Ye Olde Staging Point

1. Adventure Construction Set -- Electronic Arts, 1984

   I very nearly died of sheer joy the day this game came into my hands. Adventure Construction Set (ACS) promised the Holy Grail of gaming: the ability to create your own adventures, with stories and locales limited only by your imagination. ACS came pretty close to that elusive goal. With ACS, you could create full-blown playable adventure/roleplaying games; you would first design a world map; then populate it with cities, rivers, and other adventure locations; and finally fill it with people, monsters, and treasures of your own design. It even let you draw your own graphics and define individual attributes for the items and creatures you placed in your world.

   The possibilities opened by this game were simply mind-blowing, and I filled many a notebook with design notes, hastily sketched maps, and plot ideas as I planned out the games I would create. I can't think of any other game that prompted me to do so much brainstorming. While weighted towards the fantasy genre, the massive amount of customization you could do in ACS allowed for games set in outer space, the modern world, distant history, or whatever bizarre universe you could dream up.

   Interestingly, this game more than anything else taught me the importance of planning out projects before diving headlong into them; ACS' options were so open-ended that it was terribly easy to get caught up in designing specific elements of an adventure without having a clear goal in mind to guide the design. In the many years that have passed since ACS came and went, very few if any programs have attempted to give users the massive scope of creative control that ACS did. World-builder programs never seemed to catch on, although very recent, heavily-customizable games like Neverwinter Nights may spark a promising shift in that direction. We can only hope.

2. Heart of Africa -- Ozark Softscape, 1985

   The sequel to the equally excellent game Seven Cities of Gold, Heart of Africa (HoA) also filled many of my after-school afternoons. In HoA, you played the role of an explorer in 1890 searching the continent of Africa for the tomb of an ancient pharaoh. You could purchase needed supplies and equipment at cities and villages that you came across in the course of your exploration, and keeping the natives friendly was an important part of staying alive. The beauty of this game was its sheer size; the entire continent of Africa was out there to be explored, screen by screen; and it was filled to the brim with villages, rivers, mountains, and other interesting locations. The game consisted of you trekking through the deserts and mountains searching for clues that would lead you to the location of the lost tomb.

   This game's greatness stemmed from its wonderful atmosphere of exploration and discovery. Each new village you came across was a spectacular new find; following great rivers through the heart of the continent to see where they'd lead you was a genuine thrill; and it was simply great fun to travel for days, low on food and desperate for supplies, and suddenly stumble upon one of Africa's great geographic wonders (like Mount Kilimanjaro) or a massive hidden city.

   Like world-building construction games, exploration games like HoA and its predecessor Seven Cities seemed to slip entirely off the radar by the 1990s; I'm not aware of any recent efforts in the genre. It's a shame, as there are few games left that capture the thrill of discovery and the wonder of exploration in the way that HoA did.

3. Wasteland -- Electronic Arts, 1987

   Ah, Wasteland, the game considered by many to be the single greatest computer game ever created. Wasteland was a roleplaying game set in the western U.S. after a nuclear holocaust has destroyed civilization as we know it. Your job is to assemble a team of "Desert Rangers" and venture out into the wastes to explore newly awakened pockets of civiliazations in California and Nevada, and to investigate sinister rumors about an army of machines.

   Computer roleplaying games were nothing new at this point, but Wasteland put several new spins on the genre. The one that struck me the most was its non-linearity. Unlike most games of its era, it was extremely non-linear in nature; locations, puzzles, and challenges could be faced in whatever order you chose. Of course, many encounters were too difficult to be faced until you had gathered a great deal of experience and firepower, but there was nothing stopping you from trying. The beauty of the game was the way that it gently nudged you in the right direction--always hinting at your next step--instead of railroading you through the storyline by taking away your ability to choose what to do next. Thus the plot unfolded much more gradually than in most games, but was a more rewarding experience in the end.

   Wasteland was a great gaming experience that took months to complete. It gave you a fully-developed world and invited you to explore it at your leisure. The game has received several pseudo-sequels in the excellent Fallout series of games, but in my opinion it remains at the top of the list of great roleplaying games despite its age and technical limitations.

4. Airborne Ranger -- Microprose, 1987

   Airborne Ranger (AR) was a truly different kind of game. The plot was simple--you are an U.S. Ranger who must infiltrate numerous enemy bases and accomplish a variety of missions. Although that sounds like every other shoot-em-up ever created, AR was nothing like the numerous kill-everything-that-moves games that were floating around at the time.

   If AR had to be put in a genre, it might be called a "military simulation." It presented you with an objective and then forced you to go about accomplishing it in a realistic manner. Realistic weapons and an emphasis on stealth over gunplay were the rules of the game. In each mission, you dropped several supply crates into enemy territory, then parachuted into the target area and began slowly making your way towards your objective. With very limited amounts of ammunition, explosives, and medical kits, simply going in guns blazing was not an option. Instead, you had to slowly crawl through dry riverbeds, cautiously make your way around minefields, carefully scan the enemy lines looking for gaps in their patrols through which you could sneak... occasionally knifing a guard (gunshots attracted attention) and stealing a uniform to get you a bit closer to your goal. Along the way, if you were able, you could pick up supplies from the crates you dropped, assuming that they hadn't fallen into minefields or too close to enemy encampments (both common occurences).

   I have yet to see a game quite like AR. When it first came out, there was nothing at all like it out there--most military games were just shallow shoot-em-up action games. Only in very recent years have elements of AR-like realism been making their way into first-person shooters like Rainbow Six. The emphasis on stealth and intelligence over massive firepower was a refreshing one, and hopefully it will make a comeback as today's gun-heavy first-person-shooters grow somewhat tiresome.

And there you have it: four games that entertained me for months, even years, as I grew up. Playing these games was an experience akin to reading a good book--you got to spend a few hours immersed in the world of somebody else's imagination. There has never been a shortage of games that amount to nothing more than a waste of time, but these managed to distance themselves from the crowd and offer something unique to the player. Here's hoping we see more games in the future that stretch boundaries and genres and push the medium in new and interesting ways!

Surely there were other great games in the 80s, and surely you played some of them. Tell me what games took hold of your imagination during the era of Reagan and Madonna!