The Video Game Critic

Anyone who has been playing video games since the early days and beyond has seen a rich variety of themes and settings. But it seems that the two most dominant are "Spaaaaace..." and "Dungeon!" which rather begs the question, which is the most prevalent theme in all of video game history?

Is it even possible to know? Arcade, consoles, indies and so many old game libraries.
How well do you know gaming history?

Another way to do this might be to simply say, "If you had to guess..." (poll)

There is at least one game that seems to embody the question, "Space Dungeon" for the Atari 5200 (1983)
Box art - screenshots - main page

Edit: Added "War Zone" to the poll (thanks Voor) as this is a theme that is far more common than originally considered. Also note the ability for users to freely change their vote as new information becomes available.

Admin note: If possible, can the poll question text be made a lighter color?

You are tight Tortimer, we prob will never know. But considering in the early to mid 80's every third game was in space, I'd bet on the space setting.

James and Mike did a special of Atari games that started with Space or Star. It was definitely a lot.

If we are talking modern games, you may want to include "war zone" in the mix.

I'll have to look that one up. I know when AVGN did his intellivision/colecovision review, he commented on all the games that had space in the title. Space hawk, space armada, etc. Even some modern games have space in the title, like Looney tune space race and dead space.

I voted space. Off the top of my head, I can't think of many games with dungeon in the title.

I voted for space, but given how many rpg's incorporate dungeons I think dungeons are well represented as well over the decades.

tortimer wrote: Admin note: If possible, can the poll question text be made a lighter color?

I apologize. The good news is its in a lighter color, but the bad news is that any change to the poll question reset the counters.

For the future, you can used the color code, {color=#80FFBF}{/color}, but change the curly braces to brackets. Also, I won't change any more polls after posting. Man. I could not undo that either. Sorry again.

So - Everyone - Could you please revote! Its the Chicago way to vote more than once.

I vote space. I can't think of space and video games without mentioning SpaceHawk!

Alright so I pulled out a small sample over the weekend just to see what might happen. The Commodore 64 felt like a decent place to start. Now again the question is not so much about genre or title but about the theme or dominant setting of a given title. Here's what came out.

Space
Arkanoid, Armalyte (2DSh), Atomic Robo-Kid (2DSh), Blood Money (2DSh), Centauri Alliance, Cybernoid (2DSh), Delta (2DSh), Elite, Enforcer (2DSh), Exile, Gyruss (2DSh), Hard n Heavy, Katakis (2DSh), Kosmic Kanga (2DSh), Mega-Apocalypse (2DSh), Moonfall, Paradroid, Parallax, Project Firestart, R-Type (2DSh), Retrograde (2DSh), Rimrunner (2DSh), Space Taxi, Supremacy, Trailblazer, Uridium (2DSh), Wizball (2DSh), Zaxxon (2.5DSh)

Dungeon
Bard's Tale, Champions of Krynn, Centauri Alliance, Curse of the Azure Bonds, Death Knights of Krynn, Dragon Wars, Fairlight: A Prelude, Gauntlet, Legend of Blacksilver, Pool of Radiance, Rings of Medusa, Secret of the Silver Blades, Telengard, Times of Lore, Ultima, Wizard of War

War Zone
1942, 1943, After Burner, Airborne Ranger, Beach-Head, Commando, Contra, Destroyer, F-15 Strike Eagle, Falcon Patrol, Green Beret, Gunboat, Gunship, Platoon, Rambo, Silent Service, The Train: Escape to Normandy

As for the numbers... we get

Space - 28
War Zone - 17
Dungeon - 16

The biggest surprise to me wasn't that Space beat out Dungeon, but that so too did War Zone. Although, I wasn't sure (given the source) whether this was a complete list of the entire Commodore 64 library. And of course there's always a little bit of wiggle room in determining the theme as you can't always judge by the title of the game or even the box art.

Along the way however it became clear what was contributing to such a high number of space themed titles and that was of course the always prolific genre of 2D scrolling shooters.
What happens if you set those aside?

War Zone - 17
Dungeon - 16
Space - 12

Yikes. But we can't be discriminating against a genre simply because it's common right? Probably not. But, bear in mind this is only one system, and an older one at that. It could well be that, for technical reasons, scrolling shooters were simply easier to program and therefore more of them were developed during this era.
Or, perhaps 2D shooters were just a very popular genre back in the day.

What would we find with a larger sample I wonder, maybe taken from later generation consoles...