An open world is a game space the player crosses at will, taking its tasks in whatever order they like, while the world gets on with its own business. The name arrived late. The thing itself was being described in British magazines in 1982, when Melbourne House promised that the characters in The Hobbit would “have an independent life of their own”. Two years later Tony Quinn came out of a locked room in Cambridge having played Elite, a game with no set route at all, and in 1985 Mercenary let the player finish by any of three ways, one of which was stealing a spaceship. Grand Theft Auto made the idea a city in 1997, and Grand Theft Auto III made it three-dimensional in 2001. By then the phrase “open world” had been in print for five years.
Fast facts
- A world that moves on its own: Melbourne House’s advertising for The Hobbit, December 1982: characters that “can make decisions and act on them”.
- A route of your own: Acorn User on Elite, October 1984: “start off with a simple space ship and build it and your reputation up to ‘Elite’ status”.
- Three ways to win: Zzap!64 gave Mercenary 98% in March 1986, measuring it against Elite.
- A city that “breathes”: DMA Design’s Brian Baird on Grand Theft Auto, Edge, October 1997.
- The phrase: Computer Gaming World, December 1996, on Duke Nukem 3D’s “open world”.
Characters with their own plans
The Hobbit (1982) was a text adventure, and Melbourne House’s advertising sold it on a world that did not wait for the player. Tolkien’s characters, it said, “will all have an independent life of their own. They can make decisions and act on them! They react not only to what you do, but also to every other character in THE HOBBIT!”, so that “each time you play THE HOBBIT, events will proceed in a slightly different way”. Computer & Video Games’ Book of Adventure agreed in 1984: “what really made the Hobbit unique was the way the game’s characters roamed around the different locations”, and “the player never knew who might turn up in a particular place”. Independence had its side effects. Looking back in 1991, ACE said that all that seemed to happen was that “Thorin kept sitting down and singing about gold and Gandalf kept wandering off”.
Mike Singleton’s The Lords of Midnight (1984) opened the map instead. The player walked several lords across a landscape of plains, forests and towers, drawn afresh from wherever each one stood, in any direction and in any order, while raising armies to hold off the Witchking Doomdark. Beyond claimed 32,000 views. CRASH said the game “transcends the simple word-matching of the mainstream adventure and in many respects more resembles a strategy war game”. Its entry explains how the views were made.
Elite, 1984
Acorn User sent Tony Quinn to Cambridge for Acornsoft’s preview of Elite. Acornsoft had “spirited half a dozen journalists up to Cambridge and locked them in a room to review the game”, so he wrote it up as impressions after “a couple of hours”. His summary of the structure holds for much of what followed: “The idea of the game is to start off with a simple space ship and build it and your reputation up to ‘Elite’ status”. How was up to the player. Trading was the safe route; then “it becomes tempting to play naughty. Illicit cargoes such as slaves and drugs can be bought. You could be in trouble with the law but it’s a good way of making a fast buck. Then you can attack space stations for the fun of it, and even try trading with one of the deadlier planets. The risks are high, but so are the profits.”
The disc version added “these things called ‘missions’ where a task is set”, and Quinn ended on “the unknown: no-one has yet reached the ultimate Elite status, and there’s even a ship out there that no-one has yet come across.” Acornsoft’s advertisement in the same issue sold the size of the place: “you can dock at any of 2,000 planets in eight galaxies”. The authors were Ian Bell and David Braben, whom Quinn identified only as “Elite’s two student authors”. The Elite entry explains how the program generated its galaxies from a handful of numbers instead of storing them.
Mercenary, 1985
Paul Woakes’s Mercenary: Escape from Targ came from Novagen for the Commodore 64 and 8-bit Ataris in the autumn of 1985, after “18 months’ development”, Your Computer reported. The player crash-lands on the planet Targ in the middle of a civil war and has to get off it. Your Computer explained that you could play it “as an Adventure — the underground sequences alone have 170 rooms — or as a complicated shoot-’em-up, taking lucrative jobs from both sides in the Palyar-mechanoid civil war”. Novagen’s advertisement promised “complete freedom of movement in a truly three-dimensional vector-graphic environment”.
By then Elite was the yardstick. Zzap!64’s review in March 1986 opens on it: “Elite never really spawned that many look-alikes because its reputation was so hard to match. However, Novagen have managed to release a game based on a similar approach, yet have introduced so many original elements that the resulting game surpasses its successful predecessor in terms of excitement and playability.” What the reviewer valued was the choice of route: “The main appeal of Mercenary is that there are various ways of achieving the end goal. The most obvious is to act as a freelance fighter for either Mechanoid or Palyar.” A ship offered for sale could be stolen instead: “Mercenary plays just like the real world and instead of buying the ship you may choose to steal it”. There were three ways to finish, “but the other two are a bit of a mystery”. It was the issue’s Gold Medal game at 98%, a mark the magazine said it had given only once before.
DMA Design: Body Harvest and Grand Theft Auto
In Dundee, DMA Design was building two games on the same idea at once. When Edge visited in January 1997, Body Harvest, a Nintendo 64 game about aliens harvesting humans across several eras of history, already let the player “get in and drive any vehicle you come across. Tanks, planes, fire engines and ice-cream vans litter the (totally explorable) landscape.” The same feature previewed Grand Theft Auto, which “Like Body Harvest” was mission-based: “the crime boss hands out jobs (assassinate a certain person, steal a certain vehicle, etc) and players decide whether or not to follow orders. Apart from that, gameplay is completely open.”
