Industry | Video games |
---|---|
Founded | 1983 |
Founder | Ian Andrew |
Successor | Superscape |
Headquarters | , United Kingdom |
Incentive Software Ltd. was a British video game developer and publisher founded by Ian Andrew in 1983. [1] Programmers included Sean Ellis, Stephen Northcott and Ian's brother Chris Andrew.
Later games were based on the company's Freescape rendering engine. Developed in-house, Freescape is considered to be one of the first proprietary 3D engines to be used in video games, although the engine was not used commercially outside of Incentive's own titles. [2] The project was originally thought to be so ambitious that according to Ian Andrew, the company struggled to recruit programmers for the project, with many believing that it could not be achieved.
According to Paul Gregory (graphics artist for Major Developments, Incentive's in-house design team), [3] Freescape was developed by Chris Andrew starting in September 1986 on an Amstrad CPC, as it was the most suitable development system with 128K memory and had adequate power to run 3D environments. Due to the engine's success, it was later ported to all the dominant systems of the era: ZX Spectrum, IBM PC, Commodore 64, Amiga, and Atari ST. Freescape development ended in 1992 with the release 3D Construction Kit II .
The company was renamed Dimension International as it moved into the VR field in 1995 with its next-generation Superscape VRT engine, [4] [5] [6] then later changed name again to Superscape . [7]
The following games were published and/or developed by Incentive Software:
Year | Title | Platform |
---|---|---|
1983 | Splat! | Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum |
Mountains of Ket [8] | ZX Spectrum | |
1984 | BBC/Electron, ZX Spectrum | |
1984 | Millionaire [9] | Amstrad CPC, BBC/Electron, ZX Spectrum |
Temple of Vran [10] | ZX Spectrum | |
The Final Mission [11] | ZX Spectrum | |
Confuzion | Amstrad CPC, BBC/Electron, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum | |
Back Track | Dragon 32 | |
1985 | Moon Cresta | Amstrad CPC, BBC, Commodore 64, Dragon 32, ZX Spectrum |
Eddie Steady Go! | Dragon 32 | |
1986 | The Graphic Adventure Creator [12] | Amstrad CPC, BBC, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum |
The Ket Trilogy [13] | Amstrad CPC, BBC/Electron, Commodore 64, Dragon 32, | |
Winter Wonderland | Amstrad CPC, BBC, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum | |
Dragon's Tooth | BBC | |
The Legend of the Apache Gold | Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum | |
1987 | The Adventure Creator [14] | Electron |
Driller [15] | Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Commodore 64, IBM PC, ZX Spectrum | |
Karyssia: Queen of Diamonds | ZX Spectrum | |
1988 | The ST Adventure Creator [16] | Atari ST |
Dark Side | Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Commodore 64, IBM PC, ZX Spectrum | |
Total Eclipse | Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Commodore 64, IBM PC, ZX Spectrum | |
1990 | Castle Master | Amiga, [17] Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Commodore 64, IBM PC, ZX Spectrum |
Castle Master II: The Crypt | Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Commodore 64, IBM PC, ZX Spectrum | |
Total Eclipse II: The Sphinx Jinx | Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum | |
1991 | 3D Construction Kit [18] [19] | Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Commodore 64, IBM PC, ZX Spectrum |
1992 | 3D Construction Kit II [20] | Amiga, Atari ST, IBM PC |
id Software LLC is an American video game developer based in Richardson, Texas. It was founded on February 1, 1991, by four members of the computer company Softdisk: programmers John Carmack and John Romero, game designer Tom Hall, and artist Adrian Carmack.
Wolfenstein 3D is a first-person shooter video game developed by id Software and published by Apogee Software and FormGen. Originally released on May 5, 1992, for DOS, it was inspired by the 1981 Muse Software video game Castle Wolfenstein, and is the third installment in the Wolfenstein series. In Wolfenstein 3D, the player assumes the role of Allied spy William "B.J." Blazkowicz during World War II as he escapes from the Nazi German prison Castle Wolfenstein and carries out a series of crucial missions against the Nazis. The player traverses each of the game's levels to find an elevator to the next level or kill a final boss, fighting Nazi soldiers, dogs, and other enemies with a knife and a variety of guns.
Future Crew was a Finnish demogroup that created PC demos and software, active mostly between 1987 and 1994.
Deluxe Paint, often referred to as DPaint, is a bitmap graphics editor created by Dan Silva for Electronic Arts and published for the then-new Amiga 1000 in November 1985. A series of updated versions followed, some of which were ported to other platforms. An MS-DOS release with support for the 256 color VGA standard became popular for creating pixel graphics in video games in the 1990s.
Michael Abrash is an American programmer and technical writer. He is best known for his magazine articles and books on code optimization and graphics for IBM PC compatibles and for working at id Software in the mid-1990s on the rendering technology for Quake. Since 2014, he has been the chief scientist of Oculus VR, a subsidiary of Meta Platforms.
