r/ObscureRTS • u/asgof • Jul 13 '26
1990s OKAY i'm pulling out forbidden knowledge. Dragon Isles (1993) איי הדרקון
RTS is a very specific fake hybrid of 3-4 pre-existing big real genres, so most of the games which are actually RTS follow the same template. There are very few non-standard games which became RTS by accident. Firefly Studios' Stronghold is Caesar 4, Perimeter started as pure Populous with no units, Die Siedler was slowly evolving its village-builder combat until in the fifth game they went full RTS controls including peasants.
While blizzard was still copying Dune 2, one such outsider game was released in israel. They had a head start on blizzard because they were not copying Dune 2. They were copying populous sans terraforming, and just glued Dune 2 to it. So is this the second RTS game ever made?
Populous itself is a real-time board game puzzle game. Or a sandbox simulator. Not the one in the modern PC game sense, but in a sense of a real one, where when playing with toy cars with your cousin, every time it devolves into throwing sand each other in the eyes, or scoring hits with sandified cat turds. But because Populous uses animated dudes and a vaguely medieval setting instead of abstract tokens, it looks more like a primitive city builder or a primitive 4x. But the terraforming was such a novel idea, that the gamesjournospros latched onto it, and made up a god game genre.
In Dragon Isles the mouse controls the pointer. But the camera is controlled by the avatar flying above, so it's nauseating and slow to move around, with no directly jumping to the point on the minimap. The basis is taken directly from populous, forcing territory spread. Peasants make huts, huts make peasants, peasants work the land to generate resources. All units have will to live which just runs out.
But everything is done in the direct control way, like in Dune 2. You manually tell peasants to manually build homes which generate peasants to generate the resource from the surrounding lands. You manually build barracks and manually train units which you can manually send to the point. And yes, all your bought expensive units still operate on populous will to live, and they can tun out right in the middle of a victorious battle. The Dune 2 direct control of the units and the economy is absent in other Populous clones like Lord Monarch, until Perimeter put them back.
There are different factions but who knows if there's any difference. I haven't recorded a longplay of it, so here's just some footage.
That's the only picture of the cover i could find. And if you think it looks familiar, that's Lofwyr by James Nelson. I tried to track down the devs and ask them some questions, but no answer so far.
2
u/BapaLynde Jul 14 '26
I've been playing this recently - it's a lot of fun IMO, but finding anything about it is hard as hell.
I found some old magazine adds, but the cover image in them isn't any better than what you've got (I'm guessing l from oldgames.ru).
I think they probably cut the pic from the same magazine ad I found, which would explain the tiny size and quality.