When I was about 7 I got into an accident with some fire. Ended up in hospital for 5 months on the childrens ward. Once I'd recovered enough to get out of bed into a wheelchair, I found the "games room". Back in the 1980's that consisted of lots of board games, some colouring books, an endless supply of "The Beano" comics and ... an original table cabinet Space Invaders. Every night, about 1am once the nurses had mostly gone home, I'd sneak silently down the corridor into the games rooms and turn on Space Invaders. The nurses kept the credit key in the top left hand drawer. I usually got about 2 hours of playing in before I was discovered. They either found my empty bed and went looking for me, or a nurse would be going off duty and rumble me on her way past the room from the glowing lights. I mastered that game. Eventually they would take my wheelchair away every night at lights out to stop me from playing. I just scooted along the corridor on my butt for a few nights. You cannot stop a gamer. Good times!
@@strakhovandrri Hahaha! I think they were concerned about me not getting enough sleep, and they were worried I might fall out the wheelchair if I was unsupervised. Or maybe they were just angry, bitter middle aged people who didn't understand how amazing Space Invaders was! XD Where there is a will, there is a way.
You are correct even though you are a console lad.. what Crysis did at the time was something that really swung the market of pc hardware, when it came out I knew almost noone that could run the game smoothly because of how much processing power it needed. And the upcoming titles (except for console ports) followed similar trend, so a lot of PC gamers started upgrading their HW to run such games, expensive times haha
This video is only 6 years old, but we've now reached 8k resolutions in VR, real-time raytracing, and the long-thought paradox of having Chrome open while playing a game.
@@anonymgrill6695 MOGUS HAHAHWHAHWHAYQHWH EBEBWHWWYWTYSUSHSJEUHEUUSSYSYSUUSHAHAVAGSGU EZ A EZ A A AU)👩👩👧👦👨👩👧👦👨👩👧👦👩👩👧🧑🦯👨🦯👨🦯👨🦯👨🦯🎅🏿🎅🏿🎅🏿🎅🏿🎅🏿🎅🏿🎅🏿👳🏿♂️👳🏿♂️👳🏿♂️👳🏿♂️👳🏿♂️👳🏿♂️👁👄👁👣👣👣💀💀💩💩monfsyssysusys
@@fietae Most users aren't running around all over the place in order to find scattered solutions for issues that they bump into, it's important to make the user experience as simple and enjoyable as possible Are you happy with poorly optimized content just because there are workarounds?
yeah, I looked at the video upload date when he said Crysis was 7 years ago. Hard to believe that the distance between Crysis and this video, and the distance between this video and now, are almost the same. Crazy what graphical improvements we've made since 2015.
This video is over 5 years old and it's still the best one that I've seen summarizing the history of graphics. It must've taken a while to edit and I just appreciate this video overall.
It's because he is an erudite, educated person (as are the member of his team, which I suppose him to have). This informs his entire approach to the subject matter. First, the level of research is exhaustive. Second, a keen focus clearly led the work, so that even what could have been an amorphous and bloated research stage was well-conceived and thoughtfully directed. Last, approaching the source material from an academic stance, he takes great pains to present it, both through the lens of his intellectual process, whilst at the same time, ensuring that audiences of all educational/academic backgrounds would find the final product easily accessible. Combined, this makes for a wonderfully enjoyable document
@@1estel1ch.42 yeah but its still barely playable on most pcs, the only thing we have is a Quake 2 tech demo that can run on the most high end GPUs. Granted, thats still a big jump, but its still not main stream enough
@@fusk7799 What about that game that was released in Christmas Day 2020 that took 7 or 8 years to create? It utilized 2D graphics, pixels and sprites. Don't remember the name, but the genre is psychological horror
at 43, I've lived through most of these developments and pumped a lot of quarters in my day etc... But I gotta say... This is absolutely essential watching for anyone interested in having a good grip on this subject. I was stunned by the overall quality of of the info presented and the crystal clear audio/visual show how well you understand a modern audience's expectation for quality. Instant sub
7 years later, this stands as one of the greatest documentaries ever created about interactive media. Thank you Ahoy! Your editing, narration, structure, and scripting are second to none
I think the point of the "graphics vs gameplay" discussion is that good (or even amazing) graphics can't compensate for poor gameplay, but games with poor graphics can still be good (or even amazing) if the gameplay is awesome.
I have always thought exactly this. Good graphics can enhance an already good gameplay idea, but not salvage a crappy one. While fun gameplay is fun gameplay regardless of graphics.
yeah, but in general will sell worse and the price will need to be cheaper. You can get away with a bad game with good graphics for 60 bucks but you can't sell baba is you for 60 bucks, even being consider one of the best puzzles of all
"I don't know why you don't have millions of views and subscribers" Quality dont bring viewers because you must first watch something to discover it is good, and by the time you watched it by the first time the viwership already increased by +1. Ratio of like to dislike ratio is a better way to judge quality, this video has 96.84 likes to every dislike. A pretty awesome thing.
Pong - 1972 = A bunch of really smart people got together to program how a ball is supposed to move RDR2 - 2018 = A bunch of really smart people got together to program how a pair of balls are supposed to move Conclusion = All the technology and advancements we've made but basically we're trying to do the same thing :P
+seljak140 you can't seriously expect a developer of todays massive games to optimise to that level. the best you can expect is a well optimised game engine that can fully utilise the hardware. or for a machine to automatically optimise code
It kind of gives modern games an underlying ickiness in a developers eyes. Like many of the hands that touched the code were dirty fumbling dumb hands.
Tell that to Doom. I've never played a game that ran so good while being up to par with modern graphics. 120fps on a 5 year old budget processor with a minor overclock? Yeah the FX6300 does the job while GTA4 can't even maintain 30fps. Vulkan Doom is a case study on how to properly optimize a game. OpenGL runs 40-80fps. Vulkan's minimums are higher than OpenGL's average on my system
@@rpgfreak9999 What does that mean? "Cancerous beyond measure"? You morons all talk in nonsense and cliches. You have lost the basic ability that man has had for hundreds of thousands of years : to communicate. You're fucked, mate. You're done.
Yes i done the exact same after watching the POLYBIUS video last night, this channel could well turn out to be one of my must watch watch favourites. Just great content so far.
Crash Bandicoot may have had a "low" polygon count, but at the time it was released, it was incredibly impressive. Thanks to it's corridor based level design, the stages were able to accommodate lush, detailed environments compared to most other games at the time. Andy Gavin, co-founder of Naughty Dog, actually recalls watching Shigeru Miyamoto play the Crash demo at it's first hands on E3 showing, and apparently Miyamoto was smiling the entire time, and thoroughly enjoyed playing the game
@@dubiouslycrisp thanks! I particularly enjoy this bit of trivia, as Miyamoto has had a tremendous impact on my life, and knowing he had fun with Crash Bandicoot is just great
With Bandicoot, they actually hacked the PS1 to push it way beyond its tech capability; you can find a cool docu about it, told by the devs themselves, in the Ars Technica channel.
Watching this many years later, the section that mentioned dirt and other effects "on the lens" really brought back memories. Hit the nail on the head when you said they were overused and would become more subtle, most screen effects now are limited to the corners of the screen like vignetting. I boot up games from 5-8 years ago now and when I get water drops, bloody streaks, and smudges of dirt right on the center of the screen that stick around for more than a few seconds, it tends to be rather annoying :p
For as ephemeral as the subject of video game graphics is that also happens to feature contemporary examples of the time the video was made, Stuart Brown’s videos somehow manage to stand as timeless masterpieces
Although i wasnt alive when it came out, i played metal slug under a different title during computer clsses just over a decade after it came out. The scariest part was if you felt the teacher's hand on your shoulder telling you to log off.
I think graphics still matter greatly, photorealism does not matter. A lot of indie games wouldn't be where they were without their particular graphical choices.
exactly. graphics are HUGELY important for video games. it's often what makes or breaks succes. although it's not the technical improvements people care about anymore usually, but more how the artists use what they have available to them to make something coherent and stylish. making sure all art assets fit together in one scene is massively more important than having a couple of extra polygons or a higher resulution texture.
Graphics don't matter, they're essential for a game to exist. What matters are a game's visuals. Semantics, but an incredibly important distinction to make nontheless.
What I like is that now we can have a choice of different games from different graphical genres. My preference is for cartoony, pixelated games (I''m a product of the early 90's), and now I can play a plethora of games new and old in such styles.
Depends on who you ask and what they prefer. I like both indies and AAA game, but I also still strive for a massive exploration based RPG that has photorealism in it, and thankfully we live in that era. So the entire argument about graphics has always been moot and will forever be.
