5 pioneering games that time forgot

Pioneers have always been a very important part of the video game industry, they mark the few occasions where someone tried to do something different and that something different actually turned out to be kinda cool. So cool in fact, that everyone else starts to incorporate it into their own projects. Eventually after enough games use that “something different” it then becomes the new standard that everyone has to adhere to if they want to be taken seriously.

Screen vignetting, multiplayer perks, hidden collectibles, regenerating health, achievements, all features that a lot of us expect to find in modern games without question. But they weren’t always there; somewhere along the way there had to be a game that marked the beginning of that trend. A game where a bunch of smaller ideas came together in the exact right combination for someone to think  “Hey, that’s a pretty good thing they got going on there. Sure would like to see it in other games!”.

Sometimes the effects are instantaneous and publishers will start to shoehorn this new idea into every project they can overnight,  other times the idea will lay dormant for years until it finally clicks in someones mind. Either way, in most cases the games are well remembered as pioneers of design. Just ask around, most serious gamers can tell you off the top of their head all the things that modern FPSs owe to Halo, why just about every multiplayer game is considered a Call of Duty clone or how MMOs are desperately trying to ape World of Warcraft.

But sadly, some get left out of the limelight and are only remembered by a relatively small number of people who try and preserve the memory of these gaming pioneers as best they can. So that’s what I wanted to write about in this article, I wanted to tell people about 5 games that I think represent significant moments in game design history that too many people don’t really know about. 5 games that I believe have pretty major resonance with modern gaming that deserve to be remembered by more than they are. It’s my hope that this article can in some way spread the memory of these forgotten games and their developers, but most of all I hope people find it interesting. So here we go, enjoy!

WinBack (N64/PS2)

Without it we might not have had: Gears of War, Uncharted, Metal Gear Solid 2 onward (as we know it anyway).

What did it pioneer? The modern cover mechanic

Here’s a little question for you: imagine you’re playing a run of the mill third person shooter and you’ve just walked into a gunfight. You’re taking a lot of damage so you need somewhere to hide, but all that’s between you are your assailants is a box that you think might be large enough to obscure the lower half of your characters body. So what do you do?

A) Press the crouch button (if the game even has one) then walk up against the surface of the box which may or may not actually cover enough of your body to prevent you getting hit. When you want to start shooting back you then have to un-crouch, take your shots, then crouch again before the counter attack hits.

B) Run up to the box and have you character, either automatically or via button press “snap” to box’s surface in such a way that they will be full protected from oncoming fire (unless you’re playing MindJack). When you see an opportunity to shoot back, you simply press the aiming button to have your character pop out from behind the cover, and then automatically return to the exact same “safe” position behind the box when you feel you window of opportunity is up.

If you selected B, then congratulations! You’ve probably played a generic third person shooter made in the last 4 or so years. These days if you tried to publish one that didn’t have this sort of “Snap to cover” mechanic, then you’d likely be made laughing stock by the gaming community. It’s one of those features that most players subconsciously DEMAND be present, anything short of it is simply ridiculous right?

It can be a bit of a culture shock when you realised how quickly the cover mechanic became a standard. It really wasn’t too long ago that most third person shooters were of the run-and-gun variate, where the closest thing you had to the concept of “Cover” was the aforementioned rather haphazard crouching maneuver. Even then, that only worked on objects approximately half the height of your character and the idea of being able to take cover behind anything taller was more commonly known as “why the hell is this thing blocking the direction I’m trying to shoot?”.

Tracking this mechanics origin doesn’t seem too hard at first, it’s undoubtedly late 2006’s Gears of War that made the whole thing popular, and lead developer Cliff Bleszinski unapologetically admitted that the cover system in that game was lifted from a 2003 title called Kill.Switch (another unsung gaming pioneer for implementing the “blind fire from cover” technique shown above). But to find out where this party really got started we need to go all the way back to 1999 and take a look at a game way ahead of its time, a game that saddens me so few people have heard of. WinBack for the N64.

What was it? A standard shooter.

WinBack‘s story can be summarised thusly: terrorists have taken over a military base housing a super weapon and the player takes the role of Jean-Luc, an agent of Special Covert Action Team (yes that’s right, S.C.A.T) who’s been sent in to shoot all the terrorists until they die from it. You may laugh, but I bet you there’s at least a hand full of “next-gen” shooters in development right now with the exact same premise. Anyway, the narrative is irrelevant in this context, just watch this little gameplay video and see if you recognize anything.

 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rz4oNZqw9eA&feature=related
 

(Before any complaints about the quality, this isn’t my video it’s just the most illustrative one I could find on YouTube.)

Yup there it is. That cover system that we all know and (hopefully) love in all it’s glory. You may also notice it’s aiming mode is the sort of “precision fire” laser sight assisted type popularised by Resident Evil 4. While that never became a standard itself, it’s still pretty amusing to see it being used in such a similar way over 5 years earlier than most people would expect.

