Battlezone is a first-person shootertank combat game released for arcades in November 1980 by Atari, Inc. The player controls a tank which is attacked by other tanks and missiles. Using a small radar scanner along with the terrain window, the player can locate enemies and obstacles around them in the barren landscape. Its innovative use of 3D graphics made it a huge hit, with approximately 15,000 cabinets sold.
With its use of three-dimensional vector graphics, the game is considered to be the first true 3D arcade game that has a first-person perspective,[10] the "first big 3D success" in the video game industry,[11] and the first successful first-person shooter video game in particular. This made it a milestone for first-person shooter games.[10]
The game was primarily designed by Ed Rotberg, who was mainly inspired by Atari's top-down shooter gameTank (1974). Battlezone was distributed in Japan by Sega and Taito in 1981. The system was based on vector hardware designed by Howard Delman which was introduced in Lunar Lander and saw success with Asteroids. The 3D hardware which drove the program saw use in future games, including Red Baron, released in 1981.[12]
Gameplay
Two joysticks control the player's tank. Instructions on their use are printed on the cabinet.
The game uses wireframevector graphics displayed on a black and white vector monitor. A colored overlay tints the display green for the bottom 4⁄5 where the action takes place, and red for the top 1⁄5 where the score and radar screen are displayed.[10]
The player drives a tank using two joysticks, one controlling the right tread and the other the left. By moving the joysticks relative to each other, the tank can move forward or reverse (both moved in the same direction), turn on the spot to the left or right (one forward, one back) or move and turn at a slower rate (one forward or backward, one neutral). The right-side stick also has a fire button on top, which shoots the player's gun in the direction the tank is currently facing.[10]
Gameplay takes place on a flat plane with a mountainoushorizon featuring an erupting volcano, a distant crescent moon, and various geometric solids (in vector outline) like pyramids and blocks. The geometric solid obstacles are indestructible and can obstruct the movement of a player's tank while also blocking shots and can be used as shields. The action surrounds the player in all directions, including off-screen locations, forcing the player to locate the enemy using the radar display at the top of the screen.[10]
There are three types of enemy craft that appear during play, one at a time. At the start of a game, the enemy is dominated by slow tanks that are not particularly difficult to hit even when moving. As the game continues, missiles begin to appear in place of the enemy tanks; these move much faster and are more difficult to hit. Finally, the much faster supertanks appear at higher levels, which are not only harder to hit, but also attack more aggressively.
Periodically saucer-shaped UFOs will appear while making a distinctive sound to announce their presence; these do not show up on the radar and do not attack the user, but can be shot for bonus points. This is the only object that may appear while other enemies are already present.
There is a gameplay modification at 100,000 points if the proper conditions are met. When executed properly, the next appearing supertank will not attack, but will instead retreat. A tank icon will then appear at right on qualified high score listings.
Cabinet
Battlezone uses 3D vector graphics viewed through a "periscope".
Battlezone is housed in an upright full-sized arcade cabinet with a "periscope" viewfinder. The viewfinder restricted the player's view so that the display appeared to be naturally limited to resemble a scope.[10] The game action can also be viewed from the sides of the viewfinder for spectators to watch. The game's periscope viewfinder is similar to earlier submarine shooting arcade games, notably Midway's arcade video gameSea Wolf (1976) and Sega's electro-mechanical gamePeriscope (1966).[13] A later version of the cabinet removed the periscope and raised the monitor to a more normal position to improve visibility to non-players and improve ergonomics for players who could not reach the periscope.[14] A smaller, "cabaret" version of the cabinet has the screen angled upwards and no periscope.[10]
The large controller handles were adapted from earlier gear-shift controllers used on racing games, modified with a new stick shape that has internal ribs to make them stronger and adding rubber centering bellows. The right stick has a raised and LED illuminated fire button on top, and the controls were completed with a similar LED illuminated start button on the cabinet. There were two speakers, one each above and below the 19-inch monitor.[14]
Development
With the success of the Cinematronicsvector graphics games, Atari's Grass Valley engineering labs decided to build their own version of a vector display system known as "QuadraScan" that offered a resolution of 1024 x 768.[15] Once it was up and running, they delivered the prototype unit to Atari headquarters where it was given to Wendi Allen (then known as Howard Delman) and Rick Moncrief to develop it into a unit suitable for arcade video game use.[16] Allen decided to reimplement the driver system using analog electronics instead of digital, simplifying it and lowering its cost.[15]
