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this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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I was always so disappointed in the 90s to see 'realistic' looking graphics and then you play the game and realize it was just a point and click game
Everyone always praised Myst for its great graphics. I always thought it was cheating because it was pre-rendered.
Even being prerendered, it was an intensely impressive game for 1993.
And it's not like they didn't have plenty of problems to solve.
Here's an interesting interview with founder Rand Miller about developing Myst and how they were barely able to make it work due to the limitations of CD drives.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWX5B6cD4_4
LOL, that quicktime butterfly animation on the main island was hot shit back then.
Lots of the best games were prerendered! Donkey Kong Country, Fallout, Jagged Alliance 2, Duke 3D, the Pro Pinball games, just to name a few.
I do have a soft spot for prerendered graphics.
Technically the monsters in Doom, too.
Most things in Doom, if we're counting photos!
BioForge was particularly impressive for the time, with mixed pre-rendered graphics.
I am not sure prerendered describes ja2 and fallout (some of the best games tbh). Aren't those just sprites?
The rest I have not played.
Prerendered sprites by taking screenshots of the models on their single expensive silicon graphics.
The characters and environments in Fallout and JA2 are basically still frames (sprites) of 3D models at specific angles. They were rendered once on a powerful development machine, and converted to sprites for our lowly Pentiums and Voodoos.
Aren't all sprites prerendered? What is the alternative, hand drawn ones? That would go waaay back...
It wouldn't really. Hand-drawn sprites are pretty standard even today - whether they're hand-pixelled (Stardew Valley) or frame-by-frame animation (Spiritfarer).
Sure it was pre-rendered, but it was still impressive to see PCs do that at the time because of the sheer amount of storage it took. Myst basically required a CD-ROM drive because the game is basically made of pictures, PCM audio and video. There's an astonishing amount of video in that game from the early 90's. It was another symptom of CDs having an astonishing amount of capacity for their era. Myst couldn't exist on floppy disk.
It is pretty cool to see what they've recently done to Riven. They really brought it to life in Unreal Engine.
What's even more impressive is Myst was made on a Mac using slides.
Myst was published in what? 1993? Digital cameras were not common at the time. It was kind of cool just to see video of a person on a computer screen.
Oh shit, I forgot about that. Myst was the crowning achievement of HyperCard (which is still superior to PowerPoint, BTW).
Yes, HyperCard! Thank you.
I used to use it to make animations on my black and green Mac III.
there were engineering competitions in the late nineties for realtime rendered games. they tended to look like vetrex games.
Speaking for myself but in 1995 or whatever I didn’t even know what the term rendered was. Game looked cool but I liked Tex Murphy Under a Killing Moon for state of the art graphics lol
It was, though the difference was how early that game came out and the volume of images it had. It was pretty huge!
The novelty died out quick though, as everyone else started prerendering stuff.
There was a bunch of games that had really detailed graphics in the screenshots. Then you'd play them and realize they're prerendered. A bunch of Saturn games were guilty of that.