Ancient Art of War was a really excellent game! And in my opinion, perhaps the first "real time strategy" game, despite others being sited as the first. This was 1984! It was created by Dave Murry and Barry Murry.
AAoW was also one of the games most responsible for drawing me into game development because it shipped with an excellent level editor! I spent hours constructing my own maps using the provided tileset, and you could write your own intro story, and set some of the game rules as well.
I played the old CGA version...
The gameplay itself involved selecting units and giving movement orders around the map...
It wasn't until years later (around 2005) that I realised the same Murry family (now also joined by Dee Dee Murry) was behind another of my favorite, and most influential games, Manhunter: New York (1988) and Manhunter: San Francisco (1989) for Sierra!
The Manhunter games were these fantastic sci-fi adventure games, with a really brooding mood and dark story, depicting a dystopian future where Earth had been overrun by Orbs from outer space!
There were some cool sections of gameplay where you would track suspects in a Google Maps like device called the MAD!
The beauty of the game comes from everything being depicted in quite an everyday way where the domination of the Orbs has become mundane and accepted. You play as a Manhunter, a worker for the Orbs, tracking down those who seek to overthrow the Orbs.
The game featured great ghoulish art depicting the brown robed Manhunters, and a variety of scenes of gruesomely murdered victims and cadavers.
Thanks to the Murrys for this unique and evocative chapter in the history of adventure games!
I'm still waiting for the final title in the series, Manhunter: London. :) Here's a nice little promo video for Manhunter: New York...
And another for Manhunter: San Francisco...
And a bit more of Manhunter: New York in action...
This game was amazing. 1993. A real story, cool characters and locations, amazing music!
I loved the old game Phantasie from 1985, which was also one of the earliest games we had on the PC. It was a cool open world RPG game. BUT the story was quite hackneyed, and the interface and graphics were rudimentary. Betrayal at Krondor was like everything Phantasie was and more, with a richer story and great music and graphics (for the time!).
I personally love hand painted graphics in a game, and Krondor featured lovely images of each location you visited and great looking inventory items.
I would play all night, there was no end to it. I would huddle before the computer with a sleeping bag draped over my whole body, like some ancient form of worship, my palm red from wiggling the mouse around for hours on end.
I love this tradition of games from Phantasie, to Oblivion and Skyrim. They just keep getting more immersive and seamless. Viva! Long live adventure games!
King's Quest is probably my single fondest memory of computer gaming.
I don't think that's something that will change any time soon. It doesn't matter if it's not the best game ever. To me, it will always hold a totally special place in my imagination.
So many things seem to have been lost, or at least not fully explored, that King's Quest did.
It was a cinematic world, presented in resplendent color. And the best part, a fully WRITTEN story, based around TEXT, and the player inputing their actions through TEXT.
I loved that the world was experienced through the eyes, and the MIND, and that to interact with the world, you would READ, THINK, and WRITE.
To be honest, I can see why they brought in the mouse interface years later. But it did remove a layer of imagination from the game. It removed the "infinity" of the game world.
When playing King's Quest, ANYTHING was possible, because there was basically no interface. There was a flashing cursor at the botton of the screen, inviting you to type in ANYTHING. Anything you could imagine.
Can you think of a VERB? Try it!
Sure the game might say, "I DON'T UNDERSTAND THAT". But there's always the possibility that it WILL understand what you type next, that the next thing you type will open a new door, show you a deeper layer to the world, find a special hidden item or secret. The world was revealed, and the story moved forward, by you talking to the computer, and it talked back.
I loved that.
Every little morsel of the graphics were mouthwateringly full of potential. My eyes and mind would savour every detail, wondering what lay hidden inside this world before me.
When the mouse cursor came in, with the fixed set of verbs, "Walk, Talk, Manipulate", it actually closed off a lot of that potential in the game world. Things became much more explicitly binary. There were things you could do, and things you couldn't do. No discussion.
And ever since, I feel that games do not want to enter into a discussion with you. You play by their rules, and you move through the puzzles laid out for you.
If you waved your mouse cursor over a hole in a tree that looked suspiciously alluring, and the cursor did not change, then you can forget about it. Nothing of interest there. That is a useless bit of graphics that you can just forget about.
With the text interface, you could never really close off the potential of anything. You just hadn't discovered it yet! And I think there was a beauty in that. Sure, perhaps the actual interactions that are possible are the same. But there was something I liked about not being sure. About everything being possible, and my mind having to remain open. Perhaps it more accurately mirrors the real world, where everything has potential, and that potential is in the eye of the beholder.
Alley Cat. What a strange and absurd game. There is so much going on in this game!
And a very high inscrutability quotient! You had to figure out how EACH of the many minigames worked!
I remember it was months, perhaps years before we knew you could press ALT to switch between the different holes in the cheese.
This was a very cool game. I love the abstract nature of it. It's like a Da Da game in many ways! The broom sweeping about the level on it's own. And yet everything has it's place. The broom follows your footsteps, cleaning them up in the order that you made them!
Catching that bird from the cage was so hard, and then you're nearly there, and BAM! The broom jostles you straight out the window.
Playing as a little defenceless cat was also a unique and uncommon approach to a protagonist character.
Avoid detection, don't get caught! Perhaps this is why I like the Thief series so much! Years of subjection to Alley Cat at a young age.
I love the irreverence of this game. So many whacky concepts. The sexual nature of the cat's purpose! The funny music and sound FX. Fantastic.
This is the golden age of gaming right here. A real "one man game" classic!
To my memory, this was perhaps the first game that we EVER booted up on our home PC in about 1984.
Dad bought a computer. He NEVER used computers. I never saw him sitting in front of it that I can remember. But he ran a business, and it was doing well. He made buildings. So of course he needed a computer.
Like me, dad has always likes toys. (He's currently building a model railway.)
The main thing I remember about dad was that he'd head off in the morning in a suit with his black beard on his face, and come back quite late at night, and let us watch James Bond movies with him, when they were on TV. He was always a friendly guy, good humoured when he wasn't throwing a phone off the balcony. He was quite affectionate, although he didn't really play a strong hand in raising us. That was mum's domain. And mum is, I will tell you for free, a stella mum. And dad, having the ability and inclination to succumb to our latest desires for new toys, is of course, a stella dad! But back to Digger...
Digger provided us with endless fun. I'd play it against my brothers Evan and Oop (yes, "Oop") for hours, taking turns to get a better score, whooping at each other's finesse and ability to avoid those dreaded changeling Hobbins. It was such an exciting game, requiring such dexterity, yet always seemed fair. There was a great mix of consistency and randomness in the behaviours of the enemies.
My twin brother is a relapsed Digger addict. At times during university, he would become re-addicted to the game for weeks at a time to avoid finishing his essays.
Like many old games from this time, just learning how to play could take weeks. I swear it was months before we even knew there was a FIRE button in this game. We just played defensively for months and months. When our cousin scoffed while watching, and revealed that you can SHOOT by pressing F1, it almost felt like he'd broken the game. I was so used to playing this little vulnerable and defenceless Digger, it seemed wrong to be able to shoot those unsuspecting Nobbins in the face.
And... umm! F1? What the hell? I'm pretty sure the accepted FIRE button would be the SPACE BAR. Are you folks at Windmill Software drafting a rulebook on how to be a maverick?
That's the thing about games back in those days. Figuring out how they even worked was something that could go on for months at a time.
Inscrutable! There was something quite pleasing about that, too, I might say. You felt like an explorer, examining new species never before seen by man.
The deformable terrain at the core of this game was very cool!
