2000.
A year in gaming. Some of you might even remember it.
I've been wanting to do a chronological cross-section like this for a while. An attempt to make a cohesive narrative across the myriad releases and events of a single year. It's challenging for a number of reasons, the least of which is that history seldom has hard edges and cutting off at the end of a calendar year isn't always natural.
Anyway, it's a chance for me to set off a nostalgia bomb and lean into the aesthetic of the era. I also have a theory that broader topics with a simple premise tend to do better, but we'll see about that.
Comments (15)
God the end bummed out, we took a wrong turn somewhere
Wow, that was gorgeous!
A great video, definitely a nostalgia trip to more optimistic times. Would love to see you cover the rise of Steam, as it's kinda hard to imagine the PC games market without it. Keep up the great work Ahoy.
Apart from the great content the soundtrack had me smile throughout the whole video.
Bomfunk MCs is an incredible way to open a video
Delighted to see your coverage of that discrete moment. Excellent score, particularly your selection of tracks to cover.
Brilliant video! So many fantastic games and songs form that era. Hearing freestyler right at the very start was a massive nostalgia hit (then I had to listen to it again for real for the thousandth time haha) (Can we listen to the background tracks on their own? Your remixes are great)
Sweet, a new Ahoy video to watch at work. This makes my Friday even better.
There was one last release of a Jaguar game that was in development since the days Atari was still actively backing the system. It was a self-published release, given the Atari Corporation all but abandoned the Jaguar in 1995, was dissolved in a reverse merger with a hard drive company in 1996, and was later sold to Hasbro in 1998. But the developers known as “4Play” had been working on a “Star Raiders” style space simulation shooter game called “BattleSphere”. It was met with countless development challenges, including building the entire game in assembler code to circumvent the Jaguar’s hardware bugs and having to brute-force the console’s encryption key, the last of which Hasbro had no interest in assisting 4-Play despite being the owners of the Jaguar’s intellectual property. This led to Hasbro eventually releasing the Jaguar to the public domain. Despite all those challenges, 4Play was able to complete development of the game and release “BattleSphere” through direct online orders in late February 2000. It was a decent game with multiple play modes, high frame rates with 3D graphics, and the ability to network up to 16 consoles for deathmatch rounds. A more limited release of an improved version of the game, “BattleSphere Gold”, was later debuted in 2002.
Great video as usual, especially the soundtrack! 2000 was a year when I started to focus more on school where my goal was university, so I missed this entire generation really. Also, how I look forward to the civilised, mature discussion over at the comment section about what platform really was the best when this video is released to the public
I'm expecting plenty of comments re: omissions. Always the way with broader compilations like this.
I love this. I have vivid memories of that year. One of the best being at an all-night lock in at a gaming store where we spent the night of the infamous Y2K playing MechWarrior 3 over LAN. Oddly, nothing happened when the year rolled over, so we started up another round.
Amazing video as always!
THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT! THAT'S WHY HE'S THE MVP!
Every topic you cover becomes interesting and fascinating, let loose