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Base Attack Games

Date     : 2024-12-08
Entry ID : 16537

There is a mostly forgotten genre of action game where you are slowly weakening an enemy base by destroying its defenses and enemy vehicles. This specific style mostly appeared in war games from the late 1980s and early 1990s. The first game in the genre may have been Will Wright's Raid on Bungeling Bay from 1984, and the most famous might be Mike Posehn's Gulf War chopper game Desert Strike from 1992.

Here at syltefar.com, We have dubbed this action game subgenre Base Attack games.

The research of these games took some very unexpected twists and turns including SimCity, Jay 'The Father of the Amiga' Miner, and Jeffrey Epstein.

Contents:

• Raid on Bungeling Bay
• Kurt Reichart Von Wolfsheild
  • Fire Power
  • Return Fire
  • Epstein's Island
• Desert Strike
• Carrier Command
• Changelog
• References

Raid on Bungeling Bay

The first game in this genre was Will Wright's Raid on Bungeling Bay. In this game, you control a helicopter that takes off from a carrier surrounded by enemy islands. The world map is a topological donut, meaning that it wraps around horizontally and vertically. Your goal is to whittle down the enemy air and ground defenses, and bomb the factories that produce enemy vehicles.

You can return to your carrier at any time to restore your health and ammunition, or to defend the carrier from attacks from enemy aircraft. You can also land in certain spots on factory islands to refill ammunition.

The tactical aspects of the game was unusually deep for 1984 when it came out, and seems to have inspired a lot of games that came out the following decade.

Will Wright developed a map editor to design this game, and this editor would be the main idea for for his next game, 'Micropolis', which he would finish in 1985 for the Commodore 64. This game was a city building game, which was something completely new at the time. Wright could not find a publisher for the game, and ended up forming his own company Maxis to publish it. The game was only released 4 years later in 1989, under the new name SimCity. The Commodore 64 version would never be published.¹

'Raid on Bungeling Bay' seems to have inspired a lot of games in the decade after its release, including the immensely popular 'Desert Strike' series. A few of them were very close to Wright's original game, both in gameplay, perspective, and theme. One such game was the first game by UK company Dizzy Enterprises, the game FireHawk from 1991. In this game, you control a helicopter, take off from a carrier, and whittle down enemy defenses, enabling you to rescue troops from around the map and return them to the carrier. You destroy enemy defenses to avoid getting shot at and to get upgrades for your chopper, including increased fire rate and damage. You have a machine gun and rockets. You can destroy enemy airfields to avoid attack planes taking off, and factories that produce tanks.

The game's playfield scrolls in all directions, but the camera behaves in a clever way: your chopper is at the edge of the screen, pointing to the center, enabling you to see ahead of you to better hit your targets. Later, the game Desert Strike would take this idea and build on it, keeping the focus ahead of the chopper, but adding momentum to the camera movements.

Dizzy Enterprises would return to the genre 7 years later, this time a 3D game where you control tanks. The game seems to have been inspired by the games developed by a unique character with the most German name I've ever heard: Reichart Kurt von Wolfsheild.

Reichart Kurt von Wolfsheild

Another early base attack game, 'Fire Power', was created by programmer Reichart Kurt von Wolfsheild in 1987. He's an interesting character who worked in a lot of different fields. He worked as MTV music art director and created commercial campaigns for Pepsi and Pizza Hut. Initially, he wasn't interested in games, but a friend dragged him to an arcade where he tried Kee Games' 'Tank' from 1974. He didn't like the game, but his friend goaded him on to make something better. After having talked to friends at Activision, he realized there was a lot of money in video games.²

He was intrigued by a new home computer that was advertised with interesting artists that von Wolfsheild had worked with in the past - artists such as Andy Warhol and Debbie Harry. The computer was the Commodore Amiga. ³

Von Wolfsheild tried to write a better version of 'Tank', and one that was focused on multiplayer. The result was 'Fire Power'.

Fire Power

Fire Power was the first game in this genre that I encountered. I was playing it around 1987 on my brother's Commodore Amiga 500, and was fascinated by a game that had a big open map to explore, something that felt very new at the time.

In this game, you control a single tank that emerges in a friendly base, and you must attempt to infiltrate an AI-controlled army base while defending your own base from attacks. There is no set way of accomplishing this, you can search for weak points in the enemy base and methodically whittle down their turrets, one at a time, or you can search for places to punch holes through walls and drive through. If you manage to fight your way through the enemy defenses, and avoid getting blasted by turrets and weak, but numerous enemy helicopters, you need to destroy the enemy base, steal their flag, and bring it back to your own base.

I never managed to win a single game.

