4) Inventory Screens
First seen in: Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken – NES (1983)
Let me alleviate your pain of pronunciation by translating this Japanese tongue-twister for you: The Portopia Serial Murder Incident. Though even after that I would imagine you’ve never heard of it, much less played it, but it’s important for a great deal of reasons – chief among which, it gave us the inventory screen.
There’s not a gamer alive who hasn’t come across one of these in the past, whether it be for examining ancient artefacts in Tomb Raider, juggling food and weaponry in The Elder Scrolls, or trying to make enough space for a save-game ink ribbon in Resident Evil. It’s a simple and elegant way of making the player feel more immersed in the experience and more responsible for their actions. It’s also the reason the survival horror genre exists at all, when it was moulded into perhaps its most recognisable form for the original haunted house puzzle masterpiece Alone in the Dark.
Here in Portopia however, the inventory screen serves as a tool to store and examine evidence found at various crime scenes, where you are charged with using it to make the right decision about which of your suspects to lock up for good. It was pretty advanced as NES games went, and as if it hadn’t done enough for us already, it is often cited by Hideo Kojima as the reason he created the Metal Gear series (which also features inventory screens).
