Battlezone's Virtual Reality

Asked to explain his inspiration for "cyberspace," the virtual-reality datasphere in which the characters of his early fiction spent much of their time, William Gibson explained that he'd gotten the idea from watching video gamers. In the arcades of the early 1980s, young people by the millions stood mesmerized by the new digital realities unfolding before them, immersed more fully in those worlds that the real one. Some early videogames encouraged this immersive experience by offering a first-person perspective (as in early auto-racing games, for instance), or using external focusing hardware, like periscopes, to block out more of the dull external world.

Some did both. One of the most successful early "virtual reality"  games, Battlezone (1980), used a periscope, a first-person perspective, and a three-dimensional manifold to give players a more focused and immersive experience than any preceding title. Battlezone's 'world" didn't offer much complexity or detail - just enough to maintain one's focus and interest. Players drove a laser-shooting tank through a flat, faintly unearthly landscape, with a moon hanging low in the sky above distant mountains. They dodged polyhedral boulders and destroyed enemy tanks, missiles, and the occasional flying saucer hovering briefly near the horizon. Controls were simple: just a firing button and two joysticks, one to control the player's tank and one its turret. The two independent modes of movement allowed one to move in one direction while looking and shooting in another, surveying and scooting about the landscape like an infantryman. The graphics seem primitive by modern standards, but the blocky, monochromatic, wire-frame images of Battlezone were state-of-the-art computer animation in 1980. Indeed, John Carpenter and the designers of Escape from New York assumed they would remain so until at least 1997.

BZ never acquired the cachet of more popular titles like Space Invaders and Pac-Man, but it did produce a spin-off simulator for the U.S. Army, and many later versions of the original game with updated graphics. I suspect, given William Gibson's original observation about videogames and cyberspace, that it provided some inspiration for cyberpunk stories like Gibson and Michael Swanwick's "Dogfight" and Walter Jon Williams's "Panzerboy." I am also fairly certain fond memories of Battlezone inspired Stu Maschwitz to make "Tank," a short retro-SF film pitting fighter pilots against a seemingly-indestructible supertank. Watching "Tank," I was reminded why early video and computer games left such a mark on American geeks of a certain age (middle-aged, now): their (necessarily) high level of abstraction forced gamers to fill in sensory gaps with their own imaginations, which made it likelier for offerings like Battlezone or Zork to inspire us to create our own works.* Modern electronic games are better and smarter in many ways than their predecessors, but the enormous amount of expertise and money they require makes them less amenable to the kind of imaginative "tinkering" that Maschwitz does.


* My brother and our friend Andrew spent a good deal of time in the '80s crafting text-only computer games, some of them quite ambitious