We were very into 3D cards back then. We had a lot of ties to that part of the world. I had been doing video drivers for OS/2 and NT. I got to know Abrash from his writing on the VGA, 8514, and, of course, asm. At Valve, we hired a couple of great guys from 3dfx. I still have a 3dfx hat somewhere that I bust out on special occasions. The killer setup back then was hooking up two 3dfx cards (SLI). But I usually played on a standard card because I wanted/needed to see it run like most people would experience it.

We had a deal with one of the companies, maybe 3dfx, but I forget who, to include the first three levels of HL with their card. Even though the game wasn't anywhere near finished, we sent off a disk to the company with our first three finished levels so we could get paid. Somehow, it leaked. We were pissed at first, but then it took off. People loved it. It really gave us the confidence that we were on the right track. It was our first game. The validation was just what we needed.

Fun times.

Unfortunately I also don't recall which it was. I do recall I had a Voodoo, then moved to a TNT2 and then later a GeForce 2. The TNT2 came out well after Half-Life, so it must have been 3dfx at least.

Next to playing Quake for the first time with 3d acceleration (3dfx voodoo) it was an awe inspiring flashbulb moments that changed what I thought was possible.

So hope you had shares in them :D

One thing I (in general) miss from those days, was how easy it was to get into modding. Whether that be to make your own maps, or more involved game mods. The modding community really was something, and kept the game somewhat fresh for years. I also vividly remember downloading all the new iterations of counter-strike, which really took off - until settling on 1.6

On a side not, it's a bit tough to think that all this was 25 years ago now, but I still remember all this quite well - having only been a teenager back then, and in 25 years I'll be this old man. Wonder if all the memories from LAN-parties etc. will be as fresh in 25 years, as they are now.

I also remember it like it was yesterday when, after school on a hot summer's day, a friend showed me this "cool new mod" he recently downloaded for Half-Life. It was an early version of Counterstrike. It took him an entire night to download the mod, and it only ran on his machine with a 320x240 resolution. It looked like crap and was basically unplayable. 6 months and a hardware upgrade later, we all played it for hours each day, and often non-stop for 12 hours on LAN parties. I also remember that you could contact the internet provider (Telekom) by mail, and after a few weeks they would activate something called "Fast-Track" for your connection, which would drop the latency from around 110ms to only 35ms, a huge advantage for MP games... it really blows my mind that all of this was 25 years ago.

In the early 2000s, CS was arguably better known than the original HL. I had some friends who probably played CS for thousands of hours, but never even touched the original HL.

It was so fun cobbling together a computer that could run it. Trying every trick to squeeze a few more FPS out of it. Trying to shave a few milliseconds off my dial up ping. Going to that one guy's house who had broadband internet.

It really felt like a golden age back then.

My friends and I planned our own mod and started working on it, but our ambition outstripped our ability. That's how we all got our start though. Now we all work as software engineers.

About six months ago, I felt nostalgic and started looking into what was up with CS. Amazingly, it is still going and is popular, but seems very focused on competitive play. I wanted to experience that public lobby on a janky fan made map feel. I found a server running custom 'zombie' maps which scratched that itch for a few days. Then I got busy again and haven't touched it since.

I'm glad I got to experience it all (primarily in Source): gun game, deathmatch, RPG, surf, jailbreak, zombie mod and escape, iceskate, sliderace, hide'n'seek, trickz, xtreme climbing, multigames, deathrun, knifeball, HE wars, vehicle maps, bob, nipper maps, even hack vs hack, and the many many communities, each uniquely flavored and with their own story.

Back then I took it for granted...

I can't help but feel Valve dropped the ball with cs:go and cs2. I mean, they did become incredibly popular but IMO there was potential for so much more if they would've supported custom game modes even just a little bit.

I played the "original" CS (at least a version that looked like 1.6) around 3 years ago, and was surprised how painless it was to install it on Linux using Steam. I was also surprised that it was still no problem to find a de_dust server with > 20 players.

> That's how we all got our start though. Now we all work as software engineers.

Yes. It was so easy back then to play around with game development, web development, or desktop development. Around 2002, I hosted a web site for months on my local desktop server, reachable via a DynDNS solution.

