But they knew the game was no great shakes.

David Brevik and his co-founders, the brothers Max and Erich Schaefer, were ostensibly at the show to demonstrate their very first finished original game, a Genesis title called Justice League: Task Force. In the meantime, the makers of gaming software had an especially underwhelming time of it in Chicago that year: as usual, they were treated as second-class citizens by the organizers, relegated to the hall’s basement so that the choicer spaces were kept free for cutting-edge toasters, refrigerators, and microwave ovens.Īmong the games people who were having the worst time of it of all were the folks behind a tiny San Mateo, California, studio called Condor, Incorporated. Attendance at the Summer CES in particular was down in a big way, so much so that the organizers would move the event out of its long-standing home in Chicago’s McCormick Place the following year and turn it into a traveling exhibition in the hope of drumming up some much-needed excitement.

The venerable semiannual expo where such landmark gaming hardware as the Atari VCS, the Commodore 64 and Amiga, the Nintendo Entertainment System and Super Entertainment System, and the Sega Genesis had been seen for the first time seemed somehow past its sell-by date now.

Let’s strip away the stuff that’s turning off a lot of game fans from RPGs.”Ī palpable sense of ennui dogged the Consumer Electronics Shows of 1994. “Yeah, let’s take that cool, addictive structure and modernize it. So, when Brevik mentioned these roguelike games, it was kind of a natural. They were becoming story- and stat-laden, really appealing to a super-small niche of super RPG geeks - which we were in a way, but that wasn’t really our style. All of us had become disappointed with computer RPGs because they were going in the opposite direction of where we thought they should be going.

Age of wonders 3 orc classes