Simulation & Strategy
Will Wright was building himself a map editor for his first game, Raid on Bungeling Bay (1984), when he noticed something: “I found out that I had a lot more fun building the islands than I did flying around in the helicopter.” The game that came out of that, SimCity (1989), was turned down by publisher after publisher. What they kept asking was: when is it going to be a game? When is it going to have a win/lose situation? A game with no winning found its audience anyway; Populous opened the god's-eye view the same year, and in 1991 Sid Meier's Civilization made decisions at the scale of a civilization into a form. What he said in 1989 — that a game is a series of interesting decisions — is still a watchword for design. On the real-time side, Herzog Zwei (1989) came first and Dune II (1992) fixed the grammar, which Warcraft (1994) and StarCraft (1998) sharpened; StarCraft then met Korea's PC bang culture and produced an entirely new profession, esports. Japan has its own stream. Nobunaga's Ambition (1983, Koei, Yoichi “Shibusawa Kou” Erikawa) and Romance of the Three Kingdoms made historical simulation a household trade, and Fire Emblem (1990) gave units names and deaths, creating the strategy-RPG form (not the first: Bokosuka Wars, 1983, and others came before). One more large channel runs out of this band: a custom map for Warcraft III became DotA, and DotA became MOBA — a map made by players added a genre to the world.
The myth, corrected
Dune II was the world's first real-time strategy game.
Herzog Zwei on the Mega Drive (1989) came three years earlier — and Dune II's own designer, Joe Bostic, has said that compared with Herzog Zwei “we had the advantage of a mouse and keyboard.” What Dune II created was not the first RTS but the grammar still in use: harvest, build, produce, attack.