| Empire I: World Builders | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Developer(s) | Interactive Fantasies |
| Publisher(s) | Edu-Ware [1] |
| Designer(s) | David Mullich |
| Series | Empire |
| Platform(s) | Apple II |
| Release | 1981 |
Empire I: World Builders is a 1981 video game for the Apple II published by Edu-Ware. It is the first game in the Empire trilogy, followed by Empire II: Interstellar Sharks (1982) and Empire III: Armageddon (1983). [2]
Set during the initial colonization period of a galactic Imperial civilization, the player chooses one of three classes (miner, missionary, or homesteader) and departs from the New York city spaceport to practice their chosen trade on the newly colonized planets. [3]
Rudy Kraft reviewed Empire I: World Builders in The Space Gamer No. 51. [4] Kraft commented that "I cannot recommend buying the game. The general system is interesting, and another game with fewer flaws would be a top-notch product, but World Builders is not." [4]
Zork is a text adventure game first released in 1977 by developers Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. The original developers and others, as the company Infocom, expanded and split the game into three titles—Zork I: The Great Underground Empire, Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz, and Zork III: The Dungeon Master—which were released commercially for a range of personal computers beginning in 1980. In Zork, the player explores the abandoned Great Underground Empire in search of treasure. The player moves between the game's hundreds of locations and interacts with objects by typing commands in natural language that the game interprets. The program acts as a narrator, describing the player's location and the results of the player's commands. It has been described as the most famous piece of interactive fiction.
Pac-Man, originally called Puck Man in Japan, is a 1980 maze video game developed and released by Namco for arcades. In North America, the game was released by Midway Manufacturing as part of its licensing agreement with Namco America. The player controls Pac-Man, who must eat all the dots inside an enclosed maze while avoiding four colored ghosts. Eating large flashing dots called "Power Pellets" causes the ghosts to temporarily turn blue, allowing Pac-Man to eat them for bonus points.
Space Invaders is a 1978 shoot 'em up arcade video game, developed and released by Taito in Japan and licensed to Midway Manufacturing for overseas distribution. Commonly considered to be one of the most influential video games of all time, Space Invaders was the first fixed shooter and the first video game with endless gameplay and set the template for the genre. The goal is to defeat wave after wave of descending aliens with a horizontally moving laser cannon to earn as many points as possible.
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.
Pitfall! is a video game developed by David Crane for the Atari 2600 and released in 1982 by Activision. The player controls Pitfall Harry, who has a time limit of 20 minutes to seek treasure in a jungle. The game world is populated by enemies and hazards that variously cause the player to lose lives or points.
A video game genre is an informal classification of a video game based on how it is played rather than visual or narrative elements. This is independent of setting, unlike works of fiction that are expressed through other media, such as films or books. For example, a shooter game is still a shooter game, regardless of where or when it takes place. A specific game's genre is open to subjective interpretation. An individual game may belong to several genres at once.
Gorf is an arcade video game released in 1981 by Midway Manufacturing, whose name was advertised as an acronym for "Galactic Orbiting Robot Force". It is a fixed shooter with five distinct levels, the first of which is based on Space Invaders and another on Galaxian. The game makes heavy use of synthesized speech for the Gorfian robot which taunts the player, powered by the Votrax speech chip. Gorf allows the player to buy two additional lives per quarter before starting the game, for a maximum of seven lives.
Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom, known as Zoom 909 in Japan, is a pseudo-3D rail shooter released as an arcade video game by Sega in 1982. The player controls a spaceship in a third-person perspective, adapting the three-dimensional perspective of Sega's earlier racing game Turbo (1981) for the space shoot 'em up genre. It uses the Buck Rogers license, referencing the space battles, though Buck himself is never seen.
The golden age of arcade video games was the period of rapid growth, technological development, and cultural influence of arcade video games from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. The release of Space Invaders in 1978 led to a wave of shoot-'em-up games such as Galaxian and the vector graphics-based Asteroids in 1979, made possible by new computing technology that had greater power and lower costs. Arcade video games switched from black-and-white to color, with titles such as Frogger and Centipede taking advantage of the visual opportunities of bright palettes.
1980 saw the release of a number of games with influential concepts, including Pac-Man, Battlezone, Crazy Climber, Mystery House, Missile Command, Phoenix, Rally-X, Space Panic, Stratovox, Zork, Adventure, and Olympic Decathlon. The year's highest-grossing video game was Namco's arcade game Pac-Man, while the best-selling home system was Nintendo's Game & Watch. The Atari VCS also grew in popularity with a port of Space Invaders and support from new third-party developer Activision.
Computer Bismarck is a computer wargame developed and published by Strategic Simulations, Inc. (SSI) in 1980. The game is based on the last battle of the battleship Bismarck, in which British Armed Forces pursue the German Bismarck in 1941. It is SSI's first game, and features turn-based gameplay and two-dimensional graphics.
Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back is a scrolling shooter video game programmed by Rex Bradford for the Atari 2600 and published by Parker Brothers in 1982. It was the first licensed Star Wars video game. An Intellivision version was released in 1983.
Portals of Twilight is a supplement for fantasy role-playing games published by Judges Guild in 1981.
Dragon's Eye is fantasy role-playing video game published by Automated Simulations in 1981 for the Apple II, Atari 8-bit computers, and Commodore PET.
Adventure in Time is a text adventure written by Paul Berker for the Apple II. It was published in 1981 by Phoenix Software, followed by a version for Atari 8-bit computers in 1983.
Neutrons is a 1981 video game published by Level-10.
Empire II: Interstellar Sharks is a 1982 video game for the Apple II published by Edu-Ware. It is the second game in the Empire trilogy, preceded by Empire I: World Builders (1981) and followed by Empire III: Armageddon (1983).
Empire III: Armageddon is a video game for the Apple II published by Edu-Ware in 1983. It is the third game in the Empire trilogy, preceded by Empire I: World Builders (1981) and Empire II: Interstellar Sharks (1982).
The Final Conflict is a strategy video game written by Thomas G. Cleaver for the Apple II and published by Hayden Software in 1982. A version for Atari 8-bit computers followed in 1983.
How to Master the Video Games is a paperback book written by Tom Hirschfeld and published by Bantam Books in 1981. It is a guidebook exploring 30 of the most popular arcade games of its time. Grame Mason writing for Eurogamer described it as "one of the first tips books" while Scott Stilphen identified it as one of "the first 2 'how to' video game books" alongside Ken Uston's Mastering Pac-Man which came out the same year.