Circa 1997.

              Throughout this blog you have read me mention the canvas for games that is technology. The 1990's is one of the most innovative and impressive decades in human history when it comes to technological advancement. Last year, 1996, we saw this advancement mirrored in our new entertainment medium made possible by this tech. The much faster CPUs availablePrin in the last 18 months had allowed crazy levels of interaction with Duke Nukem 3D and a fully 3D and textured world like Quake. Quake being the prime example of the type of game that just simply couldn't exist before. This was reinforced when the OpenGL version of the game shipped allowing video card acceleration. Cards like the Voodoo1 from 3DFX could assist the CPU in a way that provided much higher resolutions, texture filtering to clear up the textures and much faster performance. Nvidia would soon in 1997 release the Riva 128 and its GPU concept allowing a dedicated processor for real time rendering to handle even more task through bespoke hardware.
                 Computer hardware had been evolving and as a side effect monumental computing task could be done at home and make interactive experiences like video games. However by 1997 we see computer hardware splitting off and specifically evolving for real time 3D rendering. Quake was the very tip of a very large ice berg. Voodoo, Nvidia and with ATi coming back strong later in 97 the markets leaders where shaping the gaming industry. But so was Sony and Nintendo. Sony new to gaming hardware and Nintendo the returning king of game platforms for the late 80's and early 90's. This will be the first year you finally see me incorporate console games into this list. With console's like the PS1 and N64 using slightly scaled down workstation equivalent CPUs and custom primitive GPUs. Both consoles would deliver incredibly high end hardware comparatively to high end PC hardware. These where monster machines built around 3D graphics. The trade offs and features set would be different between them and 3D rendering was very much the wild west still. In its infancy along with the solutions to all of 3D's problems both technically and in consideration of game design.
                     Technology was certainly changing the world. 1997 was making economics and daily life radically different that how it all worked at the start of the decade. The Dot Com boom was in full swing in the United States. Silicon Valley at its center. It was still a very different world from today but the seeds of modern technology was growing fast. 1997 even more so than 1996 would show exponential progress in the world of video games especially first person shooters. 1997 would be one of the best years in the genre's history.

- Classic movies many of us grew up with: Titanic, Jurassic Park, and Men in Black would all three come out this year.
- Princess Diana died in a car crash.
-Shows like King of the Hill and South Park debuted this year.
-Spice Girls was the most popular Pop group in the world.
-Min. Wage was $5.15 an hour.
-Wifi 802.11 was introduced to the world.
- World Population was 5.8 Billion people.

Incurable lover of the grotesque

    

