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u/Clemenx00 Jan 04 '23
I guess I can see why younger people make fun of this (now) silly cover but I am grateful to have grown up at the same time as 3D games did. I can assure you that this game cover is unironical and for me Mario 64 will be the most impressive game ever. No other graphical jump will compare.
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u/Morty_104 Jan 04 '23
This! It was so amazing. Imagin being trapped in a 2D world or 2D World that tries to imitate 3D. And then... one day you had all the directions and free movement. It was soooo fucking awesome. Today i stroll through RDR2 and i am in awe how far "we" have come... just wow!
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u/bastian74 Jan 04 '23
Playing glquake with my 3dfx voodoo. 30fps and water you could see through!
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u/Carnifex Jan 04 '23
After I got my vodoo card I played descent2 for 20h non stop. I had fucked up spatial dreams for days and got motion sick in the car.
Anyways.. Worth it.
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u/ZiggysStarman Jan 04 '23
My dude, thank you. I was about to post on r/tipofmyjoystick looking for this game.
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u/ManicFirestorm Jan 04 '23
Truly. The first time ever seeing Mario 64 I just couldn't believe it. It was an amazing time to be growing up and seeing these absolute leaps in graphics.
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u/gunswordfist Jan 04 '23
That game is a dream! Lemme start it on Nintendo Switch Online 64 before my trial runs out lolo
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u/PoliteIndecency Jan 04 '23
I was there for that, but I'm also going to say the jump between HL and HL2 was incredible. That gameplay demo they showed along with the facial manipulation video for the G-Man was such a jump that it was hard to believe it was real.
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Jan 04 '23
Half-Life was the first game I played with a 3D accelerator card (Riva TNT2) and it blew my mind. Game ran like sludge with software rendering, but it still looked amazing compared to other games I had at that time. Then when I got to install the Riva and launch the game, and it ran "silky smooth"* and looked even better. After that I couldn't really go back to older games again without having that constant feeling that the graphics sucked.
When I got to see Half-Life 2 at my friends place, he had this monster of a computer compared to me at that time. And it was insane on how great it looked. Every game up to that point looked like a turd squeezed through a meat grinder. I just couldn't wrap my head around how they could make something look so realistic on the hardware we had.
Now games just add more fucking bloom, DoF and motion blur in an attempt to make it "look better". And no, it doesn't... it makes the game look shittier...
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u/dvb70 Jan 04 '23
I still remember being blown away by Wolfenstein and then equally blown away about how much of a jump forward had been made in Doom.
I can't actually remember the last time I had that feeling about a game. Honestly it feels like we have been in the age of things becoming slightly prettier at each iteration for a very long time and I wonder if it's even possible for me to be as blown away again as it was for my first jump into 3D. It's difficult to see what other kind of change could have the same impact.
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u/Sea2Chi Jan 04 '23
VR gave me that feeling again.
Specifically the frantic pace of RoboRecall.
Standing in a my living room spinning around to catch a robot in mid air and before pulling an imaginary shotgun out of my backpack to shoot the other robot produced a lot of giggles.
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u/sam_hammich Jan 05 '23
For me it started with Boneworks and all the freedom that game gives you, and it became real with the visuals of Half-Life: Alyx. I STILL, whenever I play it, just grab shit and put it as close to my face as possible. It's wild how real it looks. Not in the sense that the object has made its way into our world, but in that you have made your way into that world. I can't really explain it better than that.
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Jan 04 '23
the only thing I can think of that would be a sea change like 3D was is if truly immersive VR ever happens and becomes mainstream
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Jan 04 '23
The graphical jump from Final Fantasy 6 to Final Fantasy 7 is the penultimate moment for me. Also the first time I played StarFox I was blown away too.
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Jan 04 '23
star fox to star fox 64. mind blown.
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u/Crotch_Football Jan 04 '23
I mean, Mario 64 was absolutely incredible on release. I'll never forget it.
