As you may have gathered from the list of home systems, this is not the light gun arcade shooter you remember from childhood. It appears to be a 2005 addition to that franchise.
Like the little-known console sequels to Far Cry, you later get infected with the gunk you're dealing with and it opens up the game a bit by adding extra abilities.
You mean the Crysis series? With no doubt tens of millions of sales[1] by this point in time and AAA marketing budgets, I’m not so sure they’re little-known. Apologies if you’re referring to something else of course.
Wow they built a whole game engine and editor just for this game, and they got David Duchovny and Marilyn Manson to voice act in it!
And now it lives in obscurity
FWIW, most games before early 2000s built all their tooling from scratch as there wasn't off the shelf engines to use. Unreal engine came out in 98 and Source in 2004
Jedi Knight 2 came out in 2002 and the original Call of Duty came out in 2003, both running heavily modified versions of John Carmack's Quake III engine
id sold a few Doom and a bunch of Quake 1/2/3 licenses back in the day. Off the top of my head: Heretic and Hexen used the Doom engine, their sequels used the Quake and Quake 2 engines respectively. Strife was an FPS RPG that was Doom based. Half-Life started out as a HEAVILY modified Quake engine and rumor has it that there is still a bit of Quake code in Source. Duke Nukem Forever started out on Quake before moving to Unreal.
Call of Duty and Medal of Honor both used id Tech 3 (aka the Quake 3 engine), as did some of the Star Wars games, etc. Unfortunately, The Source Engine came out around the time of id Tech 4, and it really took the reins, with Unreal Engine hitting a stride thereafter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Tech_3#Games_using_a_propri...
I heard an interview about Doom port to hmm 3DO? and it cost them one time payment of $50K cash money to outright buy Doom assets + game engine license.
There were game engines in the 90s -- Quake Engine, Build Engine, Unreal Engine.. to name some of the popular ones.
You also had GoldSrc, a modified Quake Engine for Half-Life 1.
Many companies created their own and was not available outside the business. Dark Engine used in the Thief:Dark Project games is an example. Think of companies like Nintendo having their own engine which powered games like Mario 64 and, I believe, Ocarina of Time was a modified version of that.
The "off the shelf" engines available at that time (like Unreal or Quake engine) might have been decent for certain type of games.
Today, you could say many games could be done with Unity, Godot, or Unreal. There are still companies today using their own.
idTech 2 was specifically built for Quake 1, and only later it was licensed to other developers as well. So it was not an off-the shelf solution id could simply take for building Quake. It was tailored for that game.
I don't think they specifically understood the idea of a "game engine" as the core product at the time. But there are plenty of references if you Google a bit that Quake was designed for modders due to the popularity of DOOM mods - so developer experience was absolutely taken into account from the start.
They had already done licensing deals for the DOOM engine at that point, including the greatest game of all time "Chex Quest."
Yeah, this is why Quake's logic for a lot of game things - monsters, weapons, moving platforms - is written in a byte-code interpreted language (QuakeC). The idea was to separate it from the engine code so modders could easily make new games without needing access to the full engine source.
(And QuakeC was supposed to be simpler as a language than C, which it... is, but at the cost of weird compromises like a single number type (float) which is also used to store bitfields by directly manipulating power of two values. Which works, of course, until your power of 2 is big enough to force the precision to drop below 1...)
Engines that come to mind: XnGine (Daggerfall, Terminator, ...), Dark Engine (Thief, System Shock 2), Build (Duke 3D, Blood...). Yes, they existed before the 2000s, but the difference to today is that there were many engines being reused for a handful of games at most. Today it's few engines running most games.
Battlefield, gta, alan wake, ms flightsim, cyberpunk, hogsward (unreal) all top games with different engines.
Agree that unreal engine has many games, but plenty of alternatives
That's a pretty small selection of well-known AAA games. Those few examples really don't change the general skew towards using 3rd party engines these days vs. few games doing something like that in the 90s. And in fact, most of these engines have also been reused between games (with heavy modifications of course - e.g. Remedy's Northlight engine has been evolving since Alan Wake 1).
Build engine duke nukem also used in many other games like blood etc. Same for quake engine. Even doom engine was used in games like hexen. Doom was also an evolution of the wolfenstein engine. Quake 1 to later quake engines all evolutions and used in a lot of other games.
These are all 3d engines. On the nes, snes and sega machines the same platform engine was reused in 1000s of games. Same for sound engines, physics engines etc. My point is. I dont think there is a lot of difference. Innovation still happening today. Not everything is Unreal.
> On the nes, snes and sega machines the same platform engine was reused in 1000s of games.