I'm looking at it, and thinking A) Wasn't Ahoy a magazine for C64 programming, and B) This guy has apparently never played Infocom games or other text-based games...
yea he should talk about Ultra HD resolutions, VR, ray tracing, nvidea hairworks, real live laser shows and holograms, DirectX 9, 11 and 12, dlss and graphics cards with artificial inteligence D;
I know a lot about video games. I have played them all my life, I've worked in the industry and I take their criticism seriously. And no source - writer, publication, channel - has taught me so much about the history and developing context of the medium as Ahoy. I learn something new every video, even on subjects I'm already familiar with. It's not artistic critique, but if you want to learn about the nuts and bolts of game history you literally cannot do better than this channel. *Such* good work.
One minor development that I'm disappointed you didn't mention was how, for a while, renders of 3D models were used as sprites. Donkey Kong Country is the most prominent example, but plenty of other games did much the same thing without the same cartoony flair. (Later non-rotoscoped 2D fighting games like Street Fighter did this.) It was popular, since it allowed more detail and polish with less work. Just make the model, pose it, and render it. No need to redraw that neat pattern or little accessory for every frame of every animation; model it once and let the renderer work its magic! And if you need to adjust something, just tweak the model or poses and let it run through the renderer again while you take a coffee break. Throw in some manual tweaks at the end of the dev cycle and you can have twice the detail for half the effort. The worst part is how close you came a few times. You brought up similar techniques like rotoscoping and prerendered backgrounds, and mentioned a couple of games using such techniques, but never mentioned it. Ah well; I suppose there would always be _some_ neat technique that got left out.
Yoshi's Island's art style is my personal favorite of ALL video games. I've played at least 120 different video games, but there's just nothing as sublime and beautiful as it.
Saw people trying to do voxels to make things constructed and breakable instead invisible walls and invincible everything in 3D. If you focus on emergent gaming, sandbox mode, and player building the worlds, they want to turn that into the new virtual reality. Kinda like minecraft but with sand or smaller like every atom in your body is glued by the program. Get cut you bleed but the processing power to measure that might take a decade or more. Still the effect of feeling what you see happens in those goggles and to make the virtual world more malleable is a worthwhile pursuit. Some started off too grand trying to MMO that around the world when it almost kills the game specs solo.
@@Blox117 Yeah there are very rare cases when a quantum computer can do something that a regular computer can't or just more faster. But it all comes down to optimization! Even a cheap laptop can destroy a a large Super Computer if the application is optimized for it.
Realtime raytracing was used in the early first person shooters (Wolfestein 3D, Doom, Duke Nukem 3D). They cast horizontal rays, one for each column of pixels in the screen, and painted a column of pixels when they found a wall or an sprite. Very efficient, but also limiting in the allowed geometry. General purpose 3D, with full 3D transformations, Z-buffer for occlusion, and arbitrary texture transformations, as introduced in Quake, required more horsepower, but was more flexible and, in the end, more powerful CPUs and dedicated GPUs made it viable.
It just came to me that while pixels rainend supreme in the 2D era, and modern reinterpretations of it, it was actually vector graphics which can be traced more as an influence in the evolution to modern 3D with its vector wireframe polygons. Meanwhile the pixels, when translated directly into 3D, are the less successful voxel graphics which are more seem on the indie scene today
I'm really looking forward to your next post, Stuart. I don't know how you do these videos with such a level of polish and cohesion while making each asset from scratch. It's breathtaking work.
Caringan Coystopitum just look it up. It’s fairly simple to understand the concept. Let’s take a simple example. When you display a circle black on white you have a instant transition from circle to background. What anti-aliasing does is that it smoothens out those kinds of edges and makes the overall image look less frayed
I was like 44 min TLDW. 44 min later still watching. I played almost every game on this list growing up and Doom was the Daddy that changed my life in 1993. I spent next several years after that buying and upgrading my pc and a few extra so my and my friends could all have a lan party at my house every weekend playing doom, quake, unreal T and duke nukem... which he did not include in this but was an all time favorite of mine. I truly miss those days....
The way he introduced Mortal Kombat, once he said, " one game was....." I already knew. To me, Mortal Kombat was the middle. The end of the old and the beginning of the new.
I would love to see another episode featuring newer techniques of graphic, the rise of VR taking the forefront of the gaming scene, and rendering techniques like DLSS and FSR
I like your laid back attitude towards graphical trends like Bloom and Motion Blur. Too many use it as fuel for their rage, but it's nice to step back and realize that technology will march on, and unfortunate fads are just that. Love your stuff, man.
Lol shit; RT tech has been around for 17 years now.. Still haven't seen it genuinely integrated at a large scale... lots of fake RT on consoles, a few titles on PC used it, some tech demos but other than that.. not shit and I guarantee you the next series of consoles will be just as shitty-middle-range-laptop incapable of truly rendering it. sure PC graphics cards have supported it since the ATi 5xxx/Nvidia 2xx but since consoles have come to dominate the industry, little software is programmed to take advantage of it. Graphics and tech have stalled because the major players in the industry know the key and it's "*Fuck if it's trash, they'll buy it anyways*"
Quake III Arena had a fully working raytracing implementation back in the early 2000's. Nvidia just sold another batch of overpriced GPU's to another million monkeys via some "Raytracing" gimmick, despite pre-release benchmarks showing that the cards were vastly incapable of such tech in games. Monkeys still slapped dat pre-order button. $2000 Titan XP - Raytracing Edition please! XD
@@TheVanillatech I think this is more of a near "plug and play" approach, because do consider that older games had to redesign their lighting systems from scratch or come up with a (yet another proprietary) game engine that would seamlessly support RT. In real world scenarios, who would wanna do that? Even a giant game company wouldn't spend tons of R&D on something that might get unstable as technology (HW and SW) progresses. Unless you're EA. Fucking Frostbite Engine.
Nah. The Industry stopped truly progressing after the buy out / conglomeration in the mid 2000's. Crysis was the last title to really push hardware in a meaningful way. Consoles and the casualization of the video game industry for the pure pursuit of profits spelled the end for PC gaming, which in turns meant the end of the golden era of graphical evolution. We could (should) have had the MW2019 graphics 10 years ago.
There are games that look better than MW 2019 that came out years before it. Cod has just finally caught up to the rest of the gaming industry after 12 years
@@glctcthnkr8059 COD has nothing to do with it. That is a franchise titles developed by human beings with access to far better tools than the Crytek team had 15 years ago. The evolution of COD's graphics was held back only by the systems the games were developed to run on. Let me give you a clue ... that WASNT the PC.
@@TheVanillatech What are you smoking? Control 2019 introduced multple ray tracing effects like shadows, ambient occlusion, transparency and reflections, all in real-time. It is the most stunning game to date by far.
I can't believe this is nearly 7 years old. I literally only realised as it ended on a bunch of older games. Minecraft is completely different now, with RTX especially, and games like GTA V, FIFA 21, and Battlefront II are amazing in comparison even to stuff from 2015.
Props for even mentioning Magic Carpet. One of the hugely underrated early entries into first-person gaming (especially with z-axis controls,) in my opinion.
Magic carpet really blew myself and my friends minds back in the day. It wasn't really about the gameplay, though that was great fun. It was about swooping over mumbling villagers and flying after wizards with a real terrible 90's joystick. They got the ambiance and flight spot on. I still have to invert my mouse decades after because of Magic Carpet. I think I should develop the 2022 version. Magic Carpet.
@@metafuel "It was about swooping over mumbling villagers and flying after wizards " "They got the ambiance and flight spot on." The passively presented world building in Magic Carpet it one of my favorite aspects about it, and probably a big part of why I am so into FROMSOFT games these days. Yeah the gameplay itself wasn't... profound or anything, but it bundled together an impressively wide array of concepts, and honestly, still feels more like an immersive sim to me than say, Bioshock. The simple fact that there were just neutral villages, who meandered around and had nothing to do with the gameplay other than having houses you could capture for resource economy, like, just those little details breathed a lot of life into the game that I feel like a lot of other developers either ignore completely, or obsessively overdo to the point of it feeling forced. I am still dumbfounded that there hasn't been a sequel/spiritual-successor to Magic Carpet. Even a simple remastering, with the exact same mechanics but simply built on a current gen game engine would be worth the price of a $20 indie game... but a total rebuild would be amazing. The bones are already there for a significantly more fleshed out game and you could really run wild with a lot of the concepts the game laid down. (Void Destroyer is probably the only thing out now that really scratches that multi-genre psuedo-sim itch that I'm aware, but if anything Void Destroyer might be *too* much. You need to commit pretty heavily to get into that game proper.) I just really love the free-flight shooter/action mechanics, (which have *remarkably* decent controls considering when the game came out,) that are combined with (admittedly minimal) RTS style resource management and base building. The castle spell and terrain deformation abilities alone make for a good time; I'd love to see that developed more heavily, to even have things like tower-defense style missions, or even just expanded options for base construction, (and I like that it's autonomous, so you don't have to micromanage your base and how it operates, but I'd love to have like, a market building that would go and trade with locals, or hell, a spell to convert monsters so you could have a little army following you around.) Guh, yeah I don't know there's just so many little things that are satisfying in that game, (like making a goddamn volcano if you want,) I really don't understand why it hasn't developed into a genre on its own.
