Genres

Sometimes it comes as a surprise to realize that things we’d been thinking of as completely different are actually quite similar. In films we are used to this sort of revelation. After all, students of the films of Alfred Hitchcock have realized for years that most of his thrillers are actually somewhat disguised boy-meets-girl romances, in the sense that the romance (whether between Cary Grant and Grace Kelly or between Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll) is actually the engine that drives the audience’s interest.

Of course there are exceptions, but the Hitchcock films that are primarily romances at heart by far outnumber those that truly break the mold, such as “The Birds” and “Lifeboat”.

Similarly, many computer games are essentially variations on the same game, when boiled down to their essentials. One of the most popular of these “essential games” is what might be called the “maze with prizes and killer zombies” game, more popularly known as a “dungeon crawler”. In this game, exemplified by the games from Id Software such as the 1993 Doom and 1996 Quake, your avatar runs around in a claustrophobia-inducing labyrinth trying to collect treasure while hungry killer zombies continually appear from around the corner, wanting to eat you.

Like any sensible individual in such a situation, you are supposed to use your high powered futuristic weapon to blow these zombies to smithereens and spatter their undead blood-soaked body parts against floor and walls, before said zombies approach near enough to rip open your chest cavity like a bag of corn chips, noisily suck out your brains and feast with rabid hunger upon your still writhing flesh.

All good clean fun.

Many games have appeared in the intervening years that continue in this hallowed tradition, such as Half Life, Diablo, Demon’s Souls and many others. These games are largely thought to be inspired by Doom, with story elements taken from Tolkien by way of Dungeons and Dragons.

But in this past week I had a revelation: The gameplay of such games is actually derivative of a game generally thought to belong to a completely different genre. Think about it for a moment: Your avatar must navigate a labyrinth, picking up valuable prizes to accumulate points, while avoiding death at the hands of autonomous monsters that roam around in the maze with no purpose other than to kill you. The first game to follow this paradigm came out well before Doom – in 1981 to be exact.

I speak, of course, of Pacman.

The only essential difference, from a game-play perspective, is that you get to see the entire maze when you play Pacman. John Carmack’s innovation in Doom was to show only a small, ground-level view of the maze. This increased the level of paranoia, as well as incorporating the task of learning and remembering the dungeon’s layout into the game itself.

One could also argue that the true progenitor of the “deathmatch” multiplayer mode of Quake, in which participants play against each other within a maze-like dungeon, is even earlier – the 1973 Atari game “Gotcha”.