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I do not understand why people consider Commander Keen important and a technical achievement in the industry.

I do believe theres an argument id helped RPGs and racing games become the leading genre in advancing PC graphics forward by having W3D and DOOM go the 2D raycasting method. After W3D was inspired by an action RPG with dynamic npcs with texture mapped 3D.

Never made sense to me.

But Command Keen is inconsequential. It was considered another Apogee platformer back then that most never really played or cared about, so the poster saying it's regarded as a legendary franchise is wild imo.

Most people don't even remember Apogee platformers. Duke Nukem didn't get popular until he was in an fps.
This is where I get confused. The entire premise is talking about commander keen as if that was Carmacks big achievement when it wasn’t even close to wolfenstein or doom or quake. Although I loved the game as a kid
 
OK, that makes a lot of sense.


Why was IBM/DOS in the 80s so underpowered in comparison to Amiga though?
Underpowered for this specific task I guess, the hardware was quite different between the two. Different processors, architecture etc.

I suppose Amiga had hardware support for scrolling, sprites etc whereas all that stuff had to be done by the CPU on DOS..?
 
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Drew1440

Member
OK, that makes a lot of sense.


Why was IBM/DOS in the 80s so underpowered in comparison to Amiga though?
The Amiga and Macintosh used dedicated graphics processors to draw and accelerate graphics rendering, which made them popular for games and desktop publishing. DOS/PC didn't support this very well and if it did, it was limited to certain video cards, and there was alot of variety of video cards beck in those days.
It wasn't until Windows 3.1 that the PC got hardware acceleration of graphics with WinG. In most cases the hardware wasn't underpowered, just that there was a large variety of hardware to support and no common API like DirectX which made it unfeasible to support.
 

01011001

Banned
OK, that makes a lot of sense.


Why was IBM/DOS in the 80s so underpowered in comparison to Amiga though?

there weren't underpowered, they were general-purpose PCs, while the Amiga was tech wise more comparable to a console with graphics hardware to allow stuff like smooth scrolling.
similarly to how now we have hardware that has raytracing acceleration... like is an RTX2060 more powerful than a GTX1080ti? not really... but try to run raytraced games and suddenly the 2060 beats the 1080ti, because the 1080ti can do raytracing, but needs to run it in software... and it was basically like that with scrolling on PCs of the time


also, the Amiga was called a computer back then, but for today's standards they would be seen like homebrew consoles.
 
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boo

Gold Member
the Amiga is not a PC my dude.
your whole argument is therefore completely irrelevant.

Commander Keen was a technological breakthrough because IT WAS ON A PC
I assume you mean that the Amiga was not an IBM-compatible PC. Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, Apple II, Apple Macintosh, etc. etc., all PCs.

Edit: Already mentioned I see.
 
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jufonuk

not tag worthy
You couldn’t scroll like Mario bros on pc’s.back then. but carmack figured out how to. Id you ported mario 3 to the pc. In hopes of doing official Nintendo ports Nintendo said no. Id said fuck it. Id Used the tech in their games which they distributed using share ware and later the internet. (They had used the shareware method before) It made money for Id Carmack made tech for wolf 3D then doom then quake. Inventing the FPS. Allowing people to make their own maps and mod the games (CoD used the quake engine.) Things like graphics cards became essential. A little company called epic didn’t want to use id tech so made something called unreal engine.

Id got sold and then that company got bought out by Microsoft. Nintendo got ports of Doom and quake games.

Thank you for coming to my well researched and thoroughly detailed presentation.
No questions please.
 
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jufonuk

not tag worthy
Carmack has done very little to move graphics forward unless you pretend his contemporaries don't exist, he mostly makes advanced for the time compromises/alternatives for something he hasn't figured out yet, such as polygons.

I also find it funny Carmack the genius didn't realize SMB3 can't play on a standard NES and works because of hardware enhancement by the ROM.