It's not a peak, but milestones. Like Crysis was the milestones on what graphical prowess can be pushed to the limit in 2007. Or Unreal in 1998. Now in 2019, games like RDR2, GOW, etc. Inch by inch pushing it to the next milestones.
@@manchesterunitedno7 For me I think peak graphics was first time I saw GL Quake around 1997/1998. I'd heard about Open GL before but seeing it in front of me blew my mind, changed everything the game looked freaking amazing this was last time I've ever played a game and thought to myself holy shit. After that everything graphics wise has just looked like a continued evolution to me, even modern games I still don't get that same mind blown reaction. The original Quake still one of my favourite games - so amazing for its time.
I really want a part 2 that covers the second half of the last decade. In all honesty though, Graphics have definitely slowed down quite a bit in recent years. Not sure how long that video would be.
I remember that the first mod I saw for Doom 3 was called "duct tape". It was a highly speculative take on the game's premise, which introduced the far-fetched, yet interesting, suggestion that somewhere in a sprawling research station, there was a roll of tape, and that the player character used it in order not to have to switch between weapon flashlight.
I begin realising how "old" I am as I recognize playing practically every game in this documentary all the way back to the original pong. Great memories. - and being a game developer now -very inspiring. Edit: I've probably watched this at least 3 times in the past. The edit is so RUclipss algorithm shows this at least 3 more times to the future Shane. Hey! Future Shane! I love you dude :) Fantastic documentary.
38:15 “Minecraft serves as strong support that graphics don’t matter” RTX update: *heavy breathing* Edit: The comment section has turned into an argument. Who's surprised?
Even if RTX gets widespread implementation, I probably won't be using it. the classic graphics have a lot of the character from the game I love. also, the somewhat blockier lighting always serves as a way to tell where mobs might spawn or how often you need to place a torch so you don't get creepered at random.
Very nice. What a blast from the past. That was a very detailed and thorough walk down memory lane. I played just about all of these games at the times when they were cutting edge. It's nice to see the progression and hear it explained in such a great way. I don't comment very often but I felt this piece deserved my respect. They say just before you die your life flashes before your eyes, as a lifelong gamer through the progression of arcades, home consoles and pc's this was like that flash for a gamer but instead of the end a whole future open to the possibilities and excitement of what will be next. Thank you for sharing!
So well written and so well done. SO MUCH WORK has gone into this! I have no idea how he affords (and/or gets away with not paying for) all these gameplay clips from copyrighted IP, but I absolutely love the clips. They illustrate all his points perfectly. Thank you so much for making this and your other videos (my favorite is the one about The Secret of Monkey Island).
Can you imagine what would happen if you went back in time and showed the creators of pong a new game? Imagine the look on their faces seeing the crysis 3 or arma 3!
26:15 I felt so strange after seeing that Far Cry Footage, I remember when that came out, feeling like graphics couldn't get better... Wow. 30:05 I felt that way again with Gears of War. and 2019 with Red Dead Redemption 2. One thing is for certain, Graphics haven't stopped moving forward.
The problem with Crysis was very much attributed to Crytek's expectations of what future PCs would be like. If you watch DF's video about Crysis, you'll hear that Crytek thought single-core processors with much higher clock speeds were the future. And yet, here we are with multi-core, multi-threaded cpus that hasn't even budged over the 6ghz territory in nearly 2 decades. It's not that companies like Intel doesn't want higher clock speeds, but attaining such a feat would prove difficult and expensive and multi-cores provided a cheaper alternative with the same raw performance...provided the applications would use multi-core cpus. Thing is however, Crysis didn't. It wasn't until it's PS3 version afaicr that Crysis tried to run on multi-core CPUs.
Which was incomprehensible since the Athlon X2 were launched in 2005 and Core 2 were launched a year after. It was pretty well known at Crysis' launch the industry was pushing it's way into the multicore realm at that time. Athlon and Pentium M have proved years earlier it was better to improve instruction per cycle rather than pump up the clock speed, in fact and ironically, the Pentium M were proven to be much better cpus for Intel desktop solutions than Pentium 4 and some motherboard manufacturers like Asus did release pin converters to fit Pentium M processors into Pentium 4 motherboards.
Not just expensive to go over 6Ghz, it's like a hard limitation of our current understanding of the universe, i.e. quantum physics and high frequency physics. They (ibm and co) are throwing hundreds of millions at it in research institutes each year trying to break that limit, or at least somehow go around it. The basic problem is with computing itself, as everything computer based is working in binary (computation and data transmission), not like quantum computing which is based on probabilities. Out computers don't need a probability engine to calculate with a 1 is a 1 or a 0 is a 0. However, if you increase the clock frequency of your chip, more and more quantum based interference shows up, i.e. particles behave like waves and such, and those waves getting detected as a transmitted signal. Since our computers don't know that a signal might just be delivered from a, let's say, 50% probability source, it can't compute and the entire computing becomes unstable (can't use it anymore to do anything). So basically, multi-core systems are a way to try to go around those limitations and making them more energy-efficient is also a good idea. However, there are new emerging technologies that can break that limit easily, and should be introduced in around 5-10 years (hopefully). As far as I understand it, they use anything but wires to transmit all the signals. Then we can finally have our 30 Ghz CPU. And finally we'll be able to play Crysis on Ultra Settings.
@@Dampfaeus My understanding was that the issue with clock-speed wasn't quantum interference, but heat dispersal. The faster you run chips the more heat you generate, until the chips basically melts themselves, and there's just no known way to economically disperse that kind of heat. A heat sink just can't store enough or do it fast enough. I actually saw a demonstration of overclocking an Intel chip to something crazy (I think it was like 9 GHz) using liquid nitrogen as a cooling agent, but it only worked for a few minutes and the CPU was toast when they were done. The stuff about quantum effects is more about our inability to scale computer chips down much further (because once transistors are small enough, they start to get "leaky" and all the stuff you mentioned happens).
@@Dampfaeus I thought the quantum physics come when you shrink the processor into the realm where the size of the transistors is the size of the wavelengths.... so if we shrink further, we can the probability stuff. Didnt know this also happens with faster clock speed.
@@Dampfaeus no. NO. No. Above the clock frequencies of today, the current becomes too high and the metal lines between the semiconductors melts. Nothing to do with quantum computing limits. Quantum physics machinery can do specific tasks, and can tell you if your signal was hacked. There's no magic 30 GHz machine such as you described. Sorry. Not sorry to burst the bubble. Waiting for Santa Claus is an infinite wait, life is too short for such impossible dreams.
what we need is a new, more realistic graphics engine not only in terms of graphical presentation but the authentic physics simulation. objects need to have weight, mass and inertia, their particular characteristics of resistance, hardness, elasticity, flexibility, dynamic impacts, destructibility, atmosphere (air resistance generating aerodynamic drag, pressure, temperature, humidity, etc. ... all in real time using a library of items needed to build a compelling virtual world.
I can't stand motion blur in first person shooters. That isn't how the human eye works... I always turn it off. I only want motion blur in racing games.
@Ahoy Wow, thanks for this restrospective. It's clear, precise and it gives a sense of nostalgia I'd never shy away from :) I'm surprised, however, that you didn't mention the massive contribution of shaders at large, especially normal mapping (which appears to me to be much more notable and pervasive than, say, chromatic aberration) and geometry shaders that allow for some nifty geometry deformations at low CPU cost, and more recently PBR (which was arlready around back when you made the vid). I would even go as far as to say that the massive use of shaders and PBR ushers a new generation of graphics in itself. The brown tones and waxy lighting of Xbox 360 ans PS3 were there because PBR wasn't around yet, so, I can't really think of a restropective about the history of graphics without thinking about it :) Anyway, awesome job, thanks for the vid!