While working on the system, Allen suggested they use it to implement a version of Lunar Lander. While Allen worked on the driver hardware and Moncrief on the display system, Rich Moore wrote the software for the game.[16]Lunar Lander was released in August 1979, Atari's first vector game, but was not a great success with only 4,830 units manufactured.[15]
Another team at Atari consisting of Lyle Rains, Ed Logg, and Steve Callfee was working on a raster graphics game called Planet Grab. When they saw Lunar Lander, they asked about using the same system for their game, and the result was Asteroids. Released in November 1979, it went on to be Atari's most successful game, with 55,000 units sold.[15]
With the system now proving a huge success in the arcades, Morgan Hoff organized a brainstorming session at Atari to consider additional uses for the hardware. Around the same time, Atari had also been experimenting with early 3D displays using a custom math chip known simply as "the math box", developed by Jed Margolin and Mike Albaugh. The idea of using the math box with the vector hardware seemed like a winner, and the idea of a tank game was raised at the meeting, although Hoff could not remember exactly who introduced the idea.[15]
The game's design was led by Ed Rotberg. He cited Atari's top-down arcade shooter gameTank (1974) as the primary inspiration behind Battlezone, essentially a 3D version of that game. While Battlezone also has similarities to a first-person tank simulation for the PLATO system, Panther, Rotberg said he had never played that game before, but had heard of it; he stated that it "may have inspired whoever originally suggested the idea at the brainstorming meeting where it was proposed, but I seriously doubt it".[17]
Owen Rubin, who shared an office with Ed Rotberg, had the idea of making the volcano in the background erupt, and coded the animation for it.[18]
The Atari 8-bit version was released on cartridge in 1987 in the styling of the then-new Atari XEGS.[6] An Atari 5200 port was scheduled for release in November 1983, but was cancelled.[19]
The Atari 2600 version uses raster graphics instead of vectors and has a third person view where the tank is visible.
The Atari ST port contains large parts of the original 6502 code which is emulated.[20]
Reception
Battlezone was released in November 1980 and was a hit. Although not as successful as Asteroids, Battlezone eventually produced another 15,000 sales for Atari.[15]
Battlezone was well received, earning an Honorable Mention for "Best Commercial Arcade Game" in 1982 at the Third Annual Arkie Awards. It was runner-up, behind Pac-Man.[21]:76 David and Sandy Small called it "addictive" and mentioned the Battlezone Tunnel Vision, which makes the players drive strangely during rush hour.[22] In a more recent review, Eurogamer stated that "Atari's designers came up with some incredibly inventive and interesting games before their decline. Battlezone is one of the finer examples" and rated it 8 out of 10.[23] Fox gives it a 4 out of 5 rating in The Video Games Guide, although he admits this might perturb some readers.[24] In 1996, GamesMaster ranked the arcade version 97th on their "Top 100 Games of All Time".[25]
Computer and Video Games magazine awarded the Spectrum version of Battlezone 30 out of 40 points, praising its technical achievements such as the implementation of hidden line removal. The reviewer compared the game to 3D Tank Duel, a similar game by Realtime Games Software, opining that the latter was marginally superior to the official port.[26]
The Bradley Trainer
A standard enemy tank in the player's sights in The Bradley Trainer
A version called The Bradley Trainer (also known as Army Battlezone or Military Battlezone) was designed for use by the U.S. Army as targeting training for gunners on the Bradley Fighting Vehicle.[27] It was commissioned by a consultant group of retired generals.[28]
Approaching Atari in December 1980, some developers within Atari refused to work on the project because of its association with the Army,[29] most notably original Battlezone programmer Ed Rotberg.[30] Rotberg only joined the project after he was promised by management that he would never be asked to do anything with the military in the future.[31] According to Rotberg, it took him three months of constant work to develop the prototype version of The Bradley Trainer.[28] Only two were produced; one was delivered to the Army and is presumed lost, and the other is in the private collection of Scott Evans,[32][33] who found it by a dumpster in the rear parking lot at Midway Games.
The gunner yoke was based on the Bradley Fighting Vehicle control and was later re-used in the popular Star Wars game.[31]The Bradley Trainer differs dramatically from the original Battlezone as it features helicopters, missiles, and machine guns; furthermore, the actual tank does not move, but the guns simply rotate.
Legacy
Due to its use of first-person pseudo 3D graphics combined with a "viewing goggle" that the player puts his or her face into, Battlezone is sometimes considered the first virtual reality arcade video game.[34]
Related games and rereleases
In 1993, the replicated version of Battlezone was included in Microsoft Arcade for PC with Windows 3.1 and Windows 95, and Mac version for Apple Macintosh.
