much.) In recent years, however, as arcade and consumer technology has converged, there is not a great deal that consoles cannot do. The exception is dedicated hardware such as the rifle used in the Silent Scope arcade series. The story goes that one of Konami’s designers had been playing with his video camera when the idea came to him to incorporate its viewfinder technology into the kind of light gun hardware that had a proven track record in arcades. And the concept he’d wrap it around? Sniping. Shooting enemies from a distance using sniping tools had been seen in plenty of games before Silent Scope, but never as the sole focus and never with dedicated hardware. The result is a uniquely tense atmosphere as you scan a scene with both eyes and then nuzzle up to your weapon, squint into its
sights, and make the shot. Silent Scope II: Dark Silhouette (or Fatal Judgement as it was called in Europe) contains plenty of tongue-in-cheek humor (one exchange sees a character enthusing about playing “Metal Gear for real”) across a series of atmospheric locations against typically restrictive time limits. The home ports should be avoided at all costs, but the authentic arcade experience provides a sense of engagement with the enemy like no other game series. TB See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Skies of Arcadia Original release date : 2000 Platform : Various Developer : Overworks Genre : Role-Playing
Skies of Arcadia was Sega’s answer to the Dreamcast’s lack of a Final Fantasy. It eventually made its way to the GameCube after the demise of Sega’s own console, but if you weren’t lucky enough to play the original, you’d have missed out playing with the Dreamcast’s tiny additional VMU hardware: a rather neat experiment in game design. The game itself was an archetypal, if brilliant, Japanese RPG. As such, the game’s strengths are those of the genre: strong characters, an engaging story, amazing worlds, and overblown boss battles. And similarly the flaws: too many random encounters—and overblown boss battles. The Jules Verne-inspired story starts where most others end, with the rescue of a princess by sky pirates Vyse and Aika and their band of Blue Rogues. The mysterious princess provides the premise for a heroic quest to defeat the evil empire and save the world. Skies of Arcadia’s most groundbreaking addition to the tried-and-tested Japanese RPG formula is how it handles the airship in which the sky pirates explore the world. Providing an excellent pretext for limiting the player’s progress, rising above the airwaves or sinking beneath the clouds gives a
very real sense of the epic scale of the game’s world, while ship-to-ship battles bring another tactical dimension to combat. While Skies of Arcadia doesn’t revolutionize the genre, it works within its constraints to achieve near perfection: it comprises a blend of puzzles, intricate combat mechanics, fantastic environments, one of the longest boss climaxes in the history of climaxes, and some brilliant set pieces (a sequence played out from multiple perspectives, for example). Unsullied by the sulky teenagers seen in some of Square’s games, this is blue-skies gaming at its best. DM See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Sin & Punishment Original release date : 2000 Platform : N64 Developer : Treasure Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
Never released in the West first time around, Treasure’s explosive and elaborate shooter Sin & Punishment was destined to become one of the most sought-after—and name-dropped—titles the cult developer has ever produced. Yet it has considerably more than chic rarity going for it. An on-rails shooter built from vivid colors and sharp controls, Sin & Punishment is an experience that no fan of fast-paced action extravaganzas should miss out on. Indeed, its relative obscurity is ultimately a crime rather than a selling point. Sidestepping the forgettable, if timely, plot involving a near-future Earth in which mankind fights over dwindling resources, Sin & Punishment is a game in which control means everything, and although the “rail” nature means you’re never at a loss for where to go next, there are still plenty of options dumped into the player’s hands, from a choice of free aim and auto targeting for the target reticule, to a series of dodges and jumps that need to be perfected as you work your way through the game’s ballistic set pieces without regular restarts. And from the glowing orange limbo of the game’s first stage to the crowded streets and mech battles of later environments, Sin & Punishment is a treat to behold, every new level throwing in an
unexpected design flourish, each new boss providing an elaborate burst of eye candy the type of which only those chaps back at Treasure HQ in Tokyo seem able to create. The best news of all, however, is that Sin & Punishment is now available on the Wii’s Virtual Console service, which, given that the game’s original cut scenes were already in English, means that there’s no reason not to power it up and then power on through. CD See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask Original release date : 2000 Platform : N64 Developer : Nintendo Genre : Action / Adventure
Arguably the most inventive video game ever made, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask may have confused fans and divided critics, but it trumps the interdimensional puzzles of both The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time with a story that blends the mechanics of a classic Zelda with a premise straight out of Groundhog Day. The results are as baffling, as fascinating, and as wonderful as that odd-couple pairing suggests. It’s very hard to come to grips with Majora’s Mask at first. After the beautifully melancholy opening, Link finds himself in Clock Town, located in the strange land of Terminus, a kingdom living under a death threat from the leering demonic moon that threatens to crash into it in just three days. Unlike most video game time limits, this one isn’t just an empty threat: three days pass, the moon collides with the Earth, and Terminus is wiped out. And the whole thing starts all over again. The game that unfolds is a real headache to comprehend at times, an adventure that plays out in three-day bursts of activity as you move the plot forward one stage at a time, warping back to the beginning of the story whenever the moon nears its impact once more.
Majora’s Mask is as astonishing as it is clever, and although the dungeons may underwhelm, the overworld is built with such devious and thrifty skill that the game survives on the strength of that alone. With fascinating characters to meet, ingenious puzzles to solve, a cluster of shape-shifting masks to collect and use, and—best of all—that ominous and endlessly repeating threat lurking overhead, this is the dark nightmare shadow world of one of gaming’s most reliably upbeat series, a frightening alternate universe to be explored at length. CD See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
The Sims Original release date : 2000 Platform : PC, Mac Developer : Maxis Genre : Life Simulation
The year 2000 was feared for the millennium bug—at least by those who weren’t worried about an apocalypse. As it turned out, we would instead become engrossed in domesticity. It was the year of Big Brother, a televisual human goldfish bowl that gave insight into the common banality of our actions and conversations. This obsession came as no surprise to PC gamers, who’d been addicted to the Sims since its arrival at the turn of the millennium. The best-selling PC game of all time, The Sims confounded rival game developers who found they’d been designing castles and spaceships when what we really wanted was an in-game microwave oven. So out went the fantastical settings and in came the Sims—adults, children, and babies—each with a mind of their own and a need to stay not just well-fed but emotionally satisfied. As far as the game is concerned, you don’t direct your Sims’ every action, but you do design their home and deck it out with furniture and playthings as their expanding budget allows. You can also encourage your charges to take jobs or get married. Otherwise the Sims will generally get on with life as they see fit, which can lead to depression, slumped in front of the TV, if you’re not careful.
Sims can even die from starvation, electrocution, fire, or a virus, which can lead to a ghost Sim haunting its old house. Some players delight in finding outlandish ways to kill their charges, but most develop an eerie concern for their entirely algorithmic welfare. Simsville is further fleshed out in various expansion packs, which bring more items, characters, and new locations into play, as well as a sequel. Indeed, we suspect we’ll still be playing The Sims long after the Orwellian nightmare of Big Brother is finally over. OB See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Vagrant Story Original release date : 2000 Platform : PS1 Developer : Square Genre : Action / Role-Playing
A brooding traipse through French medieval ruins; a story told in a weighty Shakespearean patois; a battle system whose depths are revealed over the course of days, not hours. Vagrant Story is an action-role-playing game that breaks the mold. Springing from the mind of Yasumi Matsuno, here is a game that seeks and succeeds in breaking free from the familiar constraints of genre, scenario, and setting. Released during the PlayStation’s twilight years, it is without question a technical marvel. But it’s the animation and stage direction that turns still rudimentary polygons into something that breathes life and character. Camera moves are cinematic in a way few games achieve, a feeling matched by one of gaming’s greatest scripts. With a labyrinthine choice of armory, Vagrant Story revels in its RPG complexity, allowing players to tinker with its systems at the low level, while being pushed forward by the wider drama. A game that doesn’t kowtow to expectations, it is the work of a true auteur, an approach that should be celebrated in the strongest terms. SP
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2000s
Super Monkey Ball Original release date : 2000 Platform : Arcade, GameCube Developer : Sega Genre : Action
Only Sega, purveyor of everything shiny and silly, could come up with Super Monkey Ball: a riff on Marble Madness that puts you in charge of a monkey trapped inside a transparent ball, and asks you to tilt and steer him toward the exit of each level as quickly (and painlessly) as you can. If PETA ever opens a digital branch, Super Monkey Ball will quickly join the likes of Manhunt as games to hide away when polite society comes to visit. Each of the game’s elaborate courses hangs spookily in midair, and one wrong move is enough to send your precious monkey plummeting horribly into the abyss. Close your eyes, and you can imagine the moment of impact. There are plenty of other distractions on offer, too. Monkey Target is a ramped-up gliding simulator in which the ball opens to reveal a pair of wings; you then have to drop your monkey onto the highest-scoring target you can find—or, more likely, it will take a long plunge into the sea. Cute and cruel in equal measures, Super Monkey Ball has something for everyone. A left-field classic, it’s another one of Sega’s grade-A triumphs. CD See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Thief II: The Metal Age Original release date : 2000 Platform : PC Developer : Looking Glass Studios Genre : Action
Thief: The Dark Project was strongly oriented toward stealth, but it had also played with other areas, such as Tomb Raider-style dungeon exploration. Most of these extras were removed from Thief II: The Metal Age in favor of seeing exactly what could be done with the core mechanics. While Thief II: The Metal Age’s level design was a great improvement, arguably a little of the original’s atmosphere had been sacrificed. Zombies had been a controversial component, the mere sight of the undead being enough to make most people want to turn to violence. With their removal, some of the supernatural dread disappeared. Perhaps that was appropriate. Thematically, the former game was all Dionysian pagan irrationality; This, with a plot based around the cult of the Mechanists, is about Apollonian newness. Thief II: The Metal Age was Looking Glass Studios’s swan song, and the gaming world remains all the sadder for the loss of the studio’s formal invention and intelligence. That its games are still cited by contemporary developers is a telling monument to how inspiring they were. KG See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Sacrifice Original release date : 2000 Platform : Various Developer : Shiny Entertainment Genre : Action / Strategy
If Hieronymus Bosch had been the art director of a video game, it might have turned out something like Sacrifice. A third-person action-strategy affair, this is a game about souls, wizards, gods, and bizarre visual design. You take the role of a dimension-hopping wizard, your tasks to settle a struggle between a pantheon of gods and to destroy other wizards. This curious group of celestials is beautifully acted by an all-star cast, including Tim Curry and Brad Garrett, whose superb efforts create an entertaining pantomime backdrop to a dark, magical world. Visually, Sacrifice provides a landscape of floating islands and nightmarish visions in which you slay enemies to gather souls of your own. You are also given a selection of spells that take effect depending on the gods you side with through the conflict. Sacrifice is as beautiful and weird a game as any published before or since, but it’s also astonishingly well constructed. It is Shiny’s offbeat masterpiece: a genuinely well-engineered strategy game that, despite its surreal and arty theme, hangs together as one of the greats. JR See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Animal Crossing Original release date : 2001 Platform : GameCube Developer : Nintendo Genre : Life Simulation The Nintendo GameCube was armed with its own internal clock: a dull kind of feature, you might imagine, and something few people bothered to set properly before getting down to the likes of Luigi’s Mansion or F-Zero GX. Animal Crossing, however, makes absolutely brilliant use of this inclusion, using the passage of time to brew its own powerfully affecting spell. And it’s all so simple: you switch Animal Crossing on at nine in the morning, and most of your animal friends will be wide awake and bustling around your cobbled village, chatting, trading items, and going about their whimsical lives. Switch it on again at nine in the evening, and the majority of them will be in bed—the town square will be deserted, and warm lights will glow from the windows of comfy little cottages. Turn it on in the winter, and it will be snowing; turn it on in the autumn, and you can watch the leaves turning brown. (And if you turn it on during Groundhog Day, a jokey letter from your mom will be waiting for you in your mailbox.) It’s a very simple kind of magic, but one that ensures that Animal Crossing feels like very few other games. On the surface, it’s a bare-bones social simulator, plonking you into a village of strangers, lumbering you with a hefty mortgage to pay off and an empty house to fill with furniture, and pushing you out the door to make friends. In reality, however, it genuinely feels like a gateway to a different world: a bittersweet, somewhat capitalist fantasy land with quirky characters who are just as likely to sulk at you and move away as they are to shower you with gifts and empty pleasantries. The perfect example of a game rising above its core mechanics, then, Animal Crossing is smart, cynical, adorable, and worryingly capable of weaving its way into the fabric of real life. CD See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Final Fantasy X Original release date : 2001 Platform : PS2 Developer : Square Genre : Role-Playing
A ragtag group of adventurers are brought together by fate and circumstance to confront an evil force that threatens the very existence of life on the planet. Quick: Which Final Fantasy game is it? If you answered “all of them,” you’re right, but the reason the series has stayed vital for more than two decades is the way it keeps finding new variations on its themes. Like expert jazz musicians improvising around a basic riff, the development team begin each entry with a few familiar elements before spinning something new and wonderful from it. Final Fantasy X, the first game in the series for the PlayStation 2, stands apart by narrowing its focus. In truth, it’s more about the inner lives of the characters than averting the end of the world. Our hero, Tidus—whose hair is spiky and blond, of course—is a professional athlete who nevertheless feels he’s failed to live up to his father’s expectations. And our villain isn’t the all-powerful figurehead of an evil corporation or religious sect, but a lone wizard who simply wants to hide his existence from the world. These characters are fighting for their own souls as much as anything else. That said, the fate of the world does nonetheless still hang in the balance, and Final Fantasy X contains its share of earth-rending battles. The graphical power of the PlayStation 2 lends dazzling
