Everyone always praised Myst for its great graphics. I always thought it was cheating because it was pre-rendered.
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.
Oh shit, I forgot about that. Myst was the crowning achievement of HyperCard (which is still superior to PowerPoint, BTW).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Crash Bandicoot had similar issues. The PS1 was designed to load about a megabyte at a time, in (charitably) several seconds, while displaying a static screen. It had no support for streaming data. So what Naughty Dog did instead was tell the BIOS to load the minimum page size, in the background… three or four times per second. This was about a thousand times more disc operations per hour than the PS1 was designed for. But the game looked so damn good that Sony went, okay, guess we support this now.
