Having slipstreamed the PC 3D gaming industry boom, Nvidia would go on to release the ‘first GPU’ the GeForce 256 , at the end of the 1990s. It was no coincidence that one of the first games to make use of the first Direct3D 7–compliant accelerator with hardware transform & lighting would be Quake III Arena , by id Software.
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Mark Tyson Social Links Navigation News Editor Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.
usertests I played the Keen games a lot, was on the Public Commander Keen Forum at one point, and I even made a level/sprite pack that's probably lost on some old HDD. Reply
ezst036 To some extent games like Wolfenstein are merely mods to (the) classic (idea of) dungeon crawlers like Wizardry, Dungeon Master, or D&D Eye of the Beholder. Instead of picking up wands and swords and spells along the way of defeating enemies you pick up shot guns. Doom even kept the idea of armor. Though instead of equipping it in a secondary dialog screen it's a glowing blue orb (wrong item) a glowing blue or green armor using a percentage based function that can be depleted. But armor is still there. Perhaps the biggest innovation is free walking/looking. These dungeon crawlers had a grid based walking system on tiles with a fixed view but W3d and Doom have free walking in any direction. CQWe-hBQl7o View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQWe-hBQl7o -VSVaJOemEU View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VSVaJOemEU 2IIkBgKBoFc View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IIkBgKBoFc The similarities are uncanny. It's a dungeon crawl with guns swapped in. I love this BTW, I'm not complaining at all. Just noticing. x8o0a5ntxfc View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8o0a5ntxfc Reply
alrighty_then Nice, I vaguely recollect the Commander Keen games. 1990s websites look nothing like today but perhaps the developers that saw the most change since the 90s are game devs. Thanks to all those that made fun games! Reply
alan.campbell99 Hmm, I was on an Amiga 500 at this time, I only switched to a PC after seeing Quake II running what was likely a 3D card so I soon after got a 166MHz Pentium DIY build with a Voodoo 1. I was playing side scrollers from memory on the C64 then A500 without issues so no experience with PCs prior, were there limitations for scrollers on PC prior to this game? Reply
blppt I think nowadays a lot of people dont realize how tough it was to get platformers running as well on PCs as they did on much cheaper consoles. For example, until Jazz Jackrabbit came out, the PC had nothing that could come close to Sonic's performance. And that generally required a fast 486 to do smoothly. The 486 is much more powerful than the Genesis/Mega Drive 68000 cpu. Reply
Joshua Thornton There's an hour long documentary on YouTube about the beginning (history?) of id games. I've watched it a couple of times. It's pretty entertaining, and done well. Reply
kyzarvs alan.campbell99 said: Hmm, I was on an Amiga 500 at this time, I only switched to a PC after seeing Quake II running what was likely a 3D card so I soon after got a 166MHz Pentium DIY build with a Voodoo 1. I was playing side scrollers from memory on the C64 then A500 without issues so no experience with PCs prior, were there limitations for scrollers on PC prior to this game? Same question here – I'm thinking of games like Turrican II on the Amiga which pretty much nailed side-scrollers. Reply
mode13h kyzarvs said: Same question here – I'm thinking of games like Turrican II on the Amiga which pretty much nailed side-scrollers. Consoles had been implementing smooth scrolling in hardware for a very long time. but smooth scrolling was only implemented on PC with the introduction of the VGA card. EGA (and older) did not implement hardware for handing row or column based scrolling in its graphics modes – you pretty much had to do this manually, which was quite CPU intensive. Reply
Key considerations
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/retro-gaming/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/retro-gaming/id-software-released-its-first-game-35-years-ago-today-commander-keen-title-showcased-john-carmacks-breakthrough-side-scroller-engine#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
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