A first-person shooter engine is a video game engine specialized for simulating 3D environments for use in a first-person shooter video game. First-person refers to the view where the players see the world from the eyes of their characters. Shooter refers to games which revolve primarily around wielding firearms and killing other entities in the game world, either non-player characters or other players.
Transylvania was the name of a trilogy of computer games released for several home computers of the 1980s. The games were graphic adventure games created by Antonio Antiochia and produced by Penguin Software/Polarware.
Freescape is a video game engine, an early 3D game engine used in video games such as 1987's Driller. Graphics were composed mostly of solid geometry rendered without shading.
UNIGINE is a proprietary cross-platform game engine developed by UNIGINE Company used in simulators, virtual reality systems, serious games and visualization. It supports OpenGL 4, Vulkan and DirectX 12.
Amiga software is computer software engineered to run on the Amiga personal computer. Amiga software covers many applications, including productivity, digital art, games, commercial, freeware and hobbyist products. The market was active in the late 1980s and early 1990s but then dwindled. Most Amiga products were originally created directly for the Amiga computer, and were not ported from other platforms.
Unity is a cross-platform game engine developed by Unity Technologies, first announced and released in June 2005 at Apple Worldwide Developers Conference as a Mac OS X game engine. The engine has since been gradually extended to support a variety of desktop, mobile, console, augmented reality, and virtual reality platforms. It is particularly popular for iOS and Android mobile game development, is considered easy to use for beginner developers, and is popular for indie game development.
3D Construction Kit, also known as 3D Virtual Studio, is a utility for creating 3D worlds in Freescape. Developed by Incentive Software and published by Domark, it was released in 1991 on multiple platforms. The game originally retailed for £24.99 for the 8-bit version, and £49.99 for 16-bit version and the 32-bit Acorn Archimedes version, in the United Kingdom. A sequel, 3D Construction Kit II, was released in 1992, but only available on Amiga, Atari ST and MS-DOS.
3D Construction Kit II, is a utility for creating 3D virtual worlds in Freescape. Developed by Incentive Software and published by Domark, it was released on November 10, 1992 as a sequel to 3D Construction Kit. Unlike its predecessor, 3D Construction Kit II was released simultaneously on three platforms: Amiga, Atari ST and MS-DOS.
A first-person shooter (FPS) is a video game centered on gun fighting and other weapon-based combat seen from a first-person perspective, with the player experiencing the action directly through the eyes of the main character. This genre shares multiple common traits with other shooter games, and in turn falls under the action games category. Since the genre's inception, advanced 3D and pseudo-3D graphics have proven fundamental to allow a reasonable level of immersion in the game world, and this type of game helped pushing technology progressively further, challenging hardware developers worldwide to introduce numerous innovations in the field of graphics processing units. Multiplayer gaming has been an integral part of the experience, and became even more prominent with the diffusion of internet connectivity in recent years.
Pie in the Sky is a 2.5D and 3D first-person shooter engine most popular in the mid-to-late 1990s by Pie in the Sky Software, also known as Power 3D and the 3D Game Creation or 3D Game Creation System engine. The engine was used in two games by the company as well as many other independent games and amateur projects after it was turned into a commercial game creator, largely because it minimized the amount of computer programming knowledge needed to make 3D games in its editing tools, making it suitable even for beginners with no game-design experience.
A stereoscopic video game is a video game which uses stereoscopic technologies to create depth perception for the player by any form of stereo display. Such games should not be confused with video games that use 3D game graphics on a mono screen, which give the illusion of depth only by monocular cues but lack binocular depth information.
VREAM, Inc. was a US technology company that functioned between 1991 and 1996. It was one of the first companies to develop PC-based software for authoring and viewing virtual reality (VR) environments.
Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons is a three-part episodic side-scrolling platform video game developed by Ideas from the Deep and published by Apogee Software in 1990 for MS-DOS. It is the first set of episodes of the Commander Keen series. The game follows the titular Commander Keen, an eight-year-old child genius, as he retrieves the stolen parts of his spaceship from the cities of Mars, prevents a recently arrived alien mothership from destroying landmarks on Earth, and hunts down the leader of the aliens, the Grand Intellect, on the alien home planet. The three episodes feature Keen running, jumping, and shooting through various levels while opposed by aliens, robots, and other hazards.
RealityCapture (RC) is photogrammetry software for creating 3D models out of unordered photographs or laser scans without seams. The most common fields of its current use are cultural heritage, full body scanning, gaming, surveying, mapping, visual effects (VFX) and virtual reality (VR) in general.
A virtual reality game or VR game is a video game played on virtual reality (VR) hardware. Most VR games are based on player immersion, typically through a head-mounted display unit or headset with stereoscopic displays and one or more controllers.