27 years ago, I returned home to Australia after two long years living in the USA. I was twelve years old, and my family was re-establishing roots in our old home. One of the first things we did was buy a new computer, with the help of my cousin. My dad only needed something simple for work, but my cousin had priced up a rig with me in mind too. It was a Pentium II 233 MHz, with 128 MB of RAM, a huge 20 GB hard drive, S3 VGA card and a 3dfx Voodoo 3d accelerator.

This was the era of demo discs - gaming magazines almost always came with one taped to the front, packed with the latest demos of new and upcoming games. Many retailers, keen to capture a slice of the growing games market of the Dotcom Boom, also released their own software compilations, usually available at the cash register in store. One of the largest home and appliance retailers in Australia then (and still to this day) was Harvey Norman, and for a brief period in 1997, Harvey Norman stores carried "Harvey Norman: The CD-ROM".

I don't recall exactly how I came into possession of this CD - it's possible that it came with our new computer, or that my childhood friend down the road had brought it by. I recall that my cousin had installed Civilization II on the computer, but other than that, my only access to games, for a while, was the demos on this disc - and what a selection of demos it was.

The thing about demo discs that often gets forgotten is how brilliant they were at exposing gamers to a broad variety of games. In the days before digital distribution, social media, YouTube and Twitch, exposure to games and gaming news was mostly limited to a handful of early gaming websites and monthly gaming magazines. There were no Let's Play videos to watch - the only way you knew if you were going to like a game was if you had read a review, played it on a friend's computer, or tried the demo.

The Harvey Norman CD-ROM was a crash course in gaming tastes. Raptor, Death Rally, Need for Speed II, Wipeout 2097, Quake, Blood, MDK, KKND, X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, Diablo, Fallout - this demo disc perfectly captured the zeitgeist of late 90s PC gaming, and was foundational in broadening my gaming palette and exposing me to genres and games that I would not have otherwise played.

Like many others, I voraciously consumed demo discs like this every month, trying out every game I could to see which ones I could ask for at Christmas or my birthday. Shortly after settling back into our old home, I was buying monthly issues of PC PowerPlay magazine and methodically working my way through their demos every month.

While those PC PowerPlay demo discs provided many fond memories and exposed me to a vast cross-section of late 90s and early 2000s gaming, I had always placed the Harvey Norman CD-ROM on a pedestal in my memories. This was my first exposure to Fallout, and my first real foray into RPGs outside of Ultima. This was my first experience of Need for Speed, Quake, Diablo and Blood. Hornet 3.0 and F-22 Lightning II were my first combat flight simulators. Two of my favourite games in my youth had been LucasArts' X-Wing and the incredible sequel, TIE Fighter, and X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter was a big leap forward in fidelity and into the world of multiplayer.

So cherished were my memories of this CD, that I had even falsely attributed it as the source of other beloved demos ("Remembering Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II" and "Remembering Rocket Jockey") - where I found those demos, I'm not sure, but my hazy memories of the era told me that of course it was this Harvey Norman CD.

The CD was more than just memories of demos, however. As I have discussed previously, my father was not computer literate, and he didn't really "get" games. But I never stopped trying to share my beloved hobby with him. My dad was an avid golfer, and it was an activity I often joined him on. So, when I saw the demo for Jack Nicklaus 4 on the demo disc, I of course introduced him to the game. Dad had this demo installed on his computer for many years, and he probably played the three-hole demo hundreds of times. Years later, he was still playing it, and the image of him sitting at the computer playing the Jack Nicklaus 4 demo is burned into my brain.

At some point in the early 2000s, the Harvey Norman CD-ROM ended up in a box somewhere, or perhaps went in the bin. I'd long since upgraded my computer and moved on to more modern games. The rise of digital distribution via Steam and rapid growth of the Internet had begun to chip away at the dominance of print media like gaming magazines. I was growing up. I had stopped spending my money on games magazines and started spending it on beer, rent and petrol. I could rely on YouTube to gauge whether I wanted to purchase a game. Before long, the era of demo discs was a distant but cherished memory.

