Genres

A 4X game starts the player with almost nothing on an unknown map and asks them to grow an empire against rivals doing the same. Computer Gaming World's Alan Emrich named it in 1993, rating MicroProse's Master of Orion 'XXXX' for its four X's. Empire and Reach for the Stars came first, Civilization made the form famous, and the genre has carried on through Alpha Centauri, Galactic Civilizations and Stellaris.

An action RPG keeps the role-playing game's experience, levels and equipment but has the player fight in real time with a joystick, pad or mouse instead of choosing commands from a menu. Japanese computer games of 1984 such as Falcom's Dragon Slayer and T&E Soft's Hydlide are usually named as its beginnings, alongside American dungeon games such as Epyx's Gateway to Apshai. Ys, Zelda II and Secret of Mana carried it through the 1980s and 1990s, Diablo made it a hit on the PC, and FromSoftware's Souls games gave it a new, harder branch.

Games that asked the player to explore a large map, find objects and work out where to use them, while running, jumping and dodging in real time instead of typing commands. The British magazines of the 1980s used the term constantly, CRASH gave it a readers' award of its own, and it covered everything from Ultimate's Atic Atac and Knight Lore to Gargoyle's Tir Na Nog and Head Over Heels.

Coin-operated video games began in 1971 with Computer Space and Galaxy Game. By the mid-1980s British magazines used 'arcade game' for a style of home computer game as well: quick to start, reflex-driven, scored and played in lives. Personal Computer Games labelled original Spectrum games such as Lunar Jetman 'arcade', and shops sorted their stock into arcade games, adventure games and war games.

Games whose makers set out to express an idea or a feeling rather than to test skill. Magazines were already calling games like Moondust and Lifespan art in 1983, each with an 'art mode' and no aliens to kill. The label returned in the late 2000s with Rod Humble's The Marriage, Jason Rohrer's Passage and Tale of Tales' The Path, which provoked arguments about whether they were games at all and reached the Museum of Modern Art's collection in 2012.

The scrolling beat 'em up sends one or two fighters along a street, a corridor or a city, taking on gangs as they go. Irem's Kung-Fu Master (1984) is usually named as the start; Renegade let the gang surround the player, Double Dragon added a second player and weapons, and Final Fight and Streets of Rage carried the form to the 16-bit consoles. In 1980s Britain the same name also covered one-on-one fighting games like Karate Champ, a branch that split off after Street Fighter II. The scrolling kind faded in the late 1990s and came back in the 2010s and 2020s.

First-person shooters were built for a keyboard and mouse, and the console versions had to find another way to aim. Game Boy owners hunted smiley faces in Faceball 2000, Doom reached the Jaguar in 1994, and on the Nintendo 64 Turok and GoldenEye 007 worked out how to play with an analogue stick. By the time Halo launched the Xbox in 2001, two sticks, a forgiving crosshair and four players round one television had become the console shooter's own form.

Console role-playing games put exploration, character development and combat on a television and controller. Dragon Quest helped establish a widely followed form, but console RPGs existed earlier and have never shared one set of rules.

A game seen through the eyes of a character who fights with guns. Maze War put players in a shared first-person maze in 1973-74, but the genre took shape on the IBM PC with id Software's Wolfenstein 3D (1992) and Doom (1993), whose imitators were called Doom clones until 'first-person shooter' won out. Quake took it onto the internet, Half-Life told a story without leaving the player's eyes, and GoldenEye 007 and Halo made it a console form.

Games that model how an aircraft flies and hand the player its controls and instruments. From subLOGIC's 1980 Flight Simulator and Psion's 1982 Flight Simulation to the combat simulators of MicroProse, Digital Integration and Spectrum HoloByte, it was one of the few home-computer genres that asked to be studied before it could be played.

In a god game the player looks down on a world and its people and shapes them indirectly, by changing the land, answering prayers or working miracles. The name was coined for Bullfrog's Populous in 1989, but by the early 1990s British magazines also counted SimCity, Utopia and Mega-lo-Mania as god games and argued over which had come first. The genre ran through Powermonger, Dungeon Keeper and Black & White to Spore, From Dust, Godus and Masters of Albion.