Speaking of RE4, I’d say WinBack’s 2006 sequel, WinBack 2: Project Poseidon is also worth a mention. It didn’t do anything new as such, but it was one of the first games to combine RE4’s “over-the-shoulder” aiming perspective with the cover mechanic it’s predecessor pioneered, a combination that most certainly DID become a standard!

Why was it forgotten? Really bad timing.

Despite the evolutionary leaps forward for the genre, the WinBack series was a victim of some truly awful timing on multiple occasions. By the time of it’s release in 1999 the PS1 had already spent a good few years beating the N64 into irrelevancy, destroying any chance WinBack had of stardom. It was eventually re-released in 2001 as an early PS2 game, but even with a significant graphical overhaul it came across as somewhat dated, and ended up being buried underneath the multitude of major blockbusters that came out that year.

WinBack 2: Project Poseidon ran into similar problems. When it came out in 2006 all three major 7th generation platforms had launched, meaning the expectations placed on any games that were part of the mighty PS2’s (and mighty huge Xbox’s) swan song were rather high. So despite yet another evolutionary step forward in gameplay mechanics, WinBack once again came across as lacking, especially when the revolutionary graphical bonanza Gears of War was only a few months away from release. But would Gears of War of have ever existed at all without WinBack? I guess we’ll never know for sure.

Where are the developers now? Hacking ‘n Slashing.

When I was doing research for this article, I was totally prepared for this section to be ultra depressing. I expected for these noble game developers to whom we owe so much to have faded away from memory just as their games did, and that their teams had been disbanded by mean old publishers never to heard from again. I was wrong. Oh so wrong. Because I’d forgotten who made WinBack; a small development team owned by Koei (now known as Tecmo Koei) called Omega Force. So then, what did Omega Force do after their revolutionary third person shooter was a flop? Well it seems they decided to revisit their first title, a fighting game on the PS1 called Sangoku Musou. Don’t recognise the name? Well lets just say westerners know it as Dynasty Warriors.

Calling Omega Force prolific would be a bloody understatement; since 1997 there’s been a mind blowing 40 titles bearing the “Warriors” name, and they don’t seem to be showing any signs of slowing down (even though Capcom’s copycat franchise Sengoku Basara is WAAAAY cooler).

But just to make sure you realise that not all these stories have a happy ending; Cavia, who developed WinBack 2, didn’t have it quite so good. They spent most of the last decade developing a vast range of distinctly average tie-in games for pre-existing franchises like Ghost in the Shell and Dragon Ball Z, none of which received much critical acclaim. The only games they worked on that you’re likely to have heard of are Resident Evil: Darkside/Umbrella Chronicles and Neir Gestalt/Replicant. In late 2010 Cavia was disbanded, and I think I must be one of the few people who actually cared. You see, Cavia were also responsible for Drakengard on the PS2, which despite some awful gameplay had one of my favourite storylines ever. Rest in peace Cavia.

 

Body Harvest (N64)

Without it it we might not have had: GTA, Just Cause, Assassins Creed.

What did it pioneer? 3D Sandboxes in console games.

Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but sandboxes are a big deal these days. It’s not really surprising since they represent the pinnacle of what modern gaming hardware can accomplish; wide open worlds where you can go where you please and do anything you want with the abilities the game provides.  It gives us a rather gratifying amount of freedom from the linear style progression that’s been the foundation of games since gaming began, and for pioneering that experience I think we owe 1998’s Body Harvest by DMA Design a debt of gratitude.

But just so we’re clear, I am in no way saying 3D sandbox games didn’t exist before Body Harvest, that would be a outright lie. Hunter for the Amiga and Atari ST is generally considered to be the first of its kind, and it came out way back in 1991. Further more, Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall for the PC which came out in 1996 is still to date largest 3D sandbox in gaming history by a significant margin, dwarfing all competition at a staggering 62,394 square miles large. To put that into perspective: you could fit the ginormous Just Cause 2 into Daggerfall 155 times and still have enough room for the entirety of Azeroth.  In some ways Body Harvest it wasn’t even the first  3D open world game on a console either, you could easily argue that Mario 64 beat it to the punch on that one by a long way.

But the concept itself isn’t the issue here, it’s the scope and the platform. True 3D sandbox games as we know them now, ones that span many towns and cities, were the soul privilege of PC gamers for longest of times. Consoles simply weren’t capable of providing a decent enough large scale 3D environment that people actually wanted to explore the way we do now. It essentially locked a vast majority of gamers, particularly the younger sort, out of the whole experience of a sandbox environments. That is, until Body Harvest came along and showed us how it was done. Not that many people noticed of course.

What was it? A bunch of open worlds with plenty of tools mess them up with.

