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I've been spending a lot of time working on my current project, Ritual Descent: Emergence, and it's made me think back to where my fascination with exploring strange 3D digital worlds probably started.
Hunter, Frontier: Elite II, Mercenary, Escape from Targ: The Second City, Castle Master... off the top of my head, games like that absolutely blew my mind.
They look incredibly primitive now, but in the early '90s they felt like proper magic. I'd grown up with an Atari 2600 and then my old ZX Spectrum, where games were mostly 2D sprites on a screen. Then suddenly you could stand on a hill, look across a landscape and simply decide where to go. It genuinely felt like the future.
A lot of them were basically proto-open-world games before anyone really used that term. I don't even think the enjoyment came from playing them properly half the time. I'd ignore whatever mission I was supposed to be doing and just wander. I wanted to see what was over the next hill, what was hidden around the next corner, or whether there was somewhere the developers never expected anyone to go.
(I still do this now. There's a running joke among my gaming friends that whenever I start a new game, especially an early access one, I'll immediately find somewhere I'm not supposed to be, break something, and end up stuck behind the scenery.)
A lot of those early worlds were actually pretty empty by today's standards... but your imagination happily filled in the gaps.
The Amiga was also where I first tried creating 3D worlds of my own. I experimented with AMOS and AMOS 3D, built strange little places in 3D Construction Kit, and spent hours playing around with landscape and terrain programs such as VistaPro and World Construction Set. Most of what I made was probably barely functional, but there was something incredible about generating a landscape, placing objects into it and then being able to move around inside something I'd created myself.
I've realised there's probably a fair bit of all that creeping into Ritual Descent: Emergence. It isn't really about "winning". It's about descending into a place, following your curiosity and seeing what you discover. In some ways, I'm still doing what I did back then: creating a strange landscape and wondering what it might feel like to wander around inside it.
If my project captures even a tiny bit of the wonder those early polygon worlds and creative tools gave me, I'll be happy.
I suppose that's the funny thing about inspiration. You never quite know what's going to stick with you. Sometimes it comes from the most random places... or almost subliminally from something you experienced over thirty years ago.