#12: Defender (1980, Williams Electronics)

Games began to become more complicated in the 1980s, as we saw with Battle Zone and its 3D environment. But Williams knew they could step it up even further. Gamers were ready for more challenge. They were ready for more buttons. They were ready to be able to fire more than one shot at a time...thank God for that.

And so we got Defender, another one of those games most people have played and loved. Defender holds the distinction of being both one of the first really complex games and for being hard as hell. For once, you're not just blasting enemies - you've got a job to do. Defending the people of your planet successfully earns you more rewards than just going on a murderous rampage. What's more, if you fail to keep the planet safe the game punishes you by making it more difficult to reach high scores and by bombarding you with difficult enemies.

Defender is one of those games that still stands up today. The controls are a little archaic and take some getting used to - the fact that you have to push a button to turn around is really irritating as a modern gamer, for instance - but the game itself is still plenty of fun. Defender spawned a variety of sequels, most notably Stargate (or Defender II) and even a PS2 remake.

The version of Defender I played was emulated in MAME.

#11: Battle Zone (1980, Atari)

Welcome to the 1980s! This is probably the most influential era in video game history. In the 1990s video games became more like cartoons and books; in the 2000s and 2010s they became more like movies but in the 1980s games were kind of doing their own thing. For instance, if you came across Battle Zone back when it was new you'd probably be forgiven if your jaw hit the floor.

Battle Zone is an FPS. One of the first, in fact. You control a tank and use it to battle other tanks in a first-person three-dimensional environment full of debris that you can use as cover. While I might not have felt all that inspired by some of the classic games from the 1970s, I really understood why Battle Zone is on the list once I started playing it. This is a game that was ahead of its time - back when games were largely about the wonder of controlling a little man on a screen, this game gave you an entire virtual world to roam around in.

Incidentally, Battle Zone had a pretty sweet remake for the PC in 1998 that was more of an RTS/FPS hybrid. It was very cool and certainly worth a look if you're into retro PC gaming.

The version of Battle Zone I played was Flash-based and is available for free on Atari's website. I was unable to get this game to work properly in MAME, but insofar as I can tell the two versions are identical in gameplay.

#10: Lunar Lander (1979, Atari)

PHYSICS! It's truly a miracle. Today physics is integrated into pretty much every game you can think of. Hell, what would Half-Life 2 be without ridiculous puzzles involving using floating plastic barrels to set up ramps? ...probably a little more enjoyable, really.

But that's not the game we're talking about today. No, today we're talking about Lunar Lander, quite possibly the first physics game. Lunar Lander has you trying to land the titular vehicle on the surface of the moon. In the fictional universe of the game NASA apparently decided to make all its spacecraft out of fine china because unless you land as delicately as possible the lander will explode into a fine mist. Physics!

Similar mechanics to Lunar Lander can be seen in a vast variety of games. One of the most notable is Rare's Solar Jetman, which takes the physics concept and makes a whole adventure game out of it.

The version of Lunar Lander I played was emulated in MAME. If for whatever reason you feel like playing this yourself then it's readily available online - at the Chrome Web Store, for instance, or in HTML5 if you're feeling cutting-edge.

Oh, one more thing - this is the last game on The List from the 1970s! In the next entry we're moving on to the glorious '80s.

#9: Galaxian (1979, Namco)

So really, who can remember the difference between Galaxian and Galaga without stopping to think about it? Not me. Galaxian, the game we're looking at today, is basically a clone of Space Invaders with nicer graphics and more impressive enemy patterns. More impressive because the enemies actually do something other than move down at you and bob from side to side, that is.

Frankly, in today's world, there's very little reason to play Galaxian instead of the far superior Galaga. But in the magical self-contained world of One Thousand Plus One we're still stuck in 1979. Jimmy Carter is President, Three Mile Island was just decimated by a nuclear meltdown and kids everywhere have begun the long road to obesity as McDonald's introduces the Happy Meal. We don't have Galaga yet. What we have is Space Invaders, essentially a monochrome game that's been out long enough that people are used to it.

So when Galaxian comes out with its pretty colors and enemies that fly at you in unpredictable patterns we're impressed. What's more, it's got animations! Beautiful, beautiful animations. And background music! We haven't seen something like this before. It's new. It's unique. It's now. Keep that in mind as we battle the alien menace.

The version of Galaxian I played was emulated in MAME. If for whatever reason you want to play it yourself, it's readily available with a quick google search.

#8: Asteroids (1979, Atari)

In case you hadn't noticed by now, Atari kind of had a chokehold on the games industry toward the end of the '70s and in the early '80s. It's kind of comparable to what we'll see with Nintendo when we get to the late '80s - they basically ran the show. It wasn't just business clout that did it, though. Great games like Asteroids helped keep Atari on top.

