Some of my favourite moments from Sea of Thieves – a game about sailing across a vast ocean and digging up treasure – are grounded in stealth mechanics. Like the time another player stowed away on our ship and stole a vault key, or when I lost a pursuing player by pretending to turn around an island, only to turn back in the opposite direction as soon as we were obscured by a nearby volcano.
At their core, stealth games are about positioning – being in the right place at the right time and knowing when to leap into action. It feels as if, more than ever, the genre is poised to spring up from the foliage and take us all by surprise once more.
But let’s load up an old save and go right back to the start – back to a time before save states even existed.
Pac to the Start
While Metal Gear (1987) is often cited as the birthplace of stealth, you can see the foundations of the genre much earlier – in the arcades. Pac-Man was released in the US by Midway in 1980. A year later, around 250 million games of Pac-Man were being played in America each week.
Pac-Man being played in an arcade cabinet
Image Credit: Shutterstock
Japanese games designer Toru Iwatani created Pac-Man as a response to the violent arcade games of the time, such as Space Invaders (1978) and Galaxian (1979). In those titles, the goal was to destroy the enemy with a hail of bullets. Pac-Man, for the most part, wasn’t an aggressor at all. The little fella just wanted to pop some pills in peace.
In Pac-Man the goal is to gobble up all the fruit you can while avoiding ghosts hunting you down. It’s a game about evasion rather than outright stealth – you never actually hide, you just intuit enemy patrol paths and make sure your route doesn’t intersect with them. Occasionally, you get access to a power-up that allows you to gobble up the ghosts, turning the tables and forcing the cherry-bothering phantoms to retreat from you.
When you boil it down to its core, Pac-Man grabbing a power-up and becoming the aggressor isn’t that different to The Last of Us Part II’s Ellie lying in wait before plunging a blade into someone’s neck.
Double-O Five
After Pac-Man, Sega launched an arcade game called 005 in 1981. It holds the Guinness world record for being the first-ever stealth game. Using a top-down view, you infiltrate a series of warehouses to steal documents before escaping in a helicopter. While a good portion of the game is action-focused, it innovated within the stealth genre because it was the first game to give enemies a vision cone, allowing you to tell where the enemy is looking and find a route around their patrols. Unlike Pac-Man, where the enemy always knows where you are, 005 allows you to spring an ambush or let guards pass by without being seen.
Monster maze
You can also see the birthplace of modern, first-person perspective horror-stealth games that same year. Games like Outlast and Alien Isolation can be traced all the way back to a ZX Spectrum game called 3D Monster Maze (1981). The game takes you to a low-resolution labyrinth and asks you to escape while being hunted by a T-Rex.
The action takes place through the player character’s eyes and relies on text cues to tell you what the monster is doing. ‘He is hunting for you,’ and similar messages appear on the screen, asking you to interpret the dinosaur’s location in relation to where you are. You’re also able to outrun the beast when it gives chase. It’s a rudimentary precursor to much of the YouTuber-bait horror games of the modern era.
Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake
Image Credit: Konami
Sleuthing evolved
Around the same time, you see the genre evolve via the top-down Apple II game Castle Wolfenstein. This allowed players to dress as Nazi soldiers to evade detection, and it also introduced AI that reacted to the sound of gunshots and grenade detonations. You started the game with only ten bullets, which encouraged you to play it on its own terms – as a stealth game – and hold enemies up by poking your gun into the small of their back. This way you could force them to surrender rather than wasting your limited ammo.
Metal Gear
Later, Metal Gear (1987) – another top-down game, this time for the MSX2 – popularised stealth games and truly highlighted their potential. Silenced firearms were introduced to the genre, as well as subtle noise detection and guards with multiple alert levels. Sneaky players could creep up on enemies and take them out silently with their fists. As well as dealing with patrolling sentries, Metal Gear asked you to slip past security cameras and infrared sensors.
Lured in
It was followed by Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake (1990), which added a radar window showing enemy vision cones. The sequel also introduced a timer to alert modes for guards, allowing them to return to their default state if you avoid them for long enough. The ability to crouch also gave players new ways to hide from anyone who was hunting them down.
On top of that, another staple of the stealth genre made its debut: lures. Using tiny, robotic mice, you could distract enemies and lure them to a specific location before striking, just like the bottles and bricks of The Last of Us.
There weren’t any noteworthy stealth games for a while after Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, but that all changed in 1998, the year stealth games went in three distinct directions.
This is an extract from The History of the Stealth Game by Kirk McKeand, published by White Owl, an imprint of Pen & Sword Books.
Kirk McKeand is an award-winning game journalist from Lincoln, UK, where he lives with his partner and two sons. He has written for a variety of mainstream and specialist outlets, and you can find him today as Managing Editor for GLHF, a gaming content agency serving media partners around the globe.
In Age of Empires and games like it, players assume the role of an all-seeing commander, architect and logistician. While RTS games can be sedate experiences, the layering of organisational challenge with reactive battlefield strategy sets the stage for fast-paced, intense gameplay. Here we’ll explain what an RTS game is.
The first real-time strategy
Dune II screenshot
Image Credit: Westwood Studios / Virgin Games
Dune II, released by Westwood Studios in 1992, wasn’t the first game to fit the framework of an RTS. This accolade might be attributed to various games from the 1980s. But it may have been the first game to be described as “real-time strategy”. It set a lasting model for the genre.
