I suspect you may already know this, but PC Accelerator magazine's mercifully-brief existence was not a net-gain for human culture. Who'dve thunk that "What if Maxim, but targeted at nerds, and written with all the charisma of Jeffrey Dahmer" would be a losing strategy? But one thing about its debut issue stuck with me, for both its fascinating photograph of a genre I love at a crucial point in its evolution, and for its unintended comedy/drama/dramedy as a genre at its most hubristic quietly ignores the rapidly growing piano-shaped shadow engulfing it. Because very few of the games in this cover article are depicted in the same form they emerged onto shelves in, if they emerged onto shelves at all.
I suppose we should start with the cover art.
What do you even say to this? I mean, other than the bemused chuckling that a quarter-century of hindsight brings you. Well, I suppose there's one other thing you could say. "Why's Duke holding his gun so weirdly?" I assume it's to stop his arm from getting in the way of John Daikatana over there, but the end result just looks very strange. Whatever makes the art director happy, I 'spose.
I promise I won't delve too much into the rest of the magazine, because we're here for a reason and I don't want to be here all day[1], but I wanna briefly pause on this ad:
Aside from the fact that they're actively comparing themselves with the market leader - something that rarely, rarely ends well in games, as this entire page will illustrate - this ad tells me nothing about this game. And there's so much to say about it that an edgy 90's ad in an edgy 90's rag could say! You can turn people into pillars of salt in this game. Just full-on Sodom-and-Gommorah a motherfucker on the spot. That's a good starting point. Work with that.
Also, they changed the name before release, so not as much brand recognition. Every time someone dies in a marketing office, their soul gets given this brief.
But again, that's not why we're here. Let's not let my rampant, undiagnosed, likely-not-existent-and-just-an-excuse-for-fucking-around ADHD get in the way again, and delve into our feature article! ...if I can even find the table of contents. Jesus, this rag frontloads a ton of ads. Were all American games mags like this? I only had the Aussie and UK ones as a kid.
The Five Games That'll Kick Quake 2's Ass (And Whether They Did Or Not)
Alright, here they are. "The Genuine Killers" that will conquer the world and dominate the games industry! Uh, presumably. How many cheeto-stained fingerprints wound up smeared on the crystal ball, clouding and obscuring True Judgement of the Real Future? Let's find out.
Prey
3D Realms' take on polygons hung its hat on portal screw-ballery many years before Valve ever Dropped a Narbacular. Featuring an Indigenous American protagonist that would've almost certainly been insanely offensive (remember this was just a year or so after Shadow Warrior with its Mickey Rooney-ass voice-over), portals enabling impossible level design, and... uhh... honestly, not much else was really clear. There were probably aliens? I'm not sure. They were also promising a KMFDM soundtrack at some point, but if note one of that ever got so much as written, I'll eat my hat.
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Surprisingly gracious, given 3DR's long future history of perhaps showing more 'tude than their station in life dictated. The lack of information about the gameplay raises concern though, especially with the following:
Does anyone else hear the grim chimes of foreshadowing in the distance upon reading that final sentence? The lack of information about the gameplay continues to trouble, too - I get the impression that 90% of the work on the game was on art and technology, with the game design bit being continuously put off until they had a full arsenal of gimmicks to wrap it around.
Remind me never to accept any horse-racing tips (or opened beverages) from anyone who worked on this magazine.
What Actually Happened
Prey did not, in fact, end up getting completed in 1999. The revolutionary game engine was extremely 3DFX Glide-centric, so when 3DFX bit the dust in 2000, the whole thing devolved into a painstaking engine rewrite. Combine that with Duke Nukem Forever starting to pull resources away as the larger project at 3D Realms, and the whole thing was eventually put in the bin on account of the entire team either quitting or moving to DNF.
A revised version with an extremely different story was eventually built by Human Head on the Doom 3 engine and released in 2006, but that's a whole other thing that's well outside of this page's scope, neatly absolving me of ever having to write about it. Whew!
Did It Kill Quake 2?
