Hi, folks! I have an update at this unusual time because, as of the last proper article, we’ve actually finished with our coverage of 1998, and I wanted to give you a preview of what’s coming for 1999. As usual, these subjects are more 1999-adjacent than pedantically bound to that year. And also as usual, what follows is a tentative plan only. Nonetheless, if you prefer for every article to be a complete surprise when it pops up in your browser, you might want to stop reading now.
Note that some of these subjects will be just one article, while some will spread out over two or more.
- Alpha Centauri.
- Everquest.
- Heroes of Might and Magic III, Might and Magic VII, and the decline of New World Computing thereafter.
- Rollercoaster Tycoon.
- Discworld Noir.
- Bullfrog Productions from 1996 on, with a particular focus on Theme Hospital and Dungeon Keeper 1 and 2.
- Metal Gear Solid. This one is pretty far out of my wheelhouse, but several of you suggested that I look at it. So, I’m going to follow your advice, examining it mostly as a piece of interactive narrative.
- Looking Glass Studios from 1996 on, with a particular focus on Thief I and II and System Shock 2. Just as is the case for Metal Gear Solid, I don’t feel all that well-equipped to do full justice to Looking Glass — as many of you have come to recognize, first-person 3D tends not to be my personal cup of tea — but I’ll do my best to honor some brave, uncompromising, visionary games.
- Turn-based fantasy strategy. My love for the Heroes of Might and Magic series prompted me to try out some of the contemporaries of the third game in that series, specifically Warlords III: Darklords Rising, Disciples: Sacred Lands, and Age of Wonders. The results were mixed but interesting.
- The final wave of commercially prominent space simulators, especially the Freespace games. Plus that so-bad-it’s-almost-good Wing Commander movie, because how can a writer resist a temptation like that?
- For my interactive-fiction coverage this time, I want to review some really long games that came out between 1998 and 2000. Damaging as it may be to my literary bona fides, I must admit that a sprawling old-school game that I can keep up on one of my virtual desktops for weeks on end, poking at it during lunch breaks and other snatched moments, is still my personal Platonic ideal for the genre.
- Homeworld.
- Omikron: The Nomad Soul.
- Ultima IX: Ascension.
- Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned. Because I’m me, I want to do a bit of a deep dive into the longstanding pseudo-historical cult that surrounds Gabriel Knight 3′s setting of Rennes-le-Château, France, out of which also sprang The Da Vinci Code just a few years after this game. But never fear, the infamous cat-hair-mustache puzzle will also get its due.
- The Longest Journey.
- Planescape: Torment.
As I said, these lists are always subject to change; those of you with long memories will notice that quite a lot of what was on the previous list wound up falling by the wayside. This is because some other tales grew in the telling, even as one tale — the story of Legend’s late adventures — got added, and I’m doggedly determined not to let one year of history take up more than one year of real time. Some topics that had been earmarked for the previous group, like Windows 98 and the Deer Hunter-driven phenomenon of “Wal Mart games,” will get folded into other articles in due course. Others, like my dream of doing a series on television game shows, are most likely simply a bridge too far for these histories as currently constituted. (I don’t think there’s a big appetite out there for The Digital Antiquarian turning into The Television Antiquarian for the six months or more it would take to even begin to do such a topic justice…)
There have been some specific reader requests that haven’t (yet?) come to fruition. I perhaps owe you a more complete explanation for these.
- Some of you asked for Oddworld, and I did try. Really, I did. But those games are coming from so far outside of my frame of reference as a lifelong computer rather than console gamer, and are so off-puttingly difficult to boot, that I just don’t feel like I can provide the necessary context or enthusiasm.
- Some of you asked me to look at the Laura Bow games. And I did fire up The Colonel’s Bequest, only to be killed without warning by three separate pieces of inexplicably collapsing architecture within the first fifteen minutes. I’m sorry, readers. I’m just so done with this kind of player-hostile design, and I’ve already taken Roberta Williams and her colleagues to task more than enough for it over the years.
- Some of you would like to see articles about the Impressions city builders, and, indeed, I’ve done more than dabble with them in recent months. I desperately wanted to love Pharaoh, but certain design choices — such as the excruciating worker-recruitment system, the rote busywork of having to constantly schedule festivals to keep the gods from ruining your day, and the drawn-out, repetitive campaign that makes you build city after city from scratch — made it impossible for me to do so. But it looks like the city builder after Pharaoh, 2000’s Zeus: Master of Olympus, fixed all of these problems and more. I’m optimistic that I’ll be able to write the whole story when I get there, and end it on the sort of positive note I always prefer to go out on.
- A similar logic applies to Her Interactive, for which I’ve been promising coverage for literally years now. The two Nancy Drew games that I’ve played to date have both been rather underwhelming, awkward affairs. But the good news is that each successive Her Interactive game that I’ve played — four of them in all now — has been a little better than the one before it. So, I remain optimistic that they’ll eventually figure it out, and I’ll be able to write the story I want to write about them as well. Stay tuned.
- The return of Steve Jobs to Apple and the rebirth that followed is another subject that’s been lingering out there for a while. Again, it’s just a question of finding the right grace note. The launch of OS X in 2001 might be it. We’ll see.
- On the flip side, some of you told me that Final Fantasy VIII was probably not the best choice for improving my fraught relationship with JRPGs, and after a brief investigation I’ve decided that I agree with you. But I haven’t given up on the genre. I may give 2000’s Grandia II a shot.
A couple of notes from the Department of Miscellanea:
It will mostly likely be a few months before I have 1998 ebooks for you, folks. The old system for creating them relies on a Python 2 software stack that is deprecated and all but broken by now. A good friend of mine whose coding skills have not atrophied as badly as my own is going to help me bring it up to date. But we’re in the midst of the all too short Danish summer right now, a time to be outside as much as possible; extracurricular programming projects are best reserved for other times of the year. Please bear with us.