Sorry for getting nostalgic, but it was even easier in the mid-90ies. As a 9 year old, I created a Dyna Blaster clone using a Demo-Version of "Klik&Play" on Windows 3.11 [0]. You could develop quite advanced games by just dragging around sprites, animating them, listening to mouse and keyboard events and object collisions. You could even "compile" the game into a single portable .exe! It was dead simple, but it introduced me to the basic concepts of programming and animation, and I didn't even realize it. A little later, I was able to teach myself BASIC by just reading the DOS man pages. We didn't even have internet back then. I very clearly remember realizing that "if ... then ... else" statements and variables were exactly what was missing in my "Klik&Play" demo-version. In the demo, you had to simulate these concepts by triggering the spawn of a hidden moving object and listening for the collision with another object. The hidden objects encoded the game state. Basically, the developers tried to remove Turing-completeness from the demo version, but failed and forced kids like myself to restore it via wild tricks (I remember feeling very clever when I had the idea for this trick). I only realized 2 decades later how useful these experiences were for a career in computer science.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/e2e98t/making_ga...

The first web site I ever made was for my CS clan. I hosted it on the Linux server in my university dorm room that also hosted our CS server. I don't remember what I did for DNS back then. I learned so much that I still use to this day.

I also think its neat, guessing based on your ISP, that you had such similar experiences at the same time half a world away from me (in the US).

I miss the custom games of Warcraft 3 and the likes. The creativity was running wild.

It is sad that hats, loot boxes amd dlc has killed modding in commercial games.

The craziest innovation I seen is counter strike 1.6 in the browser, fully playable multiplayer. Not sure how safe letting that much execution happen in wasm environment truly is but was still pretty funny to see how far the game has come in terms of graphics. Basically a bunch of the same maps still even though a couple have always been way skewed to one side or the other.

Another game from that time that was also easy to mod was The Sims 1.

For a bit of context, EA/Maxis released modding tools BEFORE the game was released, to let players create custom content for the game (like walls and floors) before the game was even released!

And installing custom content was also easy, just drag and drop files in folders related to what you downloaded and that's it.

Imagine any game nowadays doing that? Most games nowadays don't supporting modding out of the box, but of course, there are exceptions, like Minecraft resource packs/data packs. I don't think Fortnite and Roblox fit the "modding a game" description because you aren't really modding a game, you are creating your own game inside of Fortnite/Roblox! Sometimes you don't want to play a new game inside of your game, you just want to add new mods to enhance your experience or to make it more fun. There isn't a "base game Roblox", and while there is a "base game Fortnite" (Battle Royale... or any of the other game modes like Fortnite Festival or LEGO Fortnite) Epic does not let you create mods for the Battle Royale game. You can create your own Battle Royale map, but you can't create a "the insert season here Battle Royale map & gameplay but with a twist!".

Of course, sadly EA/Maxis didn't release all of the modding tools they could (there isn't a official custom object making tool for example, or a official way of editing the behavior of custom objects) but they still released way more modding tools than what current games release.

I think that most modern games don't support that easiness of modding because the games themselves are complex, because as an example: The Sims 1 walls are like, just three sprites, so you can generate a wall easily with a bit of programming skill, the skin format is in plain text in a format similar to ".obj", so on and so forth.

Lately I've been trying to create my own modding tools for The Sims 1, and it is funny when you are reading a page talking about the technical aspects of the game file formats and the author writes "well this field is used for xyzabc because Don Hopkins said so".

Had to look it up, didn't know they had 1MB 3D accelerators.

I think my first was 8MB and it blew my hair back for sure.

Was just about time for MDK, Quake, Tomb Raider etc even though it was way outside the official specs for these.

We’ve lost something along the way.

Performance just hasn't out paced people's needs in the last 15 years the way it used to...

I used to use the hardware raid to stripe 2x ssd's to get over 1GB/s from my sata drives.

New machine has a pcie5 gen5 m.2 nvme. Stupid fast at 12GB/s.

I gotta figure out what to do with the old machine now...

