History of 1990s Computer Games


History of PC Games 1990-99



By 1990s computer games we are referring to personal computer games (PC Games) and microcomputer games that came out in the decade spanning 1990-99. Thus, we are referring primarily to MS-DOS and Windows games as well as those that tapped hardware independently of operating systems by auto-booting volumes from ROM chips.

In the 1990s computer games increased greatly in complexity, creativity flourished and developer technical and artistic prowess hit a high point of refinement; so much so, that many 1990s computer games have not been surpassed in the three decades that followed their releases.

The 1990s was perhaps the best time to be a computer-gamer. At least, I long for that decade more than any other due its concrete innovation and evolution in both hardware and software technologies. 

It was such an interesting and exciting time to be a computer-gamer. You would not understand unless you lived through this prime-time.

Incremental advancements were not commonplace in the 1990s: it was a decade of long strides and leap-frogging, a decade of computer-game excellence and big-league competition.

No computer-gamer or commentator could keep apace with such rapid progression in such a competitive arena. No computer-gamer or commentator knew what was going to come out next, but chances were it was going to be good because things had been good for a long time already.

The expectation was always that computer games would just keep getting better as the 1990s progressed. Or rather, it was a given that computer games would keep getting better. No one questioned it.

And no one questioned the 1990s in the decades that followed -- no 2020 journo would be so insolent -- because the 1990s was objectively a good time for the computer game industry, even though there were casualties and increased cinematization.

Standouts of 1990s Genre


For pre-1990s computer games that I have covered, please refer to Computer Games Listed in Chronological Order.

This section is an overview that is designed to get the reader thinking about what we are dealing with here. This is a broad and complex subject that few commentators could undertake without exposing their bias and ignorance immediately:

  • Readers seeking U.S-only computer game commentary will not find it here: British Commonwealth and Contintental European computer game history is important as well.
  • Likewise, readers seeking IBM PC MS-DOS and Windows-only commentary will not find it here: microcomputers had impact. [0]

With that said, the overview:

As it pertains to technical prowess in harnessing machine-specs while at the same time featuring top-notch gameplay or interpretable interaction, in my estimation the computer-game genre peaks of the 90s are as follows:


Not all genre can be given equal weight. For example, turn-based strategy games are extremely strong throughout the 1990s.

It is a simple matter to identify the high-point of cRPG, RTS and FPS, but not TBS. And that is coming from someone who has deep-delved the four greatest Civ games and the two greatest X-COM games.


Yes, indeed. I would like to see anyone argue against Sid Meier games being god-tier.

Tech-Evolution & Revolution Summary


As it pertains to hardware and software engineering, the 1990s constitutes a transitional phase in that we go from:

  • i80x86 to Pentium [2]
  • Motorola 68k up to 68040 and OCS/ECS to AGA (Amiga) [2.1]
  • 8 bit ISA bus to 16 bit ISA and VL bus to 32 bit PCI bus
  • Mode 13h to Mode X [3]
  • IBM VGA to SVGA to VESA (320x200 to square-pixel 640x480) [3.1]
  • 2D to 3D dominance [4]
  • Software-rendered 3D to hardware-accelerated 3D via GPUs [4.1]
  • Flat-shaded 3D to texture-mapped 3D
  • MS-DOS to Windows 3.11 to 95 to 98
  • Pre-API computer games to Advent of the API of circa 1996 (DirectX, OpenGL)
  • Bleeps & blurps to sound cards becoming the norm via Sound Blaster
  • ST506 (IBM PC) and A590 sidecars (Amiga) to SCSI and ATA/(E)IDE hard disk drives
  • 720 KiB, 880 KiB and 1.44 MB diskettes to 700 MB CD-ROM as distribution media

The early 90s was a turbulent time in that computer-game hardware and software standards had not been finalized. There were contenders and casualties at this time, but by the mid-90s things had settled down when IBM, Intel and Microsoft came out on top and the microcomputer went out with a whimper, having been wrecked beyond recognition. [2]
 
In the mid-90s a better stage could not have been set for the computer game design talent that would come onboard or refine itself via magnum opus.

And as it pertains to the all-important gameplay, the 1990s exhibits a mastery with which no other decade contends. [5]

The Big Four of the 1990s: Civ, Doom, Frontier & Quake


Now we can outline Killer App influence and the apex of tech-prowess.