color to magical spells, and fluid animation to brawling combatants. Our heroes’ journey takes them through ice caves and up mountaintops—once again, types of locations that are common to the series, but that had never before been rendered like this. Other titles in the series may contain deeper role-playing elements and more challenging worlds to explore, but few have the heart of Final Fantasy X. MK See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance Original release date : 2001 Platform : Various Developer : Snowblind Studios Genre : Action / Role-Playing
When the original titles appeared on the PC, the Baldur’s Gate games lasted for hundreds of hours, spanned an entire continent and occasional extra dimension, and contained almost the entire Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rule set. And they arrived on six disks—more if you count the side quests and stories included in expansions. There was just no way Baldur’s Gate was ever going to fit on a home console, or be controlled on one, thanks to its menu-based, stat-heavy, mouse-driven interface. That is until the creators of Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance had a brainwave. They took the world and setting of the previous games and worked them into a Diablo clone, replacing the labyrinthine plotting and densely woven narrative with a cut-back, combat-driven action-RPG. Instead of a party of characters, you now controlled just one, picked from a choice of three at the start of the game. And instead of their abilities growing and developing according to the A D&D rules, players could use experience points to tailor their characters however they saw fit. Like any good adventure, Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance kicks off in the sewers, before graduating to a succession of fantastic environments, all superbly rendered by a groundbreaking engine that
supported true 3-D graphics, dynamic lighting, and numerous other cutting-edge effects. Wading through the lustrous, velvety-surfaced sewer waters was never so much fun. The final, crucial ingredient retained from the PC version was the fan service: D&D fans would have been delighted by the possibility of coming up against gelatinous cubes, kobolds, dragons, lizard men, and—best of all—the possibility of unlocking the legendary dark elf warrior, Drizzt Do’Urden, as a playable character. DM See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Commandos 2: Men of Courage Original release date : 2001 Platform : PC, Mac Developer : Pyro Studios Genre : Strategy
A pack of Lucky Strikes dropped in a doorway attracts the gaze of a bored German sentry who ambles over and gets a knife in the back for his trouble. Moments later, the dead man’s uniform is helping a strapping Allied commando infiltrate a naval base. Traversing a level in Pyro’s World War II stealth-strategy magnum opus involves solving dozens of delicious, unscripted puzzles. Distraction techniques, disguises, athleticism, and concealment, plus good old-fashioned brute force, all play their part as players maneuver through the sprawling isometric, three-dimensional environments. Brazenly echoing movies like The Guns of Navarone and Where Eagles Dare , the absorbing action flits from island fortress to Bavarian Schloss to Far Eastern river valley. The fact that these locations can only be viewed from four fixed perspectives hardly seems to matter, such is the exquisiteness of the art. Character party pieces and map-specific hazards add further texture and challenge. In one typically colorful episode, the player’s task is to steal an Enigma machine from an ice-bound U-boat, but danger comes as much from sustained exposure to the cold as a bullet. For all of its richness and replayability, Commandos 2: Men of Courage didn’t garner
unqualified praise, critics rightly highlighting the limitations of its AI. While alerted guards may search areas methodically, they aren’t as wary of corpse heaps as they might be. Friendly forces are also a little lacking in the self-preservation department, refusing to respond to attacks from unexpected quarters. Minor blemishes like these were partially addressed in the sequel, but Commandos 3’s shrunken venues and cropped operative roster meant it failed to measure up to the cloak-and-dagger masterpiece that is Men Of Courage. TS See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec Original release date : 2001 Platform : PS2 Developer : Polyphony Digital Genre : Driving
By the time the Gran Turismo franchise sped on to PlayStation 2, powered by the pure-octane mix of a new console’s then-unmatched graphical performance and a delicately tuned hype engine already revving higher than the average F1 car, it had amassed an unassailable lead. Such an advantage ensured a commercial performance beyond anything a driving series had experienced before, but also placed considerable pressure on Polyphony Digital to keep its foot steady on the accelerator and refrain from drastic steering changes. As such, Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec offers little in the way of surprises. Lift the hood and you find a refined handling system over the previous two games that effortlessly conveys most nuances of car behavior—in its day, the best of its kind on console—and successfully underpins a typically large array of vehicles to purchase and win as rewards for the many possibilities of on-track exploits. The core structure, too, remains untouched. There is a clear attempt at broadening the game’s appeal, but not at the expense of those already used to getting their hands coated in GT’s oil. At the heart of the experience is the continued concern with the RPG-flavored demands of obtaining and
improving your vehicle before entering it into a series of eligible races, and collecting the subsequent winnings to spend on further upgrades or new models. The lack of cosmetic damage and limited AI remain dents in Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec’s otherwise polished performance, and the corrosion caused by the passing of time is something even the remarkable content on offer can’t mask. The game may no longer be the drive of your life, but there is enough mileage left in its engine to teach many of the newcomers to the racing genre a trick or two. JDS See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Black & White Original release date : 2001 Platform : PC, Mac Developer : Bullfrog Productions Genre : Life Simulation / Strategy
Willful and fascinating, Black & White sees the studio that practically invented the god game with Populous redesigning it from the ground up in the strangest of all possible manners. Morality occupies a central position, and babysitting comes to the fore as each player rules their people with a giant animal, which they must painstakingly teach to do their bidding. It’s a bit like living with a giant toddler at times, and it’s the AI’s quirky unpredictability that actually becomes one of the game’s most enjoyable features. Commanding your giant turtle to attack your enemies only to see it wading into your own troops instead is frustrating, certainly, and probably counts as a bug, but it’s a brilliantly strange sight to watch unfold, and it’s also a unique pleasure to learn the intricacies of the system. The moral angle may be a little one-dimensional, but while such systems have become a feature of every genre since, from the creeping existential terrors of BioShock to the godlike chimney-hopping powers of Infamous, it was at its most groundbreaking here, when the basics of the idea were being so laboriously hashed out.
As with many games created by Peter Molyneux, there are frustrations, rough edges, and a couple of features that even the great man himself has admitted were unnecessary: the ability to draw realtime weather information into Black & White took a long time to implement and merely ensures that British players, at least, get to act godly under an endlessly overcast sky. But the video game industry needs oddities like Black & White and always will—strange, massive, ambitious experiments; games that think, and subsequently act, on a larger scale. CD See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Tribes 2 Original release date : 2001 Platform : PC Developer : Dynamix Genre : First-Person Shooter
While Unreal Tournament and Counter-Strike might initially spring to mind when thinking about large-scale multiplayer online first-person shooters, the originator of the genre was Starsiege: Tribes. Set in the same Starsiege universe, Tribes 2 built on the original in every way and, though not able to boast the same following as its competitors, set a high-water mark for the genre. Perhaps the comparatively small audience for Tribes 2 can be explained by its refusal to compromise. Despite the tutorial levels, few concessions are made to the casual player, and surviving—let alone becoming good—takes a great deal of practice. The difficulty is in no small part due to the game’s exploration of the Y axis; as well as running and gunning, players can launch into the air for limited periods using their jet packs, surveying the expansive maps as they do so, and taking potshots at the chaos below. Light, medium, and heavy armor suits provide the expected differentiation in abilities, and multiple classes within those create further subtle distinctions in play styles. Due to the acrobatic nature of every aggressor, tactics slant necessarily toward splash damage. Forecasting an enemy’s descent trajectory with a well-placed rocket is a unique skill, and one that is essential here. But vehicles abound, too, and some, such as the three-man bomber, require close
cooperation with teammates in order to be used to maximum effect. The danger of multiplayer-focused games is that their official servers will one day be closed down, and that was the fate that befell the Tribes 2 community. Thankfully, 2009 saw fan-run servers spring up, and the game can be played again today. Whether you’re brave enough to take on the experts, however, is another matter entirely. BM See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
IL-2 Sturmovik Original release date : 2001 Platform : PC Developer : 1C Genre : Flight Simulation / Shoot ’Em Up
What’s in a name? No whizbang marketing title to sell up this hardcore military flight sim; the developers went with what its target audience knows, which is—near enough—the name of a plane. The Illyushin Il-2 was mass produced by the Russian Air Force in World War II, when it served as a ground-attack fighter on the Eastern Front. The name also serves to reinforce that this sim is not for the faint-hearted. The flight model is exacting, which means you need to understand pitch and roll mechanics, monitor speeds and altitudes, and more, just to keep them in the air. Then there’s the Luftwaffe to deal with. A robust mission editor allows you to plot your own targets and challenges, adding greatly to the long-term value of the package. Flyboys can also test their mettle online against other pilots, and with that kind of longevity potential we can forgive some of the functional, if not flashy, visuals. The unique setting, mission styles, and plane types, along with a well-designed, challenging flight model, all contribute to an original flight sim offering tons of variety to genre aficionados. RSm See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Devil May Cry Original release date : 2001 Platform : PS2 Developer : Capcom Genre : Action
Sometimes you don’t want to think too hard about what you’re doing. Sometimes you just want to smash things up while firing off snarky quips. For those occasions, there’s Devil May Cry, Capcom’s gothic fun house, built from horror fiction’s greatest demons and blended with the kind of things David Bowie probably dreams about when he has a high temperature. Devil May Cry’s blistering approach to combat sensibly values style above all else: whether blowing enemies to shreds or slicing them to ribbons, what truly matters in this game is how good you look doing it. Dante, the game’s foppish protagonist, is a pleasure to throw around the various levels’ numerous seedy environments, and when you’re truly in the zone, the whole thing moves at such a staggering pace, your eyeballs may dry out just trying to keep up with the speed at which the action unfolds. Other titles might have saner plots, deeper characters, or more elegant pacing, but if it’s the death of a thousand cuts you’re after, Dante and Devil May Cry are your first, your last, and your only real choice. CD
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2000s
Frequency Original release date : 2001 Platform : PS2 Developer : Harmonix Genre : Music
Before turning its attention to the anatomy of rock, Guitar Hero inventor Harmonix chose a more natural subject for its rhythm games: electronica. The first and best of its PS2 games, Frequency, is an intricate, intimate journey into the genre’s darkest corners. Frequency adopts a multitrack approach to its music, splitting it into three-lane tracks for instruments and samples. With analog-controlled freestyle sections filling any empty spaces, it wraps this landscape into a tunnel, the player “locking down” tracks by matching notes with the PS2 controller, the idea being to build the song and maintain it to the end. The “invisible” interface of the pad takes players to unexpected heights. Play for long enough, and muscle memory and reflexes unite with almost telepathic results, the notes streaming through the hands like punch cards through a nineteenth-century computer. Few games have made “the zone” of musical creativity such a readily accessible place, and a loyal community of online fans remains spellbound. DH See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Stretch Panic Original release date : 2001 Platform : PS2 Developer : Treasure Genre : Platform
Linda has a magical possessed scarf that she must use to travel through the world, pinching people and freeing her sisters from their terrible all-consuming demons of vanity. Yes, it’s Treasure, the boutique Japanese developer, famous for crafting imaginative mini-classics, heavy on clever mechanics, screen-filling explosions of color, and gaming’s most elaborate bosses. The great joy of Stretch Panic (called Freak Out in Europe) is the ability to tug at the delightfully stretchy environment with your mysterious scarf before yanking things around, snatching at rubbery clumps of the ground to propel you into the air or over ravines, and pinching the flesh of the game’s bizarre bosses, twanging them where it really hurts. It’s quite unlike anything else available. Stretch Panic is not without its drawbacks: Some of the game play is frustrating and the navigation a little slow, but despite these issues there’s something at the heart of the game that’s so different, so gleefully unusual, that you may find yourself forgiving these faults and just losing yourself in the madness. CD See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Mario Kart: Super Circuit Original release date : 2001 Platform : Game Boy Advance Developer : Intelligent Systems Genre : Driving
Truly legendary games are few and far between, but Super Mario Kart, on the SNES, is certainly among their number. Mario Kart: Super Circuit borrows heavily from its template and pulls off the unexpected by being at least as good as the original. Bullishly confident in its thoroughbred pedigree, it throws down the gauntlet by including all of the first game’s tracks (albeit with subtle changes) alongside twenty new ones, as if to invite direct comparison. Presenting flat tracks, the game eschews 3-D bar a few graphical enhancements (the power-up boxes, for instance, hover above the track rather than constituting part of its texture) and is a delight for fans of 16-bit visuals. But it’s the subtle mixing of the SNES and N64 Mario Kart games’ aesthetics that most impresses, the bright, bold colors working well to compensate for the original lack of backlighting of the Game Boy Advance. This fusion extends beyond the visuals, too, and some of Mario Kart 64’s mechanics make it into the game, perhaps the most amusing of which being the ability to become a mobile bomb when defeated in battle mode. Players can number up to four, thanks to the GBA’s link cable, and playing with others, whether racing or battling, sees Mario Kart: Super Circuit come into its own. The game takes advantage of
