Hi, folks! I have an update at this unusual time because, as of the last proper article, we’ve actually finished with our coverage of 1998, and I wanted to give you a preview of what’s coming for 1999. As usual, these subjects are more 1999-adjacent than pedantically bound to that year. And also as usual, what follows is a tentative plan only. Nonetheless, if you prefer for every article to be a complete surprise when it pops up in your browser, you might want to stop reading now.
Note that some of these subjects will be just one article, while some will spread out over two or more.
- Alpha Centauri.
- Everquest.
- Heroes of Might and Magic III, Might and Magic VII, and the decline of New World Computing thereafter.
- Rollercoaster Tycoon.
- Discworld Noir.
- Bullfrog Productions from 1996 on, with a particular focus on Theme Hospital and Dungeon Keeper 1 and 2.
- Metal Gear Solid. This one is pretty far out of my wheelhouse, but several of you suggested that I look at it. So, I’m going to follow your advice, examining it mostly as a piece of interactive narrative.
- Looking Glass Studios from 1996 on, with a particular focus on Thief I and II and System Shock 2. Just as is the case for Metal Gear Solid, I don’t feel all that well-equipped to do full justice to Looking Glass — as many of you have come to recognize, first-person 3D tends not to be my personal cup of tea — but I’ll do my best to honor some brave, uncompromising, visionary games.
- Turn-based fantasy strategy. My love for the Heroes of Might and Magic series prompted me to try out some of the contemporaries of the third game in that series, specifically Warlords III: Darklords Rising, Disciples: Sacred Lands, and Age of Wonders. The results were mixed but interesting.
- The final wave of commercially prominent space simulators, especially the Freespace games. Plus that so-bad-it’s-almost-good Wing Commander movie, because how can a writer resist a temptation like that?
- For my interactive-fiction coverage this time, I want to review some really long games that came out between 1998 and 2000. Damaging as it may be to my literary bona fides, I must admit that a sprawling old-school game that I can keep up on one of my virtual desktops for weeks on end, poking at it during lunch breaks and other snatched moments, is still my personal Platonic ideal for the genre.
- Homeworld.
- Omikron: The Nomad Soul.
- Ultima IX: Ascension.
- Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned. Because I’m me, I want to do a bit of a deep dive into the longstanding pseudo-historical cult that surrounds Gabriel Knight 3′s setting of Rennes-le-Château, France, out of which also sprang The Da Vinci Code just a few years after this game. But never fear, the infamous cat-hair-mustache puzzle will also get its due.
- The Longest Journey.
- Planescape: Torment.
As I said, these lists are always subject to change; those of you with long memories will notice that quite a lot of what was on the previous list wound up falling by the wayside. This is because some other tales grew in the telling, even as one tale — the story of Legend’s late adventures — got added, and I’m doggedly determined not to let one year of history take up more than one year of real time. Some topics that had been earmarked for the previous group, like Windows 98 and the Deer Hunter-driven phenomenon of “Wal Mart games,” will get folded into other articles in due course. Others, like my dream of doing a series on television game shows, are most likely simply a bridge too far for these histories as currently constituted. (I don’t think there’s a big appetite out there for The Digital Antiquarian turning into The Television Antiquarian for the six months or more it would take to even begin to do such a topic justice…)
There have been some specific reader requests that haven’t (yet?) come to fruition. I perhaps owe you a more complete explanation for these.
- Some of you asked for Oddworld, and I did try. Really, I did. But those games are coming from so far outside of my frame of reference as a lifelong computer rather than console gamer, and are so off-puttingly difficult to boot, that I just don’t feel like I can provide the necessary context or enthusiasm.
- Some of you asked me to look at the Laura Bow games. And I did fire up The Colonel’s Bequest, only to be killed without warning by three separate pieces of inexplicably collapsing architecture within the first fifteen minutes. I’m sorry, readers. I’m just so done with this kind of player-hostile design, and I’ve already taken Roberta Williams and her colleagues to task more than enough for it over the years.
- Some of you would like to see articles about the Impressions city builders, and, indeed, I’ve done more than dabble with them in recent months. I desperately wanted to love Pharaoh, but certain design choices — such as the excruciating worker-recruitment system, the rote busywork of having to constantly schedule festivals to keep the gods from ruining your day, and the drawn-out, repetitive campaign that makes you build city after city from scratch — made it impossible for me to do so. But it looks like the city builder after Pharaoh, 2000’s Zeus: Master of Olympus, fixed all of these problems and more. I’m optimistic that I’ll be able to write the whole story when I get there, and end it on the sort of positive note I always prefer to go out on.
- A similar logic applies to Her Interactive, for which I’ve been promising coverage for literally years now. The two Nancy Drew games that I’ve played to date have both been rather underwhelming, awkward affairs. But the good news is that each successive Her Interactive game that I’ve played — four of them in all now — has been a little better than the one before it. So, I remain optimistic that they’ll eventually figure it out, and I’ll be able to write the story I want to write about them as well. Stay tuned.
- The return of Steve Jobs to Apple and the rebirth that followed is another subject that’s been lingering out there for a while. Again, it’s just a question of finding the right grace note. The launch of OS X in 2001 might be it. We’ll see.
