Atari's Tempest

Atari's Tempest is an arcade game that was originally designed and programmed by Dave Theurer and released in 1981. The game is a tube shooter, that is (unlike today's FPS's) the games environment is fixed, and  you are limited to firing your projectiles down the center of the segments on the game's field. Also, Tempest was one of the very first games to be released that allowed the players to select a level of difficulty.

The objective of this game is to survive and score as many points as possible.You do this by clearing the screen from the opposing enemies. Now as previously stated, the game is a tube shooter. Therefore each level takes place in a closed tube or open field of some shape ( hexagon, octagon etc...), and is made up of a dozen or so segments. As the player, you control a diamond shaped ship that can circle the outside of the map. You fire your projectiles at the enemies (that look like red stiff bowties) to eliminate them. After you eliminate all the enemies of the wave, you will proceed to a new wave on a different shaped level with a different difficulty.

Now, the game seems simple enough, and it pretty much is. There didn't seem to be much of a strategy to help complete each new wave. You basically just circle the outside of the playing field and click the shoot button as fast as you can. For instance, just holding down the right and down arrow keys, which are to move and shoot, I was able to move though several levels with out difficulty. Things become a bit more challenging as you progress through the levels. As you progress enemies become "smarter" and will doge your incoming fire by flipping over to a new segment. I found this quite funny, that is because when I was just holding down the arrow keys, all that was happening was my ship chasing their's in circles for a good 60 seconds. Also, there are green enemies that will lay down long spikes in the segments. These spikes will not hurt you during that certain wave, but when travailing to a new level the player can hit a spike and lose a life or the game. Also, if an enemy reaches the outside of the playing field, you lose the game. You start the game with 2 additional extra lives.

You can see above this player is about to lose

Tempest was the first multi-color vector graphic game to be released. Because of it being an arcade game, the game play itself really utilized the arcade track ball of the time. Like Missile Command, It was believed to be one of the most unique game released during the "Golden Age of Arcade Games", and is still considered a classic today.

From its hectic style of game play, I can really see how Tempest set the motion for the production of side-scrollers and first person shooters that are favored today.

References:

http://www.thocp.net/software/games/golden_age.htm