While using the Twitter search engine looking up terms involving rotating pixels/'mixels' and subpixel rotation, the writer came across a post by David Walter, the creator of Thunder Helix (showcased here: https://twitter.com/HiddenAsbestos/status/1501203058554028034), and one of the two developers with which the original post starts with.
These are two in-active-development games featuring arial combat taking cues from pre-Doom 3D games like flight simulators and such including the one mentioned prior and Tiny Combat Arena (showcased here: https://twitter.com/Why485/status/1502416666956898306) a being going by their Twitter handle of Why485. One's catch in their Twitter bio is "Solo dev making a new helicopter game from 1992." The other is even being published by a necently revived Microprose.
While keysearching Why485 for "minimalism", a reply comes up for one of their original posts from October of 2020, wherein they share a "gif" video of a 1991 flight simulator titled "F-117A Nighthawk Stealth Fighter 2.0". The visuals are striking, the low resolution of the flat-shaded 3D shimmers all over in a beautiful of color and jagged pixels at 30 frames per second.
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Also in a similar vein is this long-canned game by the Sub Rosa developer crypticsea, called A New Zero. A link to a 2012 demonstation on YouTube by the developer themselves: https://youtu.be/P_DeZUg9HiY
The description of it being less than 1MB while still having convincing enough movement instantly caught my eye those several years back in 2012. Similar to how the japanese-made X-Operations was less than 4MB in size and could likely fit in a floppy disk, despite being made in 2003 for Windows XP. That was an FPS game willing to do raw sound generation even for gunfire.
(https://youtu.be/RS_-FbBE-0I is one of the newest recordings the writer could find of this videogame). It's impressive where the developers cut corners to fit that file size. Even the keyframe animation of characters is slashed, there's no viewmodel for weapons (though an older videos show their existence), only a rotating window at most, and synthesized sound effects. Oddly enough, textures and a custom font are still implemented. This absolutely had to have been optimized for even the most paltry Intel Celeron and AMD Duron and it's awesome.
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Thank you for reading.
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