 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoghhwV1ZCI&feature=related
 

In short, Body Harvest was ambitious, violent, innovative and downright awesome in a lot of ways, but like most games of the era it had a fairly simple premise. You play Adam Drake, a space marine sent back in time to prevent various cullings of the human race by alien insects at different points in earth’s history. Each time period had it’s own unique fairly large (for the time) sandbox to explore, with the overall mission in each being to find and destroy the shield generator that keeps the local populace at the aliens mercy.

These sandboxes had just about everything we would associate with a modern open world game: guns, cars, missions, side missions, hidden collectibles and most importantly, vehicles you could steal at the touch of a button. Those vehicles weren’t just cars either, you could jack anything from a submarine to a helicopter, all of which were period specific to each time frame. It really puts a lot of contemporary Sandboxes to shame in terms of variety.

Another thing it had in common with modern sandboxes (one that I doubt Nintendo was best pleased about) was the ability to slaughter innocent civilians at a whim and watch them collapse into a pool of their own blood after giving off one final scream of pain. It was pretty graphic stuff for the time but at least the developers put in a mechanism to help keep homicidal tendencies in check, which is probably how it got away with only a T rating. It was really cool how it worked though, just below your own health bar was a second gauge that measured the number of civilians that had been “harvested” by aliens or killed by your actions in that time period and should that gauge ever be filled to the max then you would automatically get a game over. It’s a somewhat far cry from today’s open world games that more often than not encourage relentless carnage. But that’s not to say you couldn’t raise a little hell in Body Harvest if you wanted to! Plenty of objects could be bulldozed over or obliterated with heavy ordnance if you so desired, something even PC based open world games didn’t really offer back then.

Why was it forgotten? Mistargeted, ugly and again bad timing.

Despite managing to do fairly well with what passed for video game “critics” in the 90s, Body Harvest had the same problem as WinBack: the horrible misfortune of being released on the N64. A beautiful console yes, but also one where the games had to retail at an absolutely staggering £72/$117 (accounting for late 90s UK inflation) just to cover the construction costs of those lovely cartridges. Essentially that meant if you wanted to buy an N64 game it had to look and sound pretty damm good to be worth the money.

That “Looks good” part was a bit of a problem for Body Harvest, as even by the very low standards of the time it looked absolutely ghastly. Which is no surprise considering It was originally meant to be a launch title for the N64, but due to the objections by Shigeru Miyamoto over the games adult content it ended up getting delayed by nearly 2 years. Not only that but it was also a completely new IP, which just like today meant that there was no brand awareness to act as any sort of guarantee of the games quality to potential buyers. DMA couldn’t even rely on their successful Lemmings franchise for leverage, as this was WAY before most console gamers were savvy enough to bother tracking who made what.

You also had the little problem that the N64 (and console gaming in general) was primarily aimed at youngsters at the time, people who were unlikely to have that sort of wonga as pocket money. The result of that was that the purchase of games, and ultimately the selection process itself, was likely to be performed by parents on the prowl for anything that might harm their poor little child’s psyche. So lets do a little role play, Imagine you’re an average parent in ‘98 on the lookout for a nice birthday present for your child. They said they wanted a game for their N64, so let take a look whats out at the moment.

Banjo Kazooi, a game about a cute animated cartoon like bear called Bajo and his bird buddy Kazooie on a quest to rescue Banjo’s sister form an evil wicked witch. Well, that sounds pretty wholesome doesn’t it! I’m sure they’ll love it. Hmm lets see what else is here before we decide though….

………OH MY!

Yeah, the cover art (in Europe at least) didn’t really do Body Harvest any favors, especially as it featured what appears at first glance to be a pair of exposed buttocks. Even if the parents got as far as reading the back of the box they would likely find it’s subject matter off-putting enough to give it a miss in favor of something else a little more low key.

To top it all off, Body Harvest had the absolute motherload of misfortune by being released a mater of weeks before what is considered by many to be one of the greatest games ever created.

Whether Body Harvest was actually a full on flop or not is hard to tell, as back then it was still quite hard to get hold of that sort of information and the few people who actually worked on it haven’t made much in the way of public comments on the matter. But without a doubt it was overshadowed, overlooked and ignored, thus failing to find the place in mainstream gaming history it deserved. Do I shed a tear for DMA design then? No.

Where are the developers now? Literally selling gangbusters.

Some of you might be surprised to know that you’ve heard of DMA design before. In fact, you’ve played and probably loved a lot of their games on many occasions. They go under a different name these days though: Rockstar North.

Yes THAT Rockstar. The guys who like making the game industry their bitch on a regular basis, usually via their somewhat renowned Grand Theft Auto franchise. The GTAs were already a successful 2D sandbox series at the time of Body Harvest’s release, and that was despite (or as some argue, because of) what would later Rockstar’s trademark: the deafening howls of angry mothers who were utterly convinced GTA was the spawn of Satan himself.