the single-cart multiplayer functionality of the GBA by providing a pared-down party experience, even if only one person owns a copy, and thanks to the luxury of having your own screen, sneaking up on opponents is made easy. Some may lament not being able to keep tabs on competitors, but this seemingly small difference gives Mario Kart: Super Circuit a distinctive personality of its own and adds yet more depth to an already exceptional package. BM See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Gitaroo Man Original release date : 2001 Platform : PS2, PSP Developer : iNiS Genre : Music
Gitaroo Man was an unusual departure for Koei—the husband-and-wife publishing team behind several decades’ worth of obsessively detailed, historically accurate simulation war games. But it wasn’t the first. In fact, the company had tried stepping out of its comfort zone before, leaving feudal Japan behind to achieve some success in the field of romance strategy, notably in the shape of dating games like Angelique—a huge hit in Japan. But dating games and combat strategy have more in common than you might think. Certainly, they have more in common than Gitaroo Man and … well … anything. In terms of the action, sure, there is a superficial similarity to PaRappa the Rapper: You press buttons according to on-screen instructions in time to music. But for Gitaroo Man those basics are just a launch pad, as it rockets off into the zaniest reaches of outer space, borrowing bits and bobs from the beat-’em-up genre along the way. Using a scratchy, neon art style, it tells a tale of talking dogs and a space-powered, magical-guitar-wielding hero called U-1, who is forced to defend himself against the Gravilians, led by Zowie. It was a perfect prefiguration of the sort of weirdness that was to come in later games from rhythm-action specialist iNiS, such as the Oendan and Elite Beat Agents
series on Nintendo’s DS. But this isn’t just weirdness for its own sake, and it’s held together by game play that is an idiosyncratic fusion of beat ’em up and Simon Says—so keeping time is just one dimension of a game that is actually a succession of boss battles against Zowie’s increasingly insane musical minions. Gitaroo Man is a one-off and, because relatively small quantities appeared outside of Japan, something of gaming rarity in the West. DM See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Grand Theft Auto III Original release date : 2001 Platform : Various Developer : DMA Design Genre : Action
Prior to its landmark third installment, the Grand Theft Auto series was an occasionally controversial oddity. Then it became a global phenomenon, a record-breaking hit whose irregular releases would become major events in gaming, with fans lining up at midnight outside stores all around the world, and coverage breaking out of the specialist press and on to daily news. At least the game deserves it. Its transition to 3-D may not have led to the best-looking title, but this is a series that’s all about the feeling—the night-time streets, the squeal of tires as you sling yourself into an unlikely corner, and the dull thwump of a policeman flailing over the hood and past the windshield. Grand Theft Auto III nailed its murky Goodfellas atmosphere just as later games would capture the woozy citrus skies of Florida and the sunburned sidewalks of southern California. Liberty City is not just the setting but the main character, rising out of the ground with realistic architecture, its ragged arcs and streets a playground you’d revisit again and again. And it’s the little things that matter. Grand Theft Auto III may have been a step forward in terms of storytelling and mission structure—even though the series would always lag behind a little in the latter element, as it bounced against the endless opportunities of its sandbox—but the moment the
game really starts to feel magical is when you slip behind the wheel of a car you’ve just stolen, casually reverse over the original owner, and then flick through the radio stations as you peel off into the distance. With a natural feel for pop culture and its excesses that’s never quite matched in the game’s more formal mechanics, Grand Theft Auto III made its world feel real, and that was often enough to convince you to come in and play. CD See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Return to Castle Wolfenstein Original release date : 2001 Platform : Various Developer : Gray Matter Interactive Genre : First-Person Shooter
Game franchises that go for long periods between installments have bigger problems to worry about than the question of their own relevance. With nearly ten years between the release of the original first-person shooter Wolfenstein 3D and Return to Castle Wolfenstein, technological progress demanded that the entire nature of the sequel be reconsidered: the original wasn’t even three-dimensional at all, instead using techniques of ray casting and scaled sprites, so how could the sequel take onboard full three-dimensional environments powered by dedicated graphics chips? Cleverly, single-player-mode developer Gray Matter Interactive took the “reboot” route, placing Wolfenstein’s hero B. J. Blazkowicz back into the castle’s dungeons and from there into an entirely new situation. Blazkowicz then takes on the Nazis and the undead as he tries to prevent the SS Paranormal Division from resurrecting Heinreich I, an evil warlord of untold power from Germany’s history. For many, Return to Castle Wolfenstein removes one of the most important aspects of the original: You don’t get to kill Hitler at the end. Yet it manages to update the franchise into a lively pulp adventure, recasting it as an Indiana Jones-style world of magic and mysterious powers sought
after by the Nazis rather than simply a backdrop to an arcade-style three-dimensional shooter. What makes the game really special is the multiplayer mode, in which Axis and Allies compete to complete objectives and win the round—or at least stop their opponent. With four balanced classes and well-designed maps, Return to Castle Wolfenstein influenced first-person shooters that followed, making it almost as relevant to its genre as its parent—not bad, given the ten-year gap. MKu See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Max Payne Original release date : 2001 Platform : PC Developer : Remedy Entertainment Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
With a name that sounds like a counterproductive suppository brand and a hero who looks like he’s using one, it’s hard to take Max Payne seriously. But its decision to use reference materials as textures, making it the first legitimately photorealistic 3-D game, meant it was taken very seriously by makers of early video cards. Developed by Helsinki-based Remedy, the game originally looked like any other. But when its artists returned from a US field trip with hundreds of photos of New York City, revealing a landscape still as gritty as any in the French Connection, they knew what had to be done. Told in a film-noir style, with grungy comic-book style cut scenes, Max Payne is a bleak tribute to Hollywood crime classics and hard-boiled archetypes. It opens with the destruction of Payne himself, a new father in the NYPD who comes home to find his family murdered. Addicts of a new street drug called Valkyr are responsible, and the search for revenge leads Payne from the bowels of Hell’s Kitchen to the towers of the drug’s creator, the Aesir Corporation. With his mind unraveling as the plot comes together, his journey is thick with nightmare and betrayal.
Introducing games to advanced particle effects and “bullet-time” gunplay, Max Payne was also a milestone for PC action games. Finally, they didn’t have to feel like second-class citizens compared to traditional console genres. The game’s mouse-and-keyboard controls bring precision to the combat; the textures are eye-popping at high resolutions. And with a New York winter inspired by Norse mythology, it brings an otherworldly quality to its crack dens and alleyways. Ironically, given its filmic homages, Max Payne was not well treated by Hollywood: The 2008 adaptation is a crushingly disappointing and depressing event in every sense. DH See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Halo: Combat Evolved Original release date : 2001 Platform : Xbox Developer : Bungie Genre : First-Person Shooter Is it more shocking that the action game that would power Microsoft’s unlikely transformation from spreadsheet facilitator and browser monopolist to the underdog savior of hardcore video gaming was originally a real-time strategy title? Or is it that it was originally intended for the Apple Macintosh? Regardless of which, clear heads prevailed, and the Xbox ended up with its first undeniably brilliant piece of software from day one of the console’s life. Halo: Combat Evolved is unapologetically epic space opera; its story concerns mankind’s fight against the Covenant—a gaggle of religious fundamentalist aliens who want to wipe humanity from the stars. Stepping into the shoes of armor-clad supersoldier Master Chief, players explore a mysterious and ancient ring world—part shiny alien hardware, part lush, Alpine forests and mountains—engaging the enemy in exciting little clusters of combat, messing about with a nearperfect range of different toys, tooling around in the Warthog assault jeep, and generally saving the universe. Touted for its famous “thirty seconds of fun”—the core game loop that comes alive with each encounter, blending a handful of carefully arranged enemy types with a choice of delightful guns— beneath the epic musical score and waffly, often rather windy, plot, Halo is simply about the eternal pleasures of tight and economical game design, as explosions, environments, and enemies come together in a thrilling muddle. Halo: Combat Evolved has become the Xbox’s own Star Wars , a pop-culture giant with increasingly elaborate lore. And while the hype surrounding each subsequent release is inevitably getting out of hand, when the games themselves are this effortlessly replayable, the marketing will never overshadow the series’ true achievements. CD See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Silent Hill 2 Original release date : 2001 Platform : Various Developer : Team Silent Genre : Survival Horror The setup is the stuff of nightmarish J-horror. James Sunderland receives a letter from his wife, asking him to join her in Silent Hill, the rural town in which they once vacationed. One problem. She’s been dead for three years. He turns up, anyway. So begins another slice of psychological survival horror from the Team Silent crew. While the original title focused on external supernatural peril, the sequel is very much about internal demons. Silent Hill 2 is shrouded in mist, effectively symbolizing Sunderland’s emotional fogginess, and the characters he meets—a slutty dead ringer for his deceased wife, a possible serial killer, and a suicidal woman looking for her lost mother—all read as aspects of his inner torment. Sunderland has a secret: a tragic involvement with his wife’s death, and it only gradually comes to light as he explores the abandoned town, getting ever closer to the hotel at the center of his torment. Team Silent fills its dank, fetid universe with layer upon layer of grotesque imagery. The hospital walls smeared with blood, the toilet clogged with viscera, everything is rotting, burned, or broken. The monsters, too, are hugely disturbing. The deformed nurses, the stumbling shop window dummies, the horrific Pyramid Head—they’re ugly yet weirdly sexual; real, but blurred and nightmarish. As with all Silent Hill games, there are multiple endings depending on the actions of the player and what they discover throughout. None are particularly happy, although the two hidden spoof endings are an unexpected joy. Really, though, the best Sunderland can hope for is self-realization. It’s a typically downbeat end to an intense adventure, loaded with the sort of psycho-sexual symbolism and Freudian imagery you’d expect from a Hitchcock movie rather than a horror game. KS See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Shenmue II Original release date : 2001 Platform : Dreamcast, Xbox Developer : Sega Genre : Action / Adventure The second part of Yu Suzuki’s unfinished symphony of video game storytelling expands the horizons of the first game and its spiky-haired protagonist, Ryo Hazuki. When Ryo steps off a boat to find himself in a compellingly realistic but dauntingly unfamiliar Hong Kong at the start of the game, it’s clear that he’s now in a much bigger place than the small, familiar streets of Yokosuka. It’s a world in which the supernatural mixes with the mundane: brawling with giants one minute, shifting boxes or rolling dice in a desperate attempt to make some pocket money the next. Some parts of the game see Ryo rubbing shoulders with the grittily realistic gangs that compete for control of Kowloon; others see him retiring to monasteries and temples to learn near-mystical fighting techniques on his quest to locate Lan Di and avenge his father’s death. That quest contains more mini-games, more coin-ops, and more brawling than ever before, and it also contains more freedom, since Ryo’s movements are no longer quite as curtailed by bedtime. It also streamlines many aspects of the first game; for example, allowing players to skip ahead instead of waiting around for appointments. But the two most important elements are the story and characters: There are new rivalries, and love interests, here, and a colorful cast of supporting characters, from the pirate-styled Ren to the ginger-haired Joy. In terms of graphics and interactivity, Shenmue II sacrifices some of the finer details of the first game, but the result is a far wider geographical and thematic scope, reflecting the way Ryo’s hunt has wrenched him from the cozy environments of adolescence to thrust him into the challenges of becoming a man. Maybe one day that hunt will reach its conclusion. DM See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Serious Sam Original release date : 2001 Platform : PC Developer : Croteam Genre : First-Person Shooter As first-person shooter developers pursue an evolution of the genre, adding RPG elements, strategy, character development, cover mechanics, and evocative storylines, Serious Sam throws all that high-brow nonsense on the “not in this game” pile to focus on shooting stuff with big guns in crazy situations. The result is a mindless, unadulterated shoot-fest that gets increasingly improbable the farther you travel through its ancient Egyptian levels. How Sam “Serious” Stone gets to ancient Egypt is ridiculous enough. He’s sent back through time to defeat evil alien forces led by Mental (yes, you read that right) in order to change the course of history and prevent Earth’s devastation in the present. Every good shooter needs memorable enemies, and Serious Sam is full of them. The headless bomb-handed kamikazes are the standout, the game’s powerful 3-D engine allowing for vast open expanses of sand dunes from which these guys can appear and home in on Sam before exploding in his face. Add marauding werebulls, aerial harpies, machine-gunning giant scorpions, and you can see that Sam will never want for a target. When literally hundreds of werebulls appear out of thin air, you have to appreciate both the power of the engine and the manic action it delivers. By that point you’ll be used to seeing monsters appear from nowhere, particularly when you pick up a desperately needed health pack or armor shard. Some of the sound effects are probably the cackles of glee from the developers striving for the unapologetically silly. At the same time, the hardened twitch gamer will have to be on his A game to meet and defeat the challenge, chuckling along the way at the ludicrousness of it all. RSm See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Luigi’s Mansion Original release date : 2001 Platform : GameCube Developer : Nintendo Genre : Action
Nightmares and dreamscapes abound! GameCube launch title Luigi’s Mansion is the Mario game where you can’t jump or bottom-bounce off foes; indeed, it’s the Mario game where you don’t actually play as Mario. Instead, his lanky brother, Luigi, comes to the fore, the beanpole hero in green dispatched to a haunted house where his famous brother has been kidnapped by a mischievous gaggle of ghosts. What unfolds is one of the strangest and most constantly surprising Mario titles ever—a roomclearing riff on Ghostbusters, with Luigi working as a no-nonsense exorcist, sucking the cartoony blobs of undead into his handy Poltergust 3000. Essentially a series of extremely quirky boss fights strung together with a spooky minimalist narrative, Luigi’s Mansion is an absolute masterpiece of staging, each self-contained chamber featuring its own otherworldly gimmick, be it musical instruments that play themselves, a candelabra glimpsed bobbing down the hallway, a nightmare of mirrors and doors, or—best of all—the wood-lined observatory where a peak through the telescope takes Luigi on a brief, magical trip through a twinkling universe of stars. It’s a bold departure, and throughout it all there’s the lingering sense of a seasoned development
