Games To Play Before You Die: #14 - Zool

Zool: Ninja of the Nth Dimension (1992)
Publisher: Gremlin Graphics
Designers: George Allen and Ade Carrs

(“This game is going to go down in history as one of the greatest of all time.”
-- Ben Styles, Amiga Computing 54, Nov. 1992)

Imagine that it’s 1992, and you’re Commodore. Up until now, you’ve been making a name for yourself as a worthy competitor in the home computing arena against the IBM PC and the Apple Macintosh with your Amiga line of computers, but due to a handful of boneheaded decisions you’ve posted a pretty significant revenue loss this year and there are stormclouds on the horizon. You notice that the home videogame console market is booming, so you decide that your new strategy, the one that will ultimately be responsible for saving or sinking your company, will be to market your home computers as game machines which have the benefit of doubling as productivity machines, sell your systems in toy stores, and become a viable dark horse candidate in an industry dominated by only two major rivals. All you need now is a mascot. After all, Nintendo has Mario, and Sega has Sonic. Both are somewhat ridiculous in concept (an Italian plumber named Mario Mario and a speedy, electric-blue hedgehog? Ludicrous!) but the kids seem to love ‘em both. Put it out to marketing and see what they come up with.

Thus was Zool born. Actually a product of Gremlin Graphics, who were contracted to provide the Amiga with a flagship title, Zool is the sum total of the following grab-bag of adjectives: green-skinned, alien, gremlin, ninja, from the Nth Dimension, cat-eyed, remarkably fast, and presumably miniscule, if his oversized surroundings are any indication. Zool is the Poochie of videogames. To make matters worse, Commodore included blatant product placement from Chupa Chups, of all things, at regular intervals throughout the first world (which is, appropriately, candy-themed). The effect was disconcerting, to say the least.

Critical reviews in Amiga-based publications, from Amiga Computing and Amiga Format to CU Amiga and Amiga Power, were deliriously positive, achieving final scores of anywhere from 90% to 97%. Not surprisingly, Zool became the Amiga’s best-selling game, and it seemed that Commodore had the mascot they were looking for on their hands. Of course, when the company folded in 1994 after its foray into 32-bit CD-based gaming systems with the imaginatively-named 32CD, Zool became a footnote in the history of videogames, and has all but remained there ever since.

What is surprising about Zool is that, for all the crass commercialism and marketing wonkery surrounding its development, it actually wasn’t that bad a game. Certainly there was not much to recommend it over its spiky blue or mustachio-sporting counterparts - both of whom had begun incorporating novel new narrative and gameplay elements into their franchises - but it had a few things working in its favor. To begin with, the level design was singularly creative, with each world, and its respective enemies and obstacles, conforming to a different theme, from the saccharine-sweet candy world to the music world, filled with audio cables, CDs and stereo parts to the plywood-and-steel-plate motif of the tool world. Each one was a study in absolute thematic conformity, and players were motivated less by a desire to beat a particularly challenging boss than they were to simply see how the next world might make use of its thesis. Additionally, it was built on a very solid engine, and while platformers were by 1992 a dime a dozen, that also meant that designers Allen and Carrs could have just recycled code and probably gotten away with it. The fact that they took the time to deliver to Commodore a quality product makes them the unsung heroes of the tragic tale of Zool.

All things considered, it's strange that Zool has been consigned to the dustbins of history, and is remembered nowadays as, at best, a cult game. Not because Zool was a cynical and formulaic attempt at creating a mascot - there have been dozens of examples of this, from Bubsy to Aero The Acro-Bat to Alex Kidd - but because Commodore believed so strongly in Zool that they put their best foot forward and gave Amiga owners an altogether solid, if not spectacular, flagship title. If anything, Zool was a little too on-the-nose, a little too preoccupied with itself as a game and a mascot character designed to compete with the big boys. As far as inauthentic attempts to cash in on the burgeoning home console market go, Zool came the closest to success before tumbling into near-total obscurity.

Despite the fact that Zool was intended to be the Amiga’s exclusive videogame icon, the game has to date been ported to an impressive array of other systems, including the PC, the Atari ST, Nintendo’s Game Boy and Super Nintendo, Sega’s Game Gear, Master System and Genesis, a rare arcade version, and even a port to the RISC-based Acorn Archimedes home computer. The original Amiga edition is still widely considered to be the finest of the lot.

(In 1995, Zool received a pair of tie-in young adult novels: Cool Zool, by Stan Nicholls, and Zool Rules, by Ian Edginton. Edginton is best known for his work in comics, most notably his run on X-Force and his contributions to legendary British compilation monthly 2000 A.D., while Nicholls, a journalist and fantasy author, has written the Quicksilver trilogy, the Orcs trilogies, and the Nightshade Chronicles trilogy.)

Games To Play Before You Die: #13 - ActRaiser

ActRaiser (1991)
Publisher: Enix

(“I know it’s unexpected, but our people in Fillmore have something to tell you.”)

ActRaiser isn’t particularly innovative, nor is it an overlooked masterpiece by any means, but it’s conspicuous for being the first truly accessible console-based god game, a subgenre of artificial life\simulation games pioneered the year prior by Peter Molyneux’s Populous for the PC. The reason for this is so simple, it almost feels like cheating: the potentially off-putting simulation portions of the game were seeded with a copious number of side-scrolling platformer levels, effectively making ActRaiser appealing to two very different subsets of gamer.

God games differ from real-time strategy games in a number of ways. To begin with, RTSs enlist the player as an active participant, requiring them to direct units to harvest resources, construct buildings and attack enemies. God games, by contrast, place the player in a more passive role, wherein they may only interact with their burgeoning civilizations at a remove. In god games, in other words, the player quite literally become a god, and gameplay typically revolves around the utilisation of god-like powers and observing how their people respond, and hopefully thrive, in the face of these miraculous acts. In this sense, god games bear more in common with artificial life games, in which a set of user-controlled environment variables dictate the behavior, proliferation and survivability of a culture of digital organisms, than they do simulation or strategy games.

Not unlike Maniac Mansion and Monster Party, ActRaiser was the victim of Nintendo’s staunch censorship policies: in this case, the inclusion of any overtly religious material. In the original Japanese version of the game, the player is quite clearly labelled God and the overarching nemesis Satan; for the North American release, these names were changed to The Master and Tanzra, respectively, and in the game’s English documentation, a point was placed on the fact that The Master was eminently mortal. This runs counter to the exceptional - and exceptionally divine - supernatural powers acquired by the player, not to mention the underlying basis of the game, but in practice does little to detract from gameplay. As The Master, the player must assist worshippers in rebuilding a world wracked by evil forces, and this is accomplished in two ways: by clearing each region of demons and monsters with the assistance of an archery-inclined cherub, thus allowing the populace to thrive, and by descending into heroic statues scattered throughout the land and personally taking up arms against said creatures.