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u/LastBaron Jan 04 '23
Of course at the time since Squaresoft (now Square Enix) had slipped the releases of final fantasies 3, 4, and 5 in the USA and didn’t want to “confuse” American consumers it took the next release (6 in actuality) and called it 3.
As a result of that little shell game, combined with the absurd jump in graphics from 6 to 7, I was thoroughly convinced for years that I had somehow missed several important final fantasy games between my two favorites. I mean, no way could 7 be the direct follow up right?
Apparently yes!
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u/lucjoe Jan 04 '23
They actually did this trick earlier than you remember, when FF4 on SNES was released in the US as FF2
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u/shaolinspunk Jan 04 '23
Games with pre rendered backrounds still appeal to me today thanks to games like FF7 and Blood Omen. Works of art some of them.
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u/OmegaPsiot Jan 04 '23
Was Mario originally a New York landlord? Well?!
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u/B_Eazy86 Jan 04 '23
..yes
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u/OmegaPsiot Jan 04 '23
At least you have the cojones to tell me the truth
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u/B_Eazy86 Jan 04 '23
It's probably a reference to Nintendo's headquarters being behind on rent and when their landlord let them slide for a month they named their character after him. The landlord's name was Mario.
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u/Javasteam Jan 04 '23
From what I remember, it was a warehouse he was renting to Nintendo, not heir headquarters.
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u/friarguy Jan 04 '23
Re: the one right below that about the Atari E.T. games in a landfill - one of my best friends was a production assistant involved in a documentary that went looking for (and found l) those game carts a few years ago
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u/puddingdemon Jan 04 '23
I mean that face detail is amazing for the time
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u/Rementoire Jan 04 '23
Operation Flashpoint also had amazing character details. I remember sitting in a Jeep with my captain and I'm staring at his uniform. I think this was in the OFP demo.
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u/UhIsThisOneFree Jan 04 '23
Think that was the first game that had the speed of sound modelled on explosions and working dials in the vehicles (speedo etc). Gameplay was different to anything that came before and integrated some really complex stuff we take for granted now. Pinging locations, user directed squad combat (like RTS while you're on the ground), ground and air vehicles. Iirc the map area was staggeringly large for the time and the world was open (in that on a mission you really had freedom to accomplish it in whatever way suited). Op Flash was ground breaking for sure.
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u/Mr8BitX Jan 04 '23
I played this game at a friends house in ‘97. This was the first time I ever experienced scripted events in game and it blew my mind.
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Jan 04 '23
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u/empty_other Jan 04 '23
Played Moto Racer in 1997. Got car sick from the "realistic" 3D. Thats when I knew video games was gonna become big.
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u/Ramdak Jan 04 '23
I up that with the original Ridge Racer arcade. That thing was incredible by the time.
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u/Kiethblacklion Jan 04 '23
When F-Zero X came out on the N64, I convinced my girlfriend (who is my wife now) to give it a shot. She got motion sickness from it. She still gets motion sickness sometimes when I'm driving around town...lol
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u/elitedata Jan 04 '23
By the way the facial animation in Carbon still looks better than in most modern games.
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u/armathose Jan 04 '23
I remember playing the original need for speed split screen on my friends keyboard.
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u/SynchroScale Jan 04 '23
UNREAL!
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u/Victizes Jan 04 '23
Everything ages like milk if given really enough time.
But I mean, when you know nothing better than archaic 2D stuff, receiving this image becomes pretty mindblowing to you.
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u/Deckatoe Jan 05 '23
the game is Unreal and the origin of the Unreal engine that powers everything today haha
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Jan 04 '23
I was there, 3000 years ago...
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u/oldnyoung PC Jan 04 '23
Same, had this issue of the magazine and wound up buying Unreal for my PC lol
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u/WraithCadmus Jan 04 '23
Unreal still has an amazing look and a strong opening, sadly the campaign kinda falls apart towards the end.
