Tag Archives: shooter

Unreal, PC

Unreal is a pioneering first-person shooter developed by Epic Games and Digital Extremes and first published by GT Interactive in 1998. It is the very first game in the Unreal series and was the first game to use the Unreal Engine, which was a ground-breaking 3D game engine at the time. Of course most gamers know about the Unreal Engine, and how it continues to innovate now, but this game is where Unreal first started.

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Venture, Arcade

Venture is an early fantasy maze shooter developed and distributed into arcades by Exidy in 1981. In some respects it is similar to Stern ElectronicsBerzerk (and its sequel, Frenzy), with simple bitmap graphics, an overhead viewpoint, and extremely challenging gameplay.

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Flimbo’s Quest, Commodore 64

Flimbo’s Quest is a scrolling platform shooter that basically recycles the gameplay from the classic C64 game, Hawkeye. Designer/programmer Laurens van der Donk was a member of demo scene coders Boys Without Brains (who created Hawkeye), which explains the connection. From what I can tell, though, van der Donk was not involved in creating Hawkeye, so I’m not entirely sure how or why Flimbo’s Quest came to be.

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Mercenary: The Second City, ZX Spectrum

Mercenary: The Second City is an add-on for the classic game Mercenary that gives the player a new environment and new missions to solve. It was first released for the ZX Spectrum in 1988.

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Mercenary, ZX Spectrum

Paul Woakes‘ classic open-world cockpit exploration game, Mercenary, was ported to the 48K ZX Spectrum by David Aubrey-Jones and published by Novagen Software in 1987.

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Frenzy, Arcade

Frenzy is an arcade maze/shooter from 1982 that was developed and published by Stern Electronics. It is the sequel to the 1980 arcade game, Berzerk, and features similar presentation and gameplay.

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Galaxian, ColecoVision

The Galaxian conversion for the ColecoVision was first released in 1984 by Atarisoft, and it is a decent port of the classic 1979 arcade game from Namco. A secret message in the game credits James D. Eisenstein for writing the graphics and program (he also dedicates the game to his then wife/girlfriend, Jeneane).

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Return to Castle Wolfenstein, PC

Return to Castle Wolfenstein is a re-imagining of id Software‘s classic Wolfenstein 3D, developed by Gray Matter Studios and first published by Activision in 2001. It uses the id Tech 3 engine (as created for Quake III) and has a single-player campaign, as well as a multiplayer component where players are split into Allies and Axis.

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Wolfenstein 3D, PC

Wolfenstein 3D is an infamous first-person shooter, developed by id Software and published by Apogee Software in 1992. It is essentially a first-person remake of MUSE Software‘s overhead stealth game, Castle Wolfenstein, but with no stealth and lots of shooting.

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Sunset Riders, Super Nintendo

The 1993 Super Nintendo conversion of Konami‘s 1991 arcade hit, Sunset Riders, is considered to be something of a classic on the system, and it is a lot of fun to play, either single-player, or with two players playing simultaneous co-op.

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