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A Dialog in Real Time (Strategy)

At the end of the 1990s, the two most popular genres in computer gaming were the first-person shooter and the real-time strategy game. They were so dominant that most of the industry’s executives seemed to want to publish little else. And yet at the beginning of the decade neither genre even existed.

The stories of how the two rose to such heady heights are a fascinating study in contrasts, of how influences in media can either go off like an explosion in a TNT factory or like the slow burn of a long fuse. Sometimes something appears and everyone knows instantly that it’s just changed everything; when the Beatles dropped Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967, there was no doubt that the proverbial goalposts in rock music had just been shifted. Other times, though, influence can take years to make itself felt, as was the case for another album of 1967, The Velvet Underground & Nico, about which Brian Eno would later famously say that it “only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band.”

Games are the same. Gaming’s Sgt. Pepper was DOOM, which came roaring up out of the shareware underground at the tail end of 1993 to sweep everything from its path, blowing away all of the industry’s extant conventional wisdom about what games would become and what role they would play in the broader culture. Gaming’s Velvet Underground, on the other hand, was the avatar of real-time strategy, which came to the world in the deceptive guise of a sequel in the fall of 1992. Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty sported its Roman numeral because its transnational publisher had gotten its transatlantic cables crossed and accidentally wound up with two separate games based on Frank Herbert’s epic 1965 science-fiction novelone made in Paris, the other in Las Vegas. The former turned out to be a surprisingly evocative and playable fusion of adventure and strategy game, but it was the latter that would quietly — oh, so quietly in the beginning! — shift the tectonic plates of gaming.

For Dune II, which was developed by Westwood Studios and published by Virgin Games, really was the first recognizable implementation of the genre of real-time strategy as we have come to know it since. You chose one of three warring trading houses to play, then moved through a campaign made up of a series of set-piece scenarios, in which your first goal was always to make yourself an army by gathering resources and using them to build structures that could churn out soldiers, tanks, aircraft, and missiles, all of which you controlled by issuing them fairly high-level orders: “go here,” “harvest there,” “defend this building,” “attack that enemy unit.” Once you thought you were strong enough, you could launch your full-on assault on the enemy — or, if you weren’t quick enough, you might find yourself trying to fend off his attack. What made it so different from most of the strategy games of yore was right there in the name: in the fact that it all played out in real time, at a pace that ranged from the brisk to the frantic, making it a test of your rapid-fire mousemanship and your ability to think on your feet. Bits and pieces of all this had been seen before — perhaps most notably in Peter Molyneux and Bullfrog’s Populous and the Sega Genesis game Herzog Zwei — but Dune II was where it all came together to create a gaming paradigm for the ages.

That said, Dune II was very much a diamond in the rough, a game whose groundbreaking aspirations frequently ran up against the brick wall of its limitations. It’s likely to leave anyone who has ever played almost any other real-time-strategy game seething with frustration. It runs at a resolution of just 320 X 200, giving only the tiniest window into the battlefield; it only lets you select and control one unit at a time, making coordinated attacks and defenses hard to pull off; its scenarios are somewhat rote exercises, differing mainly in the number of enemy hordes they throw against you as you advance through the campaign rather than the nature of the terrain or your objectives. Even its fog of war is wonky: the whole battlefield is blank blackness until one of your units gets within visual range, after which you can see everything that goes on there forevermore, whether any of your units can still lay eyes on it or not. And it has no support whatsoever for the multiplayer free-for-alls that are for many or most players the biggest draw of the genre.

Certainly Virgin had no inkling that they had a nascent ludic revolution on their hands. They released Dune II with more of a disinterested shrug than a fulsome fanfare, having expended most of their promotional energies on the other Dune, which had come out just a few months earlier. It’s a testimony to the novelty of the gameplay experience that it did as well as it did. It didn’t become a massive hit, but it sold well enough to earn its budget back and then some on the strength of reasonably positive reviews — although, again, no reviewer had the slightest notion that he was witnessing the birth of what would be one of the two hottest genres in gaming six years in the future. Even Westwood seemed initially to regard Dune II as a one-and-done. They wouldn’t release another game in the genre they had just invented for almost three years.

But the gaming equivalent of all those budding bedroom musicians who listened to that Velvet Underground record was also out there in the case of Dune II. One hungry, up-and-coming studio in particular decided there was much more to be done with the approach it had pioneered. And then Westwood themselves belatedly jumped back into the fray. Thanks to the snowball that these two studios got rolling in earnest during the mid-1990s, the field of real-time strategy would be well and truly saturated by the end of the decade, the yin to DOOM‘s yang. This, then, is the tale of those first few years of these two studios’ competitive dialog, over the course of which they turned the real-time strategy genre from a promising archetype into one of gaming’s two biggest, slickest crowd pleasers.


Blizzard Studios is one of the most successful in the history of gaming, so much so that it now lends its name to the Activision Blizzard conglomerate, with annual revenues in the range of $7.5 billion. In 1993, however, it was Westwood, flying high off the hit dungeon crawlers Eye of the Beholder and Lands of Lore, that was by far the more recognizable name. In fact, Blizzard wasn’t even known yet as Blizzard.

The company had been founded in late 1990 by Allen Adham and Mike Morhaime, a couple of kids fresh out of university, on the back of a $15,000 loan from Morhaime’s grandmother. They called their venture Silicon & Synapse, setting it up in a hole-in-the-wall office in Costa Mesa, California. They kept the lights on initially by porting existing games from one platform to another for publishers like Interplay — the same way, as it happened, that Westwood had gotten off the ground almost a decade before. And just as had happened for Westwood, Silicon & Synapse gradually won opportunities to make their own games once they had proven themselves by porting those of others. First there was a little auto-racing game for the Super Nintendo called RPM Racing, then a pseudo-sequel to it called Rock ‘n’ Roll Racing, and then a puzzle platformer called The Lost Vikings, which appeared for the Sega Genesis, MS-DOS, and the Commodore Amiga in addition to the Super Nintendo. None of these titles took the world by storm, but they taught Silicon & Synapse what it took to create refined, playable, mass-market videogames from scratch. All three of those adjectives have continued to define the studio’s output for the past 30 years.

It was now mid-1993; Silicon & Synapse had been in business for more than two and a half years already. Adham and Morhaime wanted to do something different — something bigger, something that would be suitable for computers only rather than the less capable consoles, a real event game that would get their studio’s name out there alongside the Westwoods of the world. And here there emerged another of their company’s future trademarks: rather than invent something new from whole or even partial cloth, they decided to start with something that already existed, but make it better than ever before, polishing it until it gleamed. The source material they chose was none other than Westwood’s Dune II, now relegated to the bargain bins of last year’s releases, but a perennial after-hours favorite at the Silicon & Synapse offices. They all agreed as to the feature they most missed in Dune II: a way to play it against other people, like you could its ancestor Populous. The bane of most multiplayer strategy games was their turn-based nature, which left you waiting around half the time while your buddy was playing. Real-time strategy wouldn’t have this problem of downtime.

That became the design brief for Warcraft: Orcs & Humans: remake Dune II but make it even better, and then add a multiplayer feature. And then, of course, actually try to sell the thing in all the ways Virgin had not really tried to sell its inspiration.

To say that Warcraft was heavily influenced by Dune II hardly captures the reality. Most of the units and buildings to hand have a direct correspondent in Westwood’s game. Even the menu of icons on the side of the screen is a virtual carbon copy — or at least a mirror image. “I defensively joked that, while Warcraft was certainly inspired by Dune II, [our] game was radically different,” laughs Patrick Wyatt, the lead programmer and producer on the project. “Our radar mini-map was in the upper left corner of the screen, whereas theirs was in the bottom right corner.”

In the same spirit of change, Silicon & Synapse replaced the desert planet of Arrakis with a fantasy milieu pitting, as the subtitle would suggest, orcs against humans. The setting and the overall look of Warcraft owe almost as much to the tabletop miniatures game Warhammer as the gameplay does to Dune II; a Warhammer license was seriously considered, but ultimately rejected as too costly and potentially too restrictive. Years later, Wyatt’s father would give him a set of Warhammer miniatures he’d noticed in a shop: “I found these cool toys and they reminded me a lot of your game. You might want to have your legal department contact them because I think they’re ripping you off.”

Suffice to say, then, that Warcraft was even more derivative than most computer games. The saving grace was the same that it would ever be for this studio: that they executed their mishmash of influences so well. The squishy, squint-eyed art is stylized like a cartoon, a wise choice given that the game is still limited to a resolution of just 320 X 200, so that photo-realism is simply not on the cards. The overall look of Warcraft has more in common with contemporary console games than the dark, gritty aesthetic that was becoming so popular on computers. The guttural exclamations of the orcs and the exaggerated Monty Python and the Holy Grail-esque accents of the humans, all courtesy of regular studio staffers rather than outside voice actors, become a chorus line as you order them hither and yon, making Dune II seem rather stodgy and dull by comparison. “We felt too many games took themselves too seriously,” says Patrick Wyatt. “We just wanted to entertain people.”

Slavishly indebted though it is to Dune II in all the broad strokes, Warcraft doesn’t neglect to improve on its inspiration in those nitty-gritty details that can make the difference between satisfaction and frustration for the player. It lets you select up to four units and give them orders at the same time by simply dragging a box around them, a quality-of-life addition whose importance is difficult to overstate, one so fundamental that no real-time-strategy game from this point forward would dare not to include it. Many more keyboard shortcuts are added, a less technically impressive addition but one no less vital to the cause of playability when the action starts to heat up. There are now two resources you need to harvest, lumber and gold, in places of Dune II‘s all-purpose spice. Units are now a little more intelligent about interpreting your orders, such that they no longer blithely ignore targets of opportunity, or let themselves get mauled to death without counterattacking just because you haven’t explicitly told them to. Scenario design is another area of marked improvement: whereas every Dune II scenario is basically the same drill, just with ever more formidable enemies to defeat, Warcraft‘s are more varied and arise more logically out of the story of the campaign, including a couple of special scenarios with no building or gathering at all, where you must return a runaway princess to the fold (as the orcs) or rescue a stranded explorer (as the humans).

The orc on the right who’s stroking his “sword” looks so very, very wrong — and this screenshot doesn’t even show the animation…

And, as the cherry on top, there was multiplayer support. Patrick Wyatt finished his first, experimental implementation of it in June of 1994, then rounded up a colleague in the next cubicle over so that they could became the first two people ever to play a full-fledged real-time-strategy game online. “As we started the game, I felt a greater sense of excitement than I’d ever known playing any other game,” he says.

It was just this magic moment, because it was so invigorating to play against a human and know that it wasn’t some stupid AI. It was a player who was smart and doing his absolute best to crush you. I knew we were making a game that would be fun, but at that moment I knew the game would absolutely kick ass.

While work continued on Warcraft, the company behind it was going through a whirlwind of changes. Recognizing at long last that “Silicon & Synapse” was actually a pretty terrible name, Adham and Morhaime changed it to Chaos Studios, which admittedly wasn’t all that much better, in December of 1993. Two months later, they got an offer they couldn’t refuse: Davidson & Associates, a well-capitalized publisher of educational software that was looking to break into the gaming market, offered to buy the freshly christened Chaos for the princely sum of $6.75 million. It was a massive over-payment for what was in all truth a middling studio at best, such that Adham and Morhaime felt they had no choice but to accept, especially after Davidson vowed to give them complete creative freedom. Three months after the acquisition, the founders decided they simply had to find a decent name for their studio before releasing Warcraft, their hoped-for ticket to the big leagues. Adham picked up a dictionary and started leafing through it. He hit pay dirt when his eyes flitted over the word “blizzard.” “It’s a cool name! Get it?” he asked excitedly. And that was that.

So, Warcraft hit stores in time for the Christmas of 1994, with the name of “Blizzard Entertainment” on the box as both its developer and its publisher — the wheels of the latter role being greased by the distributional muscle of Davidson & Associates. It was not immediately heralded as a game that would change everything, any more than Dune II had been; real-time strategy continued to be more of a slowly growing snowball than the ton of bricks to the side of the head that the first-person shooter had been. Computer Gaming World magazine gave Warcraft a cautious four stars out of five, saying that “if you enjoy frantic real-time games and if you don’t mind a linear structure in your strategic challenges, Warcraft is a good buy.” At the same time, the extent of the game’s debt to Dune II was hardly lost on the reviewer: “It’s a good thing for Blizzard that there’s no precedent for ‘look and feel’ lawsuits in computer entertainment.”[1]This statement was actually not correct; makers of standup arcade games of the classic era and the makers of Tetris had successfully cowed the cloning competition in the courts.

Warcraft would eventually sell 400,000 units, bettering Dune II‘s numbers by a factor of four or more. As soon as it became clear that it was doing reasonably well, Blizzard started on a sequel.


Out of everyone who looked at Warcraft, no one did so with more interest — or with more consternation at its close kinship with Dune II — than the folks at Westwood. “When I played Warcraft, the similarities between it and Dune II were pretty… blatant, so I didn’t know what to think,” says the Westwood designer Adam Isgreen. Patrick Wyatt of Blizzard got the impression that his counterparts “weren’t exactly happy” at the slavish copying when they met up at trade shows, though he “reckoned they should have been pleased that we’d taken their game as a base for ours.” Only gradually did it become clear why Warcraft‘s existence was a matter of such concern for Westwood: because they themselves had finally decided to make another game in the style of Dune II.

The game that Westwood was making could easily have wound up looking even more like the one that Blizzard had just released. The original plan was to call it Command & Conquer: Fortress of Stone and to set it in a fantasy world. (Westwood had been calling their real-time-strategy engine “Command & Conquer” since the days of promoting Dune II.) “It was going to have goldmines and wood for building things. Sound familiar?” chuckles Westwood’s co-founder Louis Castle. “There were going to be two factions, humans and faerie folk… pretty fricking close to orcs versus humans.”

Some months into development, however, Westwood decided to change directions, to return to a science-fictional setting closer to that of Dune II. For they wanted their game to be a hit, and it seemed to them that fantasy wasn’t the best guarantee of such a thing: CRPGs were in the doldrums, and the most recent big strategy release with a fantasy theme, MicroProse’s cult-classic-to-be Master of Magic, hadn’t done all that well either. Foreboding near-future stories, however, were all the rage; witness the stellar sales of X-COM, another MicroProse strategy game of 1994. “We felt that if we were going to make something that was massive,” says Castle, “it had to be something that anybody and everybody could relate to. Everybody understands a tank; everybody understands a guy with a machine gun. I don’t have to explain to them what this spell is.” Westwood concluded that they had made the right decision as soon as they began making the switch in software: “Tanks and vehicles just felt better.” The game lost its subtitle to become simply Command & Conquer.

While the folks at Blizzard were plundering Warhammer for their units and buildings, those at Westwood were trolling the Jane’s catalogs of current military hardware and Soldier of Fortune magazine. “We assumed that anything that was talked about as possibly coming was already here,” says Castle, “and that was what inspired the units.” The analogue of Dune II‘s spice — the resource around which everything else revolved — became an awesomely powerful space-born element come to earth known as tiberium.

Westwood included most of the shortcuts and conveniences that Blizzard had built into Warcraft, but went one or two steps further more often than not. For example, they also made it possible to select multiple units by dragging a box around them, but in their game there was no limit to the number of units that could be selected in this way. The keyboard shortcuts they added not only let you quickly issue commands to units and buildings, but also jump around the map instantly to custom viewpoints you could define. And up to four players rather than just two could now play together at once over a local network or the Internet, for some true mayhem. Then, too, scenario design was not only more varied than in Dune II but was even more so than in Warcraft, with a number of “guerilla” missions in the campaigns that involved no resource gathering or construction. It’s difficult to say to what extent these were cases of parallel innovation and to what extent they were deliberate attempts to one-up what Warcraft had done. It was probably a bit of both, given that Warcraft was released a good nine months before Command & Conquer, giving Westwood plenty of time to study it.

But other innovations in Command & Conquer were without any precedent. The onscreen menus could now be toggled on and off, for instance, a brilliant stroke that gave you a better view of the battlefield when you really needed it. Likewise, Westwood differentiated the factions in the game in a way that had never been done before. Whereas the different houses in Dune II and the orcs and humans in Warcraft corresponded almost unit for unit, the factions in Command & Conquer reflected sharply opposing military philosophies, demanding markedly different styles of play: the establishment Global Defense Initiative had slow, strong, and expensive units, encouraging a methodical approach to building up and husbanding your forces, while the terroristic Brotherhood of Nod had weaker but faster and cheaper minions better suited to madcap kamikaze rushes than carefully orchestrated combined-arms operations.

Yet the most immediately obvious difference between Command & Conquer and Warcraft was all the stuff around the game. Warcraft had been made on a relatively small budget with floppy disks in mind. It sported only a brief opening cinematic, after which scenario briefings consisted of nothing but scrolling text and a single voice over a static image. Command & Conquer, by contrast, was made for CD-ROM from the outset, by a studio with deeper pockets that had invested a great deal of time and energy into both 3D animation and full-motion video, that trendy art of incorporating real-world actors and imagery into games. The much more developed story line of Command & Conquer is forwarded by little between-mission movies that, if not likely to make Steven Spielberg nervous, are quite well-done for what they are, featuring as they do mostly professional performers — such as a local Las Vegas weatherman playing a television-news anchorman — who were shot by a real film crew in Westwood’s custom-built blue-screen studio. Westwood’s secret weapon here was Joseph Kucan, a veteran theater director and actor who oversaw the film shoots and personally played the charismatic Nod leader Kane so well that he became the very face of Command & Conquer in the eyes of most gamers, arguably the most memorable actual character ever associated with a genre better known for its hordes of generic little automatons. Louis Castle reckons that at least half of Command & Conquer‘s considerable budget went into the cut scenes.

The game was released with high hopes in August of 1995. Computer Gaming World gave it a pretty good review, four stars out of five: “The entertainment factor is high enough and the action fast enough to please all but the most jaded wargamers.”

The gaming public would take to it even more than that review might imply. But in the meantime…


As I noted in an earlier article, numbered sequels weren’t really commonplace for strategy games prior to the mid-1990s. Blizzard had originally imagined Warcraft as a strategy franchise of a different stripe: each game bearing the name would take the same real-time approach into a completely different milieu, as SSI was doing at the time with their “5-Star General” series of turn-based strategy games that had begun with Panzer General and continued with the likes of Fantasy General and Star General. But Blizzard soon decided to make their sequel a straight continuation of the first game, an approach to which real-time strategy lent itself much more naturally than more traditional styles of strategy game; the set-piece story of a campaign could, after all, always be continued using all the ways that Hollywood had long since discovered for keeping a good thing going. The only snafu was that either the orcs or the humans could presumably have won the war in the first game, depending on which side the player chose. No matter: Blizzard decided the sequel would be more interesting if the orcs had been the victors and ran with that.