The irony of this story is incredible. Wants to prove PC hardware can do something without help, by trying to recreate levels from a game that can't run on an NES alone and needed help.
Steve Austin What GIF
 

Topher

Gold Member
I assume you mean that the Amiga was not an IBM-compatible PC. Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, Apple II, Apple Macintosh, etc. etc., all PCs.

Edit: Already mentioned I see.

Yep. Key distinction between IBM compatible PC and "personal computer". At that time in the 80s, all those brands were trying to be the home equivalent of what the IBM PC was in business. The computer were even advertised as "home computers" rather than PCs. Even IBM tried to compete in that space with their ill-fated IBM PC jr. In any case, all those computers, including Amiga, were effectively PCs as we know them today. They were all open systems that ran a multitude of applications and were not specific to playing games.
 

Holammer

Member
youre gonna hate me for this but the ZX spectrum honestly seems like a torture machine.... the colors, sound, everything feels more primitive than even the C64. I can't imagine having used that machine as a primary gaming device back then, the 16 bit computers in the mid 80s were so much better
I never had a Speccy myself, but you're missing the forest for the trees.
None of the things happening on screen should be possible on the machine with a CPU from the 70s and it was done 4 years before Keen on PCs with orders of magnitude more CPU power.
It may look like shit, but you can still admire the effort. We should be offering a toast (or pouring one out) for Jonathan Smith rather than Carmack.
 

SantaC

Member
that being said, despite the graphics commander keen looks like it'd be a much more fun game to play than the other 2 PC 1990 scrollers he listed so... yea
Just because he choose bad examples in op doesnt mean commander keen was better than amiga.

Carmack is incredibly overrated and was a flop in VR
 
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The whole point of Commander Keen was because they created the adaptive tile refresh method for smooth scrolling and those gifs in the OP I would say represents that.

If you weren’t aware of the history. There’s an entire wiki page on it giving you the history of the development of the games.
 

hemo memo

Gold Member
The reason is back then the side-scrolling genre was exclusive to consoles because they only have the silicon muscle to constantly redraw the screen at a fast rate. PC just couldn’t do it. Until John Carmack’s Commander Keen.
 
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64bitmodels

Reverse groomer.
Just because he choose bad examples in op doesnt mean commander keen was better than amiga.
everything else looks incredibly basic and boring gameplay wise. Commander Keen has much more open levels. Plus the later trilogies would have graphics about as good as the earlier games on amiga.
 
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Darak

Member
The PC didn't have any dedicated gaming hardware. At the time, a smooth scrolling EGA game wasn't even believed to be possible because there was not enough horsepower in 286 era computers to update the entire high resolution screen in a single frame. Carmack managed to do that by a combination of hardware trickery and plain good optimization. It was a demonstration that a brute force software approach could rival dedicated hardware for action games, something which would become very relevant a few years later with Wolfenstein and Doom.

Keen was perhaps a bit too late to be considered an influential achievement, and I'm sure that, while it was well received, nobody considered it that way. By 1990, there were 386s and even 486s computers that could perform parallax scrolling in 256-colors VGA, rivalling Amiga games. It's true that 386 computers were extremely expensive and out of range for most users for years, so, even by 1990, it was very possible that you owned a PC where something like Keen would have felt incredible, but still. I think Keen is mostly of interest due to it being part of the iD Software history.

The Cobra case mentioned previously was similar: also a game using a brute force software approach (with insanely good optimization) to rival machines with dedicated hardware. Jonathan Smith was a true legend. There is no shortage of Carmack-level geniuses in the 8 bit era, but that world was too small for them.
 
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I remember all my x86s with huge fondness. PC gaming took leaps and bounds back then, devs and hardware; as did custom console hardware.
 

SF Kosmo

Al Jazeera Special Reporter
Commander Keen is seen as a legendary franchise that 'proved' computers could have colorful scrolling platformers and is considered the series that launched ID Soft into celebrity status, leading to their work on Wolfenstein and Doom.

It's often considered one of the biggest technical achievements in gaming and an important milestone.

My question is: why?

Were there some DOS users who locked themselves from the outside world? Have these last few decades of poor journalism allowed this story to go unchallenged so long it stuck?

