Talk:Boss (video games)

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[edit] History/Development of the "Boss"

While I don't have a lot of info to offer up, I'd love to see some history on the development of the "boss." Boss characters were an integral part of the shift from retro games to modern level and story based games. Obviously, Bowser came fairly early in the concept--but Bowser was almost the same every time. Yet, between the time of SMBI and SMBII (american), mini-bosses came into their own and bosses started having character. I would guess that the original MegaMan was also very influential in creating bosses with character and theme, especially in relating that to the level in which they were found. The Legend of Zelda also must have been influential; to the best of my recollection it introduced boss "recycling" where an earlier boss became a mini-boss in later levels. Both Zelda and MegaMan had boss "weak points" or vulnerabilities. Hmmm, actually, reviewing the timelines, MegaMan looks like it came out in 87, and so benefited from the earlier development. Also, Kung-Fu came out in 1984 and had distinct boss characters with unique attacks/strategies. Compare Kung-Fu with other early titles like Ice Climber, Excite Bike, Dunk Hunt, Elevator Action, etc, and I see a distinction. Commando was a very early game too, in 1986, but I don't remember what kinds of bosses (if any) it had. So all in all, I'd love to see a treatise on the development of the boss character from say 1983 to 1988. Seems like it went from being a non-existant technique to being established and ubiquitous in that time frame. Any thoughts?

LoveMe2Times 07:44, 14 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I'd say you like Nintendo too much. ;)
It's a good idea, now I think about it. I've been trying to think back to when bosses became popular (a mite difficult seeing as I would have been about five years old), and it seems that the flash point is in 1985.
However, I am quite heavily biased toward scrolling shooters, so I'm probably missing something important. Bosses are, on the other hand, probably more important in scrolling shooters than any other genre, because they have to break up the linearity of the game.
Anyway. In 1985, you've that Mario game thingy, and Gradius, which is the first time I can recall having to fight a huge boss character. Then in 1986 you've got Darius, which is the earliest game I know of that had different bosses for every level. I think it had minibosses too.
And then it really gets going. In 1987, I can name R-Type, Raiden, and Rainbow Islands as having distinct bosses, and by this point it was all pretty standard. But I'm just namedropping (and article-dropping too, seeing as I wrote most of those articles ;) ). The point is that there seems to be a dark age of bosses before 1985, so it would probably be interesting to unravel that.
The very earliest enemy-that-could-conceivably-be-thought-of-as-a-boss that I can think of (not including that Dungeons and Dragons thing mentioned in the article, which I know nothing about) is the Flag Ship from Gorf, an arcade game released in 1981, in the prime of the Space Invaders Era. Gorf was like five games in one, and when the player completed a level, they would move onto a level in the next game.
The fifth level was a battle with the Flag Ship. It has all the hallmarks of a boss: It's much bigger than the player's ship, much better armed, has its own forcefield, and is only minorly damaged by the player's weapon. The only way to destroy it is to hit it in its weak spot - a reactor situated deep within the ship.
Now I think about it, I don't know why I didn't mention this before. The thing is, I always thought of the Flag Ship as a 'level' rather than a boss. There wasn't really any concept of a boss at that point in history. Still, it's a start. Spottedowl 12:56, 14 Jun 2004 (UTC)


It's not that I like Nintendo so much, it's just that's what I had and therefore remember ;) Problem is, it's difficult to pin down dates on these games. Wikipedia has a really nice list of NES games, and the first hundred or so all have the release dates specified. But I haven't looked at other consoles or arcade games etc. Getting all of that data fleshed out seems like a great task for WikiPedia. Anyway, I played all of my side scrolling shooters on my TurboGrafx and Duo, so I tend to think of them as having been later. But you're right, the arcade originals came a good bit earlier. You're right that everything was well established by 87; I suggested examining 83-88 for a nice 5 year window, but 84-87 might cover all of the advances.
I'm not familiar with Gorf or the D&D example the article mentions. I'm trying to remember arcade games from before I got my NES, but I can only remember PacMan, Asteroids, Space Invaders, Defender, Donkey Kong, Qbert (I think this was before my NES), Elevator Action, and Kung-Fu. Kung-Fu clearly had well-formed bosses--even more so than Bowser. They had life meters (where "normal" enemies didn't), unique appearences, unique attack patterns, did extra damage, and came at the end of the level. I suppose an extensive review of ATARI 2600 games would be in order. I'm willing to ignore the other early consoles for the moment.
Hmm, what about computer games, though? Did early text adventures ever have bosses? I never really played Zork or Adventure or anything. However, King's Quest first came out in 1983, although I don't know if you'd consider KQ to have bosses or levels--it had sections I guess. Rogue was out in like 81 or something, but I've only played Nethack (Hack came out around 85, Nethack shortly thereafter?). Nethack has bosses of sorts, but I just don't know about Rogue. This might refresh your memories about early PC games. All in all, I get the feeling that bosses are pretty much a console phenomenon.
LoveMe2Times 22:48, 15 Jun 2004 (UTC)
To be honest, I don't make a distinction between computer games, console games, video games and arcade games. They're all the same thing to me. This argument has been had several times on Wikipedia already, and I don't think it's going to be settled any time soon. :)
But in any case, bosses are certainly not a console phenomenon, any more than, say, parallax scrolling is. Bosses are a fundamental gameplay concept. In fact, I've heard a complaint made before that bosses in arcade games are just a sneaky way of killing off the player to make him put more money into the machine. (Although I don't agree with this.)
I'm not terribly familiar with early text adventures, but I doubt they have things that we would call bosses. Text adventures are more about adventure than fighting.
Another thought has occurred to me: how old is the walk-along-and-hit-people genre? (The only game I can think of as an example is Golden Axe, but I know there are loads more.) I'm pretty sure that kind of game naturally lent itself to having bosses. Spottedowl 01:31, 16 Jun 2004 (UTC)
That'd be the side-crolling beat 'em up genre; Kung Fu has already been cited there. -Sean Curtin 02:29, 16 Jun 2004 (UTC)


