The most popular games of his time, part 3: 1990s
In the first part of the cycle, we talked about the most popular games of our time about Pong, the grandfather of the “tanchiki” and Space Invaders, in the second part we discussed the Prince of Persia, Metal Gear and Mario. This time we will talk about Street Fighter II, Doom II, Half-Life, Counter-Strike and other outstanding games of the 1990s, and at the end - together decide what to devote the fourth part of the cycle The most popular games of their time.
→ The most popular games of his time, part 1: 1970s
→ The most popular games of his time, part 2: 1980s
In 1990, Capcom released the sequel to Street Fighter, the first part of which appeared in 1987. At first, the company sold 60,000 Street Fighter II slot machines, and in 1991 consolidated its success with the help of the even more popular Street Fighter II: Champion Edition. Only in Japan, slot machines with this version of the game sold out in the amount of 140 thousand pieces. By 1992, 60% of all coins in slot machines in the UK were provided by Street Fighter II, about 260 million pounds per year.
For 1995 in the United States, the games The World Warrior and the Champion Edition earned together 2.3 billion dollars. Taking into account inflation for 2017, it is about $ 3.7 billion.
With the game Street Fighter II is the emergence of the concept of "combo". Players accidentally discovered the ability to combine multiple attacks, which the opponent could not block with the desired sequence of execution. The developers did not envisage such a possibility (probably), but later on combos became commonplace. And not only for fighting games.
Based on the game in 1994, the film “Street Fighter” was shot, in which the main role was played by Jean-Claude Van Damme, and the role of Cammy went to Kylie Minogue .
The success of Street Fighter has led to the emergence of new games. In Killer Instinct, for example, for the first time at the game level they introduced combo. But the synonym for the fighting game so far is Mortal Kombat, first released in 1992.
In the game, the characters were no longer drawn. In Mortal Kombat, the digitized actions of the actors are shown. The master of martial arts and at that time employee of Midway Daniel Pesina played Johnny Cage, Scorpio, Sub-Zero and Reptilia. Actor and, again, martial arts master Park Ho Sung became the prototype of Liu Kang and Shang Tsung.
“Juggling” will appear in Mortal Kombat. You throw the enemy in the air with a blow and continue to beat him until he falls. Translated this "juggling".
The Mortal Kombat franchise has become one of the most successful and influential fighting games in the entire history of video games. It is distinguished by a high level of violence, which is perfectly visible in terms of the number of Fatality options - finishing the opponent in dozens of different ways, one more sophisticated than the other.
In 1993, Czechoslovakia fell to the Czech Republic and Slovakia, tanks stormed the White House in Moscow, and TV-6 began broadcasting. In the meantime, the graphic quest Myst has appeared in the world of computer games.
Myst became the best-selling game for personal computers, until its records broke the Sims and a few more games released five or more years later. By 2003, Myst had sold 6 million copies, and sales of all franchise games reached 12 million copies, of which 8.03 million fell on the very first game of 1993. Myst received four sequels, three remakes and a number of branches, including the MMORPG Uru Live.
In Myst, the player moved through the interactive world with a first-person view, interacting with objects and moving between screens with the mouse. To complete the game, you need to solve puzzles and visit all the worlds, collecting pages for two books - red and blue, which have become prisons for two characters capable of creating books-worlds. Workers of the game were inspired by the novel "The Mysterious Island" by Jules Verne.
In 1994, the EU states opened borders for each other, the first Russian cosmonaut Sergey Krikalev flew on the American shuttle using the Space Shuttle program, and in Russia the national top-level domain .ru was registered.
The company id Software this year released the continuation of a successful shooter - the game Doom II: Hell on Earth. On the sale of two million copies of the game id Software earned $ 100 million. For the company, it was the highest commercial success at the time, and the popularity of the games was such that other shooters for several years were called “Doom clones”. And many still have immortality associated with IDDQD.
The game has retained the old gameplay, of the innovations here appeared only one new weapon - a double-barreled gun, which deals slightly less damage than a rocket launcher. The main difference was the number of new monsters.
Keep Doom 2 speedran. Pick up only half an hour of your time.
Since 1995, it has been leading the E3 Electronic Entertainment Exhibition, in August of that year, Windows 95 was released, and in November, Nintendo presented a working prototype of the Nintendo Ultra 64 with a pair of games, Kirby Ball 64 and Super Mario 64.
