The game is streamlined to a fault in that it is all about (and only about) getting to drive around a tank and blow everything up. In the case of Mass Destruction there are no real characters to speak of and the details are all kept extremely light the point of the game is action, and you are not meant to get attached to any narrative or story. Yet realistically from a game design standpoint the avatar in-game is still more about what you are projecting onto it (a simple pixel-drawn bug or a boxy tank) and pretending on top of what the avatar is, and what it is doing in-game. Arguably Yars' Revenge is far more creative and original. Technically the tank in the game (you pick one from three, each with differing stats but the same weapons) doesn't have any more personality than the Yar, and you still go about the screen shooting and blowing things up. The cover art, also an exaggeration of the actual game, still gives a pretty good picture of what to expect:Īnd while we are leaps ahead in the graphical representation department, we are still having to use our imagination here: Really the game could be a highly updated single-player version of Atari's own Combat. yeah, sometimes we forget how weird video games are.Īnyway, speaking of tanks, fast forward fifteen years and we have another game I played through recently the Saturn version of Mass Destruction. We had to work harder to pretend we were a giant mutant bug, or a tank, or a. The point being, the player really had to do some projecting onto what was onscreen to get the most out of the game. Obviously Infocom was on to something with this classic ad:
This was on par for the earliest video games due to the extremely simple graphics technology, most of the heavy lifting was done by the imagination, channeled via the creative art on the packaging, included manuals, game labels, and arcade cabinet art. Yars' Revenge originally had an aforementioned pack-in comic that went to great lengths explaining the history and detail of the game and specifically your avatar, a slightly-animated single-color mutated housefly called a 'Yar.' There is in fact an entire high-concept sci-fi background story featuring super-powered space insects from Earth that are now defending themselves from aggressive alien invaders and striking back after the fall of one of their colony worlds, hence the game title. This combined with portability makes for a perfect pick-up-and-play, short-burst experience.īut my high praise for the under-rated GBC port isn't my point here.
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Telegames' GBC port has a scrolling playfield, a bonus minigame, full-color splash screens based off the original pack-in comic, and best of all a password system to chip away at all 250 levels. While the original (now 40 years old!) Atari 2600 version is, of course, the best remembered and praised, the GameBoy Color version is the one I actually prefer.
One of the oldest games I often go back to is Howard Scott Warshaw's classic Yars' Revenge.
Of course, in the beginning of the industry only a few pixels at most could be afforded to present the player's avatar, and animation was simple if present at all. Upon reflection, four games I've played recently paint a fascinating picture of the evolution of where we started and where we are now. Given the importance placed upon player agency in many modern games, from customization and features in Skyrim to vehicle selection and colors in the Forza Horizon series, great effort is often taken to connect the player to what is on the screen. Formulating a digital avatar, a representation of a player's interaction within a video game, is a construct often taken for granted.
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