Ok, I found a great site to research this a little: Arcade History. Looking through some entries, it seems as though 1982 was a real banner year at the arcade: Dig-Dug, Q-Bert, Pole Position, Moon Patrol, Joust, and Burger Time are all famous. Significantly, Xevious was also released in 82, and it definitely had an episodic level structure, although I don't remember whether it has bosses. Also, sounds like it was already innovating:
"Xevious was among the first games to use pre-rendered graphics and was the first vertically scrolling shooter to allow you to target both land-based and airborne enemies."
1983 saw Dragon's Lair come out--did it have bosses? It was obviously revolutionary in other ways. For point of reference, 1983 also saw the original Mario Bros, Sinistar, Spy Hunter, and Star Wars.
1984 looks like things might be coming together. 1942 came out, and I'm almost positive it had bosses. Kung-Fu comes out, pretty much inventing the beat-em-up genre. Interesting side note I never knew: apparently it's based on a Jackie Chan movie, "Wheels on Meals"! Legend of Kage is also 1984 (wow, I thought it must have been later since it had much nicer graphics). Punch Out!!! had bosses, of sorts, at least in the NES Mike Tyson version where Mike himself was a "boss." The arcade version was 1984.
By 1985 the idea is used several places: Gradius, Gun Smoke, Ghosts'n'Goblins, Space Harrier and surely others in the arcades (did Rush'n'Attack have bosses?), and Super Mario Bros on the NES.
As a note on the beat-em-up genre, Double Dragon in 1987 extended the ideas from Kung-Fu substantially and established the genre as we still know it today. Bad Dudes came out in 88 (man, the NES version ruined that game! but the arcade was great :), Golden Axe didn't come along unil 89, and I think Final Fight in 90.
So overall, if somebody can confirm or deny that the arcade version of Xevious had bosses, that would give us a good start. To be really academic about it, somebody should still check through all those less popular games that none of us remember. Thanks for the input everybody-
LoveMe2Times 07:48, 16 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Wow, I never even knew what Xevious was before. That throws my entire 'history of the scrolling shooter' out of whack. :)
Xevious apparently did have bosses. I'm not sure if it had different bosses or whether the same one kept recurring, as in Gradius. The boss I've seen is a large, disc-shaped mothership. Nonetheless, the boss concept is definitely there. Spottedowl 18:20, 16 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Yeah, Xevious is pretty cool, and I had no idea it came out so early, cause the console ports came out much later (and it was sufficiently ahead of it's time that it didn't look old 3 years later!). This is a great place to find out more information about NES games. Checking there, I found that 1942 did have bosses (I trust porting to the NES didn't change this aspect), although I think they're all the same, and they're not every level.
I guess my next question is: Have there been any significant innovations in bosses since 1988? Or has the boss formula been set in stone for 15 years?! I guess street fighter type fighting games changed it a little: bosses come only at the end of the game, since there are no "levels" exactly.
Finally, I'm not sure I'm confident enough yet to update the article, but I'm seeing the basic timeline as follows:
1982: Xevious ==> 1984: 1942, Kung-Fu ==> 1985: Gradius, Gun Smoke, SMB, and others ==> 1986: bosses everywhere ==> 1987: Double Dragon, MegaMan, Legend of Zelda demonstrate mini-bosses, bosses with specific weaknesses/vulnerabilities. Note, too, that I'm referring to arcade version dates where applicable (as most of these were ported to NES and other consoles).
LoveMe2Times 08:05, 17 Jun 2004 (UTC)
I've heard of a boss in a Mega Man game that you are not supposed to be able to beat. You are required to fail to make the game continue and the story unfold. If you beat him (which I've heard is posible, thogh very hard) the game bugs out completely. Sounds quite innovative. Can anyone confirm this?
--62.181.79.151 10:59, 23 Jul 2004 (UTC)


If anyone is interested, here is how the Boss was created.

There were other Dungeons and Dragons type games on Plato. A player started on the outside of the dungeon and went in was attacked by monsters. If you got out of the dungeon, you kept the gold you had accumulated. Your player was saved from one day to the next, from one week to the next. If you died, then you lost everything. The dungeons had a finite size, and people would play the game for hours (which suprised us) and sooner or later would go into every corner of the dungeon. The character got stronger by gathering magic swords, etc. At some point, the character would be so strong that he could kill everything, at which point the player would lose interest in the game and quit.