Blizzard Entertainment released in December 1995 The second in a series of strategy Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness. The game initially worked under DOS and Windows 95, was the version under Mac OS. In 1997, Warcraft II was ported to the Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation.
Three months after the launch of Warcraft II, Blizzard sold half a million copies, and in 2016 the game got into the corresponding edition of the Guinness Book of Records with 4.21 million sales of games for personal computers.
Within a year after the show, the Nintendo 64 company launched it, and Super Mario 64 became one of the first games. For the first time in the game of this franchise, there was a true three-dimensionality and the ability to move in an arbitrary direction, instead of sprites used polygonal models.
Nintendo has sold over 11 million copies of the game, it is one of the best-selling games in history. What can we say about the entire franchise with its half-billion sales.
Remember the gameplay.
In 1997, a criminal code began to operate in Russia with an article “for violation of copyright and related rights”, Bill Clinton took over the second term as President of the United States, and Intel officially introduced the Pentium 2 microprocessor.
This year, several years after the release of the first Need For Speed games, a new racing franchise appeared on the scene. Gran Turismo for Sony PlayStation at Polyphony Digital worked for five years, although the team was very small - up to 15 people at the best of times. The game of 1997 was far from competitors in terms of realism and complexity, it had an interesting career mode and the possibility of tuning cars.
A total of 76.8 million copies were sold.of all the games of the Gran Turismo series, of which 10.85 million falls on the first part of the game for the PlayStation. The rating of the first game on Metacritic is 96 points out of 100 possible. This is the case when critics praised the game and players voted for it with their money.
Released in 1998, a first-person shooter with a laconic main character, red mount and the lack of video savers became an important milestone in the history of the genre. Gordon Freeman is so fond of the players that they bought 9.3 million copies of Half-Life. The second part was also successful - sales of the continuation of 2004 amounted to 9.4 million units. But the third part, we, apparently, never wait, because Valve brings a good income Dota, Counter Strike and the game distribution service Steam.
Half-Life was, one might say, fan-made. Gabe Newell and his partner Mike Harrington before creating the gamelooked into id Software - one of the coolest companies at the time, which released several games of the Doom and Quake series. In this company, they received the source code for the Quake engine, for which they hired mod developers and game fans. In addition, Newell and Harrington took several industry veterans from 3D Realms, Shiny Entertainment and Microsoft, from where the founders of Valve, an unknown studio at that time, came.
The game significantly influenced the management in shooters . At the time of the release of Half-Life was a mass of a variety of keyboard layouts: AShiftZ, WADX, ESDF, ASDX. One of the creators of Quake, John Carmack, added the WASD configuration to the second part of the game, but for the first time it was used by default in 1998's Half-Life.
In 1999, fans release a modification for Half-Life called Counter-Strike. The modification, noted by Valve, then turned into an independent game and received continuations of Condition Zero, Source and Global Offensive. In recent years, ten CS remains one of the most popular online games, Global Offensive - in the first places on Steam.
Counter-Strike - team shooter on the confrontation of terrorists and special forces. The goal of the game is to complete the task or destroy all opponents. At one time, Counter-Strike 1.6 began to decline due to the emergence of powerful personal computers and much more developed from the point of view of graphics games, but by 2008 there was a reverse process - CS became a tournament discipline.
Today, eSports is a spectacular event of various levels with a wide variety of prize money. In this industry with pleasure to invest. For example, Alisher Usmanov in 2016 announced that he intends to invest more than 100 million US dollars in eSports, namely, his USM Holdings invests in the project Virtus.pro. The project includes teams in key disciplines, including StarCraft 2, FIFA, League of Legends and, of course, Counter-Strike.
In the 1990s, three generations of gaming systems changed - after the 16-bit Sega Mega Drive and Super Nintendo came the Nintendo 64, Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation, and at the end of the decade the era of the sixth generation began with DreamCast, XboX and PlayStation 2. Game Consoles from cartridges began to move to the disks. Processors for graphics processing have become more powerful, and as a standard for creating video games, true three-dimensional graphics are widely used.
An important milestone for the gaming industry was the advent of the Internet, so that in the second half of the 1990s online games appeared. E-sports has reached a new level.
In the US, game sales have overtaken sales of another entertainment industry in the country - cinema.
In the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, we can distinguish games that not only sold well, but also greatly influenced the industry as a whole or its particular genres. In the 2000s, it becomes more difficult, so I suggest using the collective mind to decide what we will talk about in the next article: write in the comments the name of the game, the year of its release and the reason why it should be included in the list of Most Popular Games of its Time for the 2000s.