Let me show you why this shocks me in an extreme way.

Here is Commander Keen:
ckeen_017.gif

ckeen_009.gif


Here is an Amiga game from the same time:
hfRomQW.gif


What exactly are people saying that Carmack accomplished with Commender Keen?

I just saw a history video on a big game site that talked about how important Commander Keens impact was on the industry, and how Carmack used his magic fingers to produce something that no one else was able to do. It's a very common tale that's been around for decades.

But how do you look at Commander Keen next to a contemporary and still honestly believe that?

I don't see a single advantage Keen has over Spellfire. Keen looks like something a college kid threw together in his bedroom overnight for a college project. Due the next morning.
The answer is the smoothness with which it scrolled, which even comparing these two gifs and not the real games is obvious, but far more so in actual gameplay. There was no tile based scrolling hardware in PCs at the time so getting the kind of smooth scrolling we saw on consoles like Genesis and NES was thought to be impossible and most games that scrolled did it in a much choppier way.

No one considers Keen one of the most important games, but it was a technical achievement, and a breakthrough for MS-DOS games in particular.

The other big thing, of course, was that it was kind of the big breakthrough game for the shareware model, which would completely take over the PC market for the next few years.
 
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Scotty W

Member
It is a technical trick which had extremely important business effects. As gamers, we tend to only think about fun and technical achievements, and are almost completely oblivious to the reality of the business.
 

ahtlas7

Member
Commander Keen is seen as a legendary franchise that 'proved' computers could have colorful scrolling platformers and is considered the series that launched ID Soft into celebrity status, leading to their work on Wolfenstein and Doom.

It's often considered one of the biggest technical achievements in gaming and an important milestone.

My question is: why?

Were there some DOS users who locked themselves from the outside world? Have these last few decades of poor journalism allowed this story to go unchallenged so long it stuck?

yada-yada, yakity-schmakity …
Bill Gates is that you?
 
You couldn’t scroll like Mario bros on pc’s.back then. but carmack figured out how to. Id you ported mario 3 to the pc. In hopes of doing official Nintendo ports Nintendo said no. Id said fuck it. Id Used the tech in their games which they distributed using share ware and later the internet. (They had used the shareware method before) It made money for Id Carmack made tech for wolf 3D then doom then quake. Inventing the FPS. Allowing people to make their own maps and mod the games (CoD used the quake engine.) Things like graphics cards became essential. A little company called epic didn’t want to use id tech so made something called unreal engine.

Id got sold and then that company got bought out by Microsoft. Nintendo got ports of Doom and quake games.

Thank you for coming to my well researched and thoroughly detailed presentation.
No questions please.
Missed the:
Doom port onto Windows 95 and started Windows gaming as we know it, the guy called Mr Newell who headed the porting project at Microsoft used the money he got to fund the creation of Valve and Steam.
 
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jufonuk

not tag worthy
Missed the:
Doom port onto Windows 95 and started Windows gaming as we know it, the guy called Mr Newell who headed the porting project at Microsoft used the money he got to fund the creation of Valve and Steam.
Yes that too plus mr gates made a special video of him in the doom game to hype windows gaming up.

Id back in the day were hugely influential to the pc gaming industry. Mods. Online gaming/distribution engine licensing. Promoting the use of graphics cards. Self publishing
 

Thaedolus

Member
This thread is even funnier than the lady in Canada declaring herself queen and telling people to citizen arrest cops
 

ResurrectedContrarian

Suffers with mild autism
As someone who loves the DOS era, I have to say that PC platformers were absolute trash.

Even the ones that have some sort of cult status (Keen, Jackrabbit, etc) are simply horrible, horrible garbage games down to every element of their design. They are also among the ugliest games in history in any genre, not just with the technical limitations but with the amateurish pixel art and garish colors.

There was no value to any of these games, at all.
 
Not even close to 60 fps scrolling. It barely works, that was the achievement :D. And even gameboy and c64 had 60 fps scrolling...

