Berzerk
Berzerk is a game where you play as a small green man with a lazer gun trying to make your way through a maze while shooting robots, avoiding the electric walls, and running from a murderous smiley face called Evil Otto (quite a mouthful there). There are 1024 randomly generated maps and increasingly difficult enemies of various colours and trigger-happy-ness. Berzerk was produced for Atari 2600 in 1980.
Your arch-nemesis Evil Otto can move through walls, and moves at the same speed as you going sideways, but much faster moving up and down, creating interesting gameplay, as you have to try to avoid going up and down for long stretches. It also has Intentionally dumb enemies that you can trick into killing themselves by walking into walls or shooting each other. The robots colour and difficulty changes as your score increases. One of the gameplay innovations of this game is that it featured an enemy (your nemesis Evil Otto) that cannot be killed, which was unheard of for a shooter game at the time. More significantly, however, is that one of the first games to have voice synthesis, in the form of talking talking robots. It cost $1,000 per word to develop synthesized speech, made more impressive by the sheer volume of dialogue the game had. There were dozens of phrases, all which could be rearranged or played at different speeds and pitches, causing hundreds of combinations which were played based on context (ex: if you didn’t kill all the robots, they say “Chicken, fight like a robot”). It had all the lines in english, french, german and spanish.
Alternate Reality
This role playing series was created for the Atari consoles. The original game concept was quite interesting, the idea being that all the games in the series would act as one game. Each game was a different region of the world (the City, the Dungeons, the Wilderness), and if you went to the entrance to a new area, it would prompt you to insert the corresponding disc. At least, this was the idea. Their producers, Datasoft, forced them to release a few of the games early and split up The City and The Dungeons, which were supposed to be the same game originally, and the seamless game transition was never created.
In the story for Alternate Reality, aliens capture you from earth, and you enter a gate that leads you to an “Alternate Reality”, in which the game world is played.
The game had several revolutionary features that were later attributed to different games. It had a lot in common with the Sims, having stats for time, strength, speed, health and more, but most interestingly, it has many hidden stats that you need to mentally track. Drunkenness and poison can artificially alter your stats, giving you false information, and there were hidden stats such as hunger, thirst, temperature, and even your characters alignment (good, neutral, evil, etc) that you had to figure out based on how characters reacted to you. Many of these features are shared with the Sims.
The first game had no traditional plot due to budget cuts, but the following games did without the players realizing, meaning that people could play for days before realizing that their actions had severe consequences down the road (a feature Grand Theft Auto was called revolutionary for, despite the fact that Alternate Reality actually did it first).
Alternate Reality had quite good 3D graphics and interesting concepts, but its huge amounts of cut features and lack of a cohesive plot ultimately made the game fail, and the final installment was never made.
Prince of Persia
Prince of Persia (1989) is 1989 cinematic platformer developed by Broderbund and released for the Apple II. In the game, the sultan of Persia is off fighting a war and his court wizard takes over the country and forces the sultan’s daughter to marry him. You, the nameless protagonist whom the princess loves, are thrown in the palace dungeons and must escape in order to rescue the princess.
The animations are exceptional due to them having an acrobat that they referenced when making animations. There have been many remakes of Prince of Persia since, and the game series has been very successful.
Berzerk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berzerk_(video_game)
http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=7096
Prince of Persia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_of_Persia_(1989_video_game)
http://princeofpersia.ubi.com/the-shadow-and-the-flame/en-GB/home/
http://ca.ign.com/articles/2010/05/18/ign-presents-the-history-of-prince-of-persia
Alternate Reality
http://www.marktaw.com/reviews/AlternateRealityTheVideoG.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_Reality_(series)
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