I remember the first time I saw Doom on the SNES. It was the most realistic thing I’d seen a computer render, the equivalent of playing the latest FPS game. Then I got a Nintendo 64 and Super Mario was the most realistic thing I’ve seen. Each successive generation of game has been both the most realistic thing I’ve seen and the theoretical limit of realism for computer graphics. Something makes me unable to imagine a higher level of fidelity than 2024 releases without it just becoming haptic sensors, and if I see a female character in that 2024 game it’s as realistic as a body can get. While I didn’t play Tomb Raider because CDs were obnoxious, I remember the characters in Golden Eye and Perfect Dark being vaguely attractive to a child who had never seen a naked woman.
Then I got a Nintendo 64 and Super Mario was the most realistic thing I’ve seen.
It’s really hard to communicate the incredible size of the graphical leaps in the early days of mainstream consoles. Every generation was just amazingly better than the last for quite a while there. I remember booting up Mario 64 for the first time and just sitting there with my whole family, jaws hanging open. You could see Mario breathing. The world was enormous, three-dimensional, and open. Coming off the SNES, it was just mind-blowing. The move from PS3 to PS5 looks like hardly a tune-up by comparison. It was wild.
Do you ever sit down to think about how Doom and Half-Life 1 were only 5 years apart? And half-Life 2 was only 11 years after Doom.
Silent Hill 3 was 4 years after the first one. Super Mario 64 was only 6 years after Super Mario World on SNES. These times were wild and it’s hard to describe how the times felt to kids nowadays. It felt like the earth was going to crack open at any second.
The Xbox 360 came out only 9 years after the N64. By comparison, Red Dead Remeption 2 is already 6 years old. Those sorts of giant leaps just haven’t happened for a while.
Yup. I recognize that this sort of thing must eventually run into diminishing returns, but it’s still really wild to compare the old timescales to the new ones. It’s especially salient with something like Skyrim to Starfield, which despite being developed by the same company almost 15 years apart, look like they could have been made within a year or two of one another. As you said, the time between 8-bit original Mario and Mario 64 was actually less than the time between Skyrim and Starfield.
The time between Mario being created as a character (Donkey Kong, 1981) and Mario 64 (1996) is the same length of time between Fallout 3 and Starfield. I saw most of this happen and I still can’t fathom how fast everything used to move.
Yeah, very much this. I think it’s tied in to how vision works - We don’t perceive the world directly. What we see is a bunch of cludges and hacks that our brain uses to assemble a coherent picture from a bunch of very bad sensors. Like I think your eyes can only really see what’s directly in front of you and most of your peripheral vision is just cludged together from things you’ve seen recently, which is probably why, like, people can sometimes sneak up on you and claerly be in your peripheral vision and you don’t notice htem bc you were focused somewhere else.
It didn’t really matter that Lara was a bunch of polygons or the dinosaurs in Turok were like 50 tris or whatever. Your brain will fill in the details. When I think about the actual experience of playing games decades ago I don’t remember the actual graphics. My brain has assembled sort of a representation of that where Lara Croft is “high poly” and shadows and lighting work and the movement system wasn’t a nightmare.
The brain filling in the details is exactly how to word it. I play Dwarf Fortress and it’s as vivid as the latest Ubisoft game because that’s the best simulation available. Whatever is missing from it, I add the fidelity.
It’s the same dog sprite for every dog, but each of them looks like an actual individual dog once I read the descriptions. If the 2044 equivalent of Dwarf Fortress has dummy-ass graphics, my experience of perceiving it will be exactly the same.
I always struggled to explain to people that after about hour 13 of a marathon df run i would more or less literally stop seeing the code and just see my dorfs running around.
Also these games were designed to be played on 640x480i CRT screens (or 720x576i if you lived in Europe). Everything, from the textures to the special effects to the menus. I’ve been upscaling stuff in PS2 games, and it’s hard to get some effects and textures to display correctly, as they’re designed to take advantage of CRT scan lines and resolution scaling. PS2 games rendered at 512x448i resolution, if you were lucky there was a 480p mode. PS1 games at half that resolution. Of course they look terrible on a modern gigantic 4K (3840x2160p) flat screen TV or monitor. Anyone that has played these older games on original hardware hooked up to a CRT TV knows that they looked better than how they are represented now.
There are various rendering presets in emulators designed to simulate CRT effects (like scan lines and softness/blur filters), but it’s not great really. Cathode ray tube televisions worked very differently to modern flat screens, for instance pixels aren’t strictly defined, so they can render any resolution, up to their maximum supported resolution, without upscaling issues. This also means the pixel edges are less harsh, even at max resolution…A lot of the text in menus/subtitles, and textures in games, are designed to take advantage of this softer look, and when displayed on a modern flat screen, look really blurry and have poorly defined edges. Or they have weird aliasing that you’d never be able to see on a CRT due to the “softness” of the pixels. Shadows and blacks/greys suffer a ton here, even in high quality textures without compression artifacts.