This game is considered a classic of the mega-drive (genesis), people compare it with sonic when it comes to what is the best platformer on the console, it was a best seller of the time and its physical version is one who the most looked for among retro fans. If that's called underrated.
Good video format! Progressing through the technologies and referring back to the early days of graphics throughout the video keeps the attention of those of us who are fond of those early days, much better than progressing through the video on a timeline. This may just be a consequence of the chosen organization of the essay, but I like it. It not only makes it more entertaining throughout, but also causes me to pay attention to the details I may otherwise not be drawn to. Well done!
I really don’t know how I should feel for actually having played 90% of all the games mentioned, especially the old ones. But at the same time, I do feel amazed that I’ve gotten to experience the growth in the world of gaming.
![Lethal Company Music Video 🎵 "Follow The Orders" [VERSION A]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/QeooZB4Z7RA/mqdefault.jpg)
When I was about 7 I got into an accident with some fire. Ended up in hospital for 5 months on the childrens ward. Once I'd recovered enough to get out of bed into a wheelchair, I found the "games room". Back in the 1980's that consisted of lots of board games, some colouring books, an endless supply of "The Beano" comics and ... an original table cabinet Space Invaders. Every night, about 1am once the nurses had mostly gone home, I'd sneak silently down the corridor into the games rooms and turn on Space Invaders. The nurses kept the credit key in the top left hand drawer. I usually got about 2 hours of playing in before I was discovered. They either found my empty bed and went looking for me, or a nurse would be going off duty and rumble me on her way past the room from the glowing lights. I mastered that game. Eventually they would take my wheelchair away every night at lights out to stop me from playing. I just scooted along the corridor on my butt for a few nights. You cannot stop a gamer. Good times!
that sounds unhealthy af lmao
I hope you don’t suffer from any consequences from that accident!
Amazing story man!
"What does the future of graphics hold?"
I come here from 2020, we have Ray Tracing.
Taking a wheelchair from a child to prevent him playing computer games, oh my god...
@@strakhovandrri Hahaha! I think they were concerned about me not getting enough sleep, and they were worried I might fall out the wheelchair if I was unsupervised. Or maybe they were just angry, bitter middle aged people who didn't understand how amazing Space Invaders was! XD
Where there is a will, there is a way.
my favorite part is when he said in what sounded like a serious voice, but can it run crysis?
Mr. Quacky taking the words out of all 80s/90s gamers mouths
U mean crisis?
@@manav466 i like your funny words magic man
@@duk6897 😂 I just asked
We know the answer though
34:01
“The future was Crisis.”
Correct in a good and a bad way.
What do you mean? I haven't ever played Crisis, so I don't have an opinion either way, and I don't own a PC (console baby here lol)
Jonah Walsh
Don’t worry, I’m a console lad too. The joke is that Crisis was g o o d , but the current future in general is b a d .
@Jay marlin That's already happened
We got the b i g b r a i n
You are correct even though you are a console lad.. what Crysis did at the time was something that really swung the market of pc hardware, when it came out I knew almost noone that could run the game smoothly because of how much processing power it needed. And the upcoming titles (except for console ports) followed similar trend, so a lot of PC gamers started upgrading their HW to run such games, expensive times haha
This video is only 6 years old, but we've now reached 8k resolutions in VR, real-time raytracing, and the long-thought paradox of having Chrome open while playing a game.
"the long-thought paradox of having Chrome open while playing a game"
And they said Opera GX was a stupid idea
@@anonymgrill6695 MOGUS HAHAHWHAHWHAYQHWH EBEBWHWWYWTYSUSHSJEUHEUUSSYSYSUUSHAHAVAGSGU EZ A EZ A A AU)👩👩👧👦👨👩👧👦👨👩👧👦👩👩👧🧑🦯👨🦯👨🦯👨🦯👨🦯🎅🏿🎅🏿🎅🏿🎅🏿🎅🏿🎅🏿🎅🏿👳🏿♂️👳🏿♂️👳🏿♂️👳🏿♂️👳🏿♂️👳🏿♂️👁👄👁👣👣👣💀💀💩💩monfsyssysusys
I set my building on fire by playing Tf2 and googling something at the same time
@@anonymgrill6695 It is. Limiting a programs ram was always possible.
@@fietae Most users aren't running around all over the place in order to find scattered solutions for issues that they bump into, it's important to make the user experience as simple and enjoyable as possible
Are you happy with poorly optimized content just because there are workarounds?
took me 40 mins to realize this video was 6 years old
it's weird to think that 5 years ago sounds like it was so far away but when you say 2015 it doesn't sound as far
@@deez3y yea it's weird
Same
yeah, I looked at the video upload date when he said Crysis was 7 years ago. Hard to believe that the distance between Crysis and this video, and the distance between this video and now, are almost the same. Crazy what graphical improvements we've made since 2015.
And it's crazy to think just how much further graphics have come since he made this video. We'd almost be due for a part 2 soon!
This video is over 5 years old and it's still the best one that I've seen summarizing the history of graphics.
It must've taken a while to edit and I just appreciate this video overall.
@Just Some Guy without a Mustache I see you almost everywhere. And yes, the video's great in every word. His voice is smoothing too :)
@@easedtoast everyone says the same thing. can you just not give these idiots attention pls.
Good to see you here master
@RReprah Not the reply I wanted, but ok then.
It's because he is an erudite, educated person (as are the member of his team, which I suppose him to have). This informs his entire approach to the subject matter. First, the level of research is exhaustive. Second, a keen focus clearly led the work, so that even what could have been an amorphous and bloated research stage was well-conceived and thoughtfully directed. Last, approaching the source material from an academic stance, he takes great pains to present it, both through the lens of his intellectual process, whilst at the same time, ensuring that audiences of all educational/academic backgrounds would find the final product easily accessible. Combined, this makes for a wonderfully enjoyable document
After 5 years, we really need "part 2" of this video.
What has really changed in 5 years besides RTX? Which sucks?
Nothing changed?
@@TheJayson8899 I don't think VR was available in 2015. I can't wait for that technology to mature.
@@TheJayson8899 explain how r e a l t i m e RTX sucks. because as far as i know, rendering that much shit at once was a fever dream 2 years ago.
@@1estel1ch.42 yeah but its still barely playable on most pcs, the only thing we have is a Quake 2 tech demo that can run on the most high end GPUs. Granted, thats still a big jump, but its still not main stream enough
My whole gaming life just flashed before my eyes. I cannot believe how many of these games I actually played.
🧛🏻♂️🧛🏼♂️🧛🏽♂️🧛🏾♂️🧛🏿♂️
🧜🏿♂️
👳🏿♂️
🎅🏿
You are just old. Oh. Me, too. :-)
@Grace Jackson IDDQD IDKFA lol
I guess that means we are getting older 😆
TRUE MAN
1980: pixel sprite games because pf technical limitation
2020: because we fricking love them
Some of the greatest games of this decade are 2D, and used pixels and sprites as graphics
@@thefilipinogamertfg crosscode for example
@@fusk7799 What about that game that was released in Christmas Day 2020 that took 7 or 8 years to create? It utilized 2D graphics, pixels and sprites. Don't remember the name, but the genre is psychological horror
@@thefilipinogamertfg you mean Omori?
@@thefilipinogamertfg I'm gonna assume you meant omori. Honestly, I never played it.
at 43, I've lived through most of these developments and pumped a lot of quarters in my day etc... But I gotta say... This is absolutely essential watching for anyone interested in having a good grip on this subject. I was stunned by the overall quality of of the info presented and the crystal clear audio/visual show how well you understand a modern audience's expectation for quality. Instant sub
At age 15 I have only seen 1/4 the evolution of graphics and game history overall.
your 43 and watching this? nice.
I'm 46 and I've played almost all of these games
I'm 50 and..... still have a copy of wolfenstein on floppy.
I'm 47, And I Absolutely agree with you😎
This isn't brief. This is the documentary I watched as a class project.
Roughly 40+ years of history in 44 minutes, I’d say that’s pretty decent
The normal version would take more than 3 hours if went into in detail
I agree. Can't relate, but I agree.
You're in the right class.
@Ethan Ansell Wasn't that on Coleco Vision?
7 years later, this stands as one of the greatest documentaries ever created about interactive media. Thank you Ahoy! Your editing, narration, structure, and scripting are second to none
Would be cool to see an addendum looking into the last 10 years of graphics
This guy is like free youtube premium
ruclips.net/video/xEpPf0k9Zw0/видео.html
@@filofoniamusicaefilosofia3192 Noo
@@filofoniamusicaefilosofia3192 reported for self promoting
RUclips Premium has nothing on this. No one is paying for "Scare Pewdiepie" 😂
not now he isnt...
this guy is amazing, the delivery is perfect, and the script is intelligent and eloquent. This man should narrate for BBC or Discovery channel!
did not think this would get so many likes!
