Another choice would be Eric Chahi’s 1991 critically acclaimed” title “Another World”, better known in North America as “Out Of This World” which also happens to be ubiquitous. I would argue it is in fact more interesting to study than DOOM because of its polygon based graphics which are suitable to wild optimizations. In some cases, clever tricks allowed Another World to run on hardware built up to five years prior to the game release.
This series is a journey through the video-games hardware of the early 90s. From the Amiga 500, Atari ST, IBM PC, Super Nintendo, up to the Sega Genesis. For each machine, I attempted to discover how Another World was implemented. I found an environment made rich by its diversity where the now ubiquitous CPU/GPU did not exist yet. In the process, I discovered the untold stories of seemingly impossible problems heroically solved by lone programmers.
In the best case I was able to get in touch with the original developer. In the worse cases, I found myself staring at disassembly. It was a fun trip. Here are my notes.
The first article in this series deals with Another World in genera, while two follow-ups dive deep into the Amiga version and the Atari ST version. Another article about the DOS version will be published over the weekend.
I still wonder why the ST did not have the music at the end. Now that I have an Apple IIGS I should beat it on that and see if it has it.
I have the Jaguar version too that includes the enhanced version. Great game, still need to win the sequel.
I love deep dives into old games. It’s a blast from the past – I started my main career on the Amiga 500/2000.
For anyone who wishes to play this game on modern hardware, you can get it from gog.com.
https://www.gog.com/game/another_world_20th_anniversary_edition
Maybe it’s just me, but I never understood the fascination with Another World. Yeah, it had rotoscoped sprites, but it was far from the first game with rotoscoped sprites (prince of persia was probably more famous in that way, and was earlier). It just doesn’t seem particularly technically impressive to me. Sure it looks OK, but that’s not really a technical feat, it’s mostly due to the art style. As a game it’s just sort of OK or even mediocre adventure fare.
It just seems so…meh, both from a flavor and technical perspective…
Just the same impression when Star Wars was released in the theaters, bweee, nothing really new, you just have to dig into the story and the experience. Now if you cared to see what was the norm at the time (little sprites, repetitive backgrounds) Another World is a complete revolution with one screen/one background, cinematic sequences, different gameplays, no “game over” (à la Prince of Persia, time counterless) and all that stuff on one floppy disk.
I never really hear about it, but I was impressed by the fully texture mapped 6 degrees of freedom in the ‘decent’ game back in the day:
https://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/descent/
https://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/descent-ii/
Descent 2 gameplay…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5kfTqNJ_vw
Back in 94 it blew me away and was less constrained than other quasi 3d graphics engines around that time like doom. As much as I feel this game pushed the boundaries of 3d on early PC hardware, people preferred the gameplay of doom and later quake.
YESSS! Descent 2, I still play it frequenty. It makes my head think differently than anything else I’ve done.
It is not made of sprites but of of 3D polygons. That’s the technical achievement. You apparently did not take the time to read the article
XtoF,
I’m not familiar with the game, but in the screenshots and videos they look like 2d polygons to me, are you sure they were 3d?
Not 3D, just 2D, but anyway it was several elements that made “Another World” really standing out from the alien crowd.