> Then id's follow-up, one of the most technically cutting edge games of its generation, was developed on Windows 95.
If you’re implying Quake was developed on Windows 95, that’s false. Windows 95 and early DirectX sucked and was only released a few months before Quake. DOS remained the dominant target for years.
The original QuakeEd is written in objective C because ID was using NeXTcubes for workstations. They also used some DEC Alphas for level compilation.
WinQuake didn’t come out until nearly a year after initial release. You could launch Quake from Windows 95 but that’s neither here nor there.
In 97 I was still regularly booting to DOS to play all kind of games. I'd use Windows 9x for internet (Netscape) but Windows for gaming? Nah. Space Cadet Pinball maybe.
Dune 2, C&C, WC2, Duke3D (the nemesis of Quake), Twilight, Crazy Bytes.
And MSDOS was relatively stable, quick to boot. Windows 95 wasn't. OSR2 was better. Windows 98 SE was OK, ME was not. NT didn't become dominant for home users until XP. Which was when Windows got reliable for home users. Although 2000 was also very stable.
1997 had:
Quake 2
Age of Empires
Jedi Knight
Total Annihilation
Diablo
All Windows. Granted there were still a few DOS games trickling out, but most of them also shipped with Windows versions (Carmageddon comes to mind).
I was still dropping to DOS when I absolutely had to but it was getting annoying fast thanks to the internet. I wasn't just using Netscape, I was downloading stuff. If I launch games under Windows then sure they might not run as good, but at least that download keeps crawling along.
Stability was also an annoyance admittedly, I was an early adopter of Windows 2000 because of that. That came with it's own caveats though.
True, Quake 2 with Lithium mod I did play on Windows. Because I never got my winmodem (which I had in the beginning) working in DOS.
Never played orig. Diablo (I'm sure I'd have loved it).
Wacky Wheels. Tomb Raider. Settlers 2. Battle Isle 2, 3. Command & Conquer: Red Alert. Duke Nukem 3D. Most of these are from '96.
At some point DOS games also worked kind of OK in Windows. Though NT regressed on it.
But let me tell you this: I've never been a sucker for needing the latest and the greatest game at launch. So I lagged behind. And some games I could replay and replay.
And I came from OS/2. Which couldn't run DOS games well.
PS: Carmageddon I remember playing on MSDOS, too. But I also remember that (I guess Carmageddon 2?) was also optically quite nice on Windows with 3D / GPU.
Wacky Wheels was 94. Tomb Raider was DOS, but it's sequel was Windows-only. Red Alert was enhanced on Windows (4x resolution, DOS was stuck on 320x200). Duke3D and the rest of the Build engine pack got left behind on DOS but they also ran acceptably well under Windows in spite of that. Carmageddon had both DOS and Windows executables, Carmageddon 2 was Windows-only.
It simply became impractical to drop to DOS by the late 90s. Once I got broadband in 2000, DOS was a memory.
As NeXTStep became obsolete SGI IRIX was considered for a successor but Carmack was not a fan and moved on to NT as you state (also calling early on that commercial Unix was fucked).
ID was going to develop on a Cray 6400 series supercomputer, and they got cray to sell them one for $500k if they'd put cray computers into the game. SGI bought Cray, and the deal fell through.
I wondered where I got the idea that they developed on Windows 95 and I think it's from this article, but prior to Carmack's correction in the comments.
I’ll even proclaim that years is an unqualified correct descriptor of 2 to 2.5 years.
Especially when things are moving that quickly.
Look, it’s not like Windows 95 came out and there were a bevy of games people wanted to play that Christmas, and I was correcting a comment that suggested it was mere months before the platform was a serious target. Oh, and not even for ‘96 either!
In October of 1995, Bill Gates is literally in Doom implying you need Windows for gaming. As far as I see it, it was just over 2 years, ie years, before that really meant anything. That short period of overlap time where releases were both DOS and Windows crucially didn’t help Microsoft’s bottom line the way they were aiming for.
You seem hell bent on convincing yourself that nothing of interest happened in 96 and 97 on the gaming front. Yes the period of time may not have been that long, but the flip side is 96 alone was a hell of year.
> As far as I see it, it was just over 2 years, ie years, before that really meant anything
You miss the forest.
Back then the typical development time was around a year. Win95 GA was in August 1995 and less than year and half Diablo came out to retail in January 1997. Not just gone to the dev, not just announced, but actually released, stamped, printed and delivered to the retail stores, ie it was finished a month before that.
Sure, there were releases what still targeted the DOS only (most notably the games on the Build engine) but for the most part it was just not feasible to spend even more time to do a rewrite to have a native Windows support.
But by the start of 1997 almost all new releases, ie games which went into development in late 1995/early 1996 were targeting Windows or a mixed release and not exclusively DOS.
Just compare Mobygames stats for DOS (which includes the mixed releases and a compilation rereleases, like Wolf3D in 1998):
726 DOS games released in the year 1995.
671 DOS games released in the year 1996 (118 compilations, 17%)
409 DOS games released in the year 1997 (93 compilations, 22%)
185 DOS games released in the year 1998 (70 compilations, 37%)
Compare it to the games with Windows platform (includes mixed releases too, of course):
262 Windows games released in the year 1995
617 Windows games released in the year 1996.
884 Windows games released in the year 1997.
1,010 Windows games released in the year 1998.
In 1996 there were a comparable amount of releases targeting Windows (108% of DOS releases), almost two times more in 1997 (46%) and 5 times more in 1998 (18%).
> You seem hell bent on convincing yourself that nothing of interest happened in 96 and 97 on the gaming front
... Did you even read the comment I gave link to? Please read it and make notice on who wrote it.
If you’re implying Quake was developed on Windows 95, that’s false. Windows 95 and early DirectX sucked and was only released a few months before Quake. DOS remained the dominant target for years.
The original QuakeEd is written in objective C because ID was using NeXTcubes for workstations. They also used some DEC Alphas for level compilation. WinQuake didn’t come out until nearly a year after initial release. You could launch Quake from Windows 95 but that’s neither here nor there.
https://www.gamers.org/dEngine/quake/QuakeEd/source.html