What makes a game an RTS?
Company of Heroes 3 screenshot
Image Credit: SEGA
RTS games typically generate drama by positioning players against another foe in a combative encounter. RTS games generally have four main elements. These are units, buildings, technologies and resources.
Units are the moveable actors that can be assigned tasks, such as gathering resources or attacking enemies, and buildings research technologies and train units. Meanwhile technologies improve economic or military stats to give one player an advantage over another. All of these elements are dependent on there being sufficient resources, which are deliberately harvested or generated during the game.
Is chess an RTS?
Bobby Fischer plays a chess match with Larry Evans in a indoor pool at the Grossinger Hotel in the Catskills, New York. ca. 1971
Image Credit: Alamy
Chess is a useful comparison which can help us to understand what an RTS is, but it is not itself an RTS. In a game of chess, play proceeds through the course of turns. In each turn, a player can move one piece. In RTS games, the game rules do not limit moves by turns. Instead it takes place all at once.
A chess board is comparable with the level or “map” in which the RTS game is played, while the white and black pieces similarly represent two opposing sides. Chess can be played with RTS rules. Simply get rid of the turn-based requirement and play. Would we recommend it? Probably not.
Are RTS games hard?
Rise of Nations: Extended Edition screenshot
Image Credit: Xbox Game Studios
RTS games are usually fairly approachable. Because of the way they often mimic a desktop environment and incorporate elements such as dragging the mouse to select multiple objects, they can be intuitive for people familiar with computers. RTS games often scale in difficulty, which makes their single player modes accessible for a range of players.
They can be hard to get good at, though. The most enduring RTS games often have a high skill ceiling. This means that there is a large gap between the abilities of an infrequent player and somebody who regularly plays competitive matches. Age of Empires is one such game. It’s often what introduces people to the genre, while it’s also our game of choice for the History Hit Open.
Are RTS games dead?
Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition screenshot
For a while in the late 2000s and early 2010s, it might have seemed like the RTS was at risk of vanishing. But RTS games aren’t dead. A consistent appetite for RTS games is evident in the multiple re-releases of the Age of Empires series. Technologically and aesthetically enhanced “Definitive Editions” of all games, apart from Age of Mythology, were released over 2019 and 2020.
Do they still make RTS games?
Age of Empires IV screenshot
Image Credit: Xbox Game Studios
It’s still an unlikely proposition for many publishers, but in the last few years we’ve had novel RTS games like Northgard and Iron Harvest, alongside bigger and more advanced entries in the Total War series.
Meanwhile, the long-awaited Age of Empires IV was released in October, 2021. Company of Heroes 3 is the next instalment in one of the best RTS series of all time, and it’s coming out in 2023.
What is a good RTS?
Northgard
Image Credit: Shiro Games
If you’re looking for a good RTS, you’ll find a solid recommendation in Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition. It’s accessible for newcomers, with skirmishes to occupy your lunch breaks and campaigns to fill in your weekends.
While franchises like Age of Empires and Company of Heroes are dependably good RTS games, you can also take a look at our list of similar games. They include interesting games like Age of Mythology and Northgard.
]]>In the first step of a new partnership aimed at engaging younger audiences with history, the National Trust have created a Minecraft version of the ruined Dorset fortress, and are asking players to reimagine and rebuild it.
Engaging younger audiences
Perhaps it’s a surprising partnership – Europe’s largest conservation charity and Microsoft’s global video gaming brand. But “why not?” asks Martin Papworth, archaeologist at the National Trust. “I think it’s a really good way of engaging younger audiences. It’s a way of reimagining the castle and seeing how they might be able to build it.”
Minecraft players are invited to download a virtual version of Corfe Castle’s ruins and redevelop them. Corfe Castle was demolished in 1646. The most recent drawing of it before its demolition is a 16th century plan. This gap in the record creates a negative space where players can “imagine how it once was and how it worked,” says Papworth.
Ruins are provocative places, prompting questions about what created them and what preceded them. Their presence in the virtual world similarly invites an act of imagination, and for that reason ruins have consistently made for compelling video game settings.
“Watching children walk around Corfe Castle and imagine them playing there, you can see that they really like to engage in what it would have been like to be there hundreds of years ago, to defend the castle,” says Papworth. “It’s very exciting to share a place we look after, conserve and open for public enjoyment with an audience in a different way.”
Creative construction
The creative rebuilding process that the partnership envisions is portrayed in a video featuring historian Alice Loxton, also of History Hit, and Minecraft YouTube creator Grian. which has them figuring out how to faithfully rebuild the fortification from its ruins in the blocky building game.
Papworth suggests that this interaction between expert and player may even yield useful insights. “It’s that kind of interaction between the creative child and the person who knows. You may even get the expert thinking. As an archaeologist working with artists on guidebooks and interpretation works, that’s the only time you actually realise how little you know.”
The National Trust have previously used a 3D digital scan of Corfe to virtually haul a 20-plus-tonne block, once part of a tower but since fallen down a hillside, back into its original position. “It’s another aspect of this reimagining,” Papworth says.
Shaping history in the classroom
There are longer term ambitions for the National Trust to use gaming and virtual worlds. “This is like a pilot for Minecraft,” says Papworth. He is open-minded about how it might develop, but he suggests other National Trust sites could be given the same treatment, such as Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire or Chedworth Roman Villa in Gloucestershire, where there are “ruins which need to be imagined to understand.”