Well, some might argue that it was better than Quake 4, but that's a whole other argument to loudly have in the middle of an increasingly-confused divorce court hearing.
Half-Life
Aha! Now here's a name people recognize. And for actually good reason! Half-Life had a prolonged and troubled development that's been wonderfully documented in recent years, but when it finally hit shelves, it hit them hard enough to make an impact that we can still feel the reverberations from today.
But that's now. This was then, when it was merely a head-turning new prospect that was taking a few minutes to get released and had achieved an alliance with an especially popular Quake mod...
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Oh boy. It's hard to remember, well over a decade into an industry-warping haberdashery obsession, the long and corpse-strewn trail that Team Fortress 2 walked to eventually reach human hands. One day someone really ought to document all the different versions that goddamn thing went through. I think the 2000 version might have briefly leaked at some point before being lost forever? I gotta do some more newsgroup-spelunking at some point when I'm really bored.
I think Team Fortress Classic was eventually included in a free patch. I believe there were also plans for a stand-alone boxed release for people who liked making nonsensical purchasing decisions, but I'm not sure if it ever saw the light of day or was just stuffed into the Anthology box-set.
What Actually Happened
Half-Life achieved release in late 1998, and was perhaps liked a little bit, receiving 50+ Game of the Year awards in rapid succession. It sparked off several expansion packs, a modding revolution, the rise of a digital distribution giant, and perhaps not enough sequels for everybody's liking.
Did It Kill Quake 2?
yeop
Sin
Half-Life's chief competition, at least on paper. Built by Ritual Entertainment, a relatively new studio of 3D Realms alumni with a Quake expansion pack under their belt, Sin aimed to use past experience in the sector-effecting field to take polygon-based FPS action up a notch by bring back a chunk of Duke 3D's environmental interactivity and quippy 'tude.
Oh, and the blatant, shameless plays to sex appeal as well, natch. Would it shock you to know that roughly half of PCXL's commentary in this section is about chief antagonist, public marketing face and one-size-too-small tank-top enthusiast Elexis Sinclaire?
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This is the first time I've seen them push "Action-Based Outcomes" as a keyword for branching story paths, but Googling tells me that they kept this up for Sin Episodes too, so it's not like a completely isolated thing. Thankfully, they seem to have dropped the unfortunate acronym in future usage.
Sin actually did come out first, beating Half-Life by a couple of weeks. Though in retrospect, they, uh, probably should have taken those extra couple of weeks to do another polish and QA pass. This is also yet another little reminder of the era when level designers were able to achieve a degree of celebrity, or at least notoriety. This is impossible nowadays, on account of every level in a modern game being built by 700 environment artists from an outsourcing firm based in a country that didn't exist when this magazine was printed.
What Actually Happened
Sin was released in a horrendously-buggy state, with boss AI having a knack for disabling itself, among other things. Patches were quickly issued, but were very large by the standards of the day (downloading 50mb on a dial-up connection sucked), causing much in the way of umbrage. An expansion pack was released, farmed out to a small team who would go onto bigger and better things, before Ritual slipped into a work-for-hire routine making manshoots for assorted publishers and bashing the Quake 3 tech into working in single player for several more.
Sin was revisited in the mid-2000s for a planned Episodic series that, uh, didn't end up Episodic at all - both the series and Ritual folded after Episode 1. The series now sits with Night Dive Studios, whose proposed remaster of the original game is currently frozen in cryogenic storage after development partner 3D Realms (the new one, in Europe, not the old--oh, forget it) suffered a bad case of the Embracers.
Did It Kill Quake 2?
Despite a strong effort, Quake 2 remained untroubled.
Daikatana
(sharp intake of breath)
Despite this being written after the Quake 2 engine transition, the screenshots in this article still seem to be from the Quake 1 build. Which is a pretty interesting detail - the transition from Q1 to Q2 was far harder than originally expected, and they may have still been in the running-around-with-hair-on-fire stage and as such, not in a position to take new promo shots.
