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Absolute firsts in video games

Glowsquid

Member
I wish I had something to contribute to this thread, because it's truly fantastic.

Did anyone research the incredibly-important question of which is the first game to feature uncensored profanity in gameplay?
 

samwyse

Neo Member
Equipment changes reflected on body of in-game character: The Legend of Zelda (FDS, 1986) [Link's sprite reflects the type of shield equipped]

Does the flame thrower pick up in Rush'n Attack/Green Beret (Arcade, 1985) count as an equipment change? I'm sure there are plenty of earlier examples.
 

samwyse

Neo Member
Any game predating Mega Man Legends (PS1, 1997) with a lock-on targeting system in a freely navigable 3D environment?

A combat flight simulator like Falcon? (lol)

I haven't been able to find a combat racing game before RC Pro Am. Any ideas?

Racing Destruction Set (Commodore 64, 1985): "In destruction mode, each player had access to oil slicks and landmines which could be ejected from the back of the vehicles" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_Destruction_Set

Rad Mobile

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AXaEGhFDqs

First and only game to have a dedicated wiper button?!?

Toyota Celica GT (press F1 to activate) (Amiga, 1990) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Celica_GT
 
Okay so I read this whole topic and didn't see it mentioned, and then I did tons of research but I'm on my phone so it's kind of tricky. And I know someone is going to immediately show me how wrong I am.

But is Pocket Kingdom: Own the World for the N-gage the first Handheld MMO (30th November 2004)?

I also tried to find the first handheld game with true online multiplayer, possibly Pathway to Glory also on the N-gage, which seems to have come out two weeks earlier.

I bet there is an earlier example though.
 
Great thread!

I didn't see it mentioned, but what would be the first game with an attract sequence? (demo gameplay shown when no players are playing it) I remember Superman on Atari 2600 (1979) had one, where it would show Superman flying around to different screens. I can't remember if any arcade games prior to that had an attract mode.
 

Phediuk

Member
I wish I had something to contribute to this thread, because it's truly fantastic.

Did anyone research the incredibly-important question of which is the first game to feature uncensored profanity in gameplay?

Oh Shit! for the MSX (1984). Already on the list.

Ultima IV (1985) has herb mixing to create spells.

Nice. Updated.


Updated!

Does the flame thrower pick up in Rush'n Attack/Green Beret (Arcade, 1985) count as an equipment change? I'm sure there are plenty of earlier examples.

True, true. Removed for the time being.
 

Phediuk

Member
Really enjoyed reading this thread.

How about the first game with proper, extensive voice acting? First famous person to voice a character?

I don't know what you'd consider "extensive", but Shark Attack (arcade, 1981) had a cassette inside the cabinet that would play back dialogue during gameplay.

http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/sharkattack/sharkattack.htm


Edit: also, updated the "Licensed song" category. Apparently Journey (arcade, 1983) was beaten to the punch by the other Journey game from the previous year, Journey Escape (Atari 2600,1982) in which a mangled version of "Don't Stop Believin'" plays.
 

Phediuk

Member
I think Crysis was the first game to use Ambient Occlusion shadows.

Nice! Adding.



Also, I've got an updated for the "randomly generated levels" category. Maze Craze (Atari 2600, 1978) generates a new maze every time the game is turned on. Pretty neat.
 

JP

Member
I'm assuming somebody in the know is going to be able to better this and tell me there was one decades before but was Gran Turismo 2 (1999) the first game to use smell to "enhance" the gameplay experience?

I'm not sure if they ever achieved what they were aiming to achieve with it as I'm not sure it smelt like cars but whatever the smell was it did smell really unpleasant to me.

EDIT:
There we go, managed to find a picture online.
BrzQGusIYAAHPns.jpg
 

Couleurs

Member
I'm assuming somebody in the know is going to be able to better this and tell me there was one decades before but was Gran Turismo 2 (1999) the first game to use smell to "enhance" the gameplay experience?

I'm not sure if they ever achieved what they were aiming to achieve with it as I'm not sure it smelt like cars but whatever the smell was it did smell really unpleasant to me.