But when Rockstar combined GTA with the 3D sandbox elements they had pioneered with Body Harvest in order to make GTA3 in 2001, THAT’S when shit got real. That’s when devs started realising that making 3D sandbox games on consoles was kinda awesome (read: profitable) that’s when almost everybody started calling every sandbox game a GTA clone, and that’s when the course of game design was forever changed.

But without Body Harvest, there’s a good chance none of that would have been possible. For all we know the very idea of having a 3D sandbox game on a console and not a PC could have still sounded absurd by now, much like how the idea of a console based RTS is still considered fairly ridiculous. But either way, Body Harvest was rocking the 3D sandbox on consoles WAY before it was cool. Oh, and it was pretty damm fun too!

Frequency (PS2)

Without it we might not have had: Guitar Hero, Rock Band, Tat Tap Revenge + just about any rhythm game that’s not a Japanese import.

Just a bit of a disclaimer: I know that people can get very….erm… opinionated when it comes to comparing rhythm games. So I’d like to say right now that I’m very sorry if my observations on this subject turn out to be contradictory to your own, all I’m doing is telling it how I see it.

What did it pioneer? Western style rhythm games.

Mario vs Sonic, Doom vs Quake, Call of Duty vs Battlefield, Fifa vs Pro Evo. Rivaling IPs have always been a hallmark of the game industry’s history, and one of the most defining of the recent era would definitely be Rock Band vs Guitar Hero. They were two IPs that desperately battled for domination over the (formerly) very lucrative rhythm game market and were constantly trying to outdo each other with every iteration. But unlike the other rivalry’s I listed, they were fighting over a genre that that only became a viable big time money-spinner relatively recently. If you were to back in time to about 6 years from now (now being 2011, just in case you’re reading this via the archive) and started telling everyone that rhythm games would soon be a multimillion dollar business in the western world then you would likely become the object of considerable jeer.

Don’t get me wrong, in a way there was a lot of money to be made in rhythm games back then, provided of course you were part of Konami’s “Bemani” music game division which was flooding the Japanese arcades with exceedingly popular (to this day) Dance Dance Revolution, Beatmania and GuitarFreaks cabinets. But even those weren’t really taken very seriously in the home retail sector as they were considered little more than novelty party games to the masses outside of Asia. So what changed? Well we owe our new found reverence of the rhythm game genre to one company in particular: Harmonix Music systems, who after a decade of obscurity released the landmark Guitar Hero in 2005 which woke westerners up to how fun rhythm games could actually be.

The characteristics of these kinds of games should be familiar to most people, even if you’ve only ever glanced at one you’ve probably at least got the basic gist of it. Basically there’s a big conveyor belt sort of thing that’s separated into several lanes and each lane is filled with little buttons representing notes in the music for that stage. To make those notes play correctly you have to wait for them to reach the bottom of the screen and then with the correct timing press the the correct button on your controller relevant to that lane while…… uh…… you know what? That’s probably not the best description in the world. Just watch the first few seconds of this video and we should all be on the same page.

 

 

As genius as Harmonix is, this style of gameplay was in no way their creation. Instead they totally riped off took inspiration from Konami’s Bemani titles, particularly GuitarFreaks which uses a near identical guitar peripheral to Guitar Hero/Rock Band. But it wasn’t the mechanics of rhythm game gameplay that Harmonix revolutionised as such, it was the presentation and the content.

As you can see from the picture above, the way Bemani style games look is very different, and to be honest relatively drab compared to what westerners are used to. One side of the screen is reserved for simplistic (but admittedly very awesome) pre-rendered animations, the conveyor belt is vertical to the screen instead of at a 45 degree angle, the buttons are very subtle 2D sprites and the UI is very cluttered. What’s more, almost every song in Bemani titles where either specifically made for the game or taken from the back catalogues of Japanese artists that (understandably) only Asians would have likley heard of.

What I’m trying to say is that even though mechanically Bemanis are nearly identical to western rhythm games like Rock Band or Tap Tap Revenge, there’s still no way you would ever be able to confuse the two because their ascetics and content are so radically different and that’s all thanks to one particular pioneering Harmonix game. Without it rhythm games would have likely never been popular outside of japan and the entire sub-industry of music games simply wouldn’t exist in any form at all in the west.

So we owe everything to Guitar Hero right? Well yes and no. Guitar Hero was certainly the first popular Harmonix rhythm game and undeniably the one that breathed life into the genre. However it wouldn’t  exist without a certain other game, one that was the true pioneer of western style rhythm games. Harmonix’s other game: Frequency released in 2001 on the PS2.

What was it? A blueprint.

 

 

This look familiar? It should do! It served as the basis for almost every subsequent rhythm game for over a decade after it’s release! There weren’t any peripherals involved at this point but other than that you still got the 3D buttons, angled conveyor belts, licenced English tracks, snazzy 3D effects and all that Jazz that laid the foundations for Guitar Hero.