It was about ten years ago, during the rise of indie games and the nostalgia boom of remasters, that I started to pay more heed to these memories. I wanted to find those old demo discs, load them up and relive happy, carefree days. But the Harvey Norman CD-ROM was long gone. In 2013, I got in touch with Harvey Norman customer service to ask whether they had an archive of demo CDs, but to no avail. They had thought I was searching for the actual games themselves, but after clarifying that I was looking for the demo disc, they told me they had no archived copies.

I tried again a few years later, this time through various Facebook groups, with no success. Then, again, I tried, about five years ago on the r/Australia subreddit, and two years ago in the r/Melbourne subreddit (Melbourne being my home town). That was the closest I came - one of the responses to my post on the r/Melbourne subreddit directed me to a 1995 Harvey Norman demo CD on the Internet Archive, but this was unfortunately the wrong one. I had all but given up hope. Unless the disc showed up in an old storage container somewhere, I simply had to accept the fact that this would remain nothing more than a memory.

A few weeks ago, I was tinkering with 86box, emulating a Windows 98 PC in order to get some old software running for a SUPERJUMP story. As I tend to do when tinkering with old software and hardware, I soon found myself distracted by nostalgic segues, such as installing After Dark screensavers or playing old games like Hover!. In this nostalgic mindset, I thought once again of the Harvey Norman CD-ROM, and decided to have another try at tracking it down. This time, I'd post on the Whirlpool Forums, a well-known Australian computing forum. If I was going to get my answer anywhere, it would be there.

I began writing my post, explaining what I could remember of the demo disc, when and where I had obtained it. I linked a video of the Harvey Norman jingle that would play in the intro video. For clarity, I wanted to provide a link to that other 1995 Harvey Norman demo CD that the r/Melbourne subreddit had sent me to, and specify that this was not the CD I was looking for. So, to find the link, I went to the Internet Archive and searched "Harvey Norman".

But wait. My search had yielded two results.

Staring back at me from the Internet Archive search results was that familiar rose-gold disc - Harvey Norman: The CD-ROM. Surely this couldn't be real? Is this the right disc? Where did it come from? When was it uploaded?

Hands shaking, I clicked the link, and saw that the disc image had been uploaded on 25 July 2023. I immediately downloaded the file and fired up my 86box Windows 98 virtual machine. I loaded the disc image. I waited. And then it began. That horrendous Harvey Norman jingle imprinted in my mind. The spinning image of the demo disc. The splash screen with the Fallout power armour and the F/A-18 Hornet firing a missile. I smiled in astonishment at the screen, overcome with joy. Tears welled up in my eyes, and the memories came flooding back. Sitting with my best friend, racing around the Pacifica track in Need for Speed II. Laying sticks of dynamite around the town in Outlaws. Watching a gang member get torn to shreds by the minigun in Fallout. Playing Quake Episode 1 over and over again.

Nostalgia is a strange thing. In my mind, I had attributed so much importance to this simple little disc. Hours of my life had been dedicated to it, replaying each demo dozens of times. It had fostered my interest in more than a few game series. There was never any possibility that revisiting it in 2024 could live up to the memories I had attributed to it. But, for a brief few moments, 27 years later, I was 12 years old again....

Whenever I speak to someone visiting Australia from overseas, there's one activity I always recommend without hesitation: get down to Melbourne, and as long as it's between March and September, get yourself tickets to an Australian Football League (AFL) game. I'm not a particularly "sporty" person; I've got the coordination of a drunk octopus, and I'm generally not a big watcher of sports either. But, like many other Australians (particularly those from the southern states), "footy" is more than a sport, it's a thoroughly ingrained part of our cultural identity.

What is AFL?

The first ever game of Australian rules football was played on 15 June 1858 in Melbourne, Australia. It was a match between Melbourne Grammar School and Scotch College. Though the true origins of footy are mysterious, the game's creator is generally credited as Tim Wills, who was born in the New South Wales countryside near the modern-day Australian capital of Canberra. Wills was sent to England in 1850 by his father to attend the prestigious Rugby School, where the sport of Rugby had been born in 1845. Wills earned a reputation for his athletic prowess and love of sport, and upon his return to Australia in 1856, he became involved in local social sporting clubs. There were a number of nascent football-type games with varied rules played in Melbourne at the time, and by 1858, Wills, likely influenced by some of these games, began to codify the rules of what would eventually become Australian rules football.

