Operation: Inner Space

Each ship belongs to one of eight teams: the Avengers, Pirates, Predators, Enforcers, Renegades, Fuzzy Ones, Knights, and the Speed Demons. Each team has personality and behaviours; for example, the Knights tend to be helpful to their allies, whereas the Pirates enjoy looting other ships. The player can play as any ship from any team, except the Enforcers, who only police the levels as bots. Each team has pre-set relations with the other teams, which are not fixed and can easily change. Certain ships have special attributes, such as a cloak or shield.

Once the player has chosen a disk drive to "disinfect" and a ship (and therefore a team) to pilot, a directory to enter must be chosen. Once a directory has been chosen, the player is debriefed on the "wave", which includes which icons are present, which other ships are entering, and what hazards are present. Hazards include viruses, which infect icons, and turrets, which fire lasers or a specific type of weapon when a ship comes into close proximity. Upon entering a wave, the player's primary task is to collect each icon present.

The Inner Demon and its viruses have invaded the player's computer and infected its icons. Then the Inner Demon set up a lair in a black hole which changes position. Guarding this lair are four dragons each holding one of the Inner Demon's powers. Using a spaceship, the player goes into the computer's "Inner Space" to collect the uninfected icons and stop the Inner Demon. Along the way, the player will improve their ship and maintain relationships with the population of Inner Space.

Operation: Inner Space was developed in 1992 for Microsoft Windows 3.1. Software Dynamics were aiming to have the game running at 36 frames per second on 16mhz 386 PCs, and aimed to develop a native Windows game that rivalled the performance of DOS games. The idea to develop the game came about because Software Dynamics wanted to develop something new after developing screensavers. The development team did not want the game to be like others where the objective is to kill everyone, but rather to play with the opponents instead. They team aimed to create an artificial intelligence that felt like real opponents.

Another aspect they wanted to achieve was personalized worlds for each user. This was believed important because they thought consumers liked things customized just for them. Furthering this goal was the creation of the Ship Factory to enable players to create ships, which Bill Stewart, the game's director, stated was not easy. It was felt that the game should be funny, and to that end, the team "couldn't resist going wild" and created ships such as ducks, tigers, and Mig 29s, and made the fuel tanks change into items such as tea cups at certain times of day.

Operation: Inner Space received critical acclaim. Gamer's Ledge lauded the game, and described it as "An excellent example for other developers to emulate". Maximize Magazine said the game rivalled the best Macintosh games. PC Multimedia & Entertainment Magazine praised the artificial intelligence, and reviewer Michael Bendner was impressed that the game could fit onto one floppy disk.

The game made it into the finalists for Ziff Davis's 1995 Shareware Awards, where it was called "The best of a new breed of native Windows games". Happy Puppy Games praised the game's originality, describing the use of the hard disk contents as game elements as "simply brilliant". Windows Magazine called the gameplay "unique". The Shareware Shop complimented its "Excellent sound and graphics".