Asteroids follows the standard early games "easy to learn, hard to master" formula. You're a triangle. There's rocks. You need to clear the screen of rocks armed only with a peashooter. If you blast a rock it splits into several smaller rocks, which split again if you blast them and so on until they're gone. It's a metaphor for life, really. See, if you're the triangle, then the rocks are problems! And if you try to solve the problems with violence, they just become more problems! Until, uh, you use violence to make them into tiny problems which you can easily crush and...okay, the metaphor kind of falls apart after awhile.

As usual with early games there have been plenty of remakes of and sequels to Asteroids over the years. One of the most beloved is Blasteroids, also by Atari, which featured power-ups and a morphing ship. Asteroids also led to other classic games like Sinistar.

The version of Asteroids I played was the revision 4 chipset and was emulated in MAME.

#7: Adventure (1979, Atari)

We're almost to the 1980s, folks, and that means we're running into a greater variety of games! What we've got here in Adventure is one of the first graphical adventure games. Text adventures had been around for awhile and Adventure didn't kill them off - we'll encounter one fairly soon, in fact - but it did a lot to redefine what an adventure game could be.

This is my first time playing this game, so what I know about it is limited to what's available in the book and online. Adventure is a port of a text adventure called Colossal Cave Adventure made by Will Crowther. It's only around 4k and apparently contains a sneaky, sneaky easter egg - one of the first in gaming!

The version of Adventure I played was emulated using Stella. I've got a semi-rule about not using walkthroughs or manuals for these games except where necessary, so I'm terribly sorry if this entry doesn't make a lot of sense. Because, to be honest, the game really didn't make much sense.

#6: Space Invaders (1978, Taito)

My day job when I'm not blogging about video games is at a multinational economic organization headquartered in Washington, DC. That means I have to take the DC subway to and from work. I'm very, very familiar with space invaders. Trust me.

Space Invaders was one of the first games released by Taito Corporation, the company we now know for a wide variety of classic shooters like the Darius series along with the Arkanoid and Cooking Mama games. It's inspired a variety of sequels and remakes, most recently the excellent Space Invaders: Infinity Gene for PlayStation Network, XBLA and IOS. It's representative of video games as a whole - pretty much everyone knows it and has played it regardless of if they do a lot of gaming or not.

What is there to add to this game, really? Perhaps even moreso than Pong, Space Invaders is the video game. Volumes have been wrote about it and what it did for gaming. We wouldn't have games as they are today without it. But chances are you know that. All I can do at this point is play it!

#5: Combat (1977, Atari)

Today we encounter the first game on The List that I actually ran into problems playing properly: Combat, a multiplayer-only shooter for the Atari 2600 VCS. Here's the problem: the version of Combat I played was emulated in Stella. Stella doesn't have netplay. I also think it might be a bit rude to call someone up and go "Hey, come over immediately! It's time to get crunk and play some ATARI! It's for my fantastic new blog!"

So what we end up finding out about Combat comes from the paltry singleplayer experience. I say paltry because it's nonexistent. Combat lacks any sort of AI, so it's two players or bust and in this case we had to go with bust. This isn't a very complex game, though. Basically you're a tank or a plane and you drive around a little map blasting away at another tank or plane. Whoever manages to hit the other guy wins.

#4: Boot Hill (1977, Midway)

So we talked about Pong not long ago. One of the things that came up during our discussion of that masterpiece was how the original arcade version lacked an AI. You played with someone else or, well, you won. It wouldn't be very fulfilling, but you'd win. Boot Hill, a Midway changed all that in 1977. Now if you didn't have any competition you could play against the computer. Who would have thought?

Essentially this is Pong with cowboys. You've got a pistol, a fancy cowboy hat and a mission: fill the other guy full of lead. One shot is all it takes, but you only get six bullets per round. If you exhaust your supply before your opponent does, you don't have any choice but to dodge and pray. If you both run out of bullets the round is a draw and play restarts. Bullets will ricochet off the top and bottom of the screen and there's also obstacles strewn about that can be used for cover. Gears of War it ain't, but I wasn't expecting even this level of depth from a game made in 1977.

The version of Boot Hill I played for this entry was emulated in MAME. In the screenshots you'll notice that there's no background - the original game used mirrors to project the action onto a drawn overlay of a frontier town. Sadly we'll have to miss out on this. Hopefully nobody's too heartbroken!

#3: Breakout (1976, Atari)

Steve Jobs was a man who did a lot to revolutionize technology. He turned Apple into a multinational juggernaut, crushing all comers with its line of sleek, stylish iDevices. The modern view of tech as an integral part of modern life is in no small part thanks to Jobs' work. Frankly, the world as we know it owes Jobs quite a bit.

One of Jobs' accomplishments that isn't as well known as the iRevolution did quite a bit to change the face of gaming as well. In 1975 Cyan Engineering hired Jobs to produce the prototype for Breakout, a game conceived as Pong for a single player. Long story short, Pong went on to inspire all manner of other games. Notably, Taito's Arkanoid, which we'll be covering later once we reach the 1980s, owes its existence to Breakout. In the modern era the most well known variation of the game is Sidhe Interactive's Shatter, which takes the concept into the modern era with HD graphics and sound and updated gameplay (we'll also be covering Shatter...sometime in 2015 at this rate.)

