Vintage Games 159
Aeonite writes "Featuring a subtitle that is almost longer than the preface, Vintage Games: An Inside Look at the History of Grand Theft Auto, Super Mario, and the Most Influential Games of All Time offers a retrospective look at those games which authors Bill Loguidice and Matt Barton feel were, in their words, 'paradigm shifters; the games that made a difference.' As the preface points out, these are not necessarily best-selling games, innovative games, or novel games, but rather titles that, 'in their own special way changed videogames forever.'" Keep reading for the rest of Michael's review.
The book itself features 25 chapters, each devoted to the study of a particular title that best stands out as "vintage" in its particular genre. Those games chosen as particularly "vintage" are (in order): Alone in the Dark, Castle Wolfenstein, Dance Dance Revolution, Diablo, Doom, Dune II, Final Fantasy VII, Flight Simulator, Grand Theft Auto III, John Madden Football, King's Quest, Myst, Pac-Man, Pole Position, SimCity, Space Invaders, Street Fighter II, Super Mario 64 (covered in tandem with Tomb Raider), Super Mario Bros.,Tetris, The Legend of Zelda, The Sims, Ultima, Ultima Online, and Zork. In addition, nine additional "Bonus Chapters" are available online at the book's website, covering Defender, Elite, Pinball Construction Set, Pong, Robotron: 2084, Rogue, Spacewar!, Star Raiders, and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater.
Vintage Games | |
author | Bill Loguidice and Matt Barton |
pages | 408 |
publisher | Focal Press |
rating | 8 |
reviewer | Michael Fiegel |
ISBN | 978-0-240-81146-8 |
summary | A look at the most influential games of the past four decades |
Though listing the titles here seems a bit tedious, it does serve two purposes. First, it demonstrates the broad range of game genres and titles covered in the book, with selections made from across four decades of gaming history. Worth noting in this regard is that each chapter is not solely dedicated only to the titular game; related games that both preceded and followed the selected title are also discussed, and although I didn't keep count many hundreds of titles are at least mentioned, if not covered in some depth. Indeed, this broad range leads to one of the minor issues I have with the book, which is a slight feeling of imbalance and inconsistency between chapters.
By way of example, the first chapter on 1992's Alone in the Dark begins with a two page look at the title itself, followed by a brief peek back at other "horror" games such as 1981's Haunted House, 1982's Dracula and 1988's Splatterhouse. The chapter then dives back into a detailed overview of the introductory scene of Alone in the Dark (along with illustrative screenshots), followed by four pages covering the game's sequels and some brief mentions of Resident Evil and Silent Hill. Chapter 2, covering Castle Wolfenstein, follows more or less the same formula of focusing on the titular game, as do Chapter 7, covering Final Fantasy VII, Chapter 9, covering GTA III, and Chapter 15, on SimCity.
However, this "formula" is not followed in many of the other chapters, which makes reading the book from cover-to-cover a somewhat uneven experience. Chapter 3, covering Dance Dance Revolution only really devotes about four of the chapter's 11 pages to DDR itself, instead choosing to spend more collective time (and screenshots) on related subjects like Dragon's Lair, Video Jogger, the Nintendo Power Pad, Sega's Activator, and Karaoke Revolution (among others). Chapter 10, covering John Madden Football goes for over a dozen pages before it truly covers the title in question on five entertaining and screenshot-packed pages. Chapter 14, covering Pole Position and Chapter 17, on Street Fighter II are other notable examples where the focus is not as tightly aimed at the vintage title in question.
This is not to say that the writing is flawed; on the contrary, it is always entertaining and interesting, and frequently illuminating. Loguidice and Barton cover a lot of terrain, and they are not afraid to point out the warts as well as the beauty marks in their selections. For those who grew up with video games in their house starting with the Atari 2600 (or before), the book is like a trip through time, giving the reader a chance to reminisce about days gone by while also learning about the many titles he or she didn't even known existed. All of this material is written in an informative yet casual style that never feels stilted or pretentious, nor too fanboyish. Indeed, the only awkwardness is the inconsistency in coverage from chapter to chapter, which sort of feels like the authors — rather than co-write each chapter — sort of divided the book in half. I have no idea if this is the case, and there are certainly no glaring stylistic differences from chapter to chapter; all are equally entertaining.