EDIT:
There we go, managed to find a picture online.
BrzQGusIYAAHPns.jpg

There were probably others as well, but Earthbound had scratch and sniffs in the strategy guide that came with the game.
 

HF2014

Member
There were probably others as well, but Earthbound had scratch and sniffs in the strategy guide that came with the game.

Yop. Do you remember the smell?I think i do! Its incredible but i think its because of this,that this game is still popular.
 

red720

Member
Destructible terrain at pixel scale: Lemmings (Amiga, 1991) or Scorched Earth (PC, 1991)

I was going to sugguest 1982's Dig Dug for this but looking at its wikipeda page there is an article on destructible terrain and it cites Space Invaders and Gun Fight (1975) as early examples. The scope in those earlier games is smaller than Dig Dug, but I think it still counts.
 

Phediuk

Member
isnt FFX the first fully voice acted game ?

Even by the most generous definition, FFX wasn't even close to the first fully voice-acted game. At least ten years too late for that, and possibly more depending on what counts as "fully voice-acted".
 

Phediuk

Member
I was going to sugguest 1982's Dig Dug for this but looking at its wikipeda page there is an article on destructible terrain and it cites Space Invaders and Gun Fight (1975) as early examples. The scope in those earlier games is smaller than Dig Dug, but I think it still counts.

That's not pixel-level destruction, though. In Scorched Earth and Lemmings, any arrangement of any pixels can be arbitrarily destroyed, not just predefined "chunks" of the terrain.
 

void_if_removed

Neo Member
I'm assuming somebody in the know is going to be able to better this and tell me there was one decades before but was Gran Turismo 2 (1999) the first game to use smell to "enhance" the gameplay experience?

Leather Goddesses of Phobos (1986) came with a scratch n sniff card. Not sure if that was the first, but it's the one I remember.
 
What was the first game to have a interactive toilet/restroom ?

Little Computer People (1985) comes to mind as an early example. You don't control the character directly but you can type in suggestions/commands that he listens to (it's a proto-Sims), or does stuff on his own. One of the actions is using the toilet.
 

flak57

Member
Racing Destruction Set (Commodore 64, 1985): "In destruction mode, each player had access to oil slicks and landmines which could be ejected from the back of the vehicles" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_Destruction_Set

This is exactly the type of game I was thinking of, nice post! I watched a vid and the guy was able to drop land mines etc while racing the computer.

I was interested in whatever specific "sub-genre" RC Pro Am falls under (and imo kart racing games today like Mario Kart), which is why games like Mach Rider didn't fit the bill for me. Only thing missing here is the item pick-ups, looks like you allocate weapons before the race in this one.
 

mclem

Member
Does anyone know a concrete release date for Cabal? It came out in 1988, the same year as Devastators, and it's fundamentally the same sort of game, so I'm wondering if it might actually beat Devastators to the punch.

Also, the OP has "The Quilt", which if it's referencing the text adventure development engine, it's "The Quill"!

The naming around there is a little confusing; the Quill is down for 'proprietary engine', when in fact it appears to be referencing another entity using someone else's engine. Compare and contrast with the entry for "3D proprietary engine", where Incentive were actually the developers of Freescape.

"Isometric platform game": 3D Ant Attack *might* beat Congo Bongo, that'll be dependent on release dates. And it might lay claim to being the first truly isometric 3D title, as Sandy White himself claims:

August(ish) 1983

The worlds first isometric 3D game!

Or was it?
Certainly at the time I was writing it, I had seen nothing else like it (like the proverbial ostrich perhaps), and it was a year before anything else isometric appeared on the Spectrum. The three quarter view 3D shooter, "Zaxxon", was around in US arcades from 1982. Alhough isometric in projection, I suggest that it was really a sideways scroller (cleverly!) slanted upwards, and would have worked equally well with a non-isometric orthogonal projection. (ahem...). So... I propose that Ant Attack was the first true isometric 3D game, followed in US arcades in 1984 by "Marble Madness", and the classic "Knight Lore" in (Dec?) 1984 on the Spectrum. But it's a big world, and you may know different.. if so let me know!

