War of the Worlds

War of the Worlds was a monochrome vector arcade game created by Tim Skelly of Cinematronics in 1982.

The game was basically a shooting game where the player controls a tank object at the bottom of the screen and shoots towards the top of the screen at descending Tripods robots in a first person perspective. The player only has movement, cannon fire and shields to protect them from the Tripods' lasers. It is believed to be based on the H. G. Wells story of the same name.

The game was developed as a 3D version of Space Invaders but overcame the poor reception it received at the 1982 AMOA show. It was never put into wide production and a little less than ten actual units were made. Though different, the game was deemed too easy by some and games that are too easy do not receive much play. In addition to that the hardware was not fast enough to run the graphics at a good rate. The game experienced lags that made its control somewhat difficult and not exciting to play.

On an interesting note, the game while it debuted on black and white vector monitors, was actually written for a color vector monitor.