A few people have mentioned that graphics that they thought looked good years ago now look bad.
However, display resolutions were far lower at the time. Old games look better if you run them at the proper resolution, but on a modern display this is a tiny portion of your screen. On top of that, some games benefited massively from CRTs — especially console games that ran on CRT TVs, which lack pixels and have a long viewing distance compared to CRT computer monitors.
Here’s Tomb Raider III on a CRT. It’s a series that is famous for having a blocky design. You can see that Lara Croft herself isn’t actually horribly blocky, though I guess that applies to her design in the first game the most.
As for the level graphics, it’s far from perfect — sometimes the camera zooms in too much on a low-resolution texture. But notice how realistic the waterfall area (at 0:17) is compared to the parts of the level meant for climbing and crawling. There’s not much to it except for keeping the textures distant and making the land reasonably sloped (and some good art design).
It seems like the blockiness is in other areas of the level is partly dictated by gameplay and engine limitations — players can only climb hard ledges, which means that hard edges are also being used to signpost tunnels — rather than graphics technology.
While device resolutions and display technology play a role in this, some of it is purely changing player expectations. The game I was thinking of specifically was the DOS game Wing Commander which is one of my all-time favorites. At the time I thought the graphics were incredible. Today…not so much. I saw the game before its release in Origin’s booth at GenCon in August 1990. One of the employees was talking about how they created the asteroids by taking digital photos of rocks hanging on strings. Digital cameras weren’t exactly easy to come by in 1990, so I guess it was pretty state of the art. I was very impressed at the time, both by the graphics and the wingman AI. I may have also accidentally insulted Warren Spector.
That’s true. I’ve never owned cutting edge PC hardware and no longer own game consoles, so I don’t really pay attention to the latest and greatest stuff. That means I’m pretty much never blown away by the newest graphics, mostly due to my own ignorance.
If I had to name something that I thought was extremely photorealistic on release in a way that no longer holds up… maybe Zelda: Twilight Princess on the Wii in 2006.
It still looks good, but its stylization is way more apparent now, and it’s supposed realism was more due to its contrast with the earlier, cartoonier Zelda entries.
I don’t think it benefited much from any objective graphics breakthrough, though I guess the developers were probably doing something smart with the Wii’s graphic tech.
I hear you, mate. It’s difficult to believe, but in 1990, Wing Commander made our jaws drop, truly. Origin managed to assemble some experimental bits of tech and glue them in a way not experienced before on the PC (fractional sprite scaling, cinematic cutscenes, and event-dependent music were just unseen in the PC). Funnily enough, when I first saw the game ported much later on Amiga (must have been 1994), I thought the graphics were terrible, but the Amiga had long been the domain of gorgeous pixel art and the PC only had that as part of the demoscene.
The game was awesome, though. And it still is, if one has the right mindset.
Ahead of you. I managed to accidentally insult John Romero, Jade Raymond, Fumito Ueda and even Zarf, so far*. The latter is the only one I’m sure won’t remember.
Yes, Wing Commander is still awesome. Except defend missions. Defend missions always suck.
I never had an Amiga, but I played around with raytracing on one back in the day. That almost led me to get an Amiga to replace my C64, but I ended up going with a pc with a 486 cpu instead. My exposure to raytracing on the Amiga led me to discover and play around with POV-Ray throughout the 90’s.
We we’re doing software ray tracing on those in real time. Early 90s. There were several tricks. Firsly everything was in fake fixedpoint ints, because you had no fp. Secondly keep res low and up color. This is what tv does. Color gived your brain the illusion of detail. finally, rendet progressive detail center outward. The eye tends to focus centrally.
Anyway it worked and looked awesome. Pity I don’t have the code still.
I enjoy having a lot left to my imagination. Maybe it’s just because of how I grew up and the games I played. Some of the 14x16 Apple icons e.g. all the professions in Ultima still speak to me, but the more detailed ones fade away. Games should make us imagine, not just pat us on the head for winning.
(Also the more photorealistic graphics are, the more worried I miss details. That’s largely on me.)
This is because the story is not about the purpose of art, but the purpose of competition.
The purpose of competition is to win.
Art is usually not a competition. I think some people who employ artists (such as, arguably, the king of the story) forget that.
I don’t expect photorealism from games, and cannot think of a single game that was improved by it. That’s not to say every game works on no graphics, or 1990-style graphics. Better graphics capabilities can increase the range of games that can be created, but making good use of a graphics (or non-graphics) style that particularly suits the game the creator is trying to create will always result in a better game than one which is going for an extreme of style (including photorealism) at the expense of the game’s playability.