It is common knowledge that the biggest computer game of the 1990s was the immortal classic Doom by id Software (1993).

Doom was the Killer App of the 90s.

Dwarfing Blizzard's Diablo, WarCraft and StarCraft taken together (94-98), it is not even possible to assess the impact Doom has exerted on computer game culture and industry for three decades and counting; its influence is seminal, incalculable and multi-faceted.

The second heavyweight contender is Sid Meier's Civilization by MicroProse (1991), which became the most prestigious franchise in computer game history due to its educational value. Civ is as playable in 2024 as it was in 1991.

Assembled by me after attaining grandmastery in Civ, this epic-level infographic captures some of the greatness of 1990s computer-game design:


But since the shadow of id Software's Quake looms large as well, it must be stated unequivocally that, in terms of influence, id Software are the undisputed King-developer not just of the 1990s, but of all-time.

Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake. It doesn't get any better than that. Imagine coding Doom and Quake from the ground up. And even Half-Life has its origin in Quake's engine core.

In Commander Keen id Software trail-blazed smooth screen-scrolling routines; in Wolf 3D and Doom, 2.5D; in Quake, 3D rendering engines, robust networking and modability via QuakeC.

This is what you call colossal influence. But not only that, relative to available technologies Quake is the most technically advanced computer game ever coded:

No computer game came close to matching Quake's graphics quality or high-impact, high-speed gameplay. No computer game came close to conveying the friction and intensity of Quake's combat; the weight and energy behind its earthquake-evoking battles.

Diablo came out in 1996 as well, but Quake's 3D rendering engine powering along at 40 FPS while shifting around thousands of Gouraud-shaded polygons made Diablo's 2D engine chugging along at 20 FPS while shifting around 20 sprites look like a complete joke.
 
But there is a third heavyweight contender that goes by largely ignored yet deserves to be mentioned alongside Doom and Civilization: Braben's Frontier Elite 2 (1993).

Yes, Braben's own Elite of 1984 was seminal and therefore more influential, but to my mind Frontier represents coding and design prowess of the highest order.

Frontier ignited imaginations like no computer game before it. And that goes beyond entertainment and into the realm of significance to humanity. It is a work of genius, a digital artifact.

Frontier ran on 1985-tech yet anyone who played it in 1993 felt like they were playing something from the future: it was the space-age subject matter coupled with the lightsourced geometry, physics engine and spartan color scheme that made Frontier a futuristic experience, a computer game that evoked the scope of Asimov's Foundation (1951).

In addition, Geoff Crammond's Formula 1 Grand Prix and Sphere's Falcon 3.0 (both of 1991) deserve to be placed in the vicinity of Frontier historio-technically; F1GP for ground-vehicle realism and Falcon 3.0 for flight physics via the math coprocessor.

Papyrus Design Group were also front-runners through their Indy and NASCAR sims.

However, I would be inclined not to place Dune 2, any RTS, or any pure cRPG in the same league of historical significance as the abovementioned.

That does not mean that RTS or cRPG genre lack greatness or god-tier examples, it just means that I don't consider them as historically significant as the rock-hard ground-breakers, industry catalysts and thought-provokers.

On an absolute level (not relative to available tech):

  • The most technically advanced 2D computer game of the 1990s was Jagged Alliance 2.
  • The most technically advanced 3D computer game of the 1990s was Quake 2.

The reader will note that Doom, Civ, Frontier, F1GP and F-3.0 came out in the space of just three years, from 1991-93. Thus, in terms of trail-blazing uncharted technical territory it could very well be the case that 1991-93 constitutes the greatest three years of computer-game development in history.

Chronological List of 1990s Computer Games


This is a hyperlinked list of 1990s computer games that I have so far covered on cRPG Blog. The computer games are listed in chronological order, from oldest to newest.

In time, depending on how much time life gives me, this will become a thorough historical account that acknowledges the talented hardware and software engineers that made such computer games possible.

Readers will note a technical slant to my coverage, a technical slant that employs layman's terms from the perspective of a computer-gamer of the 90s. Tech-lite, if you will. Which is the general language of computer gamers of the 90s.

I do not explore stories, themes and characters; as a rule, they bore me as someone who grew up on classical literature.

My focus is on the technical and on gameplay. Computer games that lack gameplay get ripped to pieces by my commentary.


