Precursors The tower defense genre can trace its lineage back to the
golden age of arcade video games in the 1980s. The object of the arcade game
Space Invaders, released in 1978, was to defend the player's territory (represented by the bottom of the screen) against waves of incoming enemies. The game featured shields that could be used to strategically obstruct enemy attacks on the player and assist the player in defending their territory, though not to expressly protect the territory. The 1980 game
Missile Command changed that by giving shields a more strategic role. In the game, players could obstruct incoming missiles, and there were multiple attack paths in each attack wave. Additionally, in
Missile Command, the targets of the attackers are the bases and cities, not a specific player character. ''
Sorcerer's Apprentice'' for the
Atari 2600 featured
Mickey Mouse and was first published in 1983. Nintendo's popular 1980s
Game & Watch handheld games featured many popular precursors. With their fixed sprite cells with binary states, games with waves of attackers following fixed paths were able to make use of the technical limitations of the platform yet proved simple and enjoyable to casual gamers.
Vermin (1980), one of the first, tasked players with defending the garden (a theme followed by many later games) from relentless horde of moles. The following years saw a flood of similar titles, including
Manhole (1981),
Parachute (1981), and
Popeye (1981). 1982 saw multiple titles with the primary object of protecting buildings from burning:
Fire Attack,
Oil Panic and
Mickey & Donald. The later titles utilized multiple
articulating screens to increase the difficulty for players. With two screens these games introduced basic resource management (e.g. oil and water), forcing players to multitask.
Green House (1982) was another popular two screen game in which players use clouds of pesticide spray to protect flowers from waves of attacking insects. Despite the early rush of archetypal titles, ultimately there was a general decline in fixed-cell games, due to their technical limitations, simplistic gameplay, and the rise of personal computers and handhelds the
Game Boy; correspondingly, this genre also declined. A rare exception was
Safebuster (1988 multi-screen) in which the player protects a safe from a thief trying to blow it up. By the mid-1980s, the strategy elements began to further evolve. Early PC gaming examples include the 1984 Commodore 64 titles
Gandalf the Sorcerer, a shooter with tower defense elements, and
Imagine Software's 1984 release
Pedro.
Pedro, a garden defense game, introduced new gameplay elements, including different enemy types as well as the ability to place fixed obstructions, and to build and repair the player's territory.
Modern genre emerges Rampart, released in 1990, is generally considered to have established the prototypical tower defense.
Rampart introduced player-placed defenses and has distinct phases of build, defend and repair. These are now staple gameplay elements of many games in the genre. It was also one of the first
multiplayer video games of its kind. While
Rampart was popular, similar games were rarely seen until the widespread adoption of the
computer mouse on the PC. The DOS title
Ambush at Sorinor (1993) was a rare exception from this era. and the
Fort Condor minigame in
Final Fantasy VII (1997), which was also one of the first to feature
3D graphics.
Attack of the Mutant Penguins for the Atari Jaguar and MS-DOS was released in 1995.
Dungeon Keeper (1997) had players defend the Dungeon Heart, a gigantic gem at the centre of your dungeon, which, if destroyed, would cause the player to lose the game.
Fortress was released for the
Game Boy Advance in 2001. As
real-time strategy games gained popularity in
PC gaming, the easy proliferation of user-created scenarios on
Battle.net expanded the genre rapidly. Custom maps for
StarCraft: Brood War such as
Turret Defense (May 2000) and
Sunken Defense (November 2001) were early examples of the genre that retained popularity for decades. Both were released early in the game's lifecycle and had various versions evolve in parallel over time due to the open-source nature of maps.
Warcraft III (2002), another real-time strategy game capable of such scenarios, added
role-playing elements to them. The
Frozen Throne expansion (2003) included a secret tower-defense scenario in one of the official campaigns. Custom maps included
Element TD and
Gem Tower Defense, from February 2006, which were initially created in
Warcraft III World Editor. Among them were the extremely popular titles
Flash Element Tower Defense released in January,
Desktop Tower Defense released in March and
Antbuster released in May.
Desktop Tower Defense earned an
Independent Games Festival award, and its success led to a version created for the
mobile phone by a different developer. Another significant Flash title released in 2008 was
GemCraft.