id software may have been absent from this journey for awhile now but no game on this list has escaped the legacy of DOOM.  Romero, Carmack, Willits and the rest of id had crafted a genre that was rapidly growing financially,expanding with creativity and budding technology. Video games as a whole by 1996 was a well oiled, money making tech industry by then bringing extreme competition as we see with Duke Nukem 3D. Within the context of the time its remarkable id had lightning strike twice. Quake fundamentally changes what we could experience and imagine with not just FPS games but video games as a medium. Quake also holds the test of time. By all present day standards the shooting and level design are still lofty design goals. Quake is the first time in this blog where I can easily tell a fundamental rebirth of the genre.
                                               Quake brought a world to video games unlike anything before. Shooting and chopping your way through rusty, grimy sci-fi hallways and arenas. Wading through thick, gray moats to literally storm from the bottom up a massive castle of interwoven platforms and hallways. Mystic Lovecraftian  dark hallways lit up with magic and lava. All tied together by a ghostly soundtrack from 90's icon Trent Reznor. The slow high pitched string tunes, moaning, foreboding bass and occasional ripping of industrial sounds for the main track take you on an emotional and atmospheric roller coaster that makes the varied horror filled world of Quake unique and timeless.
           The immersion is further built upon with incredible physics simulation for the time. Bodies blow into meat chunks that bounced around the environment. A decapitated head may blow off and land at your feet looking up at you. Blood splatters in three dimensions. The amount of brutal carnage this throws at the player makes even DOOM look kid friendly. It's clear id was very much intent on keeping their controversy intact, even relishing it. The breakneck speed of games like Duke Nukem or id's own DOOM was turned up a notch. It allows the player to literally blow through enemies and fly around the level as the gore I mentioned rains down like grotesque confetti.  Quake is one of the best feeling shooters of all time and without hyperbole no game on this blog so far can begin to compare. Romero and company return with genre leading level design.  Allowing plenty of ways to bounced around in horizontal and vertical space, make and gain ground with interwoven platform and hallways along the outside of arenas.
Because of Quake's incredible speed its not uncommon for the game to vertically stack and cross long hallways to blow through and move vertically throughout. I mentioned with DOOM II how the movement system only worked cause of fantastic level design accommodating it. Quake does this along with the gunplay in a way that only could be done from a talented and now veteran studio like id Software. It all comes together and stuns me even today. In the context of 1996 and this blog Quake would redefine my expectations and believed limitations of not just first person shooters but games.  Where even Duke Nukem 3D struggles from uneven parts at times Quake feels like a skilled blacksmith made it. Quake is shocking in terms of how special and unique the atmosphere is.  Its hard to describe the shift from all the games on this blog and then Quake. I don't think we see anything like that in modern games or have in maybe over a decade if not longer.

              The weapons in Quake follow what at this point isn't DOOM as much as it is id's DNA. Almost all FPS games I've played in this blog, bar 3D Realms and Star wars, try to steal this so it certainly was an industry staple by 1996.  Like Duke Nukem 3D though Quake really changes it up. The movement system in Quake , along with its level design, makes it incredibly fluid to play even today. The weapons play just as much a part of this and add to the games most important character, violence. Instead of DOOM Guy's fist you get an axe to chop enemies up with, after enough hits they will explode into meat chunks flying around the room. The nail gun or as it should be called NIN gun. Uses Nine Inch Nails ammo and looks the part. Dual barrels firing on even and odd turns held together with a metal plate. The nails fly through the air in three dimensions as well. This gun is probably my favorite. Another gun to use the NIN ammo is a rotating three barrel nail gun that fires slower but does more damage. The game loves to let you play with explosives. Its a trend I saw in Duke Nukem 3D and love seeing id's take on it. Rockets are plenty and essential to making the game so brutal. Also rocket jumping becomes a thing and getting thrown around the level because of shock force and doing the same to an enemy is just too much fun. The grande launcher is a blast allowing you to kill enemies around corners or arch and pop them with a direct blow.  Quake's arsenal is timeless fun and I think in 1996 it would have thrilled me.        
             The enemies in Quake would drastically change from DOOM II and use the id Tech 2 engine to make combatants not possible before. The grunt doesn't try to hide his function at all and functions very similar to Pig Cops in Duke his sci-fi borg like look could be something out of DOOM. The Death Knight however delivers a very new enemy type to the FPS genre. Fast, hulking, and badass he will either slay you with a powerful melee attack or send out a spread of fire balls. He's my third favorite enemy in the game.  Scrags fly and float but are much more nimble than say the Octobrain or Caco Demon, they also shoot poison darts that are very fast requiring lots of strafing. Enforcers again are just beefed up grunts but layering them in with multiple other hostile characters create for a good flow and they are important to the game. The Orge is my second favorite character dragging a chainsaw arm and grenade launcher around.  The grenades physically bounce around the world and its pretty incredible to see after playing the other games on this blog. Shambler makes it to my favorite as a Lovecraftian nightmare that strikes you with lightning and is much faster than your comfortable with. Fantastic and very much sums up the vibe of Quake. Vore serves similar to the baron of hell from DOOM II but in true Quake fashion is a spider monster with horrible bloody teeth and smile. Quake like Duke Nukem has the most unique enemies from this blog so far and its real nice to see by 1996 the creative design of enemy encounters was branching out as well as becoming more contextually aware.