I haven’t found a good place to mention this before today, but I actually switched from Windows 10 to Linux Mint as my primary operating system back in December; the end user in me was fed up with the creeping enshitification of the Windows 11 ecosystem, while my inner environmentalist and social-justice warriors were incensed by the arbitrary obsolescence Microsoft wishes to impose upon tens if not hundreds of millions of perfectly viable computers. I couldn’t be happier. I can recommend Linux as a fine everyday operating system for anyone who is reasonably technically proficient, or who has someone who is to call upon when the occasional lingering issue does crop up. It’s come a long, long way since the last time I tried to run it on the desktop, about 25 years ago. And with the aid of Lutris and/or Steam, Linux runs old Windows games better and more effortlessly than recent releases of Windows itself in many cases, whilst keeping them nicely sandboxed from the core operating system in a way that Windows does not. If you’re a retro-gamer or just a gamer in general who’s been contemplating giving Linux a try, by all means do so. What with Valve putting serious resources behind it, I expect that it will only continue to improve as a gaming platform.
Which reminds me: Linux is another story I should try to tell soon… Sigh.
Anyway, thank you for reading and supporting these histories for so many years! As always, feel free to suggest topics and games you’d really like to see in the next few years. Even when I can’t give them separate articles, I can sometimes shoehorn them in somewhere. And if you haven’t yet taken the Patreon plunge and have the means to do so, do give it some thought. It’s only thanks to readers just like you that I can afford to keep doing this.
I’ll see you tomorrow — yes, tomorrow already! — when we’ll get started on our bullet list for 1999. We’ve got our work cut out for us…
Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.
Emil Vikjær-Andresen
June 19, 2025 at 9:12 am
Looking so much forward to this Jimmy.
Regarding the TV show, agree that it may be too far away from the main theme of this blog but the way you handled the X-files was for me a very good way of telling an interesting story about the cultural trends that affect the computer game arena. So if you can do that again, I for one will certainly not be protesting.
Kroc Camen
June 19, 2025 at 9:23 am
I’ve been holding off reading the website until the ebook releases (despite being a Patreon) because I prefer to read on my from-my-cold-dead-hands Kindle 4 with physical page buttons so I look forward to the new book :) Covering Linux might go hand in hand with an article on the entire state of the OS market changing shape in 2001, vis-a-vis, breaking compatibility changes with OSX and WinXP; the last nail in the coffin of MS-DOS gaming; MacOS and Windows were still pretty much the same as they always had been in 1999.
Jimmy Maher
June 19, 2025 at 11:46 am
That’s a really good idea…
arthurdawg
June 19, 2025 at 12:23 pm
Wow! I loved the older Kindles with physical buttons!
Amazing it still works, mine has long passed from this world.
Ido Yehieli
June 19, 2025 at 10:33 am
Looking forward to it! As as part of the 1983 birth-year cohort you’re now covering games i’ve actually played during the Golden Age of Gaming (i.e. ages 14-18) rather than those I was more curious about from a historical point of view :)
Jimmy Maher
June 19, 2025 at 10:39 am
That’s a good year. My wife was born that year. ;)
arcanetrivia
June 20, 2025 at 4:35 am
Funny… you’re only a few years younger than I am and I have not played a single game on this list. (I have played the first Discworld game, but not Noir. Significant others played The Longest Journey and Thief, but not myself, personally.) Some of them I haven’t even heard of.
fform
June 20, 2025 at 2:46 pm
’99 was the year I got my first proper gaming computer and got to play graphically intensive games at full chat. Played a lot of System Shock 2, got in to FPSes and online gaming and was a pretty good Counterstrike player, but in retrospect I put in far more hours to Rollercoaster Tycoon and Alpha Centauri (have an Alpha Centauri tech tree poster on my wall right now actually).
It really was one of the great years in gaming history, a lot of the new genres that had been developing over the previous years became more refined as devs figured out what worked and what didn’t, and 3d graphics cards really started to become effective thanks to the standardization of D3D and DirectX on PC (and Apple just not letting anyone but ATI make cards for their systems, brute forcing the standardization on that side).
Brent
June 19, 2025 at 10:49 am
Ultima IX! Definitely a story worth telling.
Grandia II is absolutely dire from a storytelling perspective, which is unfortunate because the first Grandia had great characters and a wonderful sense of fun. But I honestly think you should just give up on trying to enjoy JRPGs. If you weren’t exposed to them in your youth I don’t think it’s possible to enjoy them now.
Knurek
June 19, 2025 at 11:43 am
There are some JRPGs that even (or especially) people who don’t enjoy them would be prudent to play.
Games that break the norm like Valkyrie Profile, Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, SaGa Frontier or Tactics Ogre
None of them got a PC port at the time the blog is in though, so aren’t really relevant.
Feldspar
June 19, 2025 at 3:20 pm
When I saw the mention of “turn-based fantasy strategy”, I was really hoping for a minute that stuff like Tactics Ogre / Final Fantasy Tactics had somehow made the cut. I’ve always felt that games like that could have a lot of crossover appeal for fans of western RPGs with grid-based combat and stuff like XCOM.
John
June 22, 2025 at 11:45 am
I have a lot of affection for Tactics Ogre because of the GBA game, but every account I’ve heard of the original paints it as a brutal, grindy slog. I tried the recent remaster, Tactics Ogre Reborn, which allegedly fixes a lot of the original’s issues and didn’t like it. The first third of the game or so was alright, but past that point every fight is a tedious battle of attrition.
All of which is to say that I suspect Jimmy wouldn’t care for it even if it has been released on PC.
fform
June 20, 2025 at 3:05 pm
Breath of Fire IV had a PC release back in the day, and just recently that itself got a re-release through GOG. It wasn’t much of a release though, it plays like they were running it in an emulator or something so you can’t even quit the game from within the game. Interestingly because they didn’t integrate it in to Windows any more than they had to, the original BoF4 PC release still works on Windows 11 without any need for modification. Unfortunately this meant that GOG didn’t really have to do anything to it so they didn’t even give it many QoL improvements that you’d expect these days (or 25~ years ago when it originally came out to be frank).
lee
June 19, 2025 at 10:57 am
Ahhhh, Freespace and Freespace 2. I’d still to this day call Freespace 2 the platonic ideal of the single player space combat sim — it out Wing Commanders Wing Commander in every way except not having Mark Hamill (though Freespace has Robert Loggia to make up for it!). And there’s something kind of funny about beholding a new Freespace player’s face the first time they look at the keybinding list. (“‘Target target’s target’? Are they serious?”)
