I’m afraid I don’t have a regular article for you this week. By way of compensation, I do have a new ebook for you, compiling all of the articles from our recently concluded historical year of 1995, along with the special “Web Around the World” series about the birth of worldwide communications networks and (eventually!) the Internet. Because some of you have requested it, Richard Lindner and I have also prepared a special ebook volume that includes only the latter series. If you enjoy these ebooks, don’t hesitate to drop Richard a line at the email address on their frontispieces to thank him for his efforts.
We’re a couple of articles into 1996 already; I’ve covered Toonstruck and the first Broken Sword game. In keeping with a developing Digital Antiquarian tradition, let me tell you what else I have planned for the year as a whole:
- The Discworld and Discworld II adventures, preceded by a short digression about Terry Pratchett and his literary Discworld universe in general, which has intersected with games on multiple occasions. (As many of you doubtless know, Terry Pratchett himself was a dedicated gamer, and his daughter Rhianna Pratchett has become a notable games journalist and designer in her own right.)
- The second (and, sadly, last) Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes game, which plunges you even deeper into Victoriana than does its predecessor.
- Rama and The Martian Chronicles, which are by no means great games. Nevertheless, they are on one level fairly typical exemplars of the Myst variants that were everywhere in the mid-1990s, and make for worthy objects of inquiry on that basis alone. And on another level, I think it will be interesting, constructive, and maybe even a bit nostalgic to compare them with earlier adaptations of Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury, from the first era of bookware. (The Martian Chronicles was even created by Byron Preiss Productions, the same folks behind the old Telarium bookware line.)
- Titanic: Adventure Out of Time, the penultimate million-selling adventure of the 1990s, a case study in being in the right place at the right time — said time being in this case very close to the release date of a certain blockbuster movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet.
- The Pandora Directive. Enough said. Tex Murphy needs no justification.
- Spycraft, an interactive spy movie by Activision, one of the more elaborate multimedia productions of its day, which courted controversy by letting you torture prisoners while playing the role of a CIA agent. Almost a decade later, the revelations about Guantánamo Bay would give this scene an uncomfortable aura of verisimilitude.
- Star Control 3, Legend Entertainment’s much-maligned sequel to a much-beloved game.
- Wing Commander IV. If anyone was wondering why Toonstruck‘s $8 million budget made it only the second most expensive computer game ever as of 1996, this article will provide the answer.
- Battlecruiser 3000 AD. Because sometimes you just need a good laugh, and this story is like an Onion satire of the games industry come to life.
- Terra Nova, Looking Glass’s next, somewhat less successful but nevertheless innovative experiment with immersive, emergent 3D world-building after the seminal System Shock.
- Civilization II, Master of Orion II, and Heroes of Might and Magic II. I lump these three games together here because they are all strategy sequels — a thought-provoking concept in itself, in that they are iterations on gameplay rather than the next chapters of ongoing stories. They will, however, each get an article of their own as part of a mini-series.
- The post-DOOM generation of first-person shooters, up to Quake and the advent of hardware-accelerated 3D graphics. I know some of you have been itching for more coverage of these topics, to which I can only plead that they just aren’t my favorite sorts of games; chalk me up as too old, too slow, too pacifistic, and/or too bookish. This means I’m really not the best person to cover most first-person shooters in great individual depth. But I’ll try to do a group of them some sort of historical justice here, and spend some time on the software and hardware technology behind them as well, which I must confess to finding more interesting in some ways than the actual games.
- Tomb Raider. Lara Croft has become arguably the most famous videogame character in the world in the years since her debut in 1996, as well as a lightning rod for discussion and controversy. Is she a sadly typical example of the objectification of women for the male-gamer gaze, or a rarer example of a capable, empowered female protagonist in a game? Or is she perhaps a little of both? We shall investigate.
- Her Interactive. The story of the earliest games of Her Interactive, who would later carve out a permanent niche for themselves making Nancy Drew adventure games, is another fascinating and slightly bizarre tale, about attempting to sell games to teenage girls through partnerships with trendy fashion labels, with plots that might have been lifted from Beverly Hills 90210, in boxes stuffed with goodies that were like girlie versions of the Infocom gray boxes of yore. Do the games stay on the right side of the line between respectful outreach and pandering condescension? Again, we shall investigate.
- Windows 95. The biggest topic for the year, this will serve as a continuation of not one but two earlier series: “Doing Windows” and the recently concluded “A Web Around the World.” Windows 95 was anything but just another Microsoft operating system, reflecting as it did its maker’s terror about a World Wide Web filled with increasingly “active” content that might eventually make traditional operating systems — and thus Microsoft themselves — irrelevant. And Windows 95 also introduced a little something called DirectX, which finally provided game developers with a runtime environment that was comprehensively better than bare-bones MS-DOS. But why, you may be asking, am I including Windows 95 in the coverage for 1996? Simply because it shipped very late in its titular year, and it took a while for its full impact to be felt.
To answer another question that will doubtless come up after reading the preceding: no, I’m not going to skip over Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo, one of the most popular games of the decade. I’ve just decided to push it into 1997, given that it appears not to have reached store shelves in most places until just after the new year. And I’ll make time for a round-up of real-time-strategy games, from Blizzard and others, before covering Diablo.
As always, none of this is set in stone. Feel free to make your case in the comments for anything I’ve neglected that you think would make a worthy topic for an article, or just to register your voice as a conscientious objector in the case of the games I won’t be able to get around to.
And if what’s coming up seems exciting to you and you haven’t yet signed up to support this project, please do think about doing so. Of course, I realize all too well that much in the world is uncertain right now and many of us feel ourselves to be on shaky ground, not least when it comes to our finances. By all means, take care of yourself and yours first. But if you have a little something left over after doing so and want to ensure that my voluminous archives continue to grow, anything you can spare would be immensely appreciated. See the links at the top right of this page!
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