1990
BattleTech: The Crescent Hawks' Revenge Review: Real-time 2D Tactics Pioneer.
BattleTech tactics include concentrated fire via Fire-at-Will, defensive fire, taking cover, ammo conservation, overburn toggle, jumpjets, movement rate adjustment, firing-on-the-move, formational movement and flanking maneuvers.
PowerMonger Review: Wargame / God Game Hybrid.
PowerMonger's 3D topographical map is an underrated technical achievement that has no peer in the late 80s and early 90s. I would venture to state that PowerMonger's map was one of the most impressive tech-graphics achievements of the 16 bit microcomputer era. And if some computer games can be said to have "soul", PowerMonger is one of them.

1991: The Birth of 4X
Sid Meier's Civilization 1 Guide: The Seminal Civ Game.
The Civilization campaign kicks off in 4000 B.C. of Antiquity but progresses through the epochs of the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Industrial Age, culminating in a Space Race and looming Nuclear Warfare. Computer gaming does not get more prestigious than Civ.
This marks the point at which the greatest genre in computer gaming was created. Civ is the greatest franchise in computer or video gaming history. Console mascot games are absolute laughing stocks in comparison to Civ.
F-117A Nighthawk Stealth Fighter 2.0: VGA Stealth-fighting at its finest.
Nighthawk constitutes a solid incremental advancement on F-19 rather than a revolution in stealth-fighting simulation.
Falcon 3.0 Review: Tapping the Math Coprocessor.
Falcon 3.0 marks the point at which MS-DOS becomes the clear-cut best platform on which to play flight sims; the point at which the ST/Amiga flight sim aficionado must go out and purchase a PC if they want to play the most advanced flight sims with the best performance and visuals.
Formula 1 Grand Prix Review: The Best Formula 1 Simulation.
The simulation is tight and accurate: on-rails and downforced in comparison to the average arcade racer. F1GP does not feel anything like an arcade game.
Gunship 2000 Review: The Most Advanced 16 bit Gunship Sim.
Gunship 2000 tactics involve stealthily weaving through canyons, manoeuvring around hilly terrain and flying at low altitude along rivers, aka nap-of-the-earth flight. Then the gunship pops up seemingly out of nowhere to give enemy forces the surprise of a lifetime -- with dead-eye firepower.

1992: The Birth of RTS
Darklands Review: Mythic-medieval role-playing in an open-ended gameworld.
In Darklands the player controls a band of up to four heroes (a party of adventurers) in search of fame and fortune. To this end, the heroes explore the overworld to battle the mundane and the mythical.
Dune 2 Review: The Formalizer of RTS.
Bases get big, evoking not so much Herbert's Dune but rather Asimov's Trantor.
Street Fighter Games MS-DOS: The Versus Fighter Gets Good on MS-DOS.
Enforcer Shoot 'em up: Never Say Die: The Commodore 64 is still hosting A1 computer games in 1992.

1993: The Killer App
Doom 1 Review: A Hellish 3D Game by id Software. An Immortal Classic.
Coded by Carmack, the Doom engine is most notable for its efficiency in shifting around a ton of sprites and texture-mapped geometry at high framerates. Doom is all about high-speed gameplay driven by efficient code.
Empire Deluxe Wargame: Origin in the 70s.
Empire Deluxe features massive maps and campaigns that can go on for thousands of turns. Truth be told Empire Deluxe plays better than most modern strategy games, yet runs on toasters.
Frontier: Elite 2 Review: The Greatest Spaceflight Sim Ever Coded.
Frontier is notable for its open-ended gameplay, hierarchical design, momentum-based Newtonian flight physics and god-tier procedural generation within a 400 KB executable.
IndyCar Racing by Papyrus Design Group: Smooth, real-time texture-mapped 3D.
Master of Orion 1: Deep-space colonization and galactic conquest.
The Settlers Review: Real-time strategy game and medieval city-builder.
The player does not have direct control of any settlers or combatants; control is abstracted and indirect -- based on vague priorities and proximities -- yet everything is unceasingly real-time and played out before the eyes in every detail.
Non-standard Square-pixel VGA Games: The Lost Vikings & Blackthorne.

