It’s hard to really describe to younger generations just what it was like.
I’m an elder millennial (1984) and the changes to games within my lifetime has been breath taking and staggering.
The first game I remember playing is River Raid on my brother’s Atari. I was a vaguely plane shaped black block.
A couple years later, I find myself playing Super Mario Bros. A few more and it’s SMB3 and I’m holding a gameboy in my hands on the road trips to Florida to see my grandparents.
Then the jump to SNES and Genesis. Seeing that depth and life seep into the characters… The music gaining in complexity…
I even had a Sega CD and I remember how mind blowing it was when Sonic turned and ran towards the back to go through a loop instead of just side to side.
Then for it was PS1 with Final Fantasy 7… Graphical cut scenes like moving works of art.
After this point, yes there was still obvious and sometimes bigger jumps… But this is where it all was SO different each generation. Not just seeing extra small details and polishes. Large, discrete jumps forward
I wish I could give my wonder to anyone who never got to experience it. It was an amazing time to live.
Its a truly unique experience that only WE experienced. Anyone much older, wasn’t interested in video games, and anyone much younger, was gaming in realistic 3D before they could understand what was even happening.
I feel it’s similar to the person in the early 1900s who had a horse & cart as a kid and experienced the invention of cars, highways, planes and eventually space travel.
N64 at the time appeared to be largely irrelevant within mainstream culture, in Europe at least. Not many people would have even knew of that game’s existence outside of magazine readers.
£70-£80 for new games (Irish punts by the way) which converts to €100 and that’s without adjusting for inflation. Jesus, the N64 really had no chance in Europe. Shame though.
Must give that game a go now though. Thankfully in hindsight we can all revisit some overlooked stuff.
I would have thought the Top Gear games would have been popular in Europe. The first two on the SNES were basically ports of Lotus and developed by Brits.
VR is great, but it’s just so hard to convince people with a trailer, it really is something that you have to experience, I’m glad there was a VR arcade here for me to try it out.
I have friends my age who won’t play games in anything below 1440p, 120Hz and I’m like… You are denying yourself a whole world of awesome games and experiences…
As a millennial born a few years before you, I don’t really appreciate the “elder” wording you used there. I’d threaten violence, but I hurt my knee walking the other day and I don’t think that’d be good for either of us.
Ps1 was just polygons, you could see all the edges and the games were not complex.
Then ps2 happened, now you get games like gta 3 and gran turismo. San Andreas was one of the longest and most in depth games in terms of all the mini games inside.
After that, came imo the peak of game graphics. Sure, some today might be technically better, but at the time, Crysis on very good hardware looked almost indistinguishable from reality. I remember seeing some highly detailed renders of people’s faces and thinking how it was just like real life.
After Crysis, there wasn’t really any other “big jump” unless you count the hard drive space requirements.
Having said that, bf3 and red dead 2 felt like milestones.
I remember walking into Blockbuster one day, and they had a playable Super Mario 64. I was blown away by a game where you could move in 3D with graphics like that.
I started out on a Commodore 64. I remember when I encountered my first 3d accelerated game, I think it was Microsoft Motocross Madness, at a friend’s house, IIRC he had a 400mhz pentium with a Matrox card, I want to say G400, but who knows, it was so long ago… Anyway 3D games were common, but not with accelerated graphics… It was mind-blowing.
This is a larger problem in our society at large: the financial class basically strangling creativity in search of ever increasing secure profit.
It sucks because the talent is all there to make these games and be creative but big money doesn’t want to take a chance.
So they shit out games that just reprise other things, remake old games, etc. for that more certain dollar. It’s no longer about making the best game of Z genre. It’s about ticking the most boxes to please the most people so the game will sell everywhere enough to fill greedy men’s pockets with money.
It’s hard to really describe to younger generations just what it was like.
I’m an elder millennial (1984) and the changes to games within my lifetime has been breath taking and staggering.
The first game I remember playing is River Raid on my brother’s Atari. I was a vaguely plane shaped black block.
A couple years later, I find myself playing Super Mario Bros. A few more and it’s SMB3 and I’m holding a gameboy in my hands on the road trips to Florida to see my grandparents.
Then the jump to SNES and Genesis. Seeing that depth and life seep into the characters… The music gaining in complexity…
I even had a Sega CD and I remember how mind blowing it was when Sonic turned and ran towards the back to go through a loop instead of just side to side.