                 All these design choices I talk about aren't without fault. I bring up Duke a lot because I think 3D Realms made many of the right choices when it came to interactivity and grounding the player in a reactive environment. Being able to push those pool balls or blow apart environments must have been pretty incredible in 1996. It also made the game feel like it respected the players interactive intentions and presence by reacting to it in so many ways. Make no mistake. I love that part of Quake's atmosphere are these dead, foreboding, filled with ambient places. But they feel lifeless in an artificial way compared to Duke Nukem 3D. It feels like a step backward after 6 months and the otherwise massive leap elsewhere. Also Quake feels very disjointed. I love the variation in the environments and being able to select difficulty and levels through 3D space was novel at the time I'm sure. However none of it fits what so ever together or seems barely intentionally together. After having such consistency in games like Heretic, Dark Forces, or Duke not having that makes it feel rather off the entire time even if the atmosphere is great.
                   All this is only possible because of idTech 2. A game engine is the essential canvas for a game. As with DOOM II in order to exist in the form it does new tech had to be made. Quake was one of the first true 3D video games. It was the first true 3D shooter. Using polygons and mapping textures to them idTech 2 was the forefront of real time rendering and would lay the fundamental foundations of what we largely still use today. It makes me wonder if any piece of video game software has ever been as important. All this ambiance and terrible blood lust is only possible because idTech 2 took FPS rendering not just to the next level but several orders of magnitude above anything on this blog before it. The jump here is astronomical and hard to describe. In 1996 this would change everyone's perception about what was possible. The gore, the weapons, the physics, the incredibly immersive visuals. Whatever Quake lacked in interactivity it made up for with that. Jon Carmack is genius of our time with idTech 2 certainly being one of his hallmark achievements.
                        This blog continues to get more and more enjoyable. I've played Quake 1 plenty before it came time to replay it with conextual lenses for this blog.  Its great to be able to look back at industry moments or years and playing games leading up them really just gives you an appreciation for it in a way reading never will. I played Duke Nukem 3D and wrote on and on about how great and innovative it was. Duke did in fact blow me away in the context of this blog. I meant what I said about it by far being the impressive thing since DOOM II. However Quake is light years beyond even that. Its by far the best and most impressive thing I've played for this blog. The entire genre owes its modern life blood to Quake. We see its influence in everything from modern rendering to design. id innovated and problem solved where no one had even had to approach the same problems before. Quake may be a bit off and disjointed but the rest of it is a perfect symphony of its parts backed by what was tech from the future. It was a very real phenomenon in 1996.  A summary of that year in technology and innovation distilled into the worlds new medium video games. Quake is the best game on this list by a landslide as of writing. Forever one of my favorite games.

             



 

Hollywood Holocaust

              

    "I'm going to blow your head off and shit down your neck." Stallone, Schwarzenegger, all 80's angst and 90's edge Duke Nukem shoves his foot up the ass of every alien he comes across. "The mighty foot", dual wielding rapid fire mini missile launchers, Pig cops, interactive strippers and night club combat arenas are the culmination of Duke's tour de force. Duke Nukem 3D in 1996 must have been the most impressive video game yet. It's level of interactivity and grounding of the player, destructible environments, puzzles, first person platforming, combat and weapons would introduce new concepts and experiences for not just first person shooters but video games as a medium. Duke Nukem 3D is the most impressive shooter I've played on this blog.
                        Duke Nukem 3D is great for a lot of reasons and unlike the game I've wrestled on how to introduce them. I think its best and most befitting of this blog to start with the new concepts Duke introduces to video games. Duke is one of the first games to really explore and deliver a multitude of grounding yet pointless activities for the player. Throughout this blog one thing I'm reminded of is how static game worlds used to be. These activities even if seemingly pointless to the goals of the player show the player a simulated reaction to the players actions. Giving a great sense of presence, modern games like Zelda Breath of the Wild or sim shooters like Prey use these interactions to great effect. Even Hexen or id's violent ascetic in DOOM feel rigid and do little to react to the player. With Duke Nukem I paid a stripper money and she flashed me her breast, I can push pool balls on the pool table, blow up toilets and fire hydrants to see a resulting water fountain out of the ground.

