Masters of Doom
Just finished reading Masters of Doom, by David Kushner. Great book. As one of the many who has followed iD since the Doom/Keen days, it was a great nostalgic trip for me, as well as serving to connect a lot of dots that I hadn't been able to before.
It's a great historical document, too. The Doom/Quake/Half-Life era was really a revolutionary period in computer gaming. It blows my mind to think of the amount of money and time I spent trying to squeeze every last bit of performance out of my computer in those days. At the time, 30 frames per second felt like the sound barrier, like the threshold of heaven.
Seems like it'd be similarly interesting to have a history of 3D acceleration in the same time period, although I suppose it'd be drier, given that the topic probably lacks the human element and is irreducibly technical.
God, I remember when my first 3dfx card arrived in the mail. I was just out of college, living with my parents, unemployed, had no clue what I was going to do with my life, and was burning through savings like mad buying new hardware so that I could ignore what a shitty situation I was in.
I remember plugging the card into an open PCI slot, running a passthrough cable from my Matrox Mystique into the 3dfx so that the 3dfx could take over all the 3D rendering, and firing up Tomb Raider. It was like nothing I'd ever seen before, it looked so incredibly real. I'm sure now it'd look chunky and choppy and crappy as hell, but at the time it was breathtaking. Then I got ahold of GLQuake, and I was completely sucked in, playing until 6am a lot of nights over my parents' 56K connection. Was it even 56K? Maybe it was 28.8, or slower.
Doom really was the earth-shattering game, though. Even though it was visually sort of a hack, lacking true 3D environments, it was miles more real than anything we'd seen before. Its immersiveness bred obsessive replay, which bred familiarity, which bred deeper immersiveness. I knew those levels better than I knew my own dorm; I had a perfect mental model constructed in my memory, total situational awareness. I don't think any game since has had quite the same hold on me, although I've certainly played some of them to death.
It's a great historical document, too. The Doom/Quake/Half-Life era was really a revolutionary period in computer gaming. It blows my mind to think of the amount of money and time I spent trying to squeeze every last bit of performance out of my computer in those days. At the time, 30 frames per second felt like the sound barrier, like the threshold of heaven.
Seems like it'd be similarly interesting to have a history of 3D acceleration in the same time period, although I suppose it'd be drier, given that the topic probably lacks the human element and is irreducibly technical.
God, I remember when my first 3dfx card arrived in the mail. I was just out of college, living with my parents, unemployed, had no clue what I was going to do with my life, and was burning through savings like mad buying new hardware so that I could ignore what a shitty situation I was in.
I remember plugging the card into an open PCI slot, running a passthrough cable from my Matrox Mystique into the 3dfx so that the 3dfx could take over all the 3D rendering, and firing up Tomb Raider. It was like nothing I'd ever seen before, it looked so incredibly real. I'm sure now it'd look chunky and choppy and crappy as hell, but at the time it was breathtaking. Then I got ahold of GLQuake, and I was completely sucked in, playing until 6am a lot of nights over my parents' 56K connection. Was it even 56K? Maybe it was 28.8, or slower.
Doom really was the earth-shattering game, though. Even though it was visually sort of a hack, lacking true 3D environments, it was miles more real than anything we'd seen before. Its immersiveness bred obsessive replay, which bred familiarity, which bred deeper immersiveness. I knew those levels better than I knew my own dorm; I had a perfect mental model constructed in my memory, total situational awareness. I don't think any game since has had quite the same hold on me, although I've certainly played some of them to death.
posted by at 2:28 AM
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