Many also inspired clones which were released for the PC. An early example of this was Commando, released in 1985.Īll of the games described above were ported to home gaming systems such as the PC, usually fairly quickly after their initial arcade release. Sequels followed, such as 1943: The Battle of Midway.īeginning in the mid-1980s, shooters developed in which the player controlled a human being on foot, rather than a spaceship or airplane. Unlike Xevious, it was inspired by actual history, namely the Pacific Theater of the Second World War. Unlike the games discussed above, Star Wars was a first-person, rather than third-person, shooter.Īnother vertically scrolling aircraft game, 1942 (published in 1984), was one of Capcom’s earliest hits. The game also featured digitized sound samples from the film. The player leads an attack on the Death Star. In 1983, Atari released an arcade game based on the final scenes of Star Wars. Just as Defender was the first horizontally scrolling shooter, Xevious was the first major game to feature vertical scrolling. In Xevious, a 1982 Namco offering, the player controls an aircraft which must destroy enemies both in the air and on the ground. The ship in Defender could also move up and down the screen as well as left and right. It stood out from its predecessors, however, in its side-scrolling environment: no longer was the player limited to a single screen. Like the games discussed above, Defender required the player to defeat never-ending waves of aliens. Galaga also featured more difficult and complex enemy behavior than its predecessors.Īnother milestone was Williams Electronics’ 1980 Defender. These had more advanced graphics than Space Invaders. Two games with similar gameplay to Space Invaders are Galaxian and Galaga, released by Namco in 19 respectively. Although simple, the game proved overwhelmingly popular: it caused a shortage of hundred-yen coins in Japan, and the home version for the Atari 2600 resulted in quadrupled sales of the console. His goal is to shoot down wave after wave of aliens, which move down from the top of the screen. In Space Invaders, the player controls a laser cannon, which is positioned at the bottom of the screen. However, the game which best exemplifies the genre is generally considered to have been Space Invaders, released in 1978 by the Japanese company Taito and licensed in the United States to Midway.

The former was created by Stanford University students and became a popular attraction at the student union there for years the latter, the first commercially released arcade game, was designed by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, who would shortly thereafter go on to found Atari.

Spacewar! inspired two of the earliest arcade games: Galaxy Game and Computer Space, both released in 1971. Created by MIT students in 1962, the game involved two rocket ships firing at each other while also flying through space so as to avoid falling into the gravity well of a nearby star. One of the earliest games ever invented on the computer, Spacewar!, might be said to have originated the shooter genre. Many games which were initially popular as arcade shooters have also been ported to PCs. Many such games exist, both in arcade-game format and on personal computers. An arcade shooter, or “shoot ‘em up,” is an action video game in which the player controls an avatar of some kind, often a plane or spaceship, and shoots large numbers of enemies while at the same time avoiding being shot by them.

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