When I think about that period in gaming I just trip out.
We are as far away from that period now as that period was from the birth of video games. Tennis for Two, Space Wars, Pong, Super Mario, DOOM, Quake, Half-Life.
Compare that 20-year evolution to the evolution of gaming in the last 20 years. You can see areas where games have gotten vastly better, not just graphically or cinematically, but with level design, mission design, characterization, contextual integration, procedural elements.
But still nowhere near the explosion of the first 20 years as innovation poured in, and all of the main players were scrappy young companies, ready to innovate in an atmosphere where it still meant something to create entirely novel experiences that challenged the player.
You can also very easily see an industry-wide shift in game design after both GTA and Minecraft, which seemed so far apart at the time but really were about a decade apart. What comes next?
As a teenager during that time it feels easy to say that we idealize those periods of youth, but objectively speaking there was never a period in gaming history with such drastic speed of innovation between the late 90s and early 200s.
For sure; if you look at 15, 20 year old games now vs today's, you can see it's more evolution than revolution, in terms of gameplay mechanics, graphics, scale, etc.
Not that it's not impressive; look at the PS5 tech demos (large scale areas that players can go through fast without loading times thanks to fast storage), or the Unreal Engine demos, e.g. the Matrix one you can download to the PS5 or the one where they highlight generative level creation.
But it doesn't feel as revolutionary anymore. Mind you, that may just be fatigue, or "getting used to" things quickly.
I think objectively 2D to 3D was a massive jump. Also the FPS genre which is maybe the most successful gaming genre of all time being invented. Can't even think of a new genre of game that's been created in the last 10 years. I guess the sandbox game Minecraft was a little over 10 years ago, that's one.
Even Minecraft didn't really invent the sandbox, it just polished and popularized it.
A new genre in the last 10 years? Probably nothing really. We're probably past the point of new genres being invented until the technology dramatically changes.
We'll see some wild Genre Fusion though. I'm excited for that. I can't wait to see what happens when we stop just stapling "RPG" to every genre and start to really innovate.
Nanite and Lumen are definitely witchcraft. That tech demo left me in awe at what humanity has been able to accomplish. "More evolution than revolution", what a fitting phrase.
I wonder if we will live to see another such revolution in the wake of mature generative AI tools? If creating a game of the density and caliber of Red Dead Redemption 2 becomes feasible with a modest team of 10?
It was a wild time; as they said, Doom was made in (just) one year; while in a sense the games of back then are comparable to indie games of today, even indie games take longer to build these days.
That said, it's a work/life balance thing too; the Doom team did pretty much a year of grinding, pizza and coffee fueled 14+ hour workdays.
And just six years between that and HL2/Doom 3, the first big games to introduce proper physics. Shooting a box and watch it move, or the pick up a soda can/shipping container and throw it around was mind blowing at the time.
Not to mention the graphics evolution; compare G-man from HL to HL2.
Deus Ex didn't have full "the cube can rotate" physics but it did a lot to move this kind of thing forward. You can totally throw a can of soda at a cop.
And Splinter Cell (2002) had curtains that moved around you as you passed under them. Many games had individual features that were innovative physics-wise, but I still think HL2 and Doom 3 were the big mind blowing ones, both for me personally and the media coverage at the time.
