Magic Carpet: An engine in search of a game
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- Опубликовано: 30 сен 2024
- This Bad Influence clip from the 1990s perfectly illustrates how PC/DOS game development was sometimes driven by software techniques instead of game design. Before the advent of hardware-accelerated graphics, sometimes people created technically impressive engines first, then tried to come up with gameplay that fit that engine. In this clip, we can see Magic Carpet originally first started as a Voxel engine (!), first made popular by Comanche: Maximum Overkill.
I had no idea they showcased WIP Magic Carpet at any point, this is phenomenal! That engine ended up serving them quite well for many years afterwards too!
Magic Carpet was fun! The only real issue with it was there was a learning curve on controlling the carpet and I knew some people who never had the reflexes for it.
Magic Carpet is unique, we never really got anything else like it even though it was such a strong concept and elegant implementation.
Recognize Peter Molyneux just from the voice lol, hasn't changed in all these years.
This game really made one want to own a Pentium. Those were the days when a gaming PC would be obsolete the moment you signed the check. 🤣
I still remember getting my first Pentium PC probably 2 years or so after magic carpet was released... It was a Pentium 120MHz with 8MB RAM (if I can remember correctly) and I played a lot of Descent I, II and III on it :) All in glorious, blocky 320x240 resolution :)
Before I got the Pentium, I had a 386SX system, with an EGA display adapter... I mainly played sierra games on it like Hero's Quest I and II, Larry I, II and III, and King's Quest I, II, III and IV. So many happy memories :)
@@HPPalmtopTube I was more into Sierra and Lucas Arts adventures myself. I still remember how getting 30 fps used to be a luxury. If memory serves those adventures ran at 15? Not sure.
@Palmtop Tube - I had an IBM PCjr (and later an IBM XT), and that got me through my entire childhood through high school. When I went to college, I bought my first computer for myself, and it was the original Pentium (I want to say it was a 75MHz, and I eventually upgraded the ram all the way to 16MB). Now that was a jump in technology :)
@@joeyr9876 Wow! going from an XT to a Pentium 75 must have blown your mind! :) (the first Pentiums had a square gold cover on the purple ceramic casing if i remember correctly right?)
I had an XT clone back in my early childhood (I was 7 or 8 years old), and 80% of the time i was working in GWBASIC on it, writing drawing programs etc... I also started learning and programming in Turbo Pascal at around 10-11 years old (the first versions with the black and white menu system, not the newer versions with the blue background/editor) and I was amazed at the speed of my programs when compiled to an .exe file, coming from GWBASIC's interpreter before... :)
@@MortimerZabi It depended on the speed setting in the game and how fast your CPU was... On a very fast system (like a 486 or so), your character would walk the entire screen in one second on high speed, whereas on an XT it would probably have walked really slowly (especially if you had a EGA or VGA display adapter)...
Lovely find. I need to try Magic Carpet out some day.
Have you played the magic carpet game they released ? I didn't myself, as I did not have a powerful enough PC at the time as a kid, but I did see it being played on the PC of a kid on my street, and it was breathtaking the first time I saw the engine at work... and according to my friend the game was extremely fun...
Nice video :)
I wasn't too much of a fan of Magic Carpet; I played more of Hi-Octane (not the best game) which uses the same engine.
@@JimLeonard Didn't know that one (Hi-Octane). I wasn't much into driving games when I was a kid (I did play some test drive I and II, but apart from the nice cars you could choose, the gameplay was a bit "meh"... :)
I remember watching that on tv :D
Just want to mention Glenn Corpes was behind the Magic Carpet engine even though this guy was the front man of the studio.