this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2024
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It's hard to really describe to younger generations just what it was like.
I'm an elder millennial (1984) and the changes to games within my lifetime has been breath taking and staggering.
The first game I remember playing is River Raid on my brother's Atari. I was a vaguely plane shaped black block.
A couple years later, I find myself playing Super Mario Bros. A few more and it's SMB3 and I'm holding a gameboy in my hands on the road trips to Florida to see my grandparents.
Then the jump to SNES and Genesis. Seeing that depth and life seep into the characters... The music gaining in complexity...
I even had a Sega CD and I remember how mind blowing it was when Sonic turned and ran towards the back to go through a loop instead of just side to side.
Then for it was PS1 with Final Fantasy 7... Graphical cut scenes like moving works of art.
After this point, yes there was still obvious and sometimes bigger jumps... But this is where it all was SO different each generation. Not just seeing extra small details and polishes. Large, discrete jumps forward
I wish I could give my wonder to anyone who never got to experience it. It was an amazing time to live.
My first videogame machine was for black and white TVs and had 10 games, and all of them bar the target shooting game were variants of Pong.
PS2 was the last really big graphical leap. My fucking mind was blown by GTA3.
Since then we've had higher resolution, normal maps, physically based rendering and now raytracing, but none of it really feels that huge when moving from one gen to the next. PS2 came out and everything from before was obsolete, instantly. It even had backwards compatibility but I think I used it exactly once just to see the texture "improvements" (they actually just blurred them). This gen I've used it all the time.
For me it was call of duty 3. Right before one of the most epic runs of a series of all time. But the graphics blew me away. Some of the in-game graphics looked just like old war videos. It was crazy how real everything felt.