Now it's FreeBSD14.1-RELEASE with a AMD Ryzen9 7950x (no 3d) still my old RX580, 64GB 4800 ECC Ram, 2x pci4 2TB nvme one for windows one for FreeBSD (i plan to buy a pci5 later that year), and two HD's 6TB mirrored for backup's and archive-stuff (just accessible from FreeB).

>I gotta figure out what to do with the old machine now...

It think i will sell/gift it to someone, since i have a ML350p Gen8 server too...but to be honest it hurts a little bit, that was such a good warhorse.

BTW: I will probably buy a new GPU if pci5 card's are on the market and affordable and the driver is in FreeBSD...so let's say in a year or more ;)

Modding still exists. It’s just called “UGC” now. Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft have thriving and accessible options. GTA has an unbelieveable number of players playing role playing mods of it too.

The problem is that multiplayer games and any game with a server component - and the engines that make them - are specifically designed to have security against cheating and hacks. No-one wants to play against a modded game. That makes supporting mods, even solo mods, all the more difficult, and it’s harder to make the business case for doing so.

Au contraire. There are plenty of people who would like to play against a modded game. They just might not want to play against a game that's modded differently from their own.

Yes, I've recently been playing Fallout: London, which is a total conversion mod for Fallout 4. It obviously changes the setting to post-apocalyptic London, but also adds new quests, monsters and things. And it's pretty good quality -- in fact the mod kept getting delayed because Bethesda saw the mod in progress and kept hiring the people working on it because they were so impressed.

But yeah, they're few and far between.

There are lots of games that will let you mod the ever loving crap out of them. UEFN and Roblox are modding with distribution platforms. Cyberpunk has Bethesda level modding. Games like lethal company are existing in an indie space that was just unfathomable when I was playing those games.

Doom, Duke3d, half life (and mods) and blood. Half life and its expansions get at least a yearly play through in 2D or VR and I play a lot of custom maps.

Getting the opportunity to play them all in VR was a huge high for me. To “walk” through those same worlds from a new perspective, it was just something else.

I’m aware I’m wasting my limited time on earth etc but…I’m ok with it.

Great read, it made me realize how far we've come. Video games as an art are really in an interesting spot right now - big budget projects all end up being bland, buggy, cookie cutter rehashes of the same couple templates.

Companies that once represented the pinnacle of creativity and what could be achieved with high budgets - Blizzard, Bethesda, Ubisoft, etc - are now the laughing stock of gamers. Not that it matters when the bulk of gamers are still putting dozens of hours and plenty of microtransaction dollars into decade old games like Fortnite/Minecraft/GTA every week.

What's the last big budget release that actually left a strong artistic impression? What's the next big budget release that will actually move the needle of the medium meaningfully?

Thankfully, there are a bunch of indie developers that still release fresh experiences - but they too kind of end up falling into the same tropes (if you like 2D roguelike/platformer/puzzler there's plenty of choice, otherwise...).

Not too unlike the state of the film industry. It's hard to imagine what a solid shakeup of these behemoth, mature industries could look like.

Elden Ring and its DLC, probably. The Japanese games industry is doing far better than their western counterparts, there have been huge headlines that in 2024's Game Awards, 4 of 5 games nominated for Game of the Year came from Asia (3 Japan, 1 China). The last game (Balatro) was an indie game developed by one person.

Not a single nominee was from a major western company like Ubisoft, EA, etc. They may be financially successful now, but the games industry is imploding. This is what happens when you treat developers poorly and chase greedy trends while expecting consumers to put up with it. Like you said, most AAA games releasing these days are either dead on arrival or completely unnotable and miss expectations.

Kingdom come deliverance, baldirs gate are two massive titles in the last 12 months. God of war, spiderman, Indiana jones are other titles that are just stand alone artistic experiences, again in the last little while.

> What's the next big budget release that will actually move the needle of the medium meaningfully?

I think it’s funny you mention that because the games you sniped at (Fortnite Minecraft GTa) were seismic shifts in gaming - in the last few years - Fortnite wrote the book on live service games IMO. But, when they’re “popular” suddenly they’re not cool anymore.

> It's hard to imagine what a solid shakeup of these behemoth, mature industries could look like.

