Tile-based Video Game - History

History

Early video game consoles such as Intellivision were designed to use tile-based graphics, since their games had to fit into video game cartridges as small as 4K in size. Regardless of their outward appearance or game genre, all Intellivision games are tile-based.

Early tile-based games shipped with pre-constructed levels or generated levels at game startup (for example, with SimCity and Civilization) or on the fly (as with Roguelike games). A feature of tile-based games is that they allow for the creation of easy to use map editors, and many tile-based games come with an editor that allows players to construct their own levels. While completed levels for a game may hide all traces of tile-based technology, use of an editor for such a game strips away all polish and reveals a game's tile-based framework.

Most early tile-based games used a top-down perspective. The top-down perspective evolved to a simulated 45-degree angle, allowing the player to see both the top and one side of objects, to give more sense of depth; this style dominated 8-bit and 16-bit console role-playing games. Ultimate Play The Game developed a series of video games in the 1980s that employed a tile-based isometric perspective. As computers advanced, isometric and dimetric perspectives began to predominate in tile-based games. Notable titles include:

• Ultima Online, which mixed elements of 3D (the ground, which is a tile-based height map) and 2D (objects) tiles
• Civilization II, which updated Civilization's top-down perspective to an "isometric" (more accurately described as dimetric) perspective.
• The Avernum series, which remade the top-down role-playing series Exile with an isometric engine.

Hexagonal tile-based games have been limited for the most part to the strategy and wargaming genres. Notable examples include the Genesis game Master of Monsters, SSI's Five Star series of wargames, the Age of Wonders series and Battle for Wesnoth.

Some entirely 3D games have been tile-based; one notable example is the Neverwinter Nights series from BioWare. Other games, like side-scrollers, are technically also tile-based (that is, the playing area is made up of graphic tiles), but are normally not referred to as such. Lode Runner is an example.