Certainly, there are plans to link the reimagining of sites like Corfe Castle to the classroom. The partnership with Xbox is intended to help shape history lessons in classrooms around the UK. A proposed teaching pack based on Minecraft would let students “talk about medieval life and the place of castles within that life, and Corfe Castle in particular.”
“Using gaming to enhance learning is something I never experienced at school but I’m so glad that some students today get to,” says YouTube creator Grian.
Minecraft has already found widespread use as an educational tool, teaching subjects from computer science to chemistry. Meanwhile, museums including the Museum of London have appreciated its versatility as a means of rendering historic landscapes on a large scale in an accessible environment.
The partnership follows the launch of Minecraft’s ‘The Wild Update’, which introduces ruinous structures to its procedurally generated landscapes.
Fuel for creative minds
For the last four hundred years, Corfe’s lofty ruins have sat jaunty and crumpled amidst Dorset downland. Where once loathed as an expression of power, the ruins took on new emotional aspects from the late 18th century that were fuel for creative minds.
The castle’s tranquil decay was depicted by J.M.W. Turner, Albert Goodwin and Arthur Streeton, while its eerie aspect lent inspiration for ‘Kirrin Castle’ in Enid Blyton’s Five on a Treasure Island (in whose film adaptation it also featured). And looming in the background in the opening of 1971’s Bedknobs and Broomsticks, it forms an impression of rural English life. In what direction will the castle’s Minecraft rebuilders take it next?
]]>In fact, while we now associate it with intellect, quick thinking and mathematical skill, chess was originally linked with battle tactics, imperial leadership and martial prowess. It travelled across continents through conquests, mercantile exchange, and diplomatic missions, adapting to each new environment quickly and seamlessly.
Four branches
The earliest mentions of the game come from 6th century India, where it was known as chaturanga, (literally: ‘four limbed’). Although the exact rules remain hazy, we know it was played between two or four players, on mostly unchequered boards of 64 or 100 squares. Each player had sixteen pieces: a raja, or king; a mantri, minister or counsellor; two ratha, chariots; two gaja, elephants; two ashva, horses; and eight padati, foot soldiers.
This division of roles reflected the four branches of the ancient Indian army: chariotry, elephantry, cavalry, and infantry. Lead by the king and his main advisor, these four factions had to work as one to fight and win on the battlefield. Even the name of the game, chaturanga, points to this sense of unity and harmony: each ‘limb’ smoothly operating in unison with the rest of the body.
Prince Aurangzeb faces a maddened elephant named Sudakar, attributed to Govardhan, c.1635
Image Credit: Historic Collection / Alamy Stock Photo
Contemporary ancient Indian texts on war theory reveal that this ability of armies to move and act together was considered pivotal to success in battle. Furthermore, such treatises frequently link chaturanga with military ideas and guidelines. In fact, chess was very much understood as a way for princes and kings to learn, practice, and perform martial leadership and strategy.
Often played in front of an assembled court, chaturanga was therefore an elite pastime used to educate heirs to the imperial throne, to cultivate their wartime smarts and, during periods of peace, to display the king’s prowess away from the battlefield.
The layout of the pieces, for one, was directly connected to warfare: it mirrored battle formations and manoeuvres that could be enacted on fields of war. The starting position that was popular in the 6th century (which wasn’t too dissimilar to the one we use today), corresponds with the ancient Indian ashauhini formation, which was known for its carefully balanced ratio of soldiers on horseback to war elephants to charioteers to foot soldier.
Just war
Chess also helped to develop ideas about war that remain central to our understanding of armed conflict even today. For instance, the ancient Indian epic Mahabharata, which sought to pass on dharma (Hindu moral law) as well as itihasa (historical wisdom), lays out the main principles of just war.
It condemns the use of unfair means, like poisoned or barbed arrowhead; it forbids attacks on defenceless civilians; and it directs victors to provide human treatment for all prisoners, abled and wounded alike.
Buzurjmihr masters the Hindu Game of Chess, folio 639v, Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp, c.1530-1535, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Image Credit: Public Domain
These ideas stayed connected do the game of chaturanga even as it travelled out of India. Indeed, in the 7th century, chess arrived to Sassanid Persia, where is quickly became central to princely education, alongside horse riding, calligraphy, poetry, mathematics, archery, and more.
The story, narrated in the Shahnama (a Persian epic that recounts the fantastical and real history of ancient Iranian kings and heroes), goes that an Indian ambassador reaches the imperial Sassanid court bearing a gift of a chessboard. He issues a challenge to the Persian court: to figure out how the game was played and what the role of each piece was. It takes a whole day and a whole night, but the clever Persian vizier manages to come to the correct answer.
The king is in danger
From then on, chaturanga became known in Persia as shatranj; it was played widely across royal and educated circles, and a couple of rules were added. Most importantly, this is where it becomes customary to warn one’s opponent when their king is under attack. The phrase was shah mat, the king is in danger. Our English term ‘checkmate’, and even ‘chess’ itself, are directly derived from the Middle Persian language.
From Persia, chess travelled in multiple directions: it went back east, along mercantile routes, to China and then Japan; it went further west, across the Islamic empires of North Africa, and was introduced into continental Europe as they conquered the Spanish peninsula.
Chess set from Iran, 12th century
Image Credit: agefotostock / Alamy Stock Photo
Therefore, by the turn of the 9th century, chess had become known across the whole Eurasian landmass. Called xiangqi in China, shogi in Japan, and ajedrez in Spain, chess adapted to its surrounding social and cultural settings.