Besides the frequent interjection of side-scrolling levels, ActRaiser presents a user-friendly face by simplifying the god game engine, resulting in something that could be described as Populous Lite. Taking control of the Angel, the player defends earthbound worshippers from flying skulls and bats, keeping these threats at bay so that the hapless peasants below may survive long enough to make their way to monster-spawning portals and close them off. At the same time, the player may make use of The Master’s accumulated powers, including sending windstorms, rain and other natural phenomena to the benefit of the huddled and struggling masses. There is a direct correlation between The Master’s strength and capability to combat the forces of Tanzra and the success of The Master’s worshippers: a higher population and level of technological advancement in the god game segments of ActRaiser contribute directly to the number of hit points available to The Master’s sword-swinging avatar in the side-scrolling segments.

Some games are brilliant; ActRaiser is a combination of two pretty great games that complement one another. Each of the two halves of the coin, simulation and side-scroller, are critical to the other, and the switch from one to the other breaks up any monotony that might be inherent to one or the other form. ActRaiser spawned a sequel in 1993, also for the SNES, which did away with the world-building aspect of the original: tellingly, the first ActRaiser sold about 620,000 copies worldwide, while the second, only about 180,000.

ActRaiser is currently available on the Wii’s Virtual Console. A mobile port was released by Macrovision in 2004, containing the first three platformer levels and skipping the game’s simulation aspect completely. Like ActRaiser II, this port is largely considered a critical failure in comparison to the game that spawned it.

(The game’s soundtrack, composed by Yuzo Koshiro, received GameSpot’s Best Music award in 1993. A portion of the score was arranged into a medley by Koshiro and performed at the second annual Symphonic Game Music Concert in Leipzig in 2004.)

Games To Play Before You Die: #12 - Out Of This World

Out Of This World (Another World) (1991)
Publisher: Delphine Software International and Interplay Entertainment
Designer: Eric Chahi

“It took six days to create the Earth. Another World took two years.”
-- Another World tagline

Out Of This World, or Another World as it was known in Europe, may not have been the first game produced by an independent designer and then sold to a publisher, but it may well be the most personal. Eric Chahi’s tale of a young physicist named Lester Knight Chaykin who opens a gateway to an alternate dimension during a late-night particle acceleration experiment was the result of twenty-four grueling months of solitary development, and Out Of This World stands as an unique authorial work upon which the hallmarks of its creator are clearly visible.

Told entirely without dialogue, text or a Heads-Up Display, Out Of This World nevertheless manages to convey specific moods and emotions, not to mention a cohesive and fully immersive narrative. Chaykin is truly a stranger in a strange land, and the player immediately experiences an almost tangible alienation at the beginning of the game, which becomes more tolerable but never fades away entirely as things progress. The detachment and loneliness experienced by the player during the first part of the game reflects Chahi’s own experience programming the game from the ground up for the better part of two years, and when Chaykin eventually gains an alien Ally, there is a sense of relief that is at least partially emotional in nature. By the end of the game, battered by his experience, Chaykin is near death but pushes forward nonetheless; this is, by his own admission, a mirror image of Chahi’s own mental state as he neared the end of the game’s development.

Visually, Out Of This World is a startling achievement, and the polygonal, vector-based graphics and motion-capture rotoscoping were utterly unprecendented in 1991. Chahi captured video of himself and used this as the basis for character animations, effectively inserting himself - quite literally - into his game. The rotoscoped polygonal sprites, along with the core engine, were coded by Chahi from scratch, and he was able to cram a consistent 20 frame-per-second frame rate into the game, an unheard accomplishment at the time. The cinematic platformer format had been previously explored (in, for example, Jordan Mechner’s Prince of Persia) but Out Of This World took it to an entirely new level, and presented a gaming experience possessing an incredible sense of both fluidity and vitality.

Chahi also pioneered the concept of foreshadowing upcoming puzzles and obstacles by having them appear in the background on earlier screens. Thus, for example, a wild beast can be occasionally glimpsed off in the distance, baying at the moon or stalking Chaykin, before it is actually encountered. The end result was an environment with depth, a place which, quite conceivably, was inhabited long before Chaykin’s arrival, and is reacting dynamically to his presence.

Out Of This World was originally released on the Amiga, which took advantage of that platform’s unique ‘genlock’ capability, allowing background and foreground to be rendered separately and simultaneously. DOS and Mac versions followed suit, and Interplay ported the game to various consoles including the Super Nintendo, Sega Mega Drive and 3DO. A number of unofficial ports of Out Of This World exist, including a Windows 3.x version in 1995, a Game Boy Advance port reverse-engineered from a previous Atari ST version in 2004, a Dreamcast version in 2005, and a PalmOS Tapwave Zodiac port in 2006. Chahi himself re-released the game in a 15th Anniversary enhanced edition in 2006, with upgraded graphics and audio, and in September of 2011, the game received a 20th Anniversary edition for iPad and iPhone.

(1992’s Flashback, also by Delphine, is often erroneously considered a sequel to Out Of This World due to its similar cinematic visual style and almost identical gameplay. The actual sequel to Out Of This World is entitled Heart Of The Alien, and was released for the Sega Mega-CD in 1994, which was later unofficially ported to Windows and Symbian.)

Games To Play Before You Die: #11 - Little Nemo: The Dream Master

Little Nemo: The Dream Master (1990)
Publisher: Capcom

(“I told you last night that you would dream if you ate those doughnuts.
But you would not listen.” -- Nemo’s Mother)

Little Nemo in Slumberland, if you’re not familiar with it, was a comic strip by Winsor McCay that ran in newspapers from 1905 to 1914, enjoyed a brief revival in the 1920s, and and then fell, for the most part, into obscurity. The comic strips of the early 20th century were a much more elaborate affair than they are today, and McCay’s tale of a young boy who finds himself lost in increasingly troubling and surreal dreamscapes were, by today's standards, simultaneously amateurish and beautifully rendered. Recent years have seen a renewed interest in McCay’s work on Little Nemo, along with his previous strip Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend (which followed a similar format), but in 1990, outside of a select circle of aficionados of turn-of-the-century cartoons, both creator and comic strip were unknown.