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Announcing an outsourced[2] sequel to your unreleased game off-hand is a hell of a power move. Or at least, is intended to be one. In reality, if anyone even noticed (there's alarmingly little documentation about this online!) it might have wound up being an Osborne Effect kinda thing.
Gee, wouldn't that be a shame if that feature got cut? The game just wouldn't be the same without it...
What Actually Happened
Daikatana limped out in May 2000 and I probably don't have to tell you what happened, but for the historical record - it was ripped to shreds by reviewers and given an impromptu sky burial to be further torn apart by players. Ion Storm's Dallas office would limp along enough to release the cult[3] RPG Arachronox before disappearing into the night. Their Austin outpost would fare much better, at least initially, gifting the world with Deus Ex.
Did It Kill Quake 2?
Oh, come the fuck on.
Duke Nukem Forever
The story of DNF is long, arduous, and changes every time someone asks, like the street-dwelling oral storytellers of antiquity who would alter and adapt their tales of swords and glory on the fly to keep their audience interested and, more importantly, chipping money into their hat. I've spilled one or two words about it in the past, you should probably go read those because they're probably better than these words.
For historical reference, this article was ran shortly after the switch from the Quake 2 engine to Unreal Engine 1 was announced. So there some buzz and no small amount of (well-placed, it turns out) apprehension circulating the internet at the point where this magazine enters the scene.
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The engine change news is so recent to this article that all the screenshots are still of the Quake 2 version. And people are already getting impatient about the delays! Boy, aren't they in for a surprise?
"Surprising" is a term one could use, in a similar way that one could describe my face as "unique".
What Actually Happened
Let's put it this way: The game came out in 2011.
Did It Kill Quake 2?
Quake 2 had already returned home from the war, finished a respectable career at a small-town accounting firm, had kids, retired, watched its kids have kids, and died hand-in-hand with its lifelong love by the time DNF achieved its final form.
Wow Kinsie, That Entire Segment Was Kind Of A Bummer
Oh boy, hold onto your ass.
The Ten Games That'll Die Trying (And Whether They Did)
The section lovingly dubbed "...And The Rest", with the disclaimer that some of these games might be good, it might just be too early to tell. So, who are the also-rans, and what was left of them?
Max Payne
Oh wow, we're starting off with a big'un.
It can be hard to remember nowadays, but there was a stretch where Max Payne was considered to be in as much of a development hell as its step-sibling Duke Nukem Forever! Unlike DNF, however, Max eventually escaped the poorly-designed nightmare dream sequence of prolonged game development and found store shelves and mass acclaim, his journey into the night recently announced to continue by an older, wiser Remedy that are so busy doing FMV dance sequences that they forgot how to design a good firefight.
Not really sure what it's doing here since it's not an FPS, but it's always been considered a bit of a spiritual member of the FPS canon for some reason, so sure, okay, I ain't gonna argue.
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Max Payne wound up being a single-player only series until Rockstar took over development of the series, many MANY years later. The Max Payne 3 multiplayer was actually really goddamn fun! I really enjoyed the few months it lasted before it died out like so many other non-tentpole multiplayer games. I'm sure someone will argue with me about this, but hear me out: It's my website, so I'm right.
What Actually Happened
Max Payne survived its prolonged development and reached shelves in mid-2001 to considerable success, an even better sequel and a movie adaption that 3D Realms were clearly very excited about if the mention in the foreword to the game's manual is any indication, but that we're probably better off never speaking of again.
The Wheel of Time
One of the weirder choices for a FPS adaption, surely. But let's be honest, Legend were kind of a weird company, jumping more or less straight from point-and-click adventures to Unreal Engine with very little in-between. And indeed, this game was originally planned to be an out and out adventure game! At least, until Robert Jordan told them to fuck off and stop stamping all over his story arcs. A reconfiguration into a more action-focused side-story later, and things became more palatable...
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Big words! And sure enough, the game does look quite pretty, with unique "Citadel" levels in both single player and multiplayer that take a more proto-Tower Defense-y approach to gameplay. But Legend being Legend, development suffered a number of issues across pretty much every part of the game you can think of - funding, budget, schedule, technology, pleasing Jordan and staying off his literary toes - and their more ambitious plans were paired back in the name of getting the damn thing out the door in one-ish pieces.