Fortifying the game
Nevertheless, its roots in Indian military thought remain: in Europe, the counsellor piece morphed into a queen to better represent the political structures present across Medieval kingdoms. To appease the Christian church, bishops were introduced, and chariots became rooks, reflecting the role of castles and fortifications in European warfare.
Similarly, in China, kings become generals, cannon pieces are added, and the board adapts to fit a river and a castle feature, all frequent elements of local armed conflicts and military training.
Treatises on strategies and popular moves begin to circulate, and, slowly, chess starts to shed it associations with war and royal leadership to become a leisurely activity enjoyed by everyone.
Thus, the game we know today has a long and convoluted history, full of stories of conquest, of global encounters, and of strategic moves. It is surprising, therefore, to see how constant gameplay has remained. Our pieces, although a little different in appearance to those of a 6th century Indian prince, stand in to enact the same aim: to check our adversary’s king.
]]>Releases
Age of Empires II was an immediate success in 1999 and quickly followed up with the “Conquerors” expansion in 2000. After that, it became quiet around AoE2 while the franchise expanded with Age of Mythology and AoE3. Since 2013, fans have received frequent updates, culminating in the much-acclaimed “Definitive Edition”, released in November 2019.
In 2021 alone, AoE2 received two expansions. The latest release in the franchise came in October 2021 with Age of Empires IV.
Age of Empires II and Age of Empires IV releases
Image Credit: Don Dinardoni
Sold copies
Ideally, we would have precise sales numbers for each of the AoE games. Unfortunately, Microsoft does not share these numbers. The last reported figure of 20 million copies is from February 2009. In February 2020, Brian Sullivan, Monsarrat Inc.’s CCO, revealed that AoE2 (HD and DE) sold another 5 million copies, bringing the total to 25 million.
Surely they have sold a few more since then. The AoE franchise is estimated to have generated revenues of one billion US Dollars, with AoE2 being the main contributor to this number.
Player base
The long-term player base evolution shows a clear positive trend for AoE2 on Steam two years before and after the Definitive Edition’s release in November 2019. The player numbers remained steadily between 5,000 and 10,000 per month until November 2019.
While this does not sound like much compared to games like Dota or Starcraft 2, we need to consider the game’s age to appreciate these numbers fully. The release of multiple patches and expansions certainly helped to keep the interest high.
Average number of AoE2 players on Steam per month
Image Credit: Don Dinardoni
Releasing the Definitive Edition had the most significant impact by far. It drove the average number of players per month beyond 20,000 and has not dropped below 15,000 since then.
Gain/loss of AoE2 players on Steam per month
Image Credit: Don Dinardoni
Recently, the average number of players declined somewhat, especially in November 2021. This is most certainly due to the release of AoE4 on 28/10/21. We have very few data points for AoE4, so we will have to watch the next few months closely. By the end of November, Steam showed an average of 29,977 AoE4 players for the last 30 days – a decline of 16.2% compared to the previous month.
Viewership
The Twitch viewership numbers paint a similar picture. Long-term, AoE2 has been doing reasonably well for its age but barely passed the monthly average of 1,000 concurrent viewers. The Definitive Edition release multiplied the number of average concurrent viewers by a factor of four in November 2019.
Since then, they remained steady at this level, with peaks around significant events, such as “Hidden Cup 4” and the various “RedBull Wololo” tournaments until September 2021. After that, they dropped significantly below 2,000. Such a steep drop in such a short period seems concerning but does not necessarily have to worry us because two main factors drove it.
- The release of AoE4
- T90Offical (the most significant caster) and TheViper (the most-watched player) moved from Twitch to Facebook Gaming.
Average concurrent AoE2 viewers on Twitch per month
Image Credit: Don Dinardoni
With all the hype around its release and a 16,000 USD tournament in November, AoE4’s impact was to be expected. Since then, the declining AoE4 numbers are tempting to think that this was just a blip. But this might be premature. At the time of this snapshot, the “King of the Desert IV ” AoE2 tournament is happening. This is a 75,000 USD event, and all the professionals and casters are focused on it. We can expect these numbers to swing back when the “SteelSeries Prime Cup ” – a 20,000 USD AoE4 event – starts in mid-December.
Events
AoE2 always had a good number of events and decent prize pools – even more so after the release of AoE2DE. From January 2019 to November 2021, there were 282 tournaments with an average prize pool of 3,455 USD and a maximum of 100,000 USD (“RedBull Wololo V” in Q3/2021).
Number of AoE2 tournaments and total prize pool per quarter
Image Credit: Don Dinardoni
Apart from “War is Coming” (2014/15) and the “Age of Empires II International Tournament” (2001), four of the six biggest AoE2 tournaments happened after the release of AoE2DE. This does not include the currently ongoing “King of the Desert IV” with a prize pool of 75,000 USD. As one would expect, these events have a measurable impact on viewer numbers.
AoE2 hours watched on Twitch 2017-2021
Image Credit: Don Dinardoni
Outlook
Some AoE2 veterans may fear AoE4 to be the death blow for the game they love. But AoE2 has been around for over 22 years. Since its initial release in 1999, many other titles have been release, including additions to the Age of Empires series. AoE2 has not just survived, but thrived since the release of the Definitive Edition.