Surprisingly the gameplay was actually a little less derivative of Bemani games than Harmonix’s later works; instead of “playing” a single conveyor belt of notes you actually had up to 8 different ones you could switch between at any time using the R1 and L1 buttons and each of them corresponded to a different element of the music such as bass, vocals, synth, lead guitar etc. Once you’d hit enough notes correctly then that belt would begin to play itself automatically for a time, allowing you to switch to a different belt without that element of the music stopping. This meant that rather than just influencing one instrument in the virtual band while the rest of it played perfectly, you were instead gradually building the song up from nothing bit by bit. It was a little weird but also incredibly satisfying.

Of course the reason Frequency is on this list is because wasn’t exactly a mega hit. In fact it wouldn’t be wrong to say that it didn’t do well at all. Regardless, Harmonix didn’t give up and eventually released an improved sequel named Amplitude (pictured above) in 2003 which went on to…. also not do too well. But still, peripheral makers RedOctane took notice of Frequency/Amplitude and later commissioned Harmonix to combine it with what were essentially knock off GuitarFreaks controllers. The rest is history.

Sadly Frequency as it’s own franchise hasn’t been heard from since, but Harmonix did see fit to give it spiritual sequels in the form of Lego Rock Band DS and Rock Band: Unplugged (PSP) both of which bare Frequency’s on the fly instrument swapping mechanism. Not exactly a fitting tribute for a game with such a significant legacy, but I guess I can’t really blame them considering how few people would actually care.

Why was it forgotten? Obscure music and no physical instruments.

The most immediately apparent reason it never came even close to the meteoric success of its successor is that it lacked any kind of peripheral, something that these days we would consider an absolutely essential part of the experience. Part of the whole draw of music games is that they allow you to immerse yourself the illusion that you’re actually playing the music rather than just telling a computer when to play some pre-recorded soundbites. However without the physical instruments it was impossible to make that illusion particularly convincing, especially since Frequency let you switch which instrument you were playing whenever you wanted at the touch of a button.

But beyond that there was a far simpler and more depressing reason that Harmonix’s magnum opus didn’t really take off. Although the in-game music was made up of licenced tracks with very high production values most of the artists were so distinctly “underground” that a vast majority of players wouldn’t have had even the slightest clue who the hell any of them were. The only vaguely recognisable name on the playlist were the Freezepops, who even today are relatively obscure to mainstream music fans. Amplitude managed to do a little better in that department thanks to a single track each from Blink-182, David Bowie, Weezer and Slipknot. But other than that it was still far too obscure to garner mass market attention, and it’s that mass market you need to appeal to if you want your game to sell.

That’s something Harmonix learnt the hard way in 2004 when they took a break from music games and released a monition controlled  extreme sports game called EyeToy: AntiGrav for the PS2. Despite a distinctive “meh” from critics compared to Frequency/ Amplitude’s “hell yes!” it went on to sell way more copies than both those games combined. Honestly, It’s a miracle they just didn’t give up on the whole thing right there and then.

Where are the developers now? Recovering from a music game meltdown.

From the moment Guitar Hero hit the scene in 2005, realised there wasn’t actually a scene to hit, then made one out of thin air, then hit it, Harmonix went from obscure down on their luck developer to one of the biggest names in the industry. Of course inevitably this lead to Activision coming along in 2007 and buying up RedOctane (thus obtaining the Guitar Hero IP rights) in order to save them the trouble of having to develop a rival franchise from the ground up. It was a bold move at the time but these days it’s kinda just their thing I guess, sorta like a force of nature.

This didn’t slow Harmonix down one bit, within a year they launched a new rhythm game franchise called Rock Band, basically just a better version of Guitar Hero that introduced support for microphones and a new range of drum kit peripherals, both of which became industry standards soon after. Unfortunately Rock Band never managed to out perform the now Activision controlled Guitar Hero franchise in therms of total sales, but it was still a major success that earned Harmonix hefty financial bonuses from Viacom (their new publisher).

But as you’re probably aware, the good times eventually came to and end in 2010 when the entire music game sector totally collapsed. Sales of both the latest iterations of Rock Band, Guitar Hero, DJ Hero and newcomers Power Gig were abysmally low, and that was despite Rock Band 3 being heralded by many critics as the greatest music game of all time. Ironically Harmonix’s other 2010 music game Dance Central manged to totally circumvent the crash by virtue of being the only Kinect game that didn’t kinda suck. Still, that wasn’t enough to stop everyone involved taking a gargantuan hit financially that they weren’t really expecting.

Now I wouldn’t (yet) call myself an expert industry analyst or anything, but pining down some of the factors that lead to the crash ain’t rocket science. like a lot of the big issues in game development over the last year or so, it involved Activision doing what they do best: milking the cash cow till its udders bleed. If you include all the various spin offs such as DJ Hero and Band Hero there have been a staggering 14 different titles in the Guitar Hero franchise in the 5 or so years since they too the reigns. Essentially the entire rhythm game audience was so spoilt for choice that it was far more appealing to buy one of the many older titles at knocked down prices second hand than it was to buy anything new. If you combine all that with a post-recession public who are far less willing to splash out on expensive pretend instruments than they used to be and you end up with a state of play where no one can profit no matter how good their product is.