Can’t wait!
fform
June 20, 2025 at 3:06 pm
To this day nobody has done it better on gameplay or plot, imo, and that’s kind of a shame.
John
June 22, 2025 at 11:49 am
I haven’t played Freespace 2 yet, but I struggled most of the way through Freespace 1 last year. It’s a mechanically competent game, but very frustrating in other ways. Definitely not as good as everyone seems to think Freespace 2 is. It’ll be interesting to see what Jimmy has to say about it.
Knurek
June 19, 2025 at 11:38 am
Honestly, I think you’d enjoy FF8 over Grandia II, since a) it has a massively improved translation over FF7 (and the story is even more bonkers than FF7 was) and b) is a system-driven game, with several interwoven frameworks given you miriad of ways to break the game in half
Also has first instance of ingame collectible card game, beating Might and Magic’s Arcomage by a few months.
Grandia II is a mid game, typical Japanese teen fare, something that will not necessarily resonate with your 40+ year old self. The only thing notable about it is the fact that its original German translation is infamous for translating the ‘Miss’ status effect (as in, to not hit an enemy) as Fraulein, which, yeah…
Throteka
June 20, 2025 at 8:02 pm
Game design-wise, Grandia 2 is notable for debuting its “moving timeline” combat system, which Nival’s Heroes 5 is deeply indebted to.
That’s about it for its significance.
For the JRPG genre, some of their systems-heavy headline entries like Dragon Quest 3, Final Fantasy 5 are actually a lot closer to the CRPG experience than the story-heavy ones.
Last year, Square Enix released remakes of Dragon Quest 3 & Romancing SaGa 2. The latter is considered the pinnacle of the SaGa series.
So yeah – Dragon Quest 3, Romancing SaGa 2, Final Fantasy 5 – I’d say these are worth a try.
Throteka
June 21, 2025 at 8:18 am
Forgot to mention some other games with combat timeline mechanics that’s either overtly or potentially influenced by Grandia 2:
Chinese RPG Sword & Fairy 3;
Final Fantasy 10 & 13;
Child of Light.
.
The moving timeline truly was a cutting edge conception of how turn-based combat could work, by giving action order nuanced, interactive properties.
Tom
June 19, 2025 at 1:27 pm
As a new fan to this website, I’m excited to see your slate for 1999. Omikron, EverQuest, The Longest Journey, LGS gems, Ultimata IX and much more.
See the care you’ve put into the prevous titles of my past, exspecially The Journeyman Project, I’m confident you’ll hit it out of the park with 1999.
Cheers!
mycophobia
June 19, 2025 at 1:36 pm
Looking forward particularly to Ultima IX, MGS, and GK3. Also props on the switch to Linux.
S.M. Oliva
June 19, 2025 at 2:00 pm
Glad to hear your transition from Windows 10 to Linux has gone well. I switched over to Linux about 13 years ago (from Mac in my case), and as a professional writer I couldn’t be happier with my workflow in Linux. I’m using Fedora right now, but Linux Mint is also a terrific product that I’ve used in the past.
Incidentally, I also create periodic ebooks from my blog–an idea I stole from you–and my process is to simply use a command-line tool called pandoc. It basically converts the Markdown files I use to write my individual blog posts and combines them with a cover image to create a finished EPUB file. It’s a fairly quick-and-dirty process but it gets the job done.
Feldspar
June 19, 2025 at 3:34 pm
Looking forward as always to another year. I’m glad that you ended up taking my and some others’ advice about looking at Thief I and II as a set, since for one reason or another Thief I doesn’t fully embrace the premise of “being a thief” (too many levels populated only by zombies and other monsters), and II is the real high point of the series in my opinion.
David Boddie
June 19, 2025 at 4:45 pm
You might be able to run your Python 2 tools in a suitable chroot, though updating it to Python 3 might be the wiser choice at this point. Or moving to a completely different set of tools…
Zack
June 19, 2025 at 5:55 pm
It’s me, it’s the Impression City Builders guy! Absolutely looking forward to a coverage of them one day, warts and all.
Regarding Pharaoh, once you allow yourself to use tiny slums (one house is enough !) for workforce recruitment, is when the game properly opens up and you’re free to actually use up the maps and all that free space real estate.
Jimmy Maher
June 20, 2025 at 9:56 am
Until a plague strikes and the poor saps die in that one hut die and half your industrial base dies with them because it no longer has access to workers, at which time you belatedly realize that the most vital building in your metropolis was that one miserable hut. ;) It’s just an awful mechanic, which makes no sense in terms of fun or realism, unless that one hut is actually a station on a secret underground subway system. I’m amazed that it took Impressions four games to figure that out. (As you can, I have rather strong feelings about this, because there aren’t many pitches that appeal to me more than “play through the architectural history of ancient Egypt.” My heartbreak that they ruined it with one inane mechanic causes me to lash out…)
Zack
June 20, 2025 at 10:07 am
I absolutely understand ! I guess years of playing it as a small kid made me blind as to how awful it can be to trudge through.
I can recommend the recent remaster/remake, came out on steam and has a toggle to enable global recruitment pool, eliminating the need for slums.
If you like that idea of building through Egypt, I can also recommend Children of the Nile (GoG), also a city builder but a different take on the formula, and more recent too.
Jimmy Maher
June 20, 2025 at 10:22 am
I tried really, really hard to find a way to justify playing Pharaoh: A New Era, just because I so wanted to love the original and because it does fix the thing that kept me from doing so. In the end, though, I had to accept that I just didn’t have the time.