team letting go after years of expanding on a brilliant, but well-defined, template. Not only did Luigi’s Mansion nail the slippery business of bagging ghouls far more convincingly than 2009’s Ghostbusters game for the 360 and PS3, but it also managed to add valuable new material to the Mario canon itself, casting Luigi as the cowardly brother made heroic, bringing a dash of lasting characterization to a series that had plenty of personality, but relied, for the most part, on interchangeably cheery ciphers for the leads. CD See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy Original release date : 2001 Platform : PS2 Developer : Naughty Dog Genre : Platform
Jak and Daxter’s own precursor was Crash Bandicoot, a character who became something of a mascot for the original PlayStation and an example of Naughty Dog’s technical skills. Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy is similarly demonstrative of the developer’s talents when it comes to character design and the manipulation of Sony’s hardware: players are treated to a high level of detail, charismatic animation, and a streaming world with no loading screen in sight. The game also paved the way for Nolan North’s later proliferation of vocal appearances by casting Max Casella (an actor who nowadays also has The Sopranos and Grand Theft Auto: The Ballad of Gay Tony on his résumé) as the voice of Daxter. As 3-D graphics had been well exploited for the previous generation of consoles, standing out from the crowd in the 128-bit landscape required new tactics. Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy’s main innovation is the aforementioned lack of loading. Before this, games were predominantly discrete experiences lacking in holistic permanence, but here players could travel to locations visible in the distance, and challenges begun would remain in the state they were left, rather than requiring restarts. The stage props used by preceding platform games had been transformed into
a living, breathing world. That the mechanics of the game are heavily evocative of classics like Super Mario 64 and BanjoKazooie is simply another reason to recommend it; the polished, fluid controls ensure that simply moving Jak around is a joy. Thought is also put into the reinvention of genre clichés: The collectibles here aren’t abstract tokens but energy orbs, which make sense in the context of the plot, setting a new bar for consistency and motivation. BM See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Maximo: Ghosts to Glory Original release date : 2001 Platform : PS2 Developer : Capcom Genre : Action
Maximo: Ghosts to Glory is a rare example of a Japanese game done justice by an overseas developer. Even more remarkable is that the game is Ghosts ’n Goblins, the arcade classic celebrated for its surgically accurate level design, magical characterization, and coin-gobbling difficulty. And most astonishing of all, this wasn’t a mere sequel but a 3-D spin-off—a doom-laden prospect if ever there was one. Thanks to a grueling approval process suffered while handling another Capcom game, Final Fight Revenge, Capcom invented Maximo: Ghosts to Glory, a self-contained brand with its own hero, art style, control system, and story. It’s all about an intrepid knight named Maximo, who returns from war to find his kingdom cursed by an ancient evil, the throne taken by his trusted advisor, Achille, and its princess abducted and forced into marriage. The four sorceresses that hold power over the land have been locked up in towers, each surrounded by legions of zombies and hellish beasts. With little more than a trusty sword, iron shield, three lives, and a spring in his step, Maximo must conquer all if he’s to take the magic back. The irony is that of all the 3-D updates to classic arcade games, one of the few really good ones
should act under an alias. Maximo: Ghosts to Glory would have made a great sequel to Ghosts ’n Goblins, and has every right to bear the family crest. In its dynamic 3-D world, where soil transforms into lava as coffins rise up like elevators, jumps and swipes must be judged as if your coins depend on it. Which they literally do, since a continue means handing over a precious “death coin” to the Grim Reaper, and he loves to add inflation. Striking a delicate balance between risk, reward, strategy, and mischief, Maximo: Ghosts to Glory is anything but a loose adaptation. DH See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Ikaruga Original release date : 2001 Platform : Various Developer : Treasure Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
Ikaruga wasn’t the first vertically scrolling shoot ’em up that Treasure had made. It wasn’t even the first to use a color-matching twist, building on a template created for the famously expensive eBay darling, Radiant Silvergun. But in its simplicity, its style, and its relentless pace, it’s certainly the best: a game to cherish and replay, a tiny, perfectly designed slice of twitchy perfection that will live on whenever you close your eyes, long after your most recent run-through has finished. At the heart of Ikaruga is a very straightforward idea: Enemies and projectiles are divided into black and white varieties, while you also have the power to flip your ship between the two polarities. Attacking an enemy with the opposing color fire will double the damage you inflict, but, while you can absorb incoming bullets of the same hue—it helps to power up your special weapon—you’re extremely vulnerable to the opposite variety. From such a simple framework, Treasure works its usual brand of elegant wonder, spitting out increasingly complex formations of waves, drenching the screen in projectiles as it swings toward the bullet-hell end of the shooter spectrum, and throwing a suite of vast alien bosses your way before you reach the finish line. And, as with all the developer’s best games, of course, getting to the end is
actually only just the beginning. Ikaruga isn’t about surviving, but thriving, and the leaderboard of high scores is where the game’s real battle will continue to grind out for years to come. Outside of its triumphant arcade setting, Ikaruga was quickly issued on the Dreamcast and GameCube platforms. The best way to enjoy the game today is almost certainly via Xbox Live Arcade. CD See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty Original release date : 2001 Platform : PS2 Developer : Kojima Genre : Action
High expectations for Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty reached fever pitch at 2000’s Tokyo Game Show, where a returning Solid Snake was shown leaping from the George Washington bridge onto a passing oil tanker, ready to sneak again into a new adventure. Thanks to the hotly debated power of PlayStation 2, his latest mission promised a visual feast, his outfit in the trailer hammered by torrential rain, his face finally chiseled into something close to human. In hindsight, though, it probably wasn’t the best way to demo a game about someone totally different. Disguised as Iroquois Pliskin—the most overt reference yet to Escape from New York hero Snake Plissken—Snake is just a bystander for most of Metal Gear Solid 2, the limelight moving to a new face—FOXHOUND agent Raiden. After the demo’s tanker prologue, this blond pretty-boy is sent to a hijacked oil rig called Big Shell to rescue the US president, held captive by rogue antiterror group Dead Cell. The nuclear threat this time is twofold, the platform hiding a monstrous weapons platform, Arsenal Gear, and a new type of mechanized walker: Metal Gear Rex. In an indulgent and consciously divergent sequel, the arrival of Raiden was massively controversial. At worst seen as shameless bait and switch, it marked a new and lasting friction
between designer Hideo Kojima and his fans. All of which makes Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty a fascinating artifact. A sprawling treatise on government and the betrayal of democracy, it plays some superb mind games during its closing act, tying its story in knots while breaking the “fourth wall,” even “crashing” the player’s console with a nod and a wink. Adding characters, weapons, and tactics with abandon, it climaxes with a notoriously long cut scene lasting for almost forty-five minutes. DH See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis Original release date : 2001 Platform : PC Developer : Bohemia Interactive Studios Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
There had been attempts across the years to create a definitive “soldier sim,” but Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis was the game that defined what the phrase actually means today. It’s a fascinating piece of design, not least in its lack of concession to beginners. You either stick with it or you go and find something else to play. At its heart there’s an infantry experience that remains terrifyingly real. A few bullets will put you down, and your enemies operate with a ferocity that was unknown in shooters up till that time. In most games the enemies are there to be shot, and ultimately let you win. No such luck for players of Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis , who face formidable challenges. The single-player campaign is notable for forcing your character to spend long periods of time crawling around on his belly, as the only possible method to avoid getting gunned down by roving troops. As this campaign opens up, however, you begin to sense the enormity of the vision: an open island, with all vehicles interactive throughout. If you happen to find a tractor or a tank, you can drive off with it. Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis is an ode to realism, and as such it is unlike almost anything other than its own sequel.
Where Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis made the most ground, however, was in the way it facilitated the ambitions of a creative community. The game editor and mod system were open and flexible, allowing players to create diverse and often intricate multiplayer scenarios. This enabling of creativity ended up fostering an even richer community as new players flocked in to enjoy the fruits of their industrious peers. Had the game not supported this kind of activity, it may not have been considerably more than a curious footnote. JR See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Pikmin Original release date : 2001 Platform : GameCube Developer : Nintendo Genre : Strategy
Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Mario and Zelda, never has to look hard for a game idea: Pikmin was created after a bit of gardening. The result is something of an oddity—a real-time strategy game of sorts, albeit one like no other, and something that can delight and disturb in equal measure. Captain Olimar has crash-landed on a mysterious planet, and needs to reclaim the various pieces of his spaceship. Marooned in a frightening environment, he enlists the help of Pikmin, funny little vegetable people who will apparently follow Olimar into the mouth of hell itself if called upon. What follows is an ingenious mixture of spatial puzzles, battles with local wildlife, and strategy, as you work out how many of the different kinds of Pikmin you need to handle each engagement. Pikmin is an exercise in pure Darwinism. It really is survival of the fittest as the friendly space captain uses his new friends to keep himself alive, even if they die in the process. It’s cute and disturbing at the same time, but that doesn’t stop it from being a sublime piece of game design in its own right. CD See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Advance Wars Original release date : 2001 Platform : Game Boy Advance Developer : Intelligent Systems Genre : Strategy
Advance Wars , like chess, suggests that global conflict doesn’t have to be messy. It can be precise, thought provoking, tidy, and actually rather polite. If you’re after a breezy tactical challenge with a story that unfolds in friendly commuter-sized chunks, built to fit into a space of fifteen minutes or so, this is the game for you. The game’s chummy tale of rip-roaring geopolitical shenanigans unfolds in bright, anime-styled cut scenes, peopled with a youthful cast who seem to treat the prospect of planet-wide warfare with all the gloom and terror one might summon for a playground game of marbles. Advance Wars may paint conflict in very cheerful colors, but to write the game off as childish would be to miss the fearsome tactical heart that beats at its core. Gripping and unforgettable, it’s elegant stuff. Indeed, a game as eternally enjoyable as Advance Wars suggests that Intelligent Systems (many of whose key staff had been part of Nintendo legend Gunpei Yokoi’s Research and Development Team) might just be the most aptly named of all video game studios. CD
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2000s
Golden Sun Original release date : 2001 Platform : Game Boy Advance Developer : Camelot Software Planning Genre : Role-Playing
Camelot’s Golden Sun is an engaging and storied RPG with one eye set firmly on the past. Its lush, colorful visuals and pseudo-3-D battle system may have pushed the GBA to its limits, but they aided in the telling of a fiercely traditional story, one with plenty of the genre’s classic elements. Set on a vast flat-Earth-styled fantasy world, Golden Sun follows the story of a band of plucky teens trying to safeguard the powerful Elemental Stars, which have kept the forces of evil at bay for generations, allowing piece and prosperity to reign. Golden Sun benefits from beautiful art; a snappy yet intricate narrative; and a rich, melancholic soundtrack. It’s a game that rewards experimentation, much of the fun coming from trying out new combinations during the game’s fairly regular battles. Earnest and epic by turn, Golden Sun is just the game for anyone who fancies a dip into the play styles of the past. While the original GBA game and its excellent sequel, The Lost Age, can still be found fairly easily at online auction sites, the series received its first DS installment in 2010. CD See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
RuneScape Original release date : 2001 Platform : PC Publisher : Jagex Genre : MMORPG
While the grown-ups slap down their credit cards to pay the stiff monthly fees on games like World of Warcraft, there is an entire stratum of free-to-play games offering online role-playing that’s just as massively multiplayer. RuneScape, the original leader of this tier, can be run on a web browser from any computer, and instead of demanding dollars a month, the game makes its money from banner ads or low-cost premium memberships. Written by two brothers, Andrew and Paul Gower, it was launched in 2001 as a basic, old-school adventure. Even after moving to 3-D in 2003, it still looks primitive, if cute and charming. But its simple-to-use character creation offers twentyfour skills, from fishing and woodcutting to thieving and summoning; the combat, on the other hand, is a little stiff and dated. RuneScape faces stiff competition: It’s more mature than Club Penguin but less dazzling than Sony’s Free Realms. What other games can’t offer, however, is the deep community, a (predominantly teenage) fan base in the millions, and the satisfaction of a rigorous, endless grind that could keep them busy all the way to adulthood. CDa See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Super Smash Bros. Melee Original release date : 2001 Platform : GameCube Developer : Nintendo Genre : Fighting
Super Smash Bros. is a fighting series with more than a little touch of sumo to it—although it would have to be a frighteningly complex, high-speed, side-scrolling variety of Japan’s most famous grapple sport. Inflicting damage on your opponent by combining different moves is still important, but forcing players off the edge of the numerous themed stages is the real objective here. The result is a fighting game in which tactics and technical approaches are crucial to success at anything other than the most basic levels, but which still has time for a rush of pure spectacle. Even if you are playing with balletic precision and attention to detail, the game will still look like an apocalyptic rumble taking place in the world’s least stable fireworks factory, as players sail through the air and land with concussive thumps, and overindulgent effects spit shiny particles into the sky. Super Smash Bros. Melee, the GameCube’s installment, was built on the success of the N64 original, with smooth animation; a suite of beautiful, themed backdrops; and even more of Nintendo’s evergreen favorites with whom to get in a rumble. With twenty-six characters to choose from, the game has fourteen more stars than the original, and the gathering ropes in characters from Zelda, Mario, the Fire Emblem series, and the Mother RPGs.