What do you want? IMO the industry is in an ok place - aside from the mass layoffs over the last 24 months. But for consumers there’s so much choice - there’s massive hundred million dollar budget tiles with new content every year (Ubisoft/CoD/ Sony/microsoft doing these) there’s “smaller” budget games in the 50-80millon mark that are achieving critical success on PC and Console, there’s AA-budget games in the 15-30 million mark coming out every month that are hits and misses, there’s a thriving indie scene for every genre you could possibly imagine, and many you can’t (e.g. trombone champ).

There’s options at every level, dozens of games coming out every year - more than any single person could ever play.

disclaimer: I’ve worked on one of the titles you’re talking about here, but don’t anymore. Opinion is mine, not theirs.

I do think we lost our way a little from around about 2018-2022 where we had these absolutely gargantuan flops like Concord that were a symptom of many things, but I really really believe we’re in another golden age right now.

This isn't unique to video games—I've had the same feeling from, say, 2666 or Stalker—but video games seem especially well-suited to do this as a medium.

Witcher 3 comes to mind. But I just realised it was released 10 years ago...

I have my opinions on the execution quality (or range of execution quality) of the game itself but it still served as my favorite “AAA/AA” major release of 2024.

I don't think it counts as big budget, but I've recently gotten into Last Train Home and it's a fantastic and unique premise (with gameplay that's a mix of Company of Heros + XCOM + This War Of Mine).

At least in one, it felt a bit more cohesive in that you could imagine that canned video game assets had been corrupted and copy-pasted into new configurations.

Elden Ring. You’d need to go quite a bit further back for the last one before that though.

And then Star Citizen is quite innovative in many regards and has virtually unlimited budget, and would not exist in the first place without a long runway

(But I don’t play many video games these days so what do I know)

This game defined my life.

It's funny, though - I would say in retrospect that Half-Life had the typical vexed impact of a truly revolutionary game made by a truly revolutionary team. In terms of design, the Half-Life team was asking and exploring a hundred different interesting questions about first person gaming and design, very close to the transition from 2d to 3d. And their influence, a few years later, often reduced down to a small handful of big ideas for later games influenced by them. After Half-Life, because of the impact of their scripted sequences, FPS games shifted to much more linear level designs to support that kind of roller coaster experience (despite many of Half-Life's levels actually harkening back to older, less linear FPS design). The role of Barneys and other AI character also really marked the shift to AI buddies being a focus in shooters. And the aesthetic experience of the aggressive AI from the marines as enemies also cast a long shadow, too, highlighting the idea of enemy AI being a priority in single player FPS games.

Certainly, those were the biggest features of Half-Life that impacted our design in Soldier of Fortune, which did go on to shift to much more linear levels, much more focus on scripted events, and would have resulted in much more emphasis on AI buddies too if I hadn't really put my foot down as a game programmer (and in my defense, if you go back to FPS games from that era, poorly implemented AI buddies are often, by a wide margin, the most frustrating aspect of that era of games, along with forced poorly done stealth missions or poorly implemented drivable vehicles - the fact that Barneys were non-essential is why they worked well in the original Half-Life). You can see this shadow pretty clearly if you compare Half-Life to, afterwards, the single player aspects of Call of Duty and Halo. Both are series that, in their single player form, are a lot more focused and a lot less varied than Half-Life was, but they clearly emphasize those aspects of Half-Life I just mentioned. And in practice, those were the single player FPS games that were in practice actually copied for quite a while.

It was a great game and one of those which stuck in my head despite being a kid back then.

The gaming market today is completely different, very competetive, very saturated, ranging from huge stakes at the top end, to an enormous number of indie studios and individuals toward the other end that are trying to make ends meet.

Yet, I've been seriously thinking for a while to start-up a game studio. The hope being that it would be one of these crazy ideas that everybody recommends against ("it can't be done") until you actually do it and prove them wrong.

Ideally, I would like to start the studio as a loose group of like-minded people that have time for developing a game solely a hobby, and if that pans out, transition it into a business. Not AAA, of course, but with the definite goal of making the best game that such a setup could realisitically produce.

The thing is, with today's tech, you can get started with very little capital if you begin doing this as a hobby.