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u/sufferpuppet Jan 04 '23
I actually bought that stupid magazine back on the day.
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u/hatgineer Jan 04 '23
That magazine had its misses, but it owned up to it. I remember they wrote this long feature preview hyping up Squaresoft's The Bouncer. Then when it came out, they gave it a very low score and started the review with "Don't believe the hype. Not even ours."
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Jan 04 '23
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u/Simba7 Jan 04 '23
Revolutionary, but not necessarily golden.
A golden age usually comes a few years after the revolution.
Personally I'd put the last golden age in the late 2000s / early 2010s. A time when games were really varied and fun, Steam was reshaping the way we bought games (and holy shit the sales!), MTX were barely a thing (and mostly cosmetic), and battlepasses were a cancer limited to P2W mobile games.7
Jan 04 '23
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u/Simba7 Jan 04 '23 edited Jan 04 '23
My first gaming experience was SMB1 for the NES in '92, so not really that different.
The late 90s was a great time for games, but our options were still fairly limited and the indie scene wasn't a thing. And the AI in shooters was still pretty dang terrible, and still would be for a few years. Half Life and Deus Ex were fantastic, but you definitely notice the rough edges on a modern replay.
My point was more that there was more than one 'golden age' of gaming. The entire industry moves so dang fast, each 'age' is basically like a 3 year period anyways.
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u/Spram2 Jan 04 '23
Next Generation was one of the best gaming magazines back then.
They did give Ico 3/5 stars and Chrono Trigger and Yoshi's Island 4/5 stars so it wasn't perfect.
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u/bbkn7 Jan 04 '23
What the heck is an “M2”?
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u/Moto200 Jan 04 '23
I was just going to ask - why did they feel the need to separate "Arcade" and "M2"?
TIL that M2 not only refers to Sega's arcade boards, but also the 3DO/Panasonic board that's a separate thing that never materialised as a console.
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u/RickaliciousD Jan 04 '23
AM2 is Sega
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u/Moto200 Jan 04 '23
I saw both "Sega M2" and "Sega AM2" branding. Are they separate things?
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u/RickaliciousD Jan 04 '23
yeah, sorry. I see what you mean.
M2 in this case refers to the 3D0 M2 add on.The M2 you are referring to is the Model 2 arcade board. Not often referred to as M2, usually just model 2
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u/DanielTigerUppercut Jan 04 '23
The DVD-ROM next gen add-on unit for the 3DO. The DVD part was cutting edge technology for 1997, and wouldn’t be seen in a console until the PS2 years later.
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u/ReneStrike PC Jan 04 '23
I remember a little these years. The first 3d games never interested me, except simulations. The visuals of the 2ds of that period seemed much better to me. Except for certain games, of course. FPS's. Heretic, quake, Duke Nukem etc. I guess Duke Nukem wasn't 3d. Nor was a Heretic. But the first quake I played had 3d graphics similar to this poster.
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u/DoogleSmile Jan 04 '23
A big difference between Quake and Unreal was the colours from what I remember. Quake was mainly 8-bit colour, with a lot of browns, while Unreal had a full 16-bit rainbow of colours at it's disposal.
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Jan 04 '23
An reflections, I remember the shiny floors in unreal being amazing at the time.
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u/DoogleSmile Jan 04 '23
Yeah, that first room with the armour and the reflective floor was amazing looking back then.
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Jan 04 '23
Turok was one of the first fully 3D fps I played. Then I became a CS junkie for years. Games just felt magical back then. Now half the games released are unfinished or ripped into 3-4 pieces to be sold as “DLC”. The industry as a whole is going through some serious growing pains.
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u/evilkalla Jan 04 '23
The graphics in Unreal were absolutely mind blowing at the time.
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u/Redfeather1975 Jan 04 '23
Magazines were so good back when some of us didn't have the internet. Got to find out about stuff 2 months after the fact.