→ The most popular games of his time, part 1: 1970s
→ The most popular games of his time, part 2: 1980s
Street Fighter II: The World Warrior
In 1990, Capcom released the sequel to Street Fighter, the first part of which appeared in 1987. At first, the company sold 60,000 Street Fighter II slot machines, and in 1991 consolidated its success with the help of the even more popular Street Fighter II: Champion Edition. Only in Japan, slot machines with this version of the game sold out in the amount of 140 thousand pieces. By 1992, 60% of all coins in slot machines in the UK were provided by Street Fighter II, about 260 million pounds per year.
For 1995 in the United States, the games The World Warrior and the Champion Edition earned together 2.3 billion dollars. Taking into account inflation for 2017, it is about $ 3.7 billion.
With the game Street Fighter II is the emergence of the concept of "combo". Players accidentally discovered the ability to combine multiple attacks, which the opponent could not block with the desired sequence of execution. The developers did not envisage such a possibility (probably), but later on combos became commonplace. And not only for fighting games.
Based on the game in 1994, the film “Street Fighter” was shot, in which the main role was played by Jean-Claude Van Damme, and the role of Cammy went to Kylie Minogue .
Mortal kombat
The success of Street Fighter has led to the emergence of new games. In Killer Instinct, for example, for the first time at the game level they introduced combo. But the synonym for the fighting game so far is Mortal Kombat, first released in 1992.
In the game, the characters were no longer drawn. In Mortal Kombat, the digitized actions of the actors are shown. The master of martial arts and at that time employee of Midway Daniel Pesina played Johnny Cage, Scorpio, Sub-Zero and Reptilia. Actor and, again, martial arts master Park Ho Sung became the prototype of Liu Kang and Shang Tsung.
“Juggling” will appear in Mortal Kombat. You throw the enemy in the air with a blow and continue to beat him until he falls. Translated this "juggling".
The Mortal Kombat franchise has become one of the most successful and influential fighting games in the entire history of video games. It is distinguished by a high level of violence, which is perfectly visible in terms of the number of Fatality options - finishing the opponent in dozens of different ways, one more sophisticated than the other.
Myst
In 1993, Czechoslovakia fell to the Czech Republic and Slovakia, tanks stormed the White House in Moscow, and TV-6 began broadcasting. In the meantime, the graphic quest Myst has appeared in the world of computer games.
Myst became the best-selling game for personal computers, until its records broke the Sims and a few more games released five or more years later. By 2003, Myst had sold 6 million copies, and sales of all franchise games reached 12 million copies, of which 8.03 million fell on the very first game of 1993. Myst received four sequels, three remakes and a number of branches, including the MMORPG Uru Live.
In Myst, the player moved through the interactive world with a first-person view, interacting with objects and moving between screens with the mouse. To complete the game, you need to solve puzzles and visit all the worlds, collecting pages for two books - red and blue, which have become prisons for two characters capable of creating books-worlds. Workers of the game were inspired by the novel "The Mysterious Island" by Jules Verne.
Doom II: Hell on Earth
In 1994, the EU states opened borders for each other, the first Russian cosmonaut Sergey Krikalev flew on the American shuttle using the Space Shuttle program, and in Russia the national top-level domain .ru was registered.
The company id Software this year released the continuation of a successful shooter - the game Doom II: Hell on Earth. On the sale of two million copies of the game id Software earned $ 100 million. For the company, it was the highest commercial success at the time, and the popularity of the games was such that other shooters for several years were called “Doom clones”. And many still have immortality associated with IDDQD.
The game has retained the old gameplay, of the innovations here appeared only one new weapon - a double-barreled gun, which deals slightly less damage than a rocket launcher. The main difference was the number of new monsters.
Keep Doom 2 speedran. Pick up only half an hour of your time.
Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness
Since 1995, it has been leading the E3 Electronic Entertainment Exhibition, in August of that year, Windows 95 was released, and in November, Nintendo presented a working prototype of the Nintendo Ultra 64 with a pair of games, Kirby Ball 64 and Super Mario 64.
Blizzard Entertainment released in December 1995 The second in a series of strategy Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness. The game initially worked under DOS and Windows 95, was the version under Mac OS. In 1997, Warcraft II was ported to the Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation.