Carmack is a legend, of course, but this is not about him, but the game itself.
The game itself was created on a PC which was considered impossible at the time. The dude is a rocket scientist.. literally a rocket scientist.
 

Mahavastu

Member
[Commander Keen] It's often considered one of the biggest technical achievements in gaming and an important milestone.
Ok, I was not so much in gaming back then (mostly programming in assembly :pie_eyeroll:), so I never heard that this is considered a big technical archievement before.

It was already mentioned, that the CPUs back then were really slow. The real 386 was still pretty much high end, and most people had computers way slower then that. And those computers were optimized for work, not for gaming.
Another problem I didn't yet saw mentioned was the extremly slow 8bit (?) ISA/AT bus which was used to transfer the image data from the CPU controlled main memory to the graphic card, which slowed down the already slow CPU even more.
The PCs back then did not have a GPU, which means the CPU had to do all the work on its own. When you wanted to move the image by a pixel for a scrolling game, you needed to transfer 64KByte. It is not much today, but the ISA bus was too slow to do that for 60fps.
You can see on those screenshot animations, that they have a single colored background, which reduces the amount of data you need to transfer over the ISA bus by a lot. If I guess for this game you only needed to transfer 1/3rd of the pixel data, making the game possible.

You can not compare this with home computers or game consoles back then, because those were designed for games and were optimized to do games with an even worse CPU possible.
For example on the Commodore 64 from the early 80s, moving the image one pixel to the left/right was just changing some byte somewhere. And the graphics could be done in a Textmode, which means much less data had to be moved. Large Animations could be done by changing a pointer (2 bytes). And it had sprites which you could put anywhere you want without having to care about transparency. Overall this means that a C64 could do much better games than a PC in the 286 era, despite having a much worse CPU and much less RAM. In Turrican 2 on C64 there was a scene with butter smooth 5 layer parallax scrolling, impossible on a PC in the early 90s...
The Amiga had some kind of 2D GPU, which could do a lot of 2D work very fast without bothering the CPU. You can see the parallax scrolling in your screenshots which thanks to the GPU probably was no real problem.
 
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It was a solution looking for a problem. CK wasn't needed as the Atari ST in its original form wasn't much better than a PC with way less raw power and it was able to, infrequently, match some Amiga games graphically, otherwise had serviceable versions of those games. Ports of Commodore games that were inferior on the ST performed better on the PC (than the ST) depending on how much effort the developer put into the port. Why the platform genre was skipped I have no clue.

ST and PC both had:

Low colors (until VGA)
No hardware scrolling
No GPU assisted blitter
No general blitter
Zero hardware sprites
No custom graphics modes for games
No copper list

That doesn't mean that Commodore had the better machine, the way it was build froze it in time without a way to account for changing times. PC and later ST models would be able to do everything Com could do in a few years just with raw power and both were already superior for polygonal and 3D applications aided by the same strengths. Once the 1980's decade was over the Commodore went right into the trash can.

But since home gaming consoles were where most game players were gaming, and it was being dominated (to the industries detriment) by scrollers the desire to get that audience to seek that same type of game on PC was a logical goal. It's also why the Amiga is much more known for gaming to the masses before CK than ST or PC, because it was filled with scrolling platform games including exclusive ports to and from home gaming consoles that were covered by the same press. It wasn't entirely necessary but CK was one of those games that helped more console gamers and press take more interest in PC games.

As for Doom, I think that was a product of bad timing. The dev team had been taking steps toward Doom since Catacomb 3D, but it's obvious they were expecting polygonal graphics to remain slow and cumbersome and not a fast smooth experience for a lot longer then reality.

Tech for PC was evolving so fast after 1991 no one could really tell where the industry was heading. You had Doom with it's pseudo 3D workaround, you had Ultima Underworld 2 which was the sequel to the 1992 game that controlled near as fluid and fast as Doom, and you had Novalogic and their Voxel engine which was fully 3D but didn't use any polygons, damn impressive for the time.