The above chapter list also demonstrates that the titles are arranged in alphabetical order, as opposed to release date or genre. While this certainly makes a sort of structural sense, it does feel a bit awkward while reading the book cover-to-cover, as the reader is constantly dancing back and forth through time, from 1992 to 1981, followed by five titles released in the '90s, a title from 1980, and then 2001's GTA III. In addition, the decision to alphabetize The Legend of Zelda and The Sims in the T's, rather than the L's and S's respectively, does feel a bit odd (especially since the titles are listed under L and S in the index). Whereas Ultima and Ultima Online, and Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Bros. are in adjacent chapters, The Sims and SimCity are separated by six chapters. This is an admittedly minor quibble, however.
If there is a more-than-minor flaw with the book, it is the same flaw that seems to beset all books covering the video game industry: the screenshots, and their inconsistent placement throughout the text. Occasionally, a screenshot will actually fall on the same page where the game it depicts is being mentioned, but in many cases screenshots appear a page or two away (a mention of Second Life comes to mind in this regard. In several cases, screenshots actually overwhelm the text (most notably on pages 312-313), and fewer would have served better. There are also a number of "back of box" shots, which hardly seem as interesting to the reader as an in-game screenshot would be; in one case, almost an entire page is given over to a blown-up back-of-box shot of Maxwell Manor, which otherwise barely gets a mention in the main text.
Also worth mentioning is that screenshots do not always guarantee title mentions, and vice versa. In some cases, the vintage title being covered in a chapter is given many screenshots, whereas in other cases there are only one or two devoted to that game title. Some other mentioned titles are given a lot of text but no screenshot, such as Resident Evil, Metal Gear, and Half-Life. Other screenshots depict titles that are not even mentioned in the text (though they are still relevant to the subject at hand, as the captions generally make clear); examples include Silent Service, Blades of Steel and Mario Kart: Super Circuit. In places it often feels as if the authors are "making do" with the art resources available to them, rather than placing the images that would best suit the topic.
Whatever the reason for these sorts of issues, they present only the occasional bump in what is otherwise a very smooth and entertaining ride. The somewhat inconsistent coverage of titles means that readers looking to read about their particular favorite game may be in for a treat, or may be disappointed, depending on which particular game they're looking to read about. However, this is not that book. What Vintage Games is, is a four-decade retrospective on 25 games that have truly made a difference, and readers who expect just that (as you now do) will come away wholly entertained.
You can purchase Vintage Games from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Missing: Defender?! Gauntlet?! (Score:2, Interesting)
Come on: those two games *defined* an entire culture of horizontal scrolling shoot-em-ups and God's-eye view dungeon rapid-fire raiding. For *fuck's sake* how many quarters did I blow on those two games in teh 80's? Prolly close to eight-thousand dollars worth....and the friggin' Baiters won every time.... '-(
And my green elf; he needs food...badly.
=Smidge=
Re:The Sims, SimCity... and Utopia is menioned whe (Score:3, Interesting)
No Need to save, or worry about if I am playing enough for to keep my stats fresh. Just play the game, kill some time, and have some fun.
I miss gaming like that. I know it still exists, but it seems few and few between titles.
Some (probably all) genres need more history. (Score:4, Interesting)
For example, CRPGs don't all trace back to Ultima. Within that same age of gestation there were also such luminaries as Wizardry, Bard's Tale, Might & Magic, Phantasie, Questron, and others. In fact, I always kind of disliked the single-avatar system of Ultima/Questron and preferred the controlling a party of players ala Bard's Tale/Wizardry/Phantasie. Also, Questron was one of the first games that I came across that used mini-games for certain tests, which was quite novel.
I agree that the arcade was the birthplace of a lot of great titles and ideas, but the Apple ][, C=64, Amiga 500, and Atari ST all were fantastic petri dishes for the wild growth and speciation of all the games we know and love. I think some of the titles mentioned in the book can be traced back to much more fundamental roots and that in many cases those roots are plural, in the form of several good games that were synthesized into a transformative game title that broke through to the mass market.
I also agree that some of these games really aren't "vintage." If you can play it without digging out old equipment of finding an emulator, then it doesn't really qualify.
