[ Retro Scan of the Week ] Lucasfilm’s 1985 FPS
February 25th, 2013 by Benj Edwards
Disney now owns this game.
In 1985, LucasFilm Games released one of the earliest first-person shooters, although they didn’t know it at the time. In The Eidolon, players fluidly navigate corridors from a first-person viewpoint, shooting monsters that they encounter along the way.
The Eidolon utilizes a novel and technically impressive vector graphics engine to dynamically generate tunnel interiors from various angles as players maneuver through them. The engine also served as the basis of other LucasFilm titles like Rescue on Fractalus! (1984) and Koronis Rift (1985).
Although this game appeared on the Atari 8-bit computer platform (which I grew up with), I never got a chance to play it until about ten years ago. If I had seen it in the 1980s, it would have immediately become a favorite.
Discussion Topic of the Week: What’s your favorite pre-1996 first-person shooter?
February 25th, 2013 at 5:02 pm
Had to sit back and think about it for a while. I was rather late catching on to the 1st person shooter craze in the nineties, but the game that really got me hooked was the Star Wars game “Dark Forces”. I remember thinking -Finally I can be IN the movies.
I also remember thinking the same thing when I played the sequels. They were all very good at capturing the spirit and feel of the original movies.
February 25th, 2013 at 6:56 pm
Catacomb 3-D, by John Carmack and John Romero, among others. It was pretty much the precursor to Wolfenstein 3D.
February 25th, 2013 at 8:47 pm
Great picks, guys.
If my cutoff limit were 1997, I’d pick Blood. But I’d have to say that Doom is probably my favorite classic FPS. Predictable choice, I know, but man was it magical when it came out.
February 25th, 2013 at 10:01 pm
It wasn’t a shooter, and it may have been the size of a sticky note, but that upper-left corner of the Bard’s Tale games where you had the very limited first-person view of your surroundings was the first time a (partially) graphical game made me feel like I was inside its world.
February 26th, 2013 at 4:18 am
When I was roughly 10, my dad bought me a game boy for xmas along with several games, including Faceball 2000, which was my introduction to (rather slow) FPSes.
February 26th, 2013 at 10:11 am
Totally had this game for my Atari 800xl. I wonder if that floppy is still in a box at my parents house? Is there a rom of this somewhere? Love to play it again.
February 26th, 2013 at 10:18 am
Chris,
You can find an Atari 800 disk image for The Eidolon on this page:
http://vjetnam.hopto.org/index.php?frame=lett&dir=e&page=0
Scroll down to “Edilon” (it’s misspelled).
February 26th, 2013 at 3:20 pm
Lucasarts’ Monkey Island. Chaos on the spectrum along with Rebelstar. Loved Grand Prix manager also on the spectrum too.
February 28th, 2013 at 10:13 am
Ah, I remember a lot of hype around this game. Sadly, I never did get to play it back in the day.
February 28th, 2013 at 1:02 pm
I still remember Xybots my first time, playing that in the arcade and being amazed at the feeling of 1st person action and exploration.
February 28th, 2013 at 6:10 pm
The first one I got hooked on was Duke Nukem in ’91. The sarcastic humor was awesome and there was something truly entertaining about strippers exploding into dollar bills when you shot them.
But when my good pal introduced me to Wolfenstein 3D in ’92 I was seriously hooked, playing it at his house on the weekend nights until 2-3AM. We later discovered Descent in’ 94 and its head-to-head capability, and my friends and I would battle endlessly. It would be actually awesome if they re-released that game with today’s modern technology.