Vertically scrolling video game
A top-down perspective with continuous vertical background movement.
A vertically scrolling video game is a game in which the player views the field from a top-down perspective while the background scrolls from top to bottom (or less often bottom to top), creating the illusion of forward motion. This design sets a pace for play and requires quick reactions to a changing environment. While used in racing, skiing, and pinball simulations, the genre of vertically scrolling shooters has made it a fundamental design element.
Quick Facts
- First known game
- Speed Race (Taito, November 1974)
- Early driving example
- Hi-way (Atari, 1975)
- Early non-driving example
- Atari Football (1978)
- Early pinball example
- Pinball Quest (1989)
Facts from the source article.
History
Vertically scrolling video games first appeared in the 1970s, and most of them were driving games. The earliest known example is Taito's Speed Race, which came out in November 1974. Atari released Hi-way eleven months later, in 1975. Soon after, driving games began mixing vertical, horizontal, and diagonal scrolling, which made the purely vertical style less notable.
Atari's Super Bug (1977) and Fire Truck (1978) both feature multidirectional scrolling. Sega's Monaco GP (1979) is a racing game that scrolls only vertically, but it does so in color. The first non-driving game to use vertical scrolling was Atari Football (1978). Scrolling allowed the entire playing field to be shown without needing to fit everything on screen at once.
Many later sports titles kept this purely vertical display, like TV Sports: Football (1988), while others zoomed in and added some horizontal scrolling. Skiing was another early genre that relied on vertical scrolling. Street Racer (1977), a launch title for the Atari Video Computer System, includes a slalom event where gates move down an otherwise blank playfield to create the illusion of vertical movement. Magnavox published Alpine Skiing! in 1979 for the Odyssey².
In 1980, Activision released Bob Whitehead's Skiing for the Atari 2600, and Mattel put out a different slalom game, also called Skiing, for the Intellivision. Taito's arcade game Alpine Ski followed in 1981, offering three modes. The 1980 Nichibutsu arcade game Crazy Climber has the player climbing a vertically scrolling skyscraper. Spider-Man for the Atari 2600 also uses vertical scrolling as the hero ascends a building.
Data East's 1981 arcade title Flash Boy came in two versions: one that scrolled sideways and one that scrolled vertically. Pinball Quest (1989) and Devil's Crush (1990) are early pinball video games with vertically scrolling playfields, a format that became popular in the 1990s. Scrolling solved the problem of fitting a naturally vertical game onto a horizontal monitor without shrinking the graphics. Namco's 1979 fixed shooter Galaxian uses a starfield background to suggest vertical movement, as does Ozma Wars from later that year.
The 1981 arcade game Pleiades is a fixed shooter that scrolls vertically between stages and then scrolls continuously during a docking sequence.
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