1994.Game - A Gaming Documentary Series

in #gaming6 years ago (edited)

1994.Game - A Gaming Documentary Series - This year brought about a new and unexpected contender in the console market. A year after the company that started the industry left, a newcomer would take the first steps in dominating the decade.

Welcome to the year after Doom. The year after 3D became the thing that everyone realized was going to stick around forever. A small company from Canada got this crazy idea that it could use computers to create an animated television show, called Reboot, that featured nothing but computer generated graphics. One with a lot of character and filled with enough references to video games and technology, that it was guaranteed to turn any kid watching it into an avid computer user. And two and a half decades later, someone would find a way to screw it up.

It was a new world. One with dreams of greatness, of immersive virtual reality video games on the horizon, the ill fated Nintendo Virtual Boy being announced and showcased to the public this year. But as dreams go, for now it would be just that. What wasn’t a dream, however, was the concept of playing with others, of togetherness. You could say that the ‘90s was the decade that brought people together, at least for a little while, in some places of the world. Symbolized by things like the tearing down of the Berlin wall years earlier, and now by a feat of engineering though impossible for thousands of years. A tunnel that tied together, for the first time since the last ice age, continental Europe and Great Britain. It took six years to complete, billions upon billions of dollars and the work of over 15 thousand people. It also cost the life of ten of them.

And so, the world became smaller. That was true for video games as well. It wasn’t just arcades bringing people together anymore, making them huddle around cabinets now running 3D marvels like Virtua Cop, from Sega, or the new fighting game sensation that was Namco’s Tekken. Even the 2D games were still going strong, with better and better stylized art than before, especially in the fighting game genre, with titles like Darkstalkers or Killer Instinct. But, as I said, they weren’t the only thing bringing strangers together. There was now the concept of a thing called a LAN party. Where people would bring their computers to one place, sometimes traveling over long distances so they could play their favorite games, like Doom. Some of the oldest, and in some cases still long running LAN events started around this time, like the Euskal Encounter in Spain. And, of course, we had the internet, that grew in 1994 to host more than 10 thousand websites. So many that you couldn’t really keep track of them all by yourself, now could you? So you could now find sites that could act as your guide. Like Jerry’s Guide, that went on-line that in ‘94. You probably know it better as Yahoo.

So, what about those video games, then? Well, if the fake 3D of Doom didn’t impress you, then the true 3D, with six degrees of freedom, of Descent would kick your expectations for the future into high gear. Just imagine it, a game where just about everything was 3D, and where you could go anyplace, attack your enemies from any direction. Front, back, side, beneath, above, no place was safe. To this day, few games that aren’t space simulators, or flight games even attempt something like this. Most game engines we have today aren’t even built to support this kind of movement by default. And yet, here was this game doing it in MS-DOS in 1994. Though truth be told, it was released on December 31st, so I’m getting ahead of myself here.

But if we’re talking games that are all about going everywhere, this year we had the start of one of the best selling series of video games in history. The brainchild of Ted Peterson, Vijay Laksham and Julian LeFay, at Bethesda. Inspired by the likes of Ultima Underworld the many dungeon crawlers that came before it, there was The Elder Scrolls Arena. One of the first true first person open world role playing games, where you’d travel through a huge world, on a quest to restore the rightful king, and doing your best to ignore that plotline entirely, and focus on just doing things. The entirety of Tamriel was open to you in a feat of technological marvel that was called impossible by people working on similar, turn based 2D roleplaying games. Arena made people take notice of what was possible, of what technology and creativity could do when put together in a large scale. And, sure, it was far from being the first open world 3D game, what with Bullfrog’s classic Magic Carpet being released that same year, but it really did start a flame that would one day burst into a raging inferno.

I can’t really say the same thing about System Shock. Looking Glass’s magnificent immersive simulation that put you in the cyberpunk cyborg shoes of a hacker on a space station filled with what used to be life. Dread at every corner, fear and anxiety as a perfect immortal machine taunted you at every turn, and a game that showed us that Survival-Horror could take many forms… before the survival-horror genre was even the thing we know it to be these days. You could choose how to progress through the station, doing your best to stop the destruction of humanity, both in the real world, and in cyberspace. Much like Ultima Underworld, the game put a heavy emphasis on realism, on believably, on immersion, to the point where you could even chose how to move your character’s head. Sadly, the game had issues. Like being released alongside Doom 2, Heretic, Marathon, not being as good of a shooter as any of them, since it wasn’t one, though looking like one… better, actually, since it was really 3D, and also being released on floppy disks. Its creators have often lamented this, because the voices in the game, SHODAN’s voice, really sold the atmosphere, and without it, the game was just not complete. System Shock wouldn’t be a gigantic hit, but enough people too notice of it, played it, understood it, and would try to emulate it even decades later.

