1992.Game - A Gaming Documentary Series

We come now to what can be called one of the greatest years in gaming history. A year filled with so many great games, so many cornerstones and required educational material for game design that it will blow your mind.

1992 can be seen as the end of an era. Apple discontinued the AppleIIgs, bringing an end to the Apple 2 series. Commodore released its final system, the Amiga 1200, a machine that, due to having its development staff fired, wasn’t the giant leap in technology that the Amiga 1000 was. Although still a capable computer on its own, it would soon fade into background, mismanaged into oblivion by a company unworthy of its greatness. A struggling publisher called Mediagenic, formally known as Activision, was taken over by an investment group lead by one Robert Kotick, and put back on the path to becoming one of the most important publishers in the video games industry. Microsoft released the first version of Windows that anyone really cared about, Windows 3.1. And the CD age was gearing up, with the international release of the Philips CD-i, and the release of the Sega CD add-on for the Genesis/Mega Drive.

If you’ve enjoyed the music on the background of this series for the past six months, you’ve got Dune to thank. Released in 1992, Dune was a strange mix of a game, created by the french studio Cryo Interactive. It was part point and click adventure, part Cinemaware Amiga game and part real time strategy. You’d be traveling the planet Arrakis, trying to muster together the fremen, to produce enough spice as to satisfy the will of the emperor, all the while working in secret to turn the desert green, and create a fighting force capable of taking down the Harkonen and the emperor’s Sardukar as well. It was a magnificent title that managed to not really fit any genre per say, instead making a name for itself as its own type of game.

1992 also brought us the excellent RPG Darklands, made by Microprose, that aimed to eschew some of the then usual attributes of the genre. It did have fantasy elements in it, but the game was set in a very solid historical context, with real world locations, covering a big stretch of Central Europe, and letting the player do as they please through the world, in an attempt to basically stop the devil.

This was a fantastic year video game sequels, some of the oldest series in the industry getting up to their sixth iteration in the case of King’s Quest, fourth in the case o f Might and Magic, seventh in the case of Wizardry and its Crusaders of the Dark Savant. The last Wizardry to be released in that millennium. And it was also when the seventh Ultima game was released. The Black Gate. A landmark title that took the concept of open world and just blew it up, by adding to it a world with a level of believably to it so deep, that it let you do things like light and put out candles you could find through the world, or basically move everything that wasn’t nailed down, and even bake bread, by combining flower with water, turning it into dough and putting it into an oven. That is just one tiny example that exemplifies the core idea at the heart of Ultima 7, that this was a world that people lived in, not just a place that existed for the player.

The same idea was also at the core of another Ultima game. Made by a small studio called Blue Sky Productions, at the time. A game called Ultima Underworld. While having the same idea as Ultima 7, of representing a lived in world, it went a few steps further. It wasn’t a top down game, you were inhabiting a single character, from a point of view seen before in many dungeon crawlers. Only here you wouldn’t be crawling through a dungeon, instead you’d be trying to learn about this worl d, you’d be talking to its inhabitants, or you could just kill everyone like a maniac. It was meant to be a reactive world that immersed you into the experience. And it did so by simulating everything it could. Your character had physical properties, you’d bounce off walls when you jumped. And even though characters were 2D sprites, the world was as threedimentional as possible. It behaved more like a flight simulator, in the way you moved, that as a dungeon crawler, and it never tried to make you feel like you were in a game. You were always in a world, a detailed, lived in world, filled with living characters. It set the groundwork for a genre called the Immersive Sim, a genre that aimed to put you in the games world completely, and try to not break the illusion that this was real, that you were not in a video game.

And it did so with only a tiny part of the screen, at a very low framerate, because the 486’s of the age could not do better. Whereas, if you wanted more simplistic gameplay, with just traveling around some really well made 2D levels, shooting nazis, you had Wolfenstein 3D. Id Software’s first claim to fame in the FPS genre that it was slowly trying to define. According to legend, Wolf 3D exists as it does because John Carmack saw a really slow version Ultima Underworld at a trade show, and said he could do it faster. That’s probably not true, but Wolf 3D was indeed faster, although unable to draw anything other than rectangles and sprites. Technologically, it was in the stone age compared to Ultima Underworld, and it did little to resemble its predecessors, the older Wolfenstein games being based more on a stealth system that couldn’t be added here, due to limitations. But in terms of sheer fun, it was easy to grasp and engaging thanks to its level design, setting the stage for something that would blow the socks off everyone within a year.

Another sequel to come out that year was the excellent adventure game Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Proof that there can be fantastic games based on films, or at least on film properties. One that managed to encapsulate the joy of the movie series, in an adventure that offered more choice that seemed obvious at first. It had a story that everyone wished would have been turned into the fourth movie of the series.