Posters rip, secret switches now have dinner tables sink into the ground or change the positioning of giant hollow gears to create a navigation puzzle. Lighting is used to great effect. It very much completes Duke in the same way blood completes DOOM. The Red Light District and porn theaters wouldn't be the same without the Build Engine. All of this was almost completely unexplored in 1996 game mechanics and setting. Duke Nukem 3D pioneers these efforts largely in a way no shooter or game had ever done to this point. The reason its great though is Duke Nukem couldn't exist with anything less. The gameplay down to its core along with it's levels all go around this sandbox mentality Duke introduced. Because of its ambition Duke Nukem 3D in 1996 showed new potentials in interactive games but also used it to be one of the best gaming experiences ever made.
                       I've mentioned Duke's philosophy permeating all aspects of its design.  One of the most refreshing things about Duke is his arsenal and combat approach. Video games like any other medium establish genre templates that are often borrowed from. Hexen was really the first game on this blog for instance to dramatically break away from DOOM II's weapon set even though it wasn't near as ambitious as Duke Nukem 3D. The pistol fires pretty fucking fast and does a low but reasonable amount of damage.

It reloads every 12 shots and is the only gun to do so. It interestingly enough keeps the rapid fire of the weapon from being a bit over powered on lower end imp like enemies such as the Assault trooper or Assault Captain. These enemies more or less act as imps and can even teleport at times. They have a dying animation of being shot in the throat sometimes and its with things like this that Duke enjoys his gore as much as DOOM guy.  Pig cops are similar to DOOM IIs zombies soldiers but shotgun armed and like most enemies in Duke 3D can dodge by lying on the ground. This makes for some dramatic differences in fire fight pacing from other shooters in this retrospect and would introduce reactionary enemy AI to the genre other than simply running into your smoking gun barrel. The shotgun ammo you get from these guys powers one of two DOOM clone weapons. The shotgun itself is nothing special but I am fond of the foregrip, other than that it wears its' DOOM DNA proudly. Duke gunplay and use has a much bigger focus on explosives and the rocket launcher does this well again straight from id's playbook. Octobrains remind me of Cacko demons but after that all the enemies feel new and fresh in game. Battlelord sentry's are so tough at times but so, so satisfying to take out with weapons like the Devastator, a dual wielded rapid fire mini rocket launcher. Like the grande launcher on the Battlelord, Duke uses physics to introduce the concept of proper throw able explosives in FPS games via the Pipe Bomb. All explosives have a chance of literally blowing your enemies to bits that fly around the level. Its a level of cartoon gore that I adore and was pretty incredible for a shooter in this era. There is plenty of other standout enemy archetypes and Duke is the first on my blog to introduce new ones to the fps template that future games even until now would borrow from. The head mounting , life sucking Protozoid Slimer come to mind. However as much as the double barrel shotgun is to DOOM's personality things like the Shrink Gun or Freeze Ray are to Duke. The game allows you to often shrink and stomp on enemies or freeze and shatter them. The guns are fun, sometimes the gimmicks get in the way of the flow of combat but generally I found the opposite to be true.Duke feels his best when running around blowing everything up and very DOOM II speeds. I had the most fun I've had with first person combat and enemies in this blog with Duke Nukem 3D. Its wholly unique and fun while being familiar enough. I would have been floored in 1996 and still in 2020 have newfound heights of respect for this games gun play and enemy designs.