Maybe even developing my own game engine.

Of course all this costs a lot of money with no clear way to make it back. If I had to come up with a monetization model, I would come up with an ad network similar to Unity.

If Unity needs 2 billion in revenue to barely keep going, I reckon a more focused engine could be funded for 20 million a year.

It's a moot point since I'll never have that much money or be able to raise a VC round.

But HN, let's dream. Imagine a .net or JavaScript engine that's web first. With mobile and PC support coming later( PC can just run a local server). The engine developers dog food their own engine, making very high quality examples for the community.

Keep the engine focused on small lightweight games.

Unity's ultimate problem is they keep trying to do literally everything.

I wouldn't do that. I'd say straight up this engine isn't going to do AAA gaming. It's not going to scale. I'm not supporting 800 design patterns.

If you want to develop a game engine as a product to make money of, it's probably better to forget that idea. There are enough very sophisticated engines out there, so why would any third-party developer take the risk and use yours instead? I mean, even the big open source engines that already exist today have trouble gaining traction.

But the idea is you build the engine, and make better tools for advertising hooked into your own commercial service. That's by and large how Unity makes money.

I want to actually make quality open source games, and I want to use one easy language, like C# from the engine to the scripting.

Or maybe one day I'll learn Rust and Bevy...

Thousand of man hours have gone into the development of the big commercial engines. You'd have to match that and then add your new feature on top in order to become a serious competitor.

What's the advantage of making your game open source? I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm a big free software fan but what do you think will come out of that?

I want to go open source so people have something to learn from.

I think Unity, Unreal, and even Godot try to do too much at once. I want an engine to do one thing really well.

Assuming you'll make _some_ money.

have a read up on Savage Game Design and the SOG Prairie Fire CDLC for Arma 3.

hands down, the best DLC ever created for Arma3. a good chunk of the original team were Unsung modders. they went down the road of CDLC, now they’re working on their own standalone game and a bunch of other stuff (look through Rob/Eggbeast’s posts on the SOG PF discord for more info).

Arma is actually a great way to hack something together for basically nothing. buy Arma, start scripting sqf to build a gamemode, create new assets in blender and stick ‘em in a mod, host a server. though the engine has lots of weird bugs/footguns, your costs are basically Arma+devtime+servers.

disclaimer: i’m a maintainer on the Mike Force multiplayer gamemode they released. do it in my spare time for kicks (although been slacking recently).

Often thought about making a lost in the woods sort of game using Arma 3 and Chernarus.

scheduled/unscheduled environment is another fun one.

Find a niche and polish it to perfection and you can make headway.

Most big-budget games have more to do with interactive movies than with gameplay, anyway.

Like you say, just from raw statistics, if you're an indie dev, most likely you're going to fail.

The sad dirty secret is that wild success depends on so many factors out of your control that the best you can do for is aim for mild success and hope lightning strikes (while avoiding as many things that could ground out lightning, I guess).

In a way, it's the difference between a lifestyle business and a startup.

It's one of those things where someone's going to eventually do it. As they say, "watch this space".

I built an early fan news site for that game (effectively a blog before I knew they were called blogs) which got me a job with an early online gaming company ~1999 where I got paid to learn how web development works.

The Orange Box console versions also suffered from a non-adjustable field of view that made me feel sick after a few minutes of playing.

I think I remember reading an interview with the dev team where they explained that playing action for too long was boring, as well as solving puzzles, so they consciously designed the game with interleaved phases of action/puzzle. Your recompense for solving a puzzle is action, and your recompense for killing all the bad guys is a relaxing puzzle.

It's funny you didn't liked that, because for me it was the complete opposite. I like pure action shooters, and I like pure puzzle adventure games, but I really loved Half-Life and I didn't know why until I read that explanation.

In the original Doom, in contrast, the only requirement was to make it to the end of the level, figuring out the map and puzzles along the way. Anything else (did you chase 100% kill and 100% secrets?) was optional. I guess it just felt more… honest?

