Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
The game Space Invaders was successfully ported on iOS by TAITO Corporation
The designers of arcade machines used the same approach. They tried to trace dif-
ferent actions from real life. Besides sporting events, developers were fond of imitat-
ing hunting, movie-style dueling, racing, military combat fighting, and so on. As you
see, all this was only a way to copy something that was very familiar to the audi-
ence. In the beginning, that worked fine, but then people learned that video games
can be a more flexible tool. In order to compete better, some creative experiments
like Space Invaders, which became a pop culture idol and a symbol of all modern
action games, could be performed. This cult product was released in 1978 by
To-
mohiro Nishikado
. It used the principles of shooting games that were already being
followed for that period of time, but tried to expand boundaries by telling an original
story rather than simply utilizing popular clichés. The trial was rewarded. The game
became a huge hit, opening a golden era of arcade entertainment.
Then, action games got larger gaming spaces. They began utilizing the advantages
of side-scrolling mechanics. This helped to concentrate on the main characters of
these games. From that moment, these characters required a more accurate and de-
tailed visual look, good animation, and interesting plot background. Remember that
another core symbol of modern action games,
Duke Nukem
, was originally the char-
acter of a 2D action-platformer game released in 1991 by
Apogee Software
.
There is a popular misbelief that the first video games with 3D-polygonal graphics
were introduced in the 1990s. In reality, the very first example was released in the
market a decade earlier. In 1983,
Atari
published an arcade shooter game called
I,
Robot
. It featured faceted 3D models rather than wire-frame images. Of course, they
were very primitive. The geometry was very simple, and there was no texture. The
