THE HISTORY OF VIDEOGAMES PART 13 - January 2000
| As we’ve seen in this series so far, by 1980 most of
the things young boys are interested in had been turned into video games. Cowboys and
Indians (Boot Hill), cops and robbers (er, Cops’n’Robbers), racing cars (Night
Driver, Death Race), fighting space aliens (Space Invaders, Galaxian), big scary robots
(Berzerk), and so on. But the obvious thing that everyone had overlooked was tanks, an
omission Atari swiftly put right with Battlezone. The first game to put the player in a truly three-dimensional environment that they could explore at will (being shot by the numerous enemies notwithstanding), Battlezone was such a convincing simulation of tank warfare (the controls even simulated independently-moving tank tracks, and you viewed the action through a sort of periscope thing) that Atari ended up making a special version of the game for the US Army to use as a training device. So now we know who to blame for all that "friendly fire" in the Gulf War. Um. (Cough.) Battlezone, everybody! |
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