Magic Carpet

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One of the reasons Magic Carpet didn't sell well was that many gamers thought it was just a ripoff of DOOM, even though they are completely different. Bullfrog unintentionally fostered this idea with a series of ads they ran for Magic Carpet, which contained hooks such as "BFG = BFD". The BFG is DOOM's strongest weapon, and BFD is an acronym for "big f***ing deal".

Bugs

The original release of Magic Carpet contained a bug which meant you could not complete level 50. This was later fixed with a patch and was rectified in all re-releases.

Engine

Magic Carpet had what was perhaps the best graphics engine of that time. The engine features, among other things: * Dynamically lighted, gouraud shaded, changable ("morphable") landscape. * Scene reflections in the water * Distance fog * Transparency effects, such as the transparent "HUD".

Missing levels

Magic Carpet does not contain all of the 50 levels described in the manual. The missing levels are: 9, 18, 29, 34 and 40.

References to the Game

The game made several appearances in the Australian soap Neighbours, as the Kennedy family owned it and were frequently seen playing.

Technology

• Magic Carpet was one of the first games to support 3D viewers/glasses in many different configurations. You can use virtual reality headsets, red/blue glasses... the program will even generate a realtime random dot stereogram!
• The first game to be enhanced for the then-new Pentium processor (as advertised proudly on the front of the box). Bullfrog recommended a P75 as the minimum system requirement, although the game ran on 486 processors and was playable enough on a 486DX/100.

3rd-person view of the main character

Early version of the game actually shows the main character on a carpet in 3rd-person view as opposite to 1st-person view in the final game.

Awards

• Computer Gaming World
  • November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) – #137 in the “150 Best Games of All Time” list
• Gamespot
  • One of "The top ten games you never played": The reason for the commercial flop of Magic Carpet seems to lie in categorization of games at that time. Most gaming-magazines labeled it at as a plain "shooter" despite the game's interesting and unique gameplay as a mix between action and strategy.
• GameStar (Germany)
  • Issue 12/1999 - #53 in the "100 Most Important PC Games of the Nineties" ranking
• PC Player (Germany)
  • Issue 01/1995 - Best Game in 1994
• Power Play
  • Issue 02/1995 – Best Game in 1994
  • Issue 02/1995 – Best Multiplayer Game in 1994
  • Issue 02/1995 – Best Action Game in 1994

Information also contributed by Accetone, Ashley Pomerov, BostonGeorge, Jeanne, Martin Smith, Matthew Bailey, Maw and Mickey Gabel