April Edition Live Magazine - April 2014 Issue. | Page 26

Real-time-strategy - ‘Dune II: The Building of a
Dynasty’ (1992, Westwood Studios)

feature

Retro Games that Spawned Gaming Genres

Racing Game - ‘Pole Position’ (1982, Namco)
Of all the genres in gaming, racing
games are one of the trickiest to
analyze the history of. There were
many games before Pole Position
that claimed to be racing games
(Rally-X, Speed Race, Monaco
GP), but few of these actually felt
like actual racing games and instead felt like arcade games that
featured cars.
Namco’s Pole Position however,

was the first racing game to feature a race track that was actually
modeled from a real race track,
and combined it with the popular
behind-the-car third-person view
that is associated with the racing
genre. Not only that, but it was
one of the first arcade racers with
a realistically-depicted car, and
not some whacky cartoon-like car.
Racing games arguably became
the genre that pursues realism the

most, and a game like Pole Position
certainly set the standard at the time
of its release.
Upon its release, Pole Position was
the highest grossing arcade game
that year in North America, earning
$61 million. It has been ported numerous times, and has even had a
Saturday morning cartoon based on
it.

Although Herzog Zwei is widely
considered the first real-time strategy game, it saw a relatively small
audience, due to it being released
on the Sega Mega Drive. At the
time, Mega Drive titles were primarily arcade titles and action titles with simpler gameplay, and PC
would have been better suited to
Herzog Zwei’s strategic gameplay.
Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty
(renamed to Dune II: The Battle
for Arrakis for some regions) took
some of Herzog Zwei’s elements
and refined them, as well as adding some of its own unique features which would later become the
standard for many RTS games. It
is based on the film Dune, which
in turn is based on Frank Herberts
science-fiction novel, Dune.
The player takes the role of the
commander of one of the three interplanetary houses, the Atreides,
the Harkonnen or the Ordos, with
the objective of wresting control of
Arrakis from the other two houses.

House Ordos is not featured in the
Dune novels and is mentioned only
in the non-canon Dune Encyclopedia. The basic strategy in the game
is to harvest spice from the treacherous sand dunes using a harvester vehicle, convert the spice into
credits via a refinery and to build
military units with these acquired
credits in order to fend off and destroy the enemy
.
Some key elements that first appeared in Dune II and later appear
in many other RTS games include:
• A world map from which the next
mission is chosen
• Resource-gathering to fund unit
const ruction
• Simple base and unit construction
• Building construction dependencies (technology tree)
• Mobile units that can be deployed
as buildings
• Different sides/factions (the
Houses), each with unique unittypes and super weapons
• A context-sensitive mouse cursor
to issue commands (introduced in

the Mega Drive/Genesis version)
Another notable feature of Dune
II was that it was one of the first
games to support MIDI sound,
and therefore, had vastly superior
sound design compared to other
games at the time. Dune II has often been described as one of the
greatest video games of all time by
a number of different game developers and publishers, as well as
various websites and even Time
magazine.
The RTS Legacy: The Warcraft series (1994-current), the Command
and Conquer series (1995-2012),
the Age of Empires series (19972013), and many more.

The Racing Game Legacy: Super
Mario Kart (1992-current), the Gran
Turismo series (1997-current), the
Test Drive series (1987-2012), the
Need for Speed series (1994-current), and many more.
So there you have it - a wrap-up of some of the biggest genres in gaming. Have you played many of them? The
standards set by many retro games are still found in games today. Experience levels, hit points, aiming crosshairs,
over worlds - all of them came from somewhere. Many passionate developers aimed to tell a story, or simply aimed
to create a game that was fun. As we look to the future of gaming one thing is for sure: its roots are firmly planted
in a retro game.

Written by Nick Getley

www.stickytriggerentertainment.com