And speaking of emulating otehrs. The people at Silicone and Synapse, now known as Blizzard, decided to try their luck at making an orcs vs humans strategy game. As the legend goes, it was meant to be a Warhammer licensed title, but the deal fell through, so with plenty of inspiration from Westwood’s Dune 2, Blizzard created Warcraft: Orcs and Human. A game that combined RTS and a dungeon crawling tactics game that, with something that Dune 2 didn’t have. And it would be the thing that really made it shine, multiplayer. A component that it delivered even in the demo version, making sure that everyone had the chance to see what in less than half a decade would become one of the world’s leading eSports. Will get to that in about two weeks. And sure, Warcraft may have been kinda simple and not all that great, even compared to Dune 2. But that multiplayer really set it apart.

The same can be said about most games of the age. Multiplayer was an important up and coming feature, and for a lot of singleplayer games, it was starting to be go big, or go home. And a lot of them, went big. Gigantic.

We say today that video game budgets have gone crazy, that they cost too much. Well, there’s one game you can blame for that. Wing Commander 3. The previous titles in the series were successful enough that the new owners of the IP, Electronic Arts, decided to turn it into the next Star Wars. And what better way to do that then by throwing 4 million dollars at it, the biggest production budget a video game ever had up to that point, and hiring Mark Hamil, aka Luke Skylwaker, to play the lead role. In a mix of FMV and 3D space action, Wing Commander 3 was very successful game, even though it wasn’t even the only game if its kind out on the market that year. It had some stiff competition from Tie Fighter, a Star Wars game that finally let you play as a villain, as well as the aforementioned Descent. Heck, it wasn’t even the onlyWing Commander game to be released that year, and Armada had multipalyer. It was the kind of game that would push the boundaries of technology, forcing people to either buy a brand spanking new Pentium CPU, or pay up for one of those new 3D capable consoles, like the 3DO, or that newfangled contraption made by a company that didn’t really have any presence in the gaming industry up until then. A company called Sony. And that platform was The Playstation.

Born out of a failed partnership with Nintendo to bring about a new CD based console, the Playstation was a disk system that that truly ushered in a new era. It did so in two ways. It was technologically more advanced than most consoles already on the market, and cost less then half of what the 3DO did. It actually brought the CD, it brought new technology to the masses, and I mean masses. In terms of units sold, in this generation, there is The Playstation on one side, and every other console in the 5th generation struggling to reach half the number of units that it sold, combined. Because, technologically, it was really meant for 3D, struggling with 2D graphics. But that only meant that game developers needed to be creative and build interesting new games. So, within just a few months, you’d start seeing some really unique titles on the platform, like From Software’s Kings Field.

But, let it not be said that it was the only new video game console to be released that year. Far from it. Sega released the Saturn. Also a disk based system, but somewhat more expensive than the Playtation and in a few ways more powerful in terms of hardware. And, unlike Sony, Sega had its own games, with a plethora of shining 3D graphics arcade ports and as big as a creative drive behind it as as the Playstation had. Heck, probably even more creative, considering the kind of exclusives it would get in the coming years. And sure, it wasn’t as successful as the Playstation, but, to be fair, few things ever were.

Even though things were heating up, it didn’t mean that the previous console generation was dead. On the contrary, the SNES was entering its golden age, with superb titles like Donkey Kong Country, the fantastically fascinating and quite strange Earthbound, the awe inspiring Final Fantasy 6, and, of course, one of the finest games of its generation, Super Metroid. It may not have been a first person immersive sim, but it was atmospheric to a level that few other games manage to achieve and let you dive deep into a world that was out to get you, filled with space pirates, mother brains, and the occasional Metroid. It was a beautiful, shining gem of its age.