Which isn’t to say that building upon its predecessor’s deathless fiction was ever the real point of Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness. Blizzard knew now that they had a competitor in Westwood, and were in any case eager to add to the sequel all of the features and ideas that time had not allowed them to include in the first game. There would be waterways and boats to sail on them, along with oil, a third resource, one that could only be mined at sea. Both sides would get new units to play with, while elves, dwarves, trolls, ogres, and goblins would join the fray as allies of one of the two main racial factions. The interface would be tweaked with another welcome shortcut: selecting a unit and right-clicking somewhere would cause it to carry out the most logical action there without having to waste time choosing from a menu. (After all, if you selected a worker unit and sent him to a goldmine, you almost certainly wanted him to start collecting gold. Why should you have to tell the game the obvious in some more convoluted fashion?)

But perhaps the most vital improvement was in the fog of war. The simplistic implementations of same seen in the first Warcraft and Command & Conquer were inherited from Dune II: areas of the map that had been seen once by any of your units were revealed permanently, even if said units went away or were destroyed. Blizzard now made it so that you would see only a back-dated snapshot of areas currently out of your units’ line of sight, reflecting what was there the last time one of your units had eyes on them. This innovation, no mean feat of programming on the part of Patrick Wyatt, brought a whole new strategic layer to the game. Reconnaissance suddenly became something you had to think about all the time, not just once.

Other improvements were not so conceptually groundbreaking, but no less essential for keeping ahead of the Joneses (or rather the Westwoods). For example, Blizzard raised the screen-resolution stakes, from 320 X 200 to 640 X 480, even as they raised the number of people who could play together online from Command & Conquer‘s four to eight. And, while there was still a limit on the number of units you could select at one time using Blizzard’s engine, that limit at least got raised from the first Warcraft‘s four to nine.

The story and its presentation, however, didn’t get much more elaborate than last time out. While Westwood was hedging its bets by keeping one foot in the “interactive movie” space of games like Wing Commander III, Blizzard was happy to “just” make Warcraft a game. The two series were coming to evince very distinct personalities and philosophies, just as gamers were sorting themselves into opposing groups of fans — with a large overlap of less partisan souls in between them, of course.

Released in December of 1995, Warcraft II managed to shake Computer Gaming World free of some of its last reservations about the burgeoning genre of real-time strategy, garnering four and a half stars out of five: “If you enjoy fantasy gaming, then this is a sure bet for you.” It joined Command & Conquer near the top of the bestseller lists, becoming the game that well and truly made Blizzard a name to be reckoned with, a peer in every sense with Westwood.

Meanwhile, and despite the sometimes bitter rivalry between the two studios and their fans, Command & Conquer and Warcraft II together made real-time strategy into a commercial juggernaut. Both games became sensations, with no need to shirk from comparison to even DOOM in terms of their sales and impact on the culture of gaming. Each eventually sold more than 3 million copies, numbers that even the established Westwood, much less the upstart Blizzard, had never dreamed of reaching before, enough to enshrine both games among the dozen or so most popular computer games of the entire 1990s. More than three years after real-time strategy’s first trial run in Dune II, the genre had arrived for good and all. Both Westwood and Blizzard rushed to get expansion packs of additional scenarios for their latest entries in the genre to market, even as dozens of other developers dropped whatever else they were doing in order to make real-time-strategy games of their own. Within a couple of years, store shelves would be positively buckling under the weight of their creations — some good, some bad, some more imaginative, some less so, but all rendered just a bit anonymous by the sheer scale of the deluge. And yet even the most also-ran of the also-rans sold surprisingly well, which explained why they just kept right on coming. Not until well into the new millennium would the tide begin to slacken.


With Command & Conquer and Warcraft II, Westwood and Blizzard had arrived at an implementation of real-time strategy that even the modern player can probably get on with. Yet there is one more game that I just have to mention here because it’s so loaded with a quality that the genre is known for even less than its characters: that of humor. Command & Conquer: Red Alert is as hilarious as it is unexpected, the only game of this style that’s ever made me laugh out loud.

Red Alert was first envisioned as a scenario pack that would move the action of its parent game to World War II. But two things happened as work progressed on it: Westwood decided it was different enough from the first game that it really ought to stand alone, and, as designer Adam Isgreen says, “we found straight-up history really boring for a game.” What they gave us instead of straight-up history is bat-guano insane, even by the standards of videogame fictions.

We’re in World War II, but in a parallel timeline, because Albert Einstein — why him? I have no idea! — chose to travel back in time on the day of the Trinity test of the atomic bomb and kill Adolf Hitler. Unfortunately, all that’s accomplished is to make world conquest easier for Joseph Stalin. Now Einstein is trying to save the democratic world order by building ever more powerful gadgets for its military. Meanwhile the Soviet Union is experimenting with the more fantastical ideas of Nikola Tesla, which in this timeline actually work. So, the battles just keep getting crazier and crazier as the game wears on, with teleporters sending units jumping instantly from one end of the map to the other, Tesla coils zapping them with lightning, and a fetching commando named Tanya taking out entire cities all by herself when she isn’t chewing the scenery in the cut scenes. Those actually display even better production values than the ones in the first game, but the script has become pure, unadulterated camp worthy of Mel Brooks, complete with a Stalin who ought to be up there singing and dancing alongside Der Führer in Springtime for Hitler. Even our old friend Kane shows up for a cameo. It’s one of the most excessive spectacles of stupidity I’ve ever seen in a game… and one of the funniest.

Joseph Stalin gets rough with an underling. When you don’t have the Darth Vader force grip, you have to do things the old-fashioned way…

Up there at the top is the killer commando Tanya, who struts across the battlefield with no regard for proportion.

Released in the dying days of 1996, Red Alert didn’t add that much that was new to the real-time-strategy template, technically speaking; in some areas such as fog of war, it still lagged behind the year-old Warcraft II. Nonetheless, it exudes so much joy that it’s by far my favorite of the games I’ve written about today. If you ask me, it would have been a better gaming world had the makers of at least a few of the po-faced real-time-strategy games that followed looked here for inspiration. Why not? Red Alert too sold in the multiple millions.



Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.



(Sources: the book Stay Awhile and Listen, Book I by David L. Craddock; Computer Gaming World of January 1995, March 1995, December 1995, March 1996, June 1996, September 1996, December 1996, March 1997, June 1997, and July 1997; Retro Gamer 48, 111, 128, and 148; The One of January 1993; the short film included with the Command & Conquer: The First Decade game collection. Online sources include Patrick Wyatt’s recollections at his blog Code of Honor, Dan Griliopoulos’s collection of interviews with Westwood alumni at Funambulism, Soren Johnson’s interview with Louis Castle for his Designer’s Notes podcast, and Richard Moss’s real-time-strategy retrospective for Ars Technica.

Warcraft: Orcs & Humans and Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, are available as digital purchases at GOG.com. The first Command & Conquer and Red Alert are available in remastered versions as a bundle from Steam.)

Footnotes

Footnotes
1 This statement was actually not correct; makers of standup arcade games of the classic era and the makers of Tetris had successfully cowed the cloning competition in the courts.
 

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Tomb Raider

If you have to stare at someone’s bum, it’s far better to look at a nice female bum than a bloke’s bum!

— Adrian Smith of Core Design

There was something refreshing about looking at the screen and seeing myself as a woman. Even if I was performing tasks that were a bit unrealistic… I still felt like, hey, this is a representation of me, as myself, as a woman. In a game. How long have we waited for that?

— gamer Nikki Douglas

Sure, she’s powerful and assertive. She takes care of herself, and she knows how to handle a gun. She’s a great role model for girls. But how many copies of Tomb Raider do you think they’d have sold if they’d made Lara Croft flat-chested?

— Charles Ardai, Computer Gaming World

It strikes me that Lara Croft must be the most famous videogame character in history if you take the word “character” literally. Her only obvious competition comes from the Nintendo stable — from Super Mario and Pac-Man and all the rest. But they aren’t so much characters as eternal mascots, archetypes out of time in the way of Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny. Lara, on the other hand, has a home, a reasonably coherent personal chronology, a reasonably fleshed-out personality — heck, she even has a last name!

Of course, Lara is by no means alone in any of these things among videogame stars. Nevertheless, for all the cultural inroads that gaming has made in recent decades, most people who don’t play games will still give you a blank stare if you try to talk to them about any of our similarly well-rounded videogame characters. Mention Solid Snake, Cloud, or Gordon Freeman to them and you’ll get nothing. But Lara is another story. After twenty games that have sold almost 100 million copies combined and three feature films whose box-office receipts approach $1 billion, everybody not living under a proverbial rock has heard of Lara Croft. Love her or hate her, she has become one of us in a way that none of her peers can match.



Lara’s roots reach back to the first wave of computer gaming in Britain, to the era when Sinclair Spectrums and Commodore 64s were the hottest machines on the market. In 1984, in the midst of this boom, Ian Stewart and Kevin Norburn founded the publisher Gremlin Graphics — later Gremlin Interactive — in the back room of a Sheffield software shop. Gremlin went on to become the Kevin Bacon of British game development: seemingly everybody who was anybody over the ensuing decades was associated with them at one time or another, or at the very least worked with someone who had been. This applies not least to Lara Croft, that most iconic woman in the history of British gaming.

Core Design, the studio that made her, was formed in 1986 as Gremlin Derby, around the talents of four young men from the same town who had just created the hit game Bounder using the Commodore 64s in their bedrooms. But not long after giving the four a real office to work in, the folks at Gremlin’s Sheffield headquarters began to realize that they should have looked before they leaped — that they couldn’t actually afford to be funding outside studios with their current revenue stream. (Such was the way of things in the topsy-turvy world of early British game development, when sober business expertise was not an overly plentiful commodity.) Rather than close the Derby branch they had barely had time to open, three Gremlin insiders — a sales executive named Jeremy Heath-Smith, the current manager of the Derby studio Greg Holmes, and the original Gremlin co-founder Kevin Norburn — cooked up a deal to take it over and run it themselves as an independent entity. They set up shop under the name of Core Design in 1988.

Over the year that followed, Core had its ups and downs: Heath-Smith bought out Holmes in 1990 and Norburn in 1992, both under circumstances that weren’t entirely amicable. But the little studio had a knack for squeezing out a solid seller whenever one was really needed, such as Rick Dangerous and Chuck Rock. Although most of these games were made available for MS-DOS among other platforms, few of them had much in common with the high-concept adventure games, CRPGs, and strategy games that dominated among American developers at the time. They were rather direct descendants of 8-bit games like Bounder: fast-paced, colorful, modest in size and ambition, and shot through with laddish humor. By 1991, Core had begun porting their games to consoles like the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo, with whose sensibilities they were perhaps a more natural fit. And indeed, the consoles soon accounted for the majority of their sales.

In late 1994, Jeremy Heath-Smith was invited to fly out to Japan to check out the two latest and greatest consoles from that country, both of which were due for a domestic Japanese release before the end of that year and an international rollout during the following one. The Sega Saturn and the Sony PlayStation were groundbreaking in a number of ways: not only did they use capacious CDs instead of cramped cartridges as their standard storage media, but they each included a graphics processing unit (GPU) for doing 3D graphics. At the time, id Software’s DOOM was in the vanguard of a 3D insurgency on personal computers, one that was sweeping away older, slower games like so much chaff in the breeze. The current generation of consoles, however, just didn’t have the horsepower to do a credible job of running games like that; they had been designed for another paradigm, that of 2D sprites moving across pixel-graphic backgrounds. The Saturn and the PlayStation would change all that, allowing the console games that constituted 80 to 90 percent of the total sales of digital games to join the 3D revolution as well. Needless to say, the potential payoff was huge.

Back at Core Design in Derby, Heath-Smith told everyone what he had seen in Japan, then asked for ideas for making maximum use of the new consoles’ capabilities. A quiet 22-year-old artist and designer named Toby Gard raised his hand: “I’ve got this idea of pyramids.” You would play a dashing archaeologist, he explained, dodging traps and enemies on the trail of ancient relics in a glorious 3D-rendered environment.

It must be said that it wasn’t an especially fresh or unexpected idea in the broad strokes. Raiders of the Lost Ark had been a constant gaming touchstone almost from the moment it had first reached cinemas in 1981. Core’s own Rick Dangerous had been essentially the same game as the one that Gard was now proposing, albeit implemented using 2D sprites rather than 3D graphics. (Its titular hero there was a veritable clone of the Raiders‘s hero Indiana Jones, right down to his trademark whip and fedora; if you didn’t read the box copy, you would assume it was a licensed game.)

Still, Gard was enthusiastic, and possessed of “immense talent” in the opinion of Heath-Smith. His idea certainly had the potential to yield an exciting 3D experience, and Heath-Smith had been around long enough to know that originality in the abstract was often overrated when it came to making games that sold. He gave Tomb Raider the green light to become Core’s cutting-edge showcase for the next-generation consoles, Core’s biggest, most expensive game to date. Which isn’t to say that he could afford to make it all that big or expensive by the standards of the American and Japanese studios: a team of just half a dozen people created Tomb Raider.

The Tomb Raider team. Toby Gard is third from left, Jeremy Heath-Smith second from right. Heather Gibson was the sole woman to work on the game — which, to be fair, was one more woman than worked on most games from this period.

The game would depart in a significant way from the many run-and-gun DOOM clones on personal computers by being a bit less bloody-minded, emphasizing puzzle-solving and platforming as much as combat. The developers quickly decided that the style of gameplay they had in mind demanded that they show the player’s avatar onscreen from a behind-the-back view rather than going with the first-person viewpoint of DOOM — an innovative choice at the time, albeit one that several other studios were making simultaneously, with such diverse eventual results as Fade to BlackDie Hard Trilogy, Super Mario 64, and MDK. In the beginning, though, they had no inkling that it would be Lara Croft’s bum the player would be staring at for hours. The star was to be Rick Dangerous or another of his ilk — i.e., just another blatant clone of Indiana Jones.

But Heath-Smith was seasoned enough to know that that sort of thing wouldn’t fly anymore in a world in which games were becoming an ever bigger and more visible mass-media phenomenon. “You must be insane,” he said to Toby Gard as soon as he heard about his intended Indiana clone. “We’ll get sued from here to kingdom come!” He told him to go back to the drawing board — literally; he was an artist, after all — and create a more clearly differentiated character.

So, Gard sat down at his desk to see what he could do. He soon produced the first sketches of Lara — Lara Cruz, as he called her in the beginning. Gard:

Lara was based on Indiana Jones, Tank Girl, and, people always say, my sister. Maybe subconsciously she was my sister. Anyway, she was supposed to be this strong woman, this upper-class adventurer. The rules at the time were, if you’re going to make a game, make sure the main character is male and make sure he’s American; otherwise it won’t sell in America. Those were the rules coming down from the marketing men. So I thought, “Ah, I know how to fix this. I’ll make the bad guys all American and the lead character female and as British as I can make her.”

She wasn’t a tits-out-for-the-lads type of character in any way. Quite the opposite, in fact. I thought that what was interesting about her was, she was this unattainable, austere, dangerous sort of person.

Sex appeal aside, Lara was in tune with the larger zeitgeist around her in a way that few videogames characters before her could match. Gard first sketched her during the fall of 1995, when Cool Britannia and Britpop were the rages of the age in his homeland, when Oasis and Blur were trash-talking one another and vying for the top position on the charts. It was suddenly hip to be British in a way it hadn’t been since the Swinging Sixties. Bands like the aforementioned made a great point of singing in their natural accents — or, some would say, an exaggerated version of same — and addressing distinctly British concerns rather than lapsing into the typical Americanisms of rock and pop music. Lara was cut from the same cloth. Gard changed her last name to “Croft” when he decided “Cruz” just wasn’t British enough, and created a defiantly blue-blooded lineage for her, making her the daughter of a Lord Henshingly Croft, complete with a posh public-school accent.

Jeremy Heath-Smith was not initially impressed. “Are you insane?” he asked Gard for the second time in a month. “We don’t do girls in videogames!” But Gard could be deceptively stubborn when he felt strongly about something, and this was one of those occasions. Heath-Smith remembers Gard telling him that “she’d be bendy. She’d do things that blokes couldn’t do.” Finally, he relented. “There was this whole movement of, females can really be cool, particularly from Japan,” he says.

And indeed, Lara was first drawn with a distinctly manga sensibility. Only gradually, as Gard worked her into the actual game, did she take on a more realistic style. Comparatively speaking, of course. We’ll come back to that…

An early concept sketch of Lara Croft.

Tomb Raider was becoming ever more important for Core. In the wake of the Sega Saturn and the Sony PlayStation, the videogames industry was changing quickly, in tandem with its customers’ expectations of what a new game ought to look like; there was a lot of space on one of those shiny new CDs, and games were expected to fill it. The pressures prompted a wave of consolidations in Britain, a pooling of a previously diffuse industry’s resources in the service of fewer but bigger, slicker, more expensive games. Core actually merged twice in just a couple of years: first with the US Gold publishing label (its name came from its original business model, that of importing American games into Britain) and then with Domark, another veteran of the 1980s 8-bit scene. Domark began trading under the name of Eidos shortly after making the deal, with Core in the role of its premier studio.

Eidos had as chairman of its board Ian Livingstone, a legend of British gaming in analog spaces, the mastermind of the Warhammer tabletop game and the Fighting Fantasy line of paperback gamebooks that enthralled millions of youth during the 1980s. He went out to have a look at what Core had in the works. “I remember it was snowing,” he says. “I almost didn’t go over to Derby.” But he did, and “I guess you could say it was love at first sight when I stepped through the door. Seeing Lara on screen.”

With such a powerful advocate, Tomb Raider was elevated to the status of Eidos’s showcase game for the Christmas of 1996, with a commensurate marketing budget. But that meant that it simply had to be a hit, a bigger one by far than anything Core had ever done before. And Core was getting some worrisome push-back from Eidos’s American arm, expressing all the same conventional wisdom that Toby Gard had so carefully created Lara to defy: that she was too British, that the pronunciation of her first name didn’t come naturally to American lips, that she was a girl, for Pete’s sake. Cool Britannia wasn’t really a thing in the United States; despite widespread predictions of a second muscial British Invasion in the States to supersede the clapped-out Seattle grunge scene, Oasis had only partially broken through, Blur not at all, and Spice Girls — the latest Britpop sensation — had yet to see their music even released Stateside. Eidos needed another way to sell Lara Croft to Americans.

It may have been around this time that an incident which Toby Gard would tell of frequently in the years immediately after Tomb Raider‘s release occurred. He was, so the story goes, sitting at his computer tweaking his latest model of Lara when his mouse hand slipped, and her chest suddenly doubled or tripled in size. When a laughing Gard showed it to his co-workers in a “look what a silly thing I did!” sort of way, their eyes lit up and they told him to leave it that way. “The technology didn’t allow us to make her [look] visually as we wanted, so it was more of a way of heightening certain things so it would give her some shape,” claims Core’s Adrian Smith.