That said, half-life mods were imo the golden age of gaming. Vampire slayer let you scare the shit out of your friends at 3am in a LAN. Day of defeat and firearms were the cod and mw of the day. Natural Selection crushed it in terms of fps/RTS hybrid, teamplay and overall quality and polish. Science & industry? Pirates Vikings & knights? Tfc? Several attempts at matrix mods & the opera. So much amazing diversity - it's such a shame that CS (the most banal, vanilla, milquetoast game ever) got all the mindshare. Even when CS ventured into making things more interesting/diverse (hostage rescue, shield, etc.) those things seem to have died off back to the 'standard' game mode (80% of players dead and spectating while "the bomb has been planted" sound effect plays).

The variety sometimes meant you only played your favorite mod a few times at the LAN parties. Because people had so many other things to play as the 90s and early aughts progressed.

Of course DOOM is its own thing completely; a timeless distillation of the 80s - the arcade, Super Mario and D&D all astonishingly abstracted into an unreasonably blissful bleeding-edge hellscape; 93 till infinity.

What really gave Half-Life its legs was the multiplayer component. It came in just as broadband internet was appearing in households across the United States and Canada. The ability to host servers and coordinate through ICQ and message boards created a one-of-a-kind community.

I know because I lived it.

The [R]age Board for the Elites. The CLQ. Adrenaline Gamer and Counter Strike.

Half-Life was incredible and still has an online presence of note - mostly in developing countries. Their hardware matches the lift to run at decent FPS and join games. Now and then I still hop on a server through Steam.

The di clan video - digital immortality - can do more to highlight “why” HLDM and its physics and weapons were such a game changer, even compared to Q3 and UT at the time. There is nothing like using the long jump and tau cannon to literally fly around maps. Other games have tried, but I’ve never gotten the same high as with HL.

Mostly I miss the community, as juvenile and crass as it was. Like the NFL, it was a young man’s game. Most of us were under 25 with rare exceptions. I’ll never forget when Neo Maximus Babson went missing.

This article bring back a lot of memories and than you for sharing… -p$ychos!s- out (LMS, CML, syn, di)

Lucasarts absolutely ruled on the story based games genre merges. See of course all the point and clicks such as Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle, but also of course XWing and Tie Fighter.

A bummer, but made for a good story and fond memories

These days, people will still cite games up to 10 years old (e.g. The Witcher 3) as looking graphically top notch.

- Half Life has much faster run and gun gameplay (stemming from it's quake roots no doubt), while in Black Mesa it's much slower paced

- The AI in the game is completely different, Black Mesa's soldiers feel way more aggressive, again encouraging a slower pace of play compared to the original

- Lots of levels have small changes - some are cool, others kinda feel like they're just different for the sake of being different

- Xen itself is completely different; Unpopular opinion, I liked the original! It feels otherwordly and alien and oppressive, the new one is certainly pretty but lacks that atmosphere, imo

Black Mesa is a great game, one thing I have nothing but praise for is it's presentation - it's really nice to look at and they did a bang up job with the graphics and animations. But which is better is a matter of opinion, and personally I much prefer how HL1 actually feels to play.

- Joel Nielsen's great sound track / sound design work in Black Mesa ... I believe he admitted in an interview that some of the "squelching" sounds are recorded by slapping someone's arse O_o

- The reworked Gonarch fight is, hands down, one of the most entertaining and intense boss fights for me in recent memory. It's way better than the original for sure, which I remember just being frustrating (lack of ammo).

> Xen itself is completely different; Unpopular opinion, I liked the original! It feels otherwordly and alien and oppressive, the new one is certainly pretty but lacks that atmosphere, imo

I see both takes. Like, in the original game I actually liked Xen (except Gonarch). It felt otherwordly and empty, as if one of the reasons for earth being invaded was because there was nothing left. But BM Xen is literally another world. I prefer BM Xen, but I did enjoy the original at the time.

For a deeper look into Black Mesa / Half-Life and some of the changes, Soup Emporium did a great video here, where he only stole some of the points he raises https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-d8KAq78gco

But to me the main problem of "remake replaces the original" approach is that it's a a very "content-consuming"-way to look at media. Videogames are art in their own way, old games can still be enjoyed for what they are and for what they were - same thing with movies. Silent Hill 2 (2024) doesn't replace the original Silent Hill 2. RoboCop (2014) doesn't make RoboCop (1987) obsolete.

