Desktop Tower Defense

Desktop Tower Defense places the player in front of a virtual computer desktop with a winding path running across it, along which waves of enemies pour in; the task is to place towers of various types so that no enemy reaches the end. Control is purely by mouse - clicking builds and upgrades towers between waves, while the game itself sets the pace of attacks and the player must judge where to place a combination of shooters, slowing towers, and area weapons most effectively. It was this combination of simple rules and deep path-planning that made it a game you could spend hours on just tweaking a single map.

The 2007 game by Paul Preece is considered the title that kicked off the mass boom of the tower defense genre on the web - the principle had existed before, but this version popularized it to such an extent that dozens of imitations and derivatives appeared within a few months, including later games like Bloons Tower Defense. The simple graphics resembling an office desktop were part of the joke: enemies and towers looked like icons and windows, which set the game apart from the fantasy stylization that later came to dominate the genre.

Today, Desktop Tower Defense is mainly a historical curiosity and an object of nostalgia for players who experienced the tower defense genre right at its birth. As a Flash game, it requires emulation or an archival portal to run, since browsers dropped native Flash Player support long ago.

Why play it: For tower defense fans who want to experience the game that literally opened the door for the genre on the web, even knowing that today's successors offer more elaborate systems.