The Golden Age Of Gaming: Part V The Death of an Era

As the old saying goes, all things must end and the golden age of gaming was unfortunately no exception. I doubt anyone knew it at the time, hell most of us didn’t even know we were living through the golden age of gaming as it was. Still by about 1994 the golden age of gaming was just about over, along with what was left of the small time business ideology of the last two decades that allowed these golden age classics to exist. The gaming industry was already taking whole new directions in design, marketing and mentality in general of what should go into a game and unfortunately for us it was for the most part bad, with some very small exceptions. Just as the final curtain of uninhibited creativity dropped, there would still be a couple of magical games, perhaps the best of them all, that would be released and still earn the right to be called a golden age classic. Master of Orion among them, despites it’s affiliation with “da man”, Microprose, was actually one of very few games of it’s time that was released as the designers of the game intended. Uninfluenced by the disastrous gaming industry philosophy being instilled into the industry, something that would plaque games and game design over the next decade, Master of Orion was released in 1994 in all its glory as a DOS based game.

Master of Orion was in many ways a groundbreaking game, but from a design perspective despite being well put together, it wasn’t necessarily all that original. In more then one way it was civilization in space, not that, this alone made it unoriginal and certainly it didn’t make it a bad game. To the contrary, by using Civilizations successful features and adding a few original design idea’s Master of Orion was far superior to Civilization in many ways and in fact, if my humble opinion counts at all I would say it was the best game of its era. Master of Orion is the product of taking good idea’s from other games and putting them into a game using a science-fiction formula that in regards to the turn based strategy genre hadn’t really been used much. In fact I think there were only one or two games that would even qualify and they were very forgettable titles I couldn’t even find on the internet today. Master of Orion became the great grandfather of the newly born genre that would come to be called the 4x turned based strategy games and in the coming years it would offer more to its genre then any game has to this very day.

Master of Orion was a galactic conquest game in which you were a ruler trying to conquer the known universe. It had plenty of starting conditions, competitive alien leaders, technology to research, planets to govern and a good mix of victory conditions, by 1994 it was a standard for turned based games set by you guessed it, Civilization. Master of Orion had more to it then that however and in many ways it’s really what made it special for sci-fi freaks like me who loved the idea of making our own ships. The game allowed you to use the technology you researched and custom build and name your own star ships using said technology. In addition units didn’t just bump into each other and give you a funny noise to let you know who won or lost combat, but rather there was a tactical battle screen that would come up anytime enemy units would meet in space and a whole separate strategically mini game would take place to determine the winner of any given combat. It was a fairly simple design with an incredibly in depth strategically element and quite frankly it was just fun to play. It wasn’t a magical game that blew you away, but sometimes being fun and addictive is all a game has to be and in the case of Master of Orion, it’s exactly what you got.

With Master of Orion, the Golden Age of Gaming ended and would never be again, but pc gaming even then was still in its infancy. There is still plenty of gaming history left for us cover and we are going to dive deeper into the specifics of what made the gaming industry what it is today. The Golden Age of Gaming was just a beginning, but it was a great beginning.

For fans of Master of Orion, especially those that were disapointed by either or both of the sequals, there is a new version of the game in the tradition of the original classic being developed by gamers outside of the industry system called Free Orion. You can find information about the game here a ttp://www.freeorion.org/index.php/Main_Page and even play the current build of the game.