What do you think of when you hear the word “camera perspective” in relation to computer and video games? You probably curse spontaneously about a title that annoyed you because of its confusing camera. But if you had confronted a player with the subject in the early 1980s, you would probably only have gotten perplexed looks. In fact, many games back then simply relied on a simple yet functional side view that was particularly well-suited to the dominant jump-and-run genre. Nintendo’s iconic plumber was seen sideways in both Donkey Kong (1981) and Super Mario Bros. (1985), sprinting across platforms, climbing ladders and jumping chasms. The graphics were completely two-dimensional and had no spatial depth. Despite this limitation, the perspective was good enough for demanding game and world design, which Nintendo itself proved with other top hits like Metroid (1986) or Super Mario Bros. 3 (1988).
Atari’s classic Pitfall! (1982) also looked at first like a hopping game from a classic side perspective and without any great frills. But if you take a closer look, you will notice the wide path with the oval pond over which the player had to jump. You really shouldn’t have seen this from a fixed side view, which is why designer David Crane showed it diagonally from above.
The so-called parallax scrolling, which game developers used more and more from the end of the 80s, provided even more depth in the truest sense of the word: the image was divided into several layers that moved at different speeds and simulated a spatial effect.
In this way, the player could distinguish between foreground and background, which was exploited in particular by colorful action games such as Shadow of the Beast (1989) and Jim Power (1992).
The first final boss of Battletoads (1991) is a good and rare example of the so-called second-person perspective.
Source: Rare/plassma media agency
Mind you, in all these games you could only move sideways and up and down to a limited extent. Only classic graphic adventures from King’s Quest (from 1984) to The Secret of Monkey Island (from 1990) to Deponia (from 2012) granted significantly more freedom of movement because you were also allowed to march “forwards” or “backwards”.
The view from above
It looks completely different with the bird’s eye view: As the name suggests, it shows the game from above – as if a camera were hovering over the game world and pointed straight down. However, this perspective was not used very often in this rigid form because it usually led to very abstract results.
In the lawnmower game Hover Bovver (1983) or the classic football game Microprose Soccer (1988), for example, you could only see the round heads, while a few arms flapped back and forth at the side. The British developer Creative Reality did it much better with its science fiction adventure Dreamweb (1994), in which the dark game story was given the right flair with amazingly well drawn animations.
Otherwise, many games use optical tricks from a bird’s eye view and show central elements such as figures or building facades from the front.
Although this technique is used in many Japanese role-playing classics such as Dragon Quest (from 1986) or final fantasy (from 1987), it had its origins much earlier, more precisely in the Ultima series (from 1981). There, too, the makers showed the game characters and opponents from the side, while the game world itself was shown from above.
Furthermore, director Richard Garriott restricted the player’s field of vision from Ultima 3 (1983), so that he could not see over mountains and from Ultima 5 (1988) even needed a torch to see more than two or three steps away at night be able.
Strategy games benefit the most from the distanced view, because after all it provided a great overview of the battlefield in Command & Conquer (from 1995), for example.
Also from far away, the mission “Death Comes From Above” in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007) took place, in which you took on the role of a thermal vision operator. He observed the theater of war from a safe distance, aimed at enemy soldiers and fired one cowardly rocket after the other at the push of a button.
The third dimension
From the bird’s-eye view, it’s only a short jump to one of the most controversial forms of representation of all: we’re talking about the isometric perspective, or iso-perspective for short. In the 1980s, it was considered the panacea for three-dimensional game worlds, because both the first-person and the shoulder perspective were still in their infancy and completely overwhelmed the hardware of the time.
Just like its direct predecessor, Grand Theft Auto 4 benefits from the shoulder perspective, which makes fast and accident-free car journeys possible in the first place.
Source: Rockstar Games/plassma media agency
Thanks to the iso perspective, you could see every room from above, so that all objects had a width, depth and height, even on weak 8-bit home computers such as the Commodore 64 or the Amstrad CPC.
However, the form of representation also had a huge disadvantage: due to the fixed camera, one could never be sure whether two platforms to be seen side by side were at the same height or offset from one another.
Among the pioneers of Perspective were the Englishmen Ultimate, who renamed themselves Rare in the mid-1990s. With Knight Lore (1984), the developer conceived the first officially recognized action-adventure from the iso perspective and celebrated such a great success with it that the games market was flooded with numerous imitators.
Among the most popular were the Amstrad CPC comic adaptation Batman (1986), the puzzle-heavy Head over Heels (1987), and the audiovisually spectacular The Last Ninja (1987).
A close relative of the iso perspective is the cavalier perspective, which also shows the game world rigidly from above and uses a different vanishing point. It’s not in the center, but in a corner of the screen. The result: you usually have a clear view of the front wall of a building, while one side wall slopes backwards and the other is completely covered.