Currently, AoE4 seems to be the strongest contender for a small but faithful community of players, casters, and viewers. I expect that many people will enjoy watching and playing both. In its current state, AoE4 is a good and fun game to play. It is not (yet) as attractive for a competitive scene as AoE2 is.
I expect player and viewer numbers will shift back and forth between AoE2 and AoE4 for the foreseeable future, driven by various tournaments. Meanwhile I’m convinced that both games will find or retain sufficient players and viewers to coexist. The differences between AoE2 and AoE4, in addition to the former’s well-established community, make me think that AoE2 will be around for a long time to come. (I wouldn’t be surprised to see further improvements and new DLCs.)
Top 10 AoE2 tournaments based on prize pool
Image Credit: Don Dinardoni
On the other hand, I’m less optimistic about the overall community growth for AoE2. The player and viewer numbers for most games went up during the COVID-19 pandemic perhaps simply because more people spent more time at home – an effect which may eventually evaporate.
They probably won’t drop back to pre-pandemic levels, but will normalize that level and what they are today. This is fine. But what happens after this?
As we have seen, significant and exciting tournaments attract viewers, players, and sponsors. For sustainable community growth, AoE2 needs a coherent series of events. Escape Champions League had an idea on these lines in 2018/19, before AoE2DE was released. A series that follows that model, motivates players to compete, viewers to watch and sponsors to support, would ensure AoE2 provides entertainment for years to come.
Don Dinardoni is an enthusiast of Age of Empires II and data visualization. Visit him here, where he will be keeping an eye on the numbers.
]]>It’s hard to imagine in a world where the video game industry is worth over $145bn globally, making it the biggest entertainment sector, but just a few decades ago people were predicting the death of the industry. After years of non-stop growth in home gaming consoles, the industry entered the worst recession of its history.
In two short years, the industry shrunk by 97% from an estimated value of $3.2bn. Telling that story not only reveals a fascinating insight into the way gaming once functioned, but also furnishes some of the most bizarre stories of the medium.
Why it happened
To put it simply, there was too much of everything. First off, consoles. There were literally dozens of choices of consoles in the 80s compared to the more limited selection now. Each then came with its own exclusive set of games, resulting in a fractured market.
Then there was a complete oversaturation of games themselves. Countless terrible games flooded the market, ranging from inferior adaptions of films to corporate video games made to sell dog food. They were made by unlicensed developers over whom console companies had no control. Their numbers skyrocketed.
On one level, the problem here was that there were only so many people who could play games. The growth in users couldn’t match the sheer number of games being released. The other issue, simply put, was that a lot of these games were terrible: gamers didn’t want to buy them. With the rise of personal computers, they didn’t have to.
The great porn game boom
Nothing quite encapsulates that explosion in low-grade, eccentric titles than the pre-recession boom in pornographic games. While a never-ending stream of console games was being produced for Atari, some developers thought sex might be their way to make a mark.
A litany of obscene games was released on the doomed Atari consoles: X-Man, Custer’s Revenge and Bachelor Party, to name a few. All of them were deeply vile productions, pervaded by intense sexism and racism. They were also rubbish games by all accounts.
Games and landfills
One of the most infamous games to come out ahead of the recession was 1982’s E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. A mix of odd controls and nonsensical mechanics left the player searching for telephone parts in barely discernible wells for some reason. Add to that poorly designed, inescapable pits, which made navigating this 8-bit nightmare an unpleasant experience.
In fact, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial is so bad that it’s seen by many as the final nail in the coffin for console manufacturer Atari. In the years that followed, rumours started to develop that it had sold so poorly that the company had been forced to secretly dump thousands or even millions of copies of unsold game stock into a landfill.
Partially-surviving cases and cartridges retrieved during the 2014 excavation
Image Credit: taylorhatmaker, CC BY 2.0
Long dismissed as an urban legend, despite contemporary coverage by the New York Times, an excavation at the site of the alleged landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico in 2014 proved that it was partially true. Excavators found hundreds of copies of the infamous game, along with an array of other poor selling games from the era.
In a strange twist of fate, the unearthed games were auctioned by the local city council. They raised over $107,000 selling 880 unearthed cartridges. One copy of the once unsellable E.T. went for over $1,500.
Randy Horn shows his personal copy of “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” at the old Alamogordo Landfill dig site in Alamogordo, New Mexico, April 26, 2014. Horn worked at the landfill from 1979-1989 and was on hand when the Atari cartridges were buried.
Image Credit: Alamy
Impact
Overall, the impact all of this had on the video games sector was massive. For one, it almost killed the entire US console industry. Countless developers went bankrupt. Most famously, the formerly dominant games company Atari lost some $356m. It was forced to lay off 3,000 of its 10,000-worker staff by the middle of 1983. It never truly recovered.
In 1985 the western release of the classic Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) reignited passion for the console market, and helped it slowly rebuild, then accelerate to the level it has reached today. That intervention helped establish Japanese companies like Nintendo, Sony and Sega as serious presences in the global industry of video games.
Lessons learned
It also changed the way games were developed. One of the primary causes of the crash was the fact that console developers couldn’t control who was making games for their devices. The reason you won’t be able to find non-Nintendo games on a Nintendo console is because they don’t want their devices to go the same way as the Atari.
The crash shaped gaming in this way and others. Some elements proved more instructive than others. Despite the part he played in the video game crash of 1983 and the demise of an industry titan, E.T. continued to feature in countless adaptations in the following decades.
