1994 is one of the most important years in the history of media. Pulp Fiction and Forrest Gump hit theaters, and would famously square off at the following year’s Academy Awards. Friends and ER both debuted on NBC. Norway held the Winter Olympics. And, most important for the future of media, I was born.
That’s right, 1994 is the year your favorite 30-year-old games journalist came into this world. The doctor said I was the first newborn to request an ‘easy mode for birth’, i.e. no spanking and leave the umbilical cord intact, thank you very much. Now that we’ve established my cred, let’s talk about the games a non-infant child might have received on Christmas Day, 1994.
Nintendo Kids Are Feasting
In retrospect, the SNES got off to an extremely strong start when it arrived in 1990. It had Super Mario World — widely considered one of the best games ever made — as a launch title. But Mario was old news at that point, and positively sluggish compared to the new platformer mascot on the block, Sonic the Hedgehog.
Three years later, Nintendo was undeniably triumphing with one of the best years in the medium’s history. Final Fantasy 6, still believed by many fans and critics to be the best game in the series, hit the console on April 2. Super Metroid, the game that launched a million indie explore-’em-ups, arrived on April 18th in the U.S. Japanese fans got the beloved RPG Earthbound on August 27.
And Rare’s ahead-of-its-time platformer classic, Donkey Kong Country, brought the magic of ‘Aquatic Ambience’ to players just in time for the holidays with a November 18 release. Those games are all considered classics today, and they all arrived within a handful of months of each other. And, if you were very lucky, they all arrived in your home on one eventful December day.
The Blue Blur Was Back With A New Red Friend
Though we think of Sonic as part of a trio of primary colored pals, the third member of the holy trinity didn’t arrive until three games in. With Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (and its weird expansion/sequel Sonic & Knuckles) the triumvirate was complete.
And just like Sonic expanded his circle of friends, players could expand their cartridges by stacking Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles on top of each other to make Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles, combining the two halves into one whole. It’s a little confusing, so just think of Sonic & Knuckles as your Sega Genesis’ tree topper.
Iconic PC RPG Series Debuts
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and World of Warcraft are arguably the two most important RPGs of the millennium so far, and we wouldn’t have either without a pair of games that arrived in 1994.
The Elder Scrolls: Arena only sold okay but, if your parents were some of the people who bought a copy, you were in for a very stressful Christmas morning. The game is notoriously difficult, and given that it procedurally generated an entire continent, likely unlike anything you’d ever seen before. If you want to try it for yourself, you can give a little gift to yourself: it’s free on GOG and Steam, alongside its sequel, Daggerfall.
Warcraft: Orcs & Humans — though not an RPG — accomplished the same thing, establishing the world for the biggest MMO of all time, which would arrive ten years later. It sold better than Arena, and helped popularize multiplayer in RTS games. You can’t get it for free, but if you have six bucks, you can treat yourself to a little bit of gaming history.
And though System Shock has never been as huge a series as Elder Scrolls or Warcraft (by several orders of magnitude), if you had extremely cool parents, you could have experienced the fusion of role-playing games and first-person shooters years before most other players would.
The Lion King
When Mufasa told Simba that “everything the light touches is our kingdom” in The Lion King, he was referring to the SNES and the Sega Genesis. One of the best licensed games of the ’90s, The Lion King brought SNES and Genesis fans together in appreciation of… just kidding. They all argued about which version was better. But on Christmas morning, you didn’t need to worry about any of that. You only needed to worry about falling off the rhino tails and drowning in the I Just Can’t Wait To Be King level. And, believe me, that was plenty.