Over the following years, the sport built a devoted following in the city of Melbourne. It spread to South Australia almost immediately, and eventually to the other colonies - Tasmania, Western Australia, New South Wales, and Queensland. By the 1870s, the rules had developed a degree of consistency, and the game had become a huge part of Australian culture. Crowds in these early days regularly numbered between two and three thousand, with many games attracting 10,000 or more spectators, at the time making it one of the largest sporting events by attendance globally. Though the game was initially favoured in the colonies of New South Wales and Queensland, Australian rules footy eventually gave way to rugby - a divide that persists to this day. The geographic divide between rugby and Australian rules football is known as the "Barassi Line", with rugby being the predominant football code in the northeast, and Australian rules football being dominant in the south, west, and north-west.

It's hard to understate the cultural significance of Australian rules footy. Since the mid-1990s, attendance at games has consistently sat between 30-40 thousand spectators, with that number jumping to 65-75 thousand during the finals season in late August and September. By attendance numbers alone, AFL is one of the largest sports in the world - impressive considering that the sport is barely known outside its small nation of 26 million people. Footy is a defining element in the culture of cities like Melbourne and Adelaide and has long acted as an avenue of assimilation for each wave of immigration. Many clubs maintain deep and enduring ties with ethnic groups in Australia, such as the long association of Carlton Football Club with Italian migrants in Melbourne, or the Western Bulldogs' ties with the Vietnamese community.

The birth of footy games

AFL has a rich history in Melbourne, and it is impossible to go more than a day without hearing some sort of heated debate about the weekend game. And while not as old as footy, video game game development too has deep roots in Melbourne. Most notable of the developers is Beam Software / Melbourne House, a prominent studio throughout the 1980s and 1990s, producing games like The Hobbit (1982), Double Dragon (1987), MechWarrior (1993), Bug! (1995), Gex (1995), and KKND: Krush, Kill n Destroy (1997).

Surprisingly, it wasn't a Melbourne developer that produced the first AFL game - rather, it was the creation of UK developer Clockwize and UK publisher Again Again. Australian Rules Football was released for the Commodore 64, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and Amstrad CPC in 1989. At the time, the "Australian Football League" hadn't been established - the national contest was still under the banner of the Victorian Football League (VFL), even though it welcomed teams from other states. So Clockwize's game wasn't technically an "AFL" game.

In a somewhat entertaining review from Your Sinclair magazine in 1990, reviewer Rich stated:

"Australian Rules Footie is supposedly the most violent 'sport' around - probably because there aren't actually any rules."

Rich wasn't far off either - AFL has traditionally been regarded as a fairly rough sport, though like many contact sports, concerns in recent years about Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) have driven rule changes aimed at reducing injuries. And while the statement that footy is a lawless game is a bit of a misrepresentation, the comment does highlight a challenge that AFL games continue to face to this day - the somewhat dynamic and subjective nature of the rules.

Like in other sports, the referee (known as an umpire in AFL) is the arbiter of fair play. However, the fast-paced and dynamic nature of play, unpredictable movement of the ball, physical contact between players, and the fact that there are 36 players on the field at a given time creates a chaotic environment where umpires are frequently required to exercise their judgement. Modern technology has started to erode the singular reliance on the umpire (with assisted decision review technology), but many fans of AFL regard the unpredictability as one of the great hallmarks of the game. That doesn't make a programmer's life any easier though.

The birth of the AFL

In 1990, the VFL renamed itself to more accurately reflect the national reach of the game, and footy games soon followed suit. Melbourne studio Beam Software released the first game under the new league name in 1991, Aussie Rules Footy, on the Nintendo Entertainment System. The game was one of only two titles for the NES released exclusively in Australia (the other being International Cricket), but it was well received, and still comes up in AFL social media feeds.

