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.
Gen alpha will never grow up with demo discs from pizza hut. I feel sorry for them. I spent so much time getting good at that crash bandicoot level though I was crap at that PaRappa the Rapper game.
Hey, I made that demo disc!
No way, how so??
I did the programming for it - the game selector, a special bootloader, and I think a video player?
Bro that’s awesome, that was such a formative part of my childhood! Thanks for making the world a brighter place
and I think a video player?
You probably remember that correctly. I don’t remember which demo disc it was on, but if you input a 574828 button string at the menu it played Korn’s Got the Life music video.
Wow, that’s cool!
Omg, wow is it this one? https://youtu.be/ZsjBBxBe4Qw
Not that one, but same era and same functionality. Maybe there was another company making those at the same time, I’m not sure.
It’s all in the mind.
If a game isn’t a demo I won’t play it.
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.
Mario 64 is still a fantastic game, it’s just the camera that sucks.
Thank god so many hacks fix it. I know it’s a lot to ask of the man, but I really hope Kaze releases his fixes as a standalone project.
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
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.
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 😀
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.
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I used to love playing a game called Trove. I’m sure it’s probably a p2w grindfest nowadays, but it was incredibly fun.
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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.
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I remember people talking about how hot Lara Croft was and I was so confused.
We’re you at peak teenage horniness at the time? There was a sweet spot you needed to be at to really appreciate it.
Google tells me it came out in 1996 and I was class of 1995, so post peak teenage horniness. Maybe that’s why?
I grew up squinting at lines and playing with the antenna on the UHF channels to try and see a boob from the Spice channel. Compared to that Lara Croft had it going on.
Triangle uni-boob making me act unwise…
Or you probably didn’t get to see what was usually shown for the advertising proper, where she’s considerably rounder
Hah, somewhere along the way someone made a texture hack for that game, Nude Raider haha!
Their hack was a bit tricky to install since it had to store the texture mod pack on the HDD while still allowing the game to access the CD drive, so I basically rebuilt my own ISO of the game with the modded textures included.
That’s some dedication to blocky nipples.
It’s because CRT’s also smoothed things a bit compared to modern TV’S
Combine that with the mind of a child and tests what you get
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!”
for its timeit was actually very impressing considering the price and the size of the device
Pong was mind-boggling
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The Jason and the Argonauts VFX team from 1963 are rolling their eyes at this