Battlezone 2000 for the Atari Lynx was released in 1995.[35]
It was included in the 1996 Battlezone / Super Breakout combo for the Game Boy.[36]
Activision developed an authorized Battlezone game in 1998. Despite having the same name, it is not an arcade game, but a more complicated tank piloting strategy game. Battlezone II: Combat Commander is the 1999 sequel.
In 2013, Rebellion Developments bought the Battlezone franchise from the Atari bankruptcy proceedings.[39] In 2016, a remaster of the 1998 game, titled Battlezone 98 Redux, was released for Windows, and an unrelated virtual reality game titled Battlezone was released for the PlayStation 4.[40] It was ported to Microsoft Windows in 2017[41] and to the Xbox One and Nintendo Switch in the following year, as Battlezone: Gold Edition. It supports Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PlayStation VR.[41]
Stellar 7 (1983) for the Apple II and Commodore 64.
Robot Tank (1983) by Activision for the Atari 2600 is similar to the official port of Battlezone.
Encounter! (1983) for the Atari 8-bit computers and Commodore 64 is also similar to 2600 Battlezone, with solid character-mode graphics instead of wireframe 3D graphics. It includes the missiles and saucers of the original.
3D Tank Zone (1983) for the Acorn Electron and BBC Micro by Dynabyte; Battlezone (2023) remake by Rocketeer.[43]
Asteroids is a space-themed multidirectional shooter arcade video game designed by Lyle Rains and Ed Logg released in November 1979 by Atari, Inc. The player controls a single spaceship in an asteroid field which is periodically traversed by flying saucers. The object of the game is to shoot and destroy the asteroids and saucers, while not colliding with either, or being hit by the saucers' counter-fire. The game becomes harder as the number of asteroids increases.
Zaxxon is a scrolling shooter developed and released by Sega as an arcade video game in 1982. The player pilots a ship through heavily defended space fortresses. Japanese electronics company Ikegami Tsushinki was also involved in the game's development.
Lunar Lander is a genre of video games loosely based on the 1969 landing of the Apollo Lunar Module on the Moon. In Lunar Lander games, players control a spacecraft as it falls toward the surface of the Moon or other astronomical body, using thrusters to slow the ship's descent and control its horizontal motion to reach a safe landing area. Crashing into obstacles, hitting the surface at too high a velocity, or running out of fuel all result in failure. In some games in the genre, the ship's orientation must be adjusted as well as its horizontal and vertical velocities.
2.5D perspective refers to gameplay or movement in a video game or virtual reality environment that is restricted to a two-dimensional (2D) plane with little to no access to a third dimension in a space that otherwise appears to be three-dimensional and is often simulated and rendered in a 3D digital environment.
Shooter video games or shooters are a subgenre of action video games where the focus is on the defeat of the character's enemies using ranged weapons given to the player. Usually these weapons are firearms or some other long-range weapons, and can be used in combination with other tools such as grenades for indirect offense, armor for additional defense, or accessories such as telescopic sights to modify the behavior of the weapons. A common resource found in many shooter games is ammunition, armor or health, or upgrades which augment the player character's weapons.
Star Wars is a first-person rail shooter designed by Mike Hally and released as an arcade video game in 1983 by Atari, Inc. It uses 3D color vector graphics to simulate the assault on the Death Star from the 1977 film Star Wars. There are three connected gameplay sequences: combat against TIE fighters in space, flying across the surface of the Death Star, and the final trench run. The sequence repeats with added complications and the Death Star regenerating for each. The player's X-Wing fighter has a shield which only protects against damage a certain number of times, then the next hit ends the game. Speech synthesis emulates actors from the film.
The following article is a broad timeline of arcade video games.
Robot Tank is a first-person shoot 'em up written by Alan Miller for the Atari 2600 and published by Activision in 1983. It is similar in design to Atari, Inc.'s Battlezone tank combat arcade video game and more so to its 2600 port. Robot Tank adds different systems which can individually be damaged—instead of the vehicle always exploding upon being shot—and weather effects.
Asteroids Deluxe is a multidirectional shooter arcade video game with monochrome vector graphics released in April 1981 by Atari, Inc. It is the sequel to Asteroids and was designed to combat the saucer-hunting strategy of the original allowing experts to play for extended periods. These modifications made it significantly more difficult and less accessible to players. Ports of Asteroids Deluxe were released for the BBC Micro in 1984 and the Atari ST in 1987.
