Absolutely Boggling
Absolutely Boggling
edit: This is actually an edited image I found years ago. I find the low poly bunnies slightly more funny than the original, which had skeletons.
As someone who was probably 10 or 11 when the Playstation came out I was absolutely boggled.
This is a poor screenshot to show the capabilities of the PlayStation though. The first playstation game that boggled my mind was crash bandicoot with it's fully expressive world, but the game that really blew me away was Mario 64 shortly after with its true freedom and wide open world.
I still remember the exalted feeling of playing Super Mario 64 in the toy store when I where a child.
Looking back, that was the peak of my life. That feeling of infinite possibilities, the feeling of living in the future.
All I've ever done since then is chasing that perfect moment, that instant of serenity at the apex of the trampoline jump that is my life.
Was 23, 24 myself. Fairly boggled....
Many forget (or don't realize) it wasn't the graphics alone, it was the smooth 3D motion.
Before the 3D console era (and the equivalent arcade machines) most "3D" motion was scaled and stacked sprites. The rest of the time we had 2D scrolling.
Two examples of the best of 16 bit 3D effects:
Which used 3x CPUs like the Genesis clocked at 12.5 Ghz
Compare to the first gen 3D console 3D effects:
It was very much like the difference between seeing a video of VR gameplay and experiencing VR yourself.
I remember seeing the screenshots in magazines (we used to update ourselves on the state of the industry with monthly or biweekly physical print media) and thinking "oh neat, but whatever..." and then I saw Battle Arena Toshinden being played at Toys'R'Us and that "oh neat" turned into "okay satan, you can have my soul for this"
We weren't blind, we knew the polygons were ugly as hell standing still, but seeing them move at 30 fps on a 25-inch CRT was downright sorcerous
Just an FYI, that Soul Edge video is it being played on a PS2 which upscaled the resolution and smoothed the textures. There was also a pretty big time gap between the Sega Y Board which came out in 1988 and the PSX which came out in 1995. While the PSX was a big jump in graphics over the previous console generation, the arcades had graphics that were similar several years earlier with the Sega Model 1 and 2.
The first PS game that really blew me away in terms of graphics was Gran Turismo. There were some other games that looked pretty good but Gran Turismo (specifically the replay feature) was head and shoulders above everything else.
Back in the day, just the idea of having an entire 3d world inside a computer was absolutely mind boggling. The first time I moved a cursor and the camera rotated, the entire game world shifting, I lost my mind. I remember thinking "how did they fit this world in there? How did they build this?"
It's what sparked my interest in programming.
I still remember the first time someone told me about EverQuest. I legit thought they were trying to trick me.
You have to put it in context and not look on it retrospective. I was absolutely blown away by the graphics of PS1
The PlayStation was capable of way more than this. Even in context this is a funny screenshot since it's a really poor demonstration of its capabilities. Also it's just funny to take historical things out of context in general but doubly so here since it's also a bad screen shot to show off the system.
A lot of advertising was super weird back then
status: boggled
It sure looks old and dated as fuck today, but when the 3D games of the time had some 500 triangles at most and run at 10FPS, having a console managing a couple thousand triangles at 30FPS was truly mind-boggling 😀
So there was this VR game in the 90s that you could play in malls called Dactyl Nightmare that had effects at about that level.
Seriously, we were blown away. There were huge lines. People would shell out five bucks over and over again to play it.
You have reminded me of an old old memory. I don't know where I was at the time and I was a little kid, but there was this VR headset thing with a stick. The stick was the controller for a lightsaber and the game I remember had like pterodactyls flying in it and then some ogre or something attacking you.
Honestly, these were crazy at the time. After doing sprites for so many years it was awesome.
Although it seems we're back here with the sprites.
A lot of the industry has finally learned that investment in the most realistic graphics doesn't offset lack of fun. I credit indie studios the most for that
Graphics have diminishing returns. Doubling the amount of polygons in the 90s meant enabling completely new kinds of games and going from blocky models you can barely distinguish from each other to something that looks like a character. Double the polygons now and the difference would be barely perceivable if at all.
I remember playing Resident Evil Outbreak (PS2) a couple of years ago and noticing how bad the graphics were (Compared with today graphics)
But also remembering how I was amazed how good the graphics were when I first saw when I was a child.
When I was 12, nothing would ever top the Dreamcast. Video game graphics had peaked, and were never going to get better than that. I mean, how could they? The games looked photo-realistic to my eyes!
When my best friend and I got the PS2 we went home and played Twisted Metal Black. I remember saying, “Bro, how much more real could it get?”
I wish he had lived long enough to see just how far the PS3 and Xbox 360 took it. Maybe my age is showing, but I’m still surprised by titles from that era sometimes.
I mean, not like I was when Drake put his hands on the wall in Uncharted 4, but still.
Meanwhile, all the moonlander deniers and their CGI theories:
Well, to be fair, Jurassic Park came out in '93. Playstation rendered it live at 27fps or whatever, with consumer affordable hardware.
Very little of it was actually CGI. The only parts were of the brontosaurus' at a very far distance. The rest was animatronics and puppets.
I don't think they really claim it was CGI though, just practical effects.
"Space was made in a Hollywood basement", from noted investigative journalists RHCP.
"Yes, this is an actual PC game screenshot!"
Pong was mind-boggling
for its timeit was actually very impressing considering the price and the size of the device
The Jason and the Argonauts VFX team from 1963 are rolling their eyes at this