Adventure games that show you the room. They began in 1980 with Mystery House, a text adventure with a line drawing for every location, and over the next decade the picture grew, the typing shrank and the mouse took over, until by the early 1990s Sierra, Lucasfilm Games and Revolution were making adventures played entirely by pointing. The form lost its commercial footing in the late 1990s and came back through episodic games and crowdfunding.

Games have borrowed from horror fiction since a haunted-house game came in the box with the Magnavox Odyssey in 1972. Atari's Haunted House and the ZX81's 3D Monster Maze made players afraid of the dark and of being chased; British text adventures such as CRL's Dracula were given film certificates; Infocom wrote horror in prose. Sweet Home, Alone in the Dark and Resident Evil turned it into survival horror, and later games added sanity meters, defenceless heroes and audiences watching players scream on YouTube.

The immersive sim puts the player in a first-person world that runs on consistent rules, then lets them solve its problems their own way. It grew out of Blue Sky Productions' Ultima Underworld (1992) and Looking Glass's System Shock and Thief, got its name around Ion Storm Austin's Deus Ex (2000), and was carried on by Irrational, Arkane and Eidos Montreal.

The Japanese role-playing game took the dungeons, hit points and experience levels of American computer games such as Wizardry and Ultima and rebuilt them for the Famicom around a written story, a manga look and a simple loop of fights, gold and levels. Enix's Dragon Quest set the pattern in 1986 and Square's Final Fantasy followed in 1987; for years many of the games never left Japan, until Final Fantasy VII became a worldwide hit on the PlayStation in 1997.

A management game gives the player an institution to run, not a character to move: a city-state, an airline, a football club, a theme park. The idea goes back to The Sumerian Game and Hamurabi. British software houses were selling 'management games' by name in 1982, the year Kevin Toms's Football Manager began a line of football management games that led to Championship Manager and Sports Interactive's Football Manager. SimCity (1989), Theme Park (1994), Transport Tycoon (1994) and RollerCoaster Tycoon (1999) took the idea to the PC and to much larger audiences.

Clear a maze while something hunts you through it. Atari's Gotcha (1973) and Sega's Head On (1979) came first, but Namco's Pac-Man (1980) fixed the form so firmly that British magazines were reviewing whole batches of Spectrum versions by 1983 under the heading 'Maze Games'. Dig Dug, Boulder Dash and Repton let the player dig the maze instead, and Bomberman began as one.

Action games set on one large, connected map, where new abilities open paths the player has already seen. Nintendo's Metroid (1986) set the pattern and Konami's Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (1997) gave it its best-known second example. The name, joining the two titles, turns up among fans from 2001 and in American magazines by 2005. The genre moved to handhelds and then to independent developers, and is still one of the most crowded in games.

Massively multiplayer online role-playing games put thousands of players in one persistent world. The idea began with MUD, a text game written at Essex University from 1978, and grew through pay-by-the-hour worlds on CompuServe and America Online, Lucasfilm's graphical Habitat and the first Internet games, to Ultima Online (1997), EverQuest (1999), Korea's Lineage and World of Warcraft (2004), which reached 12 million subscribers.

A MUD, or Multi-User Dungeon, is a text adventure that many people play at once in the same world. The first, MUD, was written by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle at Essex University from 1978. Outsiders dialled in at night, Compunet and CompuServe carried it in the mid-1980s, and students copied the idea on to university computers around the world: AberMUD, TinyMUD, LPMud, DikuMUD and the MOOs. By 1994 there were about 300, and their designs fed into the graphical online role-playing games that followed.

Games in which the player keeps time with a piece of music, following prompts with buttons, dance mats, turntables or plastic instruments. PaRappa the Rapper made the idea a hit in Japan in 1996, Konami's Bemani arcade games built a genre on it, and Guitar Hero and Rock Band took it into Western living rooms until the market for plastic instruments collapsed around 2010. The genre carries on in Japanese arcades, in virtual reality and inside Fortnite.

