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Comment by pfortuny | Hacker News Reader

Not criticizing. This is what Ultimate did in Knight Lore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Lore, and it blew everyone’s minds at the time.

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Being Spanish this bring me, of course, to La Abadía del crimen:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Abad%C3%ADa_del_Crimen

Wow, did not know that. Also Spanish, myself, btw.

Wow, that looks so cool! 1987 game version of The Name of the Rose. Never released outside Spain, how unfortunate.

Marble Madness (Mark Cerny and Bob Flanagan) predates that a few months.

With scrolling (different format from the Ant Attack to Head over Heels one).

Edit: and Crystal Castles a few years.

Graphics will be what medium and artist allow; in that phase the implementation of depth management in projection was especially impactful.

Thanks, did not know Marble Madness.

If you're into retro gaming at all, it's a very fun game on 16bit platforms.

Except for the aerial maze. That one's just a pain in the rear.

See also Spindizzy for a similar game, which came two years later and some opine is better than Marble Madness.

I remember Zaxxon, which was one of the first isometric games (1981/1982).

Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isometric_video_game_graphics

I can remember playing this in the 80s as well. They had some classic names back then, all Zs and Xs. Got on a freighter ship in China as a teenager in 1991, and the lone arcade machine was Xevious.

I was Googling around to find more examples and found this blog post [1] which gives a nice list.

[1] https://www.eurogamer.net/the-classic-8-bit-isometric-games-...

Yes! Ant attack came with the Spectrum if I remember correctly!! I did not recall it. Thanks. It was an incredible game.

Last Ninja on the C64 and (to a certain extent) Spindizzy come to mind as well...

Good memories. Head Over Heels (C64 here) was one I used to just stare at, waiting for the next animation, musical cue, or room reveal...it was very well put together.

(Oh, and the title always made me wonder if it was a Tears for Fears collab, which seemed like such a rad idea at the time)

they missed Zaxxon >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaxxon

Not 8-bit, but similar style:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D/Generation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commandos:_Behind_Enemy_Lines

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenTTD

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simutrans

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeciv

It's worth looking into the Filmation engine they invented, which went through 2 iterations before the company was acquired: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filmation_(game_engine)

As others pointed out Zaxxon and Marble Madness came first, but neither allowed the same sort of interaction with the environment (changing depth and moving other blocks around).

I found this indie game that I LOVED the artwork of a while ago: https://adamstrange.itch.io/viva-mortis

Seeing Knight Lore, it very clearly must have been the inspiration for Viva Mortis. How cool. Thanks for sharing.

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