1981.Game - A Gaming Documentary Series

free999enigma (67)in #gaming • 8 years ago

The second year of the ‘80s brought about many new innovations, with the rise of Microsoft. The establishment of the IBM PC Standard, and the creation of some of the most influential games ever made. In the mood to jump over some barrels?

To some people, nostalgic for the 80’s, 1981 was the year when many of the staples of the decade came out, like Raiders of the Lost Ark and the DeLorean DMC-12. To others it was the year of the first AIDS outbreak, the year that the Pope was shot, not fatally, and when the president of Egypt was shot, fatally. But there were good things as well happening in that year. The first electric aircraft flew over the English Channel. The Space Shuttle Columbia flew its inaugural mission, giving people the false hope that that would lead to something someday. Metallica was formed… and so was MTV for better at first, and oh, god, please stop, as time went on. That was also the year when the world witnessed the wedding ceremony of Lady Diana Spencer and Prince Charles of Wales.

And speaking of the British, they got the BBC Micro, made by the Acorn Computer company. An 8 bit computer that would prove to be very popular, as well as cheap enough to make its way into the homes of many in the UK. Including a few people that would use it to create franchises that are alive and well to this day. In Australia, Adam Osborne created the Osborne 1. A 10KG portable computer that was the first of its kind to actually be commercially successful. And it ran the CP/M operating system. But do you know what didn’t initially? The IBM PC.

1981 saw the release of the PC standard we know today, the one defined by IBM as model 5150, the one to run with an Intel x86 CPU at its core, have expandability in mind, and not come with a 3 and a half inch floppy drive, even though it became available in 1981. Instead, it used two 5 inch ones, A and B, and it used an operating system that built an empire. MS-DOS. Created as Quick and Dirty Operating System, by the Seattle Computer Products company, with a large amount of inspiration from CP/M, licensed by Microsoft, modified and sub-licensed to IBM as PC-DOS, and then sold on to other platforms as MS-DOS. If you’re wondering, why didn’t IBM use the established CP/M, the most popular operating system of its time, well, there were a few factors. Microsoft was more willing to devote itself entirely to IBM, there were certain family ties involved, and Digital Research didn’t agree to the terms of the None-Disclosure agreement that IBM wanted. However, since MS-DOS had a bunch of similarities to CP/M, there was some legal action afoot, so IBM started selling PCs with both operating systems. But since IBM really wanted PC-DOS to succeed, the licensed version of CP/M was sold at a premium of almost 200$, effectively killing it. Even though Digital Research would soon sell it directly without the added “make Microsoft great” tax, the fact that it didn’t get it on the ground floor of the new PC standard proved to be its doom over the next decade. The IBM PC became the default for all computers. And that’s how we got a monopoly on operating systems over the last 40 years. It’s important that people remember this. Now back to games.

In 1981 Nintendo finally found something to do with all those unused Radar Scope arcade cabinets. It turned them into Donkey Kong. A game that was initially supposed to feature Popeye, Olive Oil and Bluto, but due to licensing issues, you play as Jumpman, climbing ladders, jumping over barrels, and clobbering things with a hammer, in an effort to save Pauline from a giant gorilla called Donkey Kong. It was the first game designed by Shigeru Miyamoto, who would go on to think up many other great games that will spearhead Nintendo to greatness, and ingrain themselves into the global conciusness. Donkey Kong was a success both in Japan, as well as where it mattered most for an expanding company, in the US, generating hundreds of millions in revenue over the course of the year. It was very clear that leveraging a mascot to promote a game was very effective. Another very addictive arcade game to come out at that time was Konami’s Frogger. The game that put the company on the map, sold very well, and had the benefit of being seen as a method to teach children to be careful when crossing the road… and then jump on turtles and logs. Like many iconic arcade games of that age, it would be cloned and copied for many, many decades, and receive countless sequels. And speaking of sequels, Namco continued onward from Galaxian with Galaga, an improvement over the previous title, aiming to increase variety and push it even further away from its origins as a Space Invaders Clone. It was an even greater success than its predecessor.

The arcade game market in the US generated 4.8 billion dollars in revenue that year, and the home market wasn’t far behind, bringing in 1 billion dollars in the USA, and 200 million in Europe, since we hadn’t yet gotten that dream gaming machine that everyone could buy, but we were getting there. The home market saw the release of Dan Daglow’s Utopia. The same Dan Daglow that made one of the Dungeon games from a few weeks ago, as well as a Star Trek one. Utopia, released by Mattel for the Intellivision console, is considered one of the fore-runners of the real time strategy genre, the God-Game genre, and even the City Builder. It tasked you and another player with developing two islands, by building utilities and keeping their population happy, while trying to sabotage the opponent's effort to do the same by using a patrol boat. It is rudimentary by today’s standard, and doesn’t reach the same complexity as some text based games, but it is still an important game that laid the groundwork for future strategy titles.

Utopia may have been a console only affair, but PC owners would also have something to be sink their teeth into, in the form of the first great age of the Computer Role Playing Games. In the same year we got both Wizardy: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord and Ultima. Wizardry was the brainchild of Andrew Greenberg and Robert Woodhead, and was published by Sir-Tech for the Apple 2. It tasked you with making party of diverse characters, inspired by the dungeons and dragons rule set, complete with alignment, that would traverse a sprawling dungeon in the first person perspective. It was dungeon crawling at its finest and went on to spawn an entire series, that sadly faded into obscurity in recent years. But at its height, Wizardry would give us some of the most in depth roleplaying you’ll ever see. The same can be said with Ultima 1. An evolution of Akalabeth, with a more lively environment and better defined goals, but a bit bonkers mad in some places, since you were supposed to travel across a magical land, fighting all sorts of fantasy monsters, and then blast off into space and shoot down things that looked a bit like Tie Fighers, all with the objective of ending the First Age of Darkness that befell the land, and kill the wizard Mondain in a time before the completion of his immortality gem. Just make sure you put the pieces of that gem somewhere safe, you wouldn’t want them to come back to haunt you four games later. Wizardry and Ultima were each different interpretations of the idea of computer Roleplaying, and while they were both still rudimentary, limited by the capabilities of the Apple 2, and by the knowledge of their creators to use the system, they brought about an age of wonder that spurred on the development of ever more complicated Role Playing Games. They, along with Utopia, are some of the most important games of that period in history. And yet, it’s neither of them that I can truly name the game of 1981.

Instead, I give that title to Castle Wolfenstein. Why? Because strategy and RPG weren’t new things. They had never been done before in this way, sure, but the concepts weren’t innovative. But Silas Warner’s Castle Wolfenstein brought something that wasn’t really a part of the gaming lexicon up until then. Sneaking. In this game your objective was to escape a nazi filled castle, using a gun and your wits. You’d have to try and not alert soldiers, hide, kill only when you were sure there wouldn’t be anyone nearby to hear the shot, and dawn a disguise to sneak passed the enemy. But not all, a few of them knowing you were not what you seemed, and chased you all over the castle. In its simple concepts you could see the origins of every stealth game from Metal Gear, to Thief, to Hitman. And for that, it is important and must be remembered.
Next week, the video game’s industry reaches one of its lowest points and prepares for the big crash that threatened to end everything… at least in the US, on consoles.