Oasis

Summary
Oasis would have been game released in the mid-90s for the MS-DOS series of PCs. The game would've been developed by Oasis Interactive and would've been published by Interplay, wishing for a competitor to Maxis' incredibly popular game SimCity.

Features
The game would've been a spin on the SimCity game formula, as the game would take place in a massive desert, where you, the city's mayor, would have to build a massive metropolis from scratch in the harsh environments of the desert. You'd have to deal with natural disasters, water droughts, no electricity, and much more.

You'd also have to deal with the ever-moving flow of time in the game. The game would begin in the time period of your choice: the 1930s-2020s. You'd have to manage how futuristic your city was. For example: if it was the 80s, and your city hadn't fully embraced television, you'd be in trouble. Eventually, a natural disaster would occur, and since you didn't have the necessary technology, everyone in your city would perish. The game would have a research tree much like the one found in the Civilization series of games, where you'd have to research one thing to be able to research another thing.

The rest of the gameplay would be of your average city-builder, with you managing everything your tiny pixelated civilians would want and need.

Another feature of the game would be of the city-sizes. This game would have massive city-sizes, reaching those of SimCity 4.

Graphics
The graphics for the game would be nothing less than amazing, for the time-period the game would release in. Everything would have so much immaculate detail to the very pixel. The game would look as if it were released in the 32-bit era of video-game consoles (even though it would be released on PC). One of the only things that would be rendered as 3D models would be the tiny cars, taking on a very low-poly look. Other than that, everything else in the game would be pixelated.

City-Building
The city-building in the game would be done as a mix of elements found in the normal SimCity games and the spinoff SimCity game SimCity: Societies released in 2007. It would really most be like the SimCity reboot of 2013, where you were able to place down certain buildings you'd want, while still utilizing the zoning feature. In Oasis, you'd be able to plop down a certain zone-type of your choice (residential, commercial, industrial) and be able to also choose the building type, such as a brownstone, restaurant, or sawmill. This would be easier for players to mold the cities that they'd want to create.

Game Modes
There would also be different game-modes that the player would be able to choose at the game's start-up. These game-modes would include:
 * Easy Difficulty (Light on the natural disasters and challenges)
 * Medium Difficulty (Fairly light on natural disasters and challenges)
 * Hard Difficulty (Medium with natural disasters and challenges)
 * Very Hard (Many natural disasters and challenges)
 * Soul-Crushing (Natural disasters and challenges at every turn)

Development
The development of Oasis would be one of tension. As Oasis Interactive's first game, Lord's Fantasy, underperformed at sales and critic analysis. If Oasis Interactive didn't succeed with Oasis, their company would surely go bankrupt and have to close their doors forever.

The development of Oasis began on June 23rd, 1992, a couple of months after they had released Lord's Fantasy. The game was originally planned for release on the SNES, Sega Genesis, and MS-Dos machines. With the SNES, the game would've initially utilized the consoles SNES mouse, used for such games as Mario Paint, etc. With the Sega Genesis, the consoles d-pad would've acted as a cursor, much like Maxis' game SimAnt released on the SNES. The game's graphics on the 16-Bit consoles wouldn't have been as advanced, nor as pretty on it's MS-DOS cousin, utilizing only pixels and not having as great a resolution would've affected the initial look of the game. Sadly, the port ideas that Oasis Interactive had envisioned never happened, and the game only released on MS-DOS.

Oasis was a hard game to develop for the new game studio. Having only produced one game before-hand and being severely under-staffed, every employee at the company had to do all-nighters nearly every single day. Many of the employees became sick because of these working conditions and had to take medical leaves. For the people still working, they had to race to meet Interplay's deadline for the holiday season of 1993.

However, the developers weren't able to meet that deadline, and released the game in January of '94, marking the end of the horrible Oasis development.

Reviews
Oasis released to an amazing reception, scoring 8 and 9 out of 10s across the books. Many gaming magazines stated the games extraordinary graphics for the time. Computer Gaming World noted, "While the game may have a few problems, it's really brought up by the spectacular graphics, mixing in 3D and 2D..." However, some of the issues people had with the game was the scope of the initial product. Many magazines said that there wasn't much to do after you already completed the beginning of the game.

Sales
Despite these issues, the game still went on to sell a massive 1 million units, saving Oasis Interactive and solidifying the eventual release of a sequel.