Notable Games
In addition to shoot 'em ups and maze games, the third important genre to emerge from the arcades in the golden age was the platform game. In its simplest form, a platform game features a series of platforms that the player must navigate using conveyances such as ladders while collecting objects or dispatching enemies while dodging obstacles. Small company Universal Sales released the first such game in 1980, Space Panic, but the platform game did not begin its rise to prominence until the 1981 release Donkey Kong from Nintendo. At the time, Nintendo was a small Japanese game company originally founded in 1889 to manufacture Japanese hanafuda cards. Under the leadership of Hiroshi Yamauchi, who guided Nintendo as president from 1949 until retirement in 2002, the company began to experiment in other realms in the 1960s, most notably toys. After initial difficulty, the company became a success in the toy industry through several clever mechanical contraptions from engineer Gunpei Yokoi and expanded into video arcade games after the success of Space Invaders. When the company's Galaxian clone Radarscope failed to catch on in the United States, however, the company's tenuous international expansion appeared doomed to failure. To salvage the situation, Nintendo of America president Minoru Arakawa asked for a game that could be retrofitted into existing unsold Radarscope cabinets. Not wanting to divert personnel from existing projects, Yamauchi agreed to the request but placed untested artist Shigeru Miyamoto on the project. Launching a career, a company, and an entire genre, Miyamoto's Donkey Kong improved on the basic mechanics first seen in Space Panic, most importantly giving the protagonist the ability to jump to avoid obstacles. Requiring the player to guide Jumpman through four distinct single-screen stages to rescue his girlfriend Pauline from the giant ape Donkey Kong, the game sold 60,000 units and remained Nintendo's top selling machine into 1983. A sequel, Donkey Kong Junior, followed in which Jumpman was the villain and gained a new name, Mario, after Nintendo of America landlord Mario Segale. Other companies soon put out their own platform games, including Taito's Jungle King (1982), which did not actually have platforms, but included the typical run-and-jump mechanics of the platformer and was the first such game to advance via smooth scrolling, and Elevator Action (1983), a forerunner of the platform shooter that gave the hero the ability to fight back against his enemies with a gun and a flying kick, Williams' Joust (1982), the first two-player cooperative platform game, Gottlieb's Q*bert (1982), the first isometric platform game, and Namco's Mappy (1983), the first smooth-scrolling arcade game that combined run-and-jump mechanics and platforms.
The golden age was remarkable not only for its game play advances, but also for its technical innovations. One of the most important was the implementation of vector graphics, created by an electron beam drawing lines on a black screen. The use of vector graphics allowed designers to animate many more objects on the screen at the same time at a sharper resolution than raster graphics allowed at the time as well as create better-defined shapes and even wire frame 3D models. Vector graphics were pioneered by Larry Rosenthal, who wrote his master’s thesis on Spacewar! and created a vector graphics system that would allow the game to be accurately modeled in the arcade. Rosenthal took his system to Cinematronics, a small arcade game company founded in 1975, which produced his Spacewar! clone Space Wars in 1977, which sold 30,000 units, established Cinematronics as a leading arcade game producer and led to the creation of several important games using vector graphics. These games include Cinematronics own Warrior (1979, a top-down view swordfighting game that was the first fighting game) and Rip Off (1980, a tank combat game that was the first important game in which two players played cooperatively, preceded only by an obscure 1978 Atari game called Fire Truck), as well as landmark Atari games Asteroids (1979 by Ed Logg, a space shooter in which the player must destroy asteroids that became Atari’s best-selling arcade game with 70,000 units sold in the U.S. and another 30,000 sold abroad), Battlezone (1980 by Ed Rotberg, a tank combat game that was the first commercial game with 3D graphics and the first with a first-person perspective), Tempest (1981 by Dave Theurer, a tube shooter that was the first game to allow the player to continue from the point of death by inserting another coin), and Star Wars (1983, a first-person space shooter that was one of the first successful movie tie-in games). Vector graphics machines could be temperamental and prone to break downs, however, causing vector games to virtually disappear after 1983 as raster graphics became more advanced.
Another advance late in the golden age was the use of the laserdisc to store game data. While Sega released the first such game in early 1983, the shoot 'em up Astron Belt, it was once again Cinematronics that was on the cutting edge of a new technology. Conceived by Rick Dyer and animated by Don Bluth, the 1983 release Dragon's Lair made use of the increased capacity of the laserdisc to feature lavish animated sequences, create the first true story in a video game, and pioneer what would later be called the interactive movie. While the graphics were extraordinary, the game play merely consisted of choosing which path the hero should take at branching points in the story, leading to a game that could take many quarters to conquer the first time, but which had virtually no replay value once the proper sequence was known. Dragon's Lair sold 16,000 units and created a brief demand for laserdisc games, but they ended up being merely a passing fad.
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