A five-year hiatus followed the release of Aussie Rules Footy. Though the reception to Beam Software's AFL title was positive, the financial numbers might not have looked good enough for Mattel to invest in a follow-up for the SNES. But in 1996, footy re-emerged on the gaming scene bigger than ever with AFL Finals Fever, from Blue Tongue Entertainment.

AFL Finals Fever was my first exposure to an AFL game. This time, all 16 AFL teams were there in their full glory, along with up-to-date player and coach rosters, photos, team songs, and official AFL branding all over the product. Unfortunately, as professional as this game looked, the gameplay was a little lacking, as was the performance. Despite having stats for all the players, all the character sprites on the ground looked identical, so picking a player to kick to was an exercise in luck rather than strategy.

The EA Sports era

Sports gaming in the late '90s was a fairly common story: Electronics Arts' EA Sports division gobbled up sporting codes worldwide and released titles that, at least at the time, had a reputation for being polished, approachable, and enjoyable. AFL was no different, and in 1998, EA Sports published AFL 98, from developer Creative Assembly (who would eventually achieve widespread recognition for their Total War series).

Like AFL Finals Fever, AFL 98 was an officially licensed AFL product, and also like Finals Fever, was only available for Windows. Sports games are typically best enjoyed on the couch with a few friends, so the decision to once again release only for PC was rather limiting, but it was soon rectified a year later with AFL 99.

AFL 98 and 99 were the dawn of a "golden era" for AFL games; the production value was better than ever before thanks to the high product standard associated with EA Sports. The switch to 3D graphics was also a boon, with the 2D graphics of previous generations inherently limiting to a game with a significant vertical element. AFL 98 gameplay was positively received, and many criticisms were addressed in the 1999 follow-up. Most importantly though, this is when AFL games began to earn a true stamp of authenticity, with up-to-date player lists, and audio commentary from famous Australian broadcaster Bruce McAvaney and retired football legend Leigh Matthews.

The IR Gurus era

For whatever reason, AFL 99 was the last footy game from EA Sports. The next generation of games would be created by sports game developer IR Gurus, starting with the management sim, Kevin Sheedy's AFL Coach 2002 for Windows. "Forgettable" would be an understatement for this game - outside of a few forum posts and a listing in Wikipedia, there seems to be little evidence this game ever existed. Was it any good? I can't honestly say, because outside of a few abandonware sites, it's difficult to track this one down, and even when you do, good luck running it on modern hardware.

However, it wasn't Kevin Sheedy's AFL Coach 2002 that gave the IR Gurus era its reputation as one of footy gaming's great highlights - it was their AFL Live/Premiership series. Starting in 2002, IR Gurus released AFL Live 2003, followed by AFL Live 2004, AFL Live: Premiership Edition, AFL Premiership 2005, AFL Premiership 2006 and finally AFL Premiership 2007. The IR Gurus games were the first truly multi-platform AFL games, with most being released on PC, PlayStation 2, and Xbox. The graphics were (for the time) spectacular, the production value was high, but most importantly the gameplay was solid. AFL Live 2004 in particular is regarded among many fans as the best AFL game ever made, and the addition of Aussie band Grinspoon's "Lost Control" as the theme song added a truly authentic sense of modern Australiana to the experience.

The games in this era were sitting in a sweet spot. Gameplay was approachable and engaging, but not overly complex. Visual fidelity was detailed enough to communicate all the aspects of the game - tackles, height, and distance. Finally, after 15 years of footy games, IR Gurus had nailed the formula, and all they had to do was tweak it.

And that's mostly all they did, to the chagrin of reviewers. AFL Premiership Edition (essential AFL Live 2004 with updated player lists for the 2004 season) was criticised for making very few changes to the gameplay for the asking price. IR Gurus apparently responded to this with AFL Premiership 2005, but the result was derided as a buggy, poorly produced mess. AFL Premiership 2006 jumped up in the review scores again, yet it is barely mentioned by fans today. Then, AFL Premiership 2007 looked to capitalise on this success with the "don't fix what isn't broken" approach - and, like AFL Premiership Edition, IR Gurus were once again criticised for not changing enough.

