Pre Retro Gaming Love

Any one remember playing games on their first computers? I remember it being a time that started with pacman type games or even just text adventures. Remember games like Zork or Treasure Island or maybe even Haunted House. Most of these games were awesome for what they were. Wow though times have changed. Games now so life like as we play with new graphics options.

Lets take a look at some of the classics we used to love playing and spending time with. It Doesn't matter if it was Pong or on the Atari or the Commodore 64 or even the DOS systems we spent arms and legs to have available to play them on. So lets start out as old as we can remember and see how it all progressed.

To start we had games like Pack Man and Snake for the original games we knew. Pacman we started to love at the arcade and the ATARI in the 70s and 80s. Snake was a game that has not evolved sense then other than someone releasing it on new platforms for fun.

Pac Man had many ports before the game became completely different from the maze of pellet munching and ghost chasing it started out as. They eventually changed the platform during mid 90s to cover some 3D adventure styles to follow what was popular during the time.

Next we saw the text adventures Like Zork and a few others that were literally just a screen of text and telling it to move forward or turn right and left. Pick up an item. Do something. These were not the hardest games but had a fun factor to them. First they had limited commands for what you could do. this simplified it but so many ways we could try and tell it to do something that it didn't understand. It was like a choose your own adventure book. It was good times.

Next those games changed slightly because they became bigger using more floppy disks and longer load times or even on cartridges. Atari Loved the cartridge gaming. the games progressed from block shapes to colored blocks to pong and Warlords. As games advanced just so slightly we ended up with things like frogger or dig dug for the platform styles. And who could forget the advancement of Asteroids and Missile Command. These became the beginning of the new era of gaming.

So what about the text adventures? Next we got some colored screen using basic machine language that drew out a blocky representation of what you would see in front of you in basics and the text became the second part of the screen with a few lines to type and see results. We saw this in many games as the text adventures grew.

Now early games were very short if they had an ending and most were just play as long as you could. Pac Man was a long as you could play game but in comparison there were games like ET and Adventure on the Atari that had an ending or could be beaten. On the text platform there was endings but it took a long time to get to them. DOS games with graphics started having a full game from start to finish.

Some early games that started breaking away from the classic text adventures were dots with some text and options. Many of these games were RPG or fantasy games. Why? Because that was a great start to the change and use of graphics in gaming. We had many of these as we left the Atari age and went to home computers. I remember a few favorites on the computer before DOS that were eventually released on DOS platform PCs. Remember a game called Below the Root? this was an action side scroller type I played on a few systems. This was a rare type of game.

Next we had the games advance to basic cube like 3D mazes. A good example and not the first of its type was Might and magic or even Wizardry. These games brought forth new aspects to RPG and fantasy games. And on the other side there was games that had click adventures where you could move a cursor around the screen and choose what you would type. Sierra Online games brought so many genres to life doing this. They had games Like Police Quest, Space Quest and Kings Quest. You couldn't go wrong with any of these. They had a serious point and humor and the game in general just kept you playing through even after you were stuck.

So the RPG games became 3D dungeon crawlers and the text adventure became the first click your adventure at this point. But what next? Atari was gone. Arcades were becoming popular. Racing and simulators came out letting you experience more to your gaming desires. You could fly a plane now or race a nascar race. The controls even began to change. Steering wheels were coming ut and flight sticks and in some cases mice and keyboards being popular.

I was not really a fan of the simulator games. I could get started playing them but when racing it was not my thing. Flying a plane was different but the reality it tried to bring in I just got to point of auto pilot and crashing either way. These have become some of the most popular game types for people that wanted to learn or do these things but didn't have the ability in real life. They also have now become the training and testing for some peoples real life jobs now that they have become so advanced.

So lets get back to RPGs again. These games have advanced two directions now from text to dot adventures to 3D mazes as one and the other side started more towards the map views. Yes top view maps and some had graphics to them rather than dots. This was the next alternative game options for PRG games. you had 3D and you had top view maps. Both has some new graphics that let the characters and player s have a little action in how they moved or remained idle. This was starting to bring forward to where these games have come from then until now. And oh boy has it come so far and changed so many ways. During this time D&D games like Heroes of the Lance and Pools of Radiance became strong leads before the advancements continued.

The text adventures that because clicky adventures was dominated by Sierra Online that was for sure. We all loved those games because of what they game us. This was the birth or the interactions in games too. This game humor to serious games and the interactions we now look for in newer games. With out the changing dialog we wouldn't have the games that we have to search out people to get a response to find the next piece of our quest puzzles. This ultimately led to companies that made vast world games that we know now like Skyrim that actually follows through most of the stylings in this history. Recently games like Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango and Kings Quest have been re-released to see what new graphics on old games would turn out like. Good job there.

Arcade games made a huge appearance back in the early 80s and had a strong run even trough now although dying off in the late 90s. We got to see games we loved at home come to life for a quarter a play. However the older classics began to die out to racing games and fighting games. Even the next first or second gen home gaming was coming along and started the big gaming boom we know today as console gaming. This was the arcade killer by the mid 90s.

So lets go back to some early parts I missed again. We also had chess run on computers and many board games too. This was like solo family game night of today. The thing was that it didn't need all the graphics to play Monopoly or connect 4 or checkers. It was still able to stay in the box style. As it advanced there were things that were no longer board games. We got some of the first strategy games like RISK that were Lords of Conquest on the old systems and in DOS. This grew into the Real Time Strategy games we see now starting back with the first games like Command and Conquer. This series has stayed the same but grown so far with the advancement of graphics. But same concept.

Next we saw the start of ARPG action type games coming up with these RTS games. Some at the end of the true retro period gave birth to some of the biggest games in history like Diablo. There were others but none we all loved so much as that. The problem was that it was after DOS when these first greats began making appearances. and that is a whole other era of gaming.

Don't get me wrong I know I have missed many games that were great and platformers are the same and have the identical options now and some new as they did in the past. we started top view then side scrolling then side with up and down and eventually 3D worlds. This is gaming and graphics evolving. We will never forget the roots of where gaming started. Once PCs went from DOS to windows and consoles went 8-bit it was nothing but evolution of our gaming entertainment. Now we are more than 5 gaming generations forward and there is real VR, graphics that are almost reality if not film like and adventures that instead of sitting a few hours take months to play through. And we are barely 40 years into gaming and computer age being so young.

So next time I feel like going on this rant again it will be in the starting generations of windows gaming and 8-bit consoles through the first of the next gen gaming like Playstation which will lead to current gaming consoles real next/new gen gaming of today. Until then you get to read and see what we and I have for todays games.