Doom and Novalogics solutions were trying to solve a problem that no longer existed but there wasn't a way for either developer to know this until it happened. Novalogic did release Comanche in 1992 (CD ver was 1993) a year before Doom and Ultima, and in 1992 with Cybercon 3 behind it Comanche was probably the fastest & smoothest 3D game ever at the time, but when Doom came out in late 1993 X-wing, TFX, 486 compatible Stellar 7 Remake and Nova 9, CD version of World Circuit and several other fast polygonal games released. Including Ultima Underworld 2 which was much faster than the first game with a higher poly count and more texture detail.

I can't fault either i.d. or Nova though. 3D games before 1992 on almost every gaming platform ran like shit. Even racing games had no sense of speed and would lag, and Novalogic and i.d. saw this and came up with some very impressive solutions to recreate the visuals of 3D graphics but without the polygons managing to increase performance substantially.

I still am taken by surprised at how amazing the Novalogic voxel engine worked. It made the game graphics look far ahead of it's time close to cutscene quality! And you may even believe it's a cutscene when you first see gameplay, but when you watch the below video you will see you have free control to move where you want, because while Voxel graphics aren't polygons they are still solid-state 3D:



Imagine this engine with a higher resolution and Dreamcast tier detail and image clarity. Could have had GTA IV graphics (in appearance) in the 90's.

Doom and Underworld 2 for comparison:

8Xr0Mv2.gif

L0Fdmjv.gif


I don't fault anyone though, there's no way a person even with a lot of inside knowledge could possibly predict how fast PC gaming would evolve and whether alternative solutions were really necessary. All of these games and engines were made by the best development teams out there.
 
Commander Keen is seen as a legendary franchise that 'proved' computers could have colorful scrolling platformers and is considered the series that launched ID Soft into celebrity status, leading to their work on Wolfenstein and Doom.

It's often considered one of the biggest technical achievements in gaming and an important milestone.

My question is: why?

Were there some DOS users who locked themselves from the outside world? Have these last few decades of poor journalism allowed this story to go unchallenged so long it stuck?

Let me show you why this shocks me in an extreme way.

Here is Commander Keen:
ckeen_017.gif

ckeen_009.gif


Here is an Amiga game from the same time:
hfRomQW.gif


What exactly are people saying that Carmack accomplished with Commender Keen?

I just saw a history video on a big game site that talked about how important Commander Keens impact was on the industry, and how Carmack used his magic fingers to produce something that no one else was able to do. It's a very common tale that's been around for decades.

But how do you look at Commander Keen next to a contemporary and still honestly believe that?

I don't see a single advantage Keen has over Spellfire. Keen looks like something a college kid threw together in his bedroom overnight for a college project. Due the next morning.
And yet the same guy who argued Amiga was doomed to be behind the curve and fail no matter what in the other thread. How can one be so contrarian is beyond me.
 

01011001

Banned
As someone who loves the DOS era, I have to say that PC platformers were absolute trash.

Even the ones that have some sort of cult status (Keen, Jackrabbit, etc) are simply horrible, horrible garbage games down to every element of their design. They are also among the ugliest games in history in any genre, not just with the technical limitations but with the amateurish pixel art and garish colors.

There was no value to any of these games, at all.

western developed games in the 80s and early 90s in a nutshell lol
there were rare gems among them, but they were few and far between.
 
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It was a solution looking for a problem. CK wasn't needed as the Atari ST in its original form wasn't much better than a PC with way less raw power and it was able to, infrequently, match some Amiga games graphically, otherwise had serviceable versions of those games. Ports of Commodore games that were inferior on the ST performed better on the PC (than the ST) depending on how much effort the developer put into the port. Why the platform genre was skipped I have no clue.

ST and PC both had:

Low colors (until VGA)
No hardware scrolling
No GPU assisted blitter
No general blitter
Zero hardware sprites
No custom graphics modes for games
No copper list

That doesn't mean that Commodore had the better machine, the way it was build froze it in time without a way to account for changing times. PC and later ST models would be able to do everything Com could do in a few years just with raw power and both were already superior for polygonal and 3D applications aided by the same strengths. Once the 1980's decade was over the Commodore went right into the trash can.

