1995 -
Star Wars: Dark Forces
Star Wars: Dark Forces is a first-person shooter developed by LucasArts and released in 1995 for MS-DOS. It is interesting to note that inspiration for this game came from fan mods of the game Doom, where one of these mods actually contained a fan-made Death Star level! The creators of the game (Daron Stinnett, Ray Gresko, and Justin Chin) wanted to take the FPS genre of gaming and create an adventure style game with puzzles and a deep star wars storyline. They originally wanted Luke Skywalker to be the main character of the game, but they soon realized that doing so would constrain the storyline too much; so these developers agreed on a new character, Kyle Katarn. Star Wars: Dark Forces was created with the newly programmed "Jedi" game engine, which was made from scratch by the visionaries of the game. The Jedi 3D game engine featured atmospheric effects like fog and haze, and it included shading, fully animated textures, and even levels with multiple floors which were never before seen at the time! It also had an active environment with flying ships coming and going, conveyor belts and other machines moving, and even rivers sweeping by. The player controls Kyle Katarn, a mercenary for the Rebel Alliance who is sent on missions related to finding the plans to destroy the Death Star and investigating assaults of Alliance bases.
BioForge
BioForge is considered an sci-fi adventure game developed by Origin Systems and released in March, 1995 for MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows. The game revolves around playing as a Cyborg who awakens in a cell on a ship and it is up to the player to find out what happened to your cyborg, the ship and a strange cult that controls it. The development team consisted of ten people and was lead under the direction of Ken Demarest. This game was really hardware-intensive back in 1995 because of the really detailed 3D models, texture maps, and software renderer. According to Demarest, the game takes place on a "lonely planet because we could not show more than two to three characters on screen at a time." BioForge was one of the first games to utilize real-time motion capture with a rotoscoping technique and it seems to be known for its use of fully texture-mapped quaternion-based skeletal characters, which actually has become an industry standard to this day! The game took inspiration from Alone in the Dark and it inspired Resident Evil. This is also one of the first games to utilize 3D character gore and damage!
Star Wars Dark Forces gameplay screenshot.
BioForge gameplay screenshot