Be that as it may, Eidos’s marketing team, eying that all-important American market that would make or break this game that would make or break their company, saw an obvious angle to take. They plastered Lara, complete with improbably huge breasts and an almost equally bulbous rear end, all over their advertising. “Sometimes, having a killer body just isn’t enough,” ran a typical tagline. “Hey, what’s a little temptation? Especially when everything looks this good. In the game, we mean.” As for the enemies Lara would have to kill, “Not everyone sees a bright light just before dying. Lucky stiffs.” (The innuendo around Lara was never subtle…)

This, then, was the way that Lara Croft greeted the public when her game dropped in September of 1996. And Toby Gard hated it. Giving every indication of having half fallen in love with his creation, he took the tarting up she was receiving under the hands of Eidos’s marketers badly. He saw them rather as a young man might the underworld impresario who had convinced his girlfriend — or his sister? — to become a stripper. A suggestion that reached Core’s offices to include a cheat code to remove Lara’s clothing entirely was, needless to say, not well-received by Gard. “It’s really weird when you see a character of yours doing these things,” he says. “I’ve spent my life drawing pictures of things — and they’re mine, you know?”

But of course they weren’t his. As is par for the course in the games industry, Gard automatically signed over all of the rights to everything he made at Core just as soon as he made it. He was not the final arbiter of what Lara did — or what was done to her – from here on out. So, he protested the only way he knew how: he quit.

Jeremy Heath-Smith, whose hardheaded businessman’s view of the world was the polar opposite of Gard’s artistic temperament, was gobsmacked by the decision.

I just couldn’t believe it. I remember saying, “Listen, Toby, this game’s going to be huge. You’re on a commission for this, you’re on a bonus scheme, you’re going to make a fortune. Don’t leave. Just sit here for the next two years. Don’t do anything. You’ll make more money than you’ve ever seen in your life.” I’m not arty, I’m commercial. I couldn’t understand his rationale for giving up millions of pounds for some artistic bloody stand. I just thought it was insanity.

Heath-Smith’s predictions of Tomb Raider‘s success — and with them the amount of money Gard was leaving on the table — came true in spades.

Suspecting every bit as strongly as Heath-Smith that they had a winner on their hands, Eidos had already flown a lucky flock of reporters all the way to Egypt in August of 1996 to see Tomb Raider in action for the first time, with the real Pyramids of Giza as a backdrop. By now, the Sega Saturn and the Sony PlayStation had been out for a year in North America and Europe, with the PlayStation turning into by far the bigger success, thanks both to Sony’s superior marketing and a series of horrific unforced errors on Sega’s part. Nevertheless, Tomb Raider appeared first on the Saturn, thanks to a deal Eidos had inked which promised Sega one precious month of exclusivity in return for a substantial cash payment. Rather than reviving the fortunes of Sega’s moribund console, Tomb Raider on the Saturn wound up serving mostly as a teaser for the PlayStation and MS-DOS versions that everyone knew were waiting in the wings.

The game still has qualities to recommend it today, although it certainly does show its age in some senses as well. The plot is barely comprehensible, a sort of Mad Libs of Raiders of the Lost Ark, conveyed in fifteen minutes of cut scenes worth of pseudo-mystical claptrap. The environments themselves, however, are possessed of a windy grandeur that requires no exposition, with vistas that can still cause you to pull up short from time to time. If nothing else, Tomb Raider makes a nice change of pace from the blood-splattered killing fields of the DOOM clones. In the first half of the game, combat is mostly with wildlife, and is relatively infrequent. You’ll spend more of your time working out the straightforward but satisfying puzzles — locked doors and hidden keys, movable boulders waiting to be turned into staircases, that sort of thing — and navigating vertigo-inducing jumps. In this sense and many others, Tomb Raider is more of an heir to the fine old British tradition of 8-bit action-adventures than it is to the likes of DOOM. Lara is quite an acrobat, able to crouch and spring, flip forward and backward and sideways, swim, climb walls, grab ledges, and when necessary shoot an arsenal of weapons that expands in time to include shotguns and Uzis alongside her iconic twin thigh-holstered pistols.

Amidst all the discussion of Lara Croft’s appearance, a lot of people failed to notice the swath she cuts through some of the world’s most endangered species of wildlife. “The problem is that any animal that’s dangerous to humans we’ve already hunted to near extinction,” said Toby Gard. “Maybe we should have used non-endangered, harmless animals. Then you’d be asking me, ‘Why was Lara shooting all those nice bunnies and squirrels?’ You can’t win, can you?”

Unfortunately, Tomb Raider increasingly falls prey to its designers’ less worthy instincts in its second half. As the story ups the stakes from just a treasure-hunting romp to yet another world-threatening videogame conspiracy, the environments grow less coherent and more nonsensical in rhythm, until Lara is battling hordes of mutant zombies inside what appears for all the world to be a pyramid made out of flesh and blood. And the difficulty increases to match, until gameplay becomes a matter of die-and-die-again until you figure out how to get that one step further, then rinse and repeat. This is particularly excruciating on the console versions, which strictly ration their save points. (The MS-DOS version, on the other hand, lets you save any time you like, which eases the pain considerably.) The final gauntlet you must run to escape from the last of the fifteen levels is absolutely brutal, a long series of tricky, non-intuitive moves that you have to time exactly right to avoid instant death, an exercise in rote yet split-second button mashing to rival the old Dragon’s Lair game. It’s no mystery why Tomb Raider ended up like this: its amount of content is limited, and it needed to stretch its playing time to justify a price tag of $50 or more. Still, it’s hard not to think wistfully about what a wonderful little six or seven hour game it might have become under other circumstances, if it hadn’t needed to fill fifteen or twenty hours instead.

Tomb Raider‘s other weaknesses are also in the predictable places for a game of this vintage, a time when designers were still trying to figure out how to make this style of game playable. (“Everyone is sitting down and realizing that it’s bloody hard to design games for 3D,” said Peter Molyneux in a contemporaneous interview.) The controls can be a little awkward, what with the way they keep changing depending on what Lara’s actually up to. Ditto the distractingly flighty camera through which you view Lara and her environs, which can be uncannily good at finding exactly the angle you don’t want it to at times. Then, too, in the absence of a good auto-map or clear line of progression through each level, you might sometimes find orientation to be at least as much a challenge as any of the other, more deliberately placed obstacles to progress.

Games would slowly get better at this sort of thing, but it would take time, and it’s not really fair to scold Tomb Raider overmuch for failings shared by virtually all of the 3D action games of 1996. Tomb Raider is never less than a solidly executed game, and occasionally it becomes an inspired one; your first encounter with a Tyrannosaurus Rex (!) in a lost Peruvian valley straight out of Arthur Conan Doyle remains as shocking and terrifying today as it ever was.

As a purely technical feat, meanwhile, Tomb Raider was amazing in its day from first to last. The levels were bigger than any that had yet been seen outside the 2.5D Star Wars shooter Dark Forces. In contrast to DOOM and its many clones, in contrast even to id’s latest 3D extravaganza Quake, Tomb Raider stood out as its own unique thing, and not just because of its third-person behind-the-back perspective. It just had a bit more finesse about it all the way around. Those other games all relied on big bazooka-toting lunks with physiques that put Arnold Schwarzenegger to shame. Even with those overgrown balloons on her chest, Lara managed to be lithe, nimble, potentially deadly in a completely different way. DOOM and Quake were a carpet-bombing attack; she was a precision-guide missile.

Sex appeal and genuinely innovative gameplay and technology all combined to make Lara Croft famous. Shelley Blond, who voiced Lara’s sharply limited amount of dialog in the game, tells of wandering into a department store on a visit to Los Angeles, and seeing “an enormous cutout of Lara Croft. Larger than live-size.” She made the mistake of telling one of the staff who she was, whereupon she was mobbed like a Beatle in 1964: “I was bright red and shaking. They all wanted pictures, and that was when I thought, ‘Shit, this is huge!'”

In a landmark moment for the coming out of videogames as a force in mainstream pop culture, id Software had recently convinced the hugely popular industrial-rock band Nine Inch Nails to score Quake. But that was nothing compared to the journey that Lara Croft now made in the opposite direction, from the gaming ghetto into the mainstream. She appeared on the cover of the fashion magazine The Face: “Occasionally the camera angle allows you a glimpse of her slanted brown eyes and luscious lips, but otherwise Lara’s always out ahead, out of reach, like the perfect girl who passes in the street.” She was the subject of feature articles in Time, Newsweek, and Rolling Stone. Her name got dropped in the most unlikely places. David James, the star goalkeeper for the Liverpool football club, said he was having trouble practicing because he’d rather be playing Tomb Raider. Rave-scene sensations The Prodigy used their addiction to the game as an excuse for delaying their new album. U2 commissioned huge images of her to show on the Jumbotron during their $120 million Popmart tour. She became a spokeswoman for the soft drink Lucozade and for Fiat cars, was plastered across mouse pads, CD-wallets, and lunch boxes. She became a kids’ action figure and the star of her own comic book. It really was as if people thought she was an actual person; journalists clamored to “interview” her, and Eidos was buried in fan mail addressed to her. “This was like the golden goose,” says Heath-Smith. “You don’t think it’s ever going to stop laying. Everything we touched turned gold. It was just a phenomenon.” Already in 1997, negotiations began for an eventual Tomb Raider feature film.

Most of all, Lara was the perfect mascot for the PlayStation. Sony’s most brilliant marketing stroke of all had been to pitch their console toward folks in their late teens and early twenties rather than children and adolescents, thereby legitimizing gaming as an adult pursuit, something for urban hipsters to do before and/or after an evening out at the clubs. (It certainly wasn’t lost on Sony that this older demographic tended to have a lot more disposable income than the younger ones…) Lara may have come along a year too late for the PlayStation launch, but better late than never. What hipster videogaming had been missing was its very own It Girl. And now it had her. Tomb Raider sold seven and a half million copies, at least 80 percent of them on the PlayStation.

That said, it did very well for itself on computers as well, especially after Core posted on their website a patch to make the game work with the new 3Dfx Voodoo chipset for hardware-accelerated 3D graphics on that platform. Tomb Raider drove the first wave of Voodoo adoption; countless folks woke up to find a copy of the game alongside a shiny new graphics card under the tree that Christmas morning. Eidos turned a £2.6 million loss in 1996 into a £14.5 million profit in 1997, thanks entirely to Lara. “Eidos is now the house that Lara built,” wrote Newsweek magazine.

There followed the inevitable sequels, which kept Lara front and center through the balance of the 1990s and beyond: Tomb Raider II in 1997, Tomb Raider III in 1998, Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation in 1999, Tomb Raider: Chronicles in 2000. These games were competently done for the most part, but didn’t stretch overmuch the template laid down by the first one; even the forthrightly non-arty Jeremy Heath-Smith admits that “we sold our soul” to keep the gravy train running, to make sure a new Tomb Raider game was waiting in stores each Christmas. Just as the franchise was starting to look a bit tired, with each successive game posting slowly but steadily declining sales numbers, the long-in-the-works feature film Lara Croft: Tomb Raider arrived in 2001 to bring her to a whole new audience and ensure that she became one of those rare pop-culture perennials.

By this time, a strong negative counter-melody had long been detectable underneath the symphony of commercial success. A lot of people — particularly those who weren’t quite ready to admit videogames into the same halls of culture occupied by music, movies, and books — had an all too clear image of who played Tomb Raider and why. They pictured a pimply teenage boy or a socially stunted adult man sitting on the couch in his parents’ basement with one hand on a controller and another in his pants, gazing in slack-jawed fascination at Lara’s gyrating backside, perhaps with just a trace of drool running down his spotty chin. And it must be admitted that some of Lara’s biggest fans didn’t do much to combat this image: the site called Nude Raider, which did what Toby Gard had refused to do by patching a naked version of Lara into the game, may just have been the most pathetic thing on the Internet circa 1997.

But other fans leaped to Lara’s defense as something more than just the world’s saddest masturbation aid. She was smart, she was strong, she was empowered, they said, everything feminist critics had been complaining for years that most women in games were not.

The problem, answered Lara’s detractors, was that she was still all too obviously crafted for the male gaze. She was, in other words, still a male fantasy at bottom, and not a terribly mature one at that, looking as she did like something a horny teenager who had yet to lay hands on a real girl might draw in his notebook. Her proportions — proudly announced by Eidos as 34D-24-35 — were obtainable by virtually no real woman, at least absent the services of a plastic surgeon. “If you genetically engineered a Lara-shaped woman,” noted PC Gaming World‘s (female) reviews editor Cal Jones, “she would die within around fifteen seconds, since there’s no way her tiny abdomen could house all her vital organs.” Violet Berlin, a popular technology commentator on British television, called Lara “a ’70s throwback from the days when pouting lovelies were always to be found propped up against any consumer icon advertised for men.”

Everyone was right in her or his own way, of course. Lara Croft truly was different from the videogame bimbos of the past, and the fact that millions of boys were lining up to become her — or at least to control her — was progress of some sort. But still… as soon as you looked at her, you knew which gender had drawn her. Even Toby Gard, who had given up millions in a purely symbolic protest against the way his managers wished to exploit her, talked about her in ways that were far from free of male gazing — that could start to sound, if we’re being honest, just a little bit creepy.

Lara was designed to be a tough, self-reliant, intelligent woman. She confounds all the sexist clichés apart from the fact that she’s got an unbelievable figure. Strong, independent women are the perfect fantasy girls — the untouchable is always the most desirable.

Some feminist linguists would doubtless make much of the unconscious slip from “women” to “girls” in this comment…

The Lara in the games was rather a cipher in terms of personality, which worked for her benefit in the mass media. She could easily be re-purposed to serve as anything from a feminist hero to a sex kitten, depending on what was needed at that juncture.

For every point there was a counterpoint. Some girls and women saw Lara as a sign of progress, even as an aspirational figure. Others saw her only as one more stereotype of female perfection created by and for males, one to which they could never hope to measure up. “It’s a well-known fact that most [male] youngsters get their first good look at the female anatomy through porn mags, and come away thinking women have jutting bosoms, airbrushed skin, and neatly trimmed body hair,” said Cal Jones. “Now, thanks to Lara, they also think women are super fit, agile gymnasts with enough stamina to run several marathons back to back. Cheers.”

On the other hand, the same male gamers had for years been seeing images of almost equally unattainable masculine perfection on their screens, all bulging biceps and chiseled abs. How was this different? Many sensed that it was different, somehow, but few could articulate why. Michelle Goulet of the website Game Girlz perhaps said it best: Lara was “the man’s ideal image of a girl, not a girl’s ideal image of a girl.” The inverse was not true of all those warrior hunks: they were “based on the body image that is ideal to a lot of guys, not girls. They are nowhere near my ideal man.” The male gaze, that is to say, was the arbiter in both cases. What to do about it? Goulet had some interesting suggestions:

My thoughts on this matter are pretty straightforward. Include females in making female characters. Find out what the ideal female would be for both a man and a woman and work with that. Respect the females the same as you would the males.

Respecting the female characters is hard when they look like strippers with guns and seem to be nothing more than an erection waiting to happen. Believing that the industry in general respects females is hard when you see ads with women tied up on beds. In my opinion, respect is what most girls are after, and I feel that if the gaming community had more respect for their female characters they would attract the heretofore elusive female market. This doesn’t mean that girls in games have to be some kind of new butch race. Femininity is a big part of being female. This means that girls should be girls. Ideal body images and character aspects that are ideal for females, from a female point of view. I would be willing to bet that guys would find these females more attractive than the souped-up bimbos we are used to seeing. If sexuality is a major selling point, and a major attraction for the male gamer, then, fine, throw in all the sexuality you want, but doing so should not preclude respect for females.

To sum up, I have to say I think the gaming industry should give guys a little more credit, and girls a lot more respect, and I hope this will move the tide in that direction.

I’m happy to say that the tide has indeed moved in that direction for Lara Croft at least since Michelle Goulet wrote those words in the late 1990s. It began in a modest way with that first Tomb Raider movie in 2001. Although Angeline Jolie wore prosthetic breasts when she played Lara, it was impossible to recreate the videogame character’s outlandish proportions in their entirety. In order to maintain continuity with that film and a second one that came out in 2003, the Tomb Raider games of the aughts modeled their Laras on Jolie, resulting in a slightly more realistic figure. Then, too, Toby Gard returned to the franchise to work on 2007’s Tomb Raider: Anniversary and 2008’s Tomb Raider: Underworld, bringing some of his original vision of Lara with him.

But the real shift came when the franchise, which was once again fading in popularity by the end of the aughts, was rebooted in 2013, with a game that called itself simply Tomb Raider. Instead of pendulous breasts and booty mounted on spaghetti-thin legs and torso, it gave us a fit, toned, proportional Lara, a woman who looked like she had spent a lot of time and money at the local fitness center instead of the plastic surgeon’s office. If you ask this dirty old male gazer, she’s a thousand times more attractive than the old Lara, even as she’s a healthy, theoretically attainable ideal for a young woman who’s willing to put in some hard hours at the gym. This was proved by Alicia Vikander, the star of a 2018 Tomb Raider movie, the third and last to date; she looked uncannily like the latest videogame Lara up there on the big screen, with no prosthetics required.

Bravo, I say. If the original Lara Croft was a sign of progress in her way, the latest Lara is a sign that progress continued. If you were to say the new Lara is the one we should have had all along — within the limits of what the technology of the time would allow, of course — I wouldn’t argue with you. But still… better late than never.



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(Sources: The books Grand Thieves and Tomb Raiders: How British Video Games Conquered the World by Magnus Anderson and Rebecca Levene; From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, edited by Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins; Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming, edited by Yasmin B. Kafai, Carrie Heeter, Jill Denner, and Jennifer Y. Sun; Gender Inclusive Game Design: Expanding the Market by Sheri Graner Ray; The Making of Tomb Raider by Daryl Baxter; 20 Years of Tomb Raider: Digging Up the Past, Defining the Future by Meagan Marie; and A Gremlin in the Works by Mark James Hardisty. Computer Gaming World of August 1996, October 1996, January 1997, March 1997, and November 1997; PC Powerplay of July 1997; Next Generation of May 1996, October 1996, and June 1998; The Independent of April 18 2004; Retro Gamer 20, 147, 163, and 245. Online sources include three pieces for the Game Studies journal, by Helen W. Kennedy, Janine Engelbrecht, and Esther MacCallum-Stewart. Plus two interview with Toby Gard, by The Guardian‘s Greg Howson and Game Developer‘s David Jenkins.

The first three Tomb Raider games are available as digital purchases at GOG.com, as are the many games that followed those three.)

