HUNTER - GTA eat yer heart out.

[Hammer]

Once upon a time, when 80s computing reached its pinnacle in the form of the Amiga, and PCs were still running on monochrom/cga/ega monitors with pc speaker.

Back in August 1991, the x86 PC does have VGA/MCGA and Adlib sound cards btw...

The VGA standard was released somewhere in 1987.

That game ladies and gentlemen was HUNTER. And it came by, long before Doom was even a glimmer in John Carmacks eye...

Note that DOOM's predecessor i.e. Wolfenstein 3-D (released in 05 May 1992). A game with texture mapped bad guys and walls.

Its seems a travesty to the 3d gaming world, that it was not properly recognised for its merits and was instead cast away into the murky depths of has been titles.

Hunter's graphic presentation level may not be the first e.g. "Midwinter 1",  "Falcon 1", FA/18 Interceptor, "Stunt Car racer" and 'etc' .

Why was Doom

Was there a similar graphic presentation as DOOM** during this time?

**Near brain dead FPS multi-level texture mapped 3D game (with multi-player connectivity i.e. “Deathmatch” parties).

and GTA given all the glory,

A game that promotes being ‘bad’ with reasonable amount of graphic detail…

when this beast had the same groundbreaking claims as Elite was to the whole Space sim phenomenon.

From what I recall, Elite was one of the first filled 3D polygon game for the personal computer market.

[Hammer]

Funny how very few ppl could afford it at the time.

Nearly every IBM PS/2 (since 1987) has a VGA chipset. During this time IBM PS/2 out-sells the Amiga's unit sales.

Only ~3 million Amigas was ever sold, such numbers is pittance compared IBM's PS/2 sales.

VGA and 32bit MCA bus architecture was IBM’s attempt to recontrol the X86 PC market by offering superior hardware relative to X86 16bit ISA bus architectures.   With IBM PS/2 Model 56, the 32bit OS/2 operating system was bundled as standard.

Many games also didn't really take full advantage of those features all at once, it was a gradual adoption.

Such claim is untested. Most of my Amiga-to-PC game ports have VGA/MCGA support (in the 1991 context).

The point here is that Amiga had enjoyed color and stereo sound since 85.

Yes I know. Careful with "Amiga had enjoyed color" since X86 PCs has 16 colours EGA at that time. Are you implying X86 PC doesn’t have color display?

Its beside the point to be pedantic and state that joe bloggs had VGA

Note that IBM was still pretty strong during late 80s** i.e. number one PC manufacture.
**In decline due to increase clone wars, their low point was somewhere in the early/mid 90s.  

and adlib sound when 90% of the market still got by on less h/w for many many years.

Such claim is untested. In terms of numbers it still outnumber Amiga sales.

From memory; the following games supports VGA/MCGA (around 1990/1991)
1. Chicago 89 (1989).
2. TV Sports Basket Ball.
3. Test Drive II.
4. Grand Prix Circuit.
5. TV Sport Baseball.
6. 688 Attack Sub
7. Golden Axe (1991)
8. Joust VGA (1990)
9. Rick Dangerous 2
10. Space Quest 1 (VGA, 1991 Edition)
11. The Secret of Monkey Island (with SoundBlaster support)
12. The Secret of Monkey Island 2 (with SoundBlaster support)  
13. California Games 2(1990)
14. Indianapolis 500
15. F29 Retaliator  
16. Dino Wars (I think)
17. Mega lo Mania  
18. Sargon V (1991)
19. Cadaver(I think)
20. Double Dragon 3 - The Rosetta Stone (I think)  
21. Wing Commander 1 - (1990, a milestone for X86 platfrom).  
22. Wing Commander - Secret Missions 1 & 2 (follow up).
23. Gobliiins(1991)
24. TetWin (Win16)
25. Zentris  (1990)
26. Elite Plus (1991)  
27. Epic .
28. Red Baron .
29. The Games: Winter Challenge (I think)
30. Leisure Suit Larry.

During 1990 and 1991; there was a surged in VGA class games. At the same time, Amiga was still flying high in terms of games support.

I do recall playing Carmageddon, years before GTA3 (arguably the first 3d rendered of the series)

GTA2 is rendered in 3D (but in a fixed top-down presentation**). I still have this game in my old Win98 partition. I can give you the 3D graphic card configuration screen shot for GTA2.

The range of 'bad' activities is pretty limited in Carmageddon i.e. running over people.

No there wasn't. I guess the closest things were the light gun games, like Operation Thunderbolt or the like.

Operation Thunderbolt is more like Virtual Cop than DOOM.

However, your getting caught up on the processes of achieving 3d immersiveness and not the end result.

There are many factors which can influence the success for the said game.

HUNTER was quite adequate for the gameplay if offered.

IF the game offered a large gaming world; it has greater chance to get 'lost' in the game, thus frustrating the gamer.  

[Hammer]

But yeah we can't compare there sales, but we can sorta have a nice stab at the actual figures of Amigas sold, and its alot more than 3 million, if you double it you will prolly be alot closer.

Notice ‘~’ character.

Indeed, and how many of those above machines would have been sold without the millions upon millions of $ put into its advertising every year?,
.

That is CBM's problem in regards to near lack of advertising. CBM was not careful with its money (i.e. making second rated X86 PC clones didn’t help CBM in the long term).

[Hammer]

Karlos wrote:
Dude, I think he meant IBM PS/2 compatibles, not Playstation 2 :-D

IF I was referring to Sony’s Play Station 2 it would be ‘PS2’ not ‘PS/2’.  ;-)