With power-ups themed from numerous Nintendo games littering the playing field, and snatches of familiar faces and textures glimpsed whenever the battle slows down even for a second, Super Smash Bros. Melee is the kind of world-blending romp that could only exist in the video game. A blistering spasm of cartoon violence existing at the very point where precision meets popularity, the whole thing quickly descends into a hot mess. CD See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons/Ages Original release date : 2001 Platform : Game Boy Color Developer : Capcom Genre : Action / Adventure
The follow-up to the Game Boy’s brilliant The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening was always going to have its work cut out, even before you consider that, for the first time, third-party developers were handling the most delicate of Nintendo’s whimsical properties. And although Capcom can’t compete with the master company’s own designers, it does a pretty decent job of playing babysitter to greatness, with a couple of games that certainly cover very suitable territory and repeat all the right moves. The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons/Oracle of Ages are a pair of complementary interconnected games. The two games, released simultaneously, interact via a Nintendo Game Link Cable, enabling the two titles to be played on two different Game Boys at the same time. Each game transports our hero Link to a different magical land, where a powerful local oracle has been kidnapped. While the larger story can only really be grasped once both games are completed, each title can still be enjoyed as a standalone adventure in its own right. And, helpfully, Capcom has been taking notes, with adventures that unfold in a familiar progression of item-gathering, over-world exploration, and dungeon crawling. It’s not a bad copy of the previous games, and the development
team manages to throw in enough new magical twists and ideas to keep you chugging along on a series of journeys that only just fall short of what Zelda fans traditionally expect. With visuals and controls almost identical to The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, the Oracle games never quite reach the heights of Nintendo’s own work, though they still do a decent job. Heartfelt, varied, and often clever, they serve as a reminder that the right property has the power to lift everyone associated with it. CD See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
SSX Tricky Original release date : 2001 Platform : Various Developer : Electronic Arts Genre : Sports
Wintry counterparts to the mega-popular Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series, the SSX snowboarding games were probably the best sports titles to come out of Electronic Arts during the PlayStation 2 generation. The varied stages of SSX Tricky, the sequel to the original, mark the height of the series’ esoteric wackiness. (The third volume—SSX3— would shift to the grander, more unified setting of one monstrous peak.) In SSX Tricky, though, every track is a distinct adventure, each more impossible than the last: the snow-capped buttes of Mesablanca, the urban powder of Merqury City, the gravityimmune melting glacier of Aloha Ice Jam, etc. These landscapes, riddled with shortcuts and surprises, are the main characters of the game. Of course, the actual characters aren’t bad, either. You choose your rider from a cast of eccentrics, ranging from a Japanese schoolgirl to a British street biker, and work your way to the top of the international racing circuit. Smooth controls make it a pleasure to carve your board around the steep turns of each racetrack, but the real joy happens in midair, where you execute the twists, grabs, and backflips that give SSX Tricky its name. In fact, the game’s Show-Off mode dispenses with the race premise altogether and simply rewards you for how many badass jumps you can pull off without
face-planting in the snow. Hip-hop and techno backing tracks remix themselves on the fly to match your progress, so when you’re cranking out “Über Tricks,” the beats are pumping. This audio legerdemain feeds the sensation that every part of the game is moving in sync, from your thumbs to the last pixel on the screen. Motion-controls interfaces are all well and good, but a gimmicky joystick will have trouble matching the kinetic thrill of SSX Tricky. JT See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Star Wars Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader Original release date : 2001 Platform : GameCube Developer : Factor 5 Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
It’s a measure of the brilliance of Factor 5’s Star Wars Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader that it starts where most other games would reach their climax—with that paradigmatic trench run on the original Death Star, allowing players to start the game by re-enacting that seminal piece of cinema history and destroying the most powerful weapon in the galaxy. Where do you go from there? Well, from there, you get to engage in ten missions that take you right up to the run on the second Death Star at the end of Return of the Jedi. It’s like an enhanced remake of the original Rogue Squadron, extended to include all three of the original movies. That means it recreates the sights and sounds of the Star Wars universe with stunning fidelity, from the shriek of TIE Fighters to the vast dimensions of Imperial Star Destroyers. Development studio Factor 5 gained a reputation for industry-leading technical achievements throughout its history, and this represents some of its finest work. Though only ten missions are on offer, they pack pretty much everything in, from Hoth to Bespin; from womp rats to Nien Nunb. And there’s plenty of replay value, thanks to the same mission-ranking system as in the first game, allowing expert pilots to unlock five bonus levels, granting them the
option to play as Darth Vader or pilot all sorts of secret vehicles, including Boba Fett’s space-snail, Slave I, and the sound designer’s Buick Electra 225. Perhaps the only disappointing aspect of Star Wars Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader is the rock-hard difficulty toward the end of the game, culminating in a final Death Star run that resembles the end of Star Wars on a dodgy DVD that keeps skipping at the end. But you already knew how it turns out, right? DM See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Uplink Original release date : 2001 Platform : PC, Mac Developer : Introversion Software Genre : Hacking Simulation
Immersion is a highly sought sensation in the drive toward realism in games, but challenged by the natural narrative drive of game writers. It’s hard to believe that you’re part of the experience when you’re controlling a hero who is—more than likely—more dashing and heroic than you’ll ever be, even if he’s as mute as a fish. Alternate-reality games have perhaps made the best inroads toward making players feel as if they’re part of something big. But what if you want to be the chosen one? Developed by the self-termed “last of the bedroom programmers” team at Introversion Software —who started the company while working from their homes, and in true geek-made-good style, apparently enjoyed early success by spending “£10,000 a week on speedboats and fast cars”—Uplink is a game where you are the hero and the setting is wherever you have your PC set up. A hacker simulation that takes its cues from Hollywood’s brief flirtation with computer-crime drama, Uplink offers a convincing and consistent front end that “connects” the player’s computer to a gateway owned by the mysterious Uplink Corporation. After a short tutorial the player is using password crackers and other software to break into computers across the world to steal and sabotage for profit, but danger never feels too far away: Players must keep a keen eye out for traces on their
machines and may even be caught through a slipup as simple as forgetting to delete access logs. Uplink is both thrilling and scary to play, despite looking about as exciting as a spreadsheet, and the design is so immersive that you fear the trace is happening to your very computer and that the police really are about to come knocking at your door. MKu See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Age of Mythology Original release date : 2002 Platform : PC, Mac Developer : Ensemble Studios Genre : Strategy
Ensemble didn’t take risks. It didn’t have to. From the moment the historical build ’n’ bash Age of Empires launched in 1997, its course was set: It would be populist king of real-time strategy, absurdly successful regardless of whatever doomsayers might claim about the PC and Mac platforms. That owner Microsoft closed the studio in 2009 didn’t seem to add up: No developer knew how to be a reliable money-factory quite as well as Ensemble. Age of Mythology, the studio’s first game for Microsoft, doesn’t take risks either. It does quite the opposite, dragging the fantastical elements that less successful rivals tend toward into its own straitlaced but highly polished strategy structure: harvesting wood and stone, building bases in an exact order, deftly making every unit a precise rock to some other soldier’s paper or scissor. Ensemble took someone else’s risk and made it into the most sensible thing in the world. It has minotaur and sphinx and valkyrie, but somehow they’re not an outlandish presence among the more familiar cavalry and archers. Instead, they’re smart, strategic high-end units, vital to tipping the game’s mathematically precise balance in your favor. Age of Mythology knows exactly what it’s doing, and being in the company of mythical beasts doesn’t change the cast-iron formula one jot.
Age of Mythology may have played it safe, but it did suggest Ensemble might be a little more playful from thereon in. That didn’t happen. Next in line came the button-downed Age of Empires III, and then Halo Wars as a confident dying gasp. That leaves Age of Mythology as an aberration: perhaps the only game where this one-time king of studios allowed its own character to appear alongside its unsullied strategy-design skill. AM See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Battlefield 1942 Original release date : 2002 Platform : PC, Mac Developer : Digital Illusions CE Genre : First-Person Shooter
Battlefield 1942 put intelligence into multiplayer team-based shooters. PC players had been ganging up since Half-Life Team Fortress , and limited coordination was hinted at as early as Starsiege: Tribes. But by placing multiclassed team combatants within cunningly designed World War II arenas, Battlefield 1942 forced the issue, making for an epic multiplayer behemoth that rolled over the opposition. The core action takes place in loosely authentic theaters of war in the game’s “Conquest” mode, which pits two historically appropriate armies against each other: the British versus the Germans in Europe, or the Japanese versus Uncle Sam in the Pacific. Each team is assigned control points, typically villages or islands, where the action begins, from which fallen soldiers can respawn as one of several specialized character classes. Fighting side-by-side with other players—up to thirty-two in total—you battle to seize control of these strategic points, forcing back the enemy and depleting the tickets that end the game at zero. Every death reduces tickets too, neatly incentivizing players to fight for their lives rather than go for suicide missions. The game also plays smart by dumbing down, enabling you to drive, pilot, or plunge to your death
in dozens of vehicles—from jeeps and tanks to aircraft carriers and airplanes—but it eschews fussy control variations in favor of a cartoonlike equivalence. The graphics engine copes well, with ceaseless cinematic moments emerging from the random actions of you and your fellows. It all conspires to unite far-flung and (often idiotic) online gamers to give the illusion of a cohesive fighting force locked in battle. Think Wacky Races meets Medal of Honor—and don’t get too snooty, because the result is a blast, and it spawned a monster. OB See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Burnout 2: Point of Impact Original release date : 2002 Platform : Various Developer : Criterion Games Genre : Driving
Burnout opened up the throttle and snarled its way on to the video game motoring scene with all the youthful enthusiasm of a young Lightning McQueen and the destructive nihilism of Mad Max. At a time when the fashion in racing was for real-world physics, processional AI, and dull driving tests, Criterion’s game opted for arcade-styled exuberance and hyperintense high-speed thrills, where the car-porn crashes were just as important as the right racing line. This is a game in which drivers are encouraged to live dangerously or die trying in slo-mo scenes of shearing metal and twisting, burning wreckage. Sequel Burnout 2: Point of Impact picked up on the popular appeal of those collisions, making them even more prominent by introducing a Crash mode that plays like a demented, damaged version of bowling with cars. The main racing mode, though, remains, in essence, the same as its predecessor: roaring around busy roads, weaving slightly too close to the traffic, swerving round corners, and flying over jumps to charge your boost meter and secure the extra miles-per-hour needed to nose in front of the opposition. It does what video games do best: allow players to experience something that is impossible to experience in real life—and certainly inadvisable to even attempt, as
so many pre-game warning screens soberly inform us nowadays. Burnout 2: Point of Impact helped to free the entire racing genre from the shackles of realism, paving the way for the likes of Sega’s glorious resurrection of OutRun and the muddy mayhem of the PlayStation 3’s MotorStorm. There is, of course, a place for realism in gaming, but if that’s what you’re looking for, the risk-filled roads of Burnout 2: Point of Impact are most definitely not it. DM See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Crazy Taxi 3: High Roller Original release date : 2002 Platform : Various Developer : Hitmaker Genre : Driving
So, professions you initially think probably shouldn’t be immortalized in video games—number 37: taxi driver. Taxi drivers follow orders, they don’t blow things up, they don’t fire sub-machine guns, and they drive about in tiny environments fulfilling a set of mundane objectives. Wait a minute! Professions that, upon further reflection, are actually pretty much perfect for immortalization in video games—number 101: taxi driver. Taxi drivers follow orders, they make the most of small environments, they accept endless missions from dull quest givers, and they are rewarded each time they complete a task with a tiny amount of money. Also, occasionally they get to run someone over. Taxi drivers understand the grind of most games, in other words, but Crazy Taxi isn’t an RPG. It’s a fast-paced arcade racer in which you drive clients between various locations, competing for hiscores, racing the clock, and avoiding too many accidents. All Crazy Taxi games are actually pretty much the same title: The colors are intense, the characters are lovably ridiculous, the cars handle with wonderful cinematic looseness, and the sun shines in that Sega-patented manner. Often they even reuse a previous title’s range of environments.
What makes Crazy Taxi 3: High Roller stand out in particular, then, is the inclusion of the new Vegas-styled Glitter Oasis environment, and the addition of a few nighttime levels. Not too much on the surface, perhaps, but it all mounts up to one of those titles that quickly becomes worryingly replayable: a glimpse into the grim cogs of compulsion, certainly, but a brightly colored glimpse, with a chugging rock score, bright lights, and beautiful weather—even during the night. CD See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Dark Chronicle Original release date : 2002 Platform : PS2 Developer : Level-5 Genre : Action / Role-Playing
Level-5’s reputation is secure: Dragon Quest VIII, Jeanne D’Arc, and the Professor Layton games have established themselves as favorites around the world. When Dark Cloud (the precursor to Dark Chronicle) first appeared, however, the developer was unknown in the industry, creating an oft-delayed, experimental RPG for a console that had yet to establish itself as the most successful in history. And it really was experimental: an unprecedented and slightly incongruous mix of world building and dungeoneering. It played like a cross between SimCity and Diablo, bound together by the rich character design and story—typical of the developer’s subsequent hits. The idea was for players to fight their way through randomly generated dungeons in order to find and bring back the parts to rebuild a succession of villages and cities. And there was a fishing mini-game for good measure. (No self-respecting Japanese role-playing game is complete without a fishing mini-game.) It was met both by critics and buying public alike with the sort of bafflement reserved for an arthouse curio, instead of recognition as a new RPG landmark. That weird premise and some rough edges simply seemed to obscure its paradigmatic brilliance. Until, that is, Dark Chronicle tidied up
all of the rough edges, threw in some new mini-games, and made the switch to the cel-shaded graphics that have characterized many of the company’s games ever since. In truth, it wasn’t the most radical of makeovers, and the invention and photography mini-games are as inappropriate as the combination of world building, fighting, and fishing. But the game took the premise from the original and delivered on its unlikely promise, which was enough to persuade the critics. DM See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Metroid Fusion Original release date : 2002 Platform : Game Boy Advance Developer : Nintendo Genre : Platform / Shoot ’Em Up
The translation of 2-D Metroid into 3-D Metroid Prime may have been one of modern gaming’s great success stories, but at the same time there was something missing: claustrophobia. The 2-D spaces, and the restrictive axes that go with them, enable you to hem in a player much more effectively than would ever be possible in a 3-D world. And so with Metroid Fusion, the first 2-D Metroid since the superlative SNES Super Metroid (and so the first to be designed without the input of Nintendo legend Gunpei Yokoi), Nintendo returned to the mix of claustrophobia and fear that only 2-D corridors can give. The twist this time is that Samus’s suit, the source of her power, is killing her. Not only that, but the biological nasty called Phazon that’s doing it has somehow managed to clone her, creating a much more powerful version of Samus who exists in the same 2-D corridors with the sole purpose of destroying her. You can’t face this until fully upgraded. It’s a scripted hunt rather than a dynamic one, but it’s wonderfully done: You’ll be crouching in a duct, only to hear the intense thrums that herald fake Samus, and stay silent and still as she tramps mere inches above your head. When the final showdown comes, after many moments like this, it’s as cathartic as it is spectacular.
