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Starting with Atari Games' Space Lords, there's this animated explosion sprite that has been used in multiple video games since at least 1992. The origins of this graphic are currently unknown (or as everyone likes to say today, this is "lost media").

Left to right: Space Lords, Rise of the Triad, Microcosm (3DO)
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No, this is not that other famous explosion sprite from Duke Nukem or Descent. Those came from Pyromania Pro.

Here it is in Space Lords...this particular one actually doesn't show up very often during gameplay:


Before I knew this sprite was in Space Lords, I looked through both currently available versions of Pyromania and another stock footage library "Artbeats ReelExplosions" for the missing explosion graphic. But, unfortunately, those libraries came out years later and the Space Lords explosion graphics were nowhere to be found.

Other later games known to use this particular special effect include a slew of PC games and arcade titles:

- MegaRace
- Microcosm (3DO Port)
- Rise of the Triad
- Pulstar (I think?? maybe a variant explosion?)

I also noticed that some of the other explosions in Space Lords also show up in Rise of the Triad too.

It must've been widely available in an early stock footage library or CGI asset pack at some point, considering that this can be found in games as late as 1995. European devs had access to the original source as well, so it wasn't exclusive to North America. Note that all the games listed here feature pre-rendered 3D graphics, which makes me think this explosion could've been included in some sort of CD-ROM related to modeling software like 3D Studio or something. I also looked through Autodesk's World Building Toolkit CD-ROM that was available during early versions of 3D Studio to no avail.

My theory is that there's an undumped special effects library out there that contains this graphic, or maybe there's an earlier version of Pyromania that has this missing explosion? I hope to find the answer someday.
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