I think his point is largely that while it rendered in an isometric form, the gameplay was mostly a scrolling shooter (Although I thought height above ground level was a component, too, so it's not simply transferred to isometric?). Certainly Ant Attack had more freedom of movement, at least.


Since I bring it up all the damn time, I note you have "Interactive loading screen" down for Delta's sound mixer; can I also suggest a separate "Loading screen game" category or similar?

qkJ2l.gif


A Pac-Man clone on the loading screen for Joe Blade 2.

And, while it's non-interactive, I think Moon Strike (1987)'s Storyloader deserves a nod as well for being more ambitious than most.


"Photography as Gameplay": Hocus Focus (1986) has photography as a major theme of what you do. but I don't think it particularly counts - execution of the photographs is not part of the challenge itself. I'm just mentioning it for the sake of completeness
 

Phediuk

Member
Does anyone know a concrete release date for Cabal? It came out in 1988, the same year as Devastators, and it's fundamentally the same sort of game, so I'm wondering if it might actually beat Devastators to the punch.

Also, the OP has "The Quilt", which if it's referencing the text adventure development engine, it's "The Quill"!

The naming around there is a little confusing; the Quill is down for 'proprietary engine', when in fact it appears to be referencing another entity using someone else's engine. Compare and contrast with the entry for "3D proprietary engine", where Incentive were actually the developers of Freescape.

"Isometric platform game": 3D Ant Attack *might* beat Congo Bongo, that'll be dependent on release dates. And it might lay claim to being the first truly isometric 3D title, as Sandy White himself claims:



I think his point is largely that while it rendered in an isometric form, the gameplay was mostly a scrolling shooter (Although I thought height above ground level was a component, too, so it's not simply transferred to isometric?). Certainly Ant Attack had more freedom of movement, at least.


Since I bring it up all the damn time, I note you have "Interactive loading screen" down for Delta's sound mixer; can I also suggest a separate "Loading screen game" category or similar?

qkJ2l.gif


A Pac-Man clone on the loading screen for Joe Blade 2.

And, while it's non-interactive, I think Moon Strike (1987)'s Storyloader deserves a nod as well for being more ambitious than most.


"Photography as Gameplay": Hocus Focus (1986) has photography as a major theme of what you do. but I don't think it particularly counts - execution of the photographs is not part of the challenge itself. I'm just mentioning it for the sake of completeness

The difference between Cabal and Devastators is that Devastators features arbitrary movement along the Z-axis, while Cabal features only left and right movement.

Otherwise, excellent post. Updates made!
 
I think Duke 3d is the first game you can pee in. I mean I know it's not a crowning achievement but I think it was the first :p

I know Postal 2 had it as well but as far as I know I haven't seen a game earlier than duke that has a pissing mechanic.

It actually had a use as well, you could heal a small amount as long as you don't try to do it too often so if you come across a toilet in your travels, similar to Fallout 3, you can use it to regain some health.
 

Xscapist

Member
Oh, just discovered an earlier game to use "boss" to describe a harder enemy:

"Boss" Galaga in the 1981 arcade Galaga

And the Metroid (NES) instruction manual might be the origin of the term "Mini-Boss.".
 

Lurch666

Member
Seeing this thread again reminded me of a post I made in the 'arcade games that blew your mind' thread about Phoenix having different levels-the games I had played previously had a single repeating level but phoenix had 5 different levels to it.Was that a first?

EDIT:Nope-Quasar did it a year earlier in the arcades-anyone remember any earlier ones?
 
Thread bump...

LGR points out in a recent video that BioForge for the PC may be the first 3D polygon game to use a skeletal animation system.

From Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioForge

The programming team has a lot to be proud of with BioForge. We built our own Flock of Birds suit and had real time motion capture years before other companies. To my knowledge, BioForge had the first single-skin, fully texture mapped, skeleton-based characters ever seen in a video game (Alone in the Dark used hash textures and convex body pieces, which did not look nearly as good).

