Vertically scrolling video game

A vertically scrolling video game or vertical scroller is a video game in which the player views the field of play principally from a top-down perspective, while the background scrolls from the top of the screen to the bottom (or, less often, from the bottom to the top) to create the illusion that the player character is moving in the game world.^[1]

Continuous vertical scrolling is designed to suggest the appearance of constant forward motion, such as driving. The game sets a pace for play, and the player must react quickly to the changing environment.

The first vertically scrolling video game was Taito's Speed Race, released in November 1974.

History

In the 1970s, most vertically scrolling games involved driving. Atari's Hi-way was released eleven months after Speed Race, in 1975. Rapidly there were driving games that combined vertical, horizontal, and even diagonal scrolling, making the "vertical only" distinction less important. Both Atari's Super Bug (1977) and Fire Truck (1978) featured driving with multidirectional scrolling. Sega's Monaco GP (1979) was a vertical-only scrolling racing game, but in color.

Another concept to make use of vertical scrolling was skiing. Street Racer (1977), one of the launch titles for the Atari 2600, includes a slalom game in which the gates move down an otherwise empty playfield to give the impression of vertical scrolling. Magnavox published Alpine Skiing! in 1979 for their Odyssey² game console.^[2] In 1980, the same year Activision published Skiing, Bob Whitehead's slalom skiing simulation for the Atari 2600, Mattel published a different slalom game, also called Skiing, for their Intellivision console. In 1981, Taito published Alpine Ski, a more technologically sophisticated arcade game with three modes of play: an alpine ski course with various obstacles, a slalom course, and a ski jumping ramp.

1980's Crazy Climber (Nichibutsu, arcade) had the player scaling a vertically scrolling skyscraper.

Shooters

The 1981 arcade game Pleiads was a fixed-shooter that vertically scrolled as a transition between stages and then continuously scrolled during a docking sequence. 1981 also saw the release of true vertical scrollers Space Odyssey (Sega, arcade)^[3] and Atari 8-bit computer game Caverns of Mars. Caverns of Mars followed the visual style and some of the gameplay of the horizontally-scrolling Scramble arcade game released earlier in the year. The Atari computer had hardware support for vertical, as well as horizontal, scrolling.^[4]

In 1982, Namco's Xevious established the template for many vertically scrolling shooters to come: a ship flying over a landscape with both air and ground targets. That same year, Carol Shaw's River Raid was a highly-rated vertically scrolling shooter for the Atari 2600. By 1984, games like Capcom's 1942 added floating power-ups and end of level bosses to the standard formula.

See also

• Side-scrolling video game
• Parallax scrolling
• Video game genres
• Video game graphics

References