In an excerpt from his book War Play: Video Games And The Future Of Armed Conflict, Corey Mead chronicles how the military has been adapting video games for training purposes since the Pac-Man era:
The military’s interest in the kinds of video games popular today dates to 1980, when Atari released its groundbreaking Battlezone. Not only did Battlezone evoke a three-dimensional world, as opposed to the two-dimensional worlds of such previous arcade hits as Asteroids and Tempest, but players viewed the action from a first-person perspective, as if they themselves were tank gunners peering through their periscopes at the battlefield outside — in this case, a spare moonscape with mountains and an erupting volcano in the distance. This first-person element made Battlezone a direct ancestor of today’s enormously popular first-person shooters.
Soon after Battlezone took off, the army’s Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) requested Atari’s help in building a modified version of the game that could be used as a training device for the then-new Bradley infantry fighting vehicle. General Donn Starry, the head of TRADOC at the time, had recognized early on that soldiers would be more responsive to electronic training methods than to print-and lecture-based ones.
(Video: A 1983 commercial for the 3D, first-person Atari version of Star Wars)
The Dish 