A Tale of Time

The other day I was reading a Kotaku article on the cinematic Full Motion Video (FMV) sequences from PC games in the 1990s. It really brought back a tidal wave of memories from the first games I played on the PC. Dark Forces, X-wing /Tie Fighter, MegaRace, The 7th Guest. Everyone loved prerenedered CGI with FMV.

This was golden age of gaming. When the PC had more power that could be possibly imagined on a console. My Packard Bell 486DX with 8MB of ram was eventurally upgraded to 32 megs of ram. Old games like this I wish I hadn't thrown them away. I haven't played them in eons, but games seemed to rely on story a bit more when graphics looked like shit. Everything had a back story. Even crapy-ass MegaRace. MegaRace for the uninitiated was a racing game that was set in the future. You're host Lance Boyle explained how you were part of a Virutal TV show in this mix of Mad Max and The Running Man. The concept was simple. You race trying to knock the other cars off the track or shoot them with your machine guns. Eventually you'd get to the pack leader to beat the level. The game probably would never fly these days, but to a 10 year old, it was "da shit."

Another game I miss surfaced around the 1995-1996 Era. I remember playing this on an IBM Aptiva with a Ati 3D Rage card. Mechwarrior 2! Yeah, that was our first taste of online multiplayer. At that time we didn't really get into LAN Parties yet, but we sure as hell played alot of direct connect modem games. Doom and Quake were other great games we played durring this time. However, I think Mech Warrior sticks out in my mind. The graphics were total shit. Pretty much bland polygons with a few sprites scattered here and there. However, the FMV movies were killer for the time. The game set in the Battletech universe (table top game) pitted the Jade Falcon clan against Clan Wolf. Many of our summers were spent blowing each other out of our mechs. Good times.

I'm guessing that alot of the FMV videos we saw durring the mid-1990's were a result of the graphics. Because the developers couldn't really tell a dramatic story with the game engine, they had to use cutscenes with FMV to fill in the gaps left by the game play. I'm not really sure if this post has a point, but I just like thinking back to a fonder time.