Old video game advertisements

Note how design-focused companies like Apple almost never use it. It’s mostly used by Facebook and Google, who aren’t know for sophisticated design.

I suspect that in 30 years the corporate Memphis style will be a selling point where yet-to-be-born designers try to revive some "Retro Cool".

https://youtu.be/Sn5v09L_uDg

You were all but guaranteed a BASIC in most late 70s/early 80s home computers. It was frequently optimized for development cost and ROM size-- so "it fits into 4k or 8k" was more important than performance or quality of life features. The canonical example of this problem was Commodore's 2.0 BASIC-- incapable of accessing almost all of the machine's graphics and sound capacities without resorting to peeks and pokes. Even if you could fight through that, it wasn't going to be possible to maintain smooth animations or do cycle-precise operations.

The other available option was assembly. Most platforms had some assembler/monitor package available for fairly cheap, or even built into ROM.

The solutuons you'd expect to fill the gaps simply weren't there. You didn't see too many compiled languages (which could close the performance gap) likely because compilers of the time were typically expensive and commercial, and often required fairly big hardware (disc drives and more memory) to run on. If you had a VIC-20 or ZX80, there was barely room for any nontrivial code, let alone a compiler to toss around intermediary state.

I'm not saying it isn't happening. I just think it's less dramatic. The examples you've given are all significant in adding to the realism of a game but it still doesn't have the same impact that previous leaps in tech did. eg no kid chats to his mates in the playground about how much more real someone hair looks in a game.

Here's resident evil 6 on the PS3. Look at the roofs and floors, and what the monster skin looks like. Lighting is very glowy and has that heavy bloom effect that was popular at the time. https://www.savegamedownload.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/...

Here's resident evil 8 (I think on Xbox?). Even on the other end of the room you can see details in the wood paneling. The lighting feels more realistic. The reflections off of the floor varying by material and angle are particularly nice looking. The chandelier looks very intricate whereas in an older game it probably would have been comprised of 2D slices or something.

https://i0.wp.com/techstomper.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05...

Are these things you notice once you get playing the game? Eh... probably not.

It's not an age thing. It's about graphical updates becoming an advancement with diminishing returns given we only have a limited visual acuity to begin with.

This is why engines have to work on smarter lighting effects, more realistic physics of water, hair, etc to step things up (or pivot to entirely new technology platforms like VR or AR). But the thing with more realistic physics is that they're not always really obvious. That's in part because there's a law of diminishing returns there too where previous generations of game engines would get progressively better at simulating these effects. So unless you're really looking out for the differences, a lot of the improvements will be easily overlooked (though I'm sure they're at least picked up at an unconscious level).

But when you go from monochrome to 4 colours. Or 4 to 16 colours to 256 or several million, that difference is very noticeable because the limitations were very noticeable too. And those were the changes that happened to gaming during the 80s and 90s.

> I literally couldn’t tell you a difference between the last two generations of PlayStation and Xbox

Exactly.

> but both consoles have their fan communities.

Of course they do. You'll find fan bases around most things. That doesn't prove anything other than humans being largely pack animals and habitual.