Every now and then, something in DDO (or in another game, it is not just a DDO thing) reminds to stop and appreciate what has happened to computer graphics during my life time.
Yes this is going to be one of those kinds of articles, one that emphasizes just how old I have become – somehow, and I often wonder how that happened – but it is not a nostalgic look back and I promise it won’t end with me shaking my fist and yelling at all the snotty kids to get off my lawn.
Because when it comes to graphics, these are the good ole days. And one can safely assume that the future will be even better.
When I was in high school, there were no graphics at all, not on screen anyway. The larger public high schools might have a computer, but not really, they would only have a terminal, something that allowed remote access to a computer, because computers were these massive things that cost millions and filled a warehouse.
There would be a computer club. They would spend hours and hours devising programs that would be stored on paper tape or punch cards, and that if successful, would spend an hour printing a version of typewriter art Snoopy on a giant printer that sounded like several people hitting a log with big wooden mallets.
State of the art. But dorky.
Then suddenly, video games. After basketball practice, we’d wander over to this one Italian restaurant that had a Pong table. It transfixed us, everyone, jocks and dorks alike. You could manipulate things on a video screen using controls! No terminals, no paper tape, just a screen with two dials. Yes, the “players” were just lines and the “ball” was a single giant pixel, but still, wow! Tennis! On a video screen! More or less.
My Dad brought home a version of Pong and hooked it up to our TV. It was special, so special that we invited everyone we knew over just to see it. Different from anything that existed previously, in ways that you could not imagine until you’d experienced it.
Home video gaming grew quickly. Atari came out with something so ridiculously far ahead of Pong that it was breathtaking: the Atari 2600 system. It didn’t just play Pong, it played all kinds of games. And the graphics! So advanced.
But the real star of the graphics world was Mattel Intellivision:
The pixels kept shrinking. Meanwhile, usable home computers became popular, not just gaming devices but actual programmable computers. With their own form of graphics.
Fifteen years after Pong, my friends and I spend countless hours – probably countless hundreds of hours – making up crazy illogical football plays on Playmaker Football, or playing Dungeons & Dragons on computer in the form of Final Fantasy.
Hundreds and hundreds of hours. We were all married too. Thank you, spouses, thank you.
Never could we have imagined that someday, not very far away in fact, we would be playing Dungeons & Dragon on a computer in the form of an immersive 360-degree world with thousands of pixels rending every character, in 3D!
From Pong to this:
and this:
and this:
and this:
and this:
It is all so beautiful. And more important, playable.
This is the golden age of computer graphics, this. From a one-pixel tennis ball to a teeming world of thousands of polygons each containing textures built of hundreds or thousands of pixels.
And it’s only going to get better.
I can hardly wait!
