Are you ready for the future?

Hello again everyone.

In this episode, I am going to talk about multimedia and the future. We have all seen plenty of innovations in multimedia. We have things like the iPod, iPhone, Sony Playstation Portable and the Nintendo Wii. But one thing is important. For every innovation to be a success, certain factors must be met.

What I mean is the consumer base has to be ready for it. The innovative product must also be accessible. This means it should both be priced at a acceptable amount or that the system requirements for that device must be within acceptable ranges. I will talk about some multimedia ideas that were certainly innovative. However, due to certain factors, they failed to revolutionize the multimedia industry.

All right, I talked in an earlier post about virtual classrooms. In the past, virtual reality was all the rage and the abundance of IMAX theatres with virtual reality was a sign of that. Because of that, Nintendo, the very creators of the revolutionary Nintendo Wii, sought to capitalize on that excitement and create a whole new gaming platform to take take advantage of Virtual Reality.
They created their masterpiece: the Virtual Boy

More than just a headset on a stand, the Virtual Boy makes Virtual Reality, well, a reality!

If you have never heard of the Virtual Boy, then you are forgiven. Why? Because the Virtual Boy was a flop. It uses a system similar to IMAX theatres, where 2 different screens are flashed into each eye to create a semblance of virtual reality. An example of what you would see
is something like this:

I suppose it looks better in 3d.

If you are thinking that the colours are awful, well then you are not alone. Reasons why the Virtual Boy failed was that it used monochromatic red and black images as opposed to full colour.
Never mind that it was extremely expensive ( it cost about US$180 as compared to the Gameboy's US$110). And did I mention that it was extremely uncomfortable to play? The Virtual Boy is one good example of why a supposedly innovative piece of multimedia was not well-received ( only 880, 000 copies were sold worldwide).

It sure looks uncomfortable to play.

And now I am going to talk about another piece of multimedia, in this case, a game, that failed to turn heads despite it being extremely innovative for its time. A game which I enjoyed playing greatly and felt that it was the right game released at the wrong time. The game I am talking about is none other than Magic Carpet.

Ah nostalgia...this game brings back the memories.

It was basically a 1st person shooter game. You play a wizard on his titular magic carpet and your objective is to kill monsters and enemy wizards to collect their energy or mana, and you do that using a variety of spells. The carpet flies around like a helicopter so you can control both speed, direction and height. And oh, you cannot crash in case you were worried.


Hope you are not groggy, because this game is immense fun!

Now what made this game so innovative? Here is a short list from the game's article on Wikipedia:

Magic Carpet was touted by its developers as being ahead of its time and it garnered many accolades and favorable reviews. It used a realtime 3D-graphics engine, which was considered cutting-edge for its time. It included features such as:

• dynamically lighted, gouraud shaded, changeable ("morphable") landscape
• Dynamic music that changes whenever the player enters a fight
• Scene reflections in the water
• Distance fog
• Transparency effects, such as the transparent HUD, the water, and the Possess Mana spell when cast.
• A particle system, like the mana balls and flocks of vultures and other creatures. Often attacking one member of such a group is enough to attract the attention of the rest of the group.
• Player viewpoint control using the mouse

Some of the innovations, like fully deformable terrain is not found in any other games even up till today! Dynamic music is also something that some games have started to incorporate only recently. Unlike other games at that time, for example Doom, Magic Carpet is played in a 3d environment. Using the mouse, players can move in all 3 x, y and z axis while other games were essentially 2d.

However, the biggest failing of the game was that it was TOO advanced for its time! The game had notoriously high system requirements and required a Pentium core for smooth gameplay and maximum graphics, which was rare at that time. Most gamers at that time only 386 processors while Magic Carpet a 486 processor as a MINIMUM requirement. It didn't help that the game was placed in the same category together with the most definitive 1st person shooter, Doom. Because of that, the more popular Doom stole much of Magic Carpet's spotlight, despite both games being radically different from each other. It was clear that Magic Carpet was superior (at least technology wise) but unfortunately it just came out at the wrong time.

But luckily, this game is now freeware (if I am not wrong) and can be found free to download on several gaming websites. You would need a Dos emulator to get it running though. But I definitely recommend you to try it out if you can be arsed to get the emulator to work, and if you don't mind the dated and heavily pixelated graphics (by today's standards). I can assure that you would not regret it!

Compare and contrast!

I earlier said that Magic Carpet was the right game released at the wrong time. If it was released about a year later, things may have been very different. But it turned out that the consumers were not ready for the future. The Virtual Boy was another example in which everybody, even Nintendo themselves, were not ready for the future. So in light of all these new innovations in multimedia coming up we must ask ourself this question: Are we ready for the future?