This is exactly how I talk about those days with friends. Genre expectations were not so restrictive and it was more about exploration than exploitation, though

This is exactly how I talk about those days with friends. Genre expectations were not so restrictive and it was more about exploration than exploitation, though the latter was increasingly common as the 90s came to a close. I worked as a lowly artist & level designer on one of the later genre hybrids (Battlezone II) amidst the realtime strategy boom of the late 90s and as a young creator it was so much more fun to work in the spaces between genres where things hadn't been tried. I would have loved to have worked in the early/mid 90s when genres were even less well defined.