Anyway whatever the reasons were, the fallout was still harsh. Activision demolished what was left of RedOctane and Neversoft (the guys who took Harmonix’s place) putting an indefinite end to the Guitar Hero franchise that had once dominated the gaming scene. At one point it looked like Harmonix would join them too as Viacom started frantically tried to sell off the legendary company that by their own admission they had no idea how to handle anymore. But to the surprise of many (myself especially) Harmonix was neither disbanded nor sold off to a major publisher. Thanks to some timely assistance from investment firm Columbus Nova, Harmonix essentially bough themselves from Viacom and once again became an fully independent game development team, albeit one that had to axe ~15% of their staff to stay sustainable.

Now that all their competition have bit the dust and Activision have publicly sworn off music games for the time being, they essentially rule the roost of the sector they nearly single handedly created anyway. Where they’ll go from there is anyone’s guess, but I think its safe to say that Frequency 3 isn’t on the cards right now.

 

Herzog Zwei (Mega Drive-Genesis)

Without it we might not have had: Command and Conquer, Age of Empires, Warcraft (and by extension, Starcraft and World of Warcraft!)

What did it pioneer? The Real Time Strategy genre.

I’ve often found Real Time Strategy (RTS) games to be the marmite of gaming; for most people the tedious micromanaging of units and the constant balancing of resources is the very definition of boredom, but to others it represents a gateway to a deep rewarding experience that just keeps on giving. So it’s unsurprising that RTS games have always been a quintessential PC  based genre, itself a rather “marmite” platform to play games on these days due to similar connotations. But despite the PC’s (unwarranted) reputation as a “dead format” RTSs are still a pretty big deal, you just need to look at the furore surrounding the release of StarCraft 2 or the upcoming Shogun 2: Total War for evidence of that.

The RTSs continuing popularity is mostly due to it’s multiplayer components arguably still providing the ultimate contest of whits and skill that can be found in a video game. In a good match each player’s minds are constantly bombarded with a staggering level of statistics and variables that change by the second, all of which require analyses and response in the fastest time possible in order to grasp victory. For better or worse this sort of gameplay often brings out an intensely competitive side of anyone who lets it drawn them in, and if you’ve ever met someone who takes RTSs seriously then you know how deep that rabbit hole can go. At a moment’s notice they can recited so much statistical jargon and specialised lingo that pulls a game apart down to such a base level you would think they built the damm thing themselves.

If you want to see the logical extreme of such behaviour you need only look towards South Korea where RTSs have become somewhat of a national sport, one that can be taken as seriously as a high profile football match would be in the UK. They even have cyber “athletes” who train 24/7 just so they can mine that precious gold/vespene gas a few milliseconds faster than their opponent. Seriously, these guys make fighting game enthusiasts who count animation frames to gain advantage come across as “casuals” with relative ease.

 

 

But RTS isn’t just for the ultra-competitive gaming gladiators, without it we wouldn’t have those tower defence games that slowly eat away hundreds of hours of casual player’s lives every day. And if you take a slightly more abstract view, just about any game that requires intensive resource management such as Farmville owe their success to the RTS school of game design.

However the reason I want to talk about it in this article is because the actual chronology of the RTS game as concept is very unique. Most of the time genres develop slowly overtime, with many iterative video games giving us insight into its gradual evolution. RTS on the other hand just kinda popped out of nowhere with Herzog Zwei in 1989 and no one was quite sure what to do with it.

I should say that there are strategy games that predate Herzog Zwei that were indeed “real time” but they’re very far removed from what we would now actually define as an “RTS” mainly due to their very minimal emphasis on resource management and ticks (the pace at which gameplay moves) so long that they were rendered more or less turn based. Herzong Zwei on the other hand is where the RTS as we know it truly began, and for that monumental achievement it is criminally under appreciated.

What was it? A vision of the future

 

 

The original Herzog (German for Duke) for the MSX 2 PC was billed by the developers TechnoSoft as a “Real-time Combat Simulator”. The basic idea was that the game world was a narrow linear path with the player’s base and one end at the enemy’s at the other. Using a singular resource that replenished overtime at a constant rate either side could create several different sorts of units such as tanks or foot soldiers, and If any of those units managed to reach the opposite side of the field then they would deal a certain amount of damage to that side’s base .

