1999 -
Silent Hill
Silent Hill is a third-person survival horror game developed by Konami and released for PlayStation in January, 1999. Silent Hill utilizes real-time rendering of 3D environments, and to lessen the PS1's hardware limitations, the developers actually added fog and darkness to muddle the graphics! The game follows the story of Harry Mason as he searches for his missing adopted daughter, Cheryl, in the town of Silent Hill. The development of the game started in September of 1996. Team Silent, a group of staff members from Konami, decided on a "fear of the unknown" approach for their game and wrote a vague storyline to force the player to fill in the gaps. Artist Takayoshi Sato designed the cast of characters for Silent Hill. Initially, Sato was restricted to basic font editing and file sorting, but he created 3D models and presented them to the older staff members. However, Sato was not given much credit for his work since he was a young employee and was much less respected than older staff members. He actually approached the higher-ups in Konami at one point to demonstrate renderings of his 3D models and threatened to withhold his information on such rendering techniques unless they let him do the 3D modeling. He was given this opportunity! Sato's superior still did not want to give him full credit for his work and wanted to give Sato a supervisor. Sato prevented a supervisor by volunteering to do all the full-motion videos by himself after his coworkers left for the day! He practically lived there for two and a half years, rendering the full-motion videos using his coworkers' 150 different Unix-based computers. Inspiration for Silent Hill came from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's book The Lost World and Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
EverQuest
EverQuest is a fantasy Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) developed by Sony Online Entertainment and released in March, 1999. This was actually the first extremely successful MMORPG that utilized a 3D game engine. EverQuest's development started in 1996 by designers John Smedley, Brad McQuaid, Steve Clover, and Bill Trost. Inspiration for the game came from text-based MUDs (Multi-User Dungeon), in particular DikuMUD. EverQuest includes 16 classes:
Warrior
Shadow Knight
Paladin
Beastlord
Berserker
Monk
Ranger
Rogue
Wizard
Magician
Necromancer
Enchanter
Bard
Cleric
Druid
Shaman
If fantasy multiplayer role-playing games are your thing, I'd definitely check this one out!
Silent Hill gameplay screenshot
EverQuest gameplay screenshot