What Actually Happened
The game was launched in late 1999 to critical acclaim and consumer indifference, utterly bombing at retail. Legend's next title was Unreal 2: The Awakening, which continued the studio's proud new tradition of not doing nearly as well as hoped. They closed their doors after contributing weapon artwork to the Terminator 3 game on PS2. Not the most glorious end, to be sure, but far from the most ignominious that this generation of studios would face.
Trespasser
Another, shall we say, infamous one.
A collaboration between a batch of former Looking Glass alumni, megapublisher Electronic Arts and even director Steven Spielberg, Trespasser set its technological crosshairs staggeringly high even by modern standards, with bump-mapped, soft-skinned dinosaurs with advanced artificial intelligence and procedurally-generated movement through a physics-driven world. All in software rendering!
Unfortunately, development was initially troubled on account of Grim Reality before becoming intensely rushed at the end of development to hit an AMD cross-marketing deadline. The resulting compromises, struggles and consequences were so intense that it drove the game's director/lead programmer to perform acts of Jurassic Park-esque mad science in resurrecting ancient Egyptian bread[4]. And also create the Xbox, I guess, but that's less relevant IMHO.
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You can laugh at this quote, but really, can you imagine trying to sync all those physics objects over a dialup connection? Half-Life 2 struggled and made compromises on cable internet!
I'd fucking love to see what Trespasser deathmatch mode would look like though, especially if the player models were still floating one-armed torsoes. It'd be an utterly majestic shitfest. Hey, modern indie developers! You have your new game jam subject. See you in a weekend!
What Actually Happened
The game emerged in late 1998 as a technical marvel that didn't run so much as it limped and failed to reach its insane ambitions, and was promptly torn apart by pretty much anybody with a keyboard. A small cult of fans fell in love with its struggle to reach its aspirations, though, and they continue to beaver away to this day, bringing the game closer to its potential inch by bloodied inch. They've still got some work ahead of them, but bless 'em for marching ever onward.
Amen: The Awakening
And now we get into the darkest and, honestly, most fascinating corner of the article: The stuff that never actually wound up achieving escape velocity. This one was by Cavedog, the Total Annihilation people, featuring their own proprietary tech - the cleverly-named Amengine, which this article describes as "designed in full before the code was written", which you think would be a more common practice, right? Measure twice, cut once, and all that.
The proposed plotline was like some edgy late-90s take on The Happening and The Purge - On Christmas Eve, 2032, a full third of the world's population suddenly become psychotic killing machines, slaying the unaffected where they stand. The player is cast into one of the unaffected, a SAS commando who joins a strike force struggling to find the cause of the chaos before it completely dismantles modern civilization.
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No pressure, then. Reminds me a bit of the, shall we say, ambitious initial plans for Half-Life 2, which involved four distinct cities and a built-to-scale icebreaker ship that ultimately turned out to not be very fun to fight zombies in at all.
What Actually Happened
Between the game's intense ambition, the poor sales of Total Annihilation and TA Kingdoms, and GT Interactive's mounting debts, Amen (which was claimed to be 50-60% complete at the time) and several other games were taken behind the shed in the fall of 1999, and the Cavedog team were merged back into the studio they span off from: Humungous Entertainment, proud-ish purveyors of kid's adventure games and kid's sports games inexplicably built in an adventure game engine.
Prax War
There were a number of studios set up by 3D Realms alumni during the late 90s and early 2000s. It's almost as if 3D Realms was bad at project management and keeping people happy? Blasphemous concept, I know, but something we must steel ourselves and consider. Tonight's short-lived contestant is Rebel Boat Rocker, an EA-affiliated studio set up by Duke 3D, Shadow Warrior and Blood 1 alumni looking to make a name for themselves.
Set in the year 2032[5], the game cast you as a member of the Eclipse Team, an elite military force sent in to stop the evil megalomaniac Dante from controlling Prax Industries, abusing its stockpiles of Praxium to create a mutant army. The fact sheet for the game boasts of wide-open environments, tons of levels, friendly allies and a new game engine built in... hang on, lemme double check this... Java?