Re:Mentioned as "Greatest Adventure Games" (Score:3, Interesting)
There was a lot of overlap - Even as popularity went. I played Super Mario Brothers (total Pitfall Harry ripoff!) mainly at home, but years after dumping a bunch of quarters into the arcade box. I only ever played Asteroids on my Atari, but I'm aware that it had an arcade presence.
Tron and Centipede, however, were pretty strictly arcade boxes for me. Break-through and Warlock I'm not sure I saw anywhere except for Atari.
Re:The Sims, SimCity... and Utopia is menioned whe (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Mentioned as "Greatest Adventure Games" (Score:5, Interesting)
Not only that, but they seem to have missed the boat on the older computer games as well. I can think of quite a few that should probably be on the list.
Questron - An interesting mixture of interface styles, embedded mini games, and probably the best finale in any game for years to come.
Karateka - A very interesting game with great music and graphics. Between this and the arcade game Kung Fu, we get the Street Fighter games, etc.
Project Space Station - A very good strategy/simulation/management game which had an easy to learn and use interface. Many strategy games of this era were unattractive due to the interface, but this program seems to have set the bar here.
Leaderboard Golf - A lot of my friends were really addicted to this game. It had 3d graphics and a decent physics engine. All of the extra courses and sequels to this game is a testament to it's innovativeness and popularity.
Hacker - A game before it's time. An exciting game where you break into a remote computer and send a robot on an involved spy mission. I'm not really sure how popular this game was, but I thought it was something that hadn't been tried before done well.
Wild Wild West (I'm not too sure about the name) - I think this is one of the first games with dialog and characters, which idea made it's way into future adventure games like Monkey Island. Depending on how you interact with the "npc", you would either satisfy it, scare it, or be drawn into a gunfight.
Elite! - I'm not going to bother to describe this, as I know most of y'all know what this is, and are probably wondering why it's not listed.
Little Computer People - It's possible that there would be no Sims games today if this nice program was never made.
Superbowl Sunday - I think that this was one of the games that influenced the sports team management games that have been seen since. (A lot of the Avalon Hill games and some of the SSI games suffered from difficult interfaces, which is something that I noted about with PSS.)
This is just a few from the top of my head, and I'm only thinking about c64 now, there are quite a few others games on other platforms that dramatically influenced future games.
Re:Well the games at the beginning .. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Quickly Back on The Shelf... (Score:3, Interesting)
In the review it says it talks about Rogue, progenitor of Nethack and all "Rogue-likes" (der). So who's just talking about their favorite games, history be damned? Okay, those were online 'bonus' chapters. Anyway.
There's only so much room in a book about an area of entertainment to mention/discuss all instances of that form of entertainment. And frankly the list presented here is one of the most varied and comprehensive I've seen in anything of this sort. Not everything can make it in, and focusing on "influence" willows out a lot of things that we might like to see because they are our favorite games.
Like, say, nethack, which I love, but lets be honest outside of inspiring other rogue-likes to add features and inspiring nerds to fail college in their attempts to Ascend, it's influence is limited. Diablo is much more influential in my view. Yes, Diablo was itself a graphical Rogue-like -- and I'd hope the Diablo chapter at least mentions Rogue, though obviously the author is aware of the game either way -- but it's Diablo, not Rogue, that others are apeing in the explosion of dungeon-crawl hack-and-slash games that followed. Diablo brought Rogue-like gaming to the masses. This is why it deserves a whole chapter, and frankly to be honest Nethack doesn't.
Re:Grand Theft Auto? Vintage? (Score:3, Interesting)
Small difference, relatively, but GTA III is actually almost 8 years old and not 6 (it was released October 2001).
Vintage is an ambiguous term, so he gets to play loosely with it. Regardless of whether you thought the game was fun or not, it WAS the first notably high selling game that did an open world sandbox well. There are countless games today that mimic the design (the new Red Faction game released yesterday, for one example).
Like it or not, GTA III was very influential for its design and the controversy that the game itself generated for its content.
Re:Mentioned as "Greatest Adventure Games" (Score:3, Interesting)
I think any collection not mentioning 1987's amazing 'Dungeon Master' from FTL is incomplete. That game was well ahead of it's time. It was terrific on the Atari ST and Apple II GS, but it positively SHONE on the Amiga.
As if the gameplay weren't enough to get it into a list of this nature, the user interface itself should have.
