History of 1990s Computer Games | Computer Game Reviews | Amiga Game Reviews

1994 PC Games

This is a curated list of PC games that came out in 1994. The PC games are listed in alphabetical order. Both MS-DOS and Windows PC games are included. I will expand on this list in the future.

1994 was an epic year for PC gamers in that three of the best games of all-time came out. Check out this Trinity of the turn-based strategy genre:

Gollop's X-COM UFO Defense by Mythos Games was released in March
Barcia's Master of Magic by Simtex was released in September
Sid Meier's Colonization by MPS Labs was released in September

I have rated each of the above 9.9 out of 10 in my deep delves; they are grognard games of the highest order and cannot be beaten.

On top of that we have:

Panzer General by SSI (operations-level wargame)
Lords of the Realm by Impressions (kingdom-management game)
Transport Tycoon by Microprose (business simulation)

Thus, more grognard goodness.

1994 also saw the release of the original WarCraft by Blizzard Entertainment, but WarCraft is a third-rank game of 1994.

Notable as well is that the first big-name 3D SVGA 640x480 games were released in late-94:

Origin Systems' Wing Commander 3 in August
Papyrus Design Group's NASCAR Racing in October
EA's U.S. Navy Fighters in November
Looking Glass Technologies' System Shock in December

However, when displaying the above in SVGA you'd be doing well to get 30 FPS. On the other hand, a dozen notable 2D VGA games were released for PC in 1994, all of which ran at 50-60 FPS.

FPS-wise, 1994 saw the release of four notable commercial Doom-likes.

In 1994 PC gaming Intel Pentium 90 MHz CPUs were emerging and i80486DX2 66 MHz CPUs and 8 megs of RAM were bog-standard, but 16 megs of RAM was recommended. However, RAM above 16 megs could cause memory address space issues on non-DOS/4GW run-times. As for hard disk drives, 1 gig EIDEs were practically mandatory for serious gamers.

1994 video cards were based on ISA, VLB (486) or PCI (Pentium) local buses and commonly employed ATI Mach, S3, Cirrus Logic and Tseng Labs ET4000 (xxx) chipsets, each of which came in various models.

Video card manufacturers included ATI, Diamond, Genoa, Hercules, Paradise, Matrox and Orchid. Such cards featured 1-2 megs of DRAM or 1-4 megs of VRAM. The ATI and Matrox cards featured custom chipsets; that is, ATI and Matrox manufactured both chip and card.

SciTech Software's generic UniVBE VESA driver worked with at least 60 video cards in 1994. In case players did not have access to their card's drivers, many games extracted UniVBE to the installation directory.

Audio-wise, digital audio was commonly employed for sampled speech and other sound effects whereas music was FM synth- or General MIDI-based. Thus, the combo of Sound Blaster 16/Pro and Roland Sound Canvas became common in 1994. Digital audio was almost always 8-bit unless the game was CD-ROM-based (16-bit PCM).

As for non-IBM compatibles, it pains me to say it but in 1994 the Amiga was hammered once again by the PC. Consider for example that no fewer than one dozen big-name PC games of 1994 would ever see the light of day on the Amiga. And to add insult to injury the PC got an SVGA port of what had been an Amiga-exclusive -- The Settlers.

And alas, several Amiga-exclusives of 1994 were disappointments even though they had great potential. Consider:

James Pond 3 stinks of the Sega Genesis
What could have been one of the best vert-shooters on Amiga or PC turned out to be a massive disappointment (Banshee).
The Sonic-like Mr. Nutz tried to do too much.
The run and gun Ruff n Tumble suffered from poor audio and screen-scrolling.
Raiden, one of the most famous coinop shooters of the early 90s, ended up not being released for the Amiga even though it was looking promising.
Captive 2 was released on the Amiga CD32 console before the Amiga micros, but it wasn't even as good as Captive of 1991, anyway.
The AGA version of The Chaos Engine looked worse than the ECS/OCS original.
The Amiga version of TFX was cancelled.

The King computer game of 1994 was X-COM: UFO Defense by Mythos Games. I crown X-COM because it came out in early 94 whereas the other two throne-contenders came out in late 94.

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Each entry below links to either technical overviews, reviews or deep delves on the game. You can click an image and mouse-wheel up and down through the images.