Lunicus was a 3D CD-ROM action game released in 1993. It was the first title from Cyberflix, who went on to create Jump Raven, Dust: A Tale of the Wired West, and Skullcrusher before the era of CD-ROM experimentation ended.

In the far future, aliens have taken over the earth and abducted many humans. Oddly enough, they overlooked the UN moon colony Mare Ibrium, which happens to be properly equipped and staffed to fabricate effective weapons and attack vehicles.

You, of course, are a hero pilot/soldier/tank driver on this lunar outpost. The other characters on the base perform all the research you need to get the job done; all you need to do is go down to Earth cities and blast the hell out of alien robots!

Lunicus was very good at sucking up hard drive space. To play the game at its proper speed, you had to copy one of two folders of frequently used game bits to your hard drive. One of these was around 30 megabytes, and the other was more than 80. Between different levels, the game engine would copy a LOT of data to your hard drive.

All this data was necessary because EVERYTHING is pre-rendered! "What?!", you say. Yes, the polygonal (no textures at all) terrain of the building interiors, city exteriors, enemies, alien motherships, etc. are all pre-rendered video, shoved into RAM and played back on the spot.

Gameplay for this title is pretty easy. You use the arrow keys to maneuver (forward, back, turn right, turn left) through your simplified-floor-plan universe, and you aim your gun with the mouse. In each level, you must destroy a host of enemies either within buildings or outside in the streets (with a tank). Once you have defeated enough enemies (i.e., the enemy meter is empty), you can go outside and attack the alien mind-control ship. Destroying it frees the city's inhabitants and deactivates all remaining alien robots! Hurray!

After you have liberated four cities, you get to destroy the alien mothership. Oddly enough, you rarely encounter any actual aliens, except when you encounter the leader of the aliens' hive mind (or something).

Lunicus was notable for the introduction of CyberMuppets, an automated character animation system. The creation of a CyberMuppet involves drawing different frames of animated facial expressions, which are fed into a program along with voice samples. This program analyzes the voice and creates the appropriate sequence. All the staff of the lunar base are CyberMuppets, as is the alien hive mind. You can enter two-way conversations with some of them by a set of phrases shown at the bottom of the screen.

Lunicus was released for Macintosh, and later for PC. It has trouble running on Macs with stereo sound (only the left channel plays) and on systems with anything newer than System 7.x. It won a Macworld World Class Award for best CD-ROM game, and in fact beat The Journeyman Project for the same award.