Top-Down View

Follow the bouncing ball.

Top-down view, also sometimes referred to as bird's-eye view or overhead view, was a common perspective in video games before the advent of 3D, and is still in use in some genres today. Commonly found in Real-Time Strategy games and occasionally in Simulation Games that don't use Isometric Projection. It is also used in some Action Games, such as the early Grand Theft Auto series.

Some of these games, in addition to having the camera angled straight down, also use a perspectiveless top-down projection in which everything on the screen is viewed as if the camera were directly above it. Not everything can be drawn well in this perspective, though, which is why Cheated Angle is often applied to character and item sprites.

See also Isometric Projection, Side View and Three-Quarters View.

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Examples:

• Arena.Xlsm
• Balls of Steel
• Battle Chess
• Bolo
• Bubble Trouble
• The Classroom Trilogy
• Crüe Ball
• The Crush Pinball series (Alien Crush, Devil's Crush, and Jaki Crush)
• David's Midnight Magic
• Decision: this view actually makes some of the giant 10 foot tall zombies harder to see, as they're the same color as the road.
• Extreme Pinball
• The early Grand Theft Auto games.
• The 2D The Legend of Zelda games mostly use this view; many of them including the original, have brief side-view sections.
• The original SimCity, sort of, though there was an inconsistent bottom-left-to-top-right tilt for most of the graphics, see here.
• Evolution Worlds uses this as one of its two camera angles.
• Bosconian
• Heartlight
• Heavy Water Jogger
• Hell Is Others
• Herc's Adventures
• Highway Hunter
• Hotline Miami
• In Live A Live, the city in the Near Future chapter is depicted in top-down view, which, in a game which holds to Three-Quarters View everywhere else, sticks out like a sore thumb.
• A Nightmare on Elm Street
• A Noble Circle
• Obsession Pinball and its Polished Port, Absolute Pinball.
• Of Guards And Thieves
• Outbreak
• The Outlaw, The Drunk & The Whore
• Pâquerette Down the Bunburrows: The player can see the entire level, but bunnies can't. This means bunnies can run into dead ends or enter tunnels with Pâquerette on the other side. Conveniently, bunnies keep no memory of the level layout.
• All of the original games in the Pinball Dreams series.
• Pokémon Pinball
• Psycho Pinball
• The Punisher
• Reassembly
• Red Zone: Both helicopter and on-foot levels have a top-down view. Unusual for a Sega Genesis game, walls and structural objects are rendered with a 3D perspective that varies with the player's position, though it's fairly obvious that the latter are composed of flat sprites stacked on top of copies of themselves.
• Robot Rascals
• Roller Ball
• Ruiner Pinball
• Sonic the Hedgehog Spinball
• Stick RPG (First game)
• Sword Dancer is one of many RPG for the PC-98 that use this style. Although in battle this changes to a 2D Fighting Game perspective. One of the first games to do this.
• TaskMaker
• Tasty Planet
• Tauronos
• Temple of Apshai
• Uncle Albert's Adventures
• Urban Yeti!
• WarioWare
• The World's Hardest Game
• Many early Digital Pinball Tables, such as the Crush Pinball series (Alien Crush, Devil's Crush, etc.)
• Done as an art style in Williams Electronics' "rollercoaster" pinballs (Comet, Cyclone, and Hurricane); the playfields are drawn so the player is looking down on the Amusement Park attendees from high overhead.
• Spacecraft in FTL: Faster Than Light are depicted in top-down view. Character sprites, however, make a generous use of Cheated Angle, especially the Lanius whose downward-facing sprites look rather like player-facing sprites.

Top-down projection

• Practically all Vertical Scrolling Shooters (Ikaruga, 1942, etc…)
• Most all Roguelikes, to the degree that ASCII art can be said to have perspective.
• Many 2-D Space games (Asteroids, Star Castle, etc…)
• The Bilestoad
• The first two Escape Velocity games. Nova instead gave everything a 3/4ths tilt.
• Grand Theft Pizza Delivery: Zigzagged. For the most part, the game is viewed in this manner, but in the over-world, while the cars are shown like this, the buildings are seen from a Three-Quarters View, likely to make navigating the over-world easier.
• Super Mario 3D Land has this in World 5-2, which is designed in homage to The Legend of Zelda for its 25th anniversary. Super Mario 3D World, its sequel, has an Auto-Scrolling Level in this view.
• Tiny Hands Adventure: Two of the levels, "Knossos Walkabout" and "Seaside Maze", are viewed from above.

Non-Video Game Examples

Films — Live-Action

• Exit 0: The first shot of the movie is a top-down view of the car containing The Protagonists driving along a road.
• The Swarm (2020): The first shots of the movie are a top-down view of a road through a cornfield as the intro credits roll.
• The Widow (2020): Some shots of the van driving through the woods are filmed from a bird's-eye view, right over it.

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