How about we have some videogame trivia?

[A Black Falcon]

Technically, no.

You see, to send an entire army down to your opponents base in one move, you had to collect all your units together (in a line would make it easier) and then from the very last unit, tell it to follow the unit in front, then it to follow the unit in front and so on and so forth until all the units were following the one person.

Not sure how many other people did that, but that's how my brother and I achieved group movement.

The first RTS I played was Warcraft I... it had group selection, but you could only select 4 units at a time and there was no normal click and drag -- you had to hold a key and click on each unit or hold a key and then you could click and drag... of course you also had to hold the mouse button on the edge of the screen to scroll, which got REALLY annoying...

Well like I said I haven't played it, but would love to. They didn't mention it in the review. Even so, like you said, it's a definate precursur to the RTS's of today. You can't really expect a game of yesteryear to be able to implement all the features that modern machine.

Well, no, you can't. The question becomes, when does it become a RTS? I'd agree that that game is probably the first pre-RTS... but I would say the genre didn't really exist until Dune 2. Herzog Zwei, maybe... but I don't know. That game has a bunch of RTS things, but it is a console game and is part action-ish...

As you say, it really depends on where you draw the line... and I don't know where that line really belongs... same with the Myth games. You control units just like a RTS, but build no buildings and collect no resources, so is it a RTS? Many people say yes, but I've never been sure...