That's my take on re_makes_, at least. With re_masters_ I'd be much more willing to recommend them over the originals (although the preservationist in me would still like the originals to be available in some way)

I was taken aback by this comment. The original Half Life engine has super tight and responsive movement, to the point where the average "tryhard" in a server would be executing all kinds of movement tricks that require frame-perfect inputs or very close to it. Watch some speedruns or HL:DS games and you can easily find examples of gameplay involving super precise movement. In CS there was a huge scene of movement based maps like surf_, bh_, and deathrun_.

Makes me think of something in the reviewers setup while playing Half-Life was introducing extra input latency and creating this feel of sloppiness.

My memory is that it wasn't the controls but the sizes of the spaces you had to jump to and the clarity of where they were so you could adequately position yourself that were the issue. The latter of which is probably more down to texture usage than the engine itself.

All that said, I still enjoy both. Maybe I've got enough muscle memory to plow trough the BS and enjoy the level design and challenge, specially regarding Turok on original hardware lol. Meanwhile people who didn't grow up with those games are off put whenever a hard jumping puzzle appears or the lack of direction gets them stuck.

Fair, my point is more that in order for it to be possible for mere 12 year old mortals to learn to casually execute these tricks, the game has to have predictable, responsive and reproducible movement. In other words, the opposite of slop.

I suppose it's possible that they're viewing those factors as being inherent in the original Quake engine rather than something Valve should be credited for and relying on them in their fork so heavily when it didn't suit the overall game was a bad mishmash.

It's more likely they're just conflating how ugly a lot of those later levels are with the engine.

It created an entire universe of movement based mini-games that I treasured more than the base-game, but it was mostly based on unintuitive physics and engine bugs.

I do agree that the modern game's "inertia" and slow heavy movement feels bad though. Last modern game that I remember had really fast and rapid movement was The Talos Principle.

I distinctly remember a noticeable delay between moving the mouse and the view turning, even when the frame rate was high. I think the fix was switching from DirectX to OpenGL.

I liked Xen when I played it. I thought the boss fights were terrible, but I think most FPS boss fights are terrible. The other complaint is that the healing pools were too slow. The navigation and obscure puzzles were great, though. They scratched an exploration itch I didn't know I had.

1. Shew that FPS games can be more than pure shooters and still succeeded;

2. First time that an official, easy to use level editor (Worldcraft) was included in the CD of a major hit FPS. Doom and Quake definitely started the modding scene but arguably Half-Life made it more popular.

Instead we had almost 15 years of Spunkgargleweewee-s as defined by Zero Punctuation.

Later on they also found out that introducing gambling to kids is indeed a much better business than just selling games. Going on for many years without anyone cracking down, and doing workarounds when governments try to make it illegal.

Around the same time I gave up my dream of making videogames because pay and hours were terrible, and I had no prospects in the Midwest.

I remember playing Deus Ex on our iMac which was barely powerful enough to run it. Severe slow down during intense moments, and some major lighting problems. And yet, it remains probably my fondest gaming experience. Something about the way game worlds can capture your imagination when you’re young.

I feel like these days many games, especially expensive ones, went with completely opposite take. That gameplay is something that's supposed to be there but not important. With terrible results.

That's an amazingly humble insight. It's so simple, so true, and so totally not common knowledge.

I wonder if he secretly enjoys sharing it as a "say what's wrong about The Matrix sequels without mentioning The Matrix at all"

Oh, and when they purchased the Counter-Strike IP, and started selling it shrinkwrapped, if you owned Half-Life, you just kept using the mod as you already were

In these modern times, I suspect that would be monetised somehow now. Upgrade to a premium user to get golden lootboxes, likely.

But yeah, I knew people who bought Half-Life just to play CS when it was early beta.

Likewise, less famous, but still being played today, Day of Defeat - I was hooked as the experience of "Yeah the rifles can kill you in one shot, and grenades will kill you, it's not CS dude. Oh and press B if that icon comes up, it means you're bleeding"

(Still unsure how I feel about them taking bleeding out.)