Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Nonlinear gameplay" in English language version.
Zork was another inspiration—both brothers had played it, and liked how it presented a non-linear world to explore.
When you awaken, the game begins in room #6, which contains a time-consuming invisible maze that is never the same twice . . . [S]cenarios are contained within twenty 'buildings', each of which may be entered at any time.
Amazingly, open-world games can be traced back to the days of mainframes—namely, to the 1976 text-only game Colossal Cave Adventure for the PDP-10. Adventure at its core wasn't much different to the GTAs, Elites, and Minecrafts of today: you could explore, freely, in any direction, and your only goals were to find treasure (which is scattered throughout the cave) and to escape with your life.
On home computers, the influential role-playing series Ultima similarly captured the freedom, if not the liveliness, of Dungeons & Dragons. Even the first entry (1981) had no levels or "gates" to curb your wanderings through villages, towns, dungeons, and empty countryside in search of a time machine that would allow you to travel back in time a thousand years to kill an evil wizard.
Open-world games are not exactly new. Akalabeth: World of Doom (precursor to the Ultima series) was arguably first...
Temple of Apshai uses an open-ended structure, the quest merely being to plunder the temple and get filthy rich. So all the levels are accessible from the very beginning, although a fresh, uncheated character is likely to get slaughtered fast in the higher levels.
You first face cops in the "maze" segment, where you must hightail your keister into a building. Usually, you start out pretty close to an available edifice, so these mazey bits are really more of a hub where you pick either the "forklift" or "ice skate" building to tackle first.
There are five different goals to select from, like killing as much civilians as possible or destroying the whole city . . . When [the monster] finally succumbs to its hunters or starves, you'll be shown your final score, which once again represents the actual "goal" of the game - scoring better than your friends.
The player can take part in this war in one of two possible tasks. The target in scenario 1 is it to cause as much wanton destruction as possible while proceeding to the far north. This is meant as a maneuver to distract from the actual target in Scenario 2, the military commander in control of the occupation. At the beginning of each scenario comes the choice between three combat suits, which differ in attack strength, shield power, special options and the like.
In many ways, the Hitman series draws a direct lineage to Silas Warner's original Castle Wolfenstein games, released in 1981. Both provide labyrinthine spaces, tasking the player to survive through a mixture of impersonation and intelligent planning. It's a strong foundation that led to a memorable game series.
The founders of networking giant Novell designed this free-roaming shoot-em-up that inadvertently presaged the arcade classic Gauntlet...
The granddaddy of the Elite-style 'space opera', it was also the world's first free-roaming first-person perspective game.
'I wrote the game to be very general and to not restrict people from doing things', Megler recalls. 'Everything was an object. If you killed a dwarf you could use it as a weapon – it was no different to other large heavy objects. That was something you could not do with other games of the time, they had fixed possibilities.'
In many ways, the Hitman series draws a direct lineage to Silas Warner's original Castle Wolfenstein games, released in 1981. Both provide labyrinthine spaces, tasking the player to survive through a mixture of impersonation and intelligent planning. It's a strong foundation that led to a memorable game series.
MUD is very much like the classic game Zork, as well as any of the hundreds of text-based adventure video games that have flourished on personal computers . . . Your job is to explore the room and its objects and discover treasures hidden in the labyrinth of other rooms connected to it. You'll probably need to find a small collection of treasures and clues along the way to win the mother-lode booty, a search that may involve breaking a spell, becoming a wizard, slaying a dragon, or escaping from a dungeon.
Pitfall! became the first action game that demanded its fans sit down and map out routes, breaking down the complex arrangement of what initially appears to be a simple linear path.