]]>Crusader Kings 3’s battles occur on its grand map. They’re tiny, abstract calculations, akin to two chess pieces meeting each other on a board. Bannerlord, however, allows for the player to wield medieval weapons in real-time, third-person combat alongside horses, siege weapons, and up to 2,000 AI soldiers.
For such an impressive mod, the implementation is simple. As long as you own both games, you can download Crusader Blade via itch.io. It’s completely free, although the team has a Patreon for those wanting to support the project’s continued development. Run the mod’s launcher to specify the paths to both games, choose Bannerlord’s battle sizes, and you’re good to go.
A Frankenstein’s monster
Many of us have had nerdy fantasies about creating ideal Frankenstein’s monsters from our favourite games, and mod creator ‘CB’ was no different.
It was over a Christmas holiday, he tells me, that he “spent about 20 hours playing Crusader Kings. And when I went to bed, absolutely exhausted, I thought “it would be cool if the battles in Crusader Kings were like in Bannerlord”. It sounds familiar to any number of drowsy, nerd wish-fulfilment ideas I’ve had. The difference is, of course, that CB went and made it happen.
Crusader Kings, says CB, is a bit more difficult to work with using the intended tools than Bannerlord, which is “probably one of the easiest games to mod, thanks to the fact that it’s written in C# and libraries like Harmony.” CB’s focus has been on the technical aspects, leaving customisation open to individual players to tailor their experience.
Custom battles
A big factor in CK3 is character death, for example. If an important member of your family falls in battle, this can have huge repercussions for your line of succession. Currently, Crusader Blade implements a small chance of character death, with updates planned to allow players to make these clashes more or less deadly as they see fit.
CB, unsurprisingly, describes himself as a history enthusiast. “My favourite historical period is the early Middle Ages, the so-called Viking Age.” It’s an area he wants to explore in the future. “Most likely it won’t be a modification, but an independent project.”
Future planned updates to the mod include sieges, and excitingly, more accurate cultural representation. Bannerlord has six broad cultures, while Crusader Kings 3 has around 40. The grand strategy game allows players to jump in at one of two starting dates, 867 or 1066, and run up to 1453. Bannerlord, which uses fictional factions, is based on the mid-1st millennium Migration Period, sometimes called the Barbarian Invasions.
Crusader Blade versus the real thing
But how do the combined efforts of both games to represent different sides of medieval rule stack up with reality? Medieval historian, author and History Hit presenter Matt Lewis lent his expertise on the question.
Lewis was impressed with the overall visuals of both games, although pointed out “a degree of uniformity that may not always have been present on a medieval battlefield.” Lords and Knights, says Lewis, “would have been distinguishable by posh, expensive armour and bright colourful banners that helped to mark out their positions and rally points on a field.”
Livery badges, says Lewis, might have become more common as the medieval period progressed, but “those drawn from their estates to fight wouldn’t usually have had anything like a uniform, so there would have been plenty of variety in the way soldiers looked and how they were armed.”
As for the weapons on display, “the mounted knights using spears is great – there must have been a temptation to go for a lance, but they came later in the medieval period as an evolution of the spear.”
Those extra inventory slots, too, have historical precedent. “Sharp pointy things and slashy blades are great against poorly armoured opponents, but those in armour that protected them from blades were better dealt with using crushing weapons like a mace. You might not be able to cut through mail or plate, but you can break bones through it.” As plate became more prevalent, says Lewis, so did the importance of denting joints and restricting movement.
Large-scale warfare
Bannerlord’s visual spectacle, of course, is all about scale. With the 10:1 abstraction in the Crusader Blade mod, which game’s battles are more representative?
“The sizes of armies during the medieval period are notoriously difficult to judge with any certainty,” says Lewis. “There were times when a few hundred would have been all that made it to a battlefield, but Charlemagne’s force at the Battle of Roncevaux Pass in 824 is estimated at about 3,000. At the other end of the medieval period in England, the Battle of Towton is estimated to have involved around 60,000 men.”
Despite these estimates, says Lewis, the sources are hard to rely on. “They weren’t great at counting vast numbers of people, and some were prone to exaggeration because it made a better story.”
Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord
Image Credit: TaleWorlds Entertainment
Concerning military matters
Storytelling, of course, is what these games excel at. Realism itself isn’t always as desirable as it seems. A good developer knows to make some concessions for fun, but it’s surely a tricky balance.
“One of the most critical considerations for any ruler in the medieval period was the need to fill both the political and military roles expected of a leader,” says Lewis. “Winning battles was no good if you couldn’t win support for your regime, and being a nice ruler wouldn’t last long if you couldn’t defend your people and your position on a battlefield.”
Crusader Blade, reckons Lewis, “means that players can experience both aspects, and have to prove themselves in both arenas. No more ducking whichever you think is the hardest part.”
“Mind you,” adds Lewis “the prevalent military teaching of the period, Vegitius’s De Re Militari (Concerning Military Matters) was written around the late 4th century, and was in active use for more than a millennium. Vegetius warned that battles were to be avoided at all cost, because they were unpredictable and it was almost impossible to guarantee victory, even with larger numbers. So, players, think carefully before you gallop onto the field of battle.”
]]>You’d be doing Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun – Aiko’s Choice, and yourself, a great disservice though. This standalone expansion is par for the course for the developer. Which is to say that it’s a worthy addition to one of the best stealth games in recent memory.