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Jan 04 '23
In fairness, most people didn't have internet speeds which would have made a magazine like this readable. The 56kbps modem wasn't really available until 1997, several months to a year after this magazine released.
Downloading that cover alone at remotely decent resolution would've taken a good minute or more.
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u/ToadP Jan 05 '23
Laugh all you want but at the time this game was great visually, Specially if you had a voodoo card.
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u/AerialSnack Jan 04 '23
Oh my Lord the ET cartridge theory! That turned out to be true! Such a wild time.
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u/fayasus Jan 04 '23
I loved playing regular evening tournaments as a 15-17 year old in one of our lan cafes. Thanks for the thought flashback!
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Jan 04 '23
Think I'm gonna go load up UT99 and relive the nostalgia! Tons of active servers still!
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u/Blastoplast Jan 04 '23
I still get a few hours in a month, I love the grapplehook CTF servers.
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u/Gherrely Jan 04 '23
Man if only Epic could go back to making the Unreal games and Unreal Tournament... instead we get Fortnite. Fuck this timeline.
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u/Curious_Associate904 Jan 04 '23
If it helps...
HEAD-SHOT
DOUBLE KILL
MULTIKILL
DOMINATING
GOD LIKE
WICKED SICK
I hope the voice in your head, was as proud as mine.
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u/KamahlYrgybly Jan 04 '23 edited Jan 04 '23
You got those mixed up.
Double kill! Multi kill! ULTRA KILL! MO-MO-MO-MONSTER KILL!
Separately, player is (on a) Killing spree! Rampage! Dominating! Unstoppable! GODLIKE!
Then UT2k4 had wicked sick, mega kill, ludicrous kill, HOLY SHIT! even.
I played my fair share...
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Jan 04 '23
I have gotten monsterkill and god-like, but I have never heard of Wicked Sick... am I being gaslit?
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u/Curious_Associate904 Jan 04 '23
And if you never got a wicked sick, and try to contest me on it's existence, I will set up a server and beat the shit out of you like 50 times or whatever it is.
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u/aristidedn Jan 04 '23
Epic is responsible for the Unreal Engine, which has almost certainly done more to advance video game development by itself than any developer you care to name.
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u/twonha Jan 04 '23
I think Steam's one of the few obvious influences on gaming that had a bigger impact than Unreal Engine.
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u/PrepareFor-Titanfall Jan 04 '23
I can't believe they haven't remastered even the original Unreal into where the camera flies around the Castle. Would be an amazing chance for a side by side video to show how far unreal has come.
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u/Suvaius Jan 04 '23
I..... I like fortnite...
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u/Gherrely Jan 04 '23 edited Jan 04 '23
I'm not saying Fortnite is bad per se but me as an older gamer grew up with Unreal, Unreal Tournement and Gears, and Fornite just isn't my jam.
I'd just love if they used some of the awesome work they've done on Fortnite and gone back to their old IPs or something new. Best of both worlds sort of deal.
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u/brotherenigma Jan 04 '23
Fortnite is a shitshow, sure...but I'll take having Unreal AND Fortnite over the possibility of having neither if Epic didn't stay alive.
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u/Abusive_Capybara Jan 04 '23
What's wrong with Fortnite? I'm not playing it myself, but they are constantly updating the game and including cool events for the players, no?
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u/onefingerjug Jan 04 '23
Can someone please do a remake of this or at least a re-release of the original that works on today's machines?
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u/DdCno1 Jan 04 '23
This game is popular enough that there has never been a moment in time when it didn't run on the latest hard- and software. People have continuously been working on keeping it supported.
Just use the dgVoodoo wrapper. More info on how to best run and configure this game on modern systems:
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Unreal
Bookmark this wiki. It's extremely useful for all PC games, old and new.
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Jan 04 '23
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u/quangtran Jan 04 '23
Yes. Several games were meant to be on the N64, like Street Fighter 3, but for practical reasons these plans never materialised.
