#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.

Anyway, here we go. In Battle Zone you're in a tank and it's your job to kill the crap out of other tanks. You're armed with a peashooter, as is typically the case in early games. Your peashooter, like most peashooters, can only fire one slow-moving bullet at a time. It's in your best interests to hit something - even if it's not an enemy tank, you'll still get to fire again more quickly if you hit some debris.

Blasting an enemy tank results in a satisfying explosion. More enemy tanks pop up endlessly as you continue to destroy them.

Objects are strewn about all over the place. Some of them make good cover. These half-height blocks don't. Instead they just prevent you from driving through them. You have to go around, which is a problem  because your tank is about as maneuverable as...well, a tank.

Remember how it only takes one shot to kill enemy tanks? Yeah, the same goes for you too. Since you're not the speediest thing in the world it can be very tough to dodge enemy attacks. Enemies are also very aggressive. It's dangerous to attack them head on.

Also irritating is the fact that your shots are the same speed as those of the enemy. This means that if you both fire at each other at once then both of you are going to die. It's best to approach enemies from the sides or behind for precisely this reason.

Battle Zone's another one of those endless games. You can't win, it just keeps on going until you run out of lives. Still, the fact that you've got an entire world to explore, limited though it may be, makes Battle Zone one of the more memorable games out of the ones we've covered thus far. We came from this to taking an arrow through the knee in Skyrim. Just think about that.