In issue #3, I walked you through the humble beginnings of SE. This week I'm not going to take the next obvious route and thus I shy away from the Olympics and mentioning the Pocket-Hercules, Synchronized Swimming (and diving this year for the first time too!), or underwater polo (I'll take some of that please miss!) and instead shall continue down the same pixel-perfect, fully bump mapped, embossed and textured garden path as last week.
Those of you that wanted me to introduce the Rear View with an Olympic-themed intro in the same vein as the agonizing 50KM walk event, the one where they jiggle their bums/buns (yes I'm aware that Women's Distance Walking is now an event too) in that odd way, can wait a few weeks. See, I've nothing to say about the Olympics. I'm English and we don't do the Olympics very well (just ask EIDOS every four years). So without further ado (not adieu) let the games… er, this week's Rear View begin.
In lane one and favorite for this week, we have the Quantum 3D Raven review but we wish it were the Thorpedo. Even then, the Raven was far from a Thorpedo-style performer. Remember back in the old days when SLI (scan line interleave) was the coolest thing since chopped onions? It really was amazing. 3dfx gave you not only one Voodoo2 but for exactly double the price they gave you one more and with a small and bendy cable too, which left Creative Labs and Diamond with a split-level decision on how to actually cut the cable to the correct spec in order for it to work.
Adjoining the two 4/4/4 layout 12MB Voodoo2s in a render-fest at 180 Mpixels/sec became every gamer's best friend. Then 3dfx took their hard-learned success, superb know-how with technology that was so far in advance and did the nasty. They took away one TMU, added 2D and called it Banshee, hence starting the long and bumpy route of avalanche proportions from the top of the “We believe our own hype and press releases" mountain right down into 4th place and off the podium, just ahead of Matrox but certainly not behind Bitboys Oy or Gigapixel (they picked up that pile of snow on the way down and continue down the mountain together).
To this day, I truly believe that this was the turning point for 3dfx and their SuperG downhill slide (that's a winter Olympics event). And it wasn't because of some fancy technology, a military leader (depends on how you look at some of the former VPs at 3dfx), or even a drill instructor named Zim (yeah Starship Troopers- too easy). 3dfx started to lose their fan-boys and early technology adopters to NVIDIA then, who were waiting and watching, as “Bugs” do, with TNT, TNT2 and something more than "22-bits" of color.
Funnily enough, Quantum 3D decided to experiment a bit at the height of 3dfx' fame, flame, and shame and go all out into retail with probably some of most inferior technology that they'd laid their hands on- the Voodoo Banshee, which can only be described as better than Rush. Quantum 3D, folks, is a spin off of 3dfx and was/is the bees knees. They did all the “way out there” R&D-type stuff for 3dfx. All very ironic, stick with me and I'll explain.
After all, Quantum 3D were the first to introduce SLI and then got given the short end of the stick. Back in those days (when there was some sense of loyalty), if Quantum3D wanted to get into the retail business, they had little choice in the matter. It was either you get what you're given from 3Dfx (a Voodoo Banshee chip) or you hang about a while and get peeved with 3dfx (notice the little ‘d'? very important) when they go south. There was no running off up the 101 to NVIDIA, S3, Cirrus Logic (like anyone would run in any other direction but away from them at world record Olympic-100m pace) in those days. Et voila, that's the short-story of how and why the Voodoo Banshee, a 90MHz speed demon, became possibly the slowest performing screamin' demon to ever come out of Quantum 3D, who nowadays are responsible for all that fancy-pants vis-sim military truly jaggy-free (cos they do FSAA better than anyone else can for only $40k) renderings.
I'd hate to end on a negative (I'll use the Intel740 for that later) here but there was one saving grace for the Raven. In a mediocre-product-heavy environment, Quantum3D's software bundle looked like being a real winner and something to make them stand out from the crowd of Forsakens and G-Police (not exactly on the G-Money).
Quantum 3D pulled off quite the coop; even more successful than the one that Yeltsin curbed a few years back when he was still a drunk (how else could one end up talking trash on top of a soviet tank?). Using their close arcade ties with Midway, they managed to bundle two arcade classics before they hit retail. The two games were NFL Blitz (still a favorite) and a whacked-out version of San Francisco Rush. I say “whacked-out” because it seemed devoid of any AI or collision detection unlike the game with the same name in the arcades and never made it on to the PC anyway. Nice idea though and it certainly sold a few boards based on the bundle.