 

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The Next Generation in Graphics, Part 3: Software Meets Hardware

The first finished devices to ship with the 3Dfx Voodoo chipset inside them were not add-on boards for personal computers, but rather standup arcade machines. That venerable segment of the videogames industry was enjoying its last lease on life in the mid-1990s; this was the last era when the graphics of the arcade machines were sufficiently better than those which home computers and consoles could generate as to make it worth getting up off the couch, driving into town, and dropping a quarter or two into a slot to see them. The Voodoo chips now became part and parcel of that, ironically just before they would do much to destroy the arcade market by bringing equally high-quality 3D graphics into homes. For now, though, they wowed players of arcade games like San Francisco Rush: Extreme Racing, Wayne Gretzky’s 3D Hockey, and NFL Blitz.

Still, Gary Tarolli, Scott Sellers, and Ross Smith were most excited by the potential of the add-on-board market. All too well aware of how the chicken-or-the-egg deadlock between game makers and players had doomed their earlier efforts with Pellucid and Media Vision, they launched an all-out charm offensive among game developers long before they had any actual hardware to show them. Smith goes so far as to call “connecting with the developers early on and evangelizing them” the “single most important thing we ever did” — more important, that is to say, than designing the Voodoo chips themselves, impressive as they were. Throughout 1995, somebody from 3Dfx was guaranteed to be present wherever developers got together to talk among themselves. While these evangelizers had no hardware as yet, they did have software simulations running on SGI workstations — simulations which, they promised, duplicated exactly the capabilities the real chips would have when they started arriving in quantity from Taiwan.

Our core trio realized early on that their task must involve software as much as hardware in another, more enduring sense: they had to make it as easy as possible to support the Voodoo chipset. In my previous article, I mentioned how their old employer SGI had created an open-source software library for 3D graphics, known as OpenGL. A team of programmers from 3Dfx now took this as the starting point of a slimmed-down, ultra-optimized MS-DOS library they called GLide; whereas OpenGL sported well over 300 individual function calls, GLide had less than 100. It was fast, it was lightweight, and it was easy to program. They had good reason to be proud of it. Its only drawback was that it would only work with the Voodoo chips — which was not necessarily a drawback at all in the eyes of its creators, given that they hoped and planned to dominate a thriving future market for hardware-accelerated 3D graphics on personal computers.

Yet that domination was by no means assured, for they were far from the only ones developing consumer-oriented 3D chipsets. One other company in particular gave every indication of being on the inside track to widespread acceptance. That company was Rendition, another small, venture-capital-funded startup that was doing all of the same things 3Dfx was doing — only Rendition had gotten started even earlier. It had actually been Rendition who announced a 3D chipset first, and they had been evangelizing it ever since every bit as tirelessly as 3Dfx.

The Voodoo chipset was technologically baroque in comparison to Rendition’s chips, which went under the name of Vérité. This meant that Voodoo should easily outperform them — eventually, once all of the logistics of East Asian chip fabricating had been dealt with and deals had been signed with board makers. In June of 1996, when the first Vérité-powered boards shipped, the Voodoo chipset quite literally didn’t exist as far as consumers were concerned. Those first Vérité boards were made by none other than Creative Labs, the 800-pound gorilla of the home-computer add-on market, maker of the ubiquitous Sound Blaster sound cards and many a “multimedia upgrade kit.” Such a partner must be counted as yet another early coup for Rendition.

The Vérité cards were followed by a flood of others whose slickly aggressive names belied their somewhat workmanlike designs: 3D Labs Permedia, S3 Virge, ATI 3D Rage, Matrox Mystique. And still Voodoo was nowhere.

What was everywhere was confusion; it was all but impossible for the poor, benighted gamer to make heads or tails of the situation. None of these chipsets were compatible with one another at the hardware level in the way that 2D graphics cards were; there were no hardware standards for 3D graphics akin to VGA, that last legacy of IBM’s era of dominance, much less the various SVGA standards defined by the Video Electronic Standards Association (VESA). Given that most action-oriented computer games still ran on MS-DOS, this was a serious problem.

For, being more of a collection of basic function calls than a proper operating system, MS-DOS was not known for its hardware agnosticism. Most of the folks making 3D chips did provide an MS-DOS software package for steering them, similar in concept to 3Dfx’s GLide, if seldom as optimized and elegant. But, just like GLide, such libraries worked only with the chipset for which they had been created. What was sorely needed was an intermediate layer of software to sit between games and the chipset-manufacturer-provided libraries, to automatically translate generic function calls into forms suitable for whatever particular chipset happened to exist on that particular computer. This alone could make it possible for one build of one game to run on multiple 3D chipsets. Yet such a level of hardware abstraction was far beyond the capabilities of bare-bones MS-DOS.

Absent a more reasonable solution, the only choice was to make separate versions of games for each of the various 3D chipsets. And so began the brief-lived, unlamented era of the 3D pack-in game. All of the 3D-hardware manufacturers courted the developers and publishers of popular software-rendered 3D games, dangling before them all sorts of enticements to create special versions that took advantage of their cards, more often than not to be included right in the box with them. Activision’s hugely successful giant-robot-fighting game MechWarrior 2 became the king of the pack-ins, with at least half a dozen different chipset-specific versions floating around, all paid for upfront by the board makers in cold, hard cash. (Whatever else can be said about him, Bobby Kotick has always been able to spot the seams in the gaming market where gold is waiting to be mined.)

It was an absurd, untenable situation; the game or games that came in the box were the only ones that the purchasers of some of the also-ran 3D contenders ever got a chance to play with their new toys. Gamers and chipset makers alike could only hope that, once Windows replaced MS-DOS as the gaming standard, their pain would go away.

In the meanwhile, the games studio that everyone with an interest in the 3D-acceleration sweepstakes was courting most of all was id Software — more specifically, id’s founder and tech guru, gaming’s anointed Master of 3D Algorithms, John Carmack. They all begged him for a version of Quake for their chipset.

And once again, it was Rendition that scored the early coup here. Carmack actually shared some of the Quake source code with them well before either the finished game or the finished Vérité chipset was available for purchase. Programmed by a pair of Rendition’s own staffers working with the advice and support of Carmack and Michael Abrash, the Vérité-rendered version of the game, commonly known as vQuake, came out very shortly after the software-rendered version. Carmack called it “the premier platform for Quake” — truly marketing copy to die for. Gamers too agreed that 3D acceleration made the original’s amazing graphics that much more amazing, while the makers of other 3D chipsets gnashed their teeth and seethed.

Quake with software rendering.

vQuake

Among these, of course, was the tardy 3Dfx. The first Voodoo cards appeared late, seemingly hopelessly so: well into the fall of 1996. Nor did they have the prestige and distribution muscle of a partner like Creative Labs behind them: the first two Voodoo boards rather came from smaller firms by the names of Diamond and Orchid. They sold for $300, putting them well up at the pricey end of the market —  and, unlike all of the competition’s cards, these required you to have another, 2D-graphics card in your computer as well. For all of these reasons, they seemed easy enough to dismiss as overpriced white elephants at first blush. But that impression lasted only until you got a look at them in action. The Voodoo cards came complete with a list of features that none of the competition could come close to matching in the aggregate: bilinear filtering, trilinear MIP-mapping, alpha blending, fog effects, accelerated light sources. If you don’t know what those terms mean, rest assured that they made games look better and play faster than anything else on the market. This was amply demonstrated by those first Voodoo boards’ pack-in title, an otherwise rather undistinguished, typical-of-its-time shooter called Hellbender. In its new incarnation, it suddenly looked stunning.

The Orchid Righteous 3D card, one of the first two to use the Voodoo chipset. (The only consumer category as fond of bro-dude phraseology like “extreme” and “righteous” as the makers of 3D cards was men’s razors.)

The battle lines were drawn between Rendition and 3Dfx. But sadly for the former, it quickly emerged that their chipset had one especially devastating weakness in comparison to its rival: its Z-buffering support left much to be desired. And what, you ask, is Z-buffering? Read on!

One of the non-obvious problems that 3D-graphics systems must solve is the need for objects in the foreground of a scene to realistically obscure those behind them. If, at the rendering stage, we were to simply draw the objects in whatever random order they came to us, we would wind up with a dog’s breakfast of overlapping shapes. We need to have a way of depth-sorting the objects if we want to end up with a coherent, correctly rendered scene.

The most straightforward way of depth-sorting is called the Painter’s Algorithm, because it duplicates the process a human artist usually goes through to paint a picture. Let’s say our artist wants to paint a still life of an apple sitting in front of a basket of other fruits. First she will paint the basket to her satisfaction, then paint the apple right over the top of it. Similarly, when we use a Painter’s Algorithm on the computer, we first sort the whole collection of objects into a hierarchy that begins with those that are farthest from our virtual camera and ends with those closest to it. Only after this has been done do we set about the task of actually drawing them to the screen, in our sorted order from the farthest away to the closest. And so we end up with a correctly rendered image.

But, as so often happens in matters like this, the most logically straightforward way is far from the most efficient way of depth-sorting a 3D scene. When the number of objects involved is few, the Painter’s Algorithm works reasonably well. When the numbers get into the hundreds or thousands, however, it results in much wasted effort, as the computer ends up drawing objects that are completely obscured by other objects in front of them — i.e., objects that don’t really need to be drawn at all. Even more importantly, the process of sorting all of the objects by depth beforehand is painfully time-consuming, a speed bump that stops the rendering process dead until it is completed. Even in the 1990s, when their technology was in a laughably primitive stage compared to today, GPUs tended to emphasize parallel processing — i.e., staying constantly busy with multiple tasks at the same time. The necessity of sorting every object in a scene by depth before even getting properly started on rendering it rather threw all that out the window.

Enter the Z-buffer. Under this approach, every object is rendered right away as soon as it comes down the pipeline, used to build the appropriate part of the raster of colored pixels that, once completed, will be sent to the monitor screen as a single frame. But there comes an additional wrinkle in the form of the Z-buffer itself: a separate, parallel raster containing not the color of each pixel but its distance from the camera. Before the GPU adds an entry to the raster of pixel colors, it compares the distance of that pixel from the camera with the number in that location in the Z-buffer. If the current distance is less than the one already found there, it knows that the pixel in question should be overwritten in the main raster and that the Z-buffer raster should be updated with that pixel’s new distance from the camera. Ditto if the Z-buffer contains a null value, indicating no object has yet been drawn at that pixel. But if the current distance is larger than the (non-null) number already found there, the GPU simply moves on without doing anything more, confident in the knowledge that what it had wanted to draw should actually be hidden by what it has already drawn.

There are plenty of occasions when the same pixel is drawn over twice — or many times — before reaching the screen even under this scheme, but it is nevertheless still vastly more efficient than the Painter’s Algorithm, because it keeps objects flowing through the pipeline steadily, with no hiccups caused by lengthy sorting operations. Z-buffering support was reportedly a last-minute addition to the Vérité chipset, and it showed. Turning depth-sorting on for 100-percent realistic rendering on these chips cut their throughput almost in half; the Voodoo chipset, by contrast, just said, “No worries!,” and kept right on trucking. This was an advantage of titanic proportions. It eventually emerged that the programmers at Rendition had been able to get Quake running acceptably on the Vérité chips only by kludging together their own depth-sorting algorithms in software. With Voodoo, programmers wouldn’t have to waste time with stuff like that.

But surprisingly, the game that blew open the doors for the Voodoo chipset wasn’t Quake or anything else from id. It was rather a little something called Tomb Raider, from the British studio Core Design, a game which used a behind-the-back third-person perspective rather than the more typical first-person view — the better to appreciate its protagonist, the buxom and acrobatic female archaeologist Lara Croft. In addition to Lara’s considerable assets, Tomb Raider attracted gamers with its unprecedentedly huge and wide-open 3D environments. (It will be the subject of my next article, for those interested in reading more about its massive commercial profile and somewhat controversial legacy.)

In November of 1996, when Tomb Raider been out for less than a month, Core put a  Voodoo patch for it up on their website. Gamers were blown away. “It’s a totally new game!” gushed one on Usenet. “It was playable but a little jerky without the patch, but silky smooth to play and beautiful to look at with the patch.” “The level of detail you get with the Voodoo chip is amazing!” enthused another. Or how about this for a ringing testimonial?

I had been playing the regular Tomb Raider on my PC for about two weeks
before I got the patch, with about ten people seeing the game, and not
really saying anything regarding how amazing it was. When I got the
accelerated patch, after about four days, every single person who has
seen the game has been in awe watching the graphics and how
smooth [and] lifelike the movement is. The feel is different, you can see
things much more clearly, it’s just a more enjoyable game now.

Tomb Raider became the biggest hit of the 1996 holiday season, and tens if not hundreds of thousands of Voodoo-based 3D cards joined it under Christmas trees.

Tomb Raider with software rendering.

Tomb Raider with a Voodoo card.

In January of 1997, id released GLQuake, a new version of that game that supported the Voodoo chipset. In telling contrast to the Vérité-powered vQuake, which had been coded by Rendition’s programmers, GLQuake had been taken on by John Carmack as a personal project. The proof was in the pudding; this Quake ran faster and looked better than either of the previous ones. Running on a machine with a 200 MHz Intel Pentium processor and a Voodoo card, GLQuake could manage 70 frames per second, compared to 41 frames for the software-rendered version, whilst appearing much more realistic and less pixelated.

GLQuake

One last stroke of luck put the finishing touch on 3Dfx’s destiny of world domination: the price of memory dropped precipitously, thanks to a number of new RAM-chip factories that came online all at once in East Asia. (The factories had been built largely to feed the memory demands of Windows 95, the straw that was stirring the drink of the entire computer industry.) The Voodoo chipset required 4 MB of memory to operate effectively — an appreciable quantity in those days, and a big reason why the cards that used it tended to cost almost as twice as much as those based on the Vérité chips, despite lacking the added complications and expense of 2D support. But with the drop in memory prices, it suddenly became practical to sell a Voodoo card for under $200. Rendition could also lower their prices somewhat thanks to the memory windfall, of course, but at these lower price points the dollar difference wasn’t as damaging to 3Dfx. After all, the Voodoo cards were universally acknowledged to be the class of the industry. They were surely worth paying a little bit of a premium for. By the middle of 1997, the Voodoo chipset was everywhere, the Vérité one left dead at the side of the road. “If you want full support for a gamut of games, you need to get a 3Dfx card,” wrote Computer Gaming World.

These were heady times at 3Dfx, which had become almost overnight the most hallowed name in hardcore action gaming outside of id Software, all whilst making an order of magnitude more money than id, whose business model under John Carmack was hardly fine-tuned to maximize revenues. In a comment he left recently on this site, reader Captain Kal said that, when it comes to 3D gaming in the late 1990s, “one company springs to my mind without even thinking: 3Dfx. Yes, we also had 3D solutions from ATI, NVIDIA, or even S3, but Voodoo cards created the kind of dedication that I hadn’t seen since the Amiga days.” The comparison strikes me as thoroughly apropos.

3Dfx brought in a high-profile CEO named Greg Ballard, formerly of Warner Music and the videogame giant Capcom, to oversee a smashingly successful initial public offering in June of 1997. He and the three thirty-something founders were the oldest people at the company. “Most of the software engineers were [in their] early twenties, gamers through and through, loved games,” says Scott Sellers. “Would code during the day and play games at night. It was a culture of fun.” Their offices stood at the eighth hole of a golf course in Sunnyvale, California. “We’d sit out there and drink beer,” says Ross Smith. “And you’d have to dodge incoming golf balls a bit. But the culture was great.” Every time he came down for a visit, says their investing angel Gordon Campbell,

they’d show you something new, a new demo, a new mapping technique. There was always something. It was a very creative environment. The work hard and play hard thing, that to me kind of was Silicon Valley. You went out and socialized with your crew and had beer fests and did all that kind of stuff. And a friendly environment where everybody knew everybody and everybody was not in a hierarchy so much as part of the group or the team.

I think the thing that was added here was, it’s the gaming industry. And that was a whole new twist on it. I mean, if you go to the trade shows, you’d have guys that would show up at our booth with Dracula capes and pointed teeth. I mean, it was just crazy.

Gary Tarolli, Scott Sellers, and Greg Ballard do battle with a dangerous houseplant. The 1990s were wild and crazy times, kids…

While the folks at 3Dfx were working hard and playing hard, an enormously consequential advancement in the field of software was on the verge of transforming the computer-games industry. As I noted previously, in 1996 most hardcore action games were still being released for MS-DOS. In 1997, however, that changed in a big way. With the exception of only a few straggling Luddites, game developers switched over to Windows 95 en masse. Quake had been an MS-DOS game; Quake II, which would ship at the end of 1997, ran under Windows. The same held true for the original Tomb Raider and its 1997 sequel, as it did for countless others.

Gaming was made possible on Windows 95 by Microsoft’s DirectX libraries, which finally let programmers do everything in Windows that they had once done in MS-DOS, with only a slight speed penalty if any, all while giving them the welcome luxury of hardware independence. That is to say, all of the fiddly details of disparate video and sound cards and all the rest were abstracted away into Windows device drivers that communicated automatically with DirectX to do the needful. It was an enormous burden lifted off of developers’ shoulders. Ditto gamers, who no longer had to futz about for hours with cryptic “autoexec.bat” and “config.sys” files, searching out the exact combination of arcane incantations that would allow each game they bought to run optimally on their precise machine. One no longer needed to be a tech-head simply to install a game.

In its original release of September 1995, the full DirectX suite consisted of DirectDraw for 2D pixel graphics, DirectSound for sound and music, DirectInput for managing joysticks and other game-centric input devices, and DirectPlay for networked multiplayer gaming. It provided no support for doing 3D graphics. But never fear, Microsoft said: 3D support was coming. Already in February of 1995, they had purchased a British company called RenderMorphics, the creator of Reality Lab, a hardware-agnostic 3D library. As promised, Microsoft added Direct3D to the DirectX collection with the latter’s 2.0 release, in June of 1996.

But, as the noted computer scientist Andrew Tanenbaum once said, “the nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from.” For the next several years, Direct3D would compete with another library serving the same purpose: a complete, hardware-agnostic Windows port of SGI’s OpenGL, whose most prominent booster was no less leading a light than John Carmack. Direct3D would largely win out in the end among game developers despite Carmack’s endorsement of its rival, but we need not concern ourselves overmuch with the details of that tempest in a teacup here. Suffice to say that even the most bitter partisans on one side of the divide or the other could usually agree that both Direct3D and OpenGL were vastly preferable to the bad old days of chipset-specific 3D games.

Unfortunately for them, 3Dfx, rather feeling their oats after all of their success, made in response to these developments the first of a series of bad decisions that would cause their time at the top of the 3D-graphics heap to be a relatively short one.