So it was an odd choice for a licensed Nintendo game, to say the least. The fact that the game was based on a Japanese animated film, Little Nemo: Adventures In Slumberland, did little to quell the absurdity of its existence since, as it turns out, North American audiences were about as aware of trending Asian animated cinema as they were turn-of-the-century comic strips. We knew it had to have been based on something, but -- being blithely unaware of the source material -- we simply took it at face value instead of looking into it too deeply (this was before the ubiquitous omniscience of Wikipedia, remember, so trying to figure out where a game came from, and what it might have been based on, required a sight more legwork than it does today). Whatever it might have been, one thing that was certain was that it was a tight, well-executed and devilishly difficult Capcom platformer.

With the benefit of time, though, and a heightened cultural awareness of Winsor McCay’s signature work, revisiting Little Nemo: The Dream Master reveals a game packed to the brim with highly appropriate weirdness. Nemo feeds the various dream-creatures that he encounters with candy from an apparently bottomless bag, which not only tames them but, in proper dream fashion, turns them into frog- or bee- or mole-themed outfits for him to wear, with accompanying abilities. Nemo traverses a number of surprisingly large and creatively-designed levels, including an upside-down house, a speeding toy train and nighttime suburban rooftops, searching for keys to unlock the door at the end of each stage. The sheer number of possibilities engendered by the different animals Nemo tames in obtaining keys and solving puzzles is impressive, considering that the typical platformers of the day (even those produced by Capcom, who were widely regarded to be the masters of the 8-bit platformer genre) were fairly linear in construction.

In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, Capcom's Nintendo platformers (also known as sidescrollers, hop-and-boppers, or jumping games) were known for three things. First, they all had fantastic soundtracks, as anyone who remembers the chiptune scores to DuckTales, Mega Man or Strider will attest to. Secondly, they were built on a very solid, stable engine; Capcom had a very thorough QA testing process, and bugs and flaws in their games were a distinct rarity. And finally, they were really bloody hard.

Little Nemo: The Dream Master is not an easy game. There was no save option, no password entry screen, enemies spawned endlessly, and spikes and pits were unforgiving in their placement. Playing it again today is an exercise in frustration verging on masochism, until we remember that back in the day, every game was hard (although perhaps not quite this hard). In a world of walkthroughs, cheat codes and god mode, we’ve forgotten what it was like to be truly challenged by what amounts to a children’s game, and this is one of the reasons that Little Nemo: The Dream Master deserves to be remembered.

Little Nemo was released for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1990, at the tail end of Nintendo era, and stands as one of the last great games for that console.

(Following the end of the strip's run in 1927, Little Nemo was not officially seen in any media format (with the exception of reprints of the strip) until 1989, when the Japanese animated adaptation Little Nemo: Adventures In Slumberland was released, a period of 62 years. Little Nemo: The Dream Master was a licensed tie-in to that film, which did not receive a North American release until 1993, and even then to very little fanfare.)

Games To Play Before You Die: #10 - Wasteland

Wasteland (1987)
Interplay and Electronic Arts
Designer: Alan Pavlish, Brian Fargo, Michael Stackpole, Ken St. Andre

First, a confession: I have logged more hours playing games in the Fallout family than any other franchise over the course of my lifetime. Fallout (1997) and Fallout 2 (1998), with their isometric, three-quarters top-down view and brilliantly realised universe, brought me back to RPGs in my early 20s, during a time when I had all but abandoned the genre in favour of first-person shooters and fighting games - in large part thanks to the novelty of a roleplaying game set in a non-fantasy environment. Fallout 3 (2008), for its part, consumed much of my life for a year, and Fallout: New Vegas has very much followed in its footsteps.

The relationship between the Fallout series and Wasteland is one that is unique in videogame history. While both Wasteland and Fallout originated at Interplay, and both (not to mention subsequent Fallout games) appear to take place in the same universe, Fallout was never touted as an official followup to Wasteland. This may due, in part, to the fact that Electronic Arts owned the code to Wasteland; the game received a direct sequel, Fountain of Dreams (1990), with no involvement from the original Wasteland designers or Interplay whatsoever. When Fallout was released by Interplay in 1997, players picked up on the similarities between it and Wasteland, but since Wasteland was EA’s baby, it could only be considered an “inspiration” and perhaps the “spiritual successor” to Fallout.

Wasteland may not be an official part of the Fallout series, but make no mistake, it’s the game where it all started. Set in a post-apocalyptic Nevada, the player takes command of a unit of Desert Rangers who have taken refuge (though not without some initial resistance) in a prison outside of Las Vegas. These Rangers set out into the wider world, encountering a number of other survivors, either in loosely-organized camps or as part of either the Guardians, who fixate over old-world technology, or the Servants of the Mushroom Cloud, a fanatical religious group who worship Einstein, Oppenheimer, and the Great Glow (radiation)¹. Pit ghouls, radioactive vermin and shadowclaws², not to mention a wide array of robots and human thugs, are amongst those hostile to the Desert Rangers, who are themselves armed with the likes of Red Ryder BB guns, Proton axes, laser-based energy weapons³ and more conventional melee and ranged weaponry.

In terms of gameplay, Wasteland does not significantly diverge from the typical top-down, sprite-based RPG common to that era, but it did pioneer a number of innovative features which have subsequently become the norm in not only the Fallout series, but in RPGs in general. To begin with, the party was not static, and willing NPCs, found scattered throughout the game, could be recruited to join up, typically with unique skillsets. The game also offered a persistent world, in which the consequences of the player’s actions and their impact upon the environment would remain static between sessions. Beyond this, the overarching idea of taking what had previously been the (nearly) exclusive province of fantasy roleplaying and transplanting it into science-fictional territory was singularly refreshing, and a welcome antidote to a genre flooded with wizards, trolls, dungeons and dragons.

Wasteland’s legacy has always been unabashedly worn on the sleeve of Fallout, but the former game does bear a number of differences which set it apart from the Fallout series. There are no Vaults or Vault Boys, no Pip-Boy 3000s; where Fallout imagines a world in which World War III broke out in a nominal 1950s era, Wasteland is set in the more contemporary (at the time of the game’s release) post-Cold-War 1980s. The sense of humour that is so widespread and apparent in Fallout exists in a kind of chrysalid state in Wasteland; while still one of the funnier games of the ‘80s with its preponderance of toasters and the associated Toaster Repair skill, not to mention the fake passwords included in the game manual which had the effect of changing the character’s gender or detonating bombs, Wasteland took itself much more seriously than its irreverent offspring. While Fallout has always been predicated on the self-aware wink to the player, the referential treatment of the paranoias of a past era, Wasteland was released at the very tail end of the same era. Where Fallout pokes affectionate fun at the Cold War, Wasteland was a product of it.