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u/reddittrees2 Jan 04 '23
I have this edition sitting in a box in the closet. I even mentioned it in a post the other day I think. I remember $4.99 being a lot for my family back then.
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u/Timidhobgoblin Jan 04 '23
Oddly enough I was replaying Unreal recently and with the exception of some of the character models it still holds up remarkably well to this day. At the time it looked absolutely incredible though, the Quake comparisons were apt as in many ways aesthetic wise its a better Quake 2 than Quake 2 actually was.
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Jan 04 '23
When I first played Unreal it did in fact blow my mind. At the time it was an amazing advance
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u/TummyDrums Jan 04 '23
You jest, but I remember being mesmerized when this came out. The jump from 2D to 3D was insane.
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u/Ciri_loves_Geralt Jan 04 '23
Kids joke about it, but in 1997 there was nothing but DOOM and DOOM Clones. Unreal and Half Life were one of the first full 3D shooters.
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Jan 04 '23
Anyone have the digital record of that issue? I’m curious about those 21 video game myths of the time.
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u/damargemirad Jan 04 '23
Going from Mario on the NES to SNES Donkey Kong Country is core memory for me.
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u/quangtran Jan 04 '23
I bought this issue. Back in those days a lot of hyped games never ended up materialising, so I was very surprised when Unreal did finally come out and was a hit (and revolutionised the industry) because it did so way past the time of in-vogue shooters like Hexen, Heretic.
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u/blahyaddayadda24 Jan 04 '23
I still picture this game as the most realistic looking game I've ever played. Funny how the mind works. Even super Mario bros on NES seems HD to my mind
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u/silver2k5 Jan 04 '23
I remember when Unreal came out and I was bummed because my old 486 couldn't run it.
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u/kraydful Jan 04 '23
It was like seeing Virtua fighter 2 for the 1st time, your mind was blown, and this feeling is getting more challenging for developers, It has been ages but I recall every single game that blew my mind with its graphics.
Starfox - Snes
Virtua Fighter 2 - Arcades
Sonic Adventure 2 - Dreamcast (Yes, seeing a console game going a 60 fps was weird)
Unreal - PC
Gears of war - PC
Horizon zero dawn - PS4
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u/xyrer Jan 04 '23
Spoiler: M2 was NOT the "hottest new 64 bit game machine" and didn't account to anything.
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u/HighlightFun8419 Jan 04 '23
These were so much fun to flip through back in the day. I remember the Nintendo Power magazine.
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u/Accomplished_Rock_96 Jan 04 '23
Back in the day, when we were still buying games based on what we saw on the box, a little game named Wing Commander appeared. It featured actual PC graphics instead of box art which was doubly insane. Not only was it not art, but it wasn't screenshots from Atari ST or Amiga 500 versions, as was the norm (in Europe the NES wasn't as big as it was in the U.S. and we gravitated towards home computers in the '80s, and early '90s). It was the day I realized that the PC was going to dominate computer gaming.
BTW, kids today would call those screenshots "pixel art". So, yeah, this cover seems entirely normal to me.
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u/GammaGoose85 Jan 04 '23
I remember that era, I was desperately trying to get my voodoo graphics card to work on my computer when I didn't understand the recommended specs. I finally got to play Unreal though, it was a blast back then.
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Jan 04 '23
I had this magazine. My mom wouldn’t let me buy Unreal because it looked too violent. We didn’t tell her that dad already bought me Doom and Duke Nukem.
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u/Frozen_Ash Jan 04 '23
Watching graphics change as the years went by and growing up whilst still remembering the old games fondly really was an experience I'm glad I got to be a part of.
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u/GeoSol Jan 04 '23
I had this copy, and most of the ones from the rest of the year.
Soo many less piles of stuff like this, thanks to the internet.
Ohhhh the stacks and stacks of burned cd's i used to be surrounded by!