Like all of the others, the Voodoo chipset could be used under Windows with either Direct3D or OpenGL. But there were some features on the Voodoo chips that the current implementations of those libraries didn’t support. 3Dfx was worried, reasonably enough on the face of it, about a “least-common-denominator effect” which would cancel out the very real advantages of their 3D chipset and make one example of the breed more or less as good as any other. However, instead of working with the folks behind Direct3D and OpenGL to get support for the Voodoo chips’ special features into those libraries, they opted to release a Windows version of GLide, and to strongly encourage game developers to keep working with it instead of either of the more hardware-agnostic alternatives. “You don’t want to just have a title 80 percent as good as it could be because your competitors are all going to be at 100 percent,” they said pointedly. They went so far as to start speaking of Voodoo-equipped machines as a whole new platform unto themselves, separate from more plebeian personal computers.

It was the talk and actions of a company that had begun to take its own press releases a bit too much to heart. But for a time 3Dfx got away with it. Developers coded for GLide in addition to or instead of Direct3D or OpenGL, because you really could do a lot more with it and because the cachet of the “certified” 3Dfx logo that using GLide allowed them to put on their boxes really was huge.

In March of 1998, the first cards with a new 3Dfx chipset, known as Voodoo2, began to appear. Voodoo2 boasted twice the overall throughput of its predecessor, and could handle a screen resolution of 800 X 600 instead of just 640 X 480; you could even join two of the new cards together to get even better performance and higher resolutions. This latest chipset only seemed to cement 3Dfx’s position as the class of their field.

The bottom line reflected this. 3Dfx was, in the words of their new CEO Greg Ballard, “a rocket ship.” In 1995, they earned $4 million in revenue; in 1996, $44 million; in 1997, $210 million; and in 1998, their peak year, $450 million. And yet their laser focus on selling the Ferraris of 3D acceleration was blinding Ballard and his colleagues to the potential of 3D Toyotas, where the biggest money of all was waiting to be made.

Over the course of the second half of the 1990s, 3D GPUs went from being exotic pieces of kit known only to hardcore gamers to being just another piece of commodity hardware found in almost all computers. 3Dfx had nothing to do with this significant shift. Instead they all but ignored this so-called “OEM” (“Original Equipment Manufacturer”) side of the GPU equation: chipsets that weren’t the hottest or the sexiest on the market, but that were cheap and easy to solder right onto the motherboards of low-end and mid-range machines bearing such unsexy name plates as Compaq and Packard Bell. Ironically, Gordon Campbell had made a fortune with Chips & Technologies selling just such commodity-grade 2D graphics chipsets. But 3Dfx was obstinately determined to fly above the OEM segment, determined to offer “premium” products only. “It doesn’t matter if 20 million people have one of our competitors’ chips,” said Scott Sellers in 1997. “How many of those people are hardcore gamers? How many of those people are buying games?” “I can guarantee that 100 percent of 3Dfx owners are buying games,” chimed in a self-satisfied-sounding Gary Tarolli.

The obvious question to ask in response was why it should matter to 3Dfx how many games — or what types of games — the users of their chips were buying, as long as they were buying gadgets that contained their chips. While 3Dfx basked in their status as the hardcore gamer’s favorite, other companies were selling many more 3D chips, admittedly at much less of a profit on a chip-per-chip basis, at the OEM end of the market. Among these was a firm known as NVIDIA, which had been founded on the back of a napkin in a Denny’s diner in 1993. NVIDIA’s first attempt to compete head to head with 3Dfx at the high end was underwhelming at best: released well after the Voodoo2 chipset, the RIVA TNT ran so hot that it required a noisy onboard cooling fan, and yet still couldn’t match the Voodoo2’s performance. By that time, however, NVIDIA was already building a lucrative business out of cheaper, simpler chips on the OEM side, even as they were gaining the wisdom they would need to mount a more credible assault on the hardcore-gamer market. In late 1998, 3Dfx finally seemed to be waking up to the fact that they would need to reach beyond the hardcore to continue their rise, when they released a new chipset called Voodoo Banshee which wasn’t quite as powerful as the Voodoo2 chips but could do conventional 2D as well as 3D graphics, meaning its owners would not be forced to buy a second video card just in order to use their computers.

But sadly, they followed this step forward with an absolutely disastrous mistake. You’ll remember that prior to this point 3Dfx had sold their chips only to other companies, who then incorporated them into add-on boards of their own design, in the same way that Intel sold microprocessors to computer makers rather than directly to consumers (aside from the build-your-own-rig hobbyists, that is). This business model had made sense for 3Dfx when they were cash-strapped and hadn’t a hope of building retail-distribution channels equal to those of the established board makers. Now, though, they were flush with cash, and enjoyed far better name recognition than the companies that made the boards which used their chips; even the likes of Creative Labs, who had long since dropped Rendition and were now selling plenty of 3Dfx boards, couldn’t touch them in terms of prestige. Why not cut out all these middlemen by manufacturing their own boards using their own chips and selling them directly to consumers with only the 3Dfx name on the box? They decided to do exactly that with their third state-of-the-art 3D chipset, the predictably named Voodoo3, which was ready in the spring of 1999.

Those famous last words apply: “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” With the benefit of hindsight, we can see all too clearly what a terrible decision it actually was. The move into the board market became, says Scott Sellers, the “anchor” that would drag down the whole company in a rather breathtakingly short span of time: “We started competing with what used to be our own customers” — i.e., the makers of all those earlier Voodoo boards. Then, too, 3Dfx found that the logistics of selling a polished consumer product at retail, from manufacturing to distribution to advertising, were much more complex than they had reckoned with.

Still, they might — just might — have been able to figure it all out and make it work, if only the Voodoo3 chipset had been a bit better. As it was, it was an upgrade to be sure, but not quite as much of one as everyone had been expecting. In fact, some began to point out now that even the Voodoo2 chips hadn’t been that great a leap: they too were better than their predecessors, yes, but that was more down to ever-falling memory prices and ever-improving chip-fabrication technologies than any groundbreaking innovations in their fundamental designs. It seemed that 3Dfx had started to grow complacent some time ago.

NVIDIA saw their opening and made the most of it. They introduced a new line of their own, called the TNT2, which outdid its 3Dfx competitor in at least one key metric: it could do 24-bit color, giving it almost 17 million shades of onscreen nuance, compared to just over 65,000 in the case of Voodoo3. For the first time, 3Dfx’s chips were not the unqualified, undisputed technological leaders. To make matters worse, NVIDIA had been working closely with Microsoft in exactly the way that 3Dfx had never found it in their hearts to do, ensuring that every last feature of their chips was well-supported by the increasingly dominant Direct3D libraries.

And then, as the final nail in the coffin, there were all those third-party board makers 3Dfx had so rudely jilted when they decided to take over that side of the business themselves. These had nowhere left to go but into NVIDIA’s welcoming arms. And needless to say, these business partners spurned were highly motivated to make 3Dfx pay for their betrayal.

NVIDIA was on a roll now. They soon came out with yet another new chipset, the GeForce 256, which had a “Transform & Lighting” (T&L) engine built in, a major conceptual advance. And again, the new technology was accessible right from the start through Direct3D, thanks to NVIDIA’s tight relationship with Microsoft. Meanwhile the 3Dfx chips still needed GLide to perform at their best. With those chips’ sales now plummeting, more and more game developers decided the oddball library just wasn’t worth the trouble anymore. By the end of 1999, a 3Dfx death spiral that absolutely no one had seen coming at the start of the year was already well along. NVIDIA was rapidly sewing up both the high end and the low end, leaving 3Dfx with nothing.

In 2000, NVIDIA continued to go from strength to strength. Their biggest challenger at the hardcore-gamer level that year was not 3Dfx, but rather ATI, who arrived on the scene with a new architecture known as Radeon. 3Dfx attempted to right the ship with a two-pronged approach: a Voodoo4 chipset aimed at the long-neglected budget market, and a Voodoo5 aimed at the high end. Both had potential, but the company was badly strapped for cash by now, and couldn’t afford to give them the launch they deserved. In December of 2000, 3Dfx announced that they had agreed to sell out to NVIDIA, who thought they had spotted some bits and bobs in their more recent chips that they might be able to make use of. And that, as they say, was that.

3Dfx was a brief-burning comet by any standard, a company which did everything right up to the instant when someone somewhere flipped a switch and it suddenly started doing everything wrong instead. But whatever regrets Gary Tarolli, Scott Sellers, and Ross Smith may have about the way it all turned out, they can rest secure in the knowledge that they changed not just gaming but computing in general forever. Their vanquisher NVIDIA had revenues of almost $27 billion last year, on the strength of GPUs which are as far beyond the original Voodoo chips as an F-35 is beyond the Wright Brothers’ flier, which are at the forefront not just of 3D graphics but a whole new trend toward “massively parallel” computing.

And yet even today, the 3Dfx name and logo can still send a little tingle of excitement running down the spines of gamers of a certain age, just as that of the Amiga can among some just slightly older. For a brief few years there, over the course of one of most febrile, chaotic, and yet exciting periods in all of gaming history, having a Voodoo card in your computer meant that you had the best graphics money could buy. Most of us wouldn’t want to go back to the days of needing to constantly tinker with the innards of our computers, of dropping hundreds of dollars on the latest and the greatest and hoping that publishers would still be supporting it in six months, of poring over magazines trying to make sense of long lists of arcane bullet points that seemed like fragments of a particularly esoteric PhD thesis (largely because they originally were). No, we wouldn’t want to go back; those days were kind of ridiculous. But that doesn’t mean we can’t look back and smile at the extraordinary technological progression we were privileged to witness over such a disarmingly short period of time.



Did you enjoy this article? If so, please think about pitching in to help me make many more like it. You can pledge any amount you like.



(Sources: the books Renegades of the Empire: How Three Software Warriors Started a Revolution Behind the Walls of Fortress Microsoft by Michael Drummond, Masters of DOOM: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner, and Principles of Three-Dimensional Computer Animation by Michael O’Rourke. Computer Gaming World of November 1995, January 1996, July 1996, November 1996, December 1996, September 1997, October 1997, November 1997, and April 1998; Next Generation of October 1997 and January 1998; Atomic of June 2003; Game Developer of December 1996/January 1997 and February/March 1997. Online sources include “3Dfx and Voodoo Graphics — The Technologies Within” at The Overclocker, former 3Dfx CEO Greg Ballard’s lecture for Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leader series, the Computer History Museum’s “oral history” with the founders of 3Dfx, Fabian Sanglard’s reconstruction of the workings of the Vérité chipset and the Voodoo 1 chipset, “Famous Graphics Chips: 3Dfx’s Voodoo” by Dr. Jon Peddie at the IEEE Computer Society’s site, and “A Fallen Titan’s Final Glory” by Joel Hruska at the long-defunct Sudhian Media. Also, the Usenet discussions that followed the release of the 3Dfx patch for Tomb Raider and Nicol Bolas’s crazily detailed reply to the Stack Exchange question “Why Do Game Developer Prefer Windows?”.)

 

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The Next Generation in Graphics, Part 2: Three Dimensions in Hardware

Most of the academic papers about 3D graphics that John Carmack so assiduously studied during the 1990s stemmed from, of all times and places, the Salt Lake City, Utah, of the 1970s. This state of affairs was a credit to one man by the name of Dave Evans.

Born in Salt Lake City in 1924, Evans was a physicist by training and an electrical engineer by inclination, who found his way to the highest rungs of computing research by way of the aviation industry. By the early 1960s, he was at the University of California, Berkeley, where he did important work in the field of time-sharing, taking the first step toward the democratization of computing by making it possible for multiple people to use one of the ultra-expensive big computers of the day at the same time, each of them accessing it through a separate dumb terminal. During this same period, Evans befriended one Ivan Sutherland, who deserves perhaps more than any other person the title of Father of Computer Graphics as we know them today.

For, in the course of earning his PhD at MIT, Sutherland developed a landmark software application known as Sketchpad, the first interactive computer-based drawing program of any stripe. Sketchpad did not do 3D graphics. It did, however, record its user’s drawings as points and lines on a two-dimensional plane. The potential for adding a third dimension to its Flatland-esque world — a Z coordinate to go along with X and Y — was lost on no one, least of all Sutherland himself. His 1963 thesis on Sketchpad rocketed him into the academic stratosphere.

Sketchpad in action.

In 1964, at the ripe old age of 26, Sutherland succeeded J.C.R. Licklider as head of the computer division of the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), the most remarkable technology incubator in computing history. Alas, he proved ill-suited to the role of administrator: he was too young, too introverted — just too nerdy, as a later generation would have put it. But during the unhappy year he spent there before getting back to the pure research that was his real passion, he put the University of Utah on the computing map, largely as a favor to his friend Dave Evans.

Evans may have left Salt Lake City more than a decade ago, but he remained a devout Mormon, who found the counterculture values of the Berkeley of the 1960s rather uncongenial. So, he had decided to take his old alma mater up on an offer to come home and build a computer-science department there. Sutherland now awarded said department a small ARPA contract, one fairly insignificant in itself. What was significant was that it brought the University of Utah into the ARPA club of elite research institutions that were otherwise clustered on the coasts. An early place on the ARPANET, the predecessor to the modern Internet, was not the least of the perks which would come its way as a result.

Evans looked for a niche for his university amidst the august company it was suddenly joining. The territory of time-sharing was pretty much staked; extensive research in that field was already going full steam ahead at places like MIT and Berkeley. Ditto networking and artificial intelligence and the nuts and bolts of hardware design. Computer graphics, though… that was something else. There were smart minds here and there working on them — count Ivan Sutherland as Exhibit Number One — but no real research hubs dedicated to them. So, it was settled: computer graphics would become the University of Utah’s specialty. In what can only be described as a fantastic coup, in 1968 Evans convinced Sutherland himself to abandon the East Coast prestige of Harvard, where he had gone after leaving his post as the head of ARPA, in favor of the Mormon badlands of Utah.

Things just snowballed from there. Evans and Sutherland assembled around them an incredible constellation of bright young sparks, who over the course of the next decade defined the terms and mapped the geography of the field of 3D graphics as we still know it today, writing papers that remain as relevant today as they were half a century ago — or perchance more so, given the rise of 3D games. For example, the two most commonly used algorithms for calculating the vagaries of light and shade in 3D games stem directly from the University of Utah: Gouraud shading was invented by a Utah student named Henri Gouraud in 1971, while Phong shading was invented by another named Bui Tuong Phong in 1973.

But of course, lots of other students passed through the university without leaving so indelible a mark. One of these was Jim Clark, who would still be semi-anonymous today if he hadn’t gone on to become an entrepreneur who co-founded two of the most important tech companies of the late twentieth century.



When you’ve written as many capsule biographies as I have, you come to realize that the idea of the truly self-made person is for the most part a myth. Certainly almost all of the famous names in computing history were, long before any of their other qualities entered into the equation, lucky: lucky in their time and place of birth, in their familial circumstances, perhaps in (sad as it is to say) their race and gender, definitely in the opportunities that were offered to them. This isn’t to disparage their accomplishments; they did, after all, still need to have the vision to grasp the brass ring of opportunity and the talent to make the most of it. Suffice to say, then, that luck is a prerequisite but the farthest thing from a guarantee.

Every once in a while, however, I come across someone who really did almost literally make something out of nothing. One of these folks is Jim Clark. If today as a soon-to-be octogenarian he indulges as enthusiastically as any of his Old White Guy peers in the clichéd trappings of obscene wealth, from the mansions, yachts, cars, and wine to the Victoria’s Secret model he has taken for a fourth wife, he can at least credibly claim to have pulled himself up to his current station in life entirely by his own bootstraps.

Clark was born in 1944, in a place that made Salt Lake City seem like a cosmopolitan metropolis by comparison: the small Texas Panhandle town of Plainview. He grew up dirt poor, the son of a single mother living well below the poverty line. Nobody expected much of anything from him, and he obliged their lack of expectations. “I thought the whole world was shit and I was living in the middle of it,” he recalls.

An indifferent student at best, he was expelled from high school his junior year for telling a teacher to go to hell. At loose ends, he opted for the classic gambit of running away to sea: he joined the Navy at age seventeen. It was only when the Navy gave him a standardized math test, and he scored the highest in his group of recruits on it, that it began to dawn on him that he might actually be good at something. Encouraged by a few instructors to pursue his aptitude, he enrolled in correspondence courses to fill his free time when out plying the world’s oceans as a crewman on a destroyer.

Ten years later, in 1971, the high-school dropout, now six years out of the Navy and married with children, found himself working on a physics PhD at Louisiana State University. Clark:

I noticed in Physics Today an article that observed that physicists getting PhDs from places like Harvard, MIT, Yale, and so on didn’t like the jobs they were getting. And I thought, well, what am I doing — I’m getting a PhD in physics from Louisiana State University! And I kept thinking, well, I’m married, and I’ve got these obligations. By this time, I had a second child, so I was real eager to get a good job, and I just got discouraged about physics. And a friend of mine pointed to the University of Utah as having a computer-graphics specialty. I didn’t know much about it, but I was good with geometry and physics, which involves a lot of geometry.

So, Clark applied for a spot at the University of Utah and was accepted.

But, as I already implied, he didn’t become a star there. His 1974 thesis was entitled “3D Design of Free-Form B-Spline Surfaces”; it was a solid piece of work addressing a practical problem, but not anything to really get the juices flowing. Afterward, he spent half a decade bouncing around from campus to campus as an adjunct professor: the Universities of California at Santa Cruz and Berkeley, the New York Institute of Technology, Stanford. He was fairly miserable throughout. As an academic of no special note, he was hired primarily as an instructor rather than a researcher, and he wasn’t at all cut out for the job, being too impatient, too irascible. Proving the old adage that the child is the father of the man, he was fired from at least one post for insubordination, just like that angry teenager who had once told off his high-school teacher. Meanwhile he went through not one but two wives. “I was in this kind of downbeat funk,” he says. “Dark, dark, dark.”

It was now early 1979. At Stanford, Clark was working right next door to Xerox’s famed Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), which was inventing much of the modern paradigm of computing, from mice and menus to laser printers and local-area networking. Some of the colleagues Clark had known at the University of Utah were happily ensconced over there. But he was still on the outside looking in. It was infuriating — and yet he was about to find a way to make his mark at last.

Hardware engineering at the time was in the throes of a revolution and its backlash, over a technology that went by the mild-mannered name of “Very Large Scale Integration” (VLSI). The integrated circuit, which packed multiple transistors onto a single microchip, had been invented at Texas Instruments at the end of the 1950s, and had become a staple of computer design already during the following decade. Yet those early implementations often put only a relative handful of transistors on a chip, meaning that they still required lots of chips to accomplish anything useful. A turning point came in 1971 with the Intel 4004, the world’s first microprocessor — i.e., the first time that anyone put the entire brain of a computer on a single chip. Barely remarked at the time, that leap would result in the first kit computers being made available for home users in 1975, followed by the Trinity of 1977, the first three plug-em-in-and-go personal computers suitable for the home. Even then, though, there were many in the academic establishment who scoffed at the idea of VLSI, which required a new, in some ways uglier approach to designing circuitry. In a vivid illustration that being a visionary in some areas doesn’t preclude one from being a reactionary in others, many of the folks at PARC were among the scoffers. Look how far we’ve come doing things one way, they said. Why change?