1994: TBS Greatness
Sid Meier's Colonization Guide: The Greatest of All Civ Games.
In assuming the role of Your Excellency, Viceroy of the New World of The Americas, the object of Colonization is to establish colonies, build wealth and assemble an army in the New World before declaring independence from the tax-hiking Crown and defeating the King's attempt to quell the rebellion in a War of Independence: all-out-war between the Rebel Continental Army and the Royal Expeditionary Forces, complete with Tory unrest, Native councils and foreign intervention.
Master of Magic Review: The Greatest TBS Game of All-time.
Master of Magic's majesty rests upon its superior Wizard-War mechanics. If you want to play as a Wizard there is no greater game than MoM. Indeed, as it pertains to playability there is no greater computer game than MoM.
Panzer General 1 Review: Slicky-presented Tactics & Operations-level Wargame.
Constituted by 30 or so stats each, there are a whopping 350 units of ground, naval and air type in Panzer General. From infantry units up to the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, unit battle performance is impacted by unit level, vs. unit-type, terrain-type, weather, suppression and rugged defense.
WarCraft 1 Review: RTS Popularizer I.
Warcraft substitutes the spartan, sci-fi color scheme of Dune 2 for a much more colorful palette suitable to its generic fantasy theme. No doubt, colorful graphics that appeal to the masses helped to popularize Warcraft.
X-COM UFO Defense Review: The Seminal X-COM Game.
X-COM's Battlescape is highly advanced even by today's standards; the work of trail-blazing visionaries. Indeed, the Battlescape is a masterpiece of combat system design and indicative of coding wizardry. That it can be so immersive, atmospheric and engaging almost three decades after its release -- well, that's proof.

1995: RTS Boom
Command & Conquer 1 Review: RTS Popularizer II.
Setting aside, the main difference between Command & Conquer and Warcraft 2 is that, as a rule, C&C is more about commanding swarms of combat units whereas WC2 is about commanding smaller forces which consist of stronger or more capable combat units, such as spellcasters and Heroes.
Frontier: First Encounters: The Return of the Thargoids.
Over its prequel FFE features more complex geometry, procedural texture-mapping, FMVs and digitized speech, but it did not support SVGA 640x480.
Steel Panthers Review: Combined-Arms Tactics Wargame for Grognards.
The Steel Panthers franchise is notable for its historical realism and complex combined arms tactics. In its campaign and scenarios Steel Panthers treats the Western Front of the Second World War as well as other large-scale battlefields in Europe and the Pacific.
WarCraft 2 Review: RTS Popularizer III.
In Warcraft 2 technical proficiency in design, coding and aesthetics hit a highpoint of refinement. Indeed, given the brief interval between the original and the sequel, the advancements in gameplay and presentation made by the sequel are staggering.

1996: Epic
Diablo 1 Review: Shrewd streamlining of Dungeons & Dragons.
What I like about Diablo is that it knows what it is and what experience it is trying to deliver. Above all its gameplay is focused, refined and pick-up-and-play, but its outward appearance of simplicity veils an inner complexity, nuance and design genius that is revealed to players through replays, meaning we can't begin to appreciate or understand the depth of the game by playing once only.
Sid Meier's Civilization 2 Guide: The Ageless Civ Game.
It is rare that sequels eclipse originals, but Civ2 is far superior to Civ1 in terms of strategy, tactics, user interface, presentation and playability. This is due to the Advent of the API: the difference between Civ1 and Civ2 is far greater than the difference between Civ2 and any subsequent TBS.
Quake 1 Review: A Nightmarish 3D Game by id Software: The Best FPS Ever Made.
Quake's engine pushes around several thousand Gouraud-shaded polygons while maintaining 40 FPS at 640x480 resolution on Pentium 100s with 16 megs of RAM -- insane.
Grand Prix 2 MS-DOS: Formula 1 Autoracing in SVGA 640x480.
Mega Typhoon Shoot 'em up: Can you believe that this game is running on 1985 hardware? BELIEVE IT.
Red Alert Review: RTS Design Mastery & Optimization.
It is inarguable that Red Alert was one of the most polished and professional game releases of the mid-90s. The game oozes with design and coding expertise. Not only did they hit their stride with Red Alert, Westwood practically aced every aspect of RTS design.
Settlers 2: More Settling, but in SVGA 640x480!