The latter half of the IR Gurus custodianship of the AFL licence was marked with off-field drama. Publisher Acclaim Entertainment was facing bankruptcy in 2004, disrupting the release of Premiership 2005 and complicating distribution, which was split between THQ and Sony. Sony Computer Entertainment took over as publisher from then on, with Premiership 2006 and 2007 being PlayStation 2 exclusives, without a nod at the seventh generation Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

The modern era

As AFL games entered the seventh generation era with the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, they fell into a fairly predictable pattern - passable gameplay and middling review scores. From here on, AFL video games would be (mostly) developed by one of two Melbourne-based studios - Wicked Witch Software and Big Ant Studios. Wicked Witch kicked things off with AFL Challenge for the PlayStation Portable in 2009, as well as the rather bizarre Nintendo DS title AFL Mascot Manor, a 3D platformer adventure that seemed to be aimed at younger players.

This is where things get confusing. In 2011 Big Ant Studios released AFL Live for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 and Wicked Witch released AFL for the Nintendo Wii. In 2012, Wicked Witch followed up with AFL: Game of the Year Edition, which featured an updated roster of players for the 2012 season, and AFL: Gold Edition, a mobile port for iOS. Also in 2012, Big Ant Studios released AFL Live: Game of the Year Edition. 2013 saw the release of AFL Live 2 for PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 - by Big Ant Studios, right? Nope. AFL Live 2 was made by Wicked Witch Software. Only the sports genre could produce this sort of licensing shenanigans.

I should also note here that the 2010 - 2020 period saw no less than four obscure and unofficial football management sims for PC released - Premiership Coach 2010 and 2011 from Southern Cross Studios, and Australian Football Coach 2014 and 2020 by Statto Software.

This highly congested and muddled mess of releases was followed by an extended hiatus until the next console generation, when Wicked Witch Software released AFL Evolution (2017) for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC. Another three-year hiatus followed before Wicked Witch released AFL Evolution 2 in 2020, this time adding the Nintendo Switch to the supported platforms. On the management front, Statto Software has continued to plug away with Australian Football Coach 2023-24, and finally in May 2023, Big Ant Studios returned with AFL 23, an unfortunately buggy mess on release, but now vastly improved thanks to post-release support.

The problem with footy games

For over three decades, footy games have struggled to translate to the video game medium. Review scores have been mostly average at best, and sales have never been spectacular, with studios relying on the devotion of die-hard Australian fans south and west of the Barassi Line who treat the game of footy like a religion.

The real issue with making a footy game is two-fold. First of all, the market for them is always going to be niche. As much as a studio can bank on sales to the cross-section of gamers who are AFL diehards, that number is still pretty small. Sports titles like EA's FIFA/FC series and 2K's NBA series are polished and impressive thanks to massive production budgets that are only possible due to annual revenues in the billions.

The other side of the footy game problem is the sport's unstructured complexity. As I've already mentioned, AFL is extremely dynamic. The bounce of the oddly shaped ball adds chaos to an already chaotic game. Players use their hands and feet in equal measure and weave the ball between them during play. Tackles involve unseen jostling that requires a close-in perspective for the gamer, but the kicks can be huge - over 50 metres - requiring the ability for players to easily switch to a wide angled view. The rules of the game are complex, requiring an extensive tutorial mode, but even then, many of the rulings made by umpires in a match are judgment calls that might be difficult to coherently communicate to a player not already familiar with the rules of the game.

Delivering a high-fidelity footy experience on par with NBA 2k, FC24, or Madden might very well be a pipedream; the required budgets are too large and the potential revenue too small to justify it. Perhaps the way forward isn't about striving for the sort of high-fidelity experience one expects of EA Sports or 2K, but about looking backward, focusing on gameplay rather than fidelity.

The future

What comes next for the officially licensed AFL games is anyone's guess. Big Ant has committed to further updates for AFL 23, but who knows whether Wicked Witch Software is about to deliver the next game. In the meantime, indie developer Boot Mode Games is slowly chipping away at Footy Showdown, and until we see some innovative design changes to more effectively translate AFL to the video game medium, I think this might be the way forward.

