As I sit here and type this week's Rear View, it's not only pouring down with rain in sunny California so I might as well move back to bloody London, but it's kind of ironic because in looking back to two years ago, I'm still sitting here and benchmarking the fastest 3D video card we've ever had - the GeForce2 Ultra. I'm kind of going forwards but then backwards and then forwards again but all at the same time. Sort of like NBC did with their Olympic Games coverage. And I won't even go into how many times this column has been moved around over the past six weeks. Confused? Me too. Good. Either way, a review of the ELSA Gladiac Ultra should be going up at the same time as this piece so if you only read one thing, bugger off now and read that. Still here? I said bugger off. OK, with that out of the way let's press on to other matters.
It's time to put my reminiscing shoes and use the term déjà vu as much as I can in the next 20 minutes. It's pre-Comdex right now, which means it's Christmas-time come early at the SE-labs of excellence and Red Bull induced political science. Drop your jocks and grab your socks because our socks are full of video cards, CPUs, motherboards and um.. the Blair Witch Project game, which is one of those games that there was a lot of initial hype about but you kind of hoped would never actually make it to market in a Prax War sort of way. Two years ago, the weather was much better, the lab was much smaller but the amount of hardware was fairly similar to what we've got on our gourmet plate today. We were all waiting with baited breath to see what 3dfx, back then 3Dfx but soon to change to 3dfx, had up their sleeve.
Brothers and sisters, pump up the volume, check it out, it was the Voodoo3. I remember making the drive (back then our budget for Comdex involved having enough for petrol) through the middle of the night and arriving all excited about the morning press conference that 3Dfx had prepared for the entire delegation of press, web monkeys (that's me) and industry analysts at Steven Spielberg's “like a bat-out-of-hell” Dive restaurant. The coffee was good, perhaps a little light on flavor like Steve's movies but big on presentation what with all the cookies and 75 different types of sugar and milk (did anyone else get that feeling when watching Private Ryan?). The press conference received a mixed bag of comments. Some said, “what no 32-bit?” and others said “Pardon me, but isn't this just a Banshee2”. I do remember talking to the marketing folks there and questioning the name “Voodoo3” for a product that was clearly a follow-up to the Banshee with its same core and merely increased clock speed. Wouldn't this damage the Voodoo brand name?
NVIDIA, who was at their lowest ebb then, was releasing press releases announcing that they were powering the graphics artists that made the “Voodoo Bicycle”. Nonetheless NVIDIA kept quiet about their TNT2 and throughout all the fuss and hype that 3Dfx generated, NVIDIA lost the Comdex battle (because their party wasn't as good as 3Dfx') but won the war as we all know today. I'm not going to go into who played the part of the Allies and who played the part of the German's but just like Vernon Von Braun, clearly someone's Germans were better than others'. Let's just say that war is war and people get really naughty when they fight with words, lawsuits and press releases too except it doesn't get quite as bloody. Usually. All in all I remember so many industry analysts saying, “3Dfx is starting to believe their own press releases now…” Was this the start of the snowball downhill? Maybe so…but boy what a party!
Anyhoo (I'm saying that instead of anyhow because I get to let my hair down here) we had a rather interesting interview/discussion with the man that probably started it all for 3Dfx, Gary “T-Buffer” Tarolli. This was quite a rarity for the industry. If any of you don't know who Mr. T is, dig out your Voodoo Graphics board and take a look at your AUTEXEC.BAT file and you'll see a line that starts with “SST…”. Gary put the “T” in SST (Sellers and Smith being the “S's). Basically he was a star in this bubble of an industry. He's outlasted David Carusso, S3 and even did something pretty neat. He was also voted the second most influential person in gaming (right after Mr. Carmack). He pioneered Voodoo Graphics and therefore brought 3D to the mainstream. Don't worry about where 3dfx sits today in comparison to NVIDIA and ATI because when it was 3Dfx, he was THE man and we asked question after question and poked around a bit and talked about 16-bit and the limitations of it vs. 32-bit, as well as the interesting 22-bit theory. Oops. This interview is a must for geekoids and 3D graphics ho hos like us. See where 3Dfx went right and where 3dfx went wrong. This interview gives a good indication… If you're looking for stuff on T-Buffer, well I'm sure that it was already on Gary's mind, in fact in that interview he touched upon his thoughts on AA (Anti Aliasing, not Alcoholics Anonymous you dofus!).