1997: cRPG Formalized 
Fallout 1 Guide: The cRPG Formalizer.
I refer to Fallout as The Formalizer because it set most of the cRPG Design standards that are adhered to by elite cRPGs that have maintained distinguished legacies for almost three decades.
X-COM Apocalypse Guide: The Most Ambitious TBS Game.
Apocalypse is awe-inspiring in its complexity, atmosphere and tactics-strategy; it is a work of broad vision, tremendous ambition and coding wizardry.

1998: Genre Popularizers
Baldur's Gate 1 Review: cRPG All-rounder that helped spark a Role-playing Renaissance.
As of 2024 I have published over 500 hyperlinked articles and half a million words on classic Baldur's Gate. In length the equivalent to several novels, no one in the world has written more on Baldur's Gate than I have over the game's 25 year aka ¼ of a century history. Note also that my commentary is supported by 1,000 screencaps and 200 infographics, all based on the historically significant original Baldur's Gate.
Fallout 2 Guide: A Massive cRPG.
Black Isle's Fallout 2 was not as good as its god-tier predecessor. It was larger, offered a lot more content, made some improvements to companion control and the interface in general, but it lost something of the intimacy and pacing of the original Fallout 1, got carried away with pop-culture references, and muddled the lore and world.
Half-Life 1 Review: The Source of Scripted Sequences.
Half-Life was released more than two years subsequent to Quake and one year subsequent to Quake 2. Considering that two years in the 1990s was akin to a life-time in terms of software and hardware engineering advancements, does it show?
StarCraft 1 Review: RTS Super-Popularizer & Whac-A-Mole.
StarCraft unit sprites overlap on the playing field to the point that several will be stacked on top of each other. Unit sprites should never overlap in such games. Imagine if a shoot 'em up lacked collision detection? It would be castigated.

1999: God-tier
Icewind Dale 1 Review: Refinement of the Generic.
In Icewind Dale Black Isle eschewed the deep reactivity of their own Planescape: Torment, and the non-linear exploration of BioWare's Baldur's Gate, in favor of a campaign focused on dungeon crawling & tactical combat.
Jagged Alliance 2 Review: The Best Mix of Tactics & Strategy.
Tactics is seamlessy integrated with strategy. By that I mean switching between tactical mode and strategy mode is not at all jarring. It doesn't feel like we're playing two different games but rather one very well thought out game. Both modes feel like they belong; they are not tacked on or frivolously employed. They are rock solid and integral in every way. And that is called King-tier game design. Something that no modern tactics developer has been able to replicate.
Planescape: Torment Review: Reaches Narrative Heights.
Planescape: Torment does a good job of translating the world, powers and factions of the PCSC into a cRPG. While it tells a personal story of an immortal in search of the reason for his immortality, its scope is far-reaching and stretches across the planes...
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri Guide: The Most Complex Civ Game.
By reason of dying Earth humanity embarks on a mission to colonize the earth-like planet of Chiron of the Alpha Centauri star system. But during the 40-year voyage on Starship Unity the leaders divide into separate factions each of which has its own utopian vision for the future of humanity.
Tales of the Sword Coast: An expansion for Baldur's Gate.
The legendary Durlag's Tower -- the jewel in the Infinity Engine's crown -- is a multi-level dungeon crawl added into the base campaign by the Tales of the Sword Coast expansion, the existence of which is revealed to us upon reaching the far-northern town of Ulgoth's Beard.

[1]

TBS peak is practically decade-long. I consider MoM to be the absolute apex of the genre, but I could also argue in favor of MoO, Civ1-2, Colonization and SMAC.

TBS is the GOAT genre of computer games.

[2]

486 to Pentium


The Intel Pentium CPU constituted a massive upgrade on the i80486. And thanks to Intel's thorough documentation assembly coders quickly got up to speed in respect to optimization.