Wasteland was originally released for the Apple II in 1987 and ported to the Commodore 64 and the IBC PC a year later. A DOS version with updated EGA graphics was released in 1995.

1 These two factions were eventually combined into the Brotherhood of Steel in Fallout. 2 Roughly analogous to ghouls, mole rats and deathclaws, respectively. 3 The Red Ryder BB Gun has appeared in every single Fallout game to date. Proton Axes - and their offshoot, Protonic Inversal Axes - are re-introduced in the Old World Blues DLC for Fallout: New Vegas. Laser Pistols and Rifles resurface as Wattz Laser Pistols and Wattz Laser Rifles in Fallout, Fallout 2 and Fallout: New Vegas.

(Besides the reintroduction of proton axes in Old World Blues, the Fallout: New Vegas DLC pack makes a record number of other references to Wasteland. Scorpitrons return as Dr. Mobius’ Robo-Scorpions, and toasters are more prevalent than is usual, even for Fallout. It also adds a new perk, Them’s Good Eatin’, where living creatures have a 50% chance to drop either thin red paste or blood sausages, healing items whose names refer to descriptive text in Wasteland following a critical attack.)

Games To Play Before You Die: #9 - Conquests of Camelot: The Search For The Grail

Conquests of Camelot: The Search For The Grail (1989)
Publisher: Sierra On-Line
Designer: Christy Marx

("Religion is one of those things where - if you're specific about it - you're going to get yourself into a mountain of trouble. You have to be very, very careful.” - Peter Molyneux)

Videogames and religion have always been uneasy bedfellows. While there have been a few faith-specific games (most notably from Wisdom Tree, who produced such fare as Bible Adventures, Spiritual Warfare and Super 3D Noah’s Ark, all of which were thinly-veiled ports of other, more popular games, seemingly designed for God-fearin’ grandmothers to give their grandkids at Christmas as an alternative to all that sinful, pixelated blood-and-guts,) most publishers shy away from anything more than the most superficial reference to religion in their games. The reasons given for this are numerous, but they all boil down to one inarguable fact: the videogame industry is concerned with making the most revenue possible from their releases, and this necessitates reaching the widest audience available.

Conquests of Camelot: The Search For The Grail is not precisely a religious game - not in the same sense that Bible Adventures or Left Behind: Eternal Forces are religious - but there is far more of a religious component to it than most game publishers would be comfortable with in this day and age. More accurately, it’s a historical game, with a strong emphasis on melding medieval fact and Arthurian legend, and given the undeniable presence of Christianity in both everyday life in the middle ages and in the tales of King Arthur, it seems a given that the game would make direct reference to it. Excising such major themes in any work addressing this era in history, or these characters of lore, would be far more contentious.

The protagonist of Conquests of Camelot is none other than King Arthur himself, and as the title implies, he seeks the Holy Grail. Along the way, he offers up prayer not only to the Christian god but also to Mithras, the Persian diety worshipped by the Romans and absorbed by Christianity around the 5th century C.E. This sort of academic treatment of religious history crops up frequently throughout the game; during his time in Britain, Arthur comes across numerous references to pagan and druidic beliefs, and the majority of his adventure is spent in the Holy Land, covering Gaza, Palestine and Jerusalem. Joseph of Arimathea gets a name-check, as do Cernunnos and Aphrodite. Conquests of Camelot is a historical treatise on religion, disguised as an adventure game.

Of course, the traditional Arthurian figures all make an appearance as well: Lancelot, Guinevere, Merlin, the Black Knight, the Lady in the Lake. For many younger players, myself included, Conquests of Camelot was one of our first introductions to the stories surrounding Arthur, the Grail, and the Knights of the Round Table, and it did a more than adequate job conveying the myths and legends surrounding Camelot in an even-handed and engaging manner. This is not to give the impression that Conquests of Camelot was, by any stretch of the imagination, an “educational game” - and yet it was, without a doubt, highly educational.

Amongst its other achievements, Sierra On-Line was known for being a haven for designer-oriented projects. King’s Quest was Roberta Williams’ baby; The Two Guys From Andromeda, Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy, were responsible for Space Quest; Leisure Suit Larry emerged, polyester-swaddled, from the brain of Al Lowe. Conquests of Camelot, and its Robin Hood-themed sequel Conquests of the Longbow, were designed by Christy Marx and her husband Peter Ledger. This focus on designer rather than promoting a game as a product of an entire studio was as much an oddity in 1989 as it is today, but it somehow made the games that much more personal to play: they were like interactive novels with a verifiable author, rather than the output of a faceless studio simply intent on selling the most games.

Conquests of Camelot: The Search For The Grail was released for Amiga, Atari ST and DOS.

(Besides designing adventure games for Sierra On-Line, Christy Marx was also an accomplished television writer, including credits for Jem, G.I. Joe, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Captain Power.)

Games To Play Before You Die: #8 - Baseball Simulator 1.000

Baseball Simulator 1.000 (1989)
Publisher: Culture Brain

Sports games have always been very serious business. Electronic Arts has built an empire (and filled countless discount pre-owned game store bins) on releasing annual NHL, NFL and FIFA titles, each more concerned with exacting versimilitude and a fixation on fantasy-league detail verging on obsessive than the last. Early entries like Activision Tennis (1981), Konami’s Track n’ Field (1983), and Nintendo’s Ice Hockey (1988) lacked personality and self-awareness, although they were undeniably well-designed. Not unlike the flight-sim genre, sports games are practically defined by their dearth of humor.

Considering its name, one might get the impression that Baseball Simulator 1.000 is the driest of the dry, a game that goes the extra mile to simulate the experience of playing a professional team sport on a home console. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Although there is a fair bit of simulation present, from filling out a team roster to playing through a season, Culture Brain takes so many liberties with the game they purport to be simulating that the end result comes across more like a supercharged satire of baseball than any kind of straightforward depiction. Achieving any kind of realism was not one of Culture Brain’s bullet points when designing Baseball Simulator 1.000.

On the surface, Baseball Simulator 1.000 is indistinguishable from the majority of baseball games available on the NES: the player selects his team, opts for a season or merely an exhibition game, and then plays through the innings, alternately pitching or batting and running. There are two standard divisions, the Atlantic League and the Northern League, each one comprised of six teams populated by players of varying stats, and a game played according to these guidelines is an entirely satisfactory experience.