Zack
June 20, 2025 at 6:12 pm
Fair once again. Those games just take a ton of time. New Era isn’t all good, there’s a lot of bugs left and it was abandoned, but at least we got it.
Looking forward to the coverage, regardless!
Jimmy Maher
June 20, 2025 at 6:24 pm
The one drawback to A New Era is that it kind of killed the impetus to work on a major mod for Pharaoh like Caesar III has, with a global worker pool, etc. That’s what I’d really love to see. I actually prefer the aesthetics of the original game.
Zack
June 21, 2025 at 12:54 pm
Oh absolutely agreed. New Era looks are… cartoonish, to put it nicely. But I’d much rather have the old style back with the modern features. Kind of a shame that it wasn’t toggleable at least. Maybe rights issue ?
The Wargaming Scribe
June 19, 2025 at 7:17 pm
I remember my first employment in the video game industry.
What are you 3 favourite games?
“Europa Universalis 3”
“Freespace 2”
“and the third one is, err, hmm, Super Mario Kart”
Later, they told me that they took me because obviously the third one was not Super Mario Kart but clearly I could read a room and think on my feet :).
So yes, I am looking forward quite a few of those games.My parents are still playing Everquest, too.
A small note to say that the replacement of Alpha Centauri FINALLY arrived: Shadow Empire (2020).
The Wargaming Scribe
June 19, 2025 at 8:22 pm
Text under brackets disappear. I have to try again:
What are you 3 favourite games?
“Europa Universalis 3”
(empty stare)
“Freespace 2”
(empty stare)
“and the third one is, err, hmm, Super Mario Kart”
(eyes glowing)
Zack
June 20, 2025 at 10:08 am
I never tried Shadow Empire, how does it hold up as a successor to Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri ?
The Wargaming Scribe
June 20, 2025 at 3:26 pm
From what I hear, pretty well. I say “from what I hear”, because while I played Shadow Empire I only have a passing knowledge of Alpha Centauri; so my confidence about the replacement of Alpha Centauri being finally replaced is the combination of hearsay on AC and enthusiasm for SE.
Shadow Empire is the result of a designer who tried to try to put in the same game:
– Alpha Centauri/post-apo Civ,
– A weird but pretty cool card system to unleash game-changing decisions,
– A simple but purebreed “realistic” wargame with order of battle, ammo, morale, supply, etc
– A bit of Crusader Kings with ministers, factions, etc, all of them being more or less backstabby.
My general experience is that
– the Civ part is outstanding,
– the card system works well,
– the wargame part makes it even better, but maybe not worth it given the UX/complexity cost – the game was self-sufficient without it,
– the Crusader Kings part pulls down the game somewhat as it is one layer of complexity too many.
The “planet generation” system, and how it impacts gameplay is top-notch. It has none of Civ’s streamlining genius for onboarding though, so it takes hours to learn.
Zack
June 21, 2025 at 12:55 pm
Well, you convinced me! I bought Shadow Empire and the expac, and I’ll give them a go over the next few weeks.
Kinda miffed about the usage of AI assets though.
Chops
June 19, 2025 at 7:35 pm
We are well inside the period now where I am no longer reading history, but am reading a reminiscence of my own life.
I am holding my original copy of Longest Journey in my hand as I type. Came with the soundtrack on CD. Very soon we shall be reading about games I’ll never get to. A living ghost in my own future.
Keith
June 19, 2025 at 8:35 pm
Everquest made such an impact on my life, I look forward to your histories regarding it. It’s crazy that 1. the game is still live and having content produced for it, while 2. teams of technically minded superfans go through all the effort of making era-accurate servers and clients than run on modern machines, often with “house rules”, and large enough communities exist on those servers to keep them viable.
Whomever
June 19, 2025 at 8:57 pm
I’m especially looking forward to your take on Ultima IX. As a huge Ultima fan, I was so burned by Ultima VIII that I didn’t even bother looking at it (plus it got bad reviews). Should I go back and play it? YOU get to decide! :-)
Linux gaming of this era was interesting because there was actually an attempt to port a number of commercial games to it around then. I bought all of them out of policy to send a message to the market (I was idealistic and had a lot of disposable income at the time). In hindsight, Linux of this era wasn’t standardized enough to really support this, it was like the bad old dos days of adjusting config.sys to adjust your EMS settings. But I did play through Alpha Centauri on it and it worked well and was fun (another of your references!).
Vince
June 20, 2025 at 12:58 pm
You should play Ultima IX so that you will think Ultima VIII was not that bad, after all /s
f
June 19, 2025 at 9:24 pm
This is one fantastic lineup to look forward to!
I’ll toss three additional 1999 titles into the ring, for your consideration (not that roster wasn’t already packed enough …):
– Jagged Alliance 2: Sir-Tech’s landmark mercenary strategy game.
– Midtown Madness: the developer Angel Studios went on to be acquired by Take2 and became Rockstar San Diego
– King of Dragon Pass: a fascinating blend of visual novel and turn based strategy
Thank you so much for the incredible amount of work you put into this website :)
The Wargaming Scribe
June 20, 2025 at 4:59 pm
Some excellent ideas.
Jagged Alliance 2 would be a great addition (in the general opinion one of the best tactical game of all time, in addition of a solid RPG of its own), its production would be a good way to keep tabs on Sir-Tech first introduced almost two decades earlier – their demise a few years later is an interest inf story. It would also allow to backpedal into Wizardry 7 – one of the most bizarre story of development hell, a story so bizarre indeed that no one believed the ramblings testimony of its producer until internal Sir-Tech proved it to be true a few years ago.
My only fear about JA2 is that our host may not like the game that much.
KoDP was another excellent suggestion – I still occasionally play the mobile port – but Jimmy answered on that one.
I remember Midtown Madness as a fun game pushing the tech enveloppe, but I don’t think it is historically as significant as the other games mentionned.
Jimmy Maher
June 20, 2025 at 5:12 pm
I think I’ll do a longer article or series on Sir-Tech from the late 1980s through early 2000s when we get to their swansong of Wizardry 8. It really is an interesting story. Controversial too, with a lot of accusations and counter-accusations flying around among the personalities to this day. But, as you suspected, Jagged Alliance isn’t something that excites me as a player all that much in itself.
Mikko
June 23, 2025 at 7:47 am
JA2 has some parts that are the very definition of scenery chewing (anybody who has played the game knows what I am talking about), but many of the mercenaries are great examples of how a little bit can go a long way in creating unique, funny personalities and interactions that add instead of detract from the experience of of playing the game. Very few games get the balance right.
And there are so many that if (when) some of them don’t quite hit the mark – for example, when you get tired of hearing some quip for the nth time, or (for me) when maybe a few of the mercenaries start to feel more like depressing, even bigoted caricatures rather than ironic sendups of various genre archetypes… well, you don’t need to keep them in the team.
f
June 20, 2025 at 5:29 pm
JA2:
Yes, good points! Pretty much what I had in mind, too. It *is* a very deep game mechanically, which requires a sizeable amount of time to wrap your head around and appreciate – perhaps a bit of a tricky candidate in that regard. Its themes and tone hit a bit different nowadays, too. I would certainly love to learn more about its development, though.
Midtown Madness:
True, gameplay-wise it’s not really boundary-pushing. It might be more interesting in the context of its developer moving on to other seminal open-world games like GTA3 (arguably, you can still see some of MM’s technical DNA in the latter). Now that I think about it – maybe the range of games published by Microsoft in the second half of the 90’s might make for an interesting broader topic?
King of Dragon Pass:
Yes, I can see the issue. I myself only ever poked around at it at times, but never really stuck with it. Always found it fascinating, still, especially aesthetically.
Outcast was originally on my list of suggestions as well – it was quite the hype in the run-up to its release. Just the other day I was reading the development notes by one of its creators, Franck Sauer: https://francksauer.com/index.php/games?view=article&id=47:outcast-pc&catid=15:published-games
… and while writing the above, two more titles came to mind: No One Lives Forever (1999) and Shogun: Total War (2000).
Jimmy Maher
June 20, 2025 at 5:34 pm
No One Lives Forever was actually released in 2000. Definitely one on my to-be-tried list, as a lighter and wittier take on the shooter genre, with nary an alien or demon in sight.
f
June 20, 2025 at 5:46 pm
Oops, my bad. And yes, it really was a refreshing (and groovy) change of scenery in the mainly drab, otherworldly realm of FPS of that era. Happy to know it’s on your list.
Gwydden
June 19, 2025 at 10:31 pm
1999 looking good! I know you’re not too keen on RTS, but no Age of Empires 2 coverage?
I also support King of Dragon Pass if there is interest/time and will throw out Commandos as another suggestion. It’s the first in a line of stealth tactics games going through Commandos 2, Desperados, and Robin Hood: The Legend of Sherwood, and fun enough for me growing up that I forgive it being a World War II game. Commandos 2 and Desperados are better, though, so it might be worth waiting to cover them all in one go.
Pharaoh was my second PC game ever, I think, but I agree Zeus is much more approachable, charming, and overall more fun, though other Impressions Games’ fans may crucify me for saying so. I also liked Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom, the studio’s last game, though that’s several years down the line.
Jimmy Maher
June 20, 2025 at 9:33 am
I judged that Age of Empires II can be safely folded into a later article or pair of them that will conclude with Age of Mythology. The latter looks much more interesting to me personally.
I did look at King of Dragon Pass, having remembered it as a bit of a cause célèbre among the old guard years ago, its commercial failure allegedly pointing to how dumbed-down gaming was becoming. As happens a surprising amount of the time — Looking Glass’s later games are to some extent a case of this as well — I could see pretty clearly why most people might bounce off of it, and I don’t think it had much to do with their intelligence. It’s very hard for me to work up much enthusiasm for playing a game that seems so disinterested in welcoming me in. On-ramping and basic interface design are vital parts of the modern game designer’s craft. Being innovative in other areas doesn’t absolve one of these responsibilities.
Squireoivanhoe
June 21, 2025 at 3:03 am
Yes, AOM would pair nicely with AOE. There was also a Star Wars spinoff that I really enjoyed!
Josh Lawrence
June 22, 2025 at 2:23 pm
Hm, I think this claim that King of Dragon Pass puts up a wall of UX unfriendliness so tall that it could never have been successful is belied by the fact it had success when ported to iOS – surely not wild commercial success, but enough so that it spawned *two* sequels for iOS and desktop, Six Ages 1 & 2. There are some improvements to the UX in Six Ages, but not radical changes (you can see in screenshots that it’s the same engine and basic interface).
I agree that the game dunks you head-first into its fantasy society’s lore and values as a sink-or-swim proposition, in that you have to learn – by failure – what is considered ‘right’ by that society, and that combined with its UI clunkiness can be frustrating. But as likely the most robust use of the (before the term existed) ‘storylet’ idea of narrative interaction in its time (and thus a forerunner of the Failbetter approach to story), especially as embedded in a tribal management sim, it could be worth scaling the wall to get your take on it, but I understand if you don’t want to.
Aaron Reed on KoDP’s use of storylet design:
https://if50.substack.com/p/1999-king-of-dragon-pass
Josh Lawrence
June 22, 2025 at 2:56 pm
Addendum: Aaron’s article says both UI and engine were revamped for the 2011 King of Dragon Pass iOS release (and same revisions used in 2015 desktop re-release and the Six Ages sequels), which very likely helped its positive re-release reception. On the other hand, the article also notes how A Sharp did not have the budget for normal marketing for the release of the 2019 original, so its initial commercial failure might not have been completely the fault of its UI.
Deckard
June 20, 2025 at 4:56 am
Could you cover Outcast for 1999? *big pleading puss-in-boots eyes*
Jimmy Maher
June 20, 2025 at 9:06 am
It does look interesting, and it’s only $2 on GOG.com right now. I’ll give it the old college try, and see how I get on with it.
Niall M
June 20, 2025 at 8:23 am
Looking forward to your HoMM 3 work – there’s a lot of material out there, including detailed personal recollections from Greg Fulton, original lead developer. Unfortunately he seems to have severe health problems and much of the material is not directly accessible (https://www.reddit.com/r/heroes3/comments/1hqzeq2/fanstratics_development_has_ended/) but the archive etc should yield results.
There was also a HOMM3 board game kickstarter and a card game and many related things, so a deeply influential work.
The Wargaming Scribe
June 20, 2025 at 6:12 pm
I forget about it, but (december) 1999 is the year when Gameloft was founded; to an extent 2000in mobile gaming was like 1980 for computer gaming. The story of its development and of early feature phones is pretty interesting in my opinion.
Jimmy Maher
June 20, 2025 at 6:19 pm
Yeah, I don’t what I’m going to do with mobile gaming. I restrict myself pretty ruthlessly to computer rather than console gaming because a) that’s what I know and like best and b) to do otherwise would leave me overwhelmed. I think it may be necessary to rule out mobile games for the same reasons.
On the other hand, there are huge changes afoot even in the computer space. Bejeweled, the progenitor of the “casual” craze, came out in 2000; Big Fish Games was founded in 2002. As interesting as I continue to find the games I’m covering, I also look forward to the arrival of some new aesthetics and approaches, aimed at a different demographic.
Jason Dyer
June 20, 2025 at 6:40 pm
PopCap started in the computer space so it’s probably at least worth giving them a treatment at some point. Their story ties in with the launch of mobile iDevices so you can give a sort of gestural glance at mobile gaming that way.
I am honestly not sure what JRPG I’d recommend to you. Even Chrono Trigger (“the best ever”) I think you’d have issues with.
Maybe you’d like FF12? The Gambit system might be up your alley and it’s got an interesting English translation, at least. The plot avoids some of the JRPG pitfalls I think you’re falling into (in doing so, alienated some fans) but also falls into some others heavily.
re: the points earlier, for any Laura Bow fans, since I did Colonel’s Bequest out of sequence (liked conceptually, did not enjoy gameplay) I’m willing to do Laura Bow 2 sometimes out of sequence. I really needed to get out of 1982 before going anywhere like that though (which I’ve now done).
Speaking of Denmark, I should be writing about the first original adventure game in Danish soon (I even have a more-or-less accurate year now, at least an upper limit).
Jimmy Maher
June 20, 2025 at 7:18 pm
I played a very early Danish-language text adventure years ago, just for giggles. Not sure if it was the first one, though. It was set in outer space. There surely weren’t many of them made. It’s a small country, and most Danes who would be likely to play a text adventure speak pretty good English…
David Stern
June 20, 2025 at 8:01 pm
Excited for The Longest Journey, which I dug as a teen.
I remember what struck me about it the most at the time was it being the first computer game I had encountered where the characters swore like real people which made an impression on me.
The 90s before that with games I had played had a very “swear in catchphrases” or “swear to be deliberately edgy” kinda vibe to them and then that game comes along with some characters swearing occasionally, some not and exactly the characters you would think would be huge swearers doing precisely that.
It sounds like such a small thing today in an era where games are often much better written than the average game of that time was, but was very striking at the time.
CJ
June 20, 2025 at 10:55 pm
I’d certainly be interested to hear your take on the (slow!) rise of Linux as a viable gaming platform. Your histories are actually coming into an interesting time in Linux gaming. I don’t recall the exact years they were active, but we had at least two main allies at the time doing ports of some popular games to native Linux: Loki Games and Linux Game Publishing. I just checked and I’m shocked that both of those websites still exist! (Though Loki’s page is having some issues since its PHP apparently used a .php3 extension.) We even got *boxed* versions of various games — I still have my Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri and SimCity 3000 boxes from Loki.
We had some other allies at the time, too, such as Id Software and Epic Games, though I honestly don’t recall how much of it was “official” support and how much of it was down to opensourced engines. We had native versions of all the Dooms and Quakes and Unreal Tournaments for awhile from all of them. And sometime around there were other indie studios like Introversion Software who were making native Linux versions for us.
Wine had existed for awhile by that point but it was definitely a crapshoot as to what would work and what wouldn’t. The eventual incredible success of Wine in the “modern” era (via Valve’s Proton) continues to shock the hell out of me! But it was good enough even back then to play some popular titles, like the Half-Life series.
Anyway, good times. I’m sure you could dig up some real interesting stories to tell, if you can find the time for it!
CJ
June 20, 2025 at 10:58 pm
I suppose I should qualify when I say that Wine “was good enough even back then to play some popular titles, like the Half-Life series,” it’s possible I’m talking about early-to-mid 2000s rather than late 90s, of course. I don’t really have the timelines 100% straight in my head. :)
Whomever
June 21, 2025 at 1:00 am
Yeah, I think you are a bit early. That said, your allies comment is absolutely a thing…there was a flag to WOW (which is from about 5 years later) to play it using OpenGL and not DirectX. This would run pretty well in Wine of that era, though the speed would get really really really sluggish during a raid…(to the point I just bought a Mac because I was fed up with fighting X windows for 10 years anyway). (Speaking of Macs I assume they did this because they had to have the OpenGL code anyway so it wasn’t a lot of extra work).
Jaina
June 21, 2025 at 2:20 am
Man, where to even start with Final Fantasy of this era? 6 was a SNES game, and the pinnacle of the old school. 7 of course is legendary… 8 is just weird in a lot of ways. 9 is pretty classic, a return to older days. 10…. I love 10, but also… it’s so easy to make fun of a lot of 10. Blitzball… 11 is a MMO and 12 is a mmo but single player that borrows heavily from Star Wars. So, I guess I mostly love 6, like 7, 9, 10, and don’t have great feelings about 8 and 12.
Josh T.