Oh no. Oh nooo.
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...and epic Battleborn Prax War heroes! Yes, he's always been like this. Honestly, most of the developer quotes in this article are in glorified dot-point format, given that they're answers to a clumsily written "HOW IS UR GAME GUNNA KICK QUAKE 2'S ASS" e-mail. It mostly makes me wish we were at better as a society at describing things in ways other than dot-point format. It mostly makes me wish we were at better as a society at describing ourselves in ways other than dot-point format.
Seriously, look at any social media bio these days. Shit's dire.
What Actually Happened
Publisher EA did its usual cool party trick and pulled the plug in January 1999, citing that progress was too slow and it had missed its "technology window". The principals went on to reform at a new studio, Gearbox, which was marginally more successful. They snuck a reference to their lost game into Half-Life: Blue Shift, which went under the nose of pretty much anyone who played it.
A lot of games probably have similar references to cancelled titles that only like ten people will get... One day someone will point one out in some major modern title, and we'll all briefly look very confused and promptly ignore them.
SHOGO: Mobile Armor Division
Following the success of Blood 1, Monolith doubled down on FPS action. Like, literally. Casting aside BUILD and crafting their own Microsoft-funded disasterpiece of an engine (seriously, get these early Lithtech games running on a modern PC with all your hair intact, I fucking dare you), they started building two games simultaneously - Blood 2, the thrilling-ish sequel to the BUILD classic, and SHOGO, an anime-infused sci-fi FPS that took place at two scales - on-foot and piloting a huge mech.
Blood 2 was ultimately rushed hard and released unfinished by the publisher, where it's mostly regarded with contempt. SHOGO crossed the finish line in a slightly more finished form, even if the 3D rendering of the pre-cel-shading era was ill-suited to stylised anime designs. Or at least, stylised anime designs that didn't look like utter shit. Those character models were rough, man.
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Keep in mind this is the same magazine issue that featured a "Greatest Guy Games" listicle that includes Custer's Revenge[6]. I don't think they get to make the declaration on what's weird and what isn't.
What Actually Happened
Landed in late 1998, received reasonably decent reviews, but didn't sell as well as hoped. On one hand, this was before anime really took the western world by storm and was still kind of a niche convention subculture thing, which probably didn't help its chances at retail... but on the other, it was a Lithtech 1.0 game launched alongside Blood 2, and as such had more bugs than the average entomology center. Two expansion packs by external developers, "Shugotenshi" and "Legacy of the Fallen" were announced but never released. Which is kinda fucked up, given even Blood 2 got an expansion...
Heretic II
Even after having a good chunk of their ties with Id Software severed following John Romero's departure, and even after losing many veterans that quit after the studio was sold to Activision (a move with no negative consequences whatsoever), Raven continued ever-onward with their saga of the dreaded Serpent Riders, with the originally planned threequel, Hecatomb, transforming into the Quake-powered Hexen 2.
Hexen 2 is actually quite well liked online (outside of That One Puzzle), but it sold about as well as a G-rated porno, so Raven elected to switch things up for the next game and commit to third-person gameplay, with a new melee combat system joining the usual boomstick-esque magic artifacts.
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Pick a fucking lane, guys. Are the textures good or not? Work with me here!
I'm going to say that either the PCXL team did not get hands-on playtime with a build of this game, or it changed dramatically as it was tuned during development, because aiming and shooting are actually pretty FPS-y in the final game. Wouldn't be the first time a preview's been written based purely on screenshots and promises, though! Not the last, either.
What Actually Happened
Heretic 2 landed in late 1998, and bombed even harder at retail than Hexen 2 did. It has never been reissued and is spoken of only in hushed tones in the deepest darkest corners of your favorite """"""abandonware"""""" site. At least it gave the dev team some practice in melee combat and character animation that would prove instrumental in their contributions to the Jedi Knight series...!