Handheld game console were not ignored in the boom and titles included ''
Lock's Quest and Ninjatown released in September and October respectively. Bloons Tower Defense'' was first published in 2007, one of many in a series of balloon themed multi-platform games released. The genre's success also led to new releases on PC and
video game consoles. Popular 2008 titles included
PixelJunk Monsters released in January,
Defense Grid: The Awakening and
Savage Moon in December.
Plants vs. Zombies released in May 2009 was another highly popular tower defense which became a successful series on mobile devices. Also released that year were
Sentinel,
TowerMadness,
Babel Rising,
Creeper World,
Sol Survivor,
Comet Crash,
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a Darklord, ''
South Park Let's Go Tower Defense Play!, Starship Patrol and Trenches''. With the arrival of Apple's
App Store tower defense developers adapted quickly to the touchscreen interface and the titles were among the most downloaded, many of them ported directly from Flash.
Kingdom Rush, first released in 2011, sold more than seventeen million copies both on
App store and
Play store.
A new breed of 3D games '' By the end of the boom, most tower defense games were still using side scrolling, isometric, or
top-down perspective graphics.
Iron Grip: Warlord, released in November, 2008 unsuccessfully pioneered the first person perspective shooter with the genre. The awkward combination of experimental tower defense mechanics with 3D graphics was not well received, but later titles refined its execution paving the way for a popular new breed of games.
Dungeon Defenders, released in October 2010, was one of the first tower defense games to bring the genre to the
third person perspective. It sold over 250,000 copies in first two weeks of release and over 600,000 copies by the end of 2011. 2010 saw the release of
SteamWorld Tower Defense,
Protect Me Knight,
The Tales of Bearsworth Manor,
Revenge of the Titans,
Arrow of Laputa,
Toy Soldiers and
Robocalypse: Beaver Defense. The 2011 title
Sanctum, and
its 2013 sequel popularized the first person shooter hybrid that was pioneered by these earlier games.
Orcs Must Die! also integrated the FPS genre into a fully 3D environment and went to have several sequels.
Anomaly: Warzone Earth released in 2011 introduced a variation of gameplay which has been described as "reverse tower defense", "tower attack", and "tower offense". In the game, the player must attack the enemy bases protected by numerous defenses. Sequels and other games have since experimented further with both styles of tower defense.
Tiny Heroes,
Army of Darkness: Defense,
Iron Brigade,
Rock of Ages and
Trenches 2 were also released in 2011. ''
Defender's Quest, Bad Hotel, Toy Defense, Strikefleet Omega, Unstoppable Gorg, Defenders of Ardania, Orcs Must Die! 2, Fieldrunners 2, Dillon's Rolling Western, Oil Rush and Elf Defense Eng all came out in 2012. Around this period the genre matured, gaining recognition as a distinct sub-genre of strategy games and returning in numerous upgraded versions. Chain Chronicle and CastleStorm were released in 2013. Plants vs. Zombies 2 came out and Prime World: Defenders featured deck-building mechanics. 2014 saw a number of brand new titles including Space Run, Dungeon of the Endless, Island Days, Final Horizon
and The Battle Cats as well the return of Age of Empires: Castle Siege, Defense Grid 2 and
TowerMadness 2. Deathtrap and Krinkle Krusher'' were first published in 2015. More recent titles in the genre include
Rock of Ages 2: Bigger & Boulder (2017),
Tower Battles(2017) and
Orcs Must Die! Unchained (2017), ''
Dillon's Dead-Heat Breakers (2018), Eden Rising: Supremacy (2018), Aegis Defenders (2018), Bloons TD 6 (2018), Tower Defense Simulator (2019)
, Arknights (2019), Taur (2020), Element TD 2
(2020), Buster's Tower Defense
(2021), and Path to Nowhere'' (2022). With the advent of
social networking service applications, such as the
Facebook Platform, tower defense has become a popular genre with titles such as
Bloons TD and
Plants vs. Zombies Adventures making the transition to turn-based play. Recent releases include
Star Fox Guard and
McDroid which came out in 2016. == Gameplay ==