Battlezone, by simple virtue of being an arcade game from 1980, could only offer solo play. Spectre VR had another advantage over its arcade inspiration besides mere graphical horsepower: Networking. It was the product of a simpler time, updated to take advantage of the Macintosh's graphical horsepower. Spectre's mission objectives amounted to little more than capturing flags in an arena. Enemies consisted of triangles that exploded into smaller triangles upon being shot, not demonic abominations that fell to bloody pieces.
Spectre VR was all crisp polygons and neon glow set in vast, open arenas – the polar opposite of Doom's dank, claustrophobic military bases. Spectre VR was retro before anyone knew what a "retro game" even was.ĭespite its fundamental similarity to Doom, the two games felt nothing alike. It even imitated the distinctive typefaces of other Atari vector titles like Tempest. The graphics rendered the world and everything in it as a conscious imitation of Battlezone's vector-based graphics, with simple, colorful polygons and razor-sharp lines glowing against a field of black. The game's first-person perspective dropped players into the cockpit of a sleek futuristic tank. To be precise, Spectre VR's creators very deliberately patterned their shooter after Battlezone. All the way back to 1980, in fact, and Atari's Battlezone.ĭo not adjust your sets. Spectre's approach hearkened back to the classic arcade. or at least their avatar's hands, that is.
Players climbed into the head of a lone warrior, getting in close and reducing enemies to piles of gore, literally getting blood on their hands. Doom, its sequel, and its imitators approached the task of combat viewed from a first-person, three-dimensional perspective by going the visceral route. The reality was that Spectre VR – the second sequel to 1990's Mac classic Spectre – actually did belong to another time.
Yet even as the FPS format was first beginning to take shape, a studio called Peninsula Gameworks produced a shooter for Mac and PC that felt like a relic from another time. In 1993, id Software defined the first-person shooter genre with Doom.
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