X-COM: Alliance
Beloved today, the X-COM series went through some dark times at the turn of the milennium, as a Gollop-less MicroProse struggled to figure out how to keep this weird strategy thing relevant in the impending new era. All sorts of spin-offs and oddities underwent development. Some of them were even released. Some of them were even finished before release!
This was one such attempt, a tactical FPS where you command a team and research new technology to get the upper-hand in the field against an army of all-too-familiar alien invaders. Many assets were shared between this and X-COM: Legacy, an out-and-out strategy game, albeit entirely in real time instead of the series' traditional turn-based form. Legacy never achieved escape velocity, succumbing to MicroProse's internal strife and studio closures left and right.
So, how'd this one turn out? Well...
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MicroProse had their fingers in a lot of Unreal Engine-flavored pies as one of the first licensors of that engine. We'll get to Klingon, but Starship Troopers complete changed tack during development, going from a squad-based third-person action game to a 3D RTS. I don't think the final game ended up using Unreal, either. Maybe it never did, and I'm just bad at researching shit?
What Actually Happened
The game underwent development turmoil, with multiple project overhauls and even a development team replacement, before finally being quietly cancelled without any formal announcement in early 2002. Assets and other fragments were repurposed for X-COM: Enforcer, a third-person arcade shooter that everyone except me hates[7] with an intensity that borders on the sexual.
Requiem
It's the 21st Century, and humankind has been subjugated by a legion of fallen angels looking to build an interstellar spacecraft to return to the Heavens they were cast from. Sent down by God, you must use your angelic powers to prevent the completion of the spacecraft and the Biblical Armageddon that will surely ensure!
3DO, in association with their long-time hombres and developers of the Uprising series Cyclone Studios, took on the ever-burgeoning FPS genre with their usual gusto. Requiem had a lot to show off, with a unique Paradise Lost-inspired theme, divine superpowers to inject some spice into combat encounters, and a custom engine with impressive skeletal animation and the requisite silly name (Emotive Animation Technology, or EAT!), this one was ready to either reach the stars or fall from them.
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Honestly? Requiem looks great for the era. Almost on-par with Half-Life. Sadly, the engine is a lot more fragile in the face of modern hardware and operating systems, and it's a real pain in the ass to get running on modern computers. Such is the unforeseen cost of creating and maintaining your own engine...
What Actually Happened
The game shipped with a different subtitle (Requiem: Avenging Angel) in early 1999. It ultimately received decent reviews but a lukewarm retail reception, expectations having dramatically shifted in Half-Life's wake. Sadly, plans to release mod tools for the game's custom engine were ultimately shelved, as was the development studio and 3DO itself. The game remains exceptionally difficult to get to behave on modern systems, and all we can do is one day hope that someone comes along and un-fucks it for all time.
Unlikely, sure, but stranger things have happened...
Star Trek: Klingon Honor Guard
One of the earliest Unreal Engine licensees, MicroProse tried to take on the Jedi Knight series at its own game by sending everybody's favorite battle-crazed warrior-caste to do what they do best using the hottest new technology going around. Development was apparently surprisingly less troubled than most games on this list, to the point that MicroProse would go on to parachute this team into other Unreal projects (like the aforementioned X-COM: Alliance) to try and salvage them!
As a freshly inducted member of the titular squad of elite bodyguards, you're sent to investigate an assassination attempt against the Klingon Empire's Supreme Chancellor, delving into a deep conspiracy involving prison asteroids, spaceships, and some of the finest actors to ever don a silly prosthetic forehead shouting inanities at you. Look, I dunno man, I only ever watched Trek when sick and/or drunk on the couch, and usually it was the bad episodes of Voyager involving Leonardo Da Vinci...
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Describing the game outright as a TC is surprisingly harsh for a PR puff piece! Especially when things like the goddamn X-Men commercial TC for Quake 1 were still in living memory.
It's hard to remember nowadays that the original Unreal shipped with utterly dogshit netcode that was borderline unplayable on the connections of the day. Patches alleviated the situation and UT99 put that entire era well and truly to bed, but it was still a thing that happened.