STRUDUUREYRU CXY.YXZ 0:01 HAHAHSHH MOBKE AMONTSUS 💀💀💩👳🏿♂️👳🏿♂️🎅🏿🎅🏿
he stands apart in a great way
Absolutely
absolutely not
*Opens video* "Aww, 44 minutes, probably wont watch ALL of it" *Watches all of it in one sitting*
same xD
at 11 pm
Ikr
at past midnight, but yeah. :)
well when game after game that i played waay back came up, i had to continue hahahaha
I think the point of the "graphics vs gameplay" discussion is that good (or even amazing) graphics can't compensate for poor gameplay, but games with poor graphics can still be good (or even amazing) if the gameplay is awesome.
I have always thought exactly this. Good graphics can enhance an already good gameplay idea, but not salvage a crappy one. While fun gameplay is fun gameplay regardless of graphics.
yeah, but in general will sell worse and the price will need to be cheaper. You can get away with a bad game with good graphics for 60 bucks but you can't sell baba is you for 60 bucks, even being consider one of the best puzzles of all
2:25 ..... was this the VERY FIRST ROCKET LEAGUE?!
THIS IS ROCKET LEAGUE!
It really is
yup
cars playing soccer isn't exactly new and has been done in real life long before any video games came out.
dude.
I just love how you say "Doom". You really get across how awesome that game is.
It sounds like he uses every vowel in the alphabet
"A E I O U, and sometimes Y".
"DAEIOU(Y)M".
deum
Forreal. He says it with such a passion.
Its just a big sad this video was released in 2015. One year away from the new doom release
"Doom, was the daddy." Damn right
But the next king was ut99, lasting almost 2 decades
and nvidia made the technology
@@OCDingqueer uh no they didn't. idtech1, dooms engine was made by John Carmack and nvdia played no roll in its creation
Funny Almost every breakthrough in videogame was Made by DOOM in the 90'
@@jakaalatas8938 Yep doom was so good back in those days spent so many hrs on that one and using mods
Excellently put together and very well narrated. Congrats.
Where's tf2
45 mins is brief?
@@nyccollin I suppose a comprehensive dissertation would comprise a 12-part series. Maybe. 🤷♂
It was really good, but needs to have a continuations with VR methinks.
your videos are masterfully edited, beautifully narrated and have amazing content. I don't know why you don't have millions of views and subscribers
Because the majority of users nowadays propably have AD/HD and require Pewdiepie kind of tempo.
Frolof congrats you now have more likes the this comment
Hussah!
Valex Nihilist because people don't like good well made content they want crappy 20 year old men screaming down their microphone
"I don't know why you don't have millions of views and subscribers"
Quality dont bring viewers because you must first watch something to discover it is good, and by the time you watched it by the first time the viwership already increased by +1.
Ratio of like to dislike ratio is a better way to judge quality, this video has 96.84 likes to every dislike. A pretty awesome thing.
Pong - 1972 = A bunch of really smart people got together to program how a ball is supposed to move
RDR2 - 2018 = A bunch of really smart people got together to program how a pair of balls are supposed to move
Conclusion = All the technology and advancements we've made but basically we're trying to do the same thing :P
everything is BALLS
Balls is lyfe
B A L L S
it takes balls
Wait... It's all balls?
🌎 👨🚀 🔫 👨🏻🚀
Always was...
Excellent documentary.
Indeed
+seljak140 you can't seriously expect a developer of todays massive games to optimise to that level. the best you can expect is a well optimised game engine that can fully utilise the hardware. or for a machine to automatically optimise code
Yeah, it is
It kind of gives modern games an underlying ickiness in a developers eyes. Like many of the hands that touched the code were dirty fumbling dumb hands.
Tell that to Doom. I've never played a game that ran so good while being up to par with modern graphics.
120fps on a 5 year old budget processor with a minor overclock? Yeah the FX6300 does the job while GTA4 can't even maintain 30fps. Vulkan Doom is a case study on how to properly optimize a game. OpenGL runs 40-80fps. Vulkan's minimums are higher than OpenGL's average on my system
Absolute wow. Not only was this guy captivating all the way through, he is certainly poetic with his words
Compared to Gen Z? DEFINITELY! Comepared to averagely intelligent and articulate 25+ adults? Nah.
@@TheVanillatech Implying millennials aren't cancerous beyond measure.
@@rpgfreak9999 What does that mean? "Cancerous beyond measure"? You morons all talk in nonsense and cliches. You have lost the basic ability that man has had for hundreds of thousands of years : to communicate.
You're fucked, mate.
You're done.
@@TheVanillatech K.
Doesn't change that most RUclips millennials are annoying as all hell. Look around. Lol.
@@TheVanillatech literal boomer here
I rarely sub after just one video, but 30 seconds in to this I realised I'd found a talented creator. :) Excellent work, thank you.
kcuf0 no problem
Jammbd Hsj lolollll
Yes i done the exact same after watching the POLYBIUS video last night, this channel could well turn out to be one of my must watch watch favourites. Just great content so far.
Very high quality content for sure.
40:00 "with the recent arrival of a new console generation". that's when I came to realize this video is over 4 years old
Crash Bandicoot may have had a "low" polygon count, but at the time it was released, it was incredibly impressive. Thanks to it's corridor based level design, the stages were able to accommodate lush, detailed environments compared to most other games at the time. Andy Gavin, co-founder of Naughty Dog, actually recalls watching Shigeru Miyamoto play the Crash demo at it's first hands on E3 showing, and apparently Miyamoto was smiling the entire time, and thoroughly enjoyed playing the game
Cool anecdote. 😁
@@dubiouslycrisp thanks! I particularly enjoy this bit of trivia, as Miyamoto has had a tremendous impact on my life, and knowing he had fun with Crash Bandicoot is just great
With Bandicoot, they actually hacked the PS1 to push it way beyond its tech capability; you can find a cool docu about it, told by the devs themselves, in the Ars Technica channel.
Watching this many years later, the section that mentioned dirt and other effects "on the lens" really brought back memories. Hit the nail on the head when you said they were overused and would become more subtle, most screen effects now are limited to the corners of the screen like vignetting. I boot up games from 5-8 years ago now and when I get water drops, bloody streaks, and smudges of dirt right on the center of the screen that stick around for more than a few seconds, it tends to be rather annoying :p
That was surprisingly educative and well-made. Didn't expect that from a random video and was ready for something like watchmojo.. Thank you!
And each video gets better.
Agreed.
Phil Shary I
yes just what i was thinking
Don't even compare Ahoy to watchmojo
That was excellent! I've just watched my entire gaming life, from being a kid in the 70's and still gaming now at 52. Thank you
"Previously planar plumber"
Loved that.
I always feel much smarter after watching videos like this, even though I've already forgotten everything I've just learned.
i was like "where is RTX?" then realized the video is from 2015
What's RTX? Rooster Teeth Expo?
@@MM-vs2et more like: Rectal Teeth Xenomorph
rootin tootin xootin
you probably meant Ray Tracing :>
@@MM-vs2et ray-tracing xylophone
Thank you for making this documentary, it has opened my eyes more and made me appreciate the whole gaming and graphics history that has come so far.
"Doom was the daddy." - XboxAhoy
zachandbro more like grandpa
*OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOH*
What is wrong with you two?
More copies of D00M in the world than Microsoft at the time right?
Respect
For as ephemeral as the subject of video game graphics is that also happens to feature contemporary examples of the time the video was made, Stuart Brown’s videos somehow manage to stand as timeless masterpieces
Although i wasnt alive when it came out, i played metal slug under a different title during computer clsses just over a decade after it came out. The scariest part was if you felt the teacher's hand on your shoulder telling you to log off.
Especially if they give your shoulder the little "got you, fucker" squeeze
I think graphics still matter greatly, photorealism does not matter.
A lot of indie games wouldn't be where they were without their particular graphical choices.
exactly. graphics are HUGELY important for video games. it's often what makes or breaks succes. although it's not the technical improvements people care about anymore usually, but more how the artists use what they have available to them to make something coherent and stylish. making sure all art assets fit together in one scene is massively more important than having a couple of extra polygons or a higher resulution texture.
Graphics don't matter, they're essential for a game to exist.
What matters are a game's visuals.
