Lineage
Influences
RAD Tactics did not come out of nowhere. It comes from a run of games made between about 1994 and 2004, when a handful of studios worked out how to put a small squad under one player’s command and make every order cost something. Those games are still the high-water mark, and most of them are out of print, unpatched, or playable today only because volunteers kept them alive.
That is the history worth knowing: not nostalgia, but a set of solved problems. Each page below is what the game is, what it did first, and what we take from it.
The lineage
- 1994X-COM: UFO DefenseA 1994 alien invasion game that wrapped a global campaign around turn-based squad combat
- 1998Commandos: Behind Enemy LinesSix specialists, enemy bases too strong to fight, and guards whose eyesight is drawn on the screen
- 1999Jagged Alliance 2A squad tactics game about hiring mercenaries and liberating an island one sector at a time
- 2001Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of SteelPost-apocalyptic squad tactics that you can play turn by turn or in continuous time
Why the history matters
Every one of these games solved a problem a studio starting today would otherwise solve badly, or not at all: how to show a plan failing, how to make a miss feel fair, how to let a player pause without killing the tension, how to lose someone and keep playing.
They were also made under constraints that no longer exist. Small teams, fixed budgets, and no patching once the disc shipped, which bought a density of design decisions per minute of play that modern games rarely match. We read them as reference material. We keep them written up here because a genre that forgets its own work has to start over.