Red Baron is an arcade video game developed by Atari, Inc. and released in 1981. A first-person flight simulator game, the player takes the role of a World War I ace in a biplane fighting on the side of the Allies. The game is named after the nickname of Manfred von Richthofen, German flying ace. The game uses the same monochrome vector graphics and similar hardware as Atari's own Battlezone; both were developed at the same time. Like Battlezone, the player is presented with a first-person view of the action. Both Battlezone and Red Baron use additional hardware, an "Auxiliary" board, to perform the mathematical computations required for simulating a 3D environment.
Tank is an arcade game developed by Kee Games, a subsidiary of Atari, and released in November 1974. It was one of the few original titles not based on an existing Atari property developed by Kee Games, which was founded to sell clones of Atari games to distributors as a fake competitor prior to the merger of the two companies. In the game, two players drive tanks through a maze viewed from above while attempting to shoot each other and avoid mines, represented by X marks, in a central minefield. Each player controls their tank with a pair of joysticks, moving them forwards and back to drive, reverse, and steer, and firing shells with a button to attempt to destroy the other tank. The destruction of a tank from a mine or shell earns the opposing player a point, and tanks reappear after being destroyed. The winner is the player with more points when time runs out, with each game typically one or two minutes long.
Sprint 2 is a two player overhead-view arcade racing video game released in 1976 by Kee Games, a wholly owned subsidiary of Atari, and distributed by Namco in Japan. While earlier driving games had computer-controlled cars that moved along a "canned predetermined" course, Sprint 2 "introduced the concept of a computer car that had the intelligence to drive itself around the track" in "a semi-intelligent" manner.
Arcticfox is a science fiction tank simulation video game developed by Dynamix and published by Electronic Arts in 1986. It was published in Europe by Ariolasoft. A sequel to Dynamix's Stellar 7, it was released on Atari ST, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, MS-DOS, and Apple II. A third game was released in the series in 1991 titled Nova 9: The Return of Gir Draxon.
Artillery games are two or three-player video games involving tanks trying to destroy each other. The core mechanics of the gameplay is almost always to aim at the opponent(s) following a ballistic trajectory. Artillery games are among the earliest computer games developed; the theme of such games is an extension of the original uses of computer themselves, which were once used to calculate the trajectories of rockets and other related military-based calculations. Artillery games have been described as a type of "shooting game", though they are more often classified as a type of strategy video game.
Lunar Lander is a single-player arcade game in the Lunar Lander subgenre. It was developed by Atari, Inc. and released in August 1979. It was the most popular version to date of the "Lunar Lander" concept, surpassing the prior Moonlander (1973) and numerous text-based games, and most later iterations of the concept are based on this Atari version.
In video games, first-person is any graphical perspective rendered from the viewpoint of the player character, or from the inside of a device or vehicle controlled by the player character. It is one of two perspectives used in the vast majority of video games, with the other being third-person, the graphical perspective from outside of any character ; some games such as interactive fiction do not belong to either format.
Cyber Sled is a vehicular combat video game developed and published by Namco. It was originally released for arcades in 1993. The game's perspective is third-person by default, but can be switched to a first-person perspective. The game was nominated for Most Innovative New Technology at the 1994 AMOA Awards. It later received a sequel in 1994, Cyber Commando.
Line of Fire / Line of Fire: Bakudan Yarou is a first-person light gun shooter game developed by Sega and released for arcades in 1989. It was released with two arcade cabinet versions, a standard upright and a sit-down cockpit, both featuring two positional guns. The cockpit design allows the player(s) to sit down while playing the game, while having two-handed machine guns, controlled by a potentiometer-controlled gun alignment software system. The game follows a two-man commando unit as they try to escape from a terrorist facility after seizing a prototype weapon.
Submarine Commander is a shoot 'em up for the Atari 2600 developed by Matthew Hubbard at Atari, Inc.. It released exclusively under the Sears Tele-Games label in 1982.
3D Tank Duel is a video game developed by Realtime Games Software for the ZX Spectrum home computer. It is a clone of the arcade game Battlezone, featuring wireframe 3D graphics with color.
↑ Walker, Alex (October 26, 2012). "Evolution of the First Person Shooter". ABC News. Retrieved September 23, 2017. But the one game that many Generation X'ers will identify with when it comes to first-person shooters belongs to Atari and the green, wire-frame worlds within Battlezone.
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