Here are a few more choice bits from that same time period:
Finally, I would have turned this whole thing into a Private Eye column (may have made for a good round-table discussion) but I think we killed it with the Xbox round-table charade. Once again, I'd like to apologize to any of you that are so sick and tired of the sight of video card reviews. As I was saying, we had humble beginnings and were hooked on video cards in the early years. I promise we'll get to the good parts soon, like Intel, NVIDIA and AMD roadmaps.
Anyone else for more? I mean more than is really required. Redundant, like the way the steroid-loaded Bulgarian weight lifting coaches must be feeling in Sydney now with no Bulgarian weight lifters left over (they all got chucked out) to inject full of “Gatorade and Castle Maine XXXX”. Well here's a review from not only two years ago but through some sort of timeportal, three (which is almost as long ago as the Atlanta Olympics, isn't it?). One of Microsoft's waggly things, which was way before they had their sight set on the Xbox.
In the time before GigaHertz and Megapixels, a truly interactive 3D environment was a rarity..."Unfortunately for innovative game designers, the necessity of keeping within a recognizably marketable genre is imperative so the extra bits have to be added in on the side. But somebody at Digital Illusions crammed in an awful lot of extra bits...I can't be the only one who's first reaction to a new real-time 3D game is where can I break it, what can I drive behind, fly under, poke about in. So my hat is off to any game design that allows noodle heads like me to drive around pushing cones, barrels and road dividers, even other cars in front of my souped up hot rod...playing bumper tag with another driver completely disregarding the timer, score and rules. This is really what hardware acceleration is all about: real-time 3D that creates unique play opportunities with other players beyond the original game design. Nobody in their right mind "designs" a sandbox, they just fill it with sand, some toddlers and a shovel or two. The kids figure out the rest."
Here are a few more tasty bits from our game review selection circa September 1998:
Going off-road for the final time (I had to figure out a silly way to integrate a bit of film-quiz 101), I've been asked a few times, “Sharky, what was the secret to your somewhat undeserved success, you cheeky &@$#@&%?”. I'm giving away a trade secret here so get your browsers ready. The simple answer is diet.
Without www.pinkdot.com and those 3am turkey and avocado sandwiches we'd be half the men and women we are both in size and stature. My thanks to them and to the late night delivery guys who managed to scare my poor old lady neighbor into such a state she imagined some sinister sub-plot that I'll leave to your imagination (think about late night deliveries in LA).
So eat well and your web site will have wooly-mammoth-sized potential. Oh and the first correct entry to this week's music/film quiz thing gets a game of his/her choice. I'll give you a clue it's a movie this week and music double, thus you'll need to be on your very best behavior and really, really old to win. At least twice my age I believe…. Redwood (the groovy www.stomped.com web guy), I'm worried about you. You're only a couple of years my senior and yet you've won the contest (IOU a game) two weeks running. Do you like 80s music that much?
I hope you've enjoyed this trip down memory lane. I know I have. A healthy dose of “boy, were you so wrong” should be a requirement in this job. So give me your feedback and hit the forums. Let us all know if we've changed for the better or worse and in the true spirit of yesteryear, I'm writing via a stream of consciousness so chill out, ok? Cheers for tuning in all this time. And if you're new to all of this and have not a bloody clue of what I'm talking about, don't fret. Just join the rest of the queue…
Alex “Sharky” Ross
Editor-in-Chieftan
A new feature? What? No sarky (“sarky” is used in the East end of London as colloquial term for sarcastic you little blighters) comments about the title/theme of this either… The weekend is once again upon us and even after two years of doing this thing we do, I still can't believe how much the industry has changed. Thus the thought of dedicating a new weekend feature to see just what we were saying back in the day, I felt, would be fitting. You'll see where we/I went right, where we got egg on our faces and where we went so far off road that we ended up southeast of Pluto.
Two years ago we were a slightly different outfit. Language was a little more risqué (parental discretion is advised), testing methods were very different, system specs were by today's standards a snails pace and best of all we had those charts with the bubble background (hey, they were “in” in '98!).