While they don't tell the whole story by a long shot (and should not be taken as gospel), the following benchmarks in MIPS are good enough indicators of 486 versus Pentium power:

  • Doom (1993) ran well on i486DX-33 CPUs (11 MIPS) and 4 MB RAM (Software-rendered, MS-DOS-only). i486DX2-66 (25 MIPS)
  • Quake (1996) ran well on Pentium 100 MHz CPUs (190 MIPS) and 16 MB RAM (Software-rendered in MS-DOS or hardware-accelerated via OpenGL through GLQuake in Windows)
  • Half-Life (1998) ran well on Pentium 166 MHz CPUs (230 MIPS) and 32 MB RAM (Software-rendered or hardware-accelerated via OpenGL or Direct3D in Windows only)

The jump from Motorola 68k in the Amiga 500 up to 68020 in the Amiga 1200 was also big; so too the jumps from 020 to 030, 040 and 060, but the Amiga lacked computer-game market penetration by the mid-90s. Again, these benchmarks are only indicators, not gospel:

  • Motorola 68000 clocked at ~7 MHz came in at 1.2 MIPS (Amiga 500)
  • Motorola 68020 clocked at 14 MHz came in at 5 MIPS (Amiga 1200)
  • Motorola 68030 clocked at 50 MHz came in at 18 MIPS (accel. A1200, 2000, 3000)
  • Motorola 68040 clocked at 50 MHz came in at 50 MIPS (Amiga 4000)
  • Motorola 68060 clocked at 75 MHz came in at 110 MIPS (accel. A1200, Amiga 4000) [2.1]

The biggest jump for generalist Amigans was going from A500s to A1200s accelerated by 030s in the mid-90s; it was huge.
 
While Quake was ported to the Amiga by clickBOOM/PXL in 1999, the Amiga was pretty much done and dusted as as a computer-gaming platform by the mid-90s.

[3]

The Advent of High Performance VGA Modes



In the early 90s the IBM PC caught up to the Amiga in terms of 2D capability via VGA. And it caught up to the Amiga's soundchip via sound cards. And the IBM PC had more raw processing power, more RAM and more HDD pedigree than Amigas. Moreover, it had the market.

Thus, the Amiga was well and truly doomed as a computer game machine by the mid-90s, but as early as 1991 it was evident that Amigas could not contend in 3D computer games; only in 2D computer games did the Amiga contend. It is, however, quite a feat that 2D computer games on the Amiga rode 1985-tech for one decade. Bow down to the original Alienware.

CPU-speed, RAM-size and HDD-capacity aside, it was IBM's Video Graphics Array display controller along with breakthroughs in non-standard VGA coding techniques that improved the performance and fidelity of MS-DOS computer games.

In the 90s IBM VGA Mode 13h was commonplace:


Circa 1993 non-standard VGA modes became more common (such as Mode X), improving pixel-display performance and proportions:


Mode X computer games were mostly ports of Amiga and Sega Genesis games. However, there were several good-quality Mode 13h and Mode X MS-DOS exclusives. In the above infographic only EWJ and Rayman are not MS-DOS-exclusive or MS-DOS-firsts, which is impressive.

Some may say, "Oh, those are just 2D platformers, simple and casual games!", but non-standard coding routines, the level of VGA-tapping, allowed MS-DOS and Win95 to contend with Genesis and SNES 2D games via Mode 7-style effects and suchlike. And some MS-DOS and Windows platformers offered more features and more complex controls than their console-counterparts. Moreover, they did not often slow down in framerate when the screen got busy (SNES Super R-type).



Now we can compare a sample of the Amiga platform-game catalogue from 1989-96. This is not about whose catalogue is best, these are only samples.


Again, some of those Amiga games rival Genesis/SNES games even though most of them were coded to run on late-80s tech that could do more than just play games (an Amiga 500).

SVGA then stepped in to become commonplace circa 1996 [3.1]:

  • SVGA: 256 color palette (8 bit color depth) at 640x480 square-pixel 1:1 aspect ratio
  • SVGA: 16.7 million color palette (24-bit color depth) at 800x600
  • XGA: 1024x768
  • SXGA: 1280x1024
  • UXGA: 1600x1200

SVGA 640x480 was not just about 4:3 square-pixel resolution in 256 colors from a palette of 256K. It was also about hardware cursors, increased clockspeed and increased display memory (256 KB for VGA, 1-4 MB for SVGA). Line-draws, square-fills and poly-fills -- they were 30 times faster in SVGA.

The above-enumerated advancements had a big impact on computer game fidelity, bitmap display performance, sprite animation and stat presentation screen-space that facilitates player-interpretable interaction in complex computer games.

Square pixel resolutions, seamless big-bitmap switching and shifting as well as smooth hardware-scrolling enhanced gameplay, make no mistake.

