Dictating Art In the wild

Dictating Art In the wild
Horsing around on the set of fable the Journey

Saturday, 1 January 1994

Theme Park




Believe it or not this pretty much set a new paradigm for gaming. There are sooo many derivative titles it's amazing. I guess the graphics were functional and reasonably memorable but, once again, it's hard to be excited now.

It was hoped that the Theme series would form a major franchise for Bullfrog but apart from 'Theme Park 2', the extraordinarily successful 'Theme Hospital' was the only other addition. Also considered were Theme Airport and Theme Prison !

Magic Carpet

It's 1994 and finally were into 3D game engines. That'll either be a really significant landmark to you or you will juat have assumed they were always there. This was a great team to work with and the game justly deserves it's place in the favourite lists. Graphically it was pretty liberating (for the time) but in many respects I felt as if I was reworking Populous again. Lots of interesting technical challenges however and it really felt like we were pioneering developers.


We went on to do Magic carpet 2 in 1995. This had all new graphics and some evolved gameplay but was pretty much more of the same. Great if you were a fan as, presumably, that's exactly what you wanted. 


Syndicate



Lot's of people have fond memories of this 1994 game, it still actually has quite a cult following and, for whatever reason, is the old-skool game that still earns me some kudos.
For me at the time it was great to dabble in cyberpunk and work in hi-res (640 x 480, you know, like on that mobile phone you just junked) even if it meant only using 16 colours as a result. I think the wrapper screens and cut-scenes still have some creative merit even if technically they make me cringe.
Many thanks to Tomasz lis for putting this excellent resource together: http://syndicate.lubie.org/synd/html/synd_main.php simply amazing.