Alongside this, place an excellent 2-D map design that no developer but Nintendo seems able to touch, and the ever-brilliant upgrade system that locks into it, opening up areas and revealing secrets in places you thought you were long done with. Its diminutive stature means Metroid Fusion will never be considered in the same category as the series masterpiece, Super Metroid, but certain converts—or let’s call them “heretics”—might wonder whether it supersedes it. RS See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Metroid Prime Original release date : 2002 Platform : GameCube Developer : Retro Studios Genre : Action / First-Person Shooter
Let’s be honest. Nobody thought this one was going to work. First off, there was the fact that Metroid was being handled by Retro Studios rather than Nintendo itself. Could an external company (and an American one at that) understand the slow burn of Samus Aran’s mysterious adventures? Worse still, the venerable platformer was going first-person. What? Was Nintendo about to let one of its more thoughtful action games turn into just another stupid corridor shooter? The answer, quite obviously, was no. Metroid Prime is as sympathetic an update as any in gaming history. With its brooding, twitchy score, and lush, mostly deserted, environments, Retro managed to summon up the peculiar brand of melancholy and isolation that defined the 2-D originals, while finding an intelligent means to retain the manner in which your growing arsenal of weaponry and skills gradually opens up the complex environment the deeper you get into the game’s spooky ruins. What’s more, along the way, it still managed to blaze its own trail, creating a title that feels cut from the same cloth as the original titles, but without seeming like its best ideas are all borrowed. It’s colorful, too—a ceaseless riot of deep greens, rusting golds, and blinding white lights—and it crams a dazzlingly varied ecosystem into its handful of different locations. Subsequent adventures
may have offered, very moderately, diminishing returns, but even if Retro were never to make another game ever again, the smarter action fans out there will always be thankful for this one. Sleek, thoughtful, and rather sad, Metroid Prime is a game that’s as inventive and sharp and mysteriously alluring as the series to which it belongs. CD See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Dungeon Siege Original release date : 2002 Platform : PC, Mac Developer : Gas Powered Games Genre : Role-Playing
Dungeon Siege was touted as party-based Diablo. Why defeat evil alone when you can do it with nonplayer character friends? Gamers raised on traditional RPGs, and the frenzied button bashers that made Blizzard’s previous RPG a smash, all drooled. That Dungeon Siege was from Chris Taylor, designer of the fabulous Total Annihilation, only added to the anticipation. Yet on arrival Dungeon Siege featured almost none of the tactical party-based nuances expected of it. Sure, you assemble a group, with mages, archers, ax-wielding dwarves, and even a mule for carrying your nobly gotten gains. And everyone does their bit. But that’s just it: You can play Dungeon Siege on autopilot. Most of the player’s choices are concerned with inventory management: collect the fallen weapons and loot, throw the excess on the mule, and look out for a shop. Your party levels up no matter what you do. It is also very linear—like moving along some Lord of the Rings rollercoaster—which renders its innovative seamless loading rather moot. Quests are little more than plot developments. Perhaps the story is so predictable that they know you’ll succeed. So why are even discussing the game? Because judged on what it does rather than doesn’t do, Dungeon Siege is superb. Upon release it was jaw-droppingly beautiful, and even today the detail is
impressive. It’s almost embarrassingly playable. And, rather like one of those movies that makes you feel clever by name-dropping, there’s so much happening on-screen that you rarely consider you’re just one hack from a slash. A final twist: While the game rarely deviates from its one path, its excellent content creation tools spawned a plethora of mods. OB See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Medieval: Total War Original release date : 2002 Platform : PC Developer : The Creative Assembly Genre : Strategy
Medieval: Total War transplants the unexpected success of Shogun: Total War from the exotic campaigns of Sengoku, Japan, to the more familiar battlefields of western Europe during the Middle Ages—a period rich and fertile in terms of the conflict and strife needed to support a long and fruitful military campaign. Here, military campaigns are conducted in two arenas: real-time tactics, which determine the outcome of battle, and turn-based strategy, which shapes the long-term fate of your kingdom or empire. Either could have been packaged and sold separately, and yet Medieval: Total War finds space for them both. It also grants players the freedom to automate battles or just to dive in and skirmish without all the long-term turn-based politicking, if they wish to concentrate on just one aspect of the game. There are also historical scenarios, such as the Battle of Stirling Bridge, for those inspired by Braveheart, or the Hundred Years War for those seeking a lengthier challenge. Battles represent the pinnacle of real-time tactics of the era: massed armies of authentically equipped knights and archers fight across 3-D battlefields, using authentic siege machinery. The turnbased campaign, meanwhile, brilliantly captures the essence of the dynastic and religious politics of
the period. Family members can be used as pawns in your diplomatic strategy, while disobeying the pope carries the risk of excommunication. The battles and campaign combine to construct a quintessential recreation of a fascinating historical period. There are other history games, there are other real-time tactics games, and there are other turnbased strategy games, but no other game combines all three to create such an original, enthralling experience. DM See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Steel Battalion Original release date : 2002 Platform : Xbox Developer : Capcom Genre : Action
There are plastic peripherals like guitars, drum kits, and fishing rods, and then there are plastic peripherals like Steel Battalion’s absolutely gigantic foldout robot controller. This was the game that promised to make you feel like you were really piloting one of its giant, hulking mecha walkers, and the add-on was an essential part of the experience. If you had room for it on your coffee table (and there certainly wouldn’t be much room left after it was installed), it would turn your living room into the cockpit of an elaborate machine, providing access to all the switches, gauges, and dials a futuristic pilot could desire, with even a few joysticks crammed in. It was financial suicide, naturally, but it’s also the kind of thing that makes the video game industry so enduringly fascinating to follow. And the game that was wrapped around the inputs isn’t at all bad either: a stylish in-cockpit mecha assault game in which you pilot your walking death machine through various scenarios, in a bid to take down the enemy in the most explosive manner possible. Somewhat inevitably, it simply proved too much for too many players—in terms of complexity, financial commitment, and the sheer amount of room taken up playing it. And furthermore, a series of ingeniously brutal design decisions eroded even the most enduring of players’ loves: fail to eject
safely before your robot is destroyed, and the game will delete your entire save file, giving you a sense of what death might be like. But let’s put such ancient scars aside. In an era when video games scrabble over one another to become more casual, more caring, and more immediate, it’s nice to know that there are still elaborate, delightful, disastrous follies like this in existence—even if they are now wedged in the back of the closet. CD See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Eternal Darkness Original release date : 2002 Platform : GameCube Developer : Silicon Knights Genre : Survival Horror
A horror set around several generations of a cursed family, Eternal Darkness saw Canadian developer Silicon Knights trying to send its audience conclusively around the bend. I t really isn’t like other survival horrors. Sure, you still wander around a cluster of moody hallways, picking up grisly clues and fighting unspeakable foes, but Eternal Darkness has loftier ambitions: a complex plot that spans several millennia, a range of playable characters (almost all of whom meet ridiculously unpleasant ends), and some rather weighty Gothic fiction name-dropping. Eternal Darkness wears its brain on its sleeve, in other words, while other titles are happy just to splatter it over the walls. But the game’s real claim to greatness are the insanity effects that kick in as your character becomes more and more disturbed by what’s going on. Some are simple visual effects, but the best of them target your worst fears as an actual gamer: the save file that claims to be deleting itself; the polite announcement—as zombie hordes rush you—that your controller is unplugged. Few games have so convincingly messed with their audiences’ minds. CD
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2000s
Jet Set Radio Future Original release date : 2002 Platform : Xbox Developer : Smilebit Genre : Action
The task of providing a sequel to a game as singularly personable as Jet Set Radio was no easy task, and while Smilebit’s follow-up struggled to sell more than a fairly dismal 30,000 copies, it’s a title that sings with ideas: vivid, lovable, and effortlessly cool. Kicking the action into a future of subculture quirks and break-dancing robots, Jet Set Radio Future pits you and your gang of skating graffiti artists against the sinister Rokkaku Group, who are trying to overwhelm your city. Tagging remains the key to your revolt, albeit returning in streamlined form, and with a new hardware generation behind it, the game’s streets are filled with crowds of messy iconoclasts to barrel through and barge out of the way as you set about your mission. The game’s greatest pleasure, however, comes in its intense verticality, as you scale the towering megastructures of the Skyscraper District, bouncing off satellite dishes and grinding the gutters, until you throw yourself back to the streets below. Jet Set Radio Future is one of those rare titles that really transports you somewhere else. CD See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Soul Calibur II Original release date : 2002 Platform : Various Developer : Namco Genre : Fighting
Who’d have thought that the fairly anonymous arcade fighter Soul Edge would spawn one of video gaming’s genre-defining beat ’em ups? But when Soul Calibur appeared on the Dreamcast, it was proof that home consoles had overtaken the coin-op: better-than-arcade graphics were nestled within the most comprehensive single-player campaigns ever seen in a beat ’em up. Soul Calibur II retains the strengths of the previous games—the single-player campaign, the intuitive control scheme, the characters, the (sometimes skimpy) costumes, the weapons, the booming voice as you volley opponents “OUT OF THE RING!” It also adds three popular console-specific characters: Tekken’s Heihachi for the PS2; Zelda’s Link for the GameCube; and the twisted teen-hero Spawn for the Xbox version. All three console versions share cutting-edge graphics and feature a refined version of the fighting engine. “WELCOME TO THE STAGE OF HISTORY!” the voice bellows at the start of the game. It sets the tone for what is still one of the best beat ’em ups of all time. DM See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Kingdom Hearts Original release date : 2002 Platform : PS2 Developer : Square Genre : Action / Role-Playing
A merging of the crowd-pleasing worlds of Square’s RPG catalogue and Disney’s priceless cast of characters, Kingdom Hearts was perhaps inevitable—but that doesn’t mean the end result isn’t personable, colorful, and rather wonderful as well. A complex RPG and a best-selling series in its own right, Kingdom Hearts tells the story of Sora, a young boy gifted with a magical weapon called the Keyblade, which he must use to fight off the Heartless, a sinister group of shadowy beings. Teaming up with the likes of Donald Duck and Goofy, Sora sets off on an epic quest to save his world from destruction. With lavish art and an epic, rather grown-up storyline that regularly deals with themes of death and sacrifice, as well as finding room for a dizzying number of Disney cameos, it’s hardly a shock that Kingdom Hearts was a massive hit when launched on the PS2. Since then, as is Square’s way, it’s spawned an unlikely muddle of genuine sequels and oddball offshoots, including a series of increasingly strange titles for the mobile phone market. CD See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind Original release date : 2002 Platform : PC, Xbox Developer : Bethesda Game Studios Genre : Action / Role-Playing
The Elder Scrolls games are best known because of the fourth chapter in the series, Oblivion, released in 2006. The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is altogether more of a curate’s egg, neither as commercially successful nor critically lauded. Perhaps because of that, however, it’s also a much more interesting game. This isn’t the traditional Tolkienesque fantasy of the later version; instead it is a weird blend of traditional fantasy with people and places that are characterized by an almost eerie otherworldliness. One thing that is true of both games is the unparalleled freedom that their creators hand to players. More than many other similar games, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind contains entire societies and cultures that are completely convincing (and, by including the Elder Scrolls construction set, even allowed players to create their own). In one inspired piece of design, the tutorial contains the entire character creation process as part of the narrative, with attributes and skills generated by the choices the player makes while describing their character’s background to a prison bureaucrat. In another, character skills advance as players use them. If you want to become good at, say, swordfighting, you simply keep swordfighting.
For a set of rules designed to let gamers play without worrying about the numbers, this latter system is easy to exploit by anyone who wants to artificially inflate their character’s abilities. In this, however, it is also a typically well-intentioned albeit flawed piece of design—but flawed in such a way that it actually enriches the experience: The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind grants players the freedom to play it as an experience, absorbing the story and forging their own, or as a set of rules, to be ransacked with an obsessive-compulsive eye for exploits in a bid to “beat” the game. DM See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven Original release date : 2002 Platform : PC Developer : Illusion Softworks Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
Proving that an open world doesn’t have to offer countless possibilities, Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven expects just one thing from its fictional city: detail. Period detail, to be exact; this gangster epic assumes the cars, streets, decor, and even laws of a city during the Prohibition. A little too sensational to be The Godfather, perhaps, but it does a damn fine impression of The Untouchables. The story is told in flashbacks by Tommy Angelo, a member of the Lost Heaven mafia who quits the life of crime and rats out his “family” to a detective in a restaurant. In a bid for witness protection, his story goes right back to day one, when two gangsters jump into his taxi and “ask” him to outrun some trigger-happy pursuers. Made an offer he can’t refuse by the impressed Don Salieri, we see him rise through the ranks of the underworld and wage war on a newfound enemy, the connected Don Morello. Needless to say, the words “double-cross” feature prominently throughout the game from thereon in. Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven’s idea of exploration is to drive between waypoints and sniff out the best avenues for on-foot missions. It’s immersion, really; a chance to live out the age of Tommy guns, Studebakers, speakeasies, and bootleggers. Radio sounds include Louis Armstrong and the
Mills Brothers, while references to Goodfellas (not, admittedly, a 1930s saga) are everywhere. Aside from an early emphasis on visuals, most remember the game’s strict highway code, its police not taking kindly to you breaking the local speed limit. This suggestion that responsible driving could be just as enjoyable as pedestrian-mowing chases would be championed by games like Driver: Parallel Lines and Grand Theft Auto IV—but not for some years. DH See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Disaster Report Original release date : 2002 Platform : PS2 Developer : Irem Genre : Action
It’s a mystery why so few games, before or since, have attempted to appropriate the rubblestrewn trappings of the disaster movie. It’s been an enduring cinema staple, from The Poseidon Adventure to 2012, and one that you’d think would be particularly ripe ground for video game adventure: more destruction than you can fit in a first-person shooter; big, set-piece action; and the slow reveal of the intermingling motivations of an ensemble cast. Disaster Report features the whole lot, and it runs the whole range of disasters: earthquakes, landslides, tsunamis, fires, and, as in any good disaster movie, other humans. And like all great disaster movies, the real mystery is the one at the heart of the game. That mystery concerns the construction of a massive artificial island—or rather its gradual destruction, from which the game’s hero must make his escape. The challenge isn’t to find new and interesting ways of killing others, but to save yourself—for example, crawling slowly through a burning building, trying to avoid asphyxiation, or leaping your way to safety from a slowly crumbling bridge. One of the most interesting aspects of the game is the way your character’s constant thirst regulates his progress and ratchets up the tension. As each aftershock rumbles in, you’re never sure
how far you are from the next life-saving swig of water. But you’re also never far from a bit of light relief, most notably in the shape of some excellently nonsensical collectibles, like an R-Type compass. In the end, the conspiracy at the heart of the disaster is a bit unconvincing, but for a medium in which fighting people continues to be the default mode of interaction, Disaster Report is a breath of fresh air. Well, grit-filled, smoke-choking air, anyway. DM See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Original release date : 2002 Platform : Various Developer : Rockstar Genre : Action
More ’80s than the ’80s themselves, the follow-up to Grand Theft Auto III packed players into a pastel-colored time machine for a trip through the coke-fueled psychopathy of Florida gangster culture. Rockstar’s remit, as described by president Sam Houser, was to prove that video games could go toe to toe with cinema—and aesthetically Grand Theft Auto: Vice City is a startling success. The sun-kissed setting, the clothes, the cars and music recreate the 1980s in a condensed hyperreal form. There’s a heavy dose of nostalgia in the triumphant eruption of Blondie’s “Atomic” from the radio, as you scream down a beach-side boulevard in a convertible—but it’s always undercut by a horror at the period’s self-destructive decadence, its revolting avarice, and its terrible obsession with puffy shoulder pads. As jailbird Tommy Vercetti, you arrive in Vice City, planning to sew up an easy coke deal. The deal goes south, leaving Tommy without the drugs or his money—and in debt to his overlords back in Liberty City. In the process of recovering the goods, Tommy rises through the ranks of the city’s criminal elite, snapping up rivals’ scams. He nicks many a car, of course, but he also plunders the
archives of gangster filmography too. Isn’t that the sniveling lawyer from Carlito’s Way? Isn’t that the mansion from Scarface? Wasn’t that scene straight out of Miami Vice? The game also marks the point when Grand Theft Auto’s template could be logically expanded without feeling overcrowded with features. Though Rockstar’s ambition for its mission design had increased, it’s the lurid mania of its place and time, rather than any unique aspect of play, which marks out Grand Theft Auto: Vice City as one of the series’ dizziest peaks. MD See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Medal of Honor: Allied Assault Original release date : 2002 Platform : PC, Mac Developer : 2015 Genre : First-Person Shooter
There was always going to be a point when the rest of the game industry caught up with what Valve had been doing with the original Half-Life, scripting events to seem more dramatic—not to mention more cinematic. It took until 2002 for Medal of Honor: Allied Assault to use the same idea in a World War II shooter, and it did so to startling effect. The opening of the game would have been familiar to anyone who had seen Saving Private Ryan, as it was a direct video game reworking of the nightmarishly intense beach-storming sequence from Steven Spielberg’s movie. The gate went down on the landing craft, and you struggled ashore, under fire from the beach. If you made it to the first sand dunes, then you proceeded with the assault on the fortifications above, and then onward into the theaters of Europe and North Africa, set piece by set piece. In the game you take the role of Army Ranger Lt. Mike Powell, who finds himself in a number of ugly situations. You assault German bases in Norway and Morocco, and also perform a number of rescue missions behind enemy lines in France during the invasion.
