Videogames

Videogames certainly changed the face of gaming, and surely most readers of this book were brought up on videogames, so there's no point in defining them. I offer here a list of the old classics that got the industry started. There are plenty of great newer games, but these games staked out the territory.

Space Invaders

Surely the first huge videogame hit, this game is a must-play for all game designers. As far as I know, the game had no obvious predecessors; it was an original creation. The army of little monsters in the sky, marching steadily downward, raining destruction on the hapless player, made a compelling image, and the extremely simple gameplay (slide sideways while shooting) made this game accessible to everybody. Interestingly, the vertical screen structure of the game arose more from technical considerations than game design considerations; the game is a magnificent example of a designer capturing the essential nature of the technology and exploiting it to the fullest.

Pac-Man

Such an important classic that every game designer should play it. Pac-Man wasn't particularly innovative; it represented the culmination of a long series of maze games. For example, an earlier game by Atari, Dodge 'Em, had the same system of dots that the player passed over to remove. It also had the opponent who attempted to crash into the player. Pac-Man added more opponents and made the dots edible. The difference between the two games is dramatic; it demonstrates just how critical the role of fine-tuning is.

Space Panic

This is the grandaddy of all platform games. The gameplay was simple. The screen had some four floors and a variety of bad guys chasing the player. The player could climb ladders up and down between the floors and could dig holes in a floor. When anybody stepped into a hole, they would fall through and be destroyed upon hitting the next floor. Thus, the player maneuvered about, trying to sucker the bad guys into the holes he had dug. Later games added the ability to jump over holes.

Donkey Kong

Donkey Kong changed the concept somewhat by making the floors tilted so that they connected with each other like a long ramp. The bad guys became rolling barrels that the player could leap over, and additional special-case obstacles were added. From there, development of the genre consisted of little more than adding more doo-dads and gew-gaws.

Dragon's Lair

This turkey is important as an object lesson in technological opportunism. This was the first significant laserdisc game to enter the market. It boasted beautiful imagery by the Don Bluth team. For the first time in history, the images on the screen weren't jaggy blocks, but smoothly animated cartoon characters. It was a sensation! Everybody rushed to create laserdisc games to compete with it.

The problem was, the gameplay was terrible. The player, as a bold knight, sought to enter a dragon's lair and rescue the princess. As the cartoon played, various dangers or challenges would present themselves, and the player had to respond with the correct button-press within a tight time interval. If he failed, a wonderfully animated display of the knight being burned up, falling into a deep pit, being crushed, etc., would end the game. If he succeeded, he proceeded to the next challenge. The game was basically a series of these binary challenges. If you passed Challenge #1, Challenge #2, Challenge #3…Challenge #N, then you rescued the princess and won the game.

I take some pride in being the only person in the universe to dismiss the game as a technological flash in the pan. Everybody else laughed at me, rushed to build their own laserdisc games, and lost their shirts. A version for personal computers was produced during the late 80s.