At the beginning of the Nineties, not many people had NovaLogic on their radar. The company, founded by John Garcia in 1985, first converted arcade titles such as Bubble Bobble and Arkanoid to IBM PCs and Apple computers, and created decent games like the submarine simulator Wolfpack (1990) and The Rocketeer (1991). Not exactly mind-blowing. But then came the 1992 ECTS in London, and what ran on a CRT monitor at the small NovaLogic booth left the entire audience both speechless and depressed, it was Comanche: Maximum Overkill.
Why was that? Flight simulators of the time had the problem that they basically looked like nothing, especially at a low altitude – untextured polygonal surfaces are not good at creating a realistic landscape feel. took care of exactly that problem, thanks to Kyle Freeman, the game’s sole developer. “Kyle developed a unique bitmap effect: he took a tiny image of a woman’s face, repeated it in 3D space, and gave each pixel its own Z coordinate,” NovaLogic founder John Garcia tells us about the humble beginnings of’s groundbreaking 3D technology. “Applying a sine-wave function made it appear like a flag waving in the wind. Later, those coordinates were replaced with digital elevation maps, enabling real-time renderable terrains.” That wasn’t all though. “The first demo halfway through development had you shooting green balloons, because I was using a text based 3D renderer to make the sprites and entering a sphere into the text file was easy,” Kyle adds.