It's also a little ironic that this time two years ago we published a Video Card Roundup. Entries included cards based on the Voodoo2, Banshee, TNT, G200, and Savage3D chipsets. Call it déjà vu but if I'm not mistaken we did the very same thing earlier this week no? Only with bigger, bustier and faster cards on beefier PCs. I know some of you on the forums have been crying out for us to do an article based on older video cards on older PC rigs, so this might be just what you're looking for. For everyone else, you can check the current round up and look back to the old one and see how far we've come. Ah…. And you can't have a video card without a monitor and luckily we thought the same thing or perhaps it was just pure coincidence but we did our first and only ever Monitor Roundup. Check it out if you're on the ropes…
Ben and I are sitting here in the lab benchmarking. I can see a 21-inch monitor playing a demo-loop of Need For Speed Porsche. Funnily enough, two years ago this week we reviewed Need For Speed III, which we still consider a good bargain bin game. Flipping heck this really is turning into some déjà vu Rear View week.
Here's something novel for you. I also did a short glimpse at The Romero's Daikatana and posted some screen shots of it using the Quake II engine and I remember saying, “Let's hope it's worth the wait”. And boy it was worth the wait. Never has a game been so worth waiting for… It'll go down in history as the best game ever to be released with killer frogs from outer space for bad guys ever. Better than Drakan because Drakan had Dragons and just a step above Space Bunnies Must Die! which had killer rabbits from outer space but they were so badly rendered they could have been mistaken for anything really, even the killer frogs. Daiktana was in good company. Just like the NBA jingle, “I love this game”, said Billy Crystal, Spike Lee and co.
And that as they say is that. What did you expect us to do? We were small and needed to street-hawk our way to Comdex and didn't have time to do more than an interview and a couple of roundups. Tune in next week and I promise I'll have something more for you to get your teeth into. More video cards and maybe even and article or two on a CPU. There….
Just like every other week, I'm going to wrap things up with a silly music/film reference for you guys to kibitz on. This one is fairly good and we use it here a lot at the office I'll try it on you guys nonetheless, “You, you, you're good you. No you! You're good!”.
Last week's was way too easy and I got 75 correct answers, which was “Mr. Miyaggi from Karate Kid. This was worrying for a couple of reasons. Firstly I got a couple of you writing in and telling me it was Mr. Miyaggi from Karate Kid Part III and secondly because Andrew Bub, of Beatdown fame, wrote in with the first correct answer. What's up mate? You short on games or something? Ok, I can send you The Blair Witch Project as a prize. Fancy doing a review too?
I hope you've enjoyed this trip down memory lane. I know I have. A healthy dose of “boy, were you so wrong” should be a requirement in this job. So give me your feedback and hit the forums. Let us all know if we've changed for the better or worse and in the true spirit of yesteryear, I'm writing via a stream of consciousness so chill out, ok? Cheers for tuning in all this time. And if you're new to all of this and have not a bloody clue of what I'm talking about, don't fret. Just join the rest of the queue…
Alex “Sharky” Ross
Editor-in-Chieftan
A new feature? What? No sarky (“sarky” is used in the East end of London as colloquial term for sarcastic you little blighters) comments about the title/theme of this either… The weekend is once again upon us and even after two years of doing this thing we do, I still can't believe how much the industry has changed. Thus the thought of dedicating a new weekend feature to see just what we were saying back in the day, I felt, would be fitting. You'll see where we/I went right, where we got egg on our faces and where we went so far off road that we ended up southeast of Pluto.
Two years ago we were a slightly different outfit. Language was a little more risqué (parental discretion is advised), testing methods were very different, system specs were by today's standards a snails pace and best of all we had those charts with the bubble background (hey, they were “in” in '98!).