But there is no way that designers across the world produced games for arcade machines, consoles and computers for 10 years without coming up with a single playable character with a name and a sprite. They were just working up to it is all. I'm sure I'll come across one soon if I keep looking.
1976
It's basically Pong again, except instead of facing an opposing paddle, you're aiming to bounce the ball back at a wall of bricks. I guess the guy has OCD though, as he can't escape until they're all gone.
Fame never called for the nameless Breakout Guy, this isn't really a 'player character' piece of entertainment, but the game itself was huge.
Road Race also got bike variants called Man T.T. and Moto-Cross the same year, but Sega weren't done making slightly different versions of the same game yet! They decided to take one of those anonymous Moto-Cross guys in a helmet and give him a face people would recognise.
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| Image from the "Fonz" flyer |
It's a shame that the Jaws-inspired shark games had all disappeared this year, as Fonz could've let players jump over one. Though Star Wars was only a year away at this point, and its effect on video games would be a lot longer lasting.
I should probably check in on sports games again and see how they're doing. Maybe they've got animation now...
This was apparently the first hand-to-hand fighting game, though it played very differently to games like Street Fighter, Tekken, King of Fighters etc. as the two players controlled the boxers' fists with levers sticking out of the machine that could be moved around and pushed in to jab. At least, that's the impression I got from watching the video this screenshot came from. I couldn't play it myself as it doesn't exist anymore.
It was also the first game console to feature proper cartridges with the game on a ROM chip. This opened the door to all kinds of playable characters, though after browsing the game library I'm not sure there were any waiting to come in.
However, in its first year it got a videocart called Desert Fox, which is like the arcade game Gun Fight except both players can roam the whole screen. Plus you're in tanks, so the tank controls make more sense. The manual just calls them the blue tank and the green tank, but the back of the box says that you're "the Fox" and that's the closest I've come so far to finding an original video game hero with a name!
Crowther's day job was developing ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet, though he apparently didn't realise that when he left the game on their mainframe it was going to spread everywhere. He even got an email (in 1976!) from a student called Don Woods, who'd found it and wanted to develop it further.
Woods' expanded version of the game continued to spread, going on to inspire future game designers like Richard Garriott (Ultima), Roberta Williams (King's Quest), Glenn Wichman and Michael Toy (Rogue), Warren Robinett (Adventure for the Atari 2600), the folks who made Zork, and so on. It's a pretty crucial part of video game history.
It doesn't have a player character in it though, as far as I'm aware. So it's just wasting my time!
1977
I also came up empty while browsing flyers for war games. There were lots of tanks, destroyers, submarines and missiles printed on the cabinets I saw, but soldiers rarely made an appearance. I did spot a guy with a bazooka on the art for Cross Fire however. I don't know if he's anyone in particular, but it was nice to see a face for once. Plus it shows what a military player character might have looked like in '77.
No player characters in the racing games either, just the usual dudes wearing helmets. I thought I might be onto something when I saw Mr Pringle driving a Volkswagen on the cabinet for Atari's Super Bug, but he has no name or presence in the game.
The VW Beetle returned four years later to star in the first platformer with scrolling, 1981's Jump Bug. It seems like it wasn't technically licenced from Volkswagen, so it was actually a car that had a resemblance to a Beetle... but it was a Beetle. Plus the car got some proper licenced games of its own later on, like Beetle Adventure Racing and Beetle Crazy Cup.
I don't know of any games where the car drives itself, though there is one famous Beetle that does have a mind of its own, Herbie, and he got a couple of handheld games in the 2000s to tie-in with the Lindsay Lohan movie.
There is one arcade machine I wanted to show, something that actually did have an on-screen playable character, but I can't. Because it's so lost that there isn't even any surviving footage of it that I'm aware of. I've got some flyer art though:
Funny thing is, it was basically a re-skin of an earlier game called Death Race, which was famous for another reason: it was the first video game to cause a controversy because of its extreme violence. This arcade game isn't lost, so there's no mystery to how it plays: you drive a car around a big empty screen, squishing tiny dudes and leaving gravestones. Basically like Carmageddon from overhead view, or like the movie Death Race 2000.
So based on that, I imagine Score would've been basically the same thing, except you're not in a car and your loving spree leaves a trail of hearts behind where your victims once stood.
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| Breakout (Apple II) |
And these machines had pretty capable processors for their time, as the PET and Apple II had basically the same 6502 CPU as the later C64 and NES, while the TRS-80 had a Z80 like the ZX Spectrum and MSX, they were just clocked at half the speed. Unfortunately they started off with a tiny 4 KB of RAM, and the text in this article you're reading is maybe 20 KB, so the door to sprawling text-heavy adventure games remained closed for the time being.
Well, except for on mainframes. The vastly influential Zork was created this year, for instance! It doesn't really have a player character though, as far as I'm aware. Unlike this next game...
You play as the First Under-secretary to the Ambassador for the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne... which just happens to be the same job as the character James Retief from the stories by Keith Laumer. So it's like the unlicensed Star Trek games where you're "the captain of the USS Enterprise", except here you're actually playing the role of a character instead of aiming torpedoes. That feels like a bit of a milestone.
Meanwhile RPGs were evolving as well, and this year we got the genre-defining Oubliette.
I'm sorry, this is the best screenshot I've got, as I didn't get anywhere in the game. It actually has a town, which you have to map out yourself on paper. You're supposed to buy some gear in the weapon shop before heading to the tavern to find a party to join, because if you don't team up with other human players it's apparently impossible.