If there’s a significant failing on the part of Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, it’s probably down to the way the Allied soldiers only feature in very limited sequences of the game. Most of the time you are facing the Germans on your own, and the action therefore devolves into that of a more traditional shooter. The final level, in which you have to wear a gas mask, is also rather disappointing. Nevertheless, Medal of Honor: Allied Assault was the first game to learn the lessons of HalfLife, and it can most definitely be seen as a major waypoint on the road to the major successful shooters of the past few years, such as the hugely successful Call of Duty series. JR See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in H.A.R.M.’s Way Original release date : 2002 Platform : PC, Mac Developer : Monolith Productions Genre : First-Person Shooter
Prior to becoming synonymous with miserable urban horror games, Monolith Productions enjoyed a much richer palette, highlights being the laser-sharp franchise sequel Tron 2.0 and a psychedelic trio of spy games in the form of No One Lives Forever and its sequel, plus Contract JACK, a spinoff. Indebted to shows like The Avengers and Mission: Impossible, these kitsch classics are from a time when 3-D gaming had yet to sink into the browns and greens of relentless modern warfare. Reuniting players with heroine Cate Archer, an ex-cat burglar with more costumes than Lady Gaga, No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in H.A.R.M.’s Way sees uniform jumps in production values and scope, from character animation and rendering to early experiments with Havok physics. It kicks off in a Japanese village where Archer, armed with one of many exotic gadgets, is spying on the head of H.A.R.M., a global crime syndicate. Stabbed and left for dead by an ninja assassin, she makes it back to England where, recovered, she’s given her most preposterous assignment yet. In cahoots with the Soviet Union, H.A.R.M. wants to turn the Greek island of Khios into a communist tourist spot. Following the trail, Archer battles deadly mimes, super soldiers, and some of the unlikeliest set-pieces devised for a first-person shooter, including a ninja swordfight in the midst
of a trailer-tossing tornado. Like fellow physics pioneers Half-Life 2 and Painkiller, No One Lives Forever 2 turns its landscapes into leading characters, featuring over-the-top action that mellowed in subsequent games. Monolith redeployed many of these themes in physics-mad horror game F.E.A.R. Now owned by Warner Bros., the studio shows no signs of looking back, leaving this period favorite trapped in time. DH See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Original release date : 2002 Platform : Various Developer : Ubisoft Genre : Action
In the shadows, one man can be an army. In the shadows, perfection is about deathly silence and deadly force. And in Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell , the first installment of Ubisoft’s celebrated espionage franchise approved by thriller writer Tom Clancy, the shadows are long and deep. Created using the Unreal 2 engine, its levels are a chiaroscuro landscape of warehouses and oil tankers, barely illuminated by strip lamps and the soft warm glow of computer monitors. It’s a darkness in which only covert NSA operative Sam Fisher, dispatched to avert World War III, feels at home. Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell didn’t invent the stealth genre (Metal Gear got there first), but its boldly gloomy visuals were a remarkable innovation. Never before had wet work seemed so tense and lonely; murky in every way. Fisher, speaking in the gravel-gargling tones of actor Michael Ironside, was perfectly suited to it; an aging veteran whose years in the gloom had turned him cynical and suspicious. At its heart, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell is a game about execution. Not just the snapping of your enemies’ necks (although there is plenty of that), but decisions over how to execute each mission. Do you kill the guard or distract him with a thrown bottle? Sneak-walk through the shrubbery or shimmy
overhead on pipes like a cat? The challenge lies in adapting your arsenal to each new scenario. The techno-porn inventory is pure Clancy, yet the game’s ability to induce nail-biting tension as you creep between pools of light surpasses any airport thriller. The aim is silent invisibility, slipping in and out without alerting guards or triggering alarms. And for all its high-tech gadgetry, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell searches for an ancient, Zen-like harmony: that exhilarating moment when you become a true shadow warrior. JRu See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Neverwinter Nights Original release date : 2002 Platform : PC, Mac Developer : BioWare Genre : Role-Playing
No computer RPG can compete with the experience of playing a pen-and-paper campaign. No computer is as flexible or as creative as a human dungeon master, capable of creating characters and subplots and adjusting the rules on the fly to make sure his players are having just the right amount of fun. There are not enough variables inside a computer to compete with the infinite possibilities of the human imagination. So the argument went. That is, until Neverwinter Nights came out, confounding the argument by giving human DMs as much control over a computer RPG as their pen-and-paper counterparts. Following on from the Byzantine brilliance of Baldur’s Gate II , BioWare’s successor cut back the size and complexity of the single-player campaign, but didn’t skimp on the ingenuity, with a story centered on saving the city of Neverwinter from a nefarious plague. That single-player campaign was just a tiny part of the whole game, however; Neverwinter Nights was designed from the outset to be enjoyed as a multiplayer experience. It was notable because it provided players with a suite of tools that allowed them to create their own game worlds and campaigns, turning the infinite possibilities of the human imagination into video game realities.
What’s more, the same tools allowed DMs to referee those campaigns on the fly, adjusting them with just as much freedom as if they were playing with pen and paper. Except, of course, they didn’t have to be in the same room as their fellow players. (Which, some might argue, made it a superior experience to the real thing.) S o Neverwinter Nights proved that computer RPGs are every bit as rich and varied as their predecessors. The only thing lacking is odd-shaped dice, beer, and pizza. DM See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Panzer Dragoon Orta Original release date : 2002 Platform : Xbox Developer : Smilebit Genre : Shoot ’Em Up
Panzer Dragoon appeared on the Saturn in a blaze of glory, reaching heights of hitherto unimaginable technical excellence and becoming a poster boy for the power of Sega’s new processing powerhouse. And it is contained, in its entirety, in Panzer Dragoon Orta, demonstrating how far video game technology had come by the time the fourth game in the series burst on to the Xbox. Although Panzer Dragoon Orta was created by a new development team, it was staffed by many of the people who had produced its predecessors. They retained the ability to shift between different dragon forms: base wing for all-round balance; heavy wing for increased firepower; and glide wing for better maneuverability. By the time Panzer Dragoon Orta came out, the on-rails shooter had become a desperately unfashionable genre, even if Rez had recently given it a brief dose of dance-culture respectability. Compared to games in which you are free to shoot, rob, and steal, Panzer Dragoon Orta’s only concession to freedom was to allow you to steer your mysterious dragon mount around the screen as it progressed along its preordained path.
What a path, though! This is a game that serves up set pieces with remarkable ease. Some sequences recreate scenes from the original in high fidelity; others are wholly original, such as a level in which you are forced to steer your heavily damaged dragon across the floor as you attempt to destroy a gigantic manta ray undulating in and out of view alongside you. There are plenty more bells and whistles. Multiple forking paths exist throughout the game, and Pandora’s Box, which houses a host of secrets and collectibles, including additional missions and movies, can be opened up to provide plenty of scope for replayability. DM See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast Original release date : 2002 Platform : Various Developer : Raven Software Genre : Action / First-Person Shooter
A run of Star Wars-themed games that failed to capture the kudos of the earlier Star Wars: Dark Forces games caused a rethink at George Lucas’s game studio. The new philosophy was simple: get the most respected developers in specific genres and hand them the keys to the Star Wars universe. Who would turn down the chance to make a Star Wars game? For first-person shooters, Raven had a well-established history of quality games going back to Heretic and Hexen, and more recently, with Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force . The Wisconsin-based studio also had experience with the latest, greatest game engine from John Carmack at id Software, so it used the Quake III Arena engine to power the hugely anticipated sequel to Jedi Knight. Picking up the story after the conclusion of the Mysteries of the Sith expansion pack for Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Dark Forces , it once again focuses on the adventures of Kyle Katarn, who has ditched the Force. He’s quickly back on track after he believes his friend and sidekick, Jan Ors, to have been killed by the Dark Jedi Desann. It’s a handy method of reintroducing the process of earning your lightsaber and powering up a choice of Force powers that many players will have already experienced.
The new engine coupled with Raven’s experience from prior projects allowed the team to introduce fresh elements to the series, such as having characters occasionally fight alongside Katarn. It also powered flashy new special effects, adding more sizzle to the Force powers, as Katarn visits locations such as Cloud City—the home of Lando Calrissian, who we also meet in this game. Raven lived up to its billing as a leading FPS developer, crafting an experience that fits capably alongside the other highly regarded games in the series. RSm See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Suikoden III Original release date : 2002 Platform : PS2 Developer : Konami Genre : Role-Playing
Inspired by the classical Chinese novel Water Margin, Suikoden has always had a penchant for grandiose scale. When the time came to move the series to PlayStation 2, Konami ensured that this continued, creating an intricate and surprisingly mature plot that never strays too far from fantasy clichés, but imbues them with new depth and insight. Changes are also apparent visually: Moving to full 3-D, the game immediately impresses with its chunky art style, somewhat reminiscent of Skies of Arcadia. But the aesthetic differences are negligible compared to the refit applied elsewhere. The newly introduced Trinity Sight system takes full advantage of the intricately woven story by allowing the player to experience initial events from three different perspectives, playing through early chapters as Hugo, Geddoe, or Chris Lightfellow. Brilliantly, they can be tackled in any order, and events from one will inform the others. Further viewpoints are unlocked as the game progresses, and the 108 heroes of the game’s inspirational material can be used in battle as they are discovered. At release, those battles courted a little controversy as the six-strong party is split into pairs, meaning only three orders can be issued. But any loss of fine-tuning is compensated by slick, exciting encounters.
Party-focused, large-scale battles are complemented by a huge number of character-customization options. All characters can learn skills, but specialization is only possible for specific individuals, so no two players’ parties are likely to be identical. Fortress building also returns, which, as well as housing your burgeoning army, provides ample distractions from the main quest with a generous selection of mini-games. All round, it’s an appropriately accomplished tribute to its revered source material. BM See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Shinobi Original release date : 2002 Platform : PS2 Developer : Overworks Genre : Action
They don’t call ninjas “shadow warriors” for nothing. Just as the original Shinobi was followed in short order by Tecmo’s Ninja Gaiden, its reboot for modern consoles would be eclipsed two years later by its returning foe. Why? Partly because of the power gap between PS2 and Xbox, but more because of nostalgia: The new Ninja Gaiden makes itself at home in the living room; Shinobi, on the other hand, seems to long for the arcades. It’s a smaller and potentially older audience, then, that really appreciates Overworks’s game. The first Shinobi in 3-D and the first in the series for seven years—the last was the poorly received Shinobi X for Sega’s Saturn—it’s a tricksy blend of efficient combat and arcade ritual, low on checkpoints, high on sudden deaths, and played throughout at breakneck speed. Picking up the story of the Oboro clan, it follows the exploits of a new ninja, Hotsuma. Having slain his brother in a fated duel, he leads the family as Hiruko Ubusuna, an enemy vanquished decades earlier, returns to seek his vengeance. In something of a Japanese action game tradition, a giant Golden Palace then lands in the center of Tokyo, filling the streets with hellish creatures.
