RTS Origins: Where does it come from?
The RTS genre was birthed into a world of a post Cold War era, when the concept of personal computers were fresh from some of earliest mass market iterations by Apple and Microsoft, and when video games were still on the mend from the 1983 crash and piggybacking off the success of Nintendo's early consoles.
The RTS genre emerged in those times as a digital evolution of traditional strategy and war-based games, fulfilling the fantasy of commanding armies dynamically and live without physical limitations. It is a subgenre that diverged from both tabletop games and their digital turn-based strategy counterparts like the 4X genre exemplified by Sid Meier's Civilization due to their pacing and abandonment of turns to favor live, simultaneous gameplay as core mechanic.
Gaming historians debate the genre's exact origins, with several titles between 1979-1985 showing early RTS elements. Herzog Zwei (1989) demonstrated primitive resource management and unit control, but none matched (nor was defined) as an RTS game until the release of Dune II in 1992.