The best way to get close to the original look on a flatscreen is to use an HD texture pack with a faithful/true to original design with an emulator, or create one yourself. So redoing all the textures and text for an HD flat screen, trying to recreate the original look as much as possible. But not everything can be re-created, like an effect in a menu that takes advantage of CRT scan lines is just going to look like a line traveling across the screen, not matter what is done to “upscale” it. There are some very good results out there for GameCube games in particular. Lots and lots of work though to make one yourself, I know because I’m trying to lol.
But even in that video where they get the smoke and cloud effects to look correct in the introduction, slippys picture, the text and the blue part of the aircraft look worse on the “LCD CRT”, because of what I said earlier.
Oh it doesn’t happen to me. I used to do it to other people bc I learned to be extremely quiet for trauma related reasons when I was a kid.
Not that people don’t sneak up on me, mind. They do. But my limbic system is burned out and i no longer fear death so my startle response isn’t very strong.
I remember seeing footage of Shenmue when it was new and laughing. I thought it was some kind of joke, because there was no way a game could look that realistic or smooth. I thought it was some kind of footage of real people that had a special effect put over it. When I learned it was a real game I felt a weird sense of dread, because it felt like arriving at the end of human history, like I slipped into the future by accident
They’re talking about SFIII: New Generation, not Third Strike. The first iteration of SFIII. New Generation is a lil wonky and hardly anyone plays it anymore.
People were also expecting a new SF game to be in 3D. You gotta remember there was a bit of a saturation of 2D fighting games in 1997. They had gotten stale to everyone except fighting game enthusiasts. People at the time were so excited for 3D games that anything still in 2D looked old fashioned.
Agreed though. They were spoiled and didn’t know. Imagine explaining street fighter micro transactions to 1997 people. Imagine explaining that half the characters are locked by default and have to be purchased individually.
We’ve reached a point where the major bottleneck on realism isn’t the hardware you run on, it’s the size of your dev team and the amount of time you spend working on your graphics. That’s part of why triple ayyyyyyyyyy games are so much more expensive to make than they need to be, because they’re throwing money at diminishing returns and they always have to outdo the last game that came out.
I remember the first time I saw Doom on the SNES. It was the most realistic thing I’d seen a computer render, the equivalent of playing the latest FPS game. Then I got a Nintendo 64 and Super Mario was the most realistic thing I’ve seen. Each successive generation of game has been both the most realistic thing I’ve seen and the theoretical limit of realism for computer graphics. Something makes me unable to imagine a higher level of fidelity than 2024 releases without it just becoming haptic sensors, and if I see a female character in that 2024 game it’s as realistic as a body can get. While I didn’t play Tomb Raider because CDs were obnoxious, I remember the characters in Golden Eye and Perfect Dark being vaguely attractive to a child who had never seen a naked woman.
It’s really hard to communicate the incredible size of the graphical leaps in the early days of mainstream consoles. Every generation was just amazingly better than the last for quite a while there. I remember booting up Mario 64 for the first time and just sitting there with my whole family, jaws hanging open. You could see Mario breathing. The world was enormous, three-dimensional, and open. Coming off the SNES, it was just mind-blowing. The move from PS3 to PS5 looks like hardly a tune-up by comparison. It was wild.
n64/ps1 and gamecube/ps2 were easily the best times to be alive for a gamer
Do you ever sit down to think about how Doom and Half-Life 1 were only 5 years apart? And half-Life 2 was only 11 years after Doom.
Silent Hill 3 was 4 years after the first one. Super Mario 64 was only 6 years after Super Mario World on SNES. These times were wild and it’s hard to describe how the times felt to kids nowadays. It felt like the earth was going to crack open at any second.
The Xbox 360 came out only 9 years after the N64. By comparison, Red Dead Remeption 2 is already 6 years old. Those sorts of giant leaps just haven’t happened for a while.
Yup. I recognize that this sort of thing must eventually run into diminishing returns, but it’s still really wild to compare the old timescales to the new ones. It’s especially salient with something like Skyrim to Starfield, which despite being developed by the same company almost 15 years apart, look like they could have been made within a year or two of one another. As you said, the time between 8-bit original Mario and Mario 64 was actually less than the time between Skyrim and Starfield.
The time between Mario being created as a character (Donkey Kong, 1981) and Mario 64 (1996) is the same length of time between Fallout 3 and Starfield. I saw most of this happen and I still can’t fathom how fast everything used to move.
I saw it happen too, but holy fuck that’s crazy to see put into words.
Yeah, very much this. I think it’s tied in to how vision works - We don’t perceive the world directly. What we see is a bunch of cludges and hacks that our brain uses to assemble a coherent picture from a bunch of very bad sensors. Like I think your eyes can only really see what’s directly in front of you and most of your peripheral vision is just cludged together from things you’ve seen recently, which is probably why, like, people can sometimes sneak up on you and claerly be in your peripheral vision and you don’t notice htem bc you were focused somewhere else.