                           The manifestation of 3D Realms' design philosophy successfully nailed the essential aspect of 3D space in a 3D video game. Obviously they lived up to the company namesake. Duke's levels blow its contemporaries out of the water. One of the things I heavily praised DOOM II for was its allowance of the fast strafing and forward/backward movement. While the game played with vertical scale it never did anything like Duke or modern games do. Levels like Flood Zone have duke fighting on dry planes while going underwater dealing with all kind of caverns and planes. Open areas like the opening to Bank Roll leave tons of strafing horizontal space akin id games. Then some of my favorite levels like Raw Meat find some nirvana middle ground employing both sides of the design coin. It's not just design in the ways 3D Realms made Duke's levels. Duke Nukem 3D is the first game I've played in this retrospective look that feels like they could finally visually represent whatever environment they wanted. Dark Forces, DOOM II, Heretic all looked largely the same. The thematic and atmospheric aspects of level design is one of the most important things in video games. While Duke goes to the moon I do feel like he finds his identity at home with nightclubs, porn theaters and city streets. Red Light District, Hollywood Holocaust,LA Rumble, and Movie Set all took me to places not possible in games before. It fits the 90's edge and pop culture hard.A far cry from DOOM II's "city".The levels are big and use vertical movement very much connecting floors of buildings and adding platforming mechanics to Duke's dynamic.  While jumping and jet-packing or scuba diving around 3D space gives you this sandbox feel. Duke's levels aren't without fault. Some of the destruction needed to progress or that gets triggered near the player isn't intuitive or obvious and sometime poorly timed.  It can be frustrating at times and it shows designers wrestling around how to introduce mechanics or signal objectives. Most of the game's puzzles are straightforward enough and don't add much to the experience sometimes they are less obvious and I found them tiresome. These levels are made to be interacted with even with small details and are meant to be explored in 3D space thoroughly. Duke Nukem set a new standard for 3D game level design.

                             The wrapper on 3D Realm's ambition is Duke Nukem himself. I've quoted him several times, talked about paying strippers, and blowing everything up. He constantly delivers one liners that suite his character making me for the first time in this blog feel like I'm actually playing a character. Much of his alpha male, 80s'/90's disposition sits between cheap Water Boy levels of  comedy and actual parody. It really is memorable thus perfect for a 90's FPS character. Duke as a character and the game are memorable in ways the other games in this blog have not been. Broken into episodes akin to id games, Duke has 4 chapters. The first chapter introduces all the themes I love about the game. I feel like unlike the other games I've played on this blog Duke is the first game to have a somewhat cohesive approach to introducing mechanics, enemies and difficulty across episodes of the game. Hollywood Holocaust got me hyped but Lunar Apocalypse is the second and worst episode of the game. Playing much more in DOOM design principals and worse for it. It kind of drags on but then my favorite chapter Shrapnel City more than makes up for it. Throwing in full confidence everything that makes the game great. At this point the game is fine at taking moments to really punish the player but I'd found my skill had grown by this point and it really let the game mechanics shine.
                                 Thinking about Duke Nukem 3D in the perspective a 1996 fps fan is easier than many games on this list. His character is fun, the game is bright and thematically a treat. Its technologically a big jump over anything before it. I think as someone who enjoys the creative output but doesn't design games I would have been playing things I never could have dreamed of. I am personally a huge fan of interactive games like Skyrim or Crysis so this would have been the equivalent at the time. Sometimes a game comes around and just delivers everything, shifting the medium and the genre its part of. I think for 1996 Duke Nukem 3D was that game. This blog is a real pleasure and I've learned so much from this game as it wholly justifies the whole process. 3D Realms' master piece is one of my favorite games and one of the best shooters I've ever played. While game design is still rough, not player forgiving or intuitive it took big forward steps with Duke. Designers where no longer stumbling on the basics but wrestling issues that come about from much more ambition. Duke's high level of interactivity and retro sprite based visuals make it an odd ball of time. It plays and feels more advanced than it looks. No game on this blog so far had came close to the influence and impact DOOM II had until now. While Duke does indeed still borrow some id basics I'd argue this game is just as big a milestone for the FPS genre. Duke was tremendous.