My Top Five Videogames
I’m old school. Keep in mind that the first videogame I ever played was Pong.
That’s right. I’m old enough that I remember Pong. You young ‘uns with your fancy video cards and Playstations and XBoxes with your multimegapixel displays! Ha! When I was a boy, all we had were roughly 32,000 pixels and 128 colors on our consoles and weeeeeeeee liked it
- Dungeon Master (FTL) for the Atari ST.
The people of FTL (Faster Than Light) Games…. Photograph of Bruce Webster, Nancy Holder and Wayne Holder; owned by Michael Newton www.saorsamedia.comMost people think that the “first person” video game experience began with John Carmack and id Software’s Castle Wolfenstein remake, Wolfenstein 3D. While it’s true that id Software took the notion of a first-person videogame experience to the next level, when it came to role-playing games, Dungeon Master was the first of its kind…
For most gamers, it was clear from the very beginning that Dungeon Master was something very special because it eliminated the tedious turn-by-turn element so common to RPGs of that era and forced you to play in “near real time”, using the mouse and keyboard to melee and cast spells.
In other words, if you were slow with the mouse or keyboard, you died a lot.
The best resource on the Internet about Dungeon Master (and its sequels) is The Dungeon Master & Chaos Strikes Back Encyclopedia, but Wikipedia also has a great entry about the game…
Dungeon Master is the first 3D realtime action computer role-playing game, published in 1987 for the Atari ST by FTL Games. It went on to become the ST’s best selling product of all time, reaching an astounding market penetration of more than 50% of the Atari STs ever sold…
While previous games such as Alternate Reality: The Dungeon, The Bard’s Tale, Ultima and Wizardry offered Dungeons & Dragons-style role playing, Dungeon Master established several new standards for role playing and computer games in general. Dungeon Master was a realtime game instead of the traditional turn-based approach that was prevalent until then. Instead of using text-based commands to interact with the environment, players directly manipulated objects and the environment by clicking the mouse in the enlarged first-person view. Abstract Dungeons and Dragons style experience points and levels were eschewed in favor of a system where the characters’ skills were improved directly via using them. It also introduced some novel control methods including the spell casting system, which involved learning sequences of runes which represented the form and function of a spell’s effect. For example, a fireball spell was created by mixing the fire symbol with the wing symbol. This kind of attention to detail and focus on the user interface was typical of the game and helped create an often captivating sense of craft and ingenuity. Another factor in immersiveness was the then-revolutionary use of sound effects to indicate when a creature was nearby.
Another factor in its popularity may have been the imaginative mythology, with players often reporting a nurturing identity with their chosen characters. Nancy Holder, wife of producer Wayne Holder, wrote the storyline in the manual. She is a successful novelist, having written for series including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Smallville.
Many reviewers considered Dungeon Master as the best exemplar of its genre, despite the many clones that arrived to challenge it…
And like the cell phone ad where they make a big deal about “Who Is In Your Five?”, well… here’s my four who put the smack down on mummies, floating eyeballs, and even a fire-breathing dragon before sticking it to Lord Chaos.
Wuuf the Bika 
Gothmog 
Halk the Barbarian 
Sonja 
- John Madden Football ‘92 to ‘99 (EA), with an honorable mention for Madden 2007 on Nintendo Wii.
I used to hang out with a guy named Kosta who, long after I began to lose interest in console games, he kept buying the latest and greatest gear. He had a 3DO he paid $350 for, back when most consoles cost between $100-$200. He was the type who’d pay an exorbitant amount for an imported Japanese TurboGrafx/16 so he could play Bomberman. He even splurged and bought a Neo Geo for damn near $1000.
So it’s pretty easy to guess that I was able to keep my hand on the pulse of console gaming because of him… and that also meant that Kosta has to get due props as the guy who turned me on to the Madden football games.
Of course, the reason our Madden competitions are memorable is because they were epic battles that went beyond the game itself, in to the realm of trash-talking and psyops!
In other words, it was typical male bonding.
I remember our first epic series of games on Sega Genesis. The first time I played it, I realized that this was the best football game ever. For those of you who were born after Pac-Man debuted in the arcades…
…You should know that this is where we stood in terms of fun video football games prior to the Madden franchise:
Incidentally, I’d like to point out that in my pre-pubescent years, I would routinely go to Marlin & Anthony Rowley’s home and give them more than they could handle in Intellivision Football even though I owned an Atari 2600 (which ruled!)… 9-4-2-7 screen pass, bitches! And do y’all remember how I switched it up to 9-4-5-5?
We’ve come a long way, baby. This was state of the art for Madden ‘93…
So the Madden series, especially Madden ‘93 on Sega Genesis was pretty amazing for its time. More importantly, the game play was solid. The Genesis multi-button controller allowed for greater control of the action than was possible with old school systems that were pretty much sticks or d-pads with two buttons. The passing game was impressive, and running game was big fun, and it felt more like football than any other game to that point. If anyone wants to know when the Madden franchise became a killer, in my opinion, it started with Madden ‘93.