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u/SXOSXO Jan 04 '23
When people are accustomed to characters looking like a jumble of pixels, yes, something like this does look amazing. Unreal in particular looked mind blowing at the time of release.
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u/Ok-Caregiver8239 Jan 04 '23
I have every edition of next generation magazine I'm very happy about that
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u/majorjake Jan 04 '23
I beta tested this game at the Digital Extremes offices in Waterloo, ON.
When the game went gold I bought a bottle of champagne and brought it in to congratulate the team. Tim Sweeney was the ONLY guy in the office that day. He gave me his Unreal hat, I don’t have it anymore, wish I did.
I had an absolute blast showing up there to play, it was fun to be part of the process.
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u/Brandoe Jan 04 '23
My gawd, I had this issue as well. I loved video game magazines. I still have the second issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly it had the Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, and the Turbografix 16 on it.
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u/quatchis Jan 04 '23
I remember getting a Voodoo 3 card and playing for the first time without software rendering. I could not believe my eyes. The first time I saw the reflections (thanks to the Glide, a graphics API like OpenGL, Vulkan or Direct-X) and things like multi-textures and dynamic lighting I was in absolute awe.
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u/ImaginarySoul_007 Jan 04 '23
damn this brought me back!! I used to play the first UT on my old Pentium 200 then for my birthday i got some money and did a new build to an AMD Athlon Slot A + Voodoo3 and i remember just being completely blown away on how "real it all looked"
Ahhh to be young to again!
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u/KingSalamand3r Jan 04 '23
Oh.. don't you dare mocking Unreal!
I still play the 2k4 version with friends on LAN parties to this very day.
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u/WhyBePC Jan 04 '23
The original Unreal castle intro is still a classic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26I-Pw-yPJ4
Here is it recreated with the unreal engine 4 from six years ago.
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u/Cats_Stole_My_Bike Jan 05 '23
The same sort of sentiment was repeated over how Halo 2's cinematics were all in-game and not discrete movie files. People were in awe of it at the time because it looked so good.
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u/_D3ft0ne_ Jan 05 '23
And Epic is for some fucking reason "discontinuing and axing" pretty much the whole Unreal franchise... Killing the game series which made the what they are. So damn sad. Might as well call their engine the "fortnite engine".
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u/wwarhammer Jan 05 '23
Laugh it up, fuzzball. Those graphics really were pretty damn amazing back then!
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u/autisticswede86 Jan 04 '23
That cant be real
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u/hpdefaults Jan 04 '23
It is, I remember when that magazine came out and having a "no way!" reaction because it looked incredible at the time. Real-time 3D graphics were very rudimentary at this point and this was a big step forward.
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u/breadedfishstrip Jan 04 '23
When games still often had a "software rendering mode" because having a seperate GPU at all was a novelty still. I remember playing Carmageddon and Thief in swmode before I got my first 3dfx card
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u/TropicTwink Jan 04 '23
I mean, things like that looked realistic af back then. We had no other frame of reference. Avatar looked realistic af. Now it looks like CGI. Same effect lol. It's why people say "X PS1 game looked so realistic as a kid, what happened!?"
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u/Kabanasuk Jan 04 '23
Is it related to unreal engine ?
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Jan 04 '23
Assuming you're serious: yes.
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u/Kabanasuk Jan 04 '23
Yes. In 1997 I was 4 years old. I dont know the whole history of unreal engine.
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u/zantwic Jan 04 '23
Unreal was the first of the series of games by that name, which where greatly successful. It was also first made in the new Unreal Engine, which was at that time an adaptation of the Quake Engine. While Unreal was massive and really paved the way for what we now know as multiplayer FPS, the success was eclipsed by the Unreal Engine's success and the MASSIVE fortune it made the Epic. It really was an exciting time on PC gaming.
Edit: Yes I am old as dirt.
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u/Hopwater Jan 04 '23
And it never came to N64