The story is set in Japan’s early Edo period, a time of relative peace and prosperity after the chaos of the Sengoku Jidai. After their dissolution in 1573 by the ‘demon daimyo’ Oda Nobunaga, the Shogunate were re-established in 1603 by Tokugawa Ieyasu. Not everyone saw the rigid social order they kept as progress, however.
Shadow Tactics’ inciting incident involved unravelling a plot to overthrow the new shogunate. The three main missions and two playable side stories in Aiko’s choice take place as an offscreen interlude toward the end of the original game’s story, focusing on the titular kunoichi and her relationship with a former sensei.
Right at home
Gameplay follows the same patterns established by its predecessor. If you remember the old Eidos Commandos series, you’ll feel right at home. RTS style controls allow manoeuvring between up to five stealthy heroes, each with their own skills and drawbacks.
Samurai Mugen, for example, can use a devastating bladewind to disembowel multiple foes grouped close together, and is strong enough to pick up their bodies then sprint off to the nearest hiding place. The drawback here is that the warrior’s heavy armour prevents him from swimming, scaling vines, or using a grappling hook. So, if you want to take out a watchful rifleman above, perhaps you’ll need to send thief Yuki to stalk her way up there.
Shadow mode
Each level is sprawling, intricate, and guarded by dozens of interlocking patrols and sentries that halt the team’s progress. Very brief combat encounters are manageable, but stealth is the overwhelming focus.
A common problem might be a key location watched over by three sentries, each visible to the others. To avoid raising an alarm, you’ll need to study patterns, isolate weak links, lure away stragglers, break patterns with distractions, or set up perfectly-timed coordinated combos using a queueing feature called ‘Shadow Mode’.
Perfect information
While suspicious foes are prone to unpredictability, the default state of these stages is one that allows for perfect information at all times. A quick click displays any foe’s view cone, including the range at which your characters are visible crouched or standing.
Spots can be marked to show any sightline that passes over them, and enemies have consistent reactions to each of your troupe’s tricks. Mimimi’s games are notable for their difficulty, but they define themselves through this consistency.
For the game to give you this god-like knowledge, combined with your access to five team member’s worth of overpowered abilities, and still provide such a constant and satisfying challenge speaks volumes to the complexity and ingenuity of the level design. A single level can take upwards of two hours to finish. Never mind how long it takes to achieve any sort of mastery or to tackle hardcore mode.
Fresh air
Challenges and speedrun goals breathe fresh life into well-trodden ground on repeated playthroughs. While Aiko’s Choice three main levels may not seem overly generous, there’s potentially dozens of hours of play here. That’s on top of the eight or so hours for a first run-through on standard difficulty.
Aiko’s Choice doesn’t require the original Shadow Tactics to run, but it does assume a certain amount of familiarity with how Mimimi’s stealth games function. While the first game introduced characters and their skills slowly, Aiko’s Choice gives you more or less a free run from the outset, with suitably complex level design to match.
Time with the gang
While the lingering friction of the transformation of the country in this new period is used as an aesthetic backdrop, Aiko’s Choice opts to focus more on its characters. It’s an understandable direction: one last chance to spend time with the gang before they plunge into the original game’s finale.
The dynamic of the group, one of found family in hard times, is also convincing. As with its approach to gameplay complexity, Aiko’s Choice assumes familiarity with each of its five central characters from the outset. It forgoes introductions to offer more insight into their relationships.
The three main missions are broken up by smaller interludes, focusing on small areas and one or two characters. The first of these, which sees aging gunsmith Takuma escape from captivity on a Portuguese ship with the help of his pet tanuki Kuma, is a real highlight.
If these levels have a weakness, it’s that none of them are quite as dynamic as, say, the original game’s opening Siege of Osaka. More moving parts, but less spectacle.
“More character drama than historical epic”
Ultimately, Aiko’s Choice is more of the same formula. Same team. Same abilities. Same journey. It’s such a winning formula, though, that it never needed to be anything else. The noticeable difference is that extra Desperados III design experience. These new levels are dense and varied, often offering a choice in objectives, and a host of interactable quirks and traps.
The finale, especially, offers a Hitman-esque crop of multi-tiered environmental assassination solutions. Playing just once feels like missing out on many of these missions’ more interesting puzzles.
Like the original, it’s certainly more of a character drama than a historical epic. Gorgeous and bright cel-shaded visuals paint a postcard picture of the Edo Period, often so stunning you’ll almost feel bad staining the crisp snow with blood. Still, each character comes to life through their approach to stealth and their personal codes and disciplines, painting a vivid – if romanticised – portrait of the era.
]]>Given my easily distracted nature, this could be the single individual past-time I’ve dedicated the most of my time to over the last decade. To somewhat justify that sad fact, then: just what is it about this game that keeps it so fresh, even a decade after its first release in 2011?
Fluid samurai battles
Without delving too much into the technicality of it all, the game came with an improved Warscape engine that made for almost beautiful combat between warriors. It means the clashing of two units amounts to thousands of engrossing one vs one duels that are amazing to watch.
In a series used to brutal warfare, capturing that fluidity of classic samurai combat is a massive test which the developers passed admirably. More than just making the combat better though, these fluid duels embody the ideal of Japanese samurai and bushidō. Put simply, it perfectly captures a somewhat romantic ideal of what it was like in feudal Japan.
