What Happened Next Games

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Electronic Gaming Month 13, Oct 1990

Sonic’s first appearance in EGM notably pre-dates the name of the game’s genre. It was described as an Action Adventure, and then simply as a “Mario-style,” two months later in EGM 15. In 1990 games with humanoid protagonists all basically took the same form -- side-scrolling and 2D, so there was no specific need for the term at the time. Splatterhouse for TurboGrafx is described in terms of being different than a “side-scrolling shooter” in the same issue. Personally I would not hear the term until ~1993 when it was used by a  US Gold or Domark staffer downplaying two of their forthcoming releases for Super Nintendo (”Honestly, they’re just platformers...”)

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Softtline Magazine, January 1982. Brian Fargo was a young programmer when he wrote this letter to Softline magazine, a co-production of Sierra Online games and SoftTalk magazine. Ken Williams, founder of Sierra did a groundbreaking multi-issue series of articles on Apple graphics, but never answered Fargo’s question. The secret, of course, was vector graphics. Rather than store bitmaps for each room, Wizard and the Princess merely stored the instructions for drawing the images, at a significant space savings. Brian must has learned some good Apple ][ tricks, as he’d go on to form InterPlay Productions and create The Bards Tale, Wasteland, and  Fallout, among many other titles.