It isn’t until one gets into the Ultra League that Baseball Simulator 1.000 begins to show its true lunacy. Ultra League Teams have access to what amount to baseball superpowers, and making use of these powers transforms the game from a run-of-the-mill sports game into something utterly unexpected. These abilities fall into one of three categories: Ultra Pitches, Ultra Hits and Ultra Fielding. There are ten of the first two and five of the third: Ultra Pitches include Speeder Balls, which allow the player to control the speed of the pitched ball using the up and down arrows on the d-pad; Phantom Balls, which turn invisible as they go over the plate; and Fire Balls, which increase in speed until they burst into flame. Ultra Hits include Shadow Hit, which causes multiple ball shadows to confuse outfielders; Tremor Hit, which turns grounders into earthquakes; and Missile Hits, which catch any outfielders in its path and drives them into the stands. Ultra Fielding includes Rocket Jump, Super Slide and Hyper Throw, which all do exactly what their names suggest.

The end result is like playing softball with the X-Men. Batters hit homer after homer, causing bat fragments to fly around the field, knocking out anyone unlucky enough to get in the way. Balls zoom or inch their way across the plate, dance out of the way at the last second, or vanish without warning. Everyone else on the field is racing around at superhuman speed, leaping a dozen feet into the air, and catching impossible pop flies. It’s pure chaos, and it’s glorious. It’s how, by all rights, baseball should be.

Baseball Simulator 1.000 spawned a series of sequels for the Super Nintendo, including Super Baseball Simulator 1.000 and three Ultra Baseball Jitsumeiban (or Real Player Version) games. The latter three were only available in Japan, but other than the inclusion of recognisable players and upgraded graphics, there was little altered from the original. After all, why mess with a winning formula?

(Baseball Simulator 1.000 was voted “Sports Game Of The Year” by Electronic Gaminig Monthly in 1990. The year previous, another Culture Brain game, The Magic of Scheherezade, received EGM’s “Best Graphics Of The Year” award.)

Games To Play Before You Die: #7 - Monster Party

Monster Party (1989)
Publisher: Bandai

(Bert: “Don’t worry! With your weapon you’ll be able to destroy them easily.”
Mark: “This isn’t a weapon, it’s a bat!”
Bert: “Bat! Batter! Anything is ok! Anyhow, let’s go!”)

Monster Party. What the hell, Nintendo?! WHAT THE HELL.

By 1989, the Nintendo Entertainment System was a household fixture. Every single kid had wanted a NES when they came out in 1985, and four years later almost all of those kids, by virtue of a thousand mowed lawns, a hundred thousand papers thrown haphazardly into yards, or two weeks of relentless whining to their parents, had acquired one. Nintendo was starting to clue into the fact that their core demographic, by a colossal margin, was eight- to twelve-year-olds, and that without necessarily intending to, they had become a Family-Friendly Company. Nintendo was, by 1989, a huge proponent of videogame censorship (see “Games To Play Before You Die #4: Maniac Mansion”) and had laid down strict precepts on what they would or would not allow to be associated with their brand, both internally and in games by third-party developers.

Which is what makes Monster Party such a bewildering creature. Make no mistake: Monster Party was censored - considerably - between Japanese prototype and U.S. final version. That it manages to be the most nightmarish and profoundly disturbing game for the NES even after it got past the censor’s iron gauntlet calls into question why it was released at all, even in neutered form.

Monster Party is a latter-day younger sibling of Castlevania, if Castlevania had been designed by Ub Iwerks while on a four-day hallucinogen bender. The game is pure 1980s punk rock (literally: one level boss is a giant legless punk rocker) and it is absolutely, unapologetically insane. Let’s look at the evidence:

Mark, the child hero of Monster Party, is kidnapped by a dragon from another dimension named Bert, with whom he proceeds to fuse. Mark doesn’t gain dragon-powers of any sort, but rather transforms for a while into Bert whenever he eats enough pills. The first set of monsters that confront Mark are as follows: a floppy-haired Japanese gangster ghost on fire, a human-faced dog creature, and what appear to be pairs of legs sticking out of the ground from the waist up. This is not counting Mark’s first boss battle, which occurs incongruously enough at the beginning of the first stage, against a giant man-eating pitcher plant. Roughly half-way through the first of eight stages, as he passes a cheerfully-grinning anthropomorphised tree, the screen flickers and Mark finds himself, Silent-Hill-style, in a Boschian hellish landscape, with bleeding skulls replacing happy-faced blocks and blood-vomiting severed heads appearing in the background. It’s so hellish, in fact, that Mark soon stumbles across a giant spider boss who apologises for being already dead, having been torn limb from limb by the denizens of this videogame gehenna.

Along the way, Mark encounters enemies straight out of a Hallowe’en fever dream: a pumpkin-headed mummy, a haunted well that throws plates, a giant demon cat, a cow man who attacks with smaller cows, a massive wooden robot, a samurai, a caterpillar named Rolls Royce, umpires, witches, masked elephants, sea serpents, and an enormous tempura shrimp, which transforms into an onion ring and finally into a shishkabob. Finally, after defeating the end boss, Mark is sent on his way by Bert with a gift, which turns out to be a beautiful princess, who abruptly transforms into a rotting revenant. Mark freaks out, jumps in the air, his skin melts off... And he wakes up in his bed, the entire adventure having been nothing more than a dream. Except that, as he opens the door to leave for school, he finds a very menacing Bert standing there, Mark’s bat in hand, to pressgang him into service again.

It’s hard to know where to start with Monster Party. The game itself suffers from a number of design flaws (it’s difficult to strike enemies while playing as Mark, as his baseball bat is only a few pixels in length, and a bug in the game’s seventh level causes the player to become stuck without any way of progressing if all three bosses are defeated rather than just the first two) and one wonders just how much QA testing the game underwent before it was unleashed on the world. Despite a few creative decisions as far as level design is concerned (level 7 scrolls upwards, level 8 starts on the far right and scrolls left, and of course there’s the demonic tonal shift in level 1 as described above), the actual gameplay is repetitive and not particularly challenging. More than anything, Monster Party plays and feels like the product of some stoned college student with an encyclopaediac knowledge of horror movies, cartoons and Japanese mythology throwing everything they think is kinda cool into a blender and setting the whole thing to puree. What it does not feel like, not even remotely, is a game released by a sane, sober videogame company who is eminently aware of their own reputation as an industry leader.