What Actually Happened
The game landed in October 1998, where it received mixed reviews praising its graphics and cursing its level design. It has never been reissued, presumably due to the need to deal with Paramount, CBS and god knows who else over the Star Trek license. But hey, if you want more, slightly worse Unreal 1 with the late Tony Todd shouting at you between missions, there are worse ways to scratch your oddly-specific itch.
Alien vs. Predator
Not the first game based on Dark Horse's comic book crossover, but certainly the one people remember (non-AvP2 division) (non-Capcom division) (seriously please reissue the arcade game in a form that makes sense[8], thank you) (also reissuing AvP2 would be pretty cool too if you're reading this and have the power)
Built by the studio behind the Jaguar hit[9], AvP continued the original concept of three conflicting factions each with their own campaign - the Aliens wanna build nests and spread throughout the universe, the Marines would personally prefer if the Aliens did not use their spaceships or crewmates' sternums as nests, and the Predators are out to do some hunting and crack open a few brews with their mates. Just the usual excuses to visit familiar places and chew on familiar faces! Class-based multiplayer added some extra interest as the three factions could take each other on in PvPvP action.
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Completely ignoring the Jaguar bit, since that's a completely different game, the point about delays is actually pretty relevant - the game was originally announced in 1995 for a 1997 release. In 1997, the game was delayed to 1999, and the console ports were canned entirely! It's safe to say that while it wasn't exactly DNF territory, development was perhaps a little bumpy.
What Actually Happened
The game eventually landed in mid-1999 and was a big enough success to justify an expansion pack and a sequel (albeit a sequel by an entirely different studio - someone didn't want another two years of delays!) A reissue is available on modern digital platforms, though it has some bizarre issues like music being assigned to the wrong levels.
Aftermath
Decades of hindsight have told us two things: First, if your game is declared a (game name)-killer, it's going to trip over its own dick in front of its secret crush in the most humiliating and public fashion conceivable. Second, don't call your game a (game name)-killer you idiot. I wouldn't necessarily call it a tale as old as time - your favorite """"""abandonware"""""" sites are strewn with the ashes of alleged Doom-killers - but this lightweight, fluffy listicle documents a point in history relatively close to where the lessons first started to really etch themselves into blood-caked stone. Even if we took a decade or so more to actually take them to heart.
Also highlighted, unexpectedly, is the sheer amount of technological effort that went up in smoke in the process. This was decades before easily-licensable, well documented engines like Unity or modern-day Unreal were so much as an urge below the milkman's belt. Many studios burned vast sums of time and money crafting tech on par with the big hits of the era, all up in ashes and never to be witnessed. Come to think of it, that's almost certainly why modern engines are so well-documented and easy to get a grip of nowadays, to prevent spending so much time, effort and money reinventing the wheel. No wonder engine programmers are so goddamn crabby all the time!
Ultimately, the one thing we can all truly take away from this is that maybe, on the grand scheme of life in the infinite cosmos, weighed up against all that is good and bad in the universe, it's probably for the best that the enthusiast print media more or less went extinct before it could devolve into something even more gruesomely internet-tainted in all the wrong ways.
I left my car parked outside the website in a one-hour space. ↩︎
I don't think the exact developer tasked with making John Romero's Daikatana 2 for John Romero has ever been directly named, but piecing together various modern-day statements and fragments, I believe it to be Human Head. They were formed by former Raven staff Romero worked with on Heretic and Hexen, and Romero has mentioned funding their initial Unreal Engine 1 license that they ultimately used for Rune. The pieces fit together too well, frankly. ↩︎
"Cult" being a eupherism for "it was pretty good but it sold about as well as Bill Goldberg" ↩︎
What is it about cancelled FPS games being set in the year 2032? ↩︎
Albeit with a score of -3 out of whatever. Still, come on dudes. ↩︎
It's a silly little high-score rush! It's not great, but it's fine! ↩︎
i.e. not this fucking thing. ↩︎
Well, hit by Jaguar standards. Which means sales might have even hit three digits. ↩︎
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