Polar Rescue - one of the earliest games recharging health
May 1, 2024 7:17:20 GMT -5
VectorX, hcmffm, and 2 more like this
Post by Sketcz on May 1, 2024 7:17:20 GMT -5
I'm giving a keynote lecture on 22 May regarding the lineages of inspiration in games. I cover a lot of varied examples, but one that I'm tempted to include is recharging health, given that I interviewed Tokihiro Naito, creator of Hydlide, which featured it in 1984.
For a long time I thought Polar Rescue was the first example. Though it seems not quite...
Wikipedia cites Crisis Mountain as the earliest game to have it, from 1982:
But Polar Rescue (December 1983?) is still another very early proto example:
According to Peer it was programmer by Mark Indictor:
So I've tracked Mark down, he has a LinkedIn, and I've contacted him via LinkedIn, his two private emails, his former work, and his social media. To ask, what was the inspiration?
When you think about it, a submarine being damaged and repaired by the crew seems like a very natural, very organic idea to have. I'm wondering if he'd seen a film depicting it perhaps, such as Das Boot (1981), but I don't want to jump to conclusions. The core of the talk is that it's vital to speak to developers to hear their own, personal, first-hand recollections of inspiration, rather than making assumptions (which happens far too frequently among writers and YouTubers - superficial similarities between games or media does not necessarily equal inspiration or transference of ideas).
Has anyone ever seen an interview with Mark Indictor online or in magazines? Apparently NBC News, back in the 1980s, visited his mountain home to interview him about his work (I could not find archive footage of this ancient news piece).
What does everyone else think? This seems like a nice feather in the Vectrex cap - home to one of the earliest examples of a mechanic which would later become mainstream. Even if Crisis Mountain did beat it by a year, its use of recharging health isn't quite fully developed, I feel. There's basically four states you can be in (0~3), whereas Polar Rescue has a percentage. Technically a damage percentage, which is reduced through crew repairs, but this is closer to what we'd later see in games like Hydlide, Ys, etc.
Interestingly, all the examples I've cited, seemed to have evolved this idea independently. Naito described how he thought standing in an open field in the sunshine with a breeze would make you feel better, so it seemed natural to have recharging health. While I've not heard back from Mark, I highly doubt he took the idea from Crisis Mountain.
In a way, these ideas in games, are sort of like the evolution of DNA - some things are derived from earlier examples, while others spontaneously emerge on their own.
I was going "holy SH*T!". That was gigantic to me since the poor Vectrex, of course, unjustly didn't get huge. So there wasn't much coverage of it back then in the media.