- On the flip side, some of you told me that Final Fantasy VIII was probably not the best choice for improving my fraught relationship with JRPGs, and after a brief investigation I’ve decided that I agree with you. But I haven’t given up on the genre. I may give 2000’s Grandia II a shot.
A couple of notes from the Department of Miscellanea:
It will mostly likely be a few months before I have 1998 ebooks for you, folks. The old system for creating them relies on a Python 2 software stack that is deprecated and all but broken by now. A good friend of mine whose coding skills have not atrophied as badly as my own is going to help me bring it up to date. But we’re in the midst of the all too short Danish summer right now, a time to be outside as much as possible; extracurricular programming projects are best reserved for other times of the year. Please bear with us.
I haven’t found a good place to mention this before today, but I actually switched from Windows 10 to Linux Mint as my primary operating system back in December; the end user in me was fed up with the creeping enshitification of the Windows 11 ecosystem, while my inner environmentalist and social-justice warriors were incensed by the arbitrary obsolescence Microsoft wishes to impose upon tens if not hundreds of millions of perfectly viable computers. I couldn’t be happier. I can recommend Linux as a fine everyday operating system for anyone who is reasonably technically proficient, or who has someone who is to call upon when the occasional lingering issue does crop up. It’s come a long, long way since the last time I tried to run it on the desktop, about 25 years ago. And with the aid of Lutris and/or Steam, Linux runs old Windows games better and more effortlessly than recent releases of Windows itself in many cases, whilst keeping them nicely sandboxed from the core operating system in a way that Windows does not. If you’re a retro-gamer or just a gamer in general who’s been contemplating giving Linux a try, by all means do so. What with Valve putting serious resources behind it, I expect that it will only continue to improve as a gaming platform.
Which reminds me: Linux is another story I should try to tell soon… Sigh.
Anyway, thank you for reading and supporting these histories for so many years! As always, feel free to suggest topics and games you’d really like to see in the next few years. Even when I can’t give them separate articles, I can sometimes shoehorn them in somewhere. And if you haven’t yet taken the Patreon plunge and have the means to do so, do give it some thought. It’s only thanks to readers just like you that I can afford to keep doing this.
I’ll see you tomorrow — yes, tomorrow already! — when we’ll get started on our bullet list for 1999. We’ve got our work cut out for us…
Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.
Emil Vikjær-Andresen
June 19, 2025 at 9:12 am
Looking so much forward to this Jimmy.
Regarding the TV show, agree that it may be too far away from the main theme of this blog but the way you handled the X-files was for me a very good way of telling an interesting story about the cultural trends that affect the computer game arena. So if you can do that again, I for one will certainly not be protesting.
Kroc Camen
June 19, 2025 at 9:23 am
I’ve been holding off reading the website until the ebook releases (despite being a Patreon) because I prefer to read on my from-my-cold-dead-hands Kindle 4 with physical page buttons so I look forward to the new book :) Covering Linux might go hand in hand with an article on the entire state of the OS market changing shape in 2001, vis-a-vis, breaking compatibility changes with OSX and WinXP; the last nail in the coffin of MS-DOS gaming; MacOS and Windows were still pretty much the same as they always had been in 1999.
Jimmy Maher
June 19, 2025 at 11:46 am
That’s a really good idea…
arthurdawg
June 19, 2025 at 12:23 pm
Wow! I loved the older Kindles with physical buttons!
Amazing it still works, mine has long passed from this world.
Ido Yehieli
June 19, 2025 at 10:33 am
Looking forward to it! As as part of the 1983 birth-year cohort you’re now covering games i’ve actually played during the Golden Age of Gaming (i.e. ages 14-18) rather than those I was more curious about from a historical point of view :)
Jimmy Maher
June 19, 2025 at 10:39 am
That’s a good year. My wife was born that year. ;)
Brent
June 19, 2025 at 10:49 am
Ultima IX! Definitely a story worth telling.
Grandia II is absolutely dire from a storytelling perspective, which is unfortunate because the first Grandia had great characters and a wonderful sense of fun. But I honestly think you should just give up on trying to enjoy JRPGs. If you weren’t exposed to them in your youth I don’t think it’s possible to enjoy them now.
Knurek
June 19, 2025 at 11:43 am
There are some JRPGs that even (or especially) people who don’t enjoy them would be prudent to play.
Games that break the norm like Valkyrie Profile, Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, SaGa Frontier or Tactics Ogre
None of them got a PC port at the time the blog is in though, so aren’t really relevant.
Feldspar
June 19, 2025 at 3:20 pm
When I saw the mention of “turn-based fantasy strategy”, I was really hoping for a minute that stuff like Tactics Ogre / Final Fantasy Tactics had somehow made the cut. I’ve always felt that games like that could have a lot of crossover appeal for fans of western RPGs with grid-based combat and stuff like XCOM.
lee
June 19, 2025 at 10:57 am
Ahhhh, Freespace and Freespace 2. I’d still to this day call Freespace 2 the platonic ideal of the single player space combat sim — it out Wing Commanders Wing Commander in every way except not having Mark Hamill (though Freespace has Robert Loggia to make up for it!). And there’s something kind of funny about beholding a new Freespace player’s face the first time they look at the keybinding list. (“‘Target target’s target’? Are they serious?”)