No, this isn't true. Almost all games were bespoke back in that era - the machines simply weren't powerful enough to allow for competitive, flexible game engines. An individual development house might have a code library or base that they'd iterate on, but there was little sharing between different companies (much less reuse by the thousands).
By the 16-bit era sound engines did tend to be widely reused, though (e.g. GEMS).
Honestly it seems like it always has: there are a handful of dev houses using their own engine for a spread of games (e.g. EA with Frostbite, Ubi with Anvil, Rockstar with RAGE, Bungie with whatever they call the Halo/Destiny engine these days), then UE or Unity are out there mass licensed for a whole bunch of stuff, then the few less widely licensed engines like Source.
That's not how it always has been. Licensing engines was virtually unknown 30 years ago (and when it happened at all it was within a very narrow range for making games in the same genre, more like asset swaps and level packs than outright new games), and new and exciting in the '00s.
Torque was pretty instrumental in kick-starting my career. Glad it's still being maintained to this day (despite it arguably getting steamrolled by unity and mismanagement).
That's not quite true. There were plenty of 90s game engines. They just weren't as general purpose. So you would end up rewriting a good chunk anyways to get what you wanted.
Andrew initially had a rough disassembly-only dump of the retail Area 51 on GitHub in a (quickly abandoned) attempt to remaster it. He must have gotten lucky here, or maybe more likely a previous developer tossed him a (very nice) bone.
> or maybe more likely a previous developer tossed him a (very nice) bone.
This is what I am thinking. It seems a long shot the source code was simply discovered at a garage sale by chance. Too much coincidence that a. the THQ dev still had the code just kicking around and b. a computer savvy person happened upon this garage sale, buys said artifact and discovers the code. Stars must have been aligned.
I think the THQ dev likely knew the "buyer" or someone put them in touch and the cover story is "oops, I accidentally sold the source at a garage sale" in case lawyers get involved.
> It was found at a garage sale of a former THQ developer.
This would be interesting to know more about. Was it on a CD, or maybe left on the disk of an old PC? I wonder how much old source code is hanging out in developer's attics and basements around the world, before git/online repos were a thing.
Back in the early 2000s, or maybe late 1990s, I was a big fan of a PC game that ended up being a total commercial failure for the studio and publisher. It was so bad the studio went under, and the game was left with many bugs unpatched. On a lark, I (and a few other fans) got together an reached out via E-mail to the publisher and offered to take a stab at the code and fix some bugs for free. To our shock they sent us the source code on CDROM. We never actually got very far (the source code was a colossal mess) but decades ago, wild shit like this probably happened more than you'd think.
I have no idea where those CDs ended up, probably tossed them at some point.
The early aughts were like the Wild West in game development. I remember almost taking a job with a smaller agency trying to build their own game engine and similar game to GTA but with a sci-fi twist.
Same thing. Company went under for a myriad of reasons. I should really write a blog post about it, some if was just so fantastical to believe. In the end, the devs scattered in all directions but my buddy took all the source code with him and tried to get a workable version going and release it on an independent label he started just for this game and project.
I ran into him a few years back and asked him about it and he said he still had the CD's laying around in his basement in storage. He said every few months, he would try and take a stab at it, but it was just too much for one person to handle and too many years had passed were it just wasn't worth it any more.
It would be interesting to see how many people had similar stories.
Is the source for the original 1995 version available? At a retro arcade it is the one game you can never play because there is always a line (harder to get a spot than Tron). I remember playing it on pc around 1997 also.
So many questions...did the developer realize he was putting it up for sale? Did he just have a bin full of a bunch of old CDRs? How did the person rummaging even know what they came across? Presumably the buyer then took this to the developer to purchase. Did the developer know realize what he was selling?
I think nobody cares yet (or will ever), though it is obviously infringement. If I buy someone's library in a garage sale, I do not automatically own the copyright to the books in it obviously.
A find like this will get more interesting in the future when the artifacts are from the era of git. Imagine you find a single developer's git clone, and suddenly you have the full source history of the project.
The bigger question is if the company who legally owns the right to the code realizes it's their IP, and then, of course, if they care. Not every game publisher has a Nintendo-level concern for their archaic titles, and some publishing houses may own hundreds of franchises technically they have zero intent to ever touch again and may not even have bothered to keep track are theirs.
Geez, these companies just keep getting passed around and around. I was working for Time Warner Interactive (aka Tengen, the consumer arm of Atari Games) when Midway bought them in '96.
Every time someone finds "lost media", I always wonder how much media is lost to time because the wrong people went to the garage sale and did not know how rare a find was and it gets thrown away at the end of the sale.
Something I've seen personally is that family calls a cleaner/buyer in to sweep the home of a deceased relative and all is lost. In short, there is no rummage sale.