This game gets high ranking from me because, of all the sports games out there, it was the one that led to more healthy competition between friends and family than any other game out there. As the franchise aged, it led to a new generation of rivalries… such as the one I have with my nephew, James Williams, who knows that his Uncle can still beat his ass with the 1998 Los Angeles Rams (that’s before they were good) even when he has the Denver Broncos.
(My greatest videogame moment as an Uncle was watching James school Kosta in Madden….)
- Myth: The Fallen Lords by Bungie (and no, it’s not “Myst“. Geez, that game was as exciting as watching paint dry!)
Myth was the first computer game where the online play was even more compelling than the single player mode. It was an absolute blast to get on bungie.net and do battle with folks all over the world.
Blood stained the land, body parts flew with frighteningly accurate physics. What’s not to like?
Battles could degenerate in to controlled chaos. Ahhh, the smell of the undead burning in the morning… smells… like… victory!
Lightning from the Fetch could liven things up during skirmishes…
I was introduced to the game by one of my best friends, Pete Liu, who went under the moniker Evil Doc. I used to publish Atari ST software under the name Enigma Software, so I was partial to the name “enigma”, but it was already taken.
So I reversed it, and became Amgine on bungie.net. You can even see my old profile from a Myth tournament here.
While we took the game seriously (and Pete took it very seriously, often using his patented Hand Of God manuever to keep chaotic goobers like me in check so that we did not wreck his delicately-laid plans), we became known for a strategem called the slut rush.
The slut rush was created in a moment of frustration. We were playing a game on a map called The Desert Between Your Ears. It’s a map where the two armies will meet on opposite sides of a river, with a narrow land bridge that makes crossing perilous.
We were playing a team (whose name I can’t recall… it’s been about ten years, folks) who had totally outclassed us. They were patient, and they’d wait for us to make moves and punish us for our mistakes.
I was given the chance to command the last game against them, and I decided we should just “rush” the land bridge and disrupt them before they got into position. We used our fastest units (ghols) to cross the bridge, and we followed up with every other melee unit we could.
The game was over in less than a minute, and we routed our opponent… I even saved a replay of the game, and the tactic became a staple when we wanted to shake things up when playing opponents who expected to trade arrows for an hour before ultimately degenerating into an all-out slugfest at the end of the game.
It was the perfect anti-camping strategy for Myth online.
After that, our skills improved and we became a pretty formidable team and attracted others to join our “clan”. We dubbed ourselves SR for Slut Rushers, but we cleaned up the name when we joined a tournament sponsored by Mac Observer.
Over time, Pete and I joined forces with an interesting band of online players, most of whom we never met. We did meet a another (!) doctor, Nalaka Gooneratne (a.k.a., Desk Jockey) once when we hanging out up in Philadephia while Pete was checking out various options for his residency.
- Unreal Tournament by Epic Games
The important thing about this game is that it made my Top 5 because of the people I played with, not because of any great advancement it made to first-person shooters (FPS) or online gaming.
About a year after this game came out, I had just built out two home computers, and my friend John Norris had wired my house with Cat 5 cable.
Naturally, this led to epic “LAN battles” and the construction of a third computer to accomodate our “team” which consisted Barry Wagner (a.k.a., Slut Boy), John Watson (a.k.a., Fart Face), and myself (the name “Amgine” carried over for the most part… though some people kept calling me Vagine…. Bastards!).
I cannot tell you how many hours were spent doing battle, first amongst ourselves, and then across my (at the time, blazingly fast) 768k SDSL connection to the Internet.
And we played a lot of “Capture the Flag” on the Facing Worlds map. I still know every hiding spot where you can camp out to surprise someone who grabs your flag…The coolest thing about Unreal Tournament was the fact that the network play was rock solid, and the gameplay was superb. I can’t count how many time my house was filled with screaming and yelling as we did battle amongst ourselves and with foes on the internet.
- Missile Command by Atari
This was the game that I used to stand in line at the arcade to play. My father used to drop me off at the Golden Dome arcade at Beltway Plaza with $5, and I could play almost two hours on 24 tokens (you got four bonus tokens if you dropped a five-spot in to the changer).
I’d have to say that it probably inspired me to want to program videogames more than just about any other game… though “Star Raiders“, “Tempest“, and the obscure laserdisc title “Star Rider” also kept that fire burning until I could start programming on my home computer.
But Missile Command started it all.
Boom!
Why was this game so intriguing? Well, it definitely was topical, even for a pre-teen during the Cold War. During an age when even a kid growing up in the nation’s capital was acutely aware of the fact that, somewhere in the USSR, there was a nuclear missile aimed at his home. Glossy color maps with graphics showing the numerical superiority of the USSR’s nuclear arsenal made it clear that we lived in dangerous times, and yet…
It made for a great game idea.
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