🚀 go-pugleaf

AirRaid wrote:
> everyone who played / plays RTS games, including Dune 2,  Command &
> Conquer series  Red Alert,  WarCraft series,  Starcraft series,  Total
> Annihilation, Warzone 2100,
> Jagged Alliance series,  Tiberian Sun,   Conflict Zone, Red Alert 2,
> Kohan,  Age of Empires series, Homeworld,  Warlords: Battlecry, LoTR:
> Battle For Middle Earth series,
> Star Wars: Empire at War, and countless others
>
> you should know the roots of all RTS games: It's  really Herzog Zwei,
> made & developed by Tecno Soft in Japan. called Tecno Soft *or* Techno
> Soft in the U.S., sometimes with the space sometimes without ) in 1989,
>  published by SEGA for the SEGA MegaDrive / Genesis console.    Herzog
> Zwei came out in Japan in 1989, and then early 1990 in the United
> States.
>
> http://www.wolfgames.com/mdherzog.JPG
> http://www.discountgames.org/images/Herzog%20Zwei%20BS.jpg
>
>
> Herzog Zwei was a real-time strategy game with arcade/shmup elements.
> when i say shmup i don't mean first-person shooters (i,e, Doom, Quake)
> that everyone on the PC knows, i'm talking about overhead shmups like
> Xevious, Ikari Warriors, Thunder Force II (also by Technosoft /
> Tecnosoft), Aleste, Raiden, Truxton/Tetsujin, Granada, etc.
>
> Herzog Zwei, although it had these arcade/shooter/shmup elements, was
> very much a strategy game, and realtime.
>
> Herzog Zwei came out LONG before Command & Conquer, and even before
> Dune 2 / II.
> Most PC gamers only acknowledge Dune 2/II as the first RTS game. that
> simply is not true.  It was Herzog Zwei that started the whole RTS
> genre.   even though Herzog Zwei was not technically the first RTS game
> ever (Herzog by Tecnosoft came out before on the MSX computer in Japan
> in 1988, before the sequel, Herzog Zwei, and a game called 'Cytron
> Masters' was apparently the very first RTS game, back in the early
> 1980s on one of the Atari machines, i know nothing about it)   but
> Herzog Zwei is where everything launched from, because it was more
> widely available, modern enough / fast enough to make a massive
> impression on those developers (like Westwood) that would later take
> RTS to the PC with games like   Dune 2, C&C, Red Alert, and create a
> huge genre out of it.
>
...

Two good articles on the history and development of RTS's can be found
here:
http://pc.ign.com/articles/700/700747p1.html
   (choosing Broderbund's The Ancient Art of War [DOS, 1984] as the
start)
http://www.gamespot.com/gamespot/features/all/real_time/
   (choosing Herzog Zwei as the starting point)

K