DOS

Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri

Trivia

Two demos were released for Terra Nova SFC. An early 1-mission demo with lots of missing features and a full-featured 3-mission demo later on. Interestingly enough, the 4 missions themselves do not appear in the full game and are exclusive for the demos.

Terra Nova apparently started out as an adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein's classic sci-fi novel, Starship Troopers. However, Looking Glass were unable to get the license, so came up with their own story and intricate universe, instead. The year after Terra Nova's release, Paul Verhoeven's film version of Starship Troopers hit the cinemas.

Contributed by Sam Jeffreys (3336) on Sep 05, 2002.

Upon completion of the campaign, you're shown some interesting statistics: the repair cost for your armor suit (i.e. how much damage you sustained), and the number of trees you destroyed.

TN is one of the few games that supported the 320x400 alternate resolution mode. The terrain looks MUCH better in this mode.

Reportedly what Looking Glass (technologies at the time) wanted to do with this game was to create an outdoors engine to complement System Shock's indoor engine and, hopefully, merge them on a third game. Was that game to be "The Dark Project"(Thief's original title)? who knows...

Opponents include a variety of mutant human sub-types. Graphics are excellent for the time and genre, though low-tech by later standards. One of the last DOS games that was any good, it build a cult following in the USA. Can be launched from a DOS prompt in Windows with some small preparations.

While the game didn't officially support VR headsets, the option was available anyway. If you had a pair of Virtual IO i-glasses!, a Forte VFX1 Headgear, or a VictorMaxx CyberMaxx, you could use it to do rudimentary head tracking.

The development team was known as "Team Schmitty."

The readme file suggests (just as the bartender in the FMV does) that "mixing alcaps and water makes a great imitation martini."

This game was in Gamespot's list of "The top ten games you never played".

A multiplayer add-on was planned ("Terra Nova Multi-Player Pack Coming." was written in the middle of the back of the CD booklet), although never released.

Although critically acclaimed, Terra Nova was a huge commercial flop. This (together with the equally unsuccessful project of 1997, British Open Golf) plunged Looking Glass in a financial crisis from which the company never recovered. Ultimately, Looking Glass had to close its doors in June 2000. (That, and Eidos was dumping $25 million into Ion Storm at the time --Ed.)