Games about getting across a level by running, climbing and jumping between platforms. Universal's Space Panic (1980) had the ladders but no jump; Nintendo's Donkey Kong (1981) added the leap and made the form a hit. American magazines called them climbing games, British ones platform games. Super Mario Bros. (1985) set the scrolling template, the 16-bit consoles fought over mascots, Super Mario 64 (1996) took the genre into 3D, and independent developers revived the 2D form after 2008.

Handheld games began with Mattel's LED games of 1976 and Nintendo's Game & Watch in 1980. Nintendo's Game Boy (1989) settled the rules that followed: battery life and good games beat colour screens and power. Atari, Sega, NEC and SNK all lost to it, Sony's PSP and Nintendo's DS split the market in 2004, and the Switch made a home console you could carry.

Driving games were in arcades long before video, and Atari's Gran Trak 10 brought the steering wheel to a video game in 1974. Night Driver and Turbo turned the view to face down the road, Pole Position and Out Run made the scaled-sprite road the look everyone copied, and from Revs, Indianapolis 500 and Hard Drivin' onwards a second branch set out to model how a real car behaves. In the 1990s texture-mapped 3D carried both branches, from Ridge Racer and Sega Rally to Gran Turismo.

A racing simulation tries to behave like a real car on a real circuit, even when that makes it hard to play. Geoff Crammond's Revs (1985) and Papyrus's Indianapolis 500 (1989) began the line; Crammond's Grand Prix series and Papyrus's IndyCar Racing, NASCAR Racing and Grand Prix Legends carried it through the 1990s; and in 2008 Papyrus's founder opened iRacing, an online service built on laser-scanned tracks.

Shooting games in which the game moves the player through its world along a fixed path and the player only aims and fires. The idea runs from Sega's Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom (1982) and Space Harrier through polygon games such as Starblade, Star Fox and Panzer Dragoon, and alongside them through the light-gun games Operation Wolf, Virtua Cop, Time Crisis and The House of the Dead, which returned on the Wii and in virtual reality.

Real-time strategy games drop the turn: both sides gather resources, build and fight at the same moment. Forerunners go back to Cytron Masters (1982), Stonkers (1983) and Herzog Zwei (1989), and American magazines were calling Populous and Powermonger real-time strategy by 1990. Westwood's Dune II (1992) set the pattern of harvesting, base building and unit production that Warcraft, Command & Conquer, StarCraft and Age of Empires followed. By 1997 magazines complained of a flood of C&C clones; StarCraft became a spectator sport in South Korea, and a Warcraft III mod started the MOBA genre.

Roguelikes take their name from Rogue, the Unix dungeon game Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman began around 1980, which Ken Arnold helped to finish and Epyx later sold for home computers. A new dungeon every game and a character lost for good at death carried through Hack, NetHack, Moria and Angband, were written down as the 2008 Berlin Interpretation, and from Spelunky onwards spread into faster 'roguelites' such as Hades.

The game of flying, shooting and dodging. It grew out of Space Invaders in 1978, learned to scroll with Scramble and Defender, became the everyday genre of the British home-computer press, and in Japan turned into the bullet-filled 'danmaku' games of Toaplan, Cave and the one-man Touhou Project, which were still being made in the 2020s.

A simulation game models a system, an aircraft, an economy, a football club or a city, and lets the player run it. The idea goes back to The Sumerian Game (1964) and Hamurabi, which spread through David Ahl's BASIC books. subLOGIC's Flight Simulator (1980) and Psion's Flight Simulation (1982) made flying a home-computer genre, and period magazines stretched the word 'simulation' over wargames, sport, business, pirates and gods. SimCity (1989) showed a simulation could be a hit with no way to win; Theme Park, Transport Tycoon and The Sims followed, and Microsoft Flight Simulator was still being made in 2024.