We noticed that people created characters and spent time naming them and getting "attached" to them, and kind of treated them like a person. So, we asked something like, "Suppose that the character is real. Why would a real person keep going into the same dungeon over and over again?" And, then the answer was simple: To bring out something really spectacular.

So, then we said, "Hey, what if the player had to 'bring out an orb'?" And then we said, "Yeah, but if the orb is worth anything, then something really neat has to defend it." So, we put the orb into a "treasure room" and decided to stack a bunch of smaller monsters on top of a really big monster in the treasure room directly in front of "the orb". The character had to defeat 30 smaller monsters before confronting the "Golden Dragon"--a monster with probably 1,000,000 hit points. If he defeated the Golden Dragon, then he got the orb. He would then have to fight his way out of the dungeon.

In retrospect, what we did was create a video game that was a story. It had a beginning (the character initially enters the dungeon and builds up strenght), a middle (the character explores the dungeon), a climax (he finds the orb and battles the monsters, before confronting the Golden Dragon), a denoument (the character, weakened by the battle, staggers back through the dungeon, avoiding monsters and finally to safety), and an end (the charcter after leaving the dungeon with the orb is enshrined in a hall of fame). We did this in 1974-1975.

Plato was way ahead of its time. The first video games (consoles or arcade) in the late 1970s did not have a boss. To challenge the player, the game simply did either "more" (put more of the same enemy on the screen) or made the enemy move "faster". The first boss in a console/arcade game was either in Battlezone! (a 'supertank') or Tempest.

Text games (Zork, Collosal Cave) did not have a boss. They were simply a collection of word games.

[edit] Etymology of the word "Boss"

As far as I know, the first game to explicitly list an end-level, stronger opponent as "Boss" is the arcade game "Renegade" (which was ported to several other platforms) in 1985. In Japan, the gangs depicted in the game were called "Bousouzoku". So, a bit of japgrish translation did the magic. -- Tincho

"Japgrish"?!? WTF. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 12.180.154.130 (talk) 21:40, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

I have a related question that isn't addressed in the History. Where did the title "Boss" come from (as applied to video games)? How did video game Bosses come to be called "Bosses"? I can only guess that there may have been some popular video game in which the end boss was explicitly identified as being the "Boss" of the henchman. An alternative theory I've heard is that "Boss" was somehow imported from Kung Fu movies tradition-- the lyrics to the 1974 song "Kung Fu Fighting" contains a reference to fighting a Boss:

There was funky Billie Jim and little Sammy Chong
He said,"Here comes the big boss, let's get it on!"
I had always assumed this came from the 1971 Bruce Lee film The Big Boss. Do we have Bruce Lee to thank for video game bosses?

A related question is, when did the video game term "Boss" enter common usage? I seem to remember using it aroud '85 or so, but that could be false memory. -Alecmconroy 10:34, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

I always thought "BOSS" had its roots in Kung fu movie genre, but I never could find anything to substantiate it. Infact I would even go as far as to say that the word "Boss" in videogames is directly related to a Bruce Lee movie, The Big Boss (1971). It was the actors 1st major film and led to him becoming an international star. But thats just my theory anyway :) --nocturnal omnivorous canine 23:13, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
When I had an Amstrad CPC back in the 80s/ early 90s, the term "End of level guardian" seemed to be the main one in use, at least in the Amstrad Action magazine. --Wardog


I would like to add to the part of the article discussing "Unbeatable" bosses. You list Yggdrasil from Tales of Symphonia as a truly unbeatable boss. However, he belongs to the article of "insanely difficult bosses you are supposed to lose to". As proof, here is a page with of video of him being beaten. Just search for "Yggdrasil" http://www.holystar.ch.vu/

[edit] boss backlash?? wha??

If you can't find anything about a supposed "boss backlash" using a search engine, it probably isn't important enough to list on wikipedia. Johnnyfog 20:27, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] WP:VG Assessment

This post is in response to a request at the videogames project for reassessment. I've left the the article rating as is. Here's some suggestions:

  • Please find better sources than other wikis - if it's user submitted and not explicitly marked as edited by a known quantity (an expert/pro) then it's unreliable.
  • Overview should go before history.
  • There's a tight history which drops off before discussing boss evolution and an overview which is all over the place - editors need to nail down exactly what needs to be covered in the article and set up a framework for expansion. For instance, the first paragraph of overview flows from a basic description right into Shadow of the Colossus. That game certainly needs mentioning somewhere, but not right at the beginning of the overview.
  • Does boss rush need a section to itself? It's a single element of boss-focused play, for instance having access to timed boss fights from the main menu. Games can repeat some bosses, but not necessarily all of them and not necessarily all at once. At most it seems like a footnote within another section.

Hope that's of some help, it's a tricky subject to try and build an article from but your work is appreciated. Someoneanother 15:41, 16 April 2008 (UTC)