Semantics, but an incredibly important distinction to make nontheless.
What I like is that now we can have a choice of different games from different graphical genres. My preference is for cartoony, pixelated games (I''m a product of the early 90's), and now I can play a plethora of games new and old in such styles.
Depends on who you ask and what they prefer. I like both indies and AAA game, but I also still strive for a massive exploration based RPG that has photorealism in it, and thankfully we live in that era. So the entire argument about graphics has always been moot and will forever be.
@@Zerviscos Only far more dangerous and less exciting.
Anyone else watching this in 2019 and thinking: 2015 ain't seen nothin' yet!
Believe me.
I didn't know about this channel. until this week.
I'm looking at it, and thinking A) Wasn't Ahoy a magazine for C64 programming, and B) This guy has apparently never played Infocom games or other text-based games...
@@VulpisFoxfire he hasnt play alot of games. he is heavily influenced by shooter. shooter are super boring D;
yea he should talk about Ultra HD resolutions, VR, ray tracing, nvidea hairworks, real live laser shows and holograms, DirectX 9, 11 and 12, dlss and graphics cards with artificial inteligence D;
@@VulpisFoxfire HAVE YOU?
you know a video is influential when it's not a meme and still gets recommended out of the blue after 6 years
I know a lot about video games. I have played them all my life, I've worked in the industry and I take their criticism seriously. And no source - writer, publication, channel - has taught me so much about the history and developing context of the medium as Ahoy. I learn something new every video, even on subjects I'm already familiar with. It's not artistic critique, but if you want to learn about the nuts and bolts of game history you literally cannot do better than this channel. *Such* good work.
Documentary quality. Very well done.
One minor development that I'm disappointed you didn't mention was how, for a while, renders of 3D models were used as sprites. Donkey Kong Country is the most prominent example, but plenty of other games did much the same thing without the same cartoony flair. (Later non-rotoscoped 2D fighting games like Street Fighter did this.) It was popular, since it allowed more detail and polish with less work. Just make the model, pose it, and render it. No need to redraw that neat pattern or little accessory for every frame of every animation; model it once and let the renderer work its magic! And if you need to adjust something, just tweak the model or poses and let it run through the renderer again while you take a coffee break. Throw in some manual tweaks at the end of the dev cycle and you can have twice the detail for half the effort.
The worst part is how close you came a few times. You brought up similar techniques like rotoscoping and prerendered backgrounds, and mentioned a couple of games using such techniques, but never mentioned it. Ah well; I suppose there would always be _some_ neat technique that got left out.
Did I hear FNAF?
Don't forget the original Diablo and Diablo II
Yoshi's Island's art style is my personal favorite of ALL video games. I've played at least 120 different video games, but there's just nothing as sublime and beautiful as it.
And now - realtime ray tracing is coming!
Saw people trying to do voxels to make things constructed and breakable instead invisible walls and invincible everything in 3D. If you focus on emergent gaming, sandbox mode, and player building the worlds, they want to turn that into the new virtual reality. Kinda like minecraft but with sand or smaller like every atom in your body is glued by the program. Get cut you bleed but the processing power to measure that might take a decade or more. Still the effect of feeling what you see happens in those goggles and to make the virtual world more malleable is a worthwhile pursuit. Some started off too grand trying to MMO that around the world when it almost kills the game specs solo.
Quantum computers MIGHT allow that. But programmers will find a way to simulate those effects without needing a 50-ton supercomputer
quantum computers have nothing to do with ray tracing
@@Blox117 Yeah there are very rare cases when a quantum computer can do something that a regular computer can't or just more faster. But it all comes down to optimization! Even a cheap laptop can destroy a a large Super Computer if the application is optimized for it.
Realtime raytracing was used in the early first person shooters (Wolfestein 3D, Doom, Duke Nukem 3D). They cast horizontal rays, one for each column of pixels in the screen, and painted a column of pixels when they found a wall or an sprite. Very efficient, but also limiting in the allowed geometry. General purpose 3D, with full 3D transformations, Z-buffer for occlusion, and arbitrary texture transformations, as introduced in Quake, required more horsepower, but was more flexible and, in the end, more powerful CPUs and dedicated GPUs made it viable.
0:53
- Pixel pioneers
- Shows image of vector graphics
Me: Mom can I get Rocket League?
Mom: We have Rocket League at home.
Rocket League at home:
*Car Polo*
First
nyapism CAR POLO EVEN BETTER
legendary
i realized this had 999 likes so i made it 1k :D
1000th like
It just came to me that while pixels rainend supreme in the 2D era, and modern reinterpretations of it, it was actually vector graphics which can be traced more as an influence in the evolution to modern 3D with its vector wireframe polygons. Meanwhile the pixels, when translated directly into 3D, are the less successful voxel graphics which are more seem on the indie scene today
The game logic uses vectors as polygons, but ultimately has to convert them into a rastered image.
I'd love to see an update or sequel in a few years time that include raytracing, the comeback of voxels and what ever else is around the corner
D O O M W A S T H E D A D D Y
Dub Jax
"papito jugó al Doom"
D O O M I S T H E D A D D Y
Half Life the Son.
argentino detected
OH YES DADDY DOOM
Mind blowing documentary, not just for gamers and developers but also for graphic designers. Thank you.
Anyone that likes learning could enjoy this, well presented and entertaning as well.
I'm really looking forward to your next post, Stuart. I don't know how you do these videos with such a level of polish and cohesion while making each asset from scratch. It's breathtaking work.
I'm honestly surprised you skipped over the rise of anti-aliasing. I feel like that might have been a fairly major point in time.
i was waiting to see that in the video too, but it was great anyway lol
good point. the video was still well done tho
bro i was waiting for halo
I've been a gamer for over 25 years, yet I still don't know what anti-aliasing actually does or how it is pronounced xD
Caringan Coystopitum just look it up. It’s fairly simple to understand the concept. Let’s take a simple example. When you display a circle black on white you have a instant transition from circle to background. What anti-aliasing does is that it smoothens out those kinds of edges and makes the overall image look less frayed
This is one of the best documentaries I have seen about technology.
Virtually all of his content is this in depth
yes, very well made but i would have like to have heard more about the hardware side too, like the rise of nvidia etc
You need to watch more documentaries then. Not saying this isn't a good one which is but there are MUCH MUCH better ones, obviously not on youtube.
@@HeavenlyWarrior yeah, you're right. As the title says, it's "brief".
Yes I wanna see a video from 5 years ago, thanks RUclips
Hey 😳
Here we are. The future is now my friend
Do you like seeing your parents? If yes, then why? They are also old, so why do you see them?
@@vaibhavsrivastva1253 I don't think he was being sarcastic
@@Kit_Cake Neither was I [being sarcastic].
I was thinking ''why isn't he talking about ray tracing and newer games'' and then I looked at the date
"Clay Fighter was *moulded* in its image"
Please tell me you meant that pun.
Damn, I just realized that too.
Damn, i just noticed
If you think that could be a pun,
that's because it is.
he really "sculpted" that one
Mold
You know you're getting old when you have played nearly every game in the documentary.
It was like a trip down memory lane for me.
True that! I remember all of them.
It reminded me of several games I haven't thought of in years.
I was like 44 min TLDW. 44 min later still watching. I played almost every game on this list growing up and Doom was the Daddy that changed my life in 1993. I spent next several years after that buying and upgrading my pc and a few extra so my and my friends could all have a lan party at my house every weekend playing doom, quake, unreal T and duke nukem... which he did not include in this but was an all time favorite of mine. I truly miss those days....
I have played nearly none of these (possible none, I need to to check)
The way he introduced Mortal Kombat, once he said, " one game was....." I already knew. To me, Mortal Kombat was the middle. The end of the old and the beginning of the new.
I would love to see another episode featuring newer techniques of graphic, the rise of VR taking the forefront of the gaming scene, and rendering techniques like DLSS and FSR
I love how he says "DOOM IS THE DADDY"
When
@@mrbadger4375 the
@@mrbadger4375 impostor
@@mrbadger4375 is
@@mrbadger4375 sus!!!!
I like your laid back attitude towards graphical trends like Bloom and Motion Blur. Too many use it as fuel for their rage, but it's nice to step back and realize that technology will march on, and unfortunate fads are just that. Love your stuff, man.