It is definitely not the first game to use motion capture, ad there were 2D games that use rotoscoping before this. But BioForge may be the first to use a ping pongball motion capture suit and skeletal animation in 3D models. The game was developed by Origin Systems in 1995 for MSDOS PC's.

I've heard of BioForge before, but I have never actually played or seen it. I had no idea that this game was a survival horror adventure game with pre-rendered backgrounds and polygon models. This game was released a whole year before BioHazard/ Resident Evil as well.
 

Overside

Banned
That's not pixel-level destruction, though. In Scorched Earth and Lemmings, any arrangement of any pixels can be arbitrarily destroyed, not just predefined "chunks" of the terrain.

Speaking of good old scorched earth, the game came with a .cfg file that was used to edit what tanks said upon firing and death, so you could customize what the tanks said before firing and dying...

First?
 

Bleepey

Member
I know this is ancient history now, but does anybody know what this is referring to? Sounds like it would be good for a laugh.

CliffyB said in a tweet something along the lines of Mackelmore is the first rapper in a long time with something to say. People then bring it up in jest.
 
Thread bump...

LGR points out in a recent video that BioForge for the PC may be the first 3D polygon game to use a skeletal animation system.

From Wikipedia:



It is definitely not the first game to use motion capture, ad there were 2D games that use rotoscoping before this. But BioForge may be the first to use a ping pongball motion capture suit and skeletal animation in 3D models. The game was developed by Origin Systems in 1995 for MSDOS PC's.

I've heard of BioForge before, but I have never actually played or seen it. I had no idea that this game was a survival horror adventure game with pre-rendered backgrounds and polygon models. This game was released a whole year before BioHazard/ Resident Evil as well.

That's some impressive stuff about BioForge, I'm also interested about any earlier examples of such skeletal animation.

I played it back sometimes in the late 90s I think, was really impressed at how good the characters looked. The texture work was very nicely done, with baked (drawn?) lighting that, even though static, felt almost like it had normal mapping.

There's a lot of clunky stuff in that game, but it really creates a good atmosphere, without any hand holding. Lots of text, logs and difficult puzzles, if I remember it correctly.

No man sky is the first game to have a fully open universe?

It's a pretty broad definition, what exactly is a fully open universe? Elite in 1984 was pretty much the first open world game in general, and also a on open universe (8 galaxies, 256 stars per galaxy). Its sequel, Frontier: Elite II (1993) greatly increased this number, introduced a fully procedural galaxy with planets you can land on, pretty much everything No Man's Sky has in terms of being inside your spaceship (flying, combat, trading, docking on stations or landing in cities/outposts on planets), with the addition of a more complex and realistic Newtonian flight model.

No Man's Sky though adds in much more detail to the planets, flora and fauna, terrain destruction as well as enabling the player to actually walk on said planets. Again, even these elements have been done before, but never in such a complete, interconnected and seamless way.
 

Tarin02543

Member
Virtua Fighter was the first polygonal Vs fighter.

gfs_36854_1_4.jpg


Virtua Racing wasn't the first polygonal racing game :( It was immensely influential though.

Today I managed to emulate VF with Mame. I've been searching to do this for over 10 years.
 

Phediuk

Member
User who asked not to be named sent me this very lengthy PM.

Hi, I don't post on the forum, but I saw your thread (haven't read through the whole thing) about the firsts in video games and wanted to provide some info. Feel free to post this in the thread, but if you do don't mention my name please.

"1080p support out-of-box: Enclave (PC, 2003)"

This is not true, there are older PC games that support 1080p out of the box with no user modding or editing of config files. The earliest that I know of (I've owned it since the month it was released) is Total Annihilation, released in 1997. The game was intentionally future-proofed by the developers and supports out-of-the-box any possible resolution above 640x480, including 1920x1080 and far higher, and maintains correct aspect ratio on all game elements, even the HUD (which is often stretched in old games). It even supports triple-monitor resolutions such as 5760x1080 out of the box as long as you run the game in windowed mode (which is a borderless windowed mode that appears exactly like fullscreen as long as you match the monitor's native resolution, possibly another first but I'm not sure about that). The way Total Annihilation works is that it renders the game in the same way the Windows desktop does, and so it supports any possible resolution that Windows supports. Basically, if you can run your Windows desktop in a certain resolution, the game will run in that resolution with correct aspect ratio, the only limitation is that the minimum resolution is 640x480. I actually played Total Annihilation at 2048x1536 through VGA on a CRT monitor in the early 2000s before 1080p monitors even existed, and first played it at 1080p in 2005 on a really expensive DVI computer monitor when most HDTVs were still 720p/1080i.

