January 1st, 1994 - the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is signed into law. This law was a highly polarizing free trade agreement between the US, Canada, and Mexico - effectively ending all tariffs within each others' regions. The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), a militant group who were formed by Indigenous people of Mexico to respond to military efforts to supress political mobalization, responded to NAFTA's enactment by declaring war on the state of Mexico and began an uprising in the city of Chiapas.
Rif's having a bad day. First he loses a chess match, then he gets profiled for stealing the Orb of Storms, and then gets his undefined situationship Rhene locked up on the span of like three minutes! It's up to Rif, and his two friends Eeah and Okk to uncover what happened to the Orb of Storms and potentially unravel political intrigue brewing within the tribes of Morphs within the Found Land. The game uses what AGS users would recognize as the Tumbleweed interface, albeit a very early version made in the SAGE engine by Talin. The movement in the isometric areas is zoomed in a bit close for a game like this and makes traversel a little challenging, but the game is very witty and has a lot of love put into it - the art and story direction is a veritable who's who of 90's furry fandom. Despite the circumstances surrounding the three main characters, Eeah and Okk work great together as they find ways to use subterfuge to get Rif into areas that are typically inaccessible. The further you go into the game the more clans you uncover, and the larger the world becomes as you gain access to the sorts of people that exist in this world and trying your best as an outsider to court the social expectations they have.
February 1st, 1994 - Green Day releases their debut album Dookie after three weeks of recording at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley, California. The album would go on to be certified double diamond by the RIAA.
DOS Games Archive (Episode 1) | Archive.org Link (Episode 1) | Archive.org Link (Episode 2) | Archive.org Link (Episode 3)
| Net Revenue: Shareware
We've got some solid puzzle solving shareware, you play a smiley face and your goal is to collect all the keys in a given level and leave through a door. Standing in your way is a host of enemies who all behave in a specific pattern when encountering the player. Early puzzle mechanics are all about moving around sections of enemies to avoid dying, and as the game progresses, becomes more about how to maneuver enemies into positions to let you progress through the rest of the level itself. It gets surprisingly tough as you try to figure out solutions without backing yourself into a corner. It's pretty good!
| Doom Mod (Single Level WAD) 
What we have here is not only (very very likely) the earliest Doom WAD in existance, but also a marvel of ingenuity. Coming to us from Jeffrey Bird, this file was one of several made before the release of a true map editor for Doom mapping, and as such, is able to accomplish pretty much everything you see on screen - two rooms, one shotgun guy, three imps, and two Barons of Hell. In the attached Readme, Jeffrey mentions that a lack of knowledge of the nodes and sector structure at this point means this is all that can be done, but the fact that it works at all is enormous. A true piece of gaming history!
March 8th, 1994 - Nine Inch Nails releases their second album, The Downward Spiral, after recording from 92' to 93' in the former site of Sharon Tate's murder by the Manson family.
Having garnered the attention of Apogee through the release of the shooter Galactix two years earlier, what was then called Cygnus Studios would go on to release Raptor: Call of the Shadows, an Amercian tate shump. If you had any interest in shareware during a certain time period, it was a fair probability you played the first two levels of Raptor in some capacity, but needless to say, the game is very much worth the money! You play a mercenary hired by the Mega-Corps to bump off its major competitors in your powerful Raptor! The game has three campaigns in Bravo Sector, Tango Sector, and Outer Regions, each with their own layouts and biomes. The enemies fire quickly in this game but precede themselves with a shadow so you have an idea of where to shoot next, which adds a nice incentive to keep scanning the top of the screen. Audicious use of ground elements as a way of shielding oncoming enemies from the player's bullets and becoming a way to punish players attempting to take advantage of a dead zone. Several enemies who use homing bullets leads to fairly regular bullet herding but it's not a cure-all, as enemy bullet variety is constant. My reliance on macro dodging leads to my getting punished regularly and so learning how to micro dodge is essential, especially with bosses. The average scoring system for a game of this type is removed in favor of cash rewards for killing enemies/ground units/various war crimes, which can then be spent on upgrades. These upgrades are the lifeblood for a successful run, and thus it becomes imperative to buy the best weapons available as quickly as possible, especially the weapons that use homing patterns like the Laser Turret because otherwise you miss out on opportunities to make cash by avoiding enemy fire and bullet herding. I personally recommend getting a Phaser Shield early, which acts as a second health bar, and doing your best to keep it for the rest of your run because those things cost 80k a pop. Overall a very good game!
Doomworld (Ver 1.2) | Doomworld (Ver 1.666) | Doomworld (Ver 2.5)
| Doom / Doom 2 Mod (Single Level WAD) | Part of the episode Inferno (M1 of 9)
Dr. Sleep, also known as John W. Anderson, would become so critically important to Doom as a whole that the work he did on both Dante's Gate and Crossing Acheron would land him a job at Epic Mega Games around 1996 and get the remaining cantos of his Inferno series included as part of the Master Levels for Doom II. Dante's Gate version 2.5 runs as a replacement for the level Underhalls (E1M2) in Doom II and is an impressive map with several arenas and massive battles, and a plentiful supply of bullets and supplies including the BFG 9000 for massive cleanup. It's really good!
