Battlezone was developed and published for the arcade in 1980. It was a first person tank combat game with an awesome cabinet design, making use of two joysticks that moved up-down only. Each controlled the respective tread on each side of your tank (much like how an actual tank operator drives a tank). It was fantastic and surprisingly intuitive once you got a hang of the controls. You played the game by looking through a periscope that showed a completely black screen submerged partially with green vector lines forming shapes of terrain and enemy tanks. Good news for Battlezone fans (you must be really old now), the developer of Alien vs Predator is creating Battlezone VR and many are terming it return of “the father of VR gaming.”
Battlezone VR is under development by Alien vs Predator developer
“The 1980 Battlezone was really trying to put you in the game, so much so that it arguably became the first ever first-person shooter. Before Battlezone came along, games didn’t really do first-person perspectives and reticules, so maybe we weren’t being bombastic enough?
14 years later my brother Chris and I released our breakthrough game, Alien vs. Predator for the Atari Jaguar – a first-person shooter that maybe wouldn’t have existed without Battlezone. It’s hard to truly overstate its influence on modern gaming, let alone VR gaming.”
Though it was Doom that eventually jump started the FPS genre, it was Battlezone that brought the idea of playing from a first person perspective. This inspired many renowned future developers such as idSoftware and the Alien vs Predator devs.
We’ll just have to wait and see how Battlezone VR turns out. At the moment, there is no official release date for Battlezone VR as the dev will be revealing a lot more in the coming week. Stay tuned to MobiPicker.