MegaRace. To this day, I can mention this anywhere and people don't have a clue what it was and think of it in terms of a movie. This little jewel came out for SegaCD, 3DO and PC. The whole concept was a cutting edge template that racing games have mimicked ever since. The graphics itself was simply something you did not see in racing games, much less the concept of having a active pre-rendered environment. The developer Cryo got a chance to show the gaming world that 3D graphics in games was a very serious future to invest in. The music itself also raised the standard a bit for racing games and inspired future developers to actually invest in an actual publishable game soundtrack. Every person who followed my advice and played this game was able to see the influence it had at a technological level. It simply did what no one thought a graphic intensive racing game could do. Then of course on top of that, it was vehicular combat as well. Thus the traditional treatment of sprite technology had to be upgraded as well, to had more visible angles to the vehicles in the race environment.
Then as if this wasn't enough. 3D cards became a reality and once again Cryo saw to it that MegaRace 2 was just as cutting edge with all the previous treatments. The cars were now made of polygons of course. Unlike the competition, the wheel motion was not animated images on a polygon. The wheels actually turned and rolled in the 3D environment. The environments were not as active, but made up for it with a detail level unseen in games for almost another 6 years. Cryo fell in love with the reality of graphic cards that could support multi-layer textures and challenged themselves to revamp the engine to do this WITHOUT the aide of the card. For reasons no one knows, MegaRace 2 was PC exclusive and disappointed the core gaming audience whom were looking forward to grabbing their game controllers and experiencing more Lance Boyle infused lunacy.
Sadly MegaRace, like so many other pioneers became forgotten and thus Cryo felt the demand simply was not there. The closing of Mindscape nearly ended Cryo, had it not been for a new publisher by the name of The Adventure Company signing a contract and establishing a new standard for graphic adventure games. MegaRace 3 simply did not measure up to its old legacy as well. We have seen this happen many times when sequels come a little too late and people try a little too hard to make it work as great. Cryo themselves simply could not make the staff investment they had in the past, being adventure game specialists and superstars at this point. Thus the pioneering pre-rendered backgrounds was scrapped entirely as well as no co-host for Lance
Boyle. The only upside to MegaRace 3 was the publishing of it on PC and Playstation 2. At least in Europe anyway. The new publisher DreamCatcher was simply lacking the experience to market the game properly and was more focused on the adventure style games as well. One of the few saving graces of the game's entertainment value was Lance Boyle himself. Everything people expected of him, they got. The the soundtrack suffered, since the composers Knocking Boots Productions was the property of Mindscape and thus not present. Fortunately they didn't end up unemployed and their talent was adopted by Tommy Telarico Studios.