A PARC researcher named Lynn Conway was enraged by such hidebound thinking. A rare female hardware engineer, she had made scant progress to date getting her point of view through to the old boy’s club that surrounded her at PARC. So, broadening her line of attack, she wrote a paper about the basic techniques of modern chip design, and sent it out to a dozen or so universities along with a tempting offer: if any students or faculty wished to draw up schematics for a chip of their own and send them to her, she would arrange to have the chip fabricated in real silicon and sent back to its proud parent. The point of it all was just to get people to see the potential of VLSI, not to push forward the state of the art. And indeed, just as she had expected, almost all of the designs she received were trivially simple by the standards of even the microchip industry of 1979: digital time keepers, adding machines, and the like. But one was unexpectedly, even crazily complex. Alone among the submissions, it bore a precautionary notice of copyright, from one James Clark. He called his creation the Geometry Engine.

The Geometry Engine was the first and, it seems likely, only microchip that Jim Clark ever personally attempted to design in his life. It was created in response to a fundamental problem that had been vexing 3D modelers since the very beginning: that 3D graphics required shocking quantities of mathematical calculations to bring to life, scaling almost exponentially with the complexity of the scene to be depicted. And worse, the type of math they required was not the type that the researchers’ computers were especially good at.

Wait a moment, some of you might be saying. Isn’t math the very thing that computers do? It’s right there in the name: they compute things. Well, yes, but not all types of math are created equal. Modern computers are also digital devices, meaning they are naturally equipped to deal only with discrete things. Like the game of DOOM, theirs is a universe of stair steps rather than smooth slopes. They like integer numbers, not decimals. Even in the 1960s and 1970s, they could approximate the latter through a storage format known as floating point, but they dealt with these floating-point numbers at least an order of magnitude slower than they did whole numbers, as well as requiring a lot more memory to store them. For this reason, programmers avoided them whenever possible.

And it actually was possible to do so a surprisingly large amount of the time. Most of what computers were commonly used for could be accomplished using only whole numbers — for example, by using Euclidean division that yields a quotient and a remainder in place of decimal division. Even financial software could be built using integers only to count the total number of cents rather than floating-point values to represent dollars and cents. 3D-graphics software, however, was one place where you just couldn’t get around them. Creating a reasonably accurate mathematical representation of an analog 3D space forced you to use floating-point numbers. And this in turn made 3D graphics slow.

Jim Clark certainly wasn’t the first person to think about designing a specialized piece of hardware to lift some of the burden from general-purpose computer designs, an add-on optimized for doing the sorts of mathematical operations that 3D graphics required and nothing else. Various gadgets along these lines had been built already, starting a decade or more before his Geometry Engine. Clark was the first, however, to think of packing it all onto a single chip — or at worst a small collection of them — that could live on a microcomputer’s motherboard or on a card mounted in a slot, that could be mass-produced and sold in the thousands or millions. His description of his “slave processor” sounded disarmingly modest (not, it must be said, a quality for which Clark is typically noted): “It is a four-component vector, floating-point processor for accomplishing three basic operations in computer graphics: matrix transformations, clipping, and mapping to output-device coordinates [i.e., going from an analog world space to pixels in a digital raster].” Yet it was a truly revolutionary idea, the genesis of the graphical processing units (GPUs) of today, which are in some ways more technically complex than the CPUs they serve. The Geometry Engine still needed to use floating-point numbers — it was, after all, still a digital device — but the old engineering doctrine that specialization yields efficiency came into play: it was optimized to do only floating-point calculations, and only a tiny subset of all the ones possible at that, just as quickly as it could.

The Geometry Engine changed Clark’s life. At last, he had something exciting and uniquely his. “All of these people started coming up and wanting to be part of my project,” he remembers. Always an awkward fit in academia, he turned his thinking in a different direction, adopting the mindset of an entrepreneur. “He reinvented his relationship to the world in a way that is considered normal only in California,” writes journalist Michael Lewis in a book about Clark. “No one who had been in his life to that point would be in it ten years later. His wife, his friends, his colleagues, even his casual acquaintances — they’d all be new.” Clark himself wouldn’t hesitate to blast his former profession in later years with all the fury of a professor scorned.

I love the metric of business. It’s money. It’s real simple. You either make money or you don’t. The metric of the university is politics. Does that person like you? Do all these people like you enough to say, “Yeah, he’s worthy?”

But by whatever metric, success didn’t come easy. The Geometry Engine and all it entailed proved a harder sell with the movers and shakers in commercial computing than it had with his colleagues at Stanford. It wasn’t until 1982 that he was able to scrape together the funding to found a company called Silicon Graphics, Incorporated (SGI), and even then he was forced to give 85 percent of his company’s shares to others in order to make it a reality. Then it took another two years after that to actually ship the first hardware.

The market segment SGI was targeting is one that no longer really exists. The machines it made were technically microcomputers, being built around microprocessors, but they were not intended for the homes of ordinary consumers, nor even for the cubicles of ordinary office workers. These were much higher-end, more expensive machines than those, even if they could fit under a desk like one of them. They were called workstation computers. The typical customer spent tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on them in the service of some highly demanding task or another.

In the case of the SGI machines, of course, that task was almost always related to graphics, usually 3D graphics. Their expense wasn’t bound up with their CPUs; in the beginning, these were fairly plebeian chips from the Motorola 68000 series, the same line used in such consumer-grade personal computers as the Apple Macintosh and the Commodore Amiga. No, the justification of their high price tags rather lay with their custom GPUs, which even in 1984 already went far beyond the likes of Clark’s old Geometry Engine. An SGI GPU was a sort of black box for 3D graphics: feed it all of the data that constituted a scene on one side, and watch a glorious visual representation emerge at the other, thanks to an array of specialized circuitry designed for that purpose and no other.

Now that it had finally gotten off the ground, SGI became very successful very quickly. Its machines were widely used in staple 3D applications like computer-aided industrial design (CAD) and flight simulation, whilst also opening up new vistas in video and film production. They drove the shift in Hollywood from special effects made using miniature models and stop-motion techniques dating back to the era of King Kong to the extensive use of computer-generated imagery (CGI) that we see even in the purportedly live-action films of today. (Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were among SGI’s first and best customers.) “When a moviegoer rubbed his eyes and said, ‘What’ll they think of next?’,” writes Michael Lewis, “it was usually because SGI had upgraded its machines.”

The company peaked in the early 1990s, when its graphics workstations were the key to CGI-driven blockbusters like Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park. Never mind the names that flashed by in the opening credits; everyone could agree that the computer-generated dinosaurs were the real stars of Jurassic Park. SGI was bringing in over $3 billion in annual revenue and had close to 15,000 employees by 1993, the year that movie was released. That same year, President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore came out personally to SGI’s offices in Silicon Valley to celebrate this American success story.

SGI’s hardware subsystem for graphics, the beating heart of its business model, was known in 1993 as the RealityEngine2. This latest GPU was, wrote Byte magazine in a contemporary article, “richly parallel,” meaning that it could do many calculations simultaneously, in contrast to a traditional CPU, which could only execute one instruction at a time. (Such parallelism is the reason that modern GPUs are so often used for some math-intensive non-graphical applications, such as crypto-currency mining and machine learning.) To support this black box and deliver to its well-heeled customers a complete turnkey solution for all their graphics needs, SGI had also spearheaded an open-source software library for 3D applications, known as the Open Graphics Library, or OpenGL. Even the CPUs in its latest machines were SGI’s own; it had purchased a maker of same called MIPS Technologies in 1990.

But all of this success did not imply a harmonious corporation. Jim Clark was convinced that he had been hard done by back in 1982, when he was forced to give up 85 percent of his brainchild in order to secure the funding he needed, then screwed over again when he was compelled by his board to give up the CEO post to a former Hewlett Packard executive named Ed McCracken in 1984. The two men had been at vicious loggerheads for years; Clark, who could be downright mean when the mood struck him, reduced McCracken to public tears on at least one occasion. At one memorable corporate retreat intended to repair the toxic atmosphere in the board room, recalls Clark, “the psychologist determined that everyone else on the executive committee was passive aggressive. I was just aggressive.”

Clark claims that the most substantive bone of contention was McCracken’s blasé indifference to the so-called low-end market, meaning all of those non-workstation-class personal computers that were proliferating in the millions during the 1980s and early 1990s. If SGI’s machines were advancing by leaps and bounds, these consumer-grade computers were hopscotching on a rocket. “You could see a time when the PC would be able to do the sort of graphics that [our] machines did,” says Clark. But McCracken, for one, couldn’t see it, was content to live fat and happy off of the high prices and high profit margins of SGI’s current machines.

He did authorize some experiments at the lower end, but his heart was never in it. In 1990, SGI deigned to put a limited subset of the RealityEngine smorgasbord onto an add-on card for Intel-based personal computers. Calling it IrisVision, it hopefully talked up its price of “under $5000,” which really was absurdly low by the company’s usual standards. What with its complete lack of software support and its way-too-high price for this marketplace, IrisVision went nowhere, whereupon McCracken took the failure as a vindication of his position. “This is a low-margin business, and we’re a high-margin company, so we’re going to stop doing that,” he said.

Despite McCracken’s indifference, Clark eventually managed to broker a deal with Nintendo to make a MIPS microprocessor and an SGI GPU the heart of the latter’s Nintendo 64 videogame console. But he quit after yet another shouting match with McCracken in 1994, two years before it hit the street.

He had been right all along about the inevitable course of the industry, however undiplomatically he may have stated his case over the years. Personal computers did indeed start to swallow the workstation market almost at the exact point in time that Clark bailed. The profits from the Nintendo deal were rich, but they were largely erased by another of McCracken’s pet projects, an ill-advised acquisition of the struggling supercomputer maker Cray. Meanwhile, with McCracken so obviously more interested in selling a handful of supercomputers for millions of dollars each than millions upon millions of consoles for a few hundred dollars each, a group of frustrated SGI employees left the company to help Nintendo make the GameCube, the followup to the Nintendo 64, on their own. It was all downhill for SGI after that, bottoming out in a 2009 bankruptcy and liquidation.

As for Clark, he would go on to a second entrepreneurial act as remarkable as his first, abandoning 3D graphics to make a World Wide Web browser with Marc Andreessen. We will say farewell to him here, but you can read the story of his second company Netscape’s meteoric rise and fall elsewhere on this site.



Now, though, I’d like to return to the scene of SGI’s glory days, introducing in the process three new starring players. Gary Tarolli and Scott Sellers were talented young engineers who were recruited to SGI in the 1980s; Ross Smith was a marketing and business-development type who initially worked for MIPS Technologies, then ended up at SGI when it acquired that company in 1990. The three became fast friends. Being of a younger generation, they didn’t share the contempt for everyday personal computers that dominated among their company’s upper management. Whereas the latter laughed at the primitiveness of games like Wolfenstein 3D and Ultima Underworld, if they bothered to notice them at all, our trio saw a brewing revolution in gaming, and thought about how much it could be helped along by hardware-accelerated 3D graphics.

Convinced that there was a huge opportunity here, they begged their managers to get into the gaming space. But, still smarting from the recent failure of IrisVision, McCracken and his cronies rejected their pleas out of hand. (One of the small mysteries in this story is why their efforts never came to the attention of Jim Clark, why an alliance was never formed. The likely answer is that Clark had, by his own admission, largely removed himself from the day-to-day running of SGI by this time, being more commonly seen on his boat than in his office.) At last, Tarolli, Sellers, Smith, and some like-minded colleagues ran another offer up the flagpole. You aren’t doing anything with IrisVision, they said. Let us form a spinoff company of our own to try to sell it. And much to their own astonishment, this time management agreed.

They decided to call their new company Pellucid — not the best name in the world, sounding as it did rather like a medicine of some sort, but then they were still green at all this. The technology they had to peddle was a couple of years old, but it still blew just about anything else in the MS-DOS/Windows space out of the water, being able to display 16 million colors at a resolution of 1024 X 768, with 3D acceleration built-in. (Contrast this with the SVGA card found in the typical home computer of the time, which could do 256 colors at 640 X 480, with no 3D affordances). Pellucid rebranded the old IrisVision the ProGraphics 1024. Thanks to the relentless march of chip-fabrication technology, they found that they could now manufacture it cheaply enough to be able to sell it for as little as $1000 — still pricey, to be sure, but a price that some hardcore gamers, as well as others with a strong interest in having the best graphics possible, might just be willing to pay.

The problem, the folks at Pellucid soon came to realize, was a well-nigh intractable deadlock between the chicken and the egg. Without software written to take advantage of its more advanced capabilities, the ProGraphics 1024 was just another SVGA graphics card, selling for a ridiculously high price. So, consumers waited for said software to arrive. Meanwhile software developers, seeing the as-yet non-existent installed base, saw no reason to begin supporting the card. Breaking this logjam must require a concentrated public-relations and developer-outreach effort, the likes of which the shoestring spinoff couldn’t possibly afford.

They thought they had done an end-run around the problem in May of 1993, when they agreed, with the blessing of SGI, to sell Pellucid kit and caboodle to a major up-and-comer in consumer computing known as Media Vision, which currently sold “multimedia upgrade kits” consisting of CD-ROM drives and sound cards. But Media Vision’s ambitions knew no bounds: they intended to branch out into many other kinds of hardware and software. With proven people like Stan Cornyn, a legendary hit-maker from the music industry, on their management rolls and with millions and millions of dollars on hand to fund their efforts, Media Vision looked poised to dominate.

It seemed the perfect landing place for Pellucid; Media Vision had all the enthusiasm for the consumer market that SGI had lacked. The new parent company’s management said, correctly, that the ProGraphics 1024 was too old by now and too expensive to ever become a volume product, but that 3D acceleration’s time would come as soon as the current wave of excitement over CD-ROM and multimedia began to ebb and people started looking for the next big thing. When that happened, Media Vision would be there with a newer, more reasonably priced 3D card, thanks to the people who had once called themselves Pellucid. It sounded pretty good, even if in the here and now it did seem to entail more waiting around than anything else.

The ProGraphics 1024 board in Media Vision livery.

There was just one stumbling block: “Media Vision was run by crooks,” as Scott Sellers puts it. In April of 1994, a scandal erupted in the business pages of the nation’s newspapers. It turned out that Media Vision had been an experiment in “fake it until you make it” on a gigantic scale. Its founders had engaged in just about every form of malfeasance imaginable, creating a financial house of cards whose honest revenues were a minuscule fraction of what everyone had assumed them to be. By mid-summer, the company had blown away like so much dust in the wind, still providing income only for the lawyers who were left to pick over the corpse. (At least two people would eventually be sent to prison for their roles in the conspiracy.) The former Pellucid folks were left as high and dry as everyone else who had gotten into bed with Media Vision. All of their efforts to date had led to the sale of no more than 2000 graphics cards.

That same summer of 1994, a prominent Silicon Valley figure named Gordon Campbell was looking for interesting projects in which to invest. Campbell had earned his reputation as one of the Valley’s wise men through a company called Chips and Technologies (C&T), which he had co-founded in 1984. One of those hidden movers in the computer industry, C&T had largely invented the concept of the chipset: chips or small collections of them that could be integrated directly into a computer’s motherboard to perform functions that used to be placed on add-on cards. C&T had first made a name for itself by reducing IBM’s bulky nineteen-chip EGA graphics card to just four chips that were cheaper to make and consumed less power. Campbell’s firm thrived alongside the cost-conscious PC clone industry, which by the beginning of the 1990s was rendering IBM itself, the very company whose products it had once so unabashedly copied, all but irrelevant. Onboard video, onboard sound, disk controllers, basic firmware… you name it, C&T had a cheap, good-enough-for-the-average-consumer chipset to handle it.

But now Campbell had left C&T “in pursuit of new opportunities,” as they say in Valley speak. Looking for a marketing person for one of the startups in which he had invested a stake, he interviewed a young man named Ross Smith who had SGI on his résumé — always a plus. But the interview didn’t go well. Campbell:

It was the worst interview I think I’ve ever had. And so finally, I just turned to him and I said, “Okay, your heart’s not in this interview. What do you really want to do?”

And he kind of looks surprised and says, well, there are these two other guys, and we want to start a 3D-graphics company. And the next thing I know, we had set up a meeting. And we had, over a lot of beers, a discussion which led these guys to all come and work at my office. And that set up the start of 3Dfx.

It seemed to all of them that, after all of the delays and blind alleys, it truly was now or never to make a mark. For hardware-accelerated 3D graphics were already beginning to trickle down into the consumer space. In standup arcades, games like Daytona USA and Virtua Fighter were using rudimentary GPUs. Ditto the Sega Saturn and the Sony PlayStation, the latest in home-videogame consoles, both which were on the verge of release in Japan, with American debuts expected in 1995. Meanwhile the software-only, 2.5D graphics of DOOM were taking the world of hardcore computer gamers by storm. The men behind 3Dfx felt that the next move must surely seem obvious to many other people besides themselves. The only reason the masses of computer-game players and developers weren’t clamoring for 3D graphics cards already was that they didn’t yet realize what such gadgets could do for them.

Still, they were all wary of getting back into the add-on board market, where they had been burned so badly before. Selling products directly to consumers required retail access and marketing muscle that they still lacked. Instead, following in the footsteps of C&T, they decided to sell a 3D chipset only to other companies, who could then build it into add-on boards for personal computers, standup-arcade machines, whatever they wished.

At the same time, though, they wanted their technology to be known, in exactly the way that the anonymous chipsets made by C&T were not. In the pursuit of this aspiration, Gordon Campbell found inspiration from another company that had become a household name despite selling very little directly to consumers. Intel had launched the “Intel Inside” campaign in 1990, just as the era of the PC clone was giving way to a more amorphous commodity architecture. The company introduced a requirement that the makers of computers which used its CPUs include the Intel Inside logo on their packaging and on the cases of the computers themselves, even as it made the same logo the centerpiece of a standalone advertising campaign in print and on television. The effort paid off; Intel became almost as identified with the Second Home Computer Revolution in the minds of consumers as was Microsoft, whose own logo showed up on their screens every time they booted into Windows. People took to calling the emerging duopoly the “Wintel” juggernaut, a name which has stuck around to this day.

So, it was decided: a requirement to display a similarly snazzy 3Dfx logo would be written into that company’s contracts as well. The 3Dfx name itself was a vast improvement over Pellucid. As time went on, 3Dfx would continue to display a near-genius for catchy branding: “Voodoo” for the chipset itself, “GLide” for the software library that controlled it. All of this reflected a business savvy the likes of which hadn’t been seen from Pellucid, that was a credit both to Campbell’s steady hand and the accumulating experience of the other three partners.

