Sony will try to drag this thing out at least one more generation. If that goes like this one–and it has room to actually go worse–then Sony will have to make some hard decisions.
Unions can organize without the government having any protections. It’s very difficult to organize that way. It’s difficult to organize even with the most union-friendly government imaginable. But either way, it can be done.
Unions in the US have been shot by police at before. Hard to have less government protection than that.
Just wait until GabeN retires and the inheritors of Valve start to enshittify it. Unless GabeN had a good succession plan in place, or GoG can swoop in and become the new standard, things might get rough. I might stick to retro games from then on.
It’s fairly niche, and it’s been years since I’ve played it, but it seems to still keep an active player base. It’s much more cooperative than most MMOs, with very little PvP. It’s like the whole community is working together to build a civilization.
The term GPU wasn’t used yet. It got applied as something of a marketing term to cards that had hardware transform and lighting, and that was indeed the GeForce 256. Before then, they were “3d accelerators”.
GeForce 256 was marketed as “the world’s first ‘GPU’, or Graphics Processing Unit”, a term Nvidia defined at the time as “a single-chip processor with integrated transform, lighting, triangle setup/clipping, and rendering engines that is capable of processing a minimum of 10 million polygons per second”.
So it kinda depends on perspective. If you take Nvidia’s marketing at face value, then the GeForce 256 was, indeed, the first GPU. You could retroactively apply it to earlier 3d accelerators, including the SNES Super FX chip, but none of them used the term at the time.
And it’s a bad one if it applies at all. PC shooters of the time always kinda tried, but it didn’t work. The original Half Life got dinged a few points in original reviews because of a few janky platforming sections.
Even if it’s not the first, I’d say it’s the first that figured out that computers were powerful enough that you can have a gobsmackingly huge factory.
Wolf3d is an evolution of Hovertank 3D, which had flat shading for walls, floors, and ceilings. Wolf3d then has textured walls but still flat shading on the floors and ceilings. Some other games came out after Wolf3d that had textures floors and ceilings while id worked on Doom.
Doom not only had textured everything, but also stairs. Trick was, you couldn’t develop a level that had a hallway going over another hallway. Not enough computer horsepower yet to pull that off. This is sometimes called “2.5D”.
Quake brings everything together. Everything’s texture mapped, your levels have true height with things built over other things, and the character models are even fully 3d rendered.
It’s also possible they just didn’t know. LucasArts didn’t push the system all that much in their PR. You’ll see it in some bullet points on the retail boxes, and articles of the time might make a passing reference to it. It was quite a remarkable system for the time and they were very low key about it.
Jurassic Park: Trespasser invented physics engines in fps games as we know it. The game itself was a buggy mess and a financial disaster. The player’s health was shown on the main character’s boob for some damn reason. However, they did have the basics of a very good physics engine, and Valve took a lot of their ideas and incorporated it into Half Life 2.
I dispute the Serious Sam claim. The LucasArts iMUSE system was doing things like that years before. Even among fps games, the first Dark Forces game used it.
It’s a series where a dragon kidnaps a princess, and a plumber from New York must save her. To do so, he must gather mushrooms by hitting bricks while jumping with his fist, jump on turtles to make them hide in their shell, and dodge fire breathing plants.
In the most recent 2d incarnation, the fire breathing plants will sing at you.