Within just two years the people at Toys for Bob managed to turn a simplistic 2D space combat game into probably the greatest space adventure ever made, and one of the best games ever created in general. This was Star Control 2. One of the few video games that has done alien creatures and interaction with the right, and mind you, this was also the year when we got the only properly good Star Trek game, in the form of Star Trek the 25th Anniversary. Star Control 2 was inspired in part by Starflight, from 1986, with which it also had a bit of developer overlap, this game put you in the shoes of the captain of humanity’s last hope. A ship built by a race so advanced, that one of their trucks would outmatch most warships… you were commanding that truck. Flying across the galaxy, collecting allies, making friends, making enemies, and involving yourself in a complicated and ongoing in real time political system that makes most other space games look bland by comparison.

And one last sequel that we truly need to talk about in 1992 is that of a game that we’ve already discussed about 5 minutes ago. Both games released within the same year, neither beginning development of knowledge of the other. This was Dune 2. The game that put Westwood on the map. Well, it was already on the map because of the Eye of the Beholder series and a few other games, but this planted a flag on the map so tall that everyone noticed. This was the birth of the RTS genre. While there had been plenty of games with real time control over units, Dune 2 defined exactly what the formula for the RTS is. Unit production, resource gathering, technology progression and combat to no end. Paired with a killer soundtrack and an environment that was out to kill you as much as the enemy was, Dune 2 became the game to copy, at least for part of the industry, until 1993 rolled along.

And speaking of a game that would be copied to death and back. Infogrames brought us the seminal survival horror game Alone in the Dark. A mix of action and adventure, in world that mixed 3D with 2D, with fixed camera angles, tank like controls for characters and a heavy focus on needing to carefully explore the environment in order to avoid death. It was a marvelously horrifying experience for its time, and with time, its simplistic graphics have only made it scarier. Maybe not as visually frightening as Dark Seed, though. An adventure game made by Cyberdreams, based on art by HR Giger, exploring the depths of madness to which people can descent, while trying to solve its puzzles. It was, at the time, a very visually disturbing game, and it still is, giving a lot of people nightmares, as any good horror game should. This was also the year when we got Night Trap, which wasn’t a horror game, but it did bring about the horror of mandatory video game age ratings, and was seen by many in the media and in the US government as a sign that all the evils of the world were caused by some awkward full motion video game that was for the most part harmless.

And when Night Trap wasn’t enough, they set their eyes on a new fighting game that was just eating up all the attention. Mortal Kombat was developed by Midway with the initial idea of making a Blood Sport game, staring Jean Claude Van Damme. But when that idea fell through, they stuck with the idea of using digitized images of real life actors to create a fighting game that didn’t look as cartoony as Street Fighter, but kicked just as much ass. Probably more, in a literal sense, and many other body parts. Even removing them, ripping them apart, crushing them, and in general being as bloody as possible. Mortal Kombat kicked the arcade scene into high gear, with pure spectacle, encouraging the participation of others to resolve the mystery of what was the correct button combo for making a fatality. That was part of the brilliance of the game. It encouraged the development of a community around itself through mystery. It’s a game that may not be as respected, in terms of tournament pedigree as Street Fighter 2, but it was a game for the masses which spawned a series that seems to have no end.

In less violent realms, we also had the first game in the Kirby series, Kirby’s Dream Land. A joyful platformer staring a cuddly ball of yet undetermined color that swallowed up everything it could, and used it to traverse the environment. In a similar kind of genre we also got Delphine Software’s followup to Another World, in the form of Flashback. A cinematic platformer that proved that the Amiga still had bite to it, even though Commodore was was getting ready to run for the hills.

And lastly, one final game that I believe is worth mentioning is Silicon & Synapse Lost Vikings. A platformer that let you control three characters, and requierd you to use all of them to find a your way through levels that involved an alien space ships.

As for what was the game of 1992… well. This has got to be the most difficult decision in this show so far. Because, I kid you not when I say that some of these were the greatest games ever made for their time, and some are still some of the best possible games ever designed. But taking into account what best defined that year, and what left the biggest impact on the industry, I have to say that the title to Ultima Underworld. It did first person gaming and 3D world design at a level that no one managed before it. It was a technological marvel that wasn’t equaled for years to come by other first person games. It pushed the limits of what was possible in terms of graphics, physics, character interaction, world reactivity and set a standard for something that we still crave and try to do every year. A total immersion experience, for the time, that would be emulated, reimplemented, remade, redesigned and in general reused by just about every first person game since. Where as, let’s face it, the industry and the public at large have given up on the RTS. But make no mistake, most of the games you’ve seen today you should have played by now, if you truly want to understand great game design. Apart from Night Trap.

So closes the year 1992. Next week, we are all doomed.

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