No arcade game would be complete without a time limit, and Hotsuma’s sword does the job perfectly. It literally thirsts for blood, sapping its owner’s energy if it can’t find it elsewhere. So Hotsuma, able to dash intelligently between mobs of enemies with just a button press, has to make every kill count. Multiple kills can be achieved in quick succession by performing a sequence of attacking moves for which you are rewarded with more soul energy, greater sword power, and, best of all, a real-time cinematic of your enemies falling to bits. DH See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Resident Evil Zero Original release date : 2002 Platform : GameCube Developer : Capcom Genre : Survival Horror
Cooperative play was a part of Resident Evil long before the online antics of Resident Evil 5. Resident Evil Zero, the last of its GameCube titles, bucks the trend for having two characters on two separate disks, and has them both on screen at once, a “partner-zapping” feature letting you switch between them. Each has unique strengths, be it the power to move heavy objects and sustain greater damage, or the frame to squeeze through tight spaces while mixing those life-sustaining herbs. A day before the events of the original Resident Evil, Raccoon City police division STARS investigates a series of murders in the local mountains. A helicopter crash later, and its team is marooned in a remote forest. Alone, medic Rebecca Chambers stumbles upon a zombie-infested train and a disgraced ex-Marine on the run, Billy Coen. Together they follow the tracks to an underground lab, home to the Umbrella Corporation and its marauding experiments. The series was under great pressure to stir things up after the millennium, especially concerning game-isms like the magic storage trunk (where an item placed in one box would appear in every other) and mechanical puzzles. Originally planned for the Nintendo 64—few at Capcom believed a disk-based version would load fast enough—Resident Evil Zero arrived on the GameCube in
relatively short order, with little of the epic prototyping that would soon shape Resident Evil 4. You can tell: The AI that takes over the character you’re not controlling makes a poor partner, and there are contrived work-arounds for when the cooperative puzzles clash with the refurbished inventory system. Still, Resident Evil Zero is one of the most beguiling games in the series, often bettering the looks of Resident Evil Remake. DH See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus Original release date : 2002 Platform : PS2 Developer : Sucker Punch Productions Genre : Platform The introduction of Sony’s light-fingered raccoon was almost too perfect a heist for anyone to notice that it had happened: a mascot-driven pure platformer in the twilight of mascots, or even pure platformers. Though Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus leans toward action-adventure, and its subgames experiment with various play styles to varying degrees of success, at heart this is a game of running, jumping, and timing. If that’s not apparent on the first play through, a series of unlockable time-trial runs reveal how tightly wound a machine the core levels truly are. Visually, too, the game presents a double-take, with the dusky watercolors and expressive, flowing lines of a lost Sullivan-Bluth production. Those brushstroke looks are a foil for the absolute solidity of the game world. The key is physics and physicality, evident in that no opportunity for a fraught tightrope-walk or giddy carousel goes unmissed. Practically every object not already in constant motion bobs and sways with carefully judged cartoon gravity. Just the simple act of traversal is an obvious delight, abetted with a generous stickiness that focuses on show rather than forced restarts. But much of the joy of movement is carried on Sly Cooper’s wiry shoulders. A hugely expressive creation, every exaggerated action from tiptoe stalk to the twitch of his tail is a flourish of unspoken narrative. If his supporting cast can’t quite compare, at once too shrill and too straight to fill the clown shoes of comic relief, the rogues’ gallery rides its stereotyped excess to perfection. Given a hero, villains, and a canvas to spread them across, it’s a playable Saturday matinee, with all the lightness of touch and the deftness of nuance that entails. BS See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Hitman 2: Silent Assassin Original release date : 2002 Platform : Various Developer : 10 Interactive Genre : Action Killing isn’t easy, even for killers. Agent 47, the antihero of this sneak-disguise-assassinateescape game, established himself as a killer with a conscience in the first title in this impressive series. This sequel sees him atoning for the sins of his previous employment under the guiding presence of Father Vittorio. But the forces that want Agent 47 back in the game know exactly how to lure him to the killing side. Vittorio is kidnapped and a ransom issued, and the hitman knows only one way to raise that kind of capital. How you choose to approach each challenging, inventive, and truly original mission setup is limited more by your imagination than it is any artificial rules of engagement. Multiple solutions to each scenario ensure one player’s experience can differ wildly from another’s, and present excellent replay value as you try another tactic. Charging in with guns blazing is an option that usually ends in a swift restart—but it is, nonetheless, an option. Whether it’s skulking past threats toward a target or taking out bystanders, hiding their bodies in a Dumpster, and stealing their outfits for a disguise, the variety is vast, but executing a plan is far from easy. Of course, though this is about Agent 47’s conscience being salved, these are still deadly strikes, and discovering that you’re a pawn in a bigger global power play is a huge revelation that calls for reflection as well as retaliation. It’s in these moral conundrums that Hitman 2: Silent Assassin reveals a depth and complexity that led to Hollywood calling to bring the exploits to the silver screen. Saving Vittorio is a noble goal that requires ignoble deeds. And, ultimately, you vanquish personal demons worthy of a name, not just a number. RSm See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Pokémon Ruby/Sapphire Original release date : 2002 Platform : Game Boy Advance Developer : Game Freak Genre : Role-Playing The charm offensive was so intense, and the marketing so all-pervasive and brutally effective, that it can be hard to remember just how good Pokémon is as a game—how well its RPG mechanics work, how delightful its world is to explore, and, most of all, how memorable its cast of collectable critters is. A mixture of wonderful, imaginative visual design and smart, wordy names, every Pokémon is a delight to behold, and the game’s great slogan is also the mantra that drives you through this long and complex adventure: You really will find that you gotta catch ’em all. With a forgettable world-spanning narrative, Pokémon is really a simple story of exploration and collection, inspired by the bug-collecting fascinations of the game’s creator Satoshi Tajiri. Wading through a Pokémon game’s long grass is a treat, as random battles here become something of a pleasure; a chance to see a strange new breed of creature that might have eluded you until now, or an opportunity to tame, own, and then slowly learn to understand a new life-form. While each Pokémon game is essentially the same, no matter the little kinks put in the story and slow shuffling of the cast, each has its own charms and features, and Pokémon Ruby/Sapphire is no different: moving the series on to the Game Boy Advance, the graphics have been spruced up, multiplayer has been expanded to a four-person cap, and double battles have been added. Beyond that, however, if you can’t track down Ruby or Sapphire, pretty much any game in the suite will do: there aren’t any duds in this series, and you can’t really put a foot wrong. Just remember that if you stay too long, you may find yourself coming down with collection fever too. CD See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Ratchet & Clank Original release date : 2002 Platform : PS2 Developer : Insomniac Games Genre : Action / Platform If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to be a space-faring feline with a scientific expert of a robot strapped to your back, now you can find out. Just don’t blame us if you have identity issues afterward. Like Naughty Dog’s Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy—from which Insomniac borrowed both the game engine and the control system—Ratchet & Clank stars a double act, each with their own abilities. Most of the time you’re sulky, teenage, catlike Ratchet, whacking enemies with your OmniWrench 8000 or exploding them from a distance with your Bomb Glove. Certain areas, however, require you to switch to Clank, who otherwise acts mainly as a backpack for Ratchet. Besides hearing out the engaging story, the main attraction of Ratchet & Clank is the weapons and gadgets you pick up along the way. These include the Suck Cannon, which gobbles enemies and spits them back at others, and the Taunter, which distracts your foes, making them easier to dispatch. There’s a certain amount of dutiful and mindless smashing and collecting of bolts, the game currency, so that you can keep stocked up on firepower using the game’s shops, but a sensible save system means it’s never too onerous. Graphically, Ratchet & Clank is gorgeous. Each planet is visually rich and diverse, and the character animation is superb. For anyone who tracks down and plays Shiny Entertainment’s MDK and then wants more, Ratchet & Clank is worth a try. Admittedly, Insomniac’s game leans more toward Futurama than MDK’s Terry Gilliam zaniness, but in terms of comic sci-fi exuberance the two titles occupy a sparse branch in 3-D platform gaming. OB See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Grow Original release date : 2002 Platform : Internet Developer : Eyezmaze Genre : Puzzle
For all the game industry’s discussion of sandbox worlds and open-ended play, as a player undertaking a task in a game you tend to achieve one of two results: you either complete it or you don’t. Sure, the possible journey might be different in the most open of games, but what about games where the end result, imperfect or not, leads you somewhere interesting, anyway? Grow, developed by an unknown Japanese Flash developer who works only under his company’s name, Eyezmaze, shouldn’t really work. You are given a red sphere, emblazoned with the word “Grow,” and asked to place onto it twelve disparate objects—a plate, a section of ladder, a whirlwind—one after another, to see what happens. After a couple of objects are dragged across, you begin to see what’s happening. Based on the order you place them, they change form, becoming larger or turning into something different (a hill becomes a volcano) and begin to interact (the whirlwind begins to power a fan). The aim is broadly to reach a maximum level with all of the objects you place. But if that’s all that was happening, it would be a frustrating trial-and-error experience. It’s not, for example, clear why or how placing a pipe would “evolve” into an egg. The game succeeds because every failure
leads you somewhere interesting. Placing the pipe before the fan and the hill means that when it spits out some bubbles, they aren’t blown away by the fan but instead rain on the hill, stopping it from becoming a volcano—but perhaps by doing that you weren’t able to get the TV screen working or the robot built. So you try again. It’s easy to deride Grow as a toy, a Flash trinket, a time waster. But when every decision—even a wrong one—is rewarding, what’s wrong with that? MKu See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker Original release date : 2002 Platform : GameCube Developer : Nintendo Genre : Action / Adventure
Link’s first GameCube adventure launched into stormy seas, following a blustery Internet reaction to a sudden change of art style. Rather than being a 128-bit upgrading of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time’s distinctly melancholic fantasy world, The Wind Waker has a landscape drawn in broad, primary-colored strokes, with its hero transformed from brooding time-traveling teen to wideeyed cartoon child, with stumpy legs, a determined frown sketched in a single uppity scribble, and a giant balloon for a head. Fears were misplaced, however, as The Wind Waker ’s sharp cel-shading has ensured: Besides The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, it’s perhaps the most timeless of Zeldas, a stylized and stylish romp through some of the beautifully constructed dungeons of the series, with highlights including a temple designed around a giant turbine and a forest getaway where thick tendrils of thorny branches erupt from the ground to form impromptu mazes. Burying the Hyrule of old under a rolling blue ocean may have seemed almost as sacrilegious as the shift toward a more childlike narrative, and, it’s true, The Wind Waker lacks the intricate multidimensional structure of previous entries, but such audacious changes allow for a fresh kind of
adventure filled with pirates, sun-bleached islands, ghost ships, and a mysterious frozen castle trapped beneath the waves. It’s a fair trade in the end. Some of the game’s bosses may seem familiar to fans of the previous games, and there are obvious signs that the project was finished in a hurry, with entire dungeons hitting the cutting-room floor, but The Wind Waker remains a lovable addition to the franchise, offering an untold bounty of treasure, mystery, and drama to anyone who dares sail its shimmering foam-flecked oceans. CD See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Super Mario Sunshine Original release date : 2002 Platform : GameCube Developer : Nintendo Genre : Platform
After all that time spent rescuing princesses and generally saving the world, it was inevitable that Mario would need a vacation sooner or later—and it was equally inevitable that things would go comically awry pretty quickly once he jetted off for the sun. Minutes after landing in the tropical paradise of Isle Delfino, poor old Mario finds himself framed for vandalism, when it transpires that a mysterious shimmering blue Mario clone has been covering the resort in nasty, sticky gloop. It’s up to Mario to tidy things up, naturally, a task he must achieve with the use of FLUDD, a water spout on his back that also doubles as a rocket booster and, eventually, a turbo jet for powering him through obstacles. FLUDD is there to handle the tricky matter of judging jumps correctly in 3-D games, as it enables a Harrier Jump Jet-style slow hover as he eases his way over obstacles. This is the centerpiece of one of Mario’s most challenging games yet. Super Mario Sunshine takes place in some of the most recognizably real-world locations throughout the entire series. Of course, we’re not too surprised when we find the resort’s hotel is filled with shape-shifting ghosts and has a maze on the roof, while the rocky cliffs tower above waters that contain a monster with a toothache.
The game is still imaginative and thrilling, however, with enough great moments—navigating the underworld grid of a lofty mushroom village, and being pursued by Bullet Bills along some basking beaches—to lift it to the terrific standards of the other games in the series. A bold departure and one of the greatest summer games ever made, Super Mario Sunshine will play just as well on the Wii as it did on the GameCube, so there’s absolutely no reason for you to miss out on it. CD See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos Original release date : 2002 Platform : PC, Mac Developer : Blizzard Entertainment Genre : Strategy
Though Dune II is credited with kick-starting the real-time strategy genre, it’s the Command & Conquer series that came to define it. How different things could have been, though. In 1995, two RTS titles of note were released: Command & Conquer and Warcraft II. Both of them were brilliant, but while Command & Conquer went on to spawn what seemed like hundreds of sequels, Warcraft fans had to wait seven years for their next fix. If Warcraft had been taking on its rival in an RTS, the situation would have been severe, with Blizzard’s RTS swamped by weight of numbers. But Warcraft was biding its time, hoarding its resources for the end game: With the release of Warcraft III the definitive RTS had arrived. Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos adds night elves and undead armies to the humans and orcs from the original game, and features a single-player campaign that works its way through each of them in turn. If you were to plot its progress on a graph, it would be a perfectly graduated incline pitched right on the sweet spot between simplicity and depth; between the pain of acquiring new skills and the pleasure of using them.
As in any RTS, the essence of the game is managing resources—gold, lumber, and food, in this case—and then using them to build an army to crush your opponent. What sets Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos apart, however, is that there is simply nothing to complicate that. Not the story, which is perfectly integrated into the action. Not the interface, which is the epitome of intuitiveness. Not the graphics, which prefigure the effortless excellence of World of Warcraft . And not the design, which manages to establish a perfectly measured progression from resource-gathering to military expansion. DM See all games from the 2000s.
2000s
TimeSplitters 2 Original release date : 2002 Platform : Various Developer : Free Radical Design Genre : First-Person Shooter
Balanced between a rough-sketch first game and a disappointing third installment, TimeSplitters 2 exists at that rare moment when everything works: a first-person shooter with all the character, artillery, and general silliness that you could ask for, moving through a range of brilliantly caricatured video game clichés without ever becoming lazy or letting the jokes do all th