Today we have a lot of RTS videogames, from Age of empires, Bit planets and Starcraft, but how exactly this trend started?
Origins
After a long period of development and refinement, the genre now known as "real-time strategy" evolved. The games that are sometimes seen as forerunners of the real-time strategy genre were never marketed or built with it in mind. As a result, labeling games as "early real-time strategy" is difficult because they are held to modern standards. The genre developed independently in the United Kingdom, Japan, and North America at first, before eventually fusing into an united global heritage.
Tim Barry detailed a multiplayer, real-time strategy space game that ran ("and probably still does") on an IBM System/370 Model 168 at a prominent San Francisco Bay area corporation in May 1981 in InfoWorld. With a written manual and a regular timetable, he said it had "much greater assistance than many of the application packages utilized in the industry." When comparing it to Dallas, Barry recalled that "a lot of routine work halted when the game was restored at 5 p.m."
According to Ars Technica, the genre's roots may be traced back to Utopia (1981), which was hailed as the "birth of a genre" since it had a "nearly unheard-of real-time element," making it "probably the first ancestor of the real-time strategy genre." Utopia was a turn-based strategy game with hybrid components that played "in real-time yet events happened on a regular turn-based cycle," according to Ars Technica. Utopia is generally referred to be "the first real-time strategy game," according to Brett Weiss. Utopia "helped create the framework" for the genre, according to Matt Barton and Bill Loguidice, but "has more in common with SimCity than it does with Dune II and succeeding RTS games." War of Nerves is the earliest "2D Real-Time Strategy" according to Allgame.
While Cytron Masters "attempted real-time strategy," according to Scott Sharkey of 1UP, it was "far more tactical than strategic" due to "the inability to construct armies or manage resources." Cosmic Conquest was released by BYTE in December 1982 as an Apple II type-in program. The author defined it as a "single-player game of real-time action and strategic decision making," and it won the magazine's annual Game Contest. "A real-time space strategy game," according to the magazine. Resource management and wargaming are both present in the game.
Stonkers by John Gibson, published in 1983 by Imagine Software for the ZX Spectrum, and Nether Earth for the ZX Spectrum in 1987 are the first real-time strategy games in the United Kingdom. The Ancient Art of War (1984), designed by Dave and Barry Murry of Evryware, is the first game retrospectively defined as real-time strategy in North America, followed by The Ancient Art of War at Sea in 1987.
Early games such as Sensible Software's Mega Lo Mania (1991) and Supremacy (also known as Overlord – 1990) are noteworthy. Despite the fact that these two did not have direct control over armed forces, they did have significant control over resource management and economic systems. Mega Lo Mania also features sophisticated technological trees that assess attacking and defensive prowess. Another early game, Realtime Games' Carrier Command, required real-time responses to game events, necessitating resource management and vehicle control. Resource gathering and managing an attacking army by having them follow a lead unit were featured in the early game Sim Ant by Maxis. Real-time strategy games were first acknowledged as an unique genre of video games with the publication of Westwood Studios' Dune II.