Fire Power also had a cool split-screen mode, and even a way to do an early version of online multiplayer gaming, by playing over modem. Von Wolfsheild was very focused on multiplayer games. In an interview he was asked why there had been so few multiplayer games up until that point. He answered:

Because programmers write games for themselves. I write mine for people. I believe in playing games with people, not with computers.⁴

Von Wolfsheild would later meet Jay Miner, the co-creator of the Commodore Amiga and show him 'Fire Power' running on his hardware. It turned out that Miner was one of two hardware designers who was tasked by Atari to turn the 'Tank' arcade machine that von Wolfsheild was inspired by into a home console, namely the Atari 2600.^{5 6}

When Miner saw 'Fire Power', he commented: 'Ah, you made Tank - two player'. ³

Return Fire

The sequel to 'Fire Power', Return Fire, came out for the ill-fated 3DO console in 1995, and was ported to PlayStation and Windows the following year. It is based on the same 'capture the flag' mechanics with the same emphasis on multiplayer as 'Fire Power', but expands the playable vehicles with helicopters, jeeps, and armored support vehicles, and adds a bunch of levels.

The game soundtrack features classical music such as Richard Wagner's 'Ride of the Valkyries', Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's 'Flight on the Bumblebee', and Gustav Holst's 'Mars'. After winning a game, you get a video snippet from New York Yankees star player Lou Gehrig's speech on July 4th, 1939. He retired after getting diagnosed with ALS, also known as 'Lou Gehrig's disease'. Why this is in the game, I'll probably never understand.

It's a more fun game than 'Fire Power', and plays quite well to this day. Von Wolfsheild kept his promise on writing games for people, as 'Return Fire' has an excellent split-screen multiplayer mode.

Dizzy Enterprises who created 'FireHawk' for the NES changed their name to the somewhat forgettable 'Interactive Studios' and released WarGames: DEFCON 1 in 1998, a tank-based 3D base attack game similar to Return Fire. This game is officially licensing the 1983 Cold War hacker movie WarGames, although you wouldn't know it from anything that happens in the game - there is no sign of Matthew Broderick or anything else related to WarGames.

Epstein's Island

A completely unsuspected story came up when researching von Wolfsheild: he was undercover at Jeffrey Epstein's island in 2011 for a technology conference, and provided information that supposedly helped to convict the sex trafficker.⁷

Desert Strike

Mike Posehn's Desert Strike: Return to the Gulf was published by Electronic Arts for the Sega Genesis in 1992. It was an isometric base attack game set in the middle east, inspired by the Gulf War in 1991. It was a success, both critically and commercially, and was the highest selling game for Electronic Arts at the time (according to Wikipedia).⁸

The game had many similarities to 'Raid on Bungeling Bay', you control a helicopter, this time a Boeing AH-64 Apache, take off from a carrier, and proceed to slowly whittle down enemy defenses. However, in this game you have a set explicit missions for each map, where you have to take out specific targets or rescue captive soldiers. The order in which you perform the missions, and thus the strategy for each map, is up to the player, which makes the game still feel quite open.

The game had a similar camera system to FireHawk that would frame the area in front of the helicopter, but added momentum in its movement, something not commonly seen before in 1992.

Desert Strike spawned a bunch of sequels, including the very similar 'Jungle Strike' (1993) and Urban Strike (1994), as well as the 3D graphics sequels Soviet Strike (1996) and 'Nuclear Strike' (1997) for PlayStation and contemporary consoles.

'Nuclear Strike' contained a trailer for another game in the 'Strike' series, 'Future Strike'. However, this game was never released. The game would evolve into Future Cop: LAPD, a game where you play as a transforming police robot. Finally the RoboCop/Transformers cross-over we needed.⁹

Carrier Command

UK-based developer Realtime Games Software established themselves in the mid-1980s as a competent developer focused on realtime 3D-rendered games. They both created their own games such as 3D Tank Duel for the ZX Spectrum, and ported games such as the port of Elite for DOS.

In 1988, they had written a very impressive 3D game Carrier Command that had the same structure as a base attack game, but with a lot of new additions to the genre.

Instead of controlling a single attack craft taking off from a carrier like 'Raid on Bungeling Bay', you would control the carrier itself, and launch jet planes and amphibious vehicles to attempt capturing islands in a large open ocean.

Islands could be neutral, in which case you could deploy an amphibious vehicle to drop a self-building base on the island, turning the island into a resource for your carrier.

Enemy islands would have to be attacked with planes and amphibious vehicles before they could be taken over in a similar fashion. Your vehicles could be AI-controlled by setting waypoints on a map, or controlled directly, useful for direct attacks on enemy defenses. AI-controlled enemy vehicles and ground defenses would provide resistance, and eventually, you would meet the real opponent: an enemy carrier, that is doing what you are doing, taking over islands.

It was an incredibly impressive game for its time, and although we would see this type of open world 3D simulation replicated later in games such as Armour-Geddon, it seemed very novel at the time.

'Carrier Command' is part base attack game and part flight simulator, and it introduced something completely new to the genre: base building. This wasn't really explored much in later games belonging to the genre, but would be the main focus of many real-time strategy games, the genre that arguably originated with Will Wright's SimCity.

Changelog

• 2024-12-12: Fixed figures
• 2024-12-08: Initial draft

References