Pages for the eras of Video Games

Okay, I now just need to know how advances in technology contributed to all of those genres. Since I know that some of these genres wouldn't exist without sufficient advancement in technology. I also need to know general trends in how games were developed.

Really, you're better off asking someone else at this point. I'll only give you some more info when it comes to FPS games and technical progression.

Textwall here

edited 19th Oct '12 2:19:39 PM by RocketDude

Any contribution from anyone is good. Thanks for your text wall.

You can look at the ULTIMATE RPG PROJECT thread to see a decent chronology of western rpgs, and history of fps videos are common on youtube. I'm going to try to cover technological advances in adventure games.

When users first started getting affordable home computers, there was little in the way of graphical power. They had two colors and were mostly text based, so it was much easier to make a game that's all text. Adventure (1976) is credited as being the first game of this kind. I believe it was based off of Tabletop Role Playing Games such as Dungeons And Dragons. It's supposed to imitate the freedom and spontaneous storytelling of those sessions, I'm sure. However, since no programmer can predict every single thing every person is going to try to do when playing the game, they developed a verb system: a short list of verbs which the game recognized. This limitted the players choice somewhat, which allowed them to more easily predict what might happen and still gave the semblance of freedom to do what you want. Many other games were made with this style, most notably the Zork series.

Enter Sierra On Line, one of the biggest names in adventure games for a long time because they were for most of their time constantly pushing the adventure game forward in how new technologies were used. First Mystery House (1980) introduced graphics to the style. The graphics were simple and had no animation, making it very similar to an interactive slide show. Later more sofisticated graphics and color were added. These games still had the same text parser as the older games, but now users could actually really see the game.

Later, Kings Quest was released for the IBM PC Jr computer. This game introduced the third person perspective, allowing the player to directly control the chracter via keyboard. This allowed for time based actions as well as still using the text based parser from the past. Sierra would continue to release more games in this style most of them with the word "Quest" in their name. They continued to improve the graphics and technology.

The mouse introduced the idea of the point and click adventure game. Point and click games had one big advantage over the text parser. The player now no longer had to guess how the game wanted you to say something. It also made preciting responses from the player a little easier since they could control what the player could try a little more. This is also when Lucas Arts started entering the adventure scene.

Maniac Mansion is the first big point and click adventure game (There were other games that experimented with the idea before them, such as Déjà Vu). The game featured a verb based system close the the text parser idea. The players had a list of verbs at the bottom of the screen they could choose from and apply these verbs to any objects on the screen. Sierra developed their own system with a smaller set of verbs (as time went on, the number of verb choices has shrunk, until it reached the point where you just click on things to interact with them in a predetermined way). CD technology allowed for the games to be voiced as well as providing Full Motion video, which led to a few live action games, but this is kind of a side bar because those games were found to be less viable than games with animated graphics.

Enter Myst. Using 3d rendering technology, Myst presented environments in a way that had never been seen before. Notably, it also went back to the first person persective as well. There were many Myst clones produced, it's basically its own genre.

Soon after that was the initial decline of adventure games. However, they have seen a small humble reemergence of the genre, with the popularity of retro style gaming, as well as many companies releasing their own games. Some games just imitated the old style, but others took advantage of new technologies to provide great looking 3d environments as well as again showing the character from the 3rd person perspective. This is where The Longest Journey and Syberia come in.

For a slightly different perspective on this history, check out All You History's take on the genre, starting here.

@Rocket Dude: You say that 3D was always possible since the early home computer era, but out of curiosity, was 3D also possible on the workstation era that came before?

Possibly, yeah, Spasim was in a 3D environment, though I don't think it was developed on a workstation. I think it might have been designed for a US Army contest.

I'm gonna throw out that the seventh generation could easily be called the App Generation.

With regards to RTS, they're relatively "younger" than RP Gs and sidescrollers because they're quite complex games. Not really an accurate chronology but Westwood Studios was the ones that popularized the genre (I forgot who made the first RTS though). Dune, Command & Conquer, and then C&C: Red Alert. This actually inspired Blizzard to do something they haven't done before: an RTS. Hence Warcraft was born. Starcraft followed, albeit not immediately because there was something called "Diablo" that appeared in the interim. LOL.

Here's a good article on Starcraft development.

I miss the arcade. They're effectively dead now - pinball died a sad lonely death and here hasn't been a unique arcade game in well on a decade. Back in the 80s-90s, it seemed something new and different came out every week. Now it's the same old-same old.