| Part of the episode Invasion (M1 of 2)
The first in a 9 level series, Invasion...Level 1 - Contamination is a fine showing for Andy Chen and Claude Martins. This episode follows immediately after Episode 3 of Doom in which you are called back to UAC's Mars Base to fight against one final push by Hell's legions! For the age of this WAD, the work and love put in is clearly on display as you escape a bunker to find the base crawling with enemies and more teleporting in by the second - it's a mad dash to get all three keycards and fight your way to the HAL 9000 reference to shut off the electromagnetic barriers preventing you from getting further into the base. I liked this one a lot!
| Doom / Doom 2 Mod (Single Level WAD) | Part of the episode Inferno (M2 of 9)
Dr. Sleep comes back to us in short order with the second level of his Inferno series, and the #1 best WAD of 1994 as voted on by the writers of the Top 100 WADs of All Time. Following immediately after Dante's Gate, you find yourself at a keep overlooking the river Acheron. The presentation is top notch as you fight your way through a triumphal arch leading into a theatre for a ceremonial alter and a series of arcades filled with teleporters, and finally a cistern for the acrid river itself that serves as the final gauntlet before the end of the level. It's fantastic!
| Full Episode WAD (Doom E2M1 - E2M9)
The first release from the Germany-based The Innocent Crew, Slaughter Until Death is a commendable replacement for The Shores of Hell campaign. The levels are very well designed and coordinated with only enough sprinkling of evil traps to keep things interesting. The weapon placement is supurb as you're never given higher end weapons until absolutely necessary to get out of a tight spot or fight tougher enemies, so as long as you're sticking to the ol' reliable shotgun and chaingun, you'll have plenty of ammo for storming the Cyberdemon's keep in episode 8. It's a solid campaign!
| Single Level WAD (Doom E1M8)
A crew of five space marines have been sent via armored truck to secure and contain a demon invasion in the UAC's branch in Jakarta, Indonesia. As you might expect, things don't go to plan, and you're the only survivor left inside an upturned truck amid a compound full of demons. This WAD is a real treat as Leo Martin Lim made some real painstaking amount of effort to make the UAC facility you fight through really look lived in and realistic, from the exploded cars out front to the trough urinals in the men's room. Continuing further leads you to the hellmouth that released all these demons in the first place, and is a stylish bit of technical wizardry as this is the first recorded example of the self-referencing sensors trick used by a lot of modders. The ultimate fight is in a circular arena against a Cyberdemon so plenty of wiggle room for circle strafing, but your escape route is destroyed by seismic activity and you have to blast your way out of a cave-in and out to safety. You should definitely check this one out!
July 19th, 1994 - Marilyn Manson releases their debut album Portrait of an American Family, initially recorded at Criteria Studios in Miami but later re-recorded at Trent Reznor's Le Pig, where the latter had recorded The Downward Spiral some months earlier.
| Doom Mod (Replaces E1M1 and E1M9)
Billing itself as "The Ultimate Czech Level", it is at least the earliest, and definitely one of the more inspired WADs to come out of 1994! This WAD is based off of a Czech comic of the same name and central premise, you play as one of two astronauts who are sucked through a black hole and land on a planet with overgrown monstrous megafauna. The central episode of the WAD revolves around escaping the wrath of giant spiders - multiple Spider Mastermind enemies in this case (don't bother trying to kill them all) into a cave system and a dilapaded train platform which has a fun little segment of trying to coordinate where the switches to hit are with a handy map inside the level itself. This WAD is farily noteworthy because this might be one of the few, possibly the only piece of media around this comic to have reached Western audiences in earnest, and it's worth considering how that wouldn't have been possible without Doom modding.
Devan Shell has kidnapped Eva Earlong, the princess of the planet Carrotus, and it's up to Jazz Jackrabbit to save her! Travelling to each of the planets Devan has conquered and destroying his operations, Jazz Jackrabbit is a PC platformer with a memorable atmosphere that's evocative of the Sonic series at the time but is distinctly a product of early Epic MegaGames. There are six episodes in total (not counting the included Holiday Hare expansion released later that year), and each episode is six levels on three different planets leading up to a boss encounter. Like a lot of games following in Sonic's footsteps, there's a constant focus on how to keep a level of speed while maintaining a degree of enemies to worry about, and Jazz Jackrabbit's approach is to allow you use of a gun to eliminate enemies before they have time to spawn. It works most of the time, but a large part of the gameplay revolves around level memorization especially on harder difficulties/playing for a speedrun. In addition to that connection to Sonic, the levels each have a sparse 8 minute time limit that only affects your score, but you typically will never go below the 4 minute mark unless you're playing for completionism. The first four boss levels are easy to cheese because the arena have elevated entryways, with the exception of the third boss as you have to hide in trenches and take potshots at Devan's turtle-shaped tank. Each boss level wraps up with a delightful animation and illustration to take you on the the next episode. A very nice gem, this one!
October 11th, 1994 - Korn releases their self-titled album after recording from May to August at Indigo Ranch Studios in Malibu, California.
| Net Revenue: Freeware N/A
You've been locked up in a weird prison! Thankfully, a fellow prisoner helps you escape before being gunned down in cold blood. From there, it's a race against hoards of guards and obstacles to finally escape! Created by Mark McIntyre only a few weeks after his Mark Land series, the game is a fairly direct narrative as you have to collect four white keys from several purple sub-bosses before escaping from the facility proper. It's tough going, but not impossible by any stretch, though some puzzles might have you loading saves if you're not careful!