Battlezone

The record on this page is muddled, so start with what actually loads: this is not Activision's 1998 Battlezone but the Commodore 64 conversion of Atari's 1980 arcade cabinet, released by Atarisoft. That original is one of the genuinely important machines in the medium's history, and the home version is a compromised but recognisable version of it.

You are inside a tank on a flat plain, viewed from the driver's seat. A volcano and a mountain range sit permanently on the horizon; blocky pyramids and cubes are scattered around as cover. Enemy tanks approach from any direction, a radar at the top of the display tells you roughly where, and you rotate, line up a shot and fire before they do. Faster missiles show up later, and occasionally a saucer drifts across the field, harmless but worth points. One hit ends your run.

Two things separate this from the arcade. The cabinet used twin levers, one per tread, giving the tank a heavy, mechanical feel that a single joystick simply cannot reproduce, so turning here is coarser and less deliberate. And the arcade drew true vector graphics on dedicated hardware, while the C64 approximates the look with ordinary lines, which means a rougher image and visible strain when you spin quickly.

It runs in the browser as a C64 disk image, so give it a moment to load. As a game it is a ten-minute loop with no progression, no levels and no story, and nobody should expect otherwise. What survives is the atmosphere: an empty wireframe world with a narrow field of view, where you often hear a tank before you find it, is tenser than most of the colourful arcade games released alongside it. Worth playing once because everything built around a first-person 3D viewpoint since then descends from this.