Comment by busterarm

Lamothe's Black Art book came out in '95. Abrash's black book came out in '97.

Borland C++ was pretty common and popular in 93 and we even had some not-so-great C++ compilers on Amiga in 92/93 that had some use in gamedev.

SimCity 2000 was written in C++, way back in '93 (although they started with Cfront)

An absolute fuckton of shareware games I was playing in the 90s were built with Turbo C++.