But none of it would have mattered without the right product. Campbell told his trio of protégés in no uncertain terms that they were never going to make a dent in computer gaming with a $1000 video card; they needed to get the price down to a third of that at the most, which meant the chipset itself could cost the manufacturers who used it in their products not much more than $100 a pop. That was a tall order, especially considering that gamers’ expectations of graphical fidelity weren’t diminishing. On the contrary: the old Pellucid card hadn’t even been able to do 3D texture mapping, a failing that gamers would never accept post-DOOM.

It was left to Gary Tarolli and Scott Sellers to figure out what absolutely had to be in there, such as the aforementioned texture mapping, and what they could get away with tossing overboard. Driven by the remorseless logic of chip-fabrication costs, they wound up going much farther with the tossing than they ever could have imagined when they started out. There could be no talk of 24-bit color or unusually high resolutions: 16-bit color (offering a little over 65,000 onscreen shades) at a resolution of 640 X 480 would be the limit.[1]A resolution of 800 X 600 was technically possible using the Voodoo chipset, but using this resolution meant that the programmer could not use a vital affordance known as Z-buffering. For this reason, it was almost never seen in the wild. Likewise, they threw out the capability of handling any polygons except for the simplest of them all, the humble triangle. For, they realized, you could make almost any solid you liked by combining triangular surfaces together. With enough triangles in your world — and their chipset would let you have up to 1 million of them — you needn’t lament the absence of the other polygons all that much.

Sellers had another epiphany soon after. Intel’s latest CPU, to which gamers were quickly migrating, was the Pentium. It had a built-in floating-point co-processor which was… not too shabby, actually. It should therefore be possible to take the first phase of the 3D-graphics pipeline — the modeling phase — out of the GPU entirely and just let the CPU handle it. And so another crucial decision was made: they would concern themselves only with the rendering or rasterization phase, which was a much greater challenge to tackle in software alone, even with a Pentium. Another huge piece of the puzzle was thus neatly excised — or rather outsourced back to the place where it was already being done in current games. This would have been heresy at SGI, whose ethic had always been to do it all in the GPU. But then, they were no longer at SGI, were they?

Undoubtedly their bravest decision of all was to throw out any and all 2D-graphics capabilities — i.e., the neat rasters of pixels used to display Windows desktops and word processors and all of those earlier, less exciting games. Makers of Voodoo boards would have to include a cable to connect the existing, everyday graphics cards inside their customers’ machines to their new 3D ones. When you ran non-3D applications, the Voodoo card would simply pass the video signal on to the monitor unchanged. But when you fired up a 3D game, it would take over from the other board. A relay inside made a distinctly audible click when this happened. Far from a bug, gamers would soon come to consider the noise a feature.”Because you knew it was time to have fun,” as Ross Smith puts it.

It was a radical plan, to be sure. These new cards would be useful only for games, would have no other purpose whatsoever; there would be no justifying this hardware purchase to the parents or the spouse with talk of productivity or educational applications. Nevertheless, the cost savings seemed worth it. After all, almost everyone who initially went out to buy the new cards would already have a perfectly good 2D video card in their computer. Why make them pay extra to duplicate those functions?

The final design used just two custom chips. One of them, internally known as the T-Rex (Jurassic Park was still in the air), was dedicated exclusively to the texture mapping that had been so conspicuously missing from the Pellucid board. Another, called the FBI (“Frame Buffer Interface”), did everything else required in the rendering phase. Add to this pair a few less exciting off-the-shelf chips and four megabytes worth of RAM chips, put it on a board with the appropriate connectors, and you had yourself a 3Dfx Voodoo GPU.

Needless to say, getting this far took some time. Tarolli, Sellers, and Smith spent the last half of 1994 camped out in Campbell’s office, deciding what they wanted to do and how they wanted to do it and securing the funding they needed to make it happen. Then they spent all of 1995 in offices of their own, hiring about a dozen people to help them, praying all the time that no other killer product would emerge to make all of their efforts moot. While they worked, the Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation did indeed arrive on American shores, becoming the first gaming devices equpped with 3D GPUs to reach American homes in quantity. The 3Dfx crew were not overly impressed by either console — and yet they found the public’s warm reception of the PlayStation in particular oddly encouraging. “That showed, at a very rudimentary level, what could be done with 3D graphics with very crude texture mapping,” says Scott Sellers. “And it was pretty abysmal quality. But the consumers were just eating it up.”

They got their first finished chipsets back from their Taiwanese fabricator at the end of January 1996, then spent Super Bowl weekend soldering them into place and testing them. There were a few teething problems, but in the end everything came together as expected. They had their 3D chipset, at the beginning of a year destined to be dominated by the likes of Duke Nukem 3D and Quake. It seemed the perfect product for a time when gamers couldn’t get enough 3D mayhem. “If it had been a couple of years earlier,” says Gary Tarolli, “it would have been too early. If it had been a couple of years later, it would have been too late.” As it was, they were ready to go at the Goldilocks moment. Now they just had to sell their chipset to gamers — which meant they first had to sell it to game developers and board makers.



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(Sources: the books The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age by Michael A. Hiltzik, and The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story by Michael Lewis; Byte of May 1992 and November 1993; InfoWorld of April 22 1991 and May 31 1993; Next Generation of October 1997; ACM’s Computer Graphics journal of July 1982; Wired of January 1994 and October 1994. Online sources include the Computer History Museum’s “oral histories” with Jim Clark, Forest Baskett, and the founders of 3Dfx; Wayne Carlson’s “Critical History of Computer Graphics and Animation”; “Fall of Voodoo” by Ernie Smith at Tedium; Fabian Sanglard’s reconstruction of the workings of the Voodoo 1 chips; “Famous Graphics Chips: 3Dfx’s Voodoo” by Dr. Jon Peddie at the IEEE Computer Society’s site; an internal technical description of the Voodoo technology archived at bitsavers.org.)

Footnotes

Footnotes
1 A resolution of 800 X 600 was technically possible using the Voodoo chipset, but using this resolution meant that the programmer could not use a vital affordance known as Z-buffering. For this reason, it was almost never seen in the wild.
 

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The Next Generation in Graphics, Part 1: Three Dimensions in Software (or, Quake and Its Discontents)

“Mathematics,” wrote the historian of science Carl Benjamin Boyer many years ago, “is as much an aspect of culture as it is a collection of algorithms.” The same might be said about the mathematical algorithms we choose to prioritize — especially in these modern times, when the right set of formulas can be worth many millions of dollars, can be trade secrets as jealously guarded as the recipes for Coca-Cola or McDonald’s Special Sauce.

We can learn much about the tech zeitgeist from those algorithms the conventional wisdom thinks are most valuable. At the very beginning of the 1990s, when “multimedia” was the buzzword of the age and the future of games was believed to lie with “interactive movies” made out of video clips of real actors, the race was on to develop video codecs: libraries of code able to digitize footage from the analog world and compress it to a fraction of its natural size, thereby making it possible to fit a reasonable quantity of it on CDs and hard drives. This was a period when Apple’s QuickTime was regarded as a killer app in itself, when Philips’s ill-fated CD-i console could be delayed for years by the lack of a way to get video to its screen quickly and attractively.

It is a rule in almost all kinds of engineering that, the more specialized a device is, the more efficiently it can perform the tasks that lie within its limited sphere. This rule holds true as much in computing as anywhere else. So, when software proved able to stretch only so far in the face of the limited general-purpose computing power of the day, some started to build their video codecs into specialized hardware add-ons.

Just a few years later, after the zeitgeist in games had shifted, the whole process repeated itself in a different context.

By the middle years of the decade, with the limitations of working with canned video clips becoming all too plain, interactive movies were beginning to look like a severe case of the emperor’s new clothes. The games industry therefore shifted its hopeful gaze to another approach, one that would prove a much more lasting transformation in the way games were made. This 3D Revolution did have one point of similarity with the mooted and then abandoned meeting of Silicon Valley and Hollywood: it too was driven by algorithms, implemented first in software and then in hardware.

It was different, however, in that the entire industry looked to one man to lead it into its algorithmic 3D future. That man’s name was John Carmack.



Whether they happen to be pixel art hand-drawn by human artists or video footage captured by cameras, 2D graphics already exist on disk before they appear on the monitor screen. And therein lies the source of their limitations. Clever programmers can manipulate them to some extent — pixel art generally more so than digitized video — but the possibilities are bounded by the fundamentally static nature of the source material. 3D graphics, however, are literally drawn by the computer. They can go anywhere and do just about anything. For, while 2D graphics are stored as a concrete grid of pixels, 3D graphics are described using only the abstract language of mathematics — a language able to describe not just a scene but an entire world, assuming you have a powerful enough computer running a good enough algorithm.

Like so many things that get really complicated really quickly, the basic concepts of 3D graphics are disarmingly simple. The process behind them can be divided into two phases: the modeling phase and the rendering, or rasterization, phase.

It all begins with simple two-dimensional shapes of the sort we all remember from middle-school geometry, each defined as a collection of points on a plane and straight lines connecting them together. By combining and arranging these two-dimensional shapes, or surfaces, together in three-dimensional space, we can make solids — or, in the language of computerized 3D graphics, objects.

Here we see how 3D objects can be made ever more more complex by building them out of ever more surfaces. The trade-off is that more complex objects require more computing power to render in a timely fashion.

Once we have a collection of objects, we can put them into a world space, wherever we like and at whatever angle of orientation we like. This world space is laid out as a three-dimensional grid, with its point of origin — i.e., the point where X, Y, and Z are all zero — wherever we wish it to be. In addition to our objects, we also place within it a camera — or, if you like, an observer in our world — at whatever position and angle of orientation we wish. At their simplest, 3D graphics require nothing more at the modeling phase.

We sometimes call the second phase the “rasterization” phase in reference to the orderly two-dimensional grid of pixels which make up the image seen on a monitor screen, which in computer-science parlance is known as a raster. The whole point of this rasterization phase, then, is to make our computer’s monitor a window into our imaginary world from the point of view of our imaginary camera. This entails converting said world’s three dimensions back into our two-dimensional raster of pixels, using the rules of perspective that have been understood by human artists since the Renaissance.

We can think of rasterizing as observing a scene through a window screen. Each square in the mesh is one pixel, which can be exactly one color. The whole process of 3D rendering ultimately comes down to figuring out what each of those colors should be.

The most basic of all 3D graphics are of the “wire-frame” stripe, which attempt to draw only the lines that form the edges of their surfaces. They were seen fairly frequently on microcomputers as far back as the early 1980s, the most iconic example undoubtedly being the classic 1984 space-trading game Elite.

Even in something as simple as Elite, we can begin to see how 3D graphics blur the lines between a purely presentation-level technology and a full-blown world simulation. When we have one enemy spaceship in our sights in Elite, there might be several others above, behind, or below us, which the 3D engine “knows” about but which we may not. Combined with a physics engine and some player and computer agency in the model world (taking here the form of lasers and thrusters), it provides the raw materials for a game. Small wonder that so many game developers came to see 3D graphics as such a natural fit.

But, for all that those wire frames in Elite might have had their novel charm in their day, programmers realized that the aesthetics of 3D graphics had to get better for them to become a viable proposition over the long haul. This realization touched off an algorithmic arms race that is still ongoing to this day. The obvious first step was to paint in the surfaces of each solid in single blocks of color, as the later versions of Elite that were written for 16-bit rather than 8-bit machines often did. It was an improvement in a way, but it still looked jarringly artificial, even against a spartan star field in outer space.

The next way station on the road to a semi-realistic-looking computer-generated world was light sources of varying strengths, positioned in the world with X, Y, and Z coordinates of their own, casting their illumination and shadows realistically on the objects to be found there.

A 3D scene with light sources.

The final step was to add textures, small pictures that were painted onto surfaces in place of uniform blocks of color; think of the pitted paint job of a tired X-Wing fighter or the camouflage of a Sherman tank. Textures introduced an enormous degree of complication at the rasterization stage; it wasn’t easy for 3D engines to make them look believable from a multitude of different lines of sight. That said, believable lighting was almost as complicated. Textures or lighting, or both, were already the fodder for many an academic thesis before microcomputers even existed.

A 3D scene with light sources and textures.

In the more results-focused milieu of commercial game development, where what was possible was determined largely by which types of microprocessors Intel and Motorola were selling the most of in any given year, programmers were forced to choose between compromised visions of the academic ideal. These broke down into two categories, neatly exemplified by the two most profitable computer games of the 1990s. Those games that followed in one or the other’s footsteps came to be known as the “Myst clones” and the “DOOM clones.” They could hardly have been more dissimilar in personality, yet they were both symbols of a burgeoning 3D revolution.

The Myst clones got their name from a game developed by Cyan Studios and published by Brøderbund in September of 1993, which went on to sell at least 6 million copies as a boxed retail product and quite likely millions more as a pack-in of one description or another. Myst and the many games that copied its approach tended to be, as even their most strident detractors had to admit, rather beautiful to look at. This was because they didn’t attempt to render their 3D imagery in real time; their rendering was instead done beforehand, often on beefy workstation-class machines, then captured as finished rasters of pixels on disk. Given that they worked with graphics that needed to be rendered only once and could be allowed to take hours to do so if necessary, the creators of games like this could pull out all the stops in terms of textures, lighting, and the sheer number and complexity of the 3D solids that made up their worlds.

These games’ disadvantage — a pretty darn massive one in the opinion of many players — was that their scope of interactive potential was as sharply limited in its way as that of all those interactive movies built around canned video clips that the industry was slowly giving up on. They could present their worlds to their players only as a collection of pre-rendered nodes to be jumped between, could do nothing on the fly. These limitations led most of their designers to build their gameplay around set-piece puzzles found in otherwise static, non-interactive environments, which most players soon started to find a bit boring. Although the genre had its contemplative pleasures and its dedicated aficionados who appreciated them, its appeal as anything other than a tech demo — the basis on which the original Myst was primarily sold — turned out to be the very definition of niche, as the publishers of Myst clones belatedly learned to their dismay. The harsh reality became undeniable once Riven, the much-anticipated, sumptuously beautiful sequel to Myst, under-performed expectations by “only” selling 1 million copies when it finally appeared four years after its hallowed predecessor. With the exception only of Titanic: Adventure out of Time, which owed its fluke success to a certain James Cameron movie with which it happened to share a name and a setting, no other game of this style ever cracked half a million in unit sales. The genre has been off the mainstream radar for decades now.

The DOOM clones, on the other hand, have proved a far more enduring fixture of mainstream gaming. They took their name, of course, from the landmark game of first-person carnage which the energetic young men of id Software released just a couple of months after Myst reached store shelves. John Carmack, the mastermind of the DOOM engine, managed to present a dynamic, seamless, apparently 3D world in place of the static nodes of Myst, and managed to do it in real time, even on a fairly plebeian consumer-grade computer. He did so first of all by being a genius programmer, able to squeeze every last drop out of the limited hardware at his disposal. And then, when even that wasn’t enough to get the job done, he threw out feature after feature that the academics whose papers he had pored over insisted was essential for any “real” 3D engine. His motto was, if you can’t get it done honestly, cheat, by hard-coding assumptions about the world into your algorithms and simply not letting the player — or the level designer — violate them. The end result was no Myst-like archetype of beauty in still screenshots. It pasted 2D sprites into its world whenever there wasn’t horsepower enough to do real modeling, had an understanding of light and its properties that is most kindly described as rudimentary, and couldn’t even handle sloping floors or ceilings, or walls that weren’t perfectly vertical. Heck, it didn’t even let you look up or down.

And absolutely none of that mattered. DOOM may have looked a bit crude in freeze-frame, but millions of gamers found it awe-inspiring to behold in motion. Indeed, many of them thought that Carmack’s engine, combined with John Romero and Sandy Petersen’s devious level designs, gave them the most fun they’d ever had sitting behind a computer. This was immersion of a level they’d barely imagined possible, the perfect demonstration of the real potential of 3D graphics — even if it actually was, as John Carmack would be the first to admit, only 2.5D at best. No matter; DOOM felt like real 3D, and that was enough.

A hit game will always attract imitators, and a massive hit will attract legions of them. Accordingly, the market was soon flooded with, if anything, even more DOOM clones than Myst clones, all running in similar 2.5D engines, the product of both intense reverse engineering of DOOM itself and Carmack’s habit of talking freely about how he made the magic happen to pretty much anyone who asked him, no matter how much his colleagues at id begged him not to. “Programming is not a zero-sum game,” he said. “Teaching something to a fellow programmer doesn’t take it away from you. I’m happy to share what I can because I’m in it for the love of programming.” Carmack was elevated to veritable godhood, the prophet on the 3D mountaintop passing down whatever scraps of wisdom he deigned to share with the lesser mortals below.

Seen in retrospect, the DOOM clones are, like the Myst clones, a fairly anonymous lot for the most part, doubling down on transgressive ultra-violence instead of majestic isolation, but equally failing to capture a certain ineffable something that lay beyond the nuts and bolts of their inspiration’s technology. The most important difference between the Myst and DOOM clones came down to the filthy lucre of dollar and unit sales: whereas Myst‘s coattails proved largely illusory, producing few other hits, DOOM‘s were anything but. Most people who had bought Myst, it seemed, were satisfied with that single purchase; people who bought DOOM were left wanting more first-person mayhem, even if it wasn’t quite up to the same standard.

The one DOOM clone that came closest to replacing DOOM itself in the hearts of gamers was known as Duke Nukem 3D. Perhaps that isn’t surprising, given its pedigree: it was a product of 3D Realms, the rebranded incarnation of Scott Miller’s Apogee Software. Whilst trading under the earlier name, Miller had pioneered the episodic shareware model of game distribution, a way of escaping the heavy-handed group-think of the major boxed-game publishers and their tediously high-concept interactive movies in favor of games that were exponentially cheaper to develop, but also rawer, more visceral, more in line with what the teenage and twenty-something males who still constituted the large majority of dedicated gamers were actually jonesing to play. Miller had discovered the young men of id when they were still working for a disk magazine in Shreveport, Louisiana. He had then convinced them to move to his own glossier, better-connected hometown of Dallas, Texas, and distributed their proto-DOOM shooter Wolfenstein 3D to great success. His protégées had elected to strike out on their own when the time came to release DOOM, but it’s fair to say that that game would probably never have come to exist at all if not for their shareware Svengali. And even if it had, it probably wouldn’t have made them so much money; Jay Wilbur, id’s own tireless guerilla marketer, learned most of his tricks from watching Scott Miller.