I can honestly say the same about what Microprose was doing those days as well, in the realm of turn based strategies. Two brilliant games, in some ways without equal, were released around then. One was Simtex’s follow up to Master of Orion. A game that resembled Civilization, more than it did its space predecessor, but replaced a tech tree with a spell tree, and gave you so much to work with that to this day it is considered an outstanding video game in terms of the sheer possibilities it gives you, in spite of its numerous bugs. Honestly, I can’t say the game was outdone until just a few short years ago. As for the other one. Well, I can’t say it’s been outdone at all, not really. Julian Gollop’s triumphant conclusion to an experiment that began a decade ago, that of developing the best turn based tactics game possible. UFO Enemy Unknown, or X-Com UFO Defense was, for one… canceled for a short time, and also a tactical game with enough depth, atmosphere, character, dread, and pants crapping terror because you just know that one of those buggers is hiding somewhere in a building just waiting for you to make a wrong move, that it would be a considerable success for decades to come. And, yes, Jagged Alliance also came out this year, and it was fine in its own right, but X-Com was on an entirely different level. With a planet spanning scope and the task of surviving an alien invasion, while balancing a budget. Always playing catch-up with incredibly powerful enemies, and resorting to desperate measures possible only through its superb mechanics.

I should probably also mention that this year marked the beginning of a major franchise for Electronic Arts, in the form of a collaboration with Road and Track Magazine, a game developed by the original creators of the Test Drive series. The Need for Speed. A simulator game that tried to give players an actual accurate feel for how high priced road cars truly handled, which really was something, since most titles around that time were either arcade games, F1 simulators, or ran too slowly to actually get any sort of actual feel from them. It was also when EA released a sequel to a nice, but not really remarkable Sega Genesis game, called FIFA International Soccer, from last year. And I wouldn’t say that the sequel was a breathtaking re-imagining of football either. But it is notable as being the first sequel to FIFA. And they’ve never stopped. For 25 years. They have never stopped, regardless of how bland and forgettable they’ve become.

But you know what wasn’t bland and forgettable? Sensible World of Soccer. Dubbed by many to be Sensible Software’s finest game, and one of the greatest video games ever release for the Commodore Amiga. A beloved and well selling video game, on a not well selling but beloved platform, that this year ceased to exist. Commodore entirely ceased to exist. The company went bankrupt do to a lot of management problems. The company that at one time had the best selling computer on the market and the most technologically advanced computer on the market, and failed to live up to the reputation of either of them. And so, the public was left with fewer options.

So, what would be the game of 1994? Of the year that gave us Java? Well. I’d have to say that it was Wing Commander 3. It simply set a new standard for the industry. One that I can’t honestly say is healthy. With ever increasing budgets being the doom of many. But it was a paradime shift. This was Hollywood level production with Hollywood methods. This was big money, big names, big everything. And it worked. It worked so well that everyone needed to emulate this from now on. Everyone had to do it… and they had to do it often. And if they couldn’t, well, they just threw more money at the problem, instead of doing what would be normal, which was actually giving people the time they needed to finish a project properly. That doesn’t change the fact that Wing Commander 3 was a fantastic game and an attempt to legitimize video games as a serious form of entertainment, even though it had 2 meter tall cat in it.

So we close the year 1994. Next week we’ll see the effects of the new console generation and of what it means to have actual competition in a game genre.

We are supporting Steem/Steemit/DLive.io/D.Tube through our Shows


Support Us and Our Work !

Youtube.com/c/GaminGHD | Minds.com/GaminGHD | Gab.ai/GaminGHD | Patreon.com/GaminGHD | Steemit.com/@free999enigma | D.Tube/c/GaminGHD | DLive.io/#/@GaminGHD |

- UPVOTE - RESTEEM - COMMENT - FOLLOW -

Gaming-Related Friends you should follow: @StefaNonsense & @ropname & @unacomn & @vladalexan
GaminGHD Discord Server https://discord.gg/CZSXJwy
Sort:  

To listen to the audio version of this article click on the play image.

Brought to you by @tts. If you find it useful please consider upvoting this reply.

Reboot was creepy. The Saturn was cool, too bad Sega released the 32x right before and pissed off a lot of Sega fans.

Highly rEsteemed!

PassifistAggressor .jpg

Coin Marketplace

STEEM 0.35
TRX 0.12
JST 0.040
BTC 70601.40
ETH 3576.96
USDT 1.00
SBD 4.75