Total Annihilation also has a future-proofed 3D sound engine (the sounds are positioned using 3D xyz coordinates relative to the camera and then sent to the nearest available speaker, rather than directly being mapped directly to a preset speaker in a 5.1 or 7.1 setup) which theoretically supports any possible surround speaker configuration, the only limitation is whatever speaker setup Windows is configured with. The game supports 7.1 sound perfectly, which is the highest that can easily be tested. If Windows were to be set up with some Dolby Atmos or similar surround speaker system with all of the proper drivers and software then the game may support that perfectly, since all it does is pass on the coordinates of the sounds to DirectX/sound drivers, which then map the sounds to the closest speaker. I don't know if Total Annihilation is the first game to use a 3D sound engine though, a lot of old PC games used a similar audio system during the age of hardware accelerated sound cards but being released in in 1997 it was definitely an early example.

Total Annihilation also has a fully orchestrated soundtrack recorded by the Northwest Sinfonia; every bit of music was orchestrated, there is no synthesized part at all. There are games with live recorded tracks before but Total Annihilation may have been the first with a fully live recorded soundtrack (there was also a Japanese PS1 game, maybe some sort of pinball game, that also came out in 1997 and had a fully live recorded orchestral soundtrack, but I can't remember the specifics). Some of those laserdisc arcade games may have had a fully orchestral soundtrack... but considering the time period they were released in I would be surprised if there wasn't some synth thrown in somewhere just for creative reasons.

Total Annihilation also had a dynamic soundtrack, the music would change during combat and change back when combat was finished. Many games had dynamic soundtracks before but I'm pretty sure Total Annihilation was the first game that had a dynamic soundtrack utilizing only live recorded music (one of the main reasons developers still use digitally created music is because it is much easier to make the soundtrack dynamic that way).

"1080i support out-of-box: Dragon's Lair 3D (Xbox, 2002)"

This should probably be called first console game with 1080i support out of the box. You could run PC games in 1080i through an HDTV card and component cable adapter before that game came out (and I did). One of the first things I did after getting a 1080i TV way back was hook it up to the PC and play games in 1080i (including Total Annihilation which worked perfectly, many others did too but required fiddling with, and sometimes had to be restricted to 4:3). There was a program called Powerstrip that you could use to make sure your PC sent the correct video signal to the screen. With PC games of course, you are not rendering in 1080i so much as outputting in 1080i... the game renders at 1080p and the video card interlaces the image after the fact and sends the signal out to the screen. With console games, you can develop based around the interlaced output.

I'm not sure if anyone figured out what was the first game with surround sound? The earliest that I know of is Jurassic Park on the SNES which supported Dolby Surround (the predecessor to Dolby Pro Logic). Dolby Surround was matrixed surround that encoded the rear channel sounds into the stereo signal, which a Dolby Surround capable receiver would decode and send to the rear speaker. Basically it was just like Pro Logic except it only support 3.0 surround whereas Pro Logic supported 4.0 and Pro Logic II supported 5.1.

There may have been arcade games before Jurassic Park SNES that qualify as surround sound but I don't know. I feel like there may have been arcade racing games that had speakers behind or built into the drivers seat... however, these probably were just running stereo sound through multiple speakers (like a car sound system), and not actual surround sound with a rear sound channel.
 

Phediuk

Member
Also, I'm glad that that user asked about the first game with surround sound, as that's something that I already know and is missing from the list: it's Super Turrican (SNES, 1993), at least for consoles. There's all sorts of odd sound setups in arcade games, though, so its hard to answer this question definitively. If anyone has an earlier game to suggest, bring it on.
 
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