?
In October of 1993 3DI Productions made Windows history. We became the first game company to produce a Windows arcade game that delivered multimedia. Earth Invasion for Windows became the first Windows game to offer the following state of the art features:
- 3D rendered TrueColor graphics
- MIDI music support as well as digitized voices and sound effects
- Joystick support under Windows
With the exception of TrueColor graphics support, DOS games have had those features for years. What makes developing games under Windows so challenging is that well behaved Windows programs don't take over your machine. Windows programs must yield to one another in order for Windows to continue to operated as expected.
Indeed: while there was a thriving if now half forgotten game culture on the Windows platform, it had up to now been something entirely different from the world of DOS games. Windows games were usually the products of a single person. They ran in a Window, they had only 16 colors so they could be played with a VGA card, they had very little, if any, sound. The maximum of action was an occasional Breakout or Space Invaders clone. Typically, they were puzzle games.
But though justly proud 3DI Productions are not quite correct
when they claim it was their game that changed all that.
SimCity for Windows had already
brought that combination of MIDI music, sound effects and digitized
speech (Simcopter one recording heavy traffic
) the year
before. Entombed sported 256 colors and burst out of the window
frame for a sort of full-screen mode in the same year, and it did
not even use the standard Windows palette.
What they are probably right about is the TrueColor support. As such, Earth Invasion for Windows may well be the first PC game with this feature, and maybe even the first game at all. The next ones I know are Marathon and Poker Party.
Strangely, Earth Invasion for Windows is practically a forgotten game. I dug up a few screenshots in an FTP archive, otherwise, you will find as good as nothing on the Internet.
