Mechwarrior 3: Game Background

An old favorite

Expectations were high for Mech 3. MechWarrior 2 : The Clans, was (and still is) an amazing game - it gave DOS its last gasps of life, and left many with warm memories of that OS. It also brought home the need for a Pentium - once you saw it at 640x480, anything else absolutely unbearable (think of the first time you saw Quake2 OpenGL, then looked back at your software rendered beast.) When the 3D accelerator battle was just emerging, and 3Dfx needed a vehicle to launch itself into popularity, they released a massive patch for MechWarrior 2 to bring it into a feature rich 3D world (I can't remember anymore, but we're talking 10s of Megabytes, in a 14.4 modem era.) Again, MechWarrior 2 blew people away. 3Dfx changed from a complete unknown in the PC world to the 3D powerhouse it is today, in great part thanks to this super game.

Snap those power lines

PPC + Lens flare = good

Moving on

But, as the tradition goes, FASA was not happy with the delays and arrangements of this release, so the MechWarrior license passed on to Microprose. We waited, and waited, heard a few announcements, but Microprose fell on hard times and the game's future was bleak.

Locational damage

The scenic route

Finality

After a flurry of acquisitions, deals, and legal mumbo jumbo, the dust settled and this is how things stood. Zipper Interactive would develop the game. Microprose, along with its new majority investor, Hasbro Interactive, would publish it. Microsoft's massive wallet opened up and they dropped money into FASA, which owns the MechWarrior and BattleTech universe. Add it up, and you have 5 companies responsible for MechWarrior3. This makes for a very long credits sequence in the intro movie.