Big-bitmap shifting in X-Wing:


For example, on either MS-DOS 5.0 or Windows 95 with DirectX 3.0a, Fallout (1997) displays and functions gloriously in SVGA 640x480 256-colors. You would not want to play Fallout made for VGA 320x240 in 1996: that would suck.

Note that a few Amiga games featured VGA-comparable resolutions and color depths. Jim Power (1992) featured 12-level parallax hardware scrolling and over 200 on-screen colors yet ran at 50 frames per second on Amiga 500s from Jan. 1987. And JP is just one example of a dozen that could be given.


2D power, son. 2D power.

cf.



MS-DOS and Windows versions of Fallout did not have smooth screen-scrolling. Not even Windows-exclusive, DirectX Diablo had smooth scrolling. Fallout has a good excuse because its viewport is avatar-anchorless with edgescreen auto-scrolling, but Diablo has no excuse because its viewport is avatar-anchored as in arcade-game scrollers. And it doesn't matter that Diablo is more complex than stock shooters or platformers because Diablo requires Pentium 60 MHz CPUs with 8,000 KB RAM (140 MIPS) whereas stock shooters and platformers ran on 7 Mhz microprocessors with 512 KB RAM (1.2 MIPS).

100 times the computational power and that is what Blizzard North came up with: non-smooth scrolling at 20 FPS for an arcade-action game of 1996, yet Blizzard Entertainment's WarCraft 2 (1995) runs in SVGA with smooth scrolling...


My view is that if you can't make a computer game scroll smoothly on a per-pixel basis, make it flip-screen like the Crusader games.

In 90s 2D computer games there was no need to go beyond 800x600 and 256 colors: no one was going to make pixel-art computer games in resolutions above 800x600 and 8 bit color depth. And that is why even many 640x480 2D computer games -- scores of them -- feature pre-rendered backdrops/sprites or a mix of hand-drawn and pre-rendered backdrops/sprites.

Pre-rendered backdrops and sprites were necessitated by the sheer scope of some 2D computer games. Without 3D-modelling one would need an army of artists and animators to hand-draw graphics assets.

And in 90s 3D computer games there was no reason to go beyond 1280x1024 on 17" Trinitron CRTs. Quake looked glorious at 1280x1024 on such supreme monitors.

VGA computer games enabled the IBM PC to finally surpass the Amiga in 2D games by 1992 (IBM PCs already had blatantly obvious 3D supremacy by 1991).


But overtaking 2D Amiga games in the early 90s was not exactly a great achievement. Consider Amiga graphics in 1986 (38 year-old graphics as of 2024):


You can't do that on MS-DOS in 1986. I would not even waste my time posting MS-DOS screencaps of DotC.

You can read about the Amiga's doom in my Doom Review.

[4]

The Advent of 3D Graphics Cards



GLQuake and Half-Life (1997-98) powered the 3D computer game industry from the late 90s onwards. The conversion of the computer game industry to overwhelmingly 3D in nature was one of the biggest events in computer-game history; for a long while afterwards, 2D computer games did not even exist in the eyes of the masses.

2D was considered old-hat by the in-crowd of the "aughts" (2000-2009). In their estimation even 3D shovelware was superior to a 2D masterpiece: polygons good, pixel art bad.

As a rule, the aught-gamer's vision of computer games was limited in comparison to the 90s gamer: the aught gamer was obsessed with the polygon-pusher on Windows whereas the 90s gamer had knowledge of 2D, 3D and 2.5D computer games that ran on wildly different hardware and operating systems.

The 90s was non-standard, experimental and revolutionary; the aughts standardized, formulaic and incremental. The aughts was also the decade that dumbed down computer games to pander to the console crowd. For that reason alone the aughts could be called "The Terrible 2000s." Some of the worst games of all-time came out in the 2000s. The 1990s was just so much better.

The fanatical aught-obsession with 3D went so far as to all but ruin entire genre. Under the weight of 3D expectations some traditionally-2D genre were crawling on hands and knees begging hard for FPS-like popularity by three-dimensionalizing even though they did not benefit from z-axis gameplay.

Truth be told, it was a sorry sight, saddening, just sad to see, one could almost shed a tear -- but since that is a different decade entirely, I refer readers to the unpalatable facts enumerated in Computer Role-playing Game History. 

Before the advent of 3D graphics cards 3D computer games were software-rendered aka CPU-rendered; that is, the CPU was doing the heavy lifting in rendering the polygons.

