Real time strategy

Origins

Tim Barry in May 1981 described in InfoWorld a multiplayer strategy space game with "real-time response" that ran on an IBM System/370 Model 168 at a large San Francisco Bay Area company. Ars Technica traces the genre's roots back to Utopia (1982), citing it as the "birth of a genre", with a "real-time element" that was "virtually unheard of", thus making it "arguably the earliest ancestor of the real-time strategy genre". According to Ars Technica, Utopia was a turn-based strategy game with hybrid elements that ran "in real-time but events happened on a regular turn-based cycle." According to Brett Weiss, Utopia is often cited as "the first real-time strategy game." According to Matt Barton and Bill Loguidice, Utopia "helped set the template" for the genre, but has "more in common with SimCity than it does with Dune II and later RTS games." Barton also cites Cytron Masters (1982), saying it was "one of the first (if not the first [emphasis in the original]) real-time strategy game." On the other hand, Scott Sharkey of 1UP argues that, while Cytron Masters "attempted real time strategy", it was "much more tactical than strategic" due to "the inability to construct units or manage resources". Byte in December 1982 published as an Apple IItype-in programCosmic Conquest. The winner of the magazine's annual Game Contest, the author described it as a "single-player game of real-time action and strategic decision making". The magazine described it as "a real-time space strategy game". The game has elements of resource management and wargaming.