A single-screen platformer puts each level on one screen that does not scroll, so the player sees every ledge, ladder and enemy from the start. Universal's Space Panic (1980) and Nintendo's Donkey Kong (1981) set the pattern in the arcades; Miner 2049er, Manic Miner and Lode Runner took it to home computers; Mario Bros. and Bubble Bobble filled the screen with two players. Scrolling and flip-screen games took over in the late 1980s, but single-screen games are still being written.

Games that play or manage a real sport. They began in 1972 with the bat-and-ball games of the Magnavox Odyssey and Atari's Pong, split early between arcade action (Konami's button-bashing Track & Field) and statistical simulation, and in Britain became above all football, from Football Manager to Kick Off and Sensible Soccer. Electronic Arts turned licences and yearly updates into the genre's business model; its FIFA series ran until the licence ended in 2022 and continues as EA Sports FC.

Games in which staying alive is the goal: the player gathers food and materials, makes tools and shelter, and watches meters for hunger, health and warmth. Silmarils' Robinson's Requiem was billed as a 'survival simulation' in 1994, but the genre took its present shape after Minecraft (2009), with DayZ, Don't Starve and Subnautica, and its last-player-standing contests fed the battle royale.

Horror games in which the player is weak: ammunition, healing and saves are scarce, the camera hides what is coming, and running away is often the best choice. Capcom named the genre when it launched Resident Evil in 1996, but the ideas go back through Alone in the Dark and Capcom's own Famicom game Sweet Home to a 1982 Atari cartridge. Silent Hill and Fatal Frame took it towards psychological and ghost stories, Resident Evil 4 turned it towards action, and first-person games and remakes brought it back.

Tactical RPGs fight their battles on a map of squares, one unit at a time, with named characters who gain experience from battle to battle and in some games can die for good. Western role-playing and squad games had tactical combat by the mid-1980s; Intelligent Systems' Fire Emblem (1990) gave the form its Japanese shape, followed by Sega's Shining Force, Quest's Tactics Ogre, Square's Final Fantasy Tactics and Nippon Ichi's Disgaea, while X-COM and Jagged Alliance took the Western line.

Games told in prose and played by typing commands. The form began with Will Crowther and Don Woods's Adventure on a PDP-10 in the mid-1970s, reached home computers through Scott Adams, grew full-sentence parsers at Infocom, and in 1980s Britain became a genre its own players could write, thanks to tools such as The Quill. It faded commercially at the end of the 1980s and lives on as interactive fiction.

A tycoon game hands the player a little money and a business to grow: a railway, a transport company, a theme park, a zoo. The name comes from Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon (1990). MicroProse gave Chris Sawyer's Transport Tycoon (1994) its title to tie in with it, and Sawyer's RollerCoaster Tycoon, the best-selling PC game of 1999 in America, set off so many imitators that by 2001 a reviewer called 'Tycoon' the most over-used word in computer games. Microsoft's Zoo Tycoon (2001) followed the same formula with animals.

First-person games in which the player walks, looks and finds things out, with no combat and little or no way to fail. The name began as a sneer at games like Dear Esther, a 2008 Half-Life 2 modification remade commercially in 2012; Gone Home, The Stanley Parable and their successors made the form popular, and its makers went on arguing about the label.

A wargame simulates a battle, campaign or war from the commander's chair. Strategic Simulations sold Computer Bismarck for the Apple II in early 1980, and through the 1980s SSI, Australia's Strategic Studies Group and British houses such as Lothlorien, Cases Computer Simulations and PSS brought the board-wargame hobby to home computers. Magazines gave it columns of its own, and designers spent the decade trying to sell it beyond the hobby.

Western RPG is the name for the role-playing games made in America and Europe, used to set them apart from Japanese ones. They began in the mid-1970s as attempts to let a computer run Dungeons & Dragons, first on university mainframes and then on home computers with Akalabeth, Ultima and Wizardry. Through the 1980s and 1990s they kept the player-made party, the rulebook and the open map, and after a lean spell in the mid-1990s Diablo, Fallout and Baldur's Gate brought them back. Their descendants run from Morrowind and The Witcher to the crowdfunded revival of the 2010s and Baldur's Gate 3.