You couldn’t actually control any of these units directly, they would simply travel in a straight line towards the enemy base and attack any defences along the way without any input from the player. But unlike most modern strategy games the player actually had a personal avatar, a giant robot called the Land-Armour. Using the Land-Armour you could pick up and reposition units as well as getting personally involved in the combat if you so choose. In effect the whole thing was like a Defence of the Ancients style game that was made long before Defence of the Ancients even existed. Certainly an intrepid game for sure, and you could definitely see the seeds of what would later become RTS developing in the background. But it unfortunately lacked any real semblance of tactics and there was little to nothing in the way of resource management to be found.

However Herzog Zwei (Zwei being German for 2) took those seedling concepts and fast forwarded their evolution by several years. Suddenly “pop” we had a recognisable near fully fledged RTS on our hands. The battlefields were now wide open environments full of different kinds of terrain, units now had to be given specific orders and your rate of resource gain now revolved around capturing and defending outposts. You could still wade into combat on your own using the Land-Armour if you wanted to, but this time around your health and ammo was severely limited so you were unlikely to make much of a dent in enemy forces on your own. No, to win this game you had to use tactics and ingenuity to build a balanced and sustainable army, something that most console gamers hadn’t been asked to do before.

The level of micromanagement was staggering even compared to modern standards as every unit had to be given individual orders (something that actually consumed resources to do) and have their ammo and health supplies constantly monitored. So with up to 50 units of 8 different types on each side it could very quickly get overwhelming even for a modern gamer. What’s more you still couldn’t directly control your units, so all actions had to be performed by interacting with them via Land-Armour rather than the point and click style interface you’d find in a normal RTS. If you’re not sure why that would be a bit awkward, just imagine trying to play an arcade shooter and Command & Conquer at the same time on the same screen. Yeah.

 

 

It was as if TechnoSoft had travelled into the future, saw an RTS, returned to their own time, though “Yeah we could probably make one of those” and then fashioned the closest facsimile they could manage with late 80s technology and expertise but somehow ended up building something even more complicated that what they’d originally seen.

Why was it forgotten? Gamers weren’t ready for it and neither was the AI.

Herzong Zwei’s biggest issue was the same thing that made it a pioneer; there wasn’t really anything like it. So if RTS didn’t yet exist as an accepted mainstream genre what framework was left for people to judge it by? Well TechnoSoft’s only real claim to fame was their relatively popular Thunder Force series of arcade style shooters and the Mega Drive had quite a few of those already, so naturally people just assumed it was meant to be one of those. Although the cover art probably had a hand in that too.

Of course If you looked at it from the perspective of an arcade shooter it was a pretty shoddy game; your weapons were pea shooters and you died in mere seconds against a more than a handful of opponents. Not only that but would have come across as incredibly complicated for a game where people were just expecting to hold down the fire button while occasional taping the D-pad. <rant> Which just goes to show how stupid it is to judge a game based on how well it conforms to established genres, it means anything original just gets shafted! </rant>

However even those who embraced the tactics and resource managed would have quickly found Herzog Zwei to be lacking. Sure, the game had complex mechanics but the A.I. was so dumb that the developers had to give it a significantly higher number of starting units on each map to try and even the odds a little. In the end you only needed to use minimal amounts of the tactical opportunities Herzog Zwei presented in order to win, that is unless you somehow managed to find a second player who wanted to join in.

So in the end it got dismissed by a vast majority of gamers, none of whom could have possibly known what would eventually become of the style of gameplay that Herzong Zwei pioneered. That said, it has seen somewhat of a revival in recent years as people are finally starting to wise up to how incredibly ahead of the game TechnoSoft had been, but sadly it all came far far too late to save them.

Where are the developers now? Nowhere to be found.

After Herzog Zwei failed to catch on, TechnoSoft just went back to their far simpler Thunder Force games for several years which saw moderate success but little mainstream fame. Eventually it that all came to an abrupt end in 2001 when they got merged with Pachinko developer Twenty One’s R&D division, essentially ending their long but uneventful streak in game development permanently. There were some hints on their (supposedly) official website that they’d be making a comeback in 2006 with a new Thunder Force game, but they haven’t been heard from since and In 2008 when it turned out the Thunder Force IP was now owned by SEGA anyway. But screw Thunder Force! Not sure who owns the Herzog licence these days, but they gotta know that their sitting on a truly legendary IP that’s long overdue a comeback. Herzong Drei anybody?

 

Raiders of the Lost Ark (Atari 2600)

Without it we might not have had: a never ending amount of very very bad games and the 1983 video game crash.

What did it pioneer? Movie tie-in games

Not really much for me to explain on this one, even if you’re not into gaming at all you already know the score anyway: When a new Hollywood produced family film that looks like it will be even moderately successful arrives on the scene you can bet just about anything they’ll be at least one half-assed shovelware tie-in game based on it. If your lucky the game will stay exclusive to the DS and Wii, but a lot of the time it will come out on just about every platform imaginable thus ensuring that there’s absolutely no escape from its loathsome visage. Either way it’s almost guaranteed to suck yet still manage to sell a metric shit-tone of copies purely due to an association with a over-hyped movie combined with the unrelenting nagging power of children who thought that movie was kinda alright because it had talking animals in it.

