Good evening you are listening to Through Moves Ahead and I'm your host, Rob Zackney. Join me this evening. We welcome Three Moves Ahead founder, Troy Goodfellow. Hello. And we've also got Games Beats' 1990s cultural retrospective commissioner, Rowan Kaiser. Commissar, actually. Okay, now you want the commissar title. The first time you're like, no, no, no, like, get my title right. But now, now it's kind of grown on you. Now you kind of want to wear the party armband. Right, right. That or Grand Vizier. That's true. But, like, if I name you a Grand Vizier, like, your murderous betrayal is pretty much guaranteed like any minute now.

I feel like that's true for Commissar also.

I mean, that's true.

When I think of Commissar, I do think of, like, Soviet officers being led away into the woods to be murdered.

But Grand Vizier just somehow seem more treacherous about the entire thing.

But maybe that's just Prince of Persia and Aladdin scaring me more than they should have as a child.

Anyway, speaking of when I was a child, tonight we're going to be journeying back 25 years to 1993.

Late last year, we had a retrospective on 1997, but the other day Rowan made a pretty daring suggestion in our through-as-a-head group chat, which was that I think you said 1993 might be gaming's greatest year.

So I did what I always do when Rowan says something extraordinary.

I convened this quorum so that we can interrogate him and figure out why he's so wrong.

But Rowan, you want to sort of set the stage here a little bit and why this year has sort

of been standing out in your mind for basically since we started talking

about doing these yearly retrospectives?

Yeah.

What's happening in 1993 is sort of the end of the, I don't know, I haven't figured out the

best term for it, but there's a sort of genre

remaking in the mid-90s where all the old genres kind of get pushed aside and all the new

genres that are largely what we're still playing start to be forged. And we saw this when

we did 97, where we were seeing, you know, the real-time strategy genre become absolutely huge then.

And we're not going to be talking about conventional RTSs for just four years before.

We're going to be talking about the things that were kind of the prototypes for that.

It's a transitional year, the first one of that remaking maybe.

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