Still a man with a keen sense of what his customers really wanted, Miller re-branded Apogee as 3D Realms as a way of signifying its continuing relevance amidst the 3D revolution that took the games industry by storm after DOOM. Then he, his junior partner George Broussard, and 3D Realms’s technical mastermind Ken Silverman set about making a DOOM-like engine of their own, known as Build, which they could sell to other developers who wanted to get up and running quickly. And they used the same engine to make a game of their own, which would turn out to be the most memorable of all those built with Build.

Duke Nukem 3D‘s secret weapon was one of the few boxes in the rubric of mainstream gaming success that DOOM had failed to tick off: a memorable character to serve as both star and mascot. First conceived several years earlier for a pair of Apogee 2D platformers, Duke Nukem was Joseph Lieberman’s worst nightmare, an unrepentant gangster with equally insatiable appetites for bombs and boobies, a fellow who “thinks the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms is a convenience store,” as his advertising trumpeted. His latest game combined some of the best, tightest level design yet seen outside of DOOM with a festival of adolescent transgression, from toilet water that served as health potions to strippers who would flash their pixelated breasts at you for the price of a dollar bill. The whole thing was topped off with the truly over-the-top quips of Duke himself: “I’m gonna rip off your head and shit down your neck!”; “Your face? Your ass? What’s the difference?” It was an unbeatable combination, proof positive that Miller’s ability to read his market was undimmed. Released in January of 1996, relatively late in the day for this generation of 3D — or rather 2.5D — technology, Duke Nukem 3D became by some reports the best-selling single computer game of that entire year. It is still remembered with warm nostalgia today by countless middle-aged men who would never want their own children to play a game like this. And so the cycle of life continues…

In a porno shop, shooting it out with policemen who are literally pigs…

Duke Nukem 3D was a triumph of design and attitude rather than technology; in keeping with most of the DOOM clones, the Build engine’s technical innovations over its inspiration were fairly modest. John Carmack scoffed that his old friends’ creation looked like it was “held together with bubble gum.”

The game that did push the technology envelope farthest, albeit without quite managing to escape the ghetto of the DOOM clones, was also a sign in another way of how quickly DOOM was changing the industry: rather than stemming from scruffy veterans of the shareware scene like id and 3D Realms, it came from the heart of the industry’s old-money establishment — from no less respectable and well-financed an entity than George Lucas’s very own games studio.

LucasArts’s Dark Forces was a shooter set in the Star Wars universe, which disappointed everyone right out of the gate with the news that it was not going to let you fight with a light saber. The developers had taken a hard look at it, they said, but concluded in the end that it just wasn’t possible to pull off satisfactorily within the hardware specifications they had to meet. This failing was especially ironic in light of the fact that they had chosen to name their new 2.5D engine “Jedi.” But they partially atoned for it by making the Jedi engine capable of hosting unprecedentedly enormous levels — not just horizontally so, but vertically as well. Dark Forces was full of yawning drop-offs and cavernous open spaces, the likes which you never saw in DOOM — or Duke Nukem 3D, for that matter, despite its release date of almost a year after Dark Forces. Even more importantly, Dark Forces felt like Star Wars, right from the moment that John Williams’s stirring theme song played over stage-setting text which scrolled away into the frame rather than across it. Although they weren’t allowed to make any of the movies’ characters their game’s star, LucasArts created a serviceable if slightly generic stand-in named Kyle Katarn, then sent him off on vertigo-inducing chases through huge levels stuffed to the gills with storm troopers in urgent need of remedial gunnery training, just like in the movies. Although Dark Forces toned down the violence that so many other DOOM clones were making such a selling point out of — there was no blood whatsoever on display here, just as there had not been in the movies — it compensated by giving gamers the chance to live out some of their most treasured childhood media memories, at a time when there were no new non-interactive Star Wars experiences to be had.

Unfortunately, LucasArts’s design instincts weren’t quite on a par with their presentation and technology. Dark Forces‘s levels were horribly confusing, providing little guidance about what to do or where to go in spaces whose sheer three-dimensional size and scope made the two-dimensional auto-map all but useless. Almost everyone who goes back to play the game today tends to agree that it just isn’t as much fun as it ought to be. At the time, though, the Star Wars connection and its technical innovations were enough to make Dark Forces a hit almost the equal of DOOM and Duke Nukem 3D. Even John Carmack made a point of praising LucasArts for what they had managed to pull off on hardware not much better than that demanded by DOOM.

Yet everyone seemed to be waiting on Carmack himself, the industry’s anointed Master of 3D Algorithms, to initiate the real technological paradigm shift. It was obvious what that must entail: an actual, totally non-fake rendered-on-the-fly first-person 3D engine, without all of the compromises that had marked DOOM and its imitators. Such engines weren’t entirely unheard of; the Boston studio Looking Glass Technologies had been working with them for five years, employing them in such innovative, immersive games as Ultima Underworld and System Shock. But those games were qualitatively different from DOOM and its clones: slower, more complex, more cerebral. The mainstream wanted a game that played just as quickly and violently and viscerally as DOOM, but that did it in uncompromising real 3D. With computers getting faster every year and with a genius like John Carmack to hand, it ought to be possible.

And so Carmack duly went to work on just such an engine, for a game that was to be called Quake. His ever-excitable level designer John Romero, who had the looks and personality to be the rock star gaming had been craving for years, was all in with bells on. “The next game is going to blow DOOM all to hell,” he told his legions of adoring fans. “DOOM totally sucks in comparison to our next game! Quake is going to be a bigger step over DOOM than DOOM was over Wolf 3D.” Drunk on success and adulation, he said that Quake would be more than just a game: “It will be a movement.” (Whatever that meant!) The drumbeat of excitement building outside of id almost seemed to justify his hyperbole; from all the way across the Atlantic, the British magazine PC Zone declared that the upcoming Quake would be “the most important PC game ever made.” The soundtrack alone was to be a significant milestone in the incorporation of gaming into mainstream pop culture, being the work of Trent Reznor and his enormously popular industrial-rock band Nine Inch Nails. Such a collaboration would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier.

While Romero was enjoying life as gaming’s own preeminent rock star and waiting for Carmack to get far enough along on the Quake engine to give him something to do, Carmack was living like a monk, working from 4 PM to 4 AM every day. In another sign of just how quickly id had moved up in the world, he had found himself an unexpectedly well-credentialed programming partner. Michael Abrash was one of the establishment’s star programmers, who had written a ton of magazine articles and two highly regarded technical tomes on assembly-language and graphics programming and was now a part of Microsoft’s Windows NT team. When Carmack, who had cut his teeth on Abrash’s writings, invited him out of the blue to come to Dallas and do Quake with him, Bill Gates himself tried to dissuade his employee. “You might not like it down there,” he warned. Abrash was, after all, pushing 40, a staid sort with an almost academic demeanor, while id was a nest of hyperactive arrested adolescence on a permanent sugar high. But he went anyway, because he was pretty sure Carmack was a genius, and because Carmack seemed to Abrash a bit lonely, working all night every night with only his computer for company. Abrash thought he saw in Quake a first glimmer of a new form of virtual existence that companies like Meta are still chasing eagerly today: “a pretty complicated, online, networked universe,” all in glorious embodied 3D. “We do Quake, other companies do other games, people start building worlds with our format and engine and tools, and these worlds can be glommed together via doorways from one to another. To me this sounds like a recipe for the first real cyberspace, which I believe will happen the way a real space station or habitat probably would — by accretion.”

He may not have come down if he had known precisely what he was getting into; he would later compare making Quake to “being strapped onto a rocket during takeoff in the middle of a hurricane.” The project proved a tumultuous, exhausting struggle that very nearly broke id as a cohesive company, even as the money from DOOM was continuing to roll in. (id’s annual revenues reached $15.6 million in 1995, a very impressive figure for what was still a relatively tiny company, with a staff numbering only a few dozen.)

Romero envisioned a game that would be as innovative in terms of gameplay as technology, that would be built largely around sword-fighting and other forms of hand-to-hand combat rather than gun play — the same style of combat that LucasArts had decided was too impractical for Dark Forces. Some of his early descriptions make Quake sound more like a full-fledged CRPG in the offing than another straightforward action game. But it just wouldn’t come together, according to some of Romero’s colleagues because he failed to communicate his expectations to them, rather leading them to suspect that even he wasn’t quite sure what he was trying to make.

Carmack finally stepped in and ordered his design team to make Quake essentially a more graphically impressive DOOM. Romero accepted the decision outwardly, but seethed inwardly at this breach of longstanding id etiquette; Carmack had always made the engines, then given Romero free rein to turn them into games. Romero largely checked out, opening a door that ambitious newcomers like American McGee and Tim Willits, who had come up through the thriving DOOM modding community, didn’t hesitate to push through. The offices of id had always been as hyper-competitive as a DOOM deathmatch, but now the atmosphere was becoming a toxic stew of buried resentments.

In a misguided attempt to fix the bad vibes, Carmack, whose understanding of human nature was as shallow as his understanding of computer graphics was deep, announced one day that he had ordered a construction crew in to knock down all of the walls, so that everybody could work together from a single “war room.” One for all and all for one, and all that. The offices of the most profitable games studio in the world were transformed into a dystopian setting perfect for a DOOM clone, as described by a wide-eyed reporter from Wired magazine who came for a visit: “a maze of drywall and plastic sheeting, with plaster dust everywhere, loose acoustic tiles, and cables dangling from the ceiling. Almost every item not directly related to the completion of Quake was gone. The only privacy to be found was between the padded earpieces of headphones.”

Wired magazine’s August 1996 cover, showing John Carmack flanked by John Romero and Adrian Carmack, marked the end of an era. By the time it appeared on newsstands, Romero had already been fired.

Needless to say, it didn’t have the effect Carmack had hoped for. In his book-length history of id’s early life and times, journalist David Kushner paints a jittery, unnerving picture of the final months of Quake‘s development: they “became a blur of silent and intense all-nighters, punctuated by the occasional crash of a keyboard against a wall. The construction crew had turned the office into a heap. The guys were taking their frustrations out by hurling computer parts into the drywall like knives.” Michael Abrash is more succinct: “A month before shipping, we were sick to death of working on Quake.” And level designer Sandy Petersen, the old man of the group, who did his best to keep his head down and stay out of the intra-office cold war, is even more so: “[Quake] was not fun to do.”

Quake was finally finished in June of 1996. It would prove a transitional game in more ways than one, caught between where games had recently been and where they were going. Still staying true to that odd spirit of hacker idealism that coexisted with his lust for ever faster Ferraris, Carmack insisted that Quake be made available as shareware, so that people could try it out before plunking down its full price. The game accordingly got a confusing, staggered release, much to the chagrin of its official publisher GT Interactive. To kick things off, the first eight levels went up online. Shortly after, there appeared in stores a $10 CD of the full game that had to be unlocked by paying id an additional $50 in order to play beyond the eighth level. Only after that, in August of 1996, did the game appear in a conventional retail edition.

Predictably enough, it all turned into a bit of a fiasco. Crackers quickly reverse-engineered the algorithms used for generating the unlocking codes, which were markedly less sophisticated than the ones used to generate the 3D graphics on the disc. As a result, hundreds of thousands of people were able to get the entirety of the most hotly anticipated game of the year for $10. Meanwhile even many of those unwilling or unable to crack their shareware copies decided that eight levels was enough for them, especially given that the unregistered version could be used for multiplayer deathmatches. Carmack’s misplaced idealism cost id and GT Interactive millions, poisoning relations between them; the two companies soon parted ways.

So, the era of shareware as an underground pipeline of cutting-edge games came to an end with Quake. From now on, id would concentrate on boxed games selling for full price, as would all of their fellow survivors from that wild and woolly time. Gaming’s underground had become its establishment.

But its distribution model wasn’t the only sense in which Quake was as much a throwback as a step forward. It held fast as well to Carmack’s disinterest in the fictional context of id’s games, as illustrated by his famous claim that the story behind a game was no more important than the story behind a porn movie. It would be blatantly incorrect to claim that the DOOM clones which flooded the market between 1994 and 1996 represented some great exploding of the potential of interactive narrative, but they had begun to show some interest, if not precisely in elaborate set-piece storytelling in the way of adventure games, at least in the appeal of setting and texture. Dark Forces had been a pioneer in this respect, what with its between-levels cut scenes, its relatively fleshed-out main character, and most of all its environments that really did look and feel like the Star Wars films, from their brutalist architecture to John Williams’s unmistakable score. Even Duke Nukem 3D had the character of Duke, plus a distinctively seedy, neon-soaked post-apocalyptic Los Angeles for him to run around in. No one would accuse it of being an overly mature aesthetic vision, but it certainly was a unified one.

Quake, on the other hand,  displayed all the signs of its fractious process of creation, of half a dozen wayward designers all pulling in different directions. From a central hub, you took “slipgates” into alternate dimensions that contained a little bit of everything on the designers’ not-overly-discriminating pop-culture radar, from zombie flicks to Dungeons & Dragons, from Jaws to H.P. Lovecraft, from The Terminator to heavy-metal music, and so wound up not making much of a distinct impression at all.

Most creative works are stamped with the mood of the people who created them, no matter how hard the project managers try to separate the art from the artists. With its color palette dominated by shocks of orange and red, DOOM had almost literally burst off the monitor screen with the edgy joie de vivre of a group of young men whom nobody had expected to amount to much of anything, who suddenly found themselves on the verge of remaking the business of games in their own unkempt image. Quake felt tired by contrast. Even its attempts to blow past the barriers of good taste seemed more obligatory than inspired; the Satanic symbolism, elaborate torture devices, severed heads, and other forms of gore were outdone by other games that were already pushing the envelope even further. This game felt almost somber — not an emotion anyone had ever before associated with id. Its levels were slower and emptier than those of DOOM, with a color palette full of mournful browns and other earth tones. Even the much-vaunted soundtrack wound up rather underwhelming. It was bereft of the melodic hooks that had made Nine Inch Nails’s previous output more palatable for radio listeners than that of most other “extreme” bands; it was more an exercise in sound design than music composition. One couldn’t help but suspect that Trent Reznor had held back all of his good material for his band’s next real record.

At its worst, Quake felt like a tech demo waiting for someone to turn it into an actual game, proving that John Carmack needed John Romero as badly as Romero needed him. But that once-fruitful relationship was never to be rehabilitated: Carmack fired Romero within days of finishing Quake. The two would never work together again.

It was truly the end of an era at id. Sandy Petersen was soon let go as well, Michael Abrash went back to the comfortable bosom of Microsoft, and Jay Wilbur quit for the best of all possible reasons: because his son asked him, “How come all the other daddies go to the baseball games and you never do?” All of them left as exhausted as Quake looks and feels.

Of course, there was nary a hint of Quake‘s infelicities to be found in the press coverage that greeted its release. Even more so than most media industries, the games industry has always run on enthusiasm, and it had no desire at this particular juncture to eat its own by pointing out the flaws in the most important PC game ever made. The coverage in the magazines was marked by a cloying fan-boy fawning that was becoming ever more sadly prominent in gamer culture. “We are not even worthy to lick your toenails free of grit and fluffy sock detritus,” PC Zone wrote in a public letter to id. “We genuflect deeply and offer our bare chests for you to stab with a pair of scissors.” (Eww! A sense of proportion is as badly lacking as a sense of self-respect…) Even the usually sober-minded (by gaming-journalism standards) Computer Gaming World got a little bit creepy: “Describing Quake is like talking about sex. It must be experienced to be fully appreciated.”

Still, I would be a poor historian indeed if I called all the hyperbole of 1996 entirely unjustified. The fact is that the passage of time has tended to emphasize Quake‘s weaknesses, which are mostly in the realm of design and aesthetics, whilst obscuring its contemporary strengths, which were in the realm of technology. Although not quite the first game to graft a true 3D engine onto ultra-fast-action gameplay — Interplay’s Descent beat it to the market by more than a year — it certainly did so more flexibly and credibly than anything else to date, even if Carmack still wasn’t above cheating a bit when push came to shove. (By no means is the Quake engine entirely free of tricksy 2D sprites in places where proper 3D models are just too expensive to render.)

Nevertheless, it’s difficult to fully convey today just how revolutionary the granular details of Quake seemed in 1996: the way you could look up and down and all around you with complete freedom; the way its physics engine made guns kick so that you could almost feel it in your mouse hand; the way you could dive into water and experience the visceral sensation of actually swimming; the way the wood paneling of its walls glinted realistically under the overhead lighting. Such things are commonplace today, but Quake paved the way. Most of the complaints I’ve raised about it could be mitigated by the simple expedient of not even bothering with the lackluster single-player campaign, of just playing it with your mates in deathmatch.

But even if you preferred to play alone, Quake was a sign of better things to come. “It goes beyond the game and more into the engine and the possibilities,” says Rob Smith, who watched the Quake mania come and go as the editor of PC Gamer magazine. “Quake presented options to countless designers. The game itself doesn’t make many ‘all-time’ lists, but its impact [was] as a game changer for 3D gaming, [an] engine that allowed other game makers to express themselves.” For with the industry’s Master of 3D Algorithms John Carmack having shown what was possible and talking as freely as ever about how he had achieved it, with Michael Abrash soon to write an entire book about how he and Carmack had made the magic happen, more games of this type, ready and able to harness the technology of true 3D to more exciting designs, couldn’t be far behind. “We’ve pretty much decided that our niche is in first-person futuristic action games,” said John Carmack. “We stumble when we get away from the techno stuff.” The industry was settling into a model that would remain in place for years to come: id would show what was possible with the technology of 3D graphics, then leave it to other developers to bend it in more interesting directions.

Soon enough, then, titles like Jedi Knight and Half-Life would push the genre once known as DOOM clones, now trading under the more sustainable name of the first-person shooter, in more sophisticated directions in terms of storytelling and atmosphere, without losing the essence of what made their progenitors so much fun. They will doubtless feature in future articles.

Next time, however, I want to continue to focus on the technology, as we turn to another way in which Quake was a rough draft for a better gaming future: months after its initial release, it became one of the first games to display the potential of hardware acceleration for 3D graphics, marking the beginning of a whole new segment of the microcomputer industry, one worth many billions of dollars today.



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(Sources: the books Rocket Jump: Quake and the Golden Age of First-Person Shooters by David L. Craddock, The Graphics Programming Black Book by Michael Abrash, Masters of DOOM: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner, Dungeons and Dreamers: The Rise of Computer Game Culture from Geek to Chic by Brad King and John Borland, Principles of Three-Dimensional Computer Animation by Michael O’Rourke, and Computer Graphics from Scratch: A Programmer’s Introduction by Gabriel Gambetta. PC Zone of May 1996; Computer Gaming World of July 1996 and October 1996; Wired of August 1996 and January 2010. Online sources include Michael Abrash’s “Ramblings in Realtime” for Blue’s News.

Quake is available as a digital purchase at GOG.com, as is Star Wars: Dark Forces. Duke Nukem 3D can be found on Steam.)

 
 

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