Re:What was this game called? (Score:3, Interesting)
Ha ha!! There were so many of those, it's impossible to list them all.
The best, and most popular were the Infocom games, where failure to light a torch, lantern, match, etc. would put you in danger of being eaten by a grue (a theme that spanned the whole lineup, regardless of genre).
You can find the Infocom games here:
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/3398113/Infocom_Universe_Bootleg [thepiratebay.org]
Pirated, but it's very hard to get the actual copies of the games these days, and the items that came packaged with the game were essential in completing those games (and also very enjoyable to read).
While the link above may not sit well with you, since it's to a torrent site, the original Zork trilogy has been released as freeware, and you can find them here:
http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/ [csd.uwo.ca]
Text based interactive fiction was very popular on the old 8bit computers (one reason was that it was easier to port to the multiple different home computers around at that time) and there are too many different ones to be able to identify the game you played. The Infocom games are possibly the cream of the crop in this area.
Also, interactive fiction is still alive and you can get all sorts of great games here:
http://ifarchive.org/ [ifarchive.org]
Some of these are better than other ones, so be sure to read the ratings and reviews. A few of them match or exceed the quality present in the old Infocom games.
Re:Bill Budge's Pinball Construction Set (Score:3, Interesting)
From that set of games, I'm surprised you left out Arcon. It also didn't change the industry as it didn't spawn its own genre, but man, it was cool. Like chess, but you've gotta battle it out for every space? How cool is that?!
Re:Some (probably all) genres need more history. (Score:3, Interesting)
Wizardry, Bard's Tale, Might and Magic derived from Akalabeth's dungeons (Akalabeth was the prequel to Ultima and released in 1979). Questron and Phantasie mostly derived from Ultima, though yes, that was the first I remember mini-games in.
A couple of influential games I think are missing are Choplifter and Pitfall! Both were influential in gameplay and Choplifter was the first game to start as a computer game and become a video game (albeit rewritten and MUCH harder) and influenced some other games like Rescue Raiders and Armor Alley. Pitfall! was the first popular character based side scrolling game I remember, though some similar games came out the same year (Aztek comes to mind)
I always thought Super Mario Brothers was fairly derivative - basically it pulled a Blizzard, refining gameplay from many other games, including their own (like Space Panic, Donkey Kong, Pitfall!, and others). I personally think Lode Runner was at least as influential, albeit also as derivative (it also was ported to arcade).
Utopia could be considered both the first god game and sim game and is missing.
And how about Bosconian? Yes, the mostly forgotten game gave us... the continue timer. Sorry - probably not really worth a mention other than I loved that game ;)
I also wonder if Cinematronics Rip Off (Star Thief was the mac version, and it had other names for other clones) pre-dates Defender or not. Both were 1980 and had a main goal of protecting rather than destroying. It also introduced 2 player co-op mode according to wiki's Tim Skelly page [wikipedia.org] and was the first game with flocking. Skelly also wrote Starhawk, the first game I remember seeing in (pseudo) 3d (released in 1977). Yes, those are all video games (first) rather than computer games, but so was Tetris.
Source Code for classic games (Score:1, Interesting)
What I would dearly love to see is a book written by someone who programmed some of these games and was able to share their insights into game programming. Unfortunately most contemporary books on game programming, are not written by people who are professional game programmers, also they often spend 80% of the book discussing peripheral issues such as introductory programming topics.
Even better would be the source code for some of these games! Does it still exist or has it long since been misplaced? Even books written by people who did console ports, and could share the code for those would be great.
I would love to be able to progam some decent games (in the classic game style).
In fact this is an issue with the IT publishing industry in general, there is way too much filler, rehashes of vendor documentation, and people writing books on topics such as "intro to php and mysql", that have been done hundreds of times. There are relatively few titles written by professional progammers (as opposed to professional authors / trainers), who can give insights into the programming techniques that are useful in certain specialist areas.
Least Influential Games of all time (Score:1, Interesting)
Everyone always talks about the most influential games, but what about the least. What are the most forgettable, unremarkable games ever made? Not bad, not good, just 'meh', and long forgotten...
Changed? Into what? (Score:3, Interesting)
Just for the record... If a game is not immensely popular, not innovative, and not novel, how can it "change videogames forever"?