Ironically enough, the home systems were what killed the arcade. In the early days it was that the arcade version was always superior to 'the home version'. And then the tortoise passed the hare. There was no longer any point to the arcade - why pay to play when you can just pay a lump sum and have it forever with graphics equal to or even better than the arcade version? And then of course arcade game prices rose as home system sales did and soon nobody bothered any more - now they're just a small room in movie theaters filled with games that are all the same but with different names.

The arcade is dead.

And we killed it with our own two thumbs.

edited 19th Oct '12 11:31:38 PM by VeniVidiPony

Have you been to Japan lately? Most SHMU Ps and Fighting Games are optimized for arcades and have arcade versions at release. There's also all those gigantic networked pods for the various mecha games, as well as all those card based games that youngsters spend way too much money on and the weird touchscreen fishing games that I see many old folks attached to.

Rhythm games and racing games are also doing well. Bishi Bashi is still trundling along. Arcades certainly aren't dead.

I eagerly await the day that THIS or THIS can be done on a home console. Until then, I say that arcades still get the best stuff.

edited 19th Oct '12 11:56:34 PM by Recon5

Your location is "Southeast Asia", you don't have to go that far for arcades. There's still a lot of arcades here in the Philippines, for example. There's Tom's World, Worlds of Fun, Quantum, and Timezone (Australian company).

Touche. Japan and occasionally China still get the new stuff first, though, and apart from cheap knock-offs nothing's actually being made in our countries.

Correction: Warcraft came before Command And Conquer, and even Warcraft 2 was only a few months after C&C. Red Alert came after all of these, including the W2 expansion.

Also, Dune was an adventure game (of sorts); Dune 2 was Warcraft (and C&C)'s predecessor as far as the RTS genre is concerned.

And there was Herzog Zwei, which came before Dune II, though the latter made RTS popular.

True.

Real-Time Strategy is newer, but it has its roots in turn based strategy, which has a much deeper history. I think Tower Defense then would be the next evolution after Real-Time Strategy.

Speaking of Evolution, a lot of the different genres branch out of each other in often surprising ways. The original text adventures evolved into the slide show adventure games, which then branched off into the third person adventure games and first person rpgs. These became maze-like corridor dungeon crawlers with fighting, which then slowly became less slide-show like and more real-time and featured more combat, eventually turning into first person shooters. (video for reference)

The Dungeon crawler also branched into the third person isometric dungeon crawler, which led to Fallout style games and Diablo clones.

edited 20th Oct '12 7:23:21 AM by arks

Right now, I'm thinking of merging the workstation era and the early home computer eras, since I don't know if there are any mainframe games with trope pages, but I do know that there are early home computer games that have trope pages.

I don't have much of a problem with that. From what I can tell, the early workstation games have not been preserved very well for posterity.

Alrighty then, I'll edit the OP. Also, my console YKTTWs need launching hats.

edited 20th Oct '12 10:58:29 AM by WaxingName

Well, I've found something interesting. We technically already have the workstations era on the page titled Mainframes And Minicomputers. I guess that means we already have one part of PC gaming history already down.

edited 20th Oct '12 11:10:50 AM by WaxingName

Now, I think I need an idea of the kind of tech that powered early PCs. I need to know what kind of jargon was used to call the tech inside them, and other stuff like that.

My 16-bit era YKTTW has gotten 5 hats now. I'm thinking of just launching it as well as all the rest of the pages. Besides, if there's a problem with them, you can edit it when it's launched. Is it fine for me to launch them now?

Well, discussion seems to have frozen a bit.

I'm trying to make a list of the huge names in video game history. By this I mean either the great innovators of computer gaming, the first big hits in a new genre, or games that changed the landscape of their genre after they came out. I just wanted another way to look at how games evolved from their early days until today.

Here's what I got so far:

• Oregon Trail (multiple versions exist. Originally developed for mini computer in 1971, and updated in 1974. Released for Apple II 1978. Graphics updated in 1985. Released for DOS 1992))
• Colossal Cave Adventure (1976) (released 1977 for home computer)
• Rogue (1980)
• Zork (1980)
• Ultima (1981)
• King's Quest (1984)
• Sim City (1989)
• Commander Keen (1990)
• Secret Of Monkey Island (1990)
• Civilization (1991)
• Doom (1993)
• Myst (1993)
• Warcraft (1994)
• Quake (1996)
• Fallout (1997)
• Half Life (1998)

If you think a game should or shouldn't be on this list, tell me why and we can discuss it. I know the list is far from complete, but I'm limitted in my knowledge of certain genres.

edited 27th Oct '12 6:56:23 PM by arks

It's pretty good. I think what you've got so far can shape my understanding of how PC games developed. My main concern is what kind of words I should use to describe the technology in PCs.

By the way, I've already launched The History Of Video Games as an index and all the console-based subpages. Now, we can really focus on PC gaming entirely.