I started playing games on the Wii. I have learned to love bloom
4 years later: The rise of Raytracing
Lol shit; RT tech has been around for 17 years now.. Still haven't seen it genuinely integrated at a large scale... lots of fake RT on consoles, a few titles on PC used it, some tech demos but other than that.. not shit and I guarantee you the next series of consoles will be just as shitty-middle-range-laptop incapable of truly rendering it. sure PC graphics cards have supported it since the ATi 5xxx/Nvidia 2xx but since consoles have come to dominate the industry, little software is programmed to take advantage of it.
Graphics and tech have stalled because the major players in the industry know the key and it's "*Fuck if it's trash, they'll buy it anyways*"
@@CooKiesHouseCannabisCo No previous GPU was good at RT.
@@juanme555 that's weird because here's a GTX550i doing ray tracing in 2013 just fine...
ruclips.net/video/s39jRg5W6hQ/видео.html
Quake III Arena had a fully working raytracing implementation back in the early 2000's. Nvidia just sold another batch of overpriced GPU's to another million monkeys via some "Raytracing" gimmick, despite pre-release benchmarks showing that the cards were vastly incapable of such tech in games.
Monkeys still slapped dat pre-order button. $2000 Titan XP - Raytracing Edition please! XD
@@TheVanillatech I think this is more of a near "plug and play" approach, because do consider that older games had to redesign their lighting systems from scratch or come up with a (yet another proprietary) game engine that would seamlessly support RT.
In real world scenarios, who would wanna do that? Even a giant game company wouldn't spend tons of R&D on something that might get unstable as technology (HW and SW) progresses. Unless you're EA. Fucking Frostbite Engine.
After a year, I rewatched this video like it was my first time watching. The year is 2021 now. This video needs a sequel!
Me too, and I loved it all over again. Brilliant stuff!
watching this after MW2019 makes me realize how far graphics have come in 5 years.
Nah. The Industry stopped truly progressing after the buy out / conglomeration in the mid 2000's. Crysis was the last title to really push hardware in a meaningful way. Consoles and the casualization of the video game industry for the pure pursuit of profits spelled the end for PC gaming, which in turns meant the end of the golden era of graphical evolution. We could (should) have had the MW2019 graphics 10 years ago.
There are games that look better than MW 2019 that came out years before it. Cod has just finally caught up to the rest of the gaming industry after 12 years
@@glctcthnkr8059 COD has nothing to do with it. That is a franchise titles developed by human beings with access to far better tools than the Crytek team had 15 years ago.
The evolution of COD's graphics was held back only by the systems the games were developed to run on. Let me give you a clue ... that WASNT the PC.
@@glctcthnkr8059 it's because they finally moved away from their modified Quake 3 engine
@@TheVanillatech What are you smoking? Control 2019 introduced multple ray tracing effects like shadows, ambient occlusion, transparency and reflections, all in real-time. It is the most stunning game to date by far.
Quality RUclips right here.
joostoboy quality youtube??? dont you mean video?
I think he left out the “r” in RUclipsr, Ahoy is an amazing info artist.
At 2:23 Car Polo is pretty much the ancient version of todays Rocket League , isnt it? :)
ong
I can't believe this is nearly 7 years old. I literally only realised as it ended on a bunch of older games. Minecraft is completely different now, with RTX especially, and games like GTA V, FIFA 21, and Battlefront II are amazing in comparison even to stuff from 2015.
Props for even mentioning Magic Carpet. One of the hugely underrated early entries into first-person gaming (especially with z-axis controls,) in my opinion.
Magic carpet really blew myself and my friends minds back in the day.
It wasn't really about the gameplay, though that was great fun. It was about swooping over mumbling villagers and flying after wizards with a real terrible 90's joystick.
They got the ambiance and flight spot on.
I still have to invert my mouse decades after because of Magic Carpet.
I think I should develop the 2022 version.
Magic Carpet.
@@metafuel "It was about swooping over mumbling villagers and flying after wizards " "They got the ambiance and flight spot on."
The passively presented world building in Magic Carpet it one of my favorite aspects about it, and probably a big part of why I am so into FROMSOFT games these days. Yeah the gameplay itself wasn't... profound or anything, but it bundled together an impressively wide array of concepts, and honestly, still feels more like an immersive sim to me than say, Bioshock. The simple fact that there were just neutral villages, who meandered around and had nothing to do with the gameplay other than having houses you could capture for resource economy, like, just those little details breathed a lot of life into the game that I feel like a lot of other developers either ignore completely, or obsessively overdo to the point of it feeling forced.
I am still dumbfounded that there hasn't been a sequel/spiritual-successor to Magic Carpet. Even a simple remastering, with the exact same mechanics but simply built on a current gen game engine would be worth the price of a $20 indie game... but a total rebuild would be amazing. The bones are already there for a significantly more fleshed out game and you could really run wild with a lot of the concepts the game laid down. (Void Destroyer is probably the only thing out now that really scratches that multi-genre psuedo-sim itch that I'm aware, but if anything Void Destroyer might be *too* much. You need to commit pretty heavily to get into that game proper.) I just really love the free-flight shooter/action mechanics, (which have *remarkably* decent controls considering when the game came out,) that are combined with (admittedly minimal) RTS style resource management and base building. The castle spell and terrain deformation abilities alone make for a good time; I'd love to see that developed more heavily, to even have things like tower-defense style missions, or even just expanded options for base construction, (and I like that it's autonomous, so you don't have to micromanage your base and how it operates, but I'd love to have like, a market building that would go and trade with locals, or hell, a spell to convert monsters so you could have a little army following you around.)
Guh, yeah I don't know there's just so many little things that are satisfying in that game, (like making a goddamn volcano if you want,) I really don't understand why it hasn't developed into a genre on its own.
Thank you for compiling the five part series into one video
Thanks for clarifying, thought I already saw this lol.
221Prohunter description
I remember thinking we reached our peak in 2015. Look at gaming graphics and cinematics now.
I had a hard time believing we could get any better way back in 2011. How wrong I was...
Fortnite XD
It's not a peak, but milestones. Like Crysis was the milestones on what graphical prowess can be pushed to the limit in 2007. Or Unreal in 1998. Now in 2019, games like RDR2, GOW, etc. Inch by inch pushing it to the next milestones.
@@manchesterunitedno7 For me I think peak graphics was first time I saw GL Quake around 1997/1998. I'd heard about Open GL before but seeing it in front of me blew my mind, changed everything the game looked freaking amazing this was last time I've ever played a game and thought to myself holy shit. After that everything graphics wise has just looked like a continued evolution to me, even modern games I still don't get that same mind blown reaction.
The original Quake still one of my favourite games - so amazing for its time.
@@1norwood1 This. GL Quake was a revolution. I still fondly remember running out and buying my Voodoo 1. Good times.
Your narration, music, and visuals, especially with that outro, is utterly beautiful
I really want a part 2 that covers the second half of the last decade. In all honesty though, Graphics have definitely slowed down quite a bit in recent years. Not sure how long that video would be.
Not long.
* Real time Ray Tracing is now a thing
* Voxel games are rising in popularity a little bit
That's all
I remember that the first mod I saw for Doom 3 was called "duct tape". It was a highly speculative take on the game's premise, which introduced the far-fetched, yet interesting, suggestion that somewhere in a sprawling research station, there was a roll of tape, and that the player character used it in order not to have to switch between weapon flashlight.
People: Ughh fortnite looks like shit
Me, playing Black ops 1 on wii: "this looks awesome."
Me, plays a 2D pixel game: damn, this game has great graphics!
me playing gmod with exactly 1 shader mod:
I begin realising how "old" I am as I recognize playing practically every game in this documentary all the way back to the original pong.
Great memories.
- and being a game developer now -very inspiring.
Edit: I've probably watched this at least 3 times in the past.
The edit is so RUclipss algorithm shows this at least 3 more times to the future Shane.
Hey! Future Shane! I love you dude :)
Fantastic documentary.
Amazing production. Loved every second of it. You gotta give it to the 70s and 80s ingenuity of the creators. Those games are timeless.
Now it went from “can it run Crysis?” to “can it run Minecraft” (with ray-traced shaders).
Can it run Star Citizen?
minecraft /w shaders RIP 2080
No, it didn't. Please stop making noise (unnecessary comments on a video).
Nick Fenwick
#triggered
@@neekfenwick why are you so salty
38:15 “Minecraft serves as strong support that graphics don’t matter”
RTX update: *heavy breathing*
Edit: The comment section has turned into an argument. Who's surprised?
Even if RTX gets widespread implementation, I probably won't be using it. the classic graphics have a lot of the character from the game I love. also, the somewhat blockier lighting always serves as a way to tell where mobs might spawn or how often you need to place a torch so you don't get creepered at random.
shaders???
