1994, Game of the Year

[SvennoJ]

1994 another great year with lots of new games, now mostly in 640x480 leaving the old 320x240 resolution behind.

1994 saw the debut of System Shock, first person action adventure


Star Wars: Tie Fighter

Wing Commander also still going strong with Wing Commander III: Heart of the tiger

Still more excellent adventures with Beneath a steal sky, Kings Quest 7, Under a Killing Moon.

1994 got me interested in submarine games with Aces of the Deep


1994 also saw the birth of Need for Speed

It reall captured the feel of driving fast and cars felt like they had proper weight when crashing. The crashes were glorious, and the game would highlight your crashes in short replays after the race. I later got a track editior for it to make some ludicrous roller coaster tracks.

Sid Meier's Colonization was another big hit, kept me and my sister busy for months. Very addictive game play with some excellent new systems introduced.

Little Big Adventure was a personal favorite, such a unique game, still is


Magic Carpet was awesome as well, another game ahead of its time

Magic Carpet had a 3D stereogram mode where you could play the game in 3D after you trained your eyes to see stereograms. It worked and prompted me to make my own version of animated stereograms. Together with my dad we already made a program to produce static magic eye pictures from rendered 3D Studio images (by rendering them with depth information in layers and then converting to a stereogram).
After playing Magic Carpet I made a demo which renders a 3D landscape, hills and valleys with shaded depth information which I then converted to random noise stereograms. The trick I learned from Magic Carpet is to subtly shift all the lines around to avoid seeing the movement patterns too clearly which become distracting. I experimented so much with magic eye pictures in the day that my eyes still jump to see stereograms everywhere, just relaxing my eyes on the keyboard shifts it into a different perspective with keys overlapping, making the keyboard look bigger and further away.

1994 also saw the birth of the 'Theme' games starting with the excellent Theme Park


1994 had the best ever Transport Tycoon game which is still being played today.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1536610/OpenTTD/ still going.
The game was amazing for its time, starting with bus routes, trucks, then trains, boats and airplanes. You could dig your own canals for ships and the train system was a huge upgrade over railroad tycoon. There was also a map editor to make your own maps. Never has another transport game captured the scope of Chris Sawyer's Transport tycoon. So cool to have airplane hubs work together with trains, and trucks with shipping terminals.

Sim Tower was a great twist on the Sim franchise, going vertical

Very addictive game as well, running in Windows 3.1

But I have to give this year to the birth of Warcraft, Warcraft: Orcs vs Humans created the buzz and might very well be responsible for the birth of ESports, put Blizzard on the map and led to the still popular Starcraft and World of Warcraft.

And of course inspiration for the wildly successful Age of Empires series.