Nothing good is allowed to happen ever again.

The industry was so different back then, Unreal Tournament 2004 still shipped with a software renderer.

The industry was so different back then, Michael Abrash documented that renderer’s development in Dr. Dobbs, an actual ink-on-paper journal.

Here’s one thing that hasn’t changed: Intel. This renderer, Pixomatic, was all hand-optimized assembly, from the guy John Carmack hired to outclass him. At one point he realized one instruction in a very tight loop was redundant. Removing it made the loop slower. Which is, in technical terms, some bullshit. Doing less should not take more time. It wasn’t from alignment or cache or pipelines or any sensible cause. Abrash called in favors so he could study the actual traces of the Pentium 4, because he just had to know what the fuck was happening under the hood - and Intel made him sign a stack of NDAs, so we the public will never find out.

That’s not disproof they did things differently - or well. Any multiplayer-only game without players is a dead game, even if the gameplay it would have is mindblowing.

Why would it matter who made it? It was a corporate trend-chasing exercise, for an abusive business model, arriving years late and costing the wealth of Croesus.

Multiplayer-only shooters are a death wish. Either you succeed instantly and massively, or your game is nonfunctional. With digital distribution it’s not even a coