THE START AND THE PROPHECY.
I wish to tell you a brief story................
Around 7 years ago i was playing games on my $ 3000, 286. There were such games as Budokan, Alley Cat and Prophecy. Which is the one i want to talk about. Prophecy was the first game i had bought for my rather meager PC. It was designed by Activision in the early part of 1990. It was a simple top view of a charector who would could run in any direction. It had the ability of running on any PC with a graphics card that could support CGA (colour graphics adapter, only had 4 colours though.) it could, however run under 256 colours. (which was better than some of the Sierra games that appeared in 16 colour EGA) It took me a couple of months to finish the game and even then i didn't finish it properly. You see the game had two ways that it could be finished. One was that you just get the hell out'a this building before it blows, or two you just use a simple magic thing and teleport yourself. I never did figure out the magic thing. What made the game so enjoyable though is that you could just walk through city after city talking to charectors. There were hundreds of magic spells that you could use and even more weapons. There was an actual storyline to the game. You had to interact with other charecters to finish the game. The game had good level design from travelling through a city from a castle through dense flora and fauna.
Now you must be thinking - this is a RPG right? And yes although i did not know it at the time it probably was. The reason i did'nt know was because after playing the crappy dungens and dragons games i must of thought all RPG's are just plain crappy. Sadly that is not the case.
Just reading about this game you should start to get the idea about good game design.
In the early years of PC gaming it was all Sierra, Accolade, and Actvision. All made games for the crappy Atari 7600\7800 and not much later the Master System (sega) and Nitendo systems came out. They had a huge advantage against the PC in there ability to adequetly play Platform games, which were by far the most popular games at the time. Companies decided to create more games for these platforms, rather than the slow PC's at the time. While this is not to say that these platforms had the best games, as you would all know that the arcades has the greater amount of games still today. The PC was a business machine, starting to turn into a games machine. Sierra, must have seen the potential for adventure games on the PC and therefore created series such as Police Quest, Space Quest, Kings Quest, Hero's Quest etc. These were early text adventures but not the earliest. Zork were the earliest of adventures and contained no graphics what so ever so there be happy. The Zork games in the past are better than the modern ones. Maybe they should revamp the graphics in the older ones eh?
Anyways the PC tried to catch up pace with its cousins the Consoles. The Sega Genesis and Nitendo Watch-ama-call-it came out. Some games eg Golden Axe (who can forget) were converted to the PC. The PC was still the master of simulations and adventures though, and those who had access to a PC were always kept happy. The PC however was rocked back again with just one game. Street Fighter 2 appeared on Nitendo and no one could get enough of it. The PC sulked with more Space Quest games. (great) The PC had crappy sound compared to the Apple, Tandy, Commodore 64 (later went out of business)and consoles. So what do we get? an Adlib card. Yeah, Joy we can listen to our Space Quest games in FM synthesis. So we on our PC's sulked and listend to the speech on World Class leaderboard (golf) and Crime Wave, (a arcade game converted to PC on our wonderfull PC speakers. Some of us were so sick of beeping sounds through a .5 watt speaker that we connected our stereo's to our PC,s. But then it came a Soundblaster. Its fully compatible with adlib and can play digital sounds. Shit! Space Quest games dont play digital sounds. So we sulk some more over our $250 Soundblasters until they bring out Space Quest 4. They eventully gave our sound cards stereo sounds and even 16 bit playblack and recording. Then we got the shock of our lives. Return to Zork. (on disc) "Cor Blimey" we said me hard disks only got 100mb and this bloomin game takes up 24meg. So we cried as we watched it come out on CD. We cried even more when the 7th Guest came out with Rebel Assualt. We all need CD-Roms and 1994 was going to be the changing point for the PC.
1994 came at last!!!!
allow me to show you the game charts in 1994
1.) SIM CITY 2000 - This games still at full price!!
2.) THE SETTLERS - Cool medieval game kinda like Warcraft without the battles.
3.) 1942 PACIFIC AIR WAR - some crappy air game, No Really! okay so i never played it (fiddlesticks)
4.) SENSIBLE SOCCER - Silly Soccer game players are too small in it so there.
5.) CANNON FODDER - Brilliant game the led the way for C&C funny too.
6.) WORLD CUP USA 94 - Soccer game that appeared on the PC as well as Consoles. Console Version was better.
7.) PREMIER MANAGER 2 - Soccer Management Sim (boring)
8.) PAGAN ULTIMA 8 - Brilliant RPG that differed graphicly to previous ultima's but was much better.
9.) WIZARD - What the F*** never heard of this game in my life. Sounds crappy mind you.
10.) XWING - A Master piece of Gaming need I say more?
followers ---- Indycar Racing, Lemmings, Links, TFX, Frontier 2
CD-ROM - 7th Guest, Dune, Rebel Assualt, Mega Race, Sam n Max, Animal, Tornado, TFX
It was the year of the CD-ROM and we were gonna kick those consoles were it hurts. While the consoles have today brought out more crap N64 Saturn 3D0 and Playstation, we still have our Pentiums. Its 97 now and i have been playing games on a PC for 9 years so what does 97 hold, an advanced version of Space Commanders? (the first game i played. An odious clone of Space Invaders)...............
Matthew White
2nd January 1997
If you have anything to add i will put it up here.
just send an E-Mail to t+swhite@iaccess.com.au