Can’t wait!
Knurek
June 19, 2025 at 11:38 am
Honestly, I think you’d enjoy FF8 over Grandia II, since a) it has a massively improved translation over FF7 (and the story is even more bonkers than FF7 was) and b) is a system-driven game, with several interwoven frameworks given you miriad of ways to break the game in half
Also has first instance of ingame collectible card game, beating Might and Magic’s Arcomage by a few months.
Grandia II is a mid game, typical Japanese teen fare, something that will not necessarily resonate with your 40+ year old self. The only thing notable about it is the fact that its original German translation is infamous for translating the ‘Miss’ status effect (as in, to not hit an enemy) as Fraulein, which, yeah…
Tom
June 19, 2025 at 1:27 pm
As a new fan to this website, I’m excited to see your slate for 1999. Omikron, EverQuest, The Longest Journey, LGS gems, Ultimata IX and much more.
See the care you’ve put into the prevous titles of my past, exspecially The Journeyman Project, I’m confident you’ll hit it out of the park with 1999.
Cheers!
mycophobia
June 19, 2025 at 1:36 pm
Looking forward particularly to Ultima IX, MGS, and GK3. Also props on the switch to Linux.
S.M. Oliva
June 19, 2025 at 2:00 pm
Glad to hear your transition from Windows 10 to Linux has gone well. I switched over to Linux about 13 years ago (from Mac in my case), and as a professional writer I couldn’t be happier with my workflow in Linux. I’m using Fedora right now, but Linux Mint is also a terrific product that I’ve used in the past.
Incidentally, I also create periodic ebooks from my blog–an idea I stole from you–and my process is to simply use a command-line tool called pandoc. It basically converts the Markdown files I use to write my individual blog posts and combines them with a cover image to create a finished EPUB file. It’s a fairly quick-and-dirty process but it gets the job done.
Feldspar
June 19, 2025 at 3:34 pm
Looking forward as always to another year. I’m glad that you ended up taking my and some others’ advice about looking at Thief I and II as a set, since for one reason or another Thief I doesn’t fully embrace the premise of “being a thief” (too many levels populated only by zombies and other monsters), and II is the real high point of the series in my opinion.
David Boddie
June 19, 2025 at 4:45 pm
You might be able to run your Python 2 tools in a suitable chroot, though updating it to Python 3 might be the wiser choice at this point. Or moving to a completely different set of tools…
Zack
June 19, 2025 at 5:55 pm
It’s me, it’s the Impression City Builders guy! Absolutely looking forward to a coverage of them one day, warts and all.
Regarding Pharaoh, once you allow yourself to use tiny slums (one house is enough !) for workforce recruitment, is when the game properly opens up and you’re free to actually use up the maps and all that free space real estate.
The Wargaming Scribe
June 19, 2025 at 7:17 pm
I remember my first employment in the video game industry.
What are you 3 favourite games?
“Europa Universalis 3”
“Freespace 2”
“and the third one is, err, hmm, Super Mario Kart”
Later, they told me that they took me because obviously the third one was not Super Mario Kart but clearly I could read a room and think on my feet :).
So yes, I am looking forward quite a few of those games.My parents are still playing Everquest, too.
A small note to say that the replacement of Alpha Centauri FINALLY arrived: Shadow Empire (2020).
The Wargaming Scribe
June 19, 2025 at 8:22 pm
Text under brackets disappear. I have to try again:
What are you 3 favourite games?
“Europa Universalis 3”
(empty stare)
“Freespace 2”
(empty stare)
“and the third one is, err, hmm, Super Mario Kart”
(eyes glowing)
Chops
June 19, 2025 at 7:35 pm
We are well inside the period now where I am no longer reading history, but am reading a reminiscence of my own life.
I am holding my original copy of Longest Journey in my hand as I type. Came with the soundtrack on CD. Very soon we shall be reading about games I’ll never get to. A living ghost in my own future.
Keith
June 19, 2025 at 8:35 pm
Everquest made such an impact on my life, I look forward to your histories regarding it. It’s crazy that 1. the game is still live and having content produced for it, while 2. teams of technically minded superfans go through all the effort of making era-accurate servers and clients than run on modern machines, often with “house rules”, and large enough communities exist on those servers to keep them viable.
Whomever
June 19, 2025 at 8:57 pm
I’m especially looking forward to your take on Ultima IX. As a huge Ultima fan, I was so burned by Ultima VIII that I didn’t even bother looking at it (plus it got bad reviews). Should I go back and play it? YOU get to decide! :-)
Linux gaming of this era was interesting because there was actually an attempt to port a number of commercial games to it around then. I bought all of them out of policy to send a message to the market (I was idealistic and had a lot of disposable income at the time). In hindsight, Linux of this era wasn’t standardized enough to really support this, it was like the bad old dos days of adjusting config.sys to adjust your EMS settings. But I did play through Alpha Centauri on it and it worked well and was fun (another of your references!).