Full 3D and open world, this classic RoboCop game was ahead of its time | GRYOnline.pl

In the last dozen or so years, fans RoboCup they were not pampered. Apart from a less than successful cinematic remake, the brand lay fallow. This all changed in early November with the release of RoboCop: Rogue City. The project developed by the Polish studio Teyon turned out to be a fan’s dream come true, providing the best interactive adaptation of the series ever. However, this is not the first successful production of this type. Today we want to tell you about the game RoboCop 3 from 1992, which was ahead of its time in many respects.

The 1990s were a period when the console and PC markets were usually completely separate. It often happened that a production with the same title was a completely different project on computers and consoles. In case of RoboCup 3 it went even further. In total, three different platform games with this title were developed as part of the adaptation of this film (one for ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64, the second for NES, and the third for arcade machines and SNES/Genesis). However, we are interested in the fourth production under this title, which was released on PC, Amiga and Atari ST computers.

We spent a large part of the game behind the wheel of a police car. Photo source: OCEAN.

This egranization was completely different. It was developed by the DID studio (Digital Image Design), which created the popular F29 Retaliator. This team would soon begin to revolutionize the technological side of the simulator genre with titles such as TFX Whether Eurofighter 2000but first the developers showed their great skills in… RoboCopie 3.

The game was divided into a number of sections recreating various sequences from the film. They could be played linearly as part of the story campaign or independently in arcade mode. They offered different types of gameplay:

1. driving a car;
2. shooting;
3. hand-to-hand combat;
4. flying with a jetpack.

The first two types of fun were the most impressive. One of them involved driving a police car in a small 3D open world, and the other was a first-person shooter. The FPS sections were fully 3D, with vector objects and smooth exploration. Let us recall – and it was 1992 – that the peak of technological development of first-person shooters was then Wolfenstein 3Dwith objects made of sprites and locations that only pretended to be three-dimensional.

The game was one of the progenitors of the FPS genre.

The fun was diversified by the fact that there were not only enemies on the maps – there were also many civilians there and you had to be careful not to accidentally shoot any of them. At some points, the game even switched to a TPP camera, showing RoboCop slightly on one side of the screen, thus offering the perspective that dominates in third-person productions today.

These sections were the main core of the gameplay, but towards the end of the campaign two others diversified the fun – the first one was a bad, but fortunately short hand-to-hand fight with ninja robots, which, according to the movie plot, were supposed to replace RoboCop (which we could quickly talk them out of using metal fists), and the second one included flying with a jetpack, which DID was able to use its simulator experience with F29 Retaliator.

RoboCop 3 is also one of the first cases of the currently most popular TPP perspective in games, where the action is shown from over the character’s shoulder. Photo source: OCEAN.

Today, elements such as three-dimensional maps or driving in the open world do not arouse any emotions, but in 1992 it was hard to believe that something like RoboCop 3 it is even possible to run it on computers of that time.

Technology wasn’t the game’s only advantage. It was simply a very nice production – individual sections (apart from the hand-to-hand combat) were refined and very diverse, and the whole thing perfectly recreated the atmosphere of the film franchise. It is obvious that the creators would love to combine all the game modes into one module, creating something typical of today’s open world productions, but in 1992 this was completely impossible, so dividing the game into independent stages was a good solution.

What Digital Image Design created was so good that, despite the too short campaign, it remained the most ambitious adaptation of the brand until Teyon studio became interested in it. DID was simply unlucky – the technology in 1992 was a bit too primitive to fully implement the authors’ ideas, so the RoboCopie 3 the ideas only became popular when other, later productions offered them. Still, the game remains a true monument to how good the developers at Digital Image Design were, and it’s not worth letting it fall into total oblivion.

Antipiracka hysteria

As an interesting fact, it is worth mentioning that the Amiga version of the game had a very unpleasant anti-piracy system. For each copy RoboCup 3 the versions for these computers came with a small device that had to be plugged into one joystick port.

Photo source: Modern Vintage Gamer on YouTube.

The problem is that pirates quickly broke this protection, so its only function was to annoy players who bought the game legally. What’s worse, shortly after the game’s premiere, the Amiga 600 debuted on the market and its ports were changed in such a way that the device could not be connected to this computer, which in practice made it impossible to play non-pirated copies. RoboCup 3 on this computer.

The later fate of DID

DID itself for some time after the premiere RoboCup 3 remained in a science fiction atmosphere. First, in 1992, the team released a cult space shooter Epic. It was also a rare case of a game in this genre offering fully 3D gameplay with vector ships (Star Wars: X-Wing it wasn’t supposed to come out until next year), as well as sections over the surfaces of alien planets. The game received an extremely ambitious sequel two years later Infernowhich, however, sold far below expectations.

A little earlier, in 1993, DID returned to modern simulators by creating TFX and the success of this game coupled with failure Inferno shaped the rest of the studio’s output. In 1995, Digital Image Design released the groundbreaking EuroFighter 2000. The game was so technologically impressive that ads with the text “there are two types of simulators – those created by DID and all others” did not seem particularly exaggerated. Later, the authors developed their ideas in two more games of this genre in the form of the excellent F-22 Air Dominance Fighter and the legendary F-22 Total Air War. In 1999, the band was again ahead of its time, creating Wargasm. It was the first successful game simulating the entire battlefield, allowing you to control a tank, a plane and an infantryman. The technology of that time again did not allow the ideas to be fully implemented, and only two years later the Bohemia studio did it, creating Operation Flashpoint.

Like RoboCop 3 before it, Wargasm was a project that was ahead of its time. Photo source: Atari.

Some time after the DID studio was taken over by Infogrames, the main developers left and founded a new team called Evolution Studios, well known to all racing game lovers (including the series MotorStorm, DriveClub). In 2016, the developer was taken over by Codemasters and over time it lost its separate character, becoming just one of the teams of a larger whole.

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