Grand Theft Auto came out first, late in 1997. Edge’s preview that October argued that the game’s real interest lay beyond the violence that would draw the headlines: “The city feels genuinely real, with cars constantly on the move, pedestrians crossing and going about their business (until, tragically, out of the blue…) and police keeping tabs on the player’s notorious deeds.” Programmer Brian Baird described what the team was after:
We’ve gone to great lengths to try to make the city ‘breathe’. Things do go on without your participation. If you want to cause chaos you can, but you have to live with the consequences. There is a lot of logic going on underneath the surface — police cars patrol the city constantly, and if you wander near one while you’re getting chased, he’ll join in. Yes, there are shortcuts going on behind the scenes, but we can still have anything up to 400 cars and over 600 pedestrians.
Each of the three cities “takes several minutes of driving to get from one end to the other”, with “over 2000km of roads, alleyways, dead ends, bridges and tramways”. The December review added the structural point: “in one more example of the unrestrictive nature of the gameplay, players are not forced to undertake the missions in order to finish the game”, and “Never before has the sense of being in a living city with other drivers and pedestrians going about their own business been so admirably conveyed.” It scored nine out of ten.
Body Harvest followed on the Nintendo 64 in November 1998, published by Gremlin after what Edge called a “three-year wait”. The review offered more than 60 types of vehicle and put the two games side by side: “Like Grand Theft Auto before it, Body Harvest goes overboard in attempting to deliver a digital playroom for grown-ups.” It scored eight out of ten.
Grand Theft Auto III, 2001
Grand Theft Auto III moved the idea into three dimensions. Edge, reviewing it from a shop-bought copy, found Liberty City “both intricate and robust. It’s a place that sprawls but doesn’t bustle”, and was exact about how far the freedom went: “You’re still boxed in by the whims of your current overlords — any schemes of your own ruthless devising are restricted to trivial pursuits for petty cash.” The city’s “coherent and emergent behaviour” was “limited to a local scale”. What the game got right was owning the space: “it’s all about owning the streets, strutting your territory and walking tall.”
Its makers claimed less for it than later legend does. Looking back in 2011, Dan Houser said that almost everything from the earlier games was rebuilt, and “the only other things we really kept were the ideas of an open, non-linear city and the radio”. The game, he said, “was among the first to figure it out”, naming technical and design problems such as streaming the city off the disc and moving from driving to walking in one animation. Retro Gamer gave the earlier credit to DMA’s own Body Harvest, which “was doing the open-ended, free-roaming, vehicle-borrowing genre long before GTA III arrived on the scene”. By 2011 Edge could describe open worlds as “a part of every major publisher’s portfolio”.
The phrase
None of the Elite, Mercenary or Grand Theft Auto reviews says “open world”. The phrase turns up in Computer Gaming World in December 1996, describing Duke Nukem 3D: “Duke gives you interactive environments, so you can blast holes in a wall with your shotgun, and an open world, so you can revisit that past level to find your shotgun blasts still burned into the wall.” Nintendo Power used it the next year for the 3D levels of Bomberman 64. By 2000 Edge was using it in previews: in March for a smuggling game in which the player “offers an open world”, and in June for Core Design’s Herdy Gerdy: “Core promises an open world to explore, yet with enough structure to prevent endless wandering”. That balance, freedom against direction, is the one Quinn found in Elite in 1984.
Sources
- Your Computer, December 1982: Melbourne House advertisement for The Hobbit (“an independent life of their own”; “a slightly different way”). The same advertisement ran in Sinclair User issue 12, March 1983.
- Computer & Video Games, Book of Adventure supplement, January 1984: on The Hobbit’s roaming characters.
- ACE, issue 41, February 1991: “Thorin kept sitting down and singing about gold”.
- CRASH, issue 5, June 1984: The Lords of Midnight preview (Beyond’s 32,000 views); issue 7, August 1984, p. 72: Adventure Trail review (“transcends the simple word-matching”).
- Acorn User, issue 27, October 1984, p. 165: Tony Quinn, “Star Status”, on Elite; Acornsoft’s advertisement in the same issue (“2,000 planets in eight galaxies”).
- Your Computer, September 1985, p. 17 and October 1985, p. 17: news items on Novagen’s Mercenary (18 months’ development; Commodore 64 and Atari; 170 underground rooms; jobs from both sides).
- Zzap!64, issue 6, October 1985: Novagen advertisement for Mercenary (“complete freedom of movement”).
- Zzap!64, issue 11, March 1986, pp. 16–18: Mercenary review, Gold Medal, 98%.
- Computer Gaming World, issue 149, December 1996: Duke Nukem 3D (“an open world”).
- Edge, issue 41, January 1997: DMA Design studio feature, Grand Theft Auto and Body Harvest previews.
- Nintendo Power, issue 103, December 1997: Bomberman 64 review (“this open world”).
- Edge, issue 50, October 1997, pp. 50–52: Grand Theft Auto preview (Brian Baird; the three cities).
- Edge, issue 52, December 1997: Grand Theft Auto review, nine out of ten.
- Edge, issue 65, December 1998: Body Harvest review (Gremlin, November release, “three-year wait”, eight out of ten).
- Edge, issue 82, March 2000, and issue 85, June 2000: previews using “an open world”.
- Edge, issue 105, Christmas 2001: Grand Theft Auto III review.
- Stuart Hunt, “The History of Grand Theft Auto”, Retro Gamer, issue 50, 2008: Body Harvest.
- “Liberty City Story”, Edge, issue 235, Christmas 2011: Dan Houser on Grand Theft Auto III; open worlds in “every major publisher’s portfolio”.