Monster Party would never make it to market today, but 22 years ago it somehow slipped through the cracks and found its way into the basements and living rooms of countless prepubescent boys. Are we richer for it? Has it had a lasting cultural impact? Was it a great, or even a good, game? The answer to all three of those questions is: probably not, but Monster Party was a thing that happened and there’s no going back now.

(In the original Japanese Monster Party prototype, the pitcher-plant boss more closely resembled Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors, and was flanked by a gigantic microphone and speaker, alluding to the film’s musical numbers.)

Games To Play Before You Die: #6 - Phantasy Star

Phantasy Star (1988)
Publisher: Sega
Designer: Rieko Kodama

(“Some cats, if they eat a certain type of nut, they become huge and
can fly. It’s really very wierd (sic).” -- NPC in the town of Abion)

Between 1986 and 1988, a trio of flagship titles for what would become three of the most beloved Japanese RPG franchises were released: Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy and Phantasy Star. While Final Fantasy landed on North American shores in 1988 and Dragon Quest (retitled Dragon Warrior for the English-speaking market) followed suit in 1989, Phantasy Star beat them both to the punch by nearly a year, effectively earning itself a reputation as the first JRPG to cross the Pacific.

Although it bears many of the hallmarks of classic JRPGs - random battles, overworld maps, HP and MP, character levelling, and increasing item strength and magic potency - Phantasy Star innovated on a number of fronts. To begin with, dungeons were presented in an unique first-person perspective; since the Master System was not powerful enough for true first-person 3D, the game’s designers presented a smoothly animated pseudo-3D effect, giving the impression of 360-degree motion. Monster sprites and combat attacks were animated, which was largely unprecedented at the time.

Perhaps the aspect of Phantasy Star with the most enduring impact, however, was the shift in tone from a medieval, Dungeons & Dragons-inspired environment to one with heavy sci-fi overtones. Later Final Fantasy games would mine this anime-esque juxtaposition of fantasy and science fiction to the extent that it would become one of the series’ defining qualities, but while the Light Warriors were toying around with the notion of airships and floating castles, Alis Landale and her crew were flitting from planet to planet, warding off robot-cops with small arms.

The game’s protagonist Alis was female, and female protagonists in video games were few and far between in 1988 (even Samus Aran had to trick players into presuming, at best, androgyny until the very end). In a field which was, and continues to be, predominantly male-oriented, lead designer Rieko Kodama joins a short list of female game designers from the era, which includes such luminaries as Sierra co-founder Roberta Williams and Wizardry designer Brenda Braithwaite. Commenting on the role of women in her games, Kodama stated in an interview that “one thing I always have in mind is that I don’t want to include any elements that would treat women unfairly in my game. It’s not that I create games with a message of discrimination against women or wanting to eliminate gender-role, but I’m careful not to treat them unfairly.”* Alis was neither scantily-clad nor a sex symbol; rather, she was a strong and determined heroine with a mission, caught up in a drama compelling enough to draw in players regardless of gender.

Phantasy Star has spawned more than fifteen sequels, spin-offs, and remakes, most recently with 2011’s Phantasy Star Portable 2: Infinity for the PSP, but it’s important to convey just how critical the first entry in the series was when it first came out. For many non-Japanese gamers in 1988, Phantasy Star was their first encounter with a console roleplaying game, and it made a spectacular impression. It set the stage for Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, and is perhaps lesser known than those two games today simply because the Master System didn’t enjoy the same popularity, historically, that the NES did. That it managed to spark a legitimate franchise is all the more impressive considering the fact that the games were often relegated to Sega’s latter-day consoles: the Game Gear, Sega Saturn, and Dreamcast were all recipients of exclusive Phantasy Star games, and it wasn’t until remakes and collections of earlier games started to make their way over to the GameCube and PlayStation 2 that the majority of RPG fans discovered Phantasy Star’s vast, undiscovered world.

(Upon release, Phantasy Star retailed for $69.99, with some outlets selling the game for as much as $80. By comparison, the typical Sega Master System game sold for $29.99, and the system itself retailed at $99.99, making Phantasy Star one of the most expensive games ever sold.)

Games To Play Before You Die: #5 - NetHack

NetHack (1987)
The NetHack DevTeam

(The original NetHack)

(“In short, NetHack 3.1.3 is the most elaborate role-playing environment you are ever likely to explore.
This is a place to return again and again, each time for a different experience. You're really going to
have to play it for a year or two and see for yourself.” -- David Gerrold, author)

(“You fall into a pit! How pitiful. Isn't that the pits? You land on a set of sharp iron spikes!
The spikes were poisoned! The poison was deadly...
Do you want your possessions identified?" -- Yet Another Stupid Death)

Even if you’re an avid player of roleplaying games, you may not be immediately familiar with the roguelike subset of the genre. Roguelikes possess a number of defining features, including randomly generated maps, permadeath, turn-based combat, and items with hidden attributes. They are traditionally single-player and almost always involve straight-up, hack-and-slash dungeon crawls with the goal of levelling up, acquiring items, and killing monsters, foregoing any of that pesky “plot” business which only serves, in the end, to distract a player from their hacking and slashing.

As roguelike RPGs go, NetHack is pretty much the definitive item. While it wasn’t the first (that honour goes to 1980’s Rogue, of which NetHack is a descendant, although roguelike elements started appearing as early as 1975 in the likes of Adventure and Dungeon,) NetHack is the one with the most longevity, the one that gained the most dedicated following, and the only one still in active, open-source development to this day, making it the oldest game to continue to receive updates and bugfixes. As it is continually supported, NetHack has evolved, although the core gameplay, mechanics and atmosphere of the game remain; one fascinating aspect of the game is that these layers may be peeled back or completely stripped away and the remainder can still be considered, in a functional sense, wholly NetHack.

(NetHack For Windows)

For a game that has earned itself such an enduring legacy, the earliest versions of NetHack were not exactly visually impressive: they offered simple, black-and-white ASCII graphics, with the @ sign representing the player and various other characters making up the dungeon features, monsters, items, treasure chests and so forth. It could not be strictly dubbed a text adventure, but it was about as close as one could get and still feature a GUI. This ASCII version is still available and preferred by many NetHack fanatics, but over time the NetHack community began to release clients of the game with updated graphics, beginning by merely adding colour and extended ASCII characters before moving on to a top-down tiles mode for windows-based operating systems. More recently, NetHack has transitioned from the top-down view to an isometric view (as seen in the Falcon’s Eye and Vulture’s Eye ports), a semi-3D view by way of Neognud’s interface, and even, in NetHack3D, a first-person view. It is important to note that these various ports and interfaces are all assembled around the basic NetHack source code and the game is played exactly the same, no matter which interface is used.