It didn’t really matter that Lara was a bunch of polygons or the dinosaurs in Turok were like 50 tris or whatever. Your brain will fill in the details. When I think about the actual experience of playing games decades ago I don’t remember the actual graphics. My brain has assembled sort of a representation of that where Lara Croft is “high poly” and shadows and lighting work and the movement system wasn’t a nightmare.
The brain filling in the details is exactly how to word it. I play Dwarf Fortress and it’s as vivid as the latest Ubisoft game because that’s the best simulation available. Whatever is missing from it, I add the fidelity.
yea like you have to imagine the cart full of magma entirely because they still haven’t fucking fixed that bug years later
It’s the same dog sprite for every dog, but each of them looks like an actual individual dog once I read the descriptions. If the 2044 equivalent of Dwarf Fortress has dummy-ass graphics, my experience of perceiving it will be exactly the same.
I always struggled to explain to people that after about hour 13 of a marathon df run i would more or less literally stop seeing the code and just see my dorfs running around.
Also these games were designed to be played on 640x480i CRT screens (or 720x576i if you lived in Europe). Everything, from the textures to the special effects to the menus. I’ve been upscaling stuff in PS2 games, and it’s hard to get some effects and textures to display correctly, as they’re designed to take advantage of CRT scan lines and resolution scaling. PS2 games rendered at 512x448i resolution, if you were lucky there was a 480p mode. PS1 games at half that resolution. Of course they look terrible on a modern gigantic 4K (3840x2160p) flat screen TV or monitor. Anyone that has played these older games on original hardware hooked up to a CRT TV knows that they looked better than how they are represented now.
Has anyone tried making a screen overlay that simulates CRTs?
There are various rendering presets in emulators designed to simulate CRT effects (like scan lines and softness/blur filters), but it’s not great really. Cathode ray tube televisions worked very differently to modern flat screens, for instance pixels aren’t strictly defined, so they can render any resolution, up to their maximum supported resolution, without upscaling issues. This also means the pixel edges are less harsh, even at max resolution…A lot of the text in menus/subtitles, and textures in games, are designed to take advantage of this softer look, and when displayed on a modern flat screen, look really blurry and have poorly defined edges. Or they have weird aliasing that you’d never be able to see on a CRT due to the “softness” of the pixels. Shadows and blacks/greys suffer a ton here, even in high quality textures without compression artifacts.
The best way to get close to the original look on a flatscreen is to use an HD texture pack with a faithful/true to original design with an emulator, or create one yourself. So redoing all the textures and text for an HD flat screen, trying to recreate the original look as much as possible. But not everything can be re-created, like an effect in a menu that takes advantage of CRT scan lines is just going to look like a line traveling across the screen, not matter what is done to “upscale” it. There are some very good results out there for GameCube games in particular. Lots and lots of work though to make one yourself, I know because I’m trying to lol.
As for your original question, some people are trying to do just that
But even in that video where they get the smoke and cloud effects to look correct in the introduction, slippys picture, the text and the blue part of the aircraft look worse on the “LCD CRT”, because of what I said earlier.
lol skill issue
Oh it doesn’t happen to me. I used to do it to other people bc I learned to be extremely quiet for trauma related reasons when I was a kid.
Not that people don’t sneak up on me, mind. They do. But my limbic system is burned out and i no longer fear death so my startle response isn’t very strong.
I remember seeing footage of Shenmue when it was new and laughing. I thought it was some kind of joke, because there was no way a game could look that realistic or smooth. I thought it was some kind of footage of real people that had a special effect put over it. When I learned it was a real game I felt a weird sense of dread, because it felt like arriving at the end of human history, like I slipped into the future by accident
Shenmue look liked this
They didn’t know what they fucking had
They’re talking about SFIII: New Generation, not Third Strike. The first iteration of SFIII. New Generation is a lil wonky and hardly anyone plays it anymore.
People were also expecting a new SF game to be in 3D. You gotta remember there was a bit of a saturation of 2D fighting games in 1997. They had gotten stale to everyone except fighting game enthusiasts. People at the time were so excited for 3D games that anything still in 2D looked old fashioned.
Agreed though. They were spoiled and didn’t know. Imagine explaining street fighter micro transactions to 1997 people. Imagine explaining that half the characters are locked by default and have to be purchased individually.
It definitely wasn’t third strike but it was actually pretty great. Balance was a little off to be sure, it had some kinks
Man, that game was so cool
It was a bit too realistic how you eventually had to get a job and work as a forklift driver at the harbor tho
Shenmue walked so Yakuza could run
Reminds me of how ever since it came out in 2015 people have been mistaking scenes from Arma III for real battlefield footage.
We’ve reached a point where the major bottleneck on realism isn’t the hardware you run on, it’s the size of your dev team and the amount of time you spend working on your graphics. That’s part of why triple ayyyyyyyyyy games are so much more expensive to make than they need to be, because they’re throwing money at diminishing returns and they always have to outdo the last game that came out.
Halving the size of the triangles each generation eventually hits a point where the difference is negligible.
Idk I’ve never been this way. All I’ve thought was, “wow this looks great!”