Footy Showdown harks back to the early days of footy games, most notably Aussie Rules Footy and AFL Finals Fever. The great thing about this approach is that you can ignore sinking development time into accurately modeling close-in contests, and just focus on making an arcade game that is fun to play. The other great thing about this is the knowledge that there's a market of die-hard AFL fans who have shown time and again that they are prepared to devour anything that looks remotely like their beloved game. For a small indie developer with low overheads, that's a pretty lucrative combination.

Full-time siren

When I think of footy games, I like to compare them to my beloved North Melbourne Football Club, the Kangaroos. They've got a long history, with moments of greatness, but plenty of pitfalls. They're not wealthy and successful - they're the underdogs. Most criticism is driven by the fact that everyone wants to see them succeed. They have a small but extremely loyal following. And most importantly, they have a promising future and they're here to stay.

So, I'll wrap this brief history of footy games with one final, obligatory statement:

CARN NORTH!!!

The games industry in the late 1990s was in the midst of a technological arms race. The industry had been rapidly expanding for many years on the back of the Dotcom Boom, and the Internet was helping to proliferate gaming culture faster than ever before.

With the introduction of 3D accelerator cards, the arms race witnessed the emergence of its latest weapon. Specifically, PC games were transitioning from the pixelated 2D abstraction of sprites to the realm of three-dimensional models, bump-mapped textures, and real-time lighting, thanks to groundbreaking technologies like 3dfx Interactive’s Voodoo graphics cards. Likewise, the console market was leaving the sprites behind, with the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation both pushing the console market deeper into the 3D frontier.

Technological leaps forward were synonymous with progress in game design, while victory was decided by benchmarks and unit sales were the spoils of war. However, in the 2010s, the previously unmatched reign of high-quality AAA games was being eroded by the rise of a new era - low-quality indie games and remasters. What happened, and why?

The spectre of technology

More than any other art form, games have a deeply intrinsic relationship with the medium used to create them. A painting requires nothing more than a canvas and a type of paint. A book requires ink and paper, or in more recent eras, an e-reader and digital file. A film requires a screen and some method of projection. But games are complex, the result of commands sent to hardware, rendering processes, and translation of user inputs. They are often written in languages that are tied to a specific type of technology or platform. You cannot simply load a Nintendo game onto a PlayStation or a Mac computer. A game written for the IBM XT personal computer in the 1980s will not work on a modern Windows PC without a great deal of tinkering and emulation.

Other art forms, for the most part, do not suffer from the perishability of their medium. Paintings, sculptures, and books have existed for centuries and even millennia. Paper does not undergo “upgrades” that make previous types of paper obsolete and incompatible. Even with film, the ability to record and reproduce a film in a newer format offsets the obsolescence of older mediums.

Games do not have that luxury.

The technology we use to experience them is perpetually evolving and changing, and the rate of obsolescence vastly outstrips the best efforts of game preservationists. While preservation continues to be a challenge in all fields of art and history, the issue is most pronounced in the games industry.

Though technology has been the source of an immense challenge for game historians and preservationists, it has also been an enormous boon to game designers. The rapid advance of computing technology over the past 50 years has provided developers with an exponentially expanding toolset to communicate their ideas. Only 20 years after 1972’s Pong, Nintendo released Super Tennis on the Super Nintendo. Fifteen years after that, thousands of living rooms worldwide saw friends waving their Wii remotes back and forth while they played tennis in Nintendo’s Wii Sports. It’s hard to imagine that Allan Alcorn could have predicted what tennis games would look like a mere three decades later.

Marketing departments have exploited this relationship between games and technology from the beginning. A 1996 magazine advertisement for The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall stated:

"Daggerfall's world is twice the size of Great Britain, filled with people, adventures, and scenery as real as reality."

In 1998, Epic Games (then known as Epic MegaGames) released Unreal, featuring the debut of the now-ubiquitous Unreal Engine. It was a huge leap forward for FPS gaming, and a chief reason for its critical acclaim was Unreal’s spectacular visual fidelity. I can recall my own feelings upon first stepping outside the crashed prison ship and seeing that iconic scene of a waterfall plummeting into a deep canyon below. “Games will never look better than this,” I naively told myself.