Three months after the launch of Warcraft II, Blizzard sold half a million copies, and in 2016 the game got into the corresponding edition of the Guinness Book of Records with 4.21 million sales of games for personal computers.
Super Mario 64
Within a year after the show, the Nintendo 64 company launched it, and Super Mario 64 became one of the first games. For the first time in the game of this franchise, there was a true three-dimensionality and the ability to move in an arbitrary direction, instead of sprites used polygonal models.
Nintendo has sold over 11 million copies of the game, it is one of the best-selling games in history. What can we say about the entire franchise with its half-billion sales.
Remember the gameplay.
Gran turismo
In 1997, a criminal code began to operate in Russia with an article “for violation of copyright and related rights”, Bill Clinton took over the second term as President of the United States, and Intel officially introduced the Pentium 2 microprocessor.
This year, several years after the release of the first Need For Speed games, a new racing franchise appeared on the scene. Gran Turismo for Sony PlayStation at Polyphony Digital worked for five years, although the team was very small - up to 15 people at the best of times. The game of 1997 was far from competitors in terms of realism and complexity, it had an interesting career mode and the possibility of tuning cars.
A total of 76.8 million copies were sold.of all the games of the Gran Turismo series, of which 10.85 million falls on the first part of the game for the PlayStation. The rating of the first game on Metacritic is 96 points out of 100 possible. This is the case when critics praised the game and players voted for it with their money.
Half life
Released in 1998, a first-person shooter with a laconic main character, red mount and the lack of video savers became an important milestone in the history of the genre. Gordon Freeman is so fond of the players that they bought 9.3 million copies of Half-Life. The second part was also successful - sales of the continuation of 2004 amounted to 9.4 million units. But the third part, we, apparently, never wait, because Valve brings a good income Dota, Counter Strike and the game distribution service Steam.
Half-Life was, one might say, fan-made. Gabe Newell and his partner Mike Harrington before creating the gamelooked into id Software - one of the coolest companies at the time, which released several games of the Doom and Quake series. In this company, they received the source code for the Quake engine, for which they hired mod developers and game fans. In addition, Newell and Harrington took several industry veterans from 3D Realms, Shiny Entertainment and Microsoft, from where the founders of Valve, an unknown studio at that time, came.
The game significantly influenced the management in shooters . At the time of the release of Half-Life was a mass of a variety of keyboard layouts: AShiftZ, WADX, ESDF, ASDX. One of the creators of Quake, John Carmack, added the WASD configuration to the second part of the game, but for the first time it was used by default in 1998's Half-Life.
Counter strike
In 1999, fans release a modification for Half-Life called Counter-Strike. The modification, noted by Valve, then turned into an independent game and received continuations of Condition Zero, Source and Global Offensive. In recent years, ten CS remains one of the most popular online games, Global Offensive - in the first places on Steam.
Counter-Strike - team shooter on the confrontation of terrorists and special forces. The goal of the game is to complete the task or destroy all opponents. At one time, Counter-Strike 1.6 began to decline due to the emergence of powerful personal computers and much more developed from the point of view of graphics games, but by 2008 there was a reverse process - CS became a tournament discipline.
Today, eSports is a spectacular event of various levels with a wide variety of prize money. In this industry with pleasure to invest. For example, Alisher Usmanov in 2016 announced that he intends to invest more than 100 million US dollars in eSports, namely, his USM Holdings invests in the project Virtus.pro. The project includes teams in key disciplines, including StarCraft 2, FIFA, League of Legends and, of course, Counter-Strike.
In the 1990s, three generations of gaming systems changed - after the 16-bit Sega Mega Drive and Super Nintendo came the Nintendo 64, Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation, and at the end of the decade the era of the sixth generation began with DreamCast, XboX and PlayStation 2. Game Consoles from cartridges began to move to the disks. Processors for graphics processing have become more powerful, and as a standard for creating video games, true three-dimensional graphics are widely used.
An important milestone for the gaming industry was the advent of the Internet, so that in the second half of the 1990s online games appeared. E-sports has reached a new level.
In the US, game sales have overtaken sales of another entertainment industry in the country - cinema.
In the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, we can distinguish games that not only sold well, but also greatly influenced the industry as a whole or its particular genres. In the 2000s, it becomes more difficult, so I suggest using the collective mind to decide what we will talk about in the next article: write in the comments the name of the game, the year of its release and the reason why it should be included in the list of Most Popular Games of its Time for the 2000s.