The year 2000 was silly. Everyone had finally realized that whole Y2K bug stuff was a crock, and instead of learning our lesson everyone is now getting all hysterical about the world ending in 2012. I was a dumb little freshman (or sophomore) in high school. Apple computers were still junk with a niche market. Being able to text message on a cell phone was a huge feature. GameBoy was still an 8-bit machine. In fact, the GameBoy still existed. Sony was top dog about to release the Playstation 2. Sega was still building a console. Microsoft wasn’t in the game and girlfriends and parents of gamers everywhere still avoided the hobby like the plague.

Yet the very fact that we were in the year 2000 meant that it was the future...

Release of the PS2

No matter how you look at it, one of the most significant parts about the year 2000 was the release of the Sony Playstation 2. It had a built in DVD-Player, allowing games to be loaded with high quality graphics, audio and video all on a single disc as well as playing movies in this new digital format. Despite the Dreamcast releasing a year earlier, many gamers had held off since the PS2 had this DVD playing capability. Being able to use your game system for watching movies meant you only needed one device instead of two.

The Playstation 2 introduced the concept of the game console as a multimedia device. This would help spell success for the game system and influence both the Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii, but also proved to be Sony’s greatest misdirection when developing and marketing the Playstation 3 years later.

DVD’s weren’t the only significant push for the system. It also made the concept of backwards compatibility important to many gamers. Being able to get rid of your old game system while holding onto your favorite games was a great boon, though it also seems short-lived. The only modern console with true backwards compatibility today is the Nintendo Wii while the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 are very limited. Still, being able to play old games was viewed as important at the turn of the Century when it had previously been unheard of. This was another major push in the success of the Playstation 2 platform.

Despite the atrocious launch titles released with the system, the PS2 was a major success due to its spare features. If you never had a Playstation 1 there was still a massive library of games to choose from until the good titles finally hit the store shelves. In the end, the extra features allowed the PS2 to reign as king more than the games.

Microsoft acquired Bungie

I still remember when I first heard about Microsoft’s Direct-X Box. My friends laughed and expected the machine to die a quick and painful death like the 3DO. I shrugged and said I’d wait and see before making any judgment. Turns out the one thing that kept them from going the way of the Jaguar was Bungie.

Of course, aside from saving Microsoft from having one of the worst game line-ups in history, the acquisition of Bungie was also huge based on the company’s former support of the Mac. The studio had developed games primarily for the Apple computer platform, and in order to keep from shutting their doors the studio had to agree to selling their souls to Bill Gates and Steve Bullmer. These guys were like Morgoth and Sauron to Apple fans (and if you don’t get that you are likely not a virgin, too).

Such was a move no one could have foreseen. Ten years later Bungie has become independent once more, but they are still developing for the Microsoft platform. Such a turn of events can only make one wonder what surprises await us in the next ten years.

Final Fantasy IX

Despite the commercial success of Final Fantasy VIII, “old fogeys” such as I and my brother’s College friends had found ourselves feeling betrayed. The epic and excellently written stories of Final Fantasy had suddenly become a bunch of amnesiac orphans fighting monsters teleported down on a moon laser. A moon monster laser. In addition, the setting had gone from fantasy with some sci-fi elements to a sci-fi GAP commercial with some fantasy elements. Then there’s the gameplay. Oh, the wretched gameplay…

So in its last effort to actually please fans, Squaresoft had chosen to go back to the franchise roots. The game was purely fantasy, the sprites had a very cartoonish and stylistic look to them and even the combat music brought back the familiar bass and guitar riff from the 80’s and 90’s. Did this please fans? Well, it got a lot of different reactions, but the fans of old still weren’t happy with the series direction.

In the end, Final Fantasy IX was the last of the traditional games of the franchise. It has shifted and morphed ever since, and hasn’t really looked much like a fantasy for, well, nearly a decade. The beginning of a new Century also marked the end of an era in Final Fantasy.

Deus Ex

A title that really should have been on my “games I wish I had played” list, gamers still hail Deus Ex as one of the best titles ever. Despite looking and feeling like a first person shooter, the game allowed players to tackle a problem in one of many ways. While this sort of feature is spouted by developers regularly today, few games mean it as much as Deus Ex had.

Despite the game’s success due to this open-ended and lengthy gameplay, a sequel was rushed that turned it into a more straight forward shooter. The campaign had also become shorter, and ultimately fans were disappointed. However, a third iteration is now being worked on that assures fans it will live up to the original.

Shogun: Total War

LAN parties were still being dominated by StarCraft when Shogun: Total War was released. Unfortunately, nothing much has changed. However, this engine did push strategy games into territory they hadn’t before. Instead of having small sprites represent a variable number of soldiers or simplifying combat into a game of resource gathering and unit building, Shogun: Total War showed you the battlefield and each soldier rendered in real time.

Viewing the battlefield was like watching an actual war unfold before your eyes. Historic battles could be recreated, particularly with the tools the developers had released to the community. It was like watching a war from a plane above, only you could pause the game and issue commands if you so desired. It required a lot of patience and a lot of forethought to play this game, but if you loved war strategy games then this is what you had been waiting for all your life.

To this day the Total War engine proves to be unique and one of the best gaming has to offer. It has never sold as well as many other big name games, and it will never beat StarCraft in terms of recognition, but Shogun: Total War had pushed the envelope of what strategy games could do. To this day it continues to be an impressive game that ought to have changed the genre forever.

Other noteworthy titles of 2000:

Pokemon Gold and Silver, Grandia 2, Skies of Arcadia, Banjo Tooie, MechWarrior 4: Vengeance, Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, Chrono Cross, Diablo 2, Legend of Dragoon, Vagrant Story, American McGee’s Alice, Baldur’s Gate 2: Shadows of Amn, Dragon Quest VII, Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2

2000 in Video Gaming on Wikipedia

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Onward to 2001

What do you remember from the year 2000?