Graphics not matter
But optimization does, ¿why bedrock performs so horrible?
possibbly thanks to the language they used to code
@@irunasoft bedrock preforms way better than java lol
@@MatthewN07 Are you playing on a potato? Something tells me you are
Something so special and mysterious about 1997-2007 graphics
Utterly compelling documentary. Brilliant. Will definitely watch more of your vids. This brought back a lot of memories!
I really love your soothing voice and how this was well described just like a documentary, amazing video, thank you.
I would pay $4.99 for this type of polished content. Great job Ahoy!
Very nice. What a blast from the past. That was a very detailed and thorough walk down memory lane. I played just about all of these games at the times when they were cutting edge. It's nice to see the progression and hear it explained in such a great way. I don't comment very often but I felt this piece deserved my respect. They say just before you die your life flashes before your eyes, as a lifelong gamer through the progression of arcades, home consoles and pc's this was like that flash for a gamer but instead of the end a whole future open to the possibilities and excitement of what will be next. Thank you for sharing!
So well written and so well done. SO MUCH WORK has gone into this! I have no idea how he affords (and/or gets away with not paying for) all these gameplay clips from copyrighted IP, but I absolutely love the clips. They illustrate all his points perfectly. Thank you so much for making this and your other videos (my favorite is the one about The Secret of Monkey Island).
He records the clips himself.
Can you imagine what would happen if you went back in time and showed the creators of pong a new game? Imagine the look on their faces seeing the crysis 3 or arma 3!
of PC
+Andloo Yunty I mean, it would probably change the entire history of video games but it would be fun!
+Andloo Yunty I've always wondered that
+Andloo Yunty You gotta show them the codes, they'll be amazed/baffled.
+HDose Scared Shitless*
Easily one of the best documentaries on RUclips!!
Okay, i was so focused i watched this entire 43 minute video without knowing its so long
This video has been in my recommended for like 2 years so I finally watched it. Good video, I'm just glad my curse is lifted.
So, did you like it?
26:15 I felt so strange after seeing that Far Cry Footage, I remember when that came out, feeling like graphics couldn't get better...
Wow.
30:05 I felt that way again with Gears of War.
and 2019 with Red Dead Redemption 2.
One thing is for certain, Graphics haven't stopped moving forward.
Imagine how it will be in 2100!
@@mazadancoseben4818 I'll be dead, so that's how I imagine that'll go.
The problem with Crysis was very much attributed to Crytek's expectations of what future PCs would be like. If you watch DF's video about Crysis, you'll hear that Crytek thought single-core processors with much higher clock speeds were the future. And yet, here we are with multi-core, multi-threaded cpus that hasn't even budged over the 6ghz territory in nearly 2 decades. It's not that companies like Intel doesn't want higher clock speeds, but attaining such a feat would prove difficult and expensive and multi-cores provided a cheaper alternative with the same raw performance...provided the applications would use multi-core cpus. Thing is however, Crysis didn't. It wasn't until it's PS3 version afaicr that Crysis tried to run on multi-core CPUs.
Which was incomprehensible since the Athlon X2 were launched in 2005 and Core 2 were launched a year after. It was pretty well known at Crysis' launch the industry was pushing it's way into the multicore realm at that time. Athlon and Pentium M have proved years earlier it was better to improve instruction per cycle rather than pump up the clock speed, in fact and ironically, the Pentium M were proven to be much better cpus for Intel desktop solutions than Pentium 4 and some motherboard manufacturers like Asus did release pin converters to fit Pentium M processors into Pentium 4 motherboards.
Not just expensive to go over 6Ghz, it's like a hard limitation of our current understanding of the universe, i.e. quantum physics and high frequency physics. They (ibm and co) are throwing hundreds of millions at it in research institutes each year trying to break that limit, or at least somehow go around it. The basic problem is with computing itself, as everything computer based is working in binary (computation and data transmission), not like quantum computing which is based on probabilities. Out computers don't need a probability engine to calculate with a 1 is a 1 or a 0 is a 0. However, if you increase the clock frequency of your chip, more and more quantum based interference shows up, i.e. particles behave like waves and such, and those waves getting detected as a transmitted signal. Since our computers don't know that a signal might just be delivered from a, let's say, 50% probability source, it can't compute and the entire computing becomes unstable (can't use it anymore to do anything). So basically, multi-core systems are a way to try to go around those limitations and making them more energy-efficient is also a good idea. However, there are new emerging technologies that can break that limit easily, and should be introduced in around 5-10 years (hopefully). As far as I understand it, they use anything but wires to transmit all the signals. Then we can finally have our 30 Ghz CPU. And finally we'll be able to play Crysis on Ultra Settings.
@@Dampfaeus My understanding was that the issue with clock-speed wasn't quantum interference, but heat dispersal. The faster you run chips the more heat you generate, until the chips basically melts themselves, and there's just no known way to economically disperse that kind of heat. A heat sink just can't store enough or do it fast enough. I actually saw a demonstration of overclocking an Intel chip to something crazy (I think it was like 9 GHz) using liquid nitrogen as a cooling agent, but it only worked for a few minutes and the CPU was toast when they were done.
The stuff about quantum effects is more about our inability to scale computer chips down much further (because once transistors are small enough, they start to get "leaky" and all the stuff you mentioned happens).
@@Dampfaeus I thought the quantum physics come when you shrink the processor into the realm where the size of the transistors is the size of the wavelengths.... so if we shrink further, we can the probability stuff. Didnt know this also happens with faster clock speed.
@@Dampfaeus no. NO. No.
Above the clock frequencies of today, the current becomes too high and the metal lines between the semiconductors melts.
Nothing to do with quantum computing limits.
Quantum physics machinery can do specific tasks, and can tell you if your signal was hacked. There's no magic 30 GHz machine such as you described.
Sorry. Not sorry to burst the bubble. Waiting for Santa Claus is an infinite wait, life is too short for such impossible dreams.
great video using it for a school project thank you my guy you have saved the day
2:27 Damn, Rocket League's a lot older than I thought...
+meowmasterL346 Nothing is original...any more.
haha that’s what i thought too
this is quality, this is probably one of the best youtube videos I have ever seen
It's insane how far graphics have improved in the 7 years since this video came out. I hope we'll get an update sometime soon
what we need is a new, more realistic graphics engine not only in terms of graphical presentation but the authentic physics simulation. objects need to have weight, mass and inertia, their particular characteristics of resistance, hardness, elasticity, flexibility, dynamic impacts, destructibility, atmosphere (air resistance generating aerodynamic drag, pressure, temperature, humidity, etc. ... all in real time using a library of items needed to build a compelling virtual world.
Yeah, and role play characters need to pee. Go and lie down.
Unreal engine literally has all of that built in
I can't stand motion blur in first person shooters. That isn't how the human eye works... I always turn it off. I only want motion blur in racing games.
@Ahoy
Wow, thanks for this restrospective. It's clear, precise and it gives a sense of nostalgia I'd never shy away from :)
I'm surprised, however, that you didn't mention the massive contribution of shaders at large, especially normal mapping (which appears to me to be much more notable and pervasive than, say, chromatic aberration) and geometry shaders that allow for some nifty geometry deformations at low CPU cost, and more recently PBR (which was arlready around back when you made the vid). I would even go as far as to say that the massive use of shaders and PBR ushers a new generation of graphics in itself. The brown tones and waxy lighting of Xbox 360 ans PS3 were there because PBR wasn't around yet, so, I can't really think of a restropective about the history of graphics without thinking about it :)
Anyway, awesome job, thanks for the vid!
that Aladdin game was so good. one of the most underrated platformers ever
Yeah. I liked the SNES version better.
@@F_L_U_Xdude snes version was best! you ever play "The Lion King"? also an underrated masterpiece!
Andynonymous idk what you mean underated they were top sellers back in the day
This game is considered a classic of the mega-drive (genesis), people compare it with sonic when it comes to what is the best platformer on the console, it was a best seller of the time and its physical version is one who the most looked for among retro fans.
If that's called underrated.
I played it a bit, I remember the animations were superb and silky smooth
Good video format! Progressing through the technologies and referring back to the early days of graphics throughout the video keeps the attention of those of us who are fond of those early days, much better than progressing through the video on a timeline. This may just be a consequence of the chosen organization of the essay, but I like it. It not only makes it more entertaining throughout, but also causes me to pay attention to the details I may otherwise not be drawn to.
Well done!
I really don’t know how I should feel for actually having played 90% of all the games mentioned, especially the old ones. But at the same time, I do feel amazed that I’ve gotten to experience the growth in the world of gaming.