But since home gaming consoles were where most game players were gaming, and it was being dominated (to the industries detriment) by scrollers the desire to get that audience to seek that same type of game on PC was a logical goal. It's also why the Amiga is much more known for gaming to the masses before CK than ST or PC, because it was filled with scrolling platform games including exclusive ports to and from home gaming consoles that were covered by the same press. It wasn't entirely necessary but CK was one of those games that helped more console gamers and press take more interest in PC games.

As for Doom, I think that was a product of bad timing. The dev team had been taking steps toward Doom since Catacomb 3D, but it's obvious they were expecting polygonal graphics to remain slow and cumbersome and not a fast smooth experience for a lot longer then reality.

Tech for PC was evolving so fast after 1991 no one could really tell where the industry was heading. You had Doom with it's pseudo 3D workaround, you had Ultima Underworld 2 which was the sequel to the 1992 game that controlled near as fluid and fast as Doom, and you had Novalogic and their Voxel engine which was fully 3D but didn't use any polygons, damn impressive for the time.

Doom and Novalogics solutions were trying to solve a problem that no longer existed but there wasn't a way for either developer to know this until it happened. Novalogic did release Comanche in 1992 (CD ver was 1993) a year before Doom and Ultima, and in 1992 with Cybercon 3 behind it Comanche was probably the fastest & smoothest 3D game ever at the time, but when Doom came out in late 1993 X-wing, TFX, 486 compatible Stellar 7 Remake and Nova 9, CD version of World Circuit and several other fast polygonal games released. Including Ultima Underworld 2 which was much faster than the first game with a higher poly count and more texture detail.

I can't fault either i.d. or Nova though. 3D games before 1992 on almost every gaming platform ran like shit. Even racing games had no sense of speed and would lag, and Novalogic and i.d. saw this and came up with some very impressive solutions to recreate the visuals of 3D graphics but without the polygons managing to increase performance substantially.

I still am taken by surprised at how amazing the Novalogic voxel engine worked. It made the game graphics look far ahead of it's time close to cutscene quality! And you may even believe it's a cutscene when you first see gameplay, but when you watch the below video you will see you have free control to move where you want, because while Voxel graphics aren't polygons they are still solid-state 3D:



Imagine this engine with a higher resolution and Dreamcast tier detail and image clarity. Could have had GTA IV graphics (in appearance) in the 90's.

Doom and Underworld 2 for comparison:

8Xr0Mv2.gif

L0Fdmjv.gif


I don't fault anyone though, there's no way a person even with a lot of inside knowledge could possibly predict how fast PC gaming would evolve and whether alternative solutions were really necessary. All of these games and engines were made by the best development teams out there.


Which, ironically, was what the OP was also arguing, but only happened because of mismanagement. Amiga never got the planned or needed updates to keep up with let alone ahead of the PC.
 

Wildebeest

Member
Zarch on the Acorn Archimedes was way ahead of 3d gaming on PC in 1987. People then knew that cpu power was necessary for almost bypassing the 2d graphics chips of the time, but that was just a staging post for 3d accelerators becoming economically viable, which Nintendo did with the SNES before PC.
 

digdug2

Member
As someone who loves the DOS era, I have to say that PC platformers were absolute trash.

Even the ones that have some sort of cult status (Keen, Jackrabbit, etc) are simply horrible, horrible garbage games down to every element of their design. They are also among the ugliest games in history in any genre, not just with the technical limitations but with the amateurish pixel art and garish colors.

There was no value to any of these games, at all.
You aren't wrong. As a kid, I loved those shareware games. Commander Keen, Jazz Jackrabbit, Jill of the Jungle, Halloween Harry, Duke Nukem, etc. In retrospect though, NES games from years before wiped the floor with them. None of PC platformers could hold a candle to games such as Ninja Gaiden, Castlevania, Contra, or Batman, as a handful of examples.
 