It might seem humdrum now, but back in 1982 Raiders of the Lost Ark for the Atari 2600 ticked all those check boxes before they even existed; a console game of extremely dubious quality that managed to sell really well by riding the success of a popular movie. So yeah, it basically set a cast iron president that hundreds of games have followed to the letter ever since. Hey, I never said these games all pioneered something GOOD.

What was it? Mind-bending

Hmm… how to define Raiders of the Lost Ark? Okay, I’m sure at some point nearly every gamer has experienced this: Your playing a game like Zelda or Tomb Raider or something along those lines and suddenly you get stuck at a particularly perplexing puzzle. In equal parts frustration and desperation you start trying every combination of item, tool, ability and button press that you can possibly think of until you’ve done just about everything that you could possibly do in that given environment. Eventually just as you’re about to give up on the game entirely you stumble upon the correct solution. A solution so abstract and illogical that you can only conclude it was developed by someone with a very tenuous grip on reality or was included purely to sell strategy guides, and that’s what every moment Raiders of the Lost Ark was like. I’m not really sure I can define its madness anymore specifically than that with just words, so instead I’ll show you a nice little video guide from ‘82 that should help you understand what I’m on about.

 

Bet that puts that whole “water temple thing” into perspective.

 

Why was it forgotten? It’s hella old and got overshadowed by the “achievements” of it’s protégé.

I think it’s more than fair to say that a lot of the people reading this article were probably quite young in 1982, if indeed they were born at all. I think its also fair to say that anyone of any age would have found Raiders of the Lost Ark totally bewildering in every imaginable way, so it’s not really that surprising it failed to make much of an impression on gamers as a whole. Mind you it was hard for any Atari 2600 game to stand out back then as the video game industry was on the verge of collapse due to a gigantic influx of low quality titles that numbered hundreds flooding the market. It’s a situation that eventually resulted in a sort of dark age known as the “video game crash of 1983” where most major publishers went bankrupt and video gaming industry just ceased to exist in the west for a number of years.

Raiders of the Lost Ark’s significant contribution to the crash was dramatically overshadowed by the game it made possible, Atari’s E.T (also for the 2600) a game so catastrophically awful that it’s often credited with instigating the crash in the first place and has thus became a major subject of popular culture. While E.T may well have been the herald of that particular apocalypse, all it was doing was following the template Raiders of the Lost Ark had proven to be profitable as have the many hundreds of other games that followed in it’s footsteps since and shall continue to do so into the foreseeable future. That said, if you dig a little deeper you’ll find that Raiders actually had a much more direct influence on E.T than that.

Just like today getting a licence to do a movie tie-in was extremely expensive in the 80s, so to design Raiders of the Lost Ark Atari had to chose someone they could trust to pull it off. For that they looked to a man named Howard Scott Warshaw, designer of the genuinely well received Yar’s Revenge which is often considered the best game of the Atari 2600 era. After Howard’s subsequent “Success” with Raiders he was then select by Atari to do another movie-tie in project, one that had cost Atari over $45 million (adjusted for inflation) to licence. The deadline was tight: only six weeks, and Howard would be working on the whole thing on his own. But no one was worried, Raiders of the Lost Ark had proved it didn’t matter how bad your game was as long as you slapped a movie name on it. In fact Atari were so confident about Howard’s game that, under the assumption people would want to buy it multiple times, they actually built more cartridges of it than there were console to play it on in the entire world. I’m sure you can tell where I’m going with this…….

For all that it made possible I think Raiders should be remembered. Mainly so we can teach future generations to hate it with a fiery passion, but remembered all the same.

Where are the developers now? Thankfully for us, not making games anymore.

After being a major contributing factor in the collapse of an entire industry it’s unsurprising Howard didn’t really do much game designing from then on. However he did manage to do a very wide range of other stuff including (but not limited to) writing a guide book to a Philippine gambling game, writing a self-help book on how to do well in collage and directing a documentary about the BDSM scene in San Fransisco. Truly a Renaissance man if ever there was one, as this Little amusing quote I found while researching for this article (i.e. reading wikipedia) illustrates:

“People worry I might be sensitive about the ET debacle, but the fact is I’m always happy to discuss it. After all, it was the fastest game ever done, it was a million seller, and of the thousands of 2600 games, how many others are still a topic? Another thing I like to think about is having done ET (consistently rated among the worst games of all time) and Yars’ Revenge (consistently rated as one of the best) I figure I have the unique distinction of having the greatest range of any game designer in history.”

And so ends our little journey into the obscure. I really hope you’ve enjoyed reading about these overlooked progenitors even if you knew about them already! However these 5 games only represent a small proportion of whats out there. So now I pose a question to you: What other influential games do you think have been unfairly forgotten by the masses at large? Please comment and spread the word, I’d love to here about them!