Then for it was PS1 with Final Fantasy 7… Graphical cut scenes like moving works of art.
After this point, yes there was still obvious and sometimes bigger jumps… But this is where it all was SO different each generation. Not just seeing extra small details and polishes. Large, discrete jumps forward
I wish I could give my wonder to anyone who never got to experience it. It was an amazing time to live.
Its a truly unique experience that only WE experienced. Anyone much older, wasn’t interested in video games, and anyone much younger, was gaming in realistic 3D before they could understand what was even happening.
I feel it’s similar to the person in the early 1900s who had a horse & cart as a kid and experienced the invention of cars, highways, planes and eventually space travel.
My biggest “wow” effect was Gran Turismo (1). The moving reflections on the cars!
～(つˆ0ˆ)つ｡☆
N64 was doing that years earlier with Top Gear Rally
N64 at the time appeared to be largely irrelevant within mainstream culture, in Europe at least. Not many people would have even knew of that game’s existence outside of magazine readers.
£70-£80 for new games (Irish punts by the way) which converts to €100 and that’s without adjusting for inflation. Jesus, the N64 really had no chance in Europe. Shame though.
Must give that game a go now though. Thankfully in hindsight we can all revisit some overlooked stuff.
I would have thought the Top Gear games would have been popular in Europe. The first two on the SNES were basically ports of Lotus and developed by Brits.
The closest I’ve felt to those monumental leaps in recent history was the first time I played VR. It feels similarly mind-blowing.
VR is great, but it’s just so hard to convince people with a trailer, it really is something that you have to experience, I’m glad there was a VR arcade here for me to try it out.
I laugh every time I see the words “literally unplayable” because of minor headache
Started with Atari 2600, now VR simrig racing.
I have friends my age who won’t play games in anything below 1440p, 120Hz and I’m like… You are denying yourself a whole world of awesome games and experiences…
As a millennial born a few years before you, I don’t really appreciate the “elder” wording you used there. I’d threaten violence, but I hurt my knee walking the other day and I don’t think that’d be good for either of us.
I think the next couple jumps were very good too.
Ps1 was just polygons, you could see all the edges and the games were not complex.
Then ps2 happened, now you get games like gta 3 and gran turismo. San Andreas was one of the longest and most in depth games in terms of all the mini games inside.
After that, came imo the peak of game graphics. Sure, some today might be technically better, but at the time, Crysis on very good hardware looked almost indistinguishable from reality. I remember seeing some highly detailed renders of people’s faces and thinking how it was just like real life.
After Crysis, there wasn’t really any other “big jump” unless you count the hard drive space requirements.
Having said that, bf3 and red dead 2 felt like milestones.
PS2 was definitely a huge jump to me, too
The biggest detail for me being that characters blinked outside of cut scenes in higher resolution (for the time) games like The Bouncer.
It stopped feeling like leaps after that. And even that, for me, felt more like polish.
But I love the discussion and I like seeing where and how people draw the lines!
I remember walking into Blockbuster one day, and they had a playable Super Mario 64. I was blown away by a game where you could move in 3D with graphics like that.
I started out on a Commodore 64. I remember when I encountered my first 3d accelerated game, I think it was Microsoft Motocross Madness, at a friend’s house, IIRC he had a 400mhz pentium with a Matrox card, I want to say G400, but who knows, it was so long ago… Anyway 3D games were common, but not with accelerated graphics… It was mind-blowing.
Monster truck madness… played the hell out of that back in the day
I’m a bit older than you but I feel that games have stagnated. It’s the same games over and over again with some exceptions.
This is a larger problem in our society at large: the financial class basically strangling creativity in search of ever increasing secure profit.
It sucks because the talent is all there to make these games and be creative but big money doesn’t want to take a chance.
So they shit out games that just reprise other things, remake old games, etc. for that more certain dollar. It’s no longer about making the best game of Z genre. It’s about ticking the most boxes to please the most people so the game will sell everywhere enough to fill greedy men’s pockets with money.
Also being from '84, I can absolutely relate. Although I mostly skipped ps1 for the N64. Super Mario 64 was a masterpiece.
I vividly remember when I saw the first game with filtered textures on a vodoo 1 gpu. The individual pixels… were gone! It was mind blowing :)