RoboFu

One of the green rats
You aren't wrong. As a kid, I loved those shareware games. Commander Keen, Jazz Jackrabbit, Jill of the Jungle, Halloween Harry, Duke Nukem, etc. In retrospect though, NES games from years before wiped the floor with them. None of PC platformers could hold a candle to games such as Ninja Gaiden, Castlevania, Contra, or Batman, as a handful of examples.
Yeah younger people don’t understand how shitty most dos games were before around the mid 90s.
 

RoboFu

One of the green rats
The only sidescroller from that era that I have a long lasting fondness for was Monster Bash.

There was actually a very large jump hardware and tech for games between 1990 and 1993.

Even in programming languages and ides the very popular turbo c ide came out in 1990 which brought about a surge in attainable C\C++ resources.
 

U.S.E. CD

Banned
western developed games in the 80s and early 90s in a nutshell lol
there were rare gems among them, but they were few and far between.

Western developed games trashed Japanese ones. Basing this on platformers is ironic because the NES reintroduced platformers to young kids in a devolved form that removed the fast action, multidirectional, and rpg elements for a simple run and jump to the right of the screen.

All innovation in genres were on dos or other computers while consoles were oversaturated with the same type of game until 3D.

If you grew up with the NES, SMB3 to Mega Drive Sonic may look like innovation or evolution but if you were old enough or had a finger on industry information, you knew it wasn't.

All hardware postNES had been designed with scroll platform games in mind. Every other genre was horrendous and way behind the curve only seen as evolution by those growing up on those consoles.

One of the reasons why even some Japanese developers were hesitant to leave NEC PC-88, PC-98, and FM Towns.

Most people don't know that consoles were heading toward a casket fast in revenue in the early 1990s' prompting reports that PC would kill console gaming. 3D luckily broke the cycle.

3d accelerators becoming economically viable, which Nintendo did with the SNES before PC.

PC had 3D accel before SNES.
 

Ev1L AuRoN

Member
You need to see the landscape of the time, pcs of that era are not powerful enough to do sidescrollers, there isn't tile controller in them and most pc games are single screen experiences or choppy scrolling games, Commander Keen use a programming trick to allow for a smooth scrolling game, I recommend watching this excellent video about it.
 

01011001

Banned
Western developed games trashed Japanese ones. Basing this on platformers is ironic because the NES reintroduced platformers to young kids in a devolved form that removed the fast action, multidirectional, and rpg elements for a simple run and jump to the right of the screen.

All innovation in genres were on dos or other computers while consoles were oversaturated with the same type of game until 3D.

If you grew up with the NES, SMB3 to Mega Drive Sonic may look like innovation or evolution but if you were old enough or had a finger on industry information, you knew it wasn't.

All hardware postNES had been designed with scroll platform games in mind. Every other genre was horrendous and way behind the curve only seen as evolution by those growing up on those consoles.

One of the reasons why even some Japanese developers were hesitant to leave NEC PC-88, PC-98, and FM Towns.

Most people don't know that consoles were heading toward a casket fast in revenue in the early 1990s' prompting reports that PC would kill console gaming. 3D luckily broke the cycle.



PC had 3D accel before SNES.

there's almost no western developed game that was as good as even the worst Capcom had to offer at the time. Let alone Nintendo.
innovation is all nice and dandy, but an innovative game that plays like shit is still not a good game.
 

MiguelItUp

Member
I remember playing Keen the first time on PC and being surprised because it was the first side scrolling game I had on seen on PC. I was already all about Mario on NES, so seeing something like that on PC was surprising. When I think of PC side scrollers, my heart and memories automatically go to Halloween Harry because of my love for it as a kid, haha.
 

U.S.E. CD

Banned
there's almost no western developed game that was as good as even the worst Capcom had to offer at the time. Let alone Nintendo.
innovation is all nice and dandy, but an innovative game that plays like shit is still not a good game.

You're basing this on platformers. Try other games.
 
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