Strategy video game

A strategy video game is a genre in which a player assumes a godlike role and uses strategic thinking, planning, and management of resources to achieve a particular goal. Strategy video games have their origins in classic board games such as checkers or chess, but have evolved into many subgenres in the modern era. The most popular strategy video games are military or combat based, in which the player takes the role of commander, organizing troops or soldiers on a battlefield. Other games in this genre feature the controlling player as a mayor running a city or a deity creating civilizations.

Early History

The precursors to modern video games were developed by programmers in the mid-twentieth century and relegated to computer labs at universities and government facilities. The earliest known computer game was displayed in 1940 at the New York World's Fair and played a variation of an ancient mathematical strategy game called Nim. In the years that followed, other programmers created computerized forms of board games such as checkers or chess. In 1955, the United States military developed a war-game program called Hutspiel that was designed to study the effects of tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield. The simulation pitted two sides, Red vs. Blue, in a mock scenario representing a real-world confrontation between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Soviet Union. While the program was never meant for the public, it was one of the first uses of computer technology to create a war strategy game.

In the 1970s, programmers developed one of the first strategy war games for public use. The game, Empire, was a slow-paced war simulator played over a modem on a primitive version of the Internet. Games ran twenty-four hours a day and could take weeks or months to complete. One of the first successful strategy video games for home systems was Eastern Front (1941) released in 1981 for the Atari 800 home computer. Eastern Front was a tactical simulation of the German advance into the Soviet Union during World War II. The game included a scrolling map with topographical features such as mountains and rivers, and weather that changed with the seasons.

Overview

Eastern Front and other early strategy video games were examples of turn-based games. These were more like classic board games in that game play proceeded in intervals, pausing between moves while players took the time to consider their options. Notable turn-based style games included 1981's Utopia, a two-player exercise in city building in which players controlled their own island. Utopia was released on the Intellivision system and was one of the first strategy games for home video consoles. In 1985, a Japanese company released Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a historical strategy game based on the ancient wars of third-century China. The game was popular in Japan and North America, and it went on to spawn more than a dozen sequels. One of the most influential turn-based strategy games was Civilization, created in 1991 by developer Sid Meier, who was considered a pioneer in strategy video games. In the game, the player controls a culture such as the Egyptians, Babylonians, or Romans, and builds that culture into an empire and a modern civilization. The game's timeframe spans millennia and combines city and nation development with strategic battle planning. While originally released for the personal computer, the game was transferred to home consoles such as the Atari and Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). Civilization is considered one of the best strategy games ever made and led to several sequels and spin-off titles.

Advancements in computer technology allowed programmers to expand on the turn-based strategy genre in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They developed a form known as real-time strategy in which game play progressed in "real-time," and players did not have unlimited time to strategize between moves. Real-time strategy games were more action based and pressured players into making faster decisions requiring multitasking and effective time management. The real-time system became the dominant form of modern strategy games.

One of the first successful titles to utilize the format was 1992's Dune II, a space adventure set on the desert planet Arrakis from the classic science fiction novel Dune. Players could control and manage their units with the click of their computer mouse while game play progressed. Dune II is considered the first modern real-time strategy game and influenced future titles such as 1994's Warcraft. In Warcraft, a player controls armies of humans and monstrous orcs in the medieval fantasy realm of Azeroth. The first Warcraft games were considered real-time strategy, while the most popular sequel, 2004's World of Warcraft, was a multiplayer online role-playing game.

Some of the most popular strategy titles of the 1990s went on to become a long-running game series. Age of Empires, first released in 1997, was a historical-based game that gave birth to ten sequels and spin-offs; 1998's Starcraft, from the creators of Warcraft, became an eight-game series set in space during a battle for intergalactic supremacy; and the Total War series, which debuted in 2000, spanned ten games and featured battlefields as diverse as ancient Rome to feudal Japan.

The rise in mobile technology in the twenty-first century has seen a shift in strategy gaming from home computer systems to smartphones and tablets. In 2009, Kingdoms at War became one of the first strategy games available for download as a mobile application, or app. By 2016, strategy games were among the most successful mobile apps, making billions of dollars for developers. Leading the way was Clash Royale, a medieval-themed game of attack and defense estimated to have earned more than $1.9 million a day in October of 2016. Other popular mobile strategy games were Game of War: Fire Age, Mobile Strike, and Clash of Clans.

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