Front Line, Taito's 1982 arcade game, has the player advancing across a top-down battlefield, dodging tanks and enemy soldiers while firing an automatic weapon, in a design that would become a direct template for the entire run-and-gun genre later popularized by games like Commando. Coleco brought it to the Atari 2600, Atari 5200, and its own home computers, adapting the arcade formula to the limits of each piece of hardware. It's a key piece for understanding where much of the '80s military shooter's visual vocabulary comes from.
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