June 21, 2025 at 4:37 am
I am just putting my voice out there that I would love to read a history of game shows (and I’m assuming the associated video game adaptations of said shows) if you ever find the time.
Jeff Sampson
June 21, 2025 at 8:16 am
Any other JRPG circa 1999 or later is going to have lots of battles, FF8 is the best way to see the genre at its commercial zenith while skipping past most of them. From what I’ve read, Grandia II lets you see enemies on the map, but there’s a lot of them, and you need the EXP, unlike FF8. Final Fantasy 8 is a game where you can turn off random encounters by getting a certain ability early on, and you don’t even need the EXP from random encounters because of the level scaling.
And after FF8 the genre just becomes a Johnny Come Lately that takes its sweet time adding what everyone else is already doing(voice acting, “open world”, etc.), while becoming more niche and not a system seller. Also, there’s no annoying voice acting, just a love song. All in all, a good case study of how even console games were converging on “cinematic” with 3d graphics and canned assets like 3d animated cutscenes.
FF8 is also the last almost platform-exclusive “event” game I can remember aside from Halo(like FF8, Halo got a perfunctory Windows port over a year after the initial release). The PlayStation 2 buried its competitors with quantity and better pricing rather than flagship titles. And we all know platform exclusivity became rare outside of Nintendo after 2006.
There’s a lots of guides that tell you how to quickly beat FF8, no fast reflexes needed, and it has one of the first game-within a games: Triple Triad, forerunner to the card game in The Witcher 3. Both version on steam(original and remastered) have good community guides and cheats. I think you can even turn down the battle speed.
Jarno
June 21, 2025 at 9:05 am
Do you still plan to write about Boulder Dash and its successors?
Jimmy Maher
June 21, 2025 at 9:10 am
No, that kind of fell by the wayside when the X-Files, Sierra, and CRPG Renaissance series ran longer than expected. If there’s a big interest — I didn’t really sense that there was when I first broached it — I can put it back on my list of subjects to try to get to at some point.
P-Tux7
June 22, 2025 at 3:40 am
Count me in. I’m not a huge puzzle gamer, so I love these peeks into how people’s favorite games of certain genres came about and their impact on the gaming scene.
Emerald Mine, Flaschbier, Supaplex, Rocks ‘n’ Diamonds, Igor: The Time Machine, SubTerra and SubTerra Draconis…
Hresna
June 21, 2025 at 12:02 pm
Like Jimmy, I was mostly a point-and-click adventure type in the 90s, with a penchant also from RTS games. But one 1999 title that I played annually through my early oughts university years is “Drakan: Order of the Flame”, a title I don’t think a lot of people played, and probably rightly so.
Much of the game is pretty generic 3rd person explore/combat with ye-olde weapons, as a female protagonist; but what made the game special was that you have a dragon companion that, when outdoors, you ride and control. It really opens up in the third act when you get to a large outdoor area that is somewhat “open world” ish, and I used to keep a game save in that area to just fly around and chill for a few minutes between classes.
I don’t think it belongs in this blog, but I thought I’d give it a shout out for my fellow readers and patrons.
Lewis R Raszewski
June 21, 2025 at 5:37 pm
I’ve been linux-exclusive for over a decade now, a lot of it Mint (I jumped ship from Ubuntu around the time of Windows 8 because Ubuntu got infected with the same “People don’t really want computers any more; we should retool the OS to act like a big tablet” philosophy that shortened the life cycle of that generation of windows). It’s been a while since I’ve run into the traditional bane of linux users, where there is This One Application That Is The De Facto Standard, especially since almost everything has a cloud equivalent now. TBH in this era, OS is almost entirely a matter of personal preference. I do run into occasional issues with Steam, but I don’t really game enough to be angry about it. (What tends to be more annoying is itchio games that “support” Linux but clearly only by way of the dev checking a box in Unity, where you’ll run into a pile of dependency issues that don’t make sense and no one involved actually understands. Why does this game require a 10-year-old 32 bit cryptography library with known vulnerabilities? Because a dude checked a box probably)
Leo Vellés
June 21, 2025 at 11:36 pm
Wow, there is no better (and sadder) testimony to the demise of the point & click adventure games in the computer games market that seeing in your list that there are only three or four games of that genre in all 1999.
And I suppose this will be even be worst in the years to come
Jimmy Maher
June 22, 2025 at 10:23 am
The genre will begin to pick back up again in a few years, with more modest games usually made by studios in parts of the world where labor costs are cheaper than in the United States and Western Europe. Adventure games never regained the industry prominence they enjoyed in the early to mid-1990s, but there are a *lot* of post-millennial gems if you’re willing to dig for them. For now, it’s best to take a positive view and appreciate the sheer variety of experiences on this list. That’s been my philosophy, anyway. ;)
P-Tux7
June 22, 2025 at 3:54 am
I can’t wait for Worlds Apart, and maybe you remember me saying that a year ago. I would compare Suzanne Britton and her Higher World to Tolkien and his Middle Earth, in that there is quite possibly no other work of interactive fiction that is so obviously part of a greater world instead of one invented whole-cloth just for the game’s purposes. And yes, that includes all the licensed games you’ve covered. (Though I’m all ears for “if you liked Worlds Apart, you’ll like…” recommendations!) I really ought to email her and tell her that…
Something I’m curious to see you cover – although I know this is more of my time, as a 1999 baby, than yours – is the rise of Macromedia Shockwave, then Macromedia Flash, then Adobe Flash. I know you touched upon Java applets, but that is practically just the Genesis of online single-player browser gaming, with the other plugins (and modern HTML5/WebAssembly games, of course) making up the other 65 books.
I almost cannot overstate their importance. It’s really like PBS – free online games gave us children a culture we could share, almost heedless of class, and got teenagers to start being creative in a big way – “Everything by Everyone” as Newgrounds put it.