Competitors in the console market rivalry between Microsoft’s upstart Xbox and Sony’s sophomore PlayStation 2 frequently drew battle lines based on technical performance. Gaming magazines often compared the two platforms on hardware specs and game performance, rather than assessing games purely on their design merits.

Games rely on creating memorable interactive experiences, and when the latest tech allows you to craft an immersive experience unlike any that has come before it, then it is no wonder that critical success often accompanies technical innovation. But, as the perceived leaps forward become smaller, the benefits of technical superiority become less apparent.

The visual communication plateau

Back in 1998, I thought games would never look better than Unreal, and I was wrong. I'm not stupid enough to make that statement again, but the graphical leaps forward of previous decades are today more commonly “measured steps”.

Back in 2018, EA's Battlefield V arguably heralded the dawn of the "Ray-Tracing Era", being one of the earliest major releases to natively support a technology that had by then become relatively attainable on consumer hardware. However, for many gamers, the increased visual fidelity that ray-tracing offered in those early years wasn't worth the extra cost in hardware. This was compounded by the cryptocurrency bubble and then a global semiconductor shortage that vastly inflated the price of even entry-level graphics cards. Even today, with ray tracing being more widely supported, the performance cost is arguably not worth it for many games, which will opt for higher frame rates over greater visual fidelity.

Games rely on creating memorable interactive experiences, and when the latest tech allows you to craft an immersive experience unlike any that has come before it, then it is no wonder that critical success often accompanies technical innovation.

The Ray-Tracing Era has exacerbated what has been occurring since the early 2000s: diminishing returns on pushing performance. In 1996, a 3dfx Voodoo card retailed for around USD $299 on launch (that's about USD $600 today when adjusted for inflation), and the Voodoo was simply the best consumer-grade graphics card on the market. Compare that to today's graphics card prices, and the difference in the value assessment becomes quite staggering (even when you factor in that Voodoo cards were not standalone, and needed to be paired with a standard "2D" VGA card). More to the point, though, is that the difference in visual fidelity was staggering. Seeing a game with a Voodoo for the first time was a transformative experience, but the difference between a top card like the Nvidia RTX 4090 and a budget card like the RTX 4060 is hardly earth-shattering. The fact is that, even on lower-end cards, games can still look great.

Before going on, I want to clarify one point — the difference between game performance and visual communication. Game performance — framerate, number of computations per second, physics calculations, etcetera — has continued to advance at an impressive rate. On the other hand, visual communication is the ability of a designer to communicate a concept through graphics, textures, and animations.

With raw processing power, computing power has a limit – the speed of an electron moving through matter. Computing continues to push those boundaries, but the cost-benefit analysis for games is different from that of computer engineering, and there is a point where it stops making much of a difference to visual communication. The latest hardware offers incredible leaps in performance, with the ability to emulate accurately the path of light rays on reflective surfaces, create interactive physics between objects, or upscale textures on the fly. However, the concepts that this additional hardware is able to communicate are limited. There is only so much extra detail you can add to something like an in-game car, a dog, or a building. The average gamer won’t necessarily care if powerful and expensive hardware accurately models and animates the individual strands of hair on a character’s head. All they care about is whether it looks like hair.

Back to basics

Since the dawn of the indie and remaster boom in the early 2010s, there has been a noticeable return to lower-fidelity graphics. The reasons for this are many; developers are banking on nostalgia, of course, and simple graphics require less development overhead. One might have initially argued that this was a fad, but 14 years later, I think it is safe to say that lo-fi games are here to stay.

I’d argue that one of the big reasons for the emergence of lo-fi games is the growing maturity of the games industry. The combination of the growth in indie/retro games and progress in graphics becoming more granular, with resources devoted to less obvious technical details has created an environment where audiences that consume games are assessing graphics in a more aesthetic frame of mind, rather than a technical one.

Perhaps another contributing factor is the increasingly uninspired state of AAA gaming. AAA developers have always focused on utilizing the latest technology, but despite their visually appealing nature, they have burnt much goodwill with excessive monetization, buggy releases, and bland gameplay.

