SvennoJ said:
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, Under a Killing Moon.
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.
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. |
