Uploaded August 2022 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
Building fortresses, slaying monsters, and dueling rival wizards in Bullfrog Productions' Magic Carpet (1994), one of the most unique and technically impressive first-person games of all time.
More a first-person strategy game than a traditional first-person shooter, Magic Carpet tasks you with building a fortress and filling it with mana. The fortress essentially acts as a "main base" and even features one or more hot air balloons that automatically go out and collect mana claimed from fallen foes. You can of course also use mana yourself by casting spells, and there are dozens of them ranging from "Fireball" (which does exactly what you'd expect) to the devastating "Lightning Storm."
As you can probably tell by the video, Magic Carpet is also visually stunning for a 1994 game. In addition to shadows, deformable terrain, and reflective water, it even features some of the earliest implementations of anti-aliasing and motion blur (both of which were disabled for this video, since I felt YouTube's compression wouldn't treat them very kindly).
Unfortunately Magic Carpet is also difficult to emulate well since its speed is tied directly to the frame rate. If you crank up the CPU cycles in DOSBox, you'll probably just end up with a game that's unplayably fast. I was using 110000 cycles when recording this video, but even then (as you can plainly see) some areas resulted in some serious performance drops.
If you can push past the performance issues and tricky controls, Magic Carpet is a one-of-a-kind game that's totally worth checking out just for its premise alone.
Magic Carpet is available over on GOG at the following link:
gog.com/en/game/magic_carpet
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:14 Level 1: Al Jahan
05:26 Level 5: Cessecca
Building fortresses, slaying monsters, and dueling rival wizards in Bullfrog Productions' Magic Carpet (1994), one of the most unique and technically impressive first-person games of all time.
More a first-person strategy game than a traditional first-person shooter, Magic Carpet tasks you with building a fortress and filling it with mana. The fortress essentially acts as a "main base" and even features one or more hot air balloons that automatically go out and collect mana claimed from fallen foes. You can of course also use mana yourself by casting spells, and there are dozens of them ranging from "Fireball" (which does exactly what you'd expect) to the devastating "Lightning Storm."
As you can probably tell by the video, Magic Carpet is also visually stunning for a 1994 game. In addition to shadows, deformable terrain, and reflective water, it even features some of the earliest implementations of anti-aliasing and motion blur (both of which were disabled for this video, since I felt YouTube's compression wouldn't treat them very kindly).
Unfortunately Magic Carpet is also difficult to emulate well since its speed is tied directly to the frame rate. If you crank up the CPU cycles in DOSBox, you'll probably just end up with a game that's unplayably fast. I was using 110000 cycles when recording this video, but even then (as you can plainly see) some areas resulted in some serious performance drops.
If you can push past the performance issues and tricky controls, Magic Carpet is a one-of-a-kind game that's totally worth checking out just for its premise alone.
Magic Carpet is available over on GOG at the following link:
gog.com/en/game/magic_carpet
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:14 Level 1: Al Jahan
05:26 Level 5: Cessecca