The original Quake was software-rendered by the CPU and accelerated via VESA 2.0 Local bus in 256-color (8 bit color depth) linear framebuffer mode (LFB) that supported up to 1280x1024 resolution.

On the other hand, GLQuake is hardware-accelerated Quake using the OpenGL API and texture object extensions on 3D graphics cards such as 3dfx Voodoo (opengl32.dll). GLQuake added support for many more and higher resolutions as well as windowed mode via -window and realtime shadow-casting via r_shadows 1. At resolutions above 800x600 GLQuake featured much smoother framerates than software-rendered Quake; the same is true of Half-Life.

In the late-90s, the perceivable differences between software-rendered and hardware-accelerated computer games were almost non-existent; in fact, most people were not able to distinguish the one from the other. And most people were not running Quake and Half-Life above 800x600 when they came out; to think otherwise is romanticism.
 
3dfx PCI Voodoo graphics cards only offered 3D acceleration, not 2D acceleration. So yes, you could push around thousands of texture-mapped polygons but it wasn't going to do a damn thing for your Tyrian or Raptor shoot 'em up. However, Nvidia's Riva 128 (NV3) featured both 3D and 2D onboard acceleration by mid-1997. [4.1]

In 1998 you could SLI 2x Voodoo2 12 meg boards (for example) whereas OpenGL cards on NT workstations offered 64 megs stock-standard on a single monster-board (for real-time previewing of what would become ray-traced renders).

In the late-90s there was a yawning gulf in performance between computer-game graphics cards and NT-workstation graphics cards: gaming PCs and personal workstations were completely different worlds and there was zero cross-compatibility. Most computer games did not support Windows NT, including Quake. And you weren't running any graphics-workstation software on Windows 3.11, 95 or 98.

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Some pre-API computer games of the 1980s and early 90s were masterpieces unaccelerated so one can only imagine how good they could have been if their release was delayed by just a few years; if they were able to harness 2D hardware acceleration, square-pixel resolutions and Pentium CPUs.



To expand, it is arguable that some pre-API computer games exhibit stronger gameplay than their highly sophisticated API-era counterparts; that gameplay in pre-API computer games is only let down by technical limitations, such as (to cite one example) jerky screen-scrolling due to the lack of 2D hardware acceleration in non-Amigas, which impacts playability.

Best Graphics in 1990s Computer Games



As it pertains to early-90s graphics, the 2D highlight was Shadow of the Beast 3 and the 3D highlights were Frontier and Falcon 3.0. (Doom was not fully 3D, but is an overall highlight in graphics.)

In the mid-90s, the 2D highlight was Diablo and the 3D highlight was Quake.

In the late-90s, the 2D highlight was Jagged Alliance 2 and the 3D highlight was Quake 2.

On IBM PC the fastest 2D scroller that was ultra-smooth (per-pixel) was Jazz Jackrabbit (1994).


Shadow of the Beast featured the most levels of parallax scrolling (13).

The best background color schemes were found in Secret of Monkey Island and Beneath a Steel Sky:


The most impressive sprite-shifters of the 90s were Doom and StarCraft; and the decade's ultimate polygon-pusher was Quake 2.

Cinematic platformers had the best rotoscoped animations:


cf. Amiga versions of Another World and Flashback.

The MS-DOS ports of the Mortal Kombat arcade games (1-3) are notable for their responsive controls and digitized motion-captured sprites; they are practically 1:1 arcade-perfect ports. Running on 1987-tech the Amiga versions of MK1/2 also verged on arcade-perfect, but the MS-DOS versions were the most accurate arcade conversions by far.

The MS-DOS and Win95 versions of MK3 were coded for square-pixel SVGA 640x480.


Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo (1995) was another good arcade conversion for MS-DOS:


To see how much Street Fighter evolved from the late 80s to the mid 90s, please refer to Street Fighter Games MS-DOS.

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On the other hand, I do not cover non-Western platforms because I did not own, for example, Japanese microcomputers back in the day. Thus, the weakness of my computer-game history is that, with the exception of some arcade ports, it is only Western in treatment range. Forgive me for not having experienced every computer game on every machine world-wide during the 1990s; unlike posers and pretenders, I only commentate on what I experienced first-hand.

cf.


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