April Edition Live Magazine - April 2014 Issue. | Page 14

feature

Retro Games that Spawned Gaming Genres
Do you like a particular genre of games over others? Maybe you love to raid dungeons in an MMORPG such as
World of Warcraft or Star Wars: The Old Republic, or perhaps you enjoy pwning n00bs in Battlefield 4 or the newlyreleased Titanfall. Whatever your buzz, all the genres in gaming began with just one game (and in some cases,
two).
The following is a list of some of video games’ most influential classics, with information about the games themselves and the genres they helped create. We’ve aimed to cover as many genres as possible but with magazine
space being a precious commodity, we’ve had to only cover the big genres.
Say hello to the Grand Daddies of gaming!

Maze game - ‘Pac-Man’ (1980, Namco)
If there’s one single video game
character who is recognisable
above all else, it’s Pac-Man - the
yellow, round ball-man from Namco
(now Namco Bandai). Long before
the mascot era was ushered in by a
certain Italian plumber and hyperactive hedgehog, Pac-Man was the
first ever video game protagonist
and the king of the arcade-era.
Essentially a game about eating,
Pac-Man takes place in haunted
mazes where players must eat
240 dots in a level, all the while
being pursued by ghosts. Players
are able to eat power dots (also
known as power pellets, Pac-dots)
which enable Pac-Man¬¬ to eat
the ghosts, but only for a brief time.
One would assume from a brief
glance that Pac-Man’s gameplay
was rather simple (and compared to
modern games, it is), but it’s cheerful sprites and bright colours hide

an addictive and tense game of cat
and mouse. It was also one of the
earliest examples of A.I. (Artificial
Intelligence) in a video game, with
each ghost having a different way
of moving through the maze and a
different approach for hunting PacMan. Pac-Man enthusiasts often
state that to succeed at Pac-Man,
players must learn to understand
the different ghosts’ behaviours.
It has been 34 years since PacMan fever first struck the world,
and Pac himself has managed to
remain popular throughout that entire time. Sure, he’s had the odd
game that has broken from his core
mechanics (Pac-Man 2: The New
Adventures was quite a departure
from Pac-Man), but with a new
cartoon series as well as a slew of
new games across consoles, PC
and mobiles, Pac-Man isn’t going
anywhere any time soon.

The Maze Game Legacy: Mouse
Trap (1981), Pengo (1982), I’m
Sorry (1985), and more.

Shoot-em-up/Space shooter - ‘Space Invaders’
(1978, Taito)
You can’t deny the importance of
Space Invaders. It ushered in the
era of space shooters (and shoot
‘em ups), both of which are still
popular today. One of the shooters that followed the computer-only
game, Spacewar! (1962), Space
Invaders won game overs with its
addictive gameplay and intense atmosphere.
Space Invaders saw players pilot a
lone spaceship (which could only
move on a lateral plane) in combat
against an alien army. The aliens
constantly advance, whilst moving sideways to avoid the player’s
shots. Unlike other shooters where
bullets can be fired instantaneously, shots have a slight delay in
recharging, so timing one’s shots
correctly takes practice, and is especially difficult against the strafing
aliens as they increase in speed.
What was truly brilliant about
Space Invaders was the tense atmosphere, which was gained by a
soundtrack of just four descending notes, which increased in
pace in sync with the aliens. At the
start of the game, the aliens and
soundtrack were quite slow, but
by the end of a player’s run, they
would both be absolutely manic.

Space shooters like Spacewar
and Space Invaders were actually developed in response to real
life events. The cold war and the
space race both took place during the same time as the birth and
rise of video games, and the public (particularly in the United States
of America) lived in caution of both
the perils of space and the threat
of international conflict. It wouldn’t
have been completely unreasonable then, to fear a combination of
the two, namely the threat of aliens
or a conflict fought in outer space.
Space Invaders has seen many
ports and remakes across a wide
variety of consoles. Earlier ports
kept graphics and gameplay identical (such as the ones on the NES
and Atari systems) but later systems saw inclusions such as special enemies and weapon power
ups. Space Invaders remains a
hugely popular retro title, and has
gone onto influence a number of
other retro and modern shooters.
The
Shooter
(Shoot-em-up)
Legacy - Galaxian (1987), Galaga (1981), 1942 (1984), R-Type
(1987), the Starfox series (19932011), Mars Matrix (2000), and
more.