(Noegnud)

NetHack may not be the most user-friendly of games, but it has an addictive quality borne of its immense depth and substance which more than makes up for it. As with the typical RPG, players begin by selecting their race, role and alignment. They are then assigned a deity to which they are beholden and are tasked with recovering the Amulet of Yendor from the lowest reaches of the dungeon. Along the way, they will encounter monsters, side quests, shops and loot; gain experience and level up both their characters and their pets; and, if they are lucky, recover the Amulet and ‘ascend’ after sacrificing it on their deity’s altar. The replayability factor is high, since, as mentioned above, each level of the dungeon is randomly generated, character death is permanent, and games are unsaveable. And the game makes you work to uncover its secrets: with no rulebook and ‘spoilers’ of the game considered anathema to the serious player, aficionados of NetHack can spend years attempting to unlock all that it has to offer and still find themselves surprised by something.

(Falcon's Eye)

NetHack started as a Unix binary and has always had a following of primarily Unix and Linux environment users. It has made the transition to other platforms over the years, and the current version is available to download for Windows, Mac, DOS, Windows CE, OS/2, Atari, and Amiga. An official port called iNetHack has been released for iOS devices, and unofficial versions are available for the PSP and Nintendo DS. You can also play a Java-based version of NetHack, entitled NetHax, in-browser.

(Although Diablo - a bona fide roguelike which owes a considerable debt to NetHack - has earned a name for itself in North America, the genre itself is generally underrated. In Japan, however, the popularity of roguelike RPGs has skyrocketed, thanks in large part to spin-offs from the Pokemon (Pokémon Mystery Dungeon), Final Fantasy (Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon) and Dragon Quest (Dragon Quest: Shōnen Yangus to Fushigi no Dungeon) franchises.)

Games To Play Before You Die: #4 - Maniac Mansion

Maniac Mansion (1987)
Publisher: LucasFilm Games
Designer: Ron Gilbert & Gary Winnick

(“Hey, did anybody see that movie on television last night? These four kids
went into this strange house and... uh, never mind.” -- Michael F. Stoppe)

Interactive fiction has a long and, if you’ll pardon the pun, storied history. Generally acknowledged to be the first text adventure, ADVENT (also called Adventure and Colossal Cave) laid the groundwork for the genre in 1975, followed by Infocom’s legendary Zork (A.K.A. Dungeon) in 1980. Graphic adventure games were the next natural stage in the evolution of interactive fiction and were pioneered by On-Line Systems with Mystery House and Wizard and the Princess, both in 1980. The company rechristened itself as Sierra On-Line with the release of its first Adventure Game Interpreter engine-based game, King’s Quest: Quest For The Crown, in 1984, kick-starting a decade of such popularity that adventure games quickly became the default genre for the PC.

Enter LucasArts, who in 1987 was going by the name LucasFilm Games. At that time, Sierra and most other producers of adventure games relied on a text parser that referred to a set of specific verbs and nouns (and, very occasionally, adjectives). LucasFilm Games took the adventure game model established by Sierra and upped the ante by introducing, in the form of Maniac Mansion, the world’s first ‘point-and-click’ adventure game: verbs were listed at the bottom of the screen, and a cursor would allow the player to select an object, non-player character, or aspect of the scenery to manipulate.

Maniac Mansion broke new ground stylistically as well. It was highly referential, a kind of bastard offspring of Little Shop of Horrors, Reanimator, Scooby Doo, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and 1980s punk rock; it involved a family of mad scientists, sentient tentacles from outer space, and a handful of distinctly-archetypal teenagers to select from, each one bringing their own abilities to the various puzzles and interactions present in the house of Edison. It was gleefully anarchic, tongue-in-cheek, pointlessly violent and filled with easter eggs and one-off gags. And the whole thing was based on a new interpreter, programmed from the ground up by Gilbert and fellow LucasFilm employee Chip Morningstar, which they called SCUMM - Script Creation Utility For Maniac Mansion - which would later become the cornerstone for all of LucasArts’ graphic adventure games.

Originally released for the Commodore 64, Maniac Mansion was ported to the Amiga, Atari ST, Macintosh and IBM PC... And ultimately, to the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1990. While the NES port was serviceable (and added a few new features, such as individual soundtracks on Discmen for each playable character) it is significant largely because of the amount of pre-Entertainment Software Ratings Board censorship imposed by Nintendo on the conversion project manager, Douglas Crockford, and his team. In a classic tale of missing the forest for the trees, Crockford relates how family-friendly Nintendo demanded the removal or alteration of dozens of objectionable elements, including the words “sucked out” and “kill”, a poster of a sexy mummy, and most of Nurse Edna’s suggestive dialogue, and even took umbrage at the listing of the “NES SCUMM system” in the game’s credits, but completely overlooked the ability for characters to microwave a hamster to death.

The cult of Maniac Mansion has grown steadily since the game was first released. An uncensored Famicom port with redesigned sprites (and, sadly, no translation) was released in 1988. A sequel, Day of the Tentacle, hit shelves in 1993, focusing on Bernard Bernoulli - the nerdy teenager from Maniac Mansion - and his misadventures through time (given the original’s tiny file size, one easter egg present in Day of the Tentacle allows you to access and play through the entirity of Maniac Mansion on an in-game computer). Maniac Mansion Deluxe, a free-to-download remake with updated graphics and audio, was released by LucasFan Games in 2004. German indie developer Vampyre Games is producing a long-in-gestation 3D remake entitled Meteor Mess 3D, while fellow Deutschlanders Edison Interactive are in the process of remaking Maniac Mansion under the name Night of the Meteor, with the goal of adapting the game to a graphical style similar to Day of the Tentacle.

Finally, though it may be daming a classic game with faint praise, Maniac Mansion was one of the first videogames to receive a live-action television adaptation. Lucasfilm and The Family Channel collaborated on the Canadian production, which debuted in 1990 and starred Joe Flaherty, Deborah Theaker, Kathleen Robertson and a disappointingly small number (read: zero) of green or purple tentacles. The show, virtually a spin-off of SCTV with guest spots from Eugene Levy, Dave Thomas, Martin Short and David Cronenberg (!!!), shared almost no similarities with the game other than the name of Flaherty’s protagonist character Dr. Fred Edison and the fact that there was a meteor in the household basement.