For this entry I used MAME to emulate Super Breakout, which is identical to the original game but uses a traditional microprocessor setup instead of an archaic discrete logic system.

#2: Pong (1972, Atari)

It's Pong. What is there to say about it? It's gaming in the raw. You've got a paddle, the other player's got a paddle, you bounce a steadily accelerating ball back and forth and whoever wins gets the girl and saves the day. I could go on and on about how significant Pong was to gaming history, but the book does a fantastic job of that.

The version of Pong I played for this post is part of the Discrete Integrated Circuit Emulator, or DICE. It's the most accurate version you're going to get short of finding a Pong machine which would probably take a bit of work. I know I said I wasn't going to be strict over accuracy when it came to these entries but it turns out you can't get Pong in MAME anymore. Either way, there's not much to say about it because, well, it's Pong.

If you really want to play some Pong, there's no shortage of options. If you just want straight Pong, that's easy enough to find. But maybe you've got a flair for the exotic. Maybe vanilla Pong isn't enough for you and you want a Pong-based fighting game with fatalities. Pong Kombat's got you covered there. Maybe you want Pong in 3D; try Pong: The Next Level on PC or PSX. And maybe you want Pong that you can play by yourself. A version where, I don't know, you use the ball to break bricks or something like that. We'll get there. For now, we just want Pong.

#1: The Oregon Trail (1971, MECC)

It's fitting that the first of the Thousand and One would be a game so revered by so many of my generation. The Oregon Trail, a 1971 edutainment program by MECC, found a home in computer labs around the country. For many, myself included, it was an early exposure to computer technology at a time when it still seemed magical.

The version of this game that I played was the Apple II virtual disk image available at virtualapple.org. This is a faithful representation of the game many of us are familiar with. Plenty of others are now available, including versions on the Wii and IOS.

Essentially you're an emigrant trying to make your way to Oregon to start a new life. To accomplish this you're going to have to make a bunch of tough decisions. Chief among these tough decisions is what you'll put on your tombstone when you inevitably run out of food and die of dysentery. Life wasn't easy in the Wild West.  The Oregon Trail is an edutainment game, meaning it was essentially a means of attempting to teach kids without having them realize they're learning. It's one of the few good examples of this idea - others include the Carmen Sandiego games and Math Blaster.

Introduction

I've been playing video games since I was a kid. That's not really saying much - these days, most of us have. As a military brat I spent a fair amount of time migrating from place to place, so for me, games were a constant. I might leave friends, schools and homes behind, but games could come along with me.

Along with playing them, though, throughout my life I've enjoyed reading and writing about games as well. A big chunk of one of my summers as an adolescent was spent contributing to GameFAQs from a dialup connection on a little townhouse in Rota, Spain when the site was in its infancy. Over the years I've wrote for sites like AllRPG.com and Jay Is Games.

Since then I like to think I've grown up a bit. I've got a job and a life. Instead of just writing because it's fun, it's what I'm paid to do. Games aren't the constant that they were for me anymore. As much as it pains me to say it, I've got better things to do. But at the same time it's great to sit back with some spare time and a bottle of water to take in some vidya.

Given my background it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that when I came across Tony Mott's 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die I was immediately intrigued. How exhaustive was the list? As a kid who grew up with games, there's a fair number that have meaning for me - would I find them in the list? And how much detail would be provided on each game? As I browsed the list I realized that I hadn't played the vast majority of the entries. Clearly I'd have to do something about this.

As it turns out, each entry in the list comes with a blurb about the game, but not only is that blurb short but it's someone else's viewpoint. I wanted to experience these games for myself and leave my own little mark on each entry. In the end, I've decided to reconcile my love of games by going down the list - every day I'll play at least one of the thousand and one games in the list in order. Then I'll hop on here and write about it. Some of these games are going to take more than one day, and that's fine; I'll stick with each entry until I'm done with it. Some games are short enough that I'll be able to post more than one in a day. And I won't make any claims toward trying to play each game as authentically as possible or anything like that - we're going to aim for convenience here. I'm going to aim to play each game for at least an hour before writing about it, no matter how much it makes me want to die. That's dedication, folks.

Entry #1 will be on The Oregon Trail. The final entry will be on Alien Zombie Death. Between The Oregon Trail and Alien Zombie Death nearly three years will pass...and that's assuming I only spend one day on each game, which is unlikely, or that I won't just forget this exists, which is likely. This is a long time to get through a long list. The absolute most conservative estimate for when this will be done is October 20, 2014. That's a pretty tall order to fill.

In the end, though, there's a slim chance I'll end up to a monument to the medium...or maybe just a bunch of slipshod entries about games with names like Alien Zombie Death. I guess we'll know in 2014!