Resuming from where I left off yesterday, here are the next few years of gaming history in the 1990s!
1993 -
DOOM
Doom is a 3D first-person shooter game released in 1993 by id Software, and it is considered one of the most influential games in gaming history because of its graphics and first-person gameplay at the time! After Wolfenstein 3D in 1992, John Carmack decided to develop another 3D game engine, id Tech 1, which became known as the Doom Engine. The designers at id Software were looking to create a game that combined both science fiction and horror, and they took influence from movies such as Alien and Evil Dead II. John Carmack cited that he came up with name after watching the movie The Color of Money, where at one scene Tom Cruise arrives at a pool hall with a case for his custom pool cue and somebody asks "What you've got in there?" Cruise replies "Doom." Doom tells the story of a space marine ("Doomguy") who has to fight his way through hordes of demons that have possessed the crew of the Mars space stations and eventually goes to hell after an experiment goes wrong. This classic game set the pathway for many first-person shooter games in the 1990s, such as Duke Nukem 3D, Star Wars Dark Forces, and Rise of the Triad. As of right now, a new Doom game was announced at E3 this last summer! Looks like Earth is in for trouble!
Virtua Fighter
Virtua Fighter is an arcade fighting game by SEGA released in October 1993. This game was actually the first fighting game to utilize fully 3D polygonal graphics, and it was highly regarded for its use of real world fighting techniques. Each character was created with flat-shaded quads and each had their own distinctive move set with different martial arts, which made the game more diverse and interesting. There were only 8 characters in the game and there were only three buttons (punch, kick, and guard) and a joystick to fight with. The single-player consists of fighting all other characters and a final boss named Dural. Each fight is a best-of-three match, where the player wins by either knocking out the enemy, forcing the enemy out of the ring, or by having more health when the time runs out. Virtua Fighter helped give rise to 3D versions of other classic fighting games, such as Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter.
Doom gameplay screenshot
Virtua Fighter gameplay screenshot
1994 -
The Elder Scrolls: Arena
The Elder Scrolls: Arena is a fantasy open-world role-playing game (RPG) developed by Bethesda Softworks and released in November 1994 for MS-DOS. The Elder Scrolls: Arena wasn't originally planned to be an RPG. Instead, the designers of the game Ted Peterson and Vijay Lakshman planned on creating a "medieval-style gladiator game." The player and his companions were originally designed to travel the world and fight other gladiators in different arenas until he/she became the "Grand Champion" of the Imperial City, the world's capital. After taking inspiration from table-top RPGS and seeing the newly released Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss, the game was put into production. However, when the game was in development, the designers started diverting from the main premise of the game and focused more and more on the side quests, cities, and dungeons instead of the arenas; this soon took precedence over the rest of the game and finally the designers agreed to make a fully-fledged RPG instead. Eventually, Arena combat was removed from the game entirely. Todd Howard joined the team and tested the CD-ROM version of the game as his first assignment. Howard now works as Executive Producer of Bethesda Softworks. If you love free-roaming in a massive fantastical world full of dungeons, inns, cities, quests, interactions, and realistic day/night cycles, or if you just love The Elder Scrolls series and old school gaming, then this is the game for you!
The Elder Scrolls: Arena gameplay screenshot