The 5: Nineties Computer Games

This Week on The 5: Computer Games of the Nineties

The 90’s may been the time when the home gaming console came to be found in every single household, be it the Super Nintendo or Genesis, video games became gigantic. But at the same time, games were being developed for home PC’s and they were just as big, meant for the more hardcore gamer. Instead of a controller with six buttons, you had a keyboard and mouse, giving designers and users a much larger interface to develop for and play with. Below are five PC games that foreshadowed the coming multi-billion dollar gaming industry.

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• Doom.  Release date – December 10, 1993.  Doom is considered to be the pioneer of the first person shooter genre by, at the time, having amazing 3D graphics and environments making it a massive success. Starting as a lonely space marine whose squad is all but dead, you are left with a brass-knuckled fist and a pistol to fight a legion of demons on the planet Mars. It blew up the first person shooter, more than it’s predecessor Wolfenstein 3D could. Before there were ever playable shooters on a home video game system they all ran through home computersRunning on the DOS IOS, if you had a computer in the mid-90s you were playing Doom. Without Doom, there is no Call of Duty.
• Diablo.  Release Date – December 31, 1996.  Diablo is a third person role playing game that is in the genre of hack and slash. Anyone who has played Diablo remembers the constant clicking on the mouse to attack your enemies leaving your hand hurting for days, it induced carpel tunnel. Diablo labyrinth like level designs were so huge and immersive that you could get lost in them, the levels would constantly change generating different ones every time you played. It was one of the first games to have true replay value, it made it so that you had to keep playing to see everything the game offered. And one of the most innovative features was you could play online with other people on Blizzards online gaming network Battle Net. This was utilizing the internet when not everyone had cable modems, it was ahead of its time.
• Command and Conquer Red Alert.  Release Date – October 31, 1996. Command & Conquer Red Alert started the golden age real time strategy games. The game consists of you building a base and building an army while harvesting minerals to fund your military operation. This was a genre game, that to this day, really can’t be played well on a home console. The real time strategy game is one that can eat up hours, days, and weeks of your time and combined with Command and Conquers above average storyline of an alternate history where World War 2 never happened, it rose to be one of the most beloved.
• Starcraft.  Release Date – March 31, 1998.  Command & Conquer paved the way for this blizzard titan that sold over 1.5 million copies in the first year and 9.5 million copies worldwide. StarCraft was the best real time strategy game to date when it came out making it a juggernaut worldwide with a massive online game play. It was somewhat of a follow up to Blizzard’s first big success, Warcraft. People became obsessed with this game, there’s still a huge market for this 1998 game in the online community. South Korea has an industry centered around Starcraft where players are sponsored and there’s televised tournaments of there games. Starcraft hit right when broadband internet was becoming widely available in the United States and it grew right along with people ability to play each other across the country and the world.
• Half Life.  Release Date – November 19, 1998.   The Half-Life franchise from Valve is considered by many to be the greatest first person shooter/video game of all time, selling over 20 million copies worldwide. The game has no levels or cut scenes which makes it a constant continuation of nonstop gameplay. It broke a lot of the conventional rules of the first person shooter by not having “levels” or “end bosses”. It integrated your characters actions and moves seamlessly into the storyline. Because of this game, it changed the entire genre of first person shooters, developers had been getting lazy and churning out one cookie cutter game after another, until Half Life dropped. The people at Valve created something different, that video game players hadn’t seen before and they loved it. The astonishing thing is, they did it again in 2007 with Portal.

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