(Maniac Mansion was the first game to include cutscenes. The term ‘cutscene’ was coined by Rob Gilbert to describe the interjected timer-based (rather than behaviour-based) cutaway scenes to non-player characters in the house which propelled the game’s narrative.)

Games To Play Before You Die: #3 - Marble Madness

Marble Madness (1986)
Publisher: Atari Games
Designer: Mark Cerny

(“I designed a game I’d want to play so you’d want to play it.” -- Mark Cerny)

When Marble Madness was released for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1986, a generation of 10-year-olds learned exactly what happens to a game controller when thrown against the wall in a fit of rage.

Marble Madness was devilishly difficult to play. In the arcade, the machines came equipped with trackballs, which allowed you 360-degree control over the titular marble, but the NES had no such peripheral and the d-pad made for a singularly poor substitute. Despite the game’s control-scheme concession of offering a choice between 90-degree or 45-degree directionals, the combination of the d-pad’s limitations and some ahead-of-their-time physics resulted in the sensation of trying to steer a fighter jet with a handlebar. Oh, and don’t get me started on that damn Black Marble. That guy was a straight-up bastard.

The fact that it was so hard is precisely the reason why it’s remembered so fondly today. We spent hours - HOURS - trying to maneuvre our marble around obstacles, past Black Marble, down pipes and along ledges, sometimes gaining little more than a few inches at a time between spawns. Marble Madness was not designed to be played with an NES controller, but we still attempted to master it.

Of course, it didn’t hurt that Marble Madness featured a catchy and memorable soundtrack ranking amongst the best of the 8-bit era, gorgeous isometric level design, and a truly novel gameplay concept. Besides increasing in difficulty, each level possessed distinct qualities: the Practice stage was shorter and contained fewer enemies, pitfalls and ledges; the Silly stage reversed the established direction of courses to that point and forced the player to roll uphill; the Ariel stage contained ramps, catapults and funnels, ensuring that the titular marble spent much of its time aloft. And though the list of hostile entities was short, they were memorable: tube worms which leapt on and devoured you, sentient puddles of acid which reduced you to molten glass, and the aforementioned Black Marble, who seemed to exist for no other reason but to cause you immeasurable grief.

Marble Madness came about as a direct result of the North American videogame crash of 1983. The causes of and factors related to this industry-wide implosion are too numerous and complex to get into here, but suffice it to say that Atari was one of the hardest-hit companies by the disaster (owing in part to their extemely poor Atari 2600 port of Pac-Man on 1981, and similarly poorly-designed E.T.: The Extraterrestial, released the following year) and consequently set about rethinking videogames from the ground up. Designers were pressed into adopting two specific goals in their games: providing a distinctive experience through the use of a unique control system, and offering a simultaneous two-player mode.

Taking these missives to heart, Mark Cerny conceived of a game with trackball controls, a multiplayer race mode and unique isometric graphics, and spent 10 months developing Marble Madness with lead programmer Bob Flanagan. Since Atari was in difficult financial straits owing to the market collapse, Cerny and Flanagan were placed under strict deadline and hardware restrictions. Released on time and on budget, the resulting game was, at only six levels, relatively short; for six weeks after release, it became the highest-earning arcade game, but by the seventh week, it dropped off the charts due to its short play-through time.

Despite respectable earnings, Marble Madness couldn’t rescue Atari from the mire they had gotten bogged down in, but it remains one of the last great games from the golden age of arcades and managed to make a respectable transition to the home console market. It was ported to a wide range of consoles and home computers, including the Commodore 64, Amiga, Game Boy, Sega Mega Drive and of course, the Nintendo Entertainment System. A mobile phone version of Marble Madness was announced by Electronic Arts in 2010.

(Mark Cerny, who has executive produced or contributed to dozens of games, including Crash Bandicoot, Ratchet & Clank, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune and Resistance: Fall of Man, designed Marble Madness when he was only 18 years old.)

Games To Play Before You Die: #2 - TradeWars 2002

TradeWars 2002 (1984)
Publisher: EIS
Designers: Gary Martin & John Pritchett

(“This has to be the single, largest man-made object you’ve ever seen. It continues
on for miles and contains the factories for all of the major brands of Space-going craft.
Since the material wars of 1998 on Earth, all ship builders relocated here.”)

They don’t get much credit these days, but for about two decades before the rise of the Internet, dial-up bulletin board systems, or BBSes, offered the only means to getting online. The conceit that one might connect to, and communicate with, other people via their computers was heady fare in 1984 - the stuff of “Neuromancer” and “Terminator" rather than the cultural zeitgeist that we take for granted today.

Inevitably, new kinds of shared social spaces lead to new kinds of play, and by the mid-’80s BBSes began to implement door games into their interfaces, allowing users to load external, multiplayer game modules. These door games, or doors, were typically text-based with ANSI or ASCII graphics thrown in for flavour, and while they did not offer simultaneous multiplayer, they are notable for the fact that they were our first taste of interactive online gaming.

Nowhere was this more engaging than in TradeWars 2002. It was far from intuitive and had a steep learning curve, compounded by the fact that, like most doors of the time, a set number of daily turns were distributed to each player in order to discourage them from staying connected to the BBS and tying up the incoming phone line for other users. Planets, ships, starports and corporations were all defined by so many stats, rankings and variables that the casual or new player might find themselves intimidated right off the bat. And yet, once you got the hang of it, TradeWars 2002 was a genuinely addictive game.

Nominally a trading sim, TradeWars 2002 possesses so many traditional and open-world roleplaying game elements that it may be considered a proto-MMORPG. There are no missions, no narrative and no canonical characters... Just a vast, open galaxy of sectors to explore, planets to mine, colonies to establish, and space pirates to fight. Interestingly, it was also one of the first games to include morality alignment, with benefits from and detriments to being either good or evil, and guilds, here called corporations, within which players may trade or share resources, ships and colonies.

TradeWars 2002 boasts a faithful collective of fans to this day, and Telnet-based tournaments are still held. In 2007, EIS in partnership with Sylien Games announced that they were remaking the game under the title TradeWars Rising, updating the graphical user interface and introducing true massively multiplayer elements but retaining the essential mechanics of gameplay. As of this writing, TradeWars Rising is in Beta and is free to play at http://www.tradewarsrising.com/.

(Supported systems: DOS and Windows-based systems, required dial-up connectivity.)