Streamlined yet complex strategy
But Total War games are about more than just grand battles. On the strategic level, Shogun 2 was a huge leap from its predecessors.
It added a patchwork diplomacy system, where you find yourself making agreements with countless minor factions in a more transparent and understandable way than in either Empire or Napoleon: Total War. Its economy, too, involves enough complexity to remain interesting but strips away the more superfluous parts of the previous games.
Unlike series like Europa or Crusader Kings, there weren’t millions of potential cogs playing out at once. There’s a limited number of ways to play, but even within that there’s lots of room for various approaches and strategies. While some future Total War games would go onto overcomplicate things again, Shogun 2 struck a fine and enjoyable balance.
Guns that actually work
I love Napoleon: Total War, Empire: Total War and the rest of the modern history entrants as much as the next guy, but they never properly functioned. I would lose count of the number of battles where immaculate lines of high-quality riflemen would just decide against firing their guns for reasons beyond mortal comprehension. The bugs were endless.
And to be fair, that pretty much held true for the guns in Shogun 2’s main campaign. Yet given the amount of work that goes into playing the game, from converting to Christianity and being hated by everyone, to expending a disgusting amount of time conducting research, the bugs are easily ignored.
But the standalone Fall of Samurai expansion is another matter. Not only are gun units actively more deadly than in Napoleon or Empire, but their functioning diversity allows you to build up a much more complex strategy around how you position and use different gun units. The campaign depicts a culture clash and pits modernity against tradition. As a result, the units are massively diverse.
That means you find yourself having to plan your armies and battle strategy prepared to confront not just other riflemen in stale shooting matches, but hordes of angry samurai. Or even bowmen that have longer range than riflemen, which can pepper your army from just out of reach.
The best standalone DLC in Total War history
Fall of the Samurai could have been its own game and it would still be one of the better entries in the entire Total War canon. A mixture of complex battles, a genuinely hard-to-master strategic campaign, a swathe of new units, complex fighting, a strong theme and powerful historical narrative really puts Fall of Samurai into its own.
Fall of the Samurai explores a realm of history so different from the original Shogun 2 that all they really have in common is a map. It allows Fall of Samurai to feel completely different.
Add to that its series of historical battles that follow the story of legendary warrior Saigo Takamori (the actual last ever samurai warlord). They are both genuinely challenging while their interweaving historical narrative makes them a highlight of the game rather than an ignored extra.
Life is futile
And that brings me to maybe the best thing about Shogun 2 and its expansions: its sheer futility. You can spend the entire game building alliances, vassals, trade networks and a stable economy, only for it all to disappear. Capture enough territory and you enter the Realm Divide phase, where every other faction immediately declares war on you. War is inescapable.
While less of an issue in the Fall of Samurai campaign, where the factions are split between imperial and shogunate allegiances, see what happens if you decide to reject both and become a republic.
Everyone’s enemy
That doesn’t make all the other aspects of the game you used up until then meaningless of course. They were vital to get you to where you are. But it stops you from gaming the system. I’ve lost count of how many Total War games where you can slide to victory by building an unruly web of never-ending alliances.
But in Shogun 2, there’s no way to game the system. No matter what you do, no matter how good your trade or diplomacy is, once the Realm Divide or Republican stage is entered, you become everyone’s enemy. Nothing says ‘Total War’ more than that.
]]>Under the moniker VeniVidiCreavi, they carefully produce reconstructions of historical cities using the classic, 1990s strategy game. The result are landscape illustrations in the distinctive 2D isometric visuals of Age of Empires, which they then share as huge, high-resolution images.
So far they’ve created versions of the city of Vladimir in Russia, Tudor London, and an interpretation of Xi’an as it existed during the Tang dynasty. Their favourite, they tell History Hit, is “probably Paris. I’ve liked it since the Joan of Arc campaign in the Age of Kings and have redone it several times and am very happy with the final result.”
Reconstruction of medieval Paris by VeniVidiCreavi
VeniVidiCreavi has been working making these visualizations since around 2006, but only started making them historically accurate around two years ago. To create the cities, they plan them out using whatever source materials they can muster.
“I try to find historical reconstructions, old paintings, city plans,” VeniVidiCreavi explains. “There is limited info on some cities and huge detailed material on others. A series of 16th century paintings, Civitates orbis terrarum, is of great help since it captures the AOE2 period.”
Genoa reconstruction by VeniVidiCreavi
“Then I draw the outlines of a city on a blank map shot, keeping the relative dimensions and just add the buildings step by step.” They then create a new screenshot of the whole map, and compare that to the source material.
Reconstructing medieval cities in Age of Empires II isn’t completely straightforward. “Initially the limitation was the lack of diversity in architectural styles,” says VeniVidiCreavi, but thanks to user-made mods to the game there are “all kinds of new designs which greatly expanded the possibilities.”
Tudor London reconstructed by VeniVidiCreavi
There’s also the issue of the lack of a map shot function in the new versions of the game, the absence of circular walls which are otherwise difficult to replicate in Age of Empires II, and a limited pool of buildings. “I usually replace [them] with combinations of existing ones [by] pasting them together with the map copy function, but that’s a common trick.”
In their Reddit threads, which are popular in both maps and Age of Empires segments of the site, VeniVidiCreavi includes historical information about the cities. They support the endeavour through Patreon, where they share high-res images and the original scenario files for the city maps.
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