The days of games being punished in reviews for not looking cutting-edge are, largely, a thing of the past. It still occurs, usually when a game advertises itself as groundbreaking when it’s not, but most of the time, criticism of graphics is more focused on artistic coherence rather than technical brilliance.

One of the great positive side effects of this change in perspective has been the reinterpretation of many classic games that were once criticised for their dated look. Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura was one of these titles; it looked dated before it was even released and was judged accordingly. But as many players who braved the game’s many bugs found at the time (and many have since), Arcanum is an RPG with incredible depth and a truly unique world.

When there is no need to maintain currency with the latest tech, critics evaluate a game based on different aspects, such as mechanics, story-telling, aesthetics, and gameplay. The mechanics might still feel dated, but this allows for a reasonable comparison between many classic games and their modern counterparts.

Boomer shooters: A case study

The release of David Szymanski's DUSK in 2018 was a defining moment in the emergence of what would come to be known as the "boomer shooter" genre. After a decade of iron sights, regenerating health, and grounded settings, shooter fans were ready to return to the genre's roots: gore-soaked, lighting-fast, run-and-gun tests of player skills and reflexes. DUSK showed that, far from being a tired genre, there was still life to be found in classic shooter design.

The years since have seen an explosion of interest in the genre. HROT, ULTRAKILL, Project Warlock, Proteus, Ashes 2063, Amid Evil, Cultic, and Selaco are just some of the titles that have received acclaim. A poster child for this classic shooter rebirth was Ion Fury (Voidpoint Interactive, 2019), a game developed in the Build Engine. If that name sounds familiar to those who have been around the block a few times, the Build Engine was used for many of the games that were the inspiration for this genre rebirth, titles from the pre-millennium FPS heyday like Blood, Shadow Warrior, PowerSlave and of course, the mighty Duke Nukem 3D. Seizing on the popularity of this FPS renaissance, developers like id Software, Apogee and Nightdive Studios released remasters and remakes of classics like Doom, Quake, Rise of the Triad, Turok, and many more.

The days of games being punished in reviews for not looking cutting-edge are, largely, a thing of the past.

If you consider DUSK to be the beginning, then the boomer shooter genre has now reached the same age as Doom was when Quake III Arena was released in 1999. By most metrics, the genre is doing better than ever, but from a technical perspective, there’s been little progress. Released in 2024 by Altered Orbit Studios, Selaco was developed using the GZ Doom engine, a source port of the original Doom engine from 1993. Yet, while the tech hasn’t advanced at all, the technique has taken leaps and bounds. Developers are constantly finding new and novel ways to employ tech that is in some cases almost 30 years old.

The big reason behind the longevity of the boomer shooter revival so far, and other retro-revival genres like classic RPGs, driving sims, and strategy games, is that these aging engines and graphical styles can communicate design intent effectively, without relying on performance-taxing techniques. Yes, Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring, and Forza Motorsport look spectacular, but clever indie developers have been showing for many years now that gameplay always trumps technical complexity, and an adept designer can deliver artistic impact in a dated style just as well as a designer using the latest technology.

If games are truly art, then the medium used to create them is not central to their worth. I highly doubt that Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) viewed the works of Rembrandt (1606-1669) with any less admiration or respect, simply because Rembrandt was using a medium and style that, in Picasso’s day, was no longer current. Similarly, many contemporary artists strive to recreate the style and technique of Baroque masters like Rembrandt in 2024

Likewise, a game released in 2014, or 1992, or 1979 is no less important today than it was at the time. These games are not “obsolete.” They are merely of their era. The revival of classic genres is a testament to this. The games industry has reached a level of maturity where classics are being reinterpreted as a defined style rather than simply being dismissed as obsolete.

The intrinsic relationship between games and technology will continue to push the boundaries of what is possible in game design, but it is design methodology and artistic interpretation that continue to broaden game design horizons. Progress is not framerates, clock speed, and polygon counts. It is the creative minds that drive the industry, perpetually reinterpreting their influences and breathing new life, innovation, and richness into the hobby.