Raid on Bungeling Bay was the first video game designed by Will Wright. It was published

Video game publisher

A video game publisher is a company that publishes video games that they have either developed internally or have had developed by a video game developer....

 by Brøderbund

Brøderbund

Brøderbund Software, Inc. was an American maker of computer games, educational software and The Print Shop productivity tools. It was best known as the original creator and publisher of the popular Carmen Sandiego games. The company was founded in Eugene, Oregon, but moved to San Rafael,...

 for the Commodore 64

Commodore 64

The Commodore 64 is an 8-bit home computer introduced by Commodore International in January 1982.Volume production started in the spring of 1982, with machines being released on to the market in August at a price of US$595...

 in 1984 and the NES

Nintendo Entertainment System

The Nintendo Entertainment System is an 8-bit video game console that was released by Nintendo in North America during 1985, in Europe during 1986 and Australia in 1987...

 and MSX

MSX

MSX was the name of a standardized home computer architecture in the 1980s conceived by Kazuhiko Nishi, then Vice-president at Microsoft Japan and Director at ASCII Corporation...

 computers in 1985. The Commodore 64 version was published in the UK by Ariolasoft

Ariolasoft

Ariolasoft GmbH, later known as United Software, was a German computer game developer, publisher and distributor. It started as the software subsidiary of Ariola Records...

, and the NES version was ported by Hudson Soft

Hudson Soft

, formally known as , is a majority-owned subsidiary of Konami Corporation is a Japanese electronic entertainment publisher headquartered in the Midtown Tower in Tokyo Midtown, Akasaka, Minato, Tokyo, Japan, with an additional office in the Hudson Building in Sapporo. It was founded on May 18, 1973...

.

Apart from offering a 2D

2D computer graphics

2D computer graphics is the computer-based generation of digital images—mostly from two-dimensional models and by techniques specific to them...

 overhead view of terrain which was a bit more complex than in other games, Raid on Bungeling Bay was basically a simple war zone shoot 'em up

Shoot 'em up

Shoot 'em up is a subgenre of shooter video games. In a shoot 'em up, the player controls a lone character, often in a spacecraft or aircraft, shooting large numbers of enemies while dodging their attacks. The genre in turn encompasses various types or subgenres and critics differ on exactly what...

. The player controlled a helicopter

Helicopter

A helicopter is a type of rotorcraft in which lift and thrust are supplied by one or more engine-driven rotors. This allows the helicopter to take off and land vertically, to hover, and to fly forwards, backwards, and laterally...

 that launches from an aircraft carrier

Aircraft carrier

An aircraft carrier is a warship designed with a primary mission of deploying and recovering aircraft, acting as a seagoing airbase. Aircraft carriers thus allow a naval force to project air power worldwide without having to depend on local bases for staging aircraft operations...

 to bomb six factories scattered across islands on a small planetoid occupied by the Bungeling Empire

Bungeling Empire

The Bungeling Empire was a villainous organization that the players were said to be pitted against in several different games created by Brøderbund.-Summary:...

 (the usual villains in Brøderbund games), while fending off escalating counterattacks by gun turrets, fighter jets, guided missile

Guided Missile

Guided Missile is a London based independent record label set up by Paul Kearney in 1994.Guided Missile has always focused on 'the underground', preferring to put out a steady flow of releases and developing the numerous GM events around London and beyond....

s, and a battleship

Battleship

A battleship is a large armored warship with a main battery consisting of heavy caliber guns. Battleships were larger, better armed and armored than cruisers and destroyers. As the largest armed ships in a fleet, battleships were used to attain command of the sea and represented the apex of a...

. There was also a hidden island for the player to reload on. Failure meant that the Bungeling Empire develops a war machine to take over the planet Earth

Earth

Earth is the third planet from the Sun, and the densest and fifth-largest of the eight planets in the Solar System. It is also the largest of the Solar System's four terrestrial planets...

. Players had to attack its infrastructure

Infrastructure

Infrastructure is basic physical and organizational structures needed for the operation of a society or enterprise, or the services and facilities necessary for an economy to function...

 while defending the aircraft carrier

Aircraft carrier

An aircraft carrier is a warship designed with a primary mission of deploying and recovering aircraft, acting as a seagoing airbase. Aircraft carriers thus allow a naval force to project air power worldwide without having to depend on local bases for staging aircraft operations...

 which served as home base.

The game offers an interesting insight into the design style of Will Wright, who would later go on to design SimCity

SimCity

SimCity is a critically acclaimed city-building simulation video game, first released in 1989, and designed by Will Wright. SimCity was Maxis' first product, which has since been ported into various personal computers and game consoles, and spawned several sequels including SimCity 2000 in 1994,...

. The islands and factories in the game behaved in a sophisticated manner which closely resembled SimCity. Over time, the factories would grow and develop new technologies to use against the player. There were also visible signs of interdependency among the islands, such as supply boats moving between them. In order to win the game, the player must prevent the escalation by bombing all the factories as quickly as possible, keeping them from advancing their technology. If left alone for too long, the factories would create enough new weaponry to overwhelm the player.

Legacy

Wright continued to develop the editor for the game as a personal toy because he enjoyed it so much. He researched urban planning

Urban planning

Urban planning incorporates areas such as economics, design, ecology, sociology, geography, law, political science, and statistics to guide and ensure the orderly development of settlements and communities....

 and realised that others might enjoy constructing and building cities themselves. The result was a fancier simulation that eventually became SimCity.

External links

• Profile at Video Game Rebirth (includes original promotional text)