I do feel sorry to say this for the fans that Oddworld hit like a freight train in their tweens or teens, that Invader Zim/Hot Topic/Salad Fingers group – but I am afraid to report that the creator of Oddworld has become quite a repugnant person in recent years, just like the creator of The Neverhood, and I don’t blame you at all for not covering it, even independent of how player-hostile those games can get. Let’s just say that he’s voting for people who you REALLY wouldn’t have expected someone who made the game’s villain “Moloch the Glukkon” – with all the condemnation of liberalized capitalism that implies – to vote for. The series’ recent resurrection will always be tainted by that, and it would be a sour note for the article to go out on.
Alex
June 22, 2025 at 6:02 am
Good to read this article! As always, really looking forward to your thoughts on some of this games. Like others commented, it was a notably time of transition. Somehow I could really feel that the industry was going to make the next step forward.
Regarding JA2: While it slipes my mind frequently, this was really an excellent game, hitting the sweet spot between deep mechanics and accessibility perfectly. Bought it soon after release and loved it. It was also the most brutal game that I played until this point, from the scenario to the animations to some dialogue. I didnt´t mind a bit as a teenager, but can´t stomach it nowadays.
Regarding Grandia 2: While the story, some character progression and the music are allright, the presentation is really digitized modern anime to its core. You really have to be into this stuff. For some people it´s a classic, but I wouldn´t recommend it either for a beginner.
If you are really curios to try another J-RPG however, I would recommend trying “The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky”. While its presentation is a matter of personal taste, the gameplay and story is really solid and it all feels kind of mature compared to some other games in this genre.
For a fresh take on the genre I would recommend the 2022 game “Chained Echoes” however. It got great reviews in- and outside the windows community and I can see why.
Also, it really seems that Linux made a big step forward. Tried it out twice over 20 years ago, got burned really badly, but now will look into it again.
Kai
June 22, 2025 at 8:39 am
According to my personal list of videogames, three out of the four games from 1999 I played made it into the selection:
* The Longest Journey
* Ultima IX
* Planescape: Torment
The only one missing is Civilization: Call to Power (another of the few games receiving an early Linux treatment). Looking at its reception, seems it didn’t fare too well. Though I do remember it fondly.
Alex
June 22, 2025 at 12:00 pm
Planescape:Torment found its way in my collection when some game magazine I was reading around the new millenium decided to include it on their covermount. I already knew about RPG´s, but was actually totally overwhelmed by the experience. I tried my best to make anything out of the whole story and gameplay and I really enjoyed it, but then moved on. Many years later I got into the strange situation that on one side I knew that I played the game while on the other side I questioned myself if it wasn´t just a fever dream at all. It was still quite a unique experience when I played the remastered version not so long ago.
Captain Kal
June 22, 2025 at 12:52 pm
Freespace 2: Since you are migrated to Linux, I think you should check Knossos.net (https://github.com/KnossosNET/Knossos.NET/releases) a Freespace 2 Mod Manager/Launcher.
There is an Appimage available for Linux. There are separate downloads for playing the campaign using the original graphics (Retail FS2) or the vastly superior Freespace Upgrade MediaVPs Mod.
And if you have a Force Feedback Joystick tucked away somewhere, you can still use it, with the Linux version. I restarted the campaign just for that !!!!!
Last year I bought a Lenovo Legion Go handheld. It came with Windows 11 which did not translate well to handhelds so I switched to bazzite (https://bazzite.gg/). I still keep Win11 in a usb for some games, that refuse to run in bazzite (I am looking at you Terminus https://www.mobygames.com/game/3060/terminus/) and I still cannot mount disk images except isos, but Valve made a tremendous job with Proton layer. And the funny thing is that the main bazzite developer works for Microsoft!!!
I always thought that HOMM3 was a puzzle game in strategy clothing. There many time you get into a “dead man walking” scenario in the second game week, with no chance of recovering. I am eagerly waiting for your take on this and similar games!!!
Busca
June 22, 2025 at 1:31 pm
Looking forward to your coverage of this year. Won’t add any comment on the list of titles itself, much has already been said by others, but just a somewhat OT remark on your article title since I also enjoy little touches like this.
I see that you either changed the rhythm of rhyming year preview titles from two-yearly (1994, 1996, 1998) to yearly. Or maybe it just was easier for you to find a rhyme for “1999” than it was for “1995” (e.g. by adding “in life” in the middle of your “And Onward to 1995”? ;-)) or “1997”. Although “1997 feels like heaven” might have been too much, I guess ;-), and so it became “Another Year Down, Many More To Go” instead.
Will be interesting to observe how you handle next year then – at least it offers more variety on how to phrase it (“2000”, “Y2K”, “millenium”, …).
Carlton Little
June 22, 2025 at 6:02 pm
Hmmm… what about Nightlong: Union City? I think you mentioned it before but I don’t recall an article.
Jimmy Maher
June 23, 2025 at 5:38 am
Yeah, I had originally thought to pair it with Sanitarium in an article on “the future of adventure games” as more restrained, lower budget productions aimed at a niche market. But Sanitarium was so interesting in itself that it seemed a little bit demeaning to it to pair it with Nightlong, which is so average in every way.
Madeleine
June 22, 2025 at 6:56 pm
A few years ago I played through all but the first and last of the Nancy Drew games. I started with Stay Tuned for Danger, which was so bad that I wondered if I’d imagined all my fond childhood memories of the series. Fortunately Message in a Haunted Mansion was a major improvement, and I enjoyed almost all of the games after that. So hopefully you’ll soon get to a Nancy Drew game you like.
Mikko
June 23, 2025 at 8:05 am
I wonder if you will find the time to do some kind of a retrospective of Accolade. I’m sure it would not be a multiparter like Sierra, and the latter half of the company history didn’t really have that many highlights that I can recall after Star Control II, but it still survived for 15 years until 1999.
Jimmy Maher
June 23, 2025 at 10:53 am
It’s hard to know what to really say about their latter years. They had a strong, distinctive identity in the 1980s as the maker of polished and accessible yet sneakily innovative Commodore 64 games. In the 1990s, though, they became rather bland and anonymous, with few releases of any real note.