“I don’t recall having ever seen a ‘survival sim’ before,” wrote a previewer in The One in January 1994. The game was Silmarils’ Robinson’s Requiem, and its publisher, Daze, called it a “survival simulation/adventure”. A scout is stranded on a prison planet with a survival kit and a computer strapped to his chest that reports on his body. The game calculated his fatigue, wounds, infections, sleep and the outside temperature in real time, and the monsters he met were there to provide “meat and hide”. Twenty years later that list of needs (food, warmth, shelter, medicine) was the basis of a whole genre.
A survival game makes staying alive the point. The player starts with little or nothing, gathers food and materials from the world, makes tools and shelter, and keeps an eye on meters for hunger, health or warmth. There is often no other goal. The threats come from the world itself (night, cold, monsters) and, in online games, from other players who want what you have collected.
The phrase is older than the genre. In the early 1980s magazines used “survival game” for almost any game whose aim was simply to last. Sinclair User printed a reader’s “quick and challenging survival game in which you must flee the pursuing ghost and also avoid contact with poisonous flowers” in April 1983, and Video Games described Synapse’s Salmon Run in 1984 as “a survival game in a vertically scrolling obstacle course”. Survival in those games meant dodging. In the later genre it means looking after yourself.
Fast facts
- Core loop: gather, make, survive another day.
- Precursor: Robinson’s Requiem (Silmarils, 1994), sold as a “survival simulation”.
- The model: Minecraft (started 2009; version 1.0 in 2011).
- Online survival: DayZ (2012), a modification for the military simulation ARMA II, then a separate game.
- Single-player wilderness: Don’t Starve (Klei, 2013); Subnautica, on an alien ocean world.
- Related: crafting systems, permadeath, survival horror.
Robinson’s Requiem
Silmarils’ game went further into the body than most games before or since. The hero had no health bar: his monitoring computer reported his condition instead, and the player had to treat wounds, fractures and malaria with what came to hand. Reviewing it in November 1994, The One praised the freedom it gave: “Every single item you pick up can be used in a variety of ways, just like in real life.” It also warned that “for the first few days you play it, you’ll keep dying very, very quickly indeed”, and found some of the solutions obscure: a survival expert, the reviewer supposed, would know to make a hat by sewing leaves together with a needle and thread. Not every magazine was won over; the Silmarils entry gathers the other reviews.
Minecraft
Minecraft made the idea mainstream. Each game starts in a newly generated landscape, and Edge described the player arriving “as a block-headed Robinson Crusoe, lost, lonely”, with nothing. Blocks are mined and placed, tools are crafted from what is mined, and night brings zombies, “forcing you to work during the day and then fortify yourself after dark”. A creative mode turns the danger off, but Edge’s reviewer found surviving more rewarding.
DayZ and the online survivors
DayZ began in 2012 as Dean Hall’s modification for Bohemia Interactive’s ARMA II. Edge that summer filed it as a “zombie survival MMOG” and set it beside ZombiU as games that had “realised that if you want to induce a bit of survivalist peril in the hearts of players, zombies by themselves just don’t cut it any more”. When the standalone version was shown in 2013, Edge explained what it added to ARMA’s simulation: “the need to eat food and drink water”, the risk of being killed by zombies “and other players with designs on the beans in your backpack”, infections caught from other players, individually broken bones, and the need to find heat to stay warm. Its world, Edge thought, “often feels more like a social experiment than a game”.
Don’t Starve
Klei’s Don’t Starve (2013) took the idea into a hand-drawn Gothic wilderness. Edge called it “what you’d expect if you packed Minecraft’s penchant for crafting and exploration off to the Bear Grylls school of wilderness taming”. The player has “three meters to manage: your hunger, sanity and health”, night falls on the first day, and “you won’t make it to day two without a fire”. Death is permanent unless you have found a way back. Edge gave it six out of ten, because once the player had learnt to survive there was little else to do: “merely surviving is mundane”. It ended: “Klei may have modelled Hell brilliantly, but that doesn’t mean we want to live there.”
Under the sea, and the last player standing
Subnautica moved the genre under water. Wireframe called it an “alien planet survival sim”, and the artist behind the alien life of its sequel, Subnautica: Below Zero, told the magazine that “real science is a critical underpinning of my work”.
Online survival games also produced a new kind of shooter. Wireframe traced the battle royale to a Minecraft mod, first called Hunger Games and renamed Survival Games, in which up to 48 players fought until one was left, and to mods of DayZ with the same rule. By 2018 Fortnite, PUBG and Call of Duty all had a battle royale mode; see First-Person Shooter.
Sources
- Sinclair User issue 13, April 1983: a reader’s listing described as a “survival game”.
- Video Games vol. 2 no. 7, April 1984: Salmon Run review (“a survival game in a vertically scrolling obstacle course”).
- The One issue 64, January 1994: Robinson’s Requiem preview (“survival simulation/adventure”; the micro-computer; fatigue, infections, wounds, sleep, temperature and weather calculated in real time; “meat and hide”; “I don’t recall having ever seen a ‘survival sim’ before”).
- The One issue 74, November 1994, p. 52: Robinson’s Requiem review (Silmarils, £29.99; the freedom to use every item; dying “very, very quickly”; the hat of leaves).
- See the Silmarils entry for the ST Format, Amiga Format and Amiga Power reviews.
- Edge issue 236, January 2012, pp. 118–120: Minecraft review. See the Minecraft entry.
- Edge issue 242, July 2012: DayZ as a “zombie survival MMOG”.
- Edge issue 244, September 2012: DayZ and ZombiU.
- Edge issue 256, August 2013: DayZ standalone at E3 (food and water, other players, viruses, broken bones, heat).
- Edge issue 254, June 2013, p. 112: Don’t Starve review (six out of ten).
- Wireframe issue 59, January 2022: Subnautica and Subnautica: Below Zero.
- Wireframe issue 3, November 2018: the Minecraft Survival Games mod, DayZ mods and the battle royale.