Retro
Dune II: The RTS Template
Westwood shipped a genre in 1992 and everyone has been decorating it ever since
Topic
Retro
45 articles
Retro
It Came from the Desert: The B-Movie as Game
Cinemaware finally found a fiction where the clock ticking was the whole point
Retro
Frontier: Elite II — The Universe That Fit on a Floppy
David Braben built a galaxy with real physics and real stars, and watched the game drain out of it
Retro
Midwinter: The Survival Sim Before the Genre
Mike Singleton built an island that could kill you with weather, then gave you thirty-two people and no orders
Retro
Hunter: The Open World in 1991
Paul Holmes built filled-polygon islands you could drive, sail and fly across a decade before anyone called it a genre
Retro
Apidya: The Shooter Nobody Outside Germany Bought
Kaiko put a bee on the box, a fake II on the title screen, and a Huelsbeck score under the whole thing
Retro
Turrican II: The Amiga's Loudest Game
Factor 5 took Manfred Trenz's sprawl to 16-bit and let Chris Huelsbeck off the leash
Retro
Alien Breed: The Amiga's Aliens Fan Film
Team17 copied their homework openly and got away with it because the loop was good
Retro
Syndicate: The Corporate Dystopia With a Persuadertron
Bullfrog built a cyberpunk world that never once tells you what to think about it
Retro
Populous: The God Game's Year Zero
Bullfrog gave you one verb — raise the land, lower the land — and invented a genre with it
Retro
Lemmings: The Puzzle Game as Slapstick Tragedy
DMA Design gave you eight verbs, a save quota and a button that kills everyone
Retro
Sensible World of Soccer: The Football Game as System
Twenty-seven thousand players, twenty seasons, and sprites the size of a fingernail
Retro
Cannon Fodder: The Anti-War Game That Sang
Sensible Software named every soldier, then made you walk past their graves
Retro
The Chaos Engine: The Bitmaps' Steampunk Run-and-Gun
Six mercenaries, a Victorian machine that broke reality, and an AI partner that actually pulls its weight
Retro
Speedball 2: The Bitmap Brothers' Perfect Sport
A game where putting a man in hospital pays exactly as well as scoring
Retro
Shadow of the Beast: The Parallax That Sold Amigas
Thirteen layers of scrolling forest, a David Whittaker score, and almost nothing underneath
Retro
Flashback: The Rotoscoped Sequel-That-Wasn't
Delphine's second cinematic platformer has been living in the wrong shadow for thirty years
Retro
Another World: The Cinematic Game With No Words
How one man on an Amiga 500 built a story that never explains itself
Retro
Monty on the Run: The Music That Made It
Gremlin sold a platform game about a mole and Rob Hubbard sold the machine
Retro
Cauldron II: The Bouncing Pumpkin's Cruelty
Palace Software made the walking the hard part and then took the walking away
Retro
Bubble Bobble on the C64: The Conversion That Held Up
In an age of arcade ports that lied to you, Firebird's 1987 cassette told the truth
Retro
Sanxion: The Loading Screen That Outlived the Game
Thalamus shipped a split-screen shooter and accidentally shipped a legend on the front of it
Retro
Rescue on Fractalus: The Fractals and the Jump Scare
Lucasfilm's first game generated a planet out of maths and then knocked on your window
Retro
Thrust: The Physics Game in 16K
Jeremy Smith put Newton on a budget cassette and charged £1.99 for the privilege
Retro
Creatures: The Cute Game With the Nasty Streak
Apex, Thalamus, 1990, and the C64 platformer that spent its best art on your failure
Retro
IK+: The Fighting Game as Comedy
Archer Maclean, System 3, 1987, and the last great fighting game with a sense of humour
Retro
Defender of the Crown: The Cinematic Bluff
Cinemaware, 1986, and the game that sold a computer on the strength of its pictures
Retro
Pirates!: The Freedom Sid Meier Found First
MicroProse, 1987, and the open world that solved the problem open worlds still have
Retro
Archon: Chess With Fights
Free Fall Associates, 1983, and the board game where a capture is only a proposal
Retro
M.U.L.E.: The Economics Game That Still Teaches
Ozark Softscape's 1983 colony sim and the auction nobody has improved on
Retro
Little Computer People: The Sims Before The Sims
Activision's 1985 house-on-a-disk, and what it actually passed down
Retro
Skool Daze: The Sandbox Nobody Called a Sandbox
David Reidy gave a schoolful of NPCs names and timetables in 1984 and let you loose in it
Retro
Head Over Heels: The Isometric Puzzle With Two Bodies
Jon Ritman and Bernie Drummond built a co-op game for one player and never mentioned it
Retro
Boulder Dash: The Grid That Taught Physics
Peter Liepa took a few local rules from cellular automata and got a whole game out of them
Retro
Impossible Mission: The Voice, the Somersault, the Puzzle
Dennis Caswell built a game with no attack button and gave it the most famous line on the C64
Retro
Last Ninja 2: The Isometric Peak
System 3 put a feudal assassin in Manhattan and gave him a jump nobody could aim
Retro
Mayhem in Monsterland: The C64 Doing the Impossible
Two brothers shipped a speed platformer in 1993, years after the machine was supposed to be finished
Retro
Turrican: The Sprawl That Broke the Rules
Manfred Trenz built a C64 platformer the size of a map and dared you to get lost in it
Retro
Armalyte: The C64's Answer to Everything
Two blokes called Cyberdyne Systems out-R-Typed R-Type on hardware that had no business managing it
Retro
Delta: The C64 Shooter as Music Video
Stavros Fasoulas built a competent scrolling shooter and Rob Hubbard turned it into something people still talk about
Retro
Wizball: The Colour-Restoring Oddity
Sensible Software built a shooter where the first thing you have to earn is the ability to steer, and the second is a cat
Retro
Uridium: The Shoot-Em-Up as Precision Instrument
Braybrook's second great C64 system replaced the bullet sponge with a machine that demands you fly properly
Retro
Paradroid: Braybrook's Perfect Little System
One takeover minigame does the work of an entire progression tree, and Andrew Braybrook wrote down how he built it
Retro
The Sentinel: The Strangest Game on the C64
Geoff Crammond's 1986 puzzle game has no lineage, no imitators and no obvious ancestors — forty years on it is still sui generis
Retro
Elite on the C64: The Universe in 32K
Braben and Bell shipped the instructions for a galaxy and let the machine build the rest