Nether Earth

Nether Earth is a genuinely important piece of gaming history: a 1987 title, seen here on the Commodore 64, that is frequently cited as one of the earliest real-time strategy games, predating the genre's commercial explosion by years. Originally programmed for the ZX Spectrum and ported across the 8-bit machines, it laid down ideas that would later become standard.

The game hands you control of a war for a planet, where you capture factories and use their resources to design and build your own robot units on the fly, choosing chassis, weapons and detection systems before sending them out to seize the enemy's bases. That combination of resource control, on-the-spot unit construction and real-time combat was remarkably forward-looking for its day, all running on modest 8-bit hardware. It's rough by modern standards, but as a foundational experiment in the RTS form it's a fascinating and historically significant game that rewards a look from anyone interested in where the genre came from.