A short history of the isometric tactics game

Isometric means the camera looks down at a fixed angle and never rotates, and lines that are parallel in the world stay parallel on the screen. A box at the far corner of the map is drawn exactly the same size as a box at your feet. There is no vanishing point and no perspective, which is why the view looks slightly wrong and reads so well.

Say isometric to anyone who plays tactics games and they will name X-COM, Fallout, Jagged Alliance, Commandos. That is not a coincidence, but it is also not a design law. The view and the genre have separate histories, and they only overlapped for about fifteen years.

Zaxxon (Sega, 1982) is usually named as the first isometric game in arcades, and it was selling the novelty of depth: you could see how high your ship was flying over the wall you were about to hit. Q*bert came out the same year on the same slant.

On home computers the step that mattered was Ant Attack, written by Sandy White and published by Quicksilva in 1983 for the ZX Spectrum. Zaxxon and Q*bert used the projection to draw a scene; Ant Attack used it to give the player a third axis to move along, up and down as well as across. White claimed it was the first true isometric 3D game, and the claim has held up well enough that nobody has mounted much of an argument against it.

A year later the Stamper brothers at Ultimate Play the Game built an engine they called Filmation and shipped Knight Lore (1984) on it, with rooms of isometric blocks joined by archways. It drew more complicated spaces than anything before it and set the template they reused for Alien 8 (1985) and Pentagram (1986).

All of this was a workaround. The hardware could not draw real three-dimensional space, so the projection drew the appearance of it instead, using flat sprites that could be stacked. Better still, every tile could be drawn once by an artist and reused thousands of times, because it looked identical wherever it sat on the map. That is the whole economic argument for isometric art, and it is why a small team could make a large world.

The other half of the story is two brothers in England. Julian and Nick Gollop were making turn-based squad games through the eighties with no isometric view at all: a flat grid seen from directly above, which is all a tactics game strictly needs. Laser Squad (Target Games, 1988) is the one that set the pattern. A handful of named soldiers, action points spent one at a time on moving or shooting or opening a door, and line of sight that decided what each soldier could see for themselves rather than what the player could see.

That was the genre, fully formed, in a top-down grid. The slanted camera was not part of it.

Then the two halves met. X-COM: UFO Defense, known in Europe as UFO: Enemy Unknown (Mythos Games and MicroProse, 1994), began life as a sequel to Laser Squad. It kept the action points and the per-soldier sight, drew them on an isometric grid with buildings you could see into and walls you could shoot through, and wrapped the whole thing in a second game about a base, a budget and a world map. It is the moment the view and the genre became the same thing in everyone's head.

From 1993 to 1999 nearly every idea the genre still uses got built and shipped. Syndicate (Bullfrog Productions, 1993) ran four cyborgs around a fixed isometric city in real time. Jagged Alliance (Madlab Software, published by Sir-Tech, 1995) put mercenaries you hired by name and personality on the grid, and Jagged Alliance 2 (Sir-Tech Canada, 1999) turned that into a campaign to take a country back one sector at a time. Fallout (Interplay, 1997) proved the view carried a role-playing game as well as a fight. Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines (Pyro Studios, 1998) dropped turns entirely and drew every guard's vision as a cone on the ground, which made stealth a thing you could read instead of guess at.

By the end of it the parts list was settled, and it has barely changed:

Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel (Micro Forté, 2001) is close to the last of the classic run, and it was already hedging: it shipped with turn-based and real-time modes because nobody was sure which way the market had gone. Silent Storm (Nival Interactive, 2003) answered the technical question instead, rebuilding the genre in rotatable 3D with walls and floors that came apart properly, and it is still the high-water mark for destruction in a tactics game.

After that, close to a decade of very little. Two things caused it. Graphics hardware got good enough that real three-dimensional space was cheap, so the isometric projection lost the only reason it had ever existed; and the money moved to shooters and to consoles, where a turn-based game with a mouse-driven grid had nowhere to go. The genre did not die, it went to the margins, kept alive by a handful of small European studios and by mod communities. The 1.13 project for Jagged Alliance 2 was still being worked on years after its publisher had ceased to exist.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown (Firaxis Games, 2012) was a genuine commercial risk: a remake of an eighteen-year-old game, turn-based, with permanent death, aimed at consoles as well as PC. It worked, and it settled the argument about whether an audience existed.

Firaxis also quietly unpicked the weld. XCOM has a free camera you can swing around, not a fixed isometric one, and it still has the grid, the action economy and the sight lines. The genre turned out not to need the projection at all.

What followed came mostly from crowdfunding and from small studios. Shadowrun Returns (Harebrained Schemes, 2013) asked Kickstarter for 400,000 dollars and was given 1,836,447, which told every other studio with an old idea that the audience was reachable directly. Then Invisible, Inc. (Klei Entertainment, 2015), Battle Brothers (Overhype Studios, 2017), Into the Breach (Subset Games, 2018), Phoenix Point (Snapshot Games, 2019, Julian Gollop again), and eventually a third Jagged Alliance (Haemimont Games, 2023) from a different studio in a different country twenty-four years after the second.

Nothing technical requires the slanted camera now. It persists because it is the clearest way to show a player what they need in order to give an order.

A fixed overhead angle shows cover, elevation, distance and who can see whom in one glance, with nothing hidden behind anything else and no camera for the player to fight. Parallel lines staying parallel means two squares the same distance apart look the same distance apart anywhere on the map, so you can count tiles by eye. And because there is no perspective, a character at the back of the screen is as readable as one at the front.

A tactics game is a game of reading a situation correctly and then paying for your reading. Any camera that makes the situation harder to read is taking something away. That is the argument, and it is the only one left.

RAD Tactics is a squad tactics game for PC, in development in Unity, and it runs in real time with the ability to pause. So it takes the Commandos answer to the clock rather than the X-COM one, and the parts list above is the inheritance it is working from. Beyond that there is nothing announced, and we are not going to describe a game you cannot see yet.