The thing about Oubliette that really makes it notable, is that it's basically Wizardry, except four years early. The game that famously set the template for the RPG genre was itself mimicking this. Though the thing that makes it relevant to this article, is that it's one of the first RPGs to let you choose 'male' or 'female' for your hero. Plus they can age. Not that you ever get to see them.
1978
Designer Tomohiro Nishikado was impressed when his arcade cowboy shooter Western Gun was adapted to run on an actual CPU, so he wanted to have a go with this hardware himself. Breakout was very popular so he came up with the idea of a paddle that shoots bullets and bricks that shoot back, and gave it a space theme because that was also very popular at the time. The end result: the game was extremely popular, making more money than Star Wars, and pulling the industry back up after the 1977 crash that I've somehow never heard about until now. Basically people got sick of Pong clones, but now they had a new genre to obsesses about: space shooters!
The space invaders themselves are perhaps the first iconic enemy design in video game history, but they're not the player character so the game's not giving me much to write about.
I'm a bit surprised though, because judging by the other arcade games coming out around this time I assumed publishers were targeting an audience of tanks and racing cars. There weren't many humans showing up in the artwork I was looking through. To be fair I came across fewer tank games this year as well. I suppose most of the wars were in space now.
But nope, false alarm, this bee character with an N for 'Namco' on their chest isn't actually who you play in the game. Gee Bee is a pinball/Breakout hybrid where you control a paddle and bounce a ball around.
Okay, there's just one year left in this decade now. One last chance to find a proper original playable character in a video game. Someone who has a distinct appearance and a name, and who turns up in the game itself. I don't think I'm setting the bar too high here!
1979
That's an unnamed baseball player from Atari Baseball on the left, those are unnamed football players from Atari Soccer at the top, and there's an unnamed space guy from Galaxy Wars on the right. There were lots of anonymous space guys in 1979 in fact, each of them piloting a spaceship so you never see them. All I know is that the hero of Galaxian... is a Galaxian.
At the bottom are two nameless duelling knights from one-on-one fighting game Warrior, who may be the first playable characters to be animated using motion capture! Unfortunately in game they're displayed using wireframe vector graphics... from top view. I'd show you how awkward it looks, but it's hard to get a screenshot when the graphics are meant to be projected onto a printed background.
It was doing the maze chase thing before Pac-Man and the digging thing before Lode Runner, and it became one of the 10 biggest games in Japan that year. Though for the US version they replaced the protagonist with a shirtless blond guy... which was also pretty original to be fair. It's just a shame they never got as far as giving either of them names as far as I'm aware.
Caring about another human being is the kind of thing a character would do, though inside the game he's just an anonymous cowboy shape who's there to hold your gun. Outside the game the flyers always call him just 'the sheriff', and so do the instructions on the cabinet, so they weren't going out of their way to give him an identity.
Though there is this:
So he's depicted on screen with a visible sprite, he doesn't originate from a TV series, book or movie, and he has an actual name. That's it, it took a whole decade but I've finally found a proper video game player character! He's even trying to save his girlfriend and you don't get more 'arcade game hero' than that.
If you do well enough there's a scene of the two running towards each other and a massive heart fills the screen. But then the next time you see her, she's being chased by a bandit again, yelling "HELP!". So it's definitely a Nintendo game.
Though if you want to see a player character who does originate from a TV series, book or movie...
Though 1978 gave us the first big budget blockbuster superhero movie, Superman, starring Christopher Reeve, and Atari took advantage of the hype with the first licenced console exclusive.
I've got to be honest, I think the game looks pretty terrible, but for its time this is actually impressive. Sprites have three or four colours, which is a big step up from one, and it has a background. Plus the screen changes to a new city block when you reach the edge, which is something else most games didn't do, though it took me a while to figure out that flying upwards into the sky was taking me north.
It even features a co-op mode, with one person moving Superman left and right while the other handles up and down.
The goal is to fly around the city looking for Lex Luthor's gang and the pieces of the bridge, then you've got to fly them to where they need to be. This is weirdly ambitious for such an early console game. In fact the programmer had been able to borrow some code from the upcoming Adventure - which would go on to define a genre.
But Superman came out first, so you could make the argument that this licenced comic book game no one ever talks about ticks enough boxes to be the first ever action-adventure game. Though the important thing for me, is that it definitely has a player character.
That's it, I've ran out of '70s, and I'm really glad I found an actual character before the end otherwise this would've been a real anticlimax.
It turns out that the first human sprite was a basketball player, the first licenced character was the Fonz, the first licenced character that you properly get to see and play as was Superman, and the first original on-screen player character with an identity may be Sheriff's Mr. Jack. Unless I missed someone, which isn't unlikely. For instance, I had no idea that 1964 grain distribution simulator The Sumerian Game let you play as three characters each called Luduga until I read about it in the comments for part 1.
So how did games go a decade without having any heroes? Why didn't it occur to anyone that they could give the pixels on screen a name, put a face on the cabinet, and people would grow more attached to them? I think it's partly because arcades had already been home to pinball tables, pachinko machines, and other games that were purely games. You don't play a character in pinball, you press the flippers, so it makes sense that video games would mimic this. Especially as some were based on existing electromechanical games like Gun Fight. Plus the hardware wasn't really capable of showing characters anyway, not until machines started running code on CPUs. You can call your Pong bat 'Gavin the Aardvark', but it's still a glowing rectangle.
By the end of the decade things were different. We had CPU-based arcade machines, consoles like the Atari 2600, and home computers like the Apple II. The technology was there and developers had been given a few years to figure out what they could do with it. In fact they were only five months away from introducing video games' biggest star, whose arrival changed everything...
Share your thoughts in the comments! Plus if you want you could suggest some video game characters from the year 1980 that absolutely deserve to get a mention.
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