Everyone whose has played FFVII original know that at the end of disc 1 is a seven-second FMV, known as THE SPOILER, whose remains a major turning point of gaming history.
who was not moved and shocked by these seven seconds of pre-rendered FMV, roughly the mid-90s state of art ?
Well, I had been half-expecting it, so it wasn’t that much of a shock. I was already used to these kinds of storytelling devices: they are taught formally and pervade classic literature. The whole point of FF7’s story is that just because someone dies, it doesn’t mean they’re really gone. This was supported by Sakaguchi himself, who said (later on) that he wanted to show a real, meaningful death. That’s where the idea of the lifestream comes from, and since it was apparent what the idea was, that’s why I was expecting the character’s fate (since no other embodied that spirit equally well), and why THE SPOILER had to happen. That’s what FF7 is all about: how people stick with us, even after they’re gone..
Maybe you meant to highlight the cinematic quality of the graphics. It is not in question. But what makes the scene powerful is the subtle foreshadowing (there’s a bit of it too), the timing and its tight fit with both theme and narrative. If the scene had been line-art, it would have been just as impactful, in my opinion.
Exactly my point: What matters is the narrative. and if THE SPOILER was rendered in words, will be impactful as in both high-graphics of their times, original VII and VII Rebirth. and this is what matters in an IF context. (albeit I’m sure that even the best of us IF authors & coders can dare to attempt coding & writing “The Mother of all Demakes”…)
so, the true red herring here is discussing photorealistic graphics in an IF context
It’s about both. And it’s not a story; it’s a riddle! An important distinction, since it’s only “solvable” if the audience shares the king’s viewpoint and values realism above all other modes of expression. If realism is not understood to have a spot at the top of the food chain, the answer to the riddle makes no sense. It’s also relevant that no actual paintings exist for the king (or the audience) to judge; the modes themselves are being judged, in the abstract, by the riddle itself.
In the context of this conversation, the fact that it’s a competition is important too. Which mode of expression will receive royal patronage? Where does the money go? What gets boosted by the most powerful taste-makers, and what doesn’t? How is public perception of the arts shaped? History has answers to these questions. So does the current market.
Perhaps taking a riddle and framing it as a parable wasn’t the clearest way to express my own view. Techniques like trompe l’oeil aren’t really the point. But this is a massive subject! To really unpack everything, I’d need to write pages and pages. Better to condense it into a paragraph or two – if possible.
On the subject of art… While I can appreciate the technical skill that must have gone into its creation, I find the Mona Lisa to be a rather dull painting, and on the few occasions I’ve visited an Art Museum, I have generally preferred the modern art section for having more interesting pieces and less about capturing an image of reality.
From what I understand, this was the typical opinion for a long time, and then some con artist stole it, and then the piece gained an incredible amount of notoriety and value beyond what it had already carried from its artist’s legacy.
“Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist, a master […] can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is… and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be.”
At least for the artist, the end point of photorealism would be that my drawing of something looked exactly the same as your drawing of it. So I understand the consistent inclination, in art competitoins, away from valuing it over individual interpretation and abstraction.
We also like to reward apparent effort. In photoreal-leaning images, effort is transparent. Elsewhere, the effort may be in the entire churning of the artist, not an individual piece of art. The truth is that sometimes, low-effort effort produces as great a result as any other, and humans struggle with that. At other times, the abstract painting can just be a splat of red paint that also appears to be low effort and which I think sucks.
On Mona Lisa, you bring involuntarily an excellent point:
Maestro Leonardo was first and foremost an Engineer, (one can easily recognise the ordered geometry and placement of elements and details in practically all of his paintings), who, being the renowned polymath he was, handled the paintbrush as the pencil.
IF scene, like gaming and demo scenes is first and foremost using the most flexible engineering tool (programming a computer) for creating art works. In our case, written art.
I think this will go on until the GPUs will be where sound cards are now (as in, you can achieve any graphics even on integrated GPU, just like you can now achieve any sound, even on integrated sound card). I.e. as long as graphic progress CAN be made, it will be made. Then nVidia will start selling consumer AI accelerators (they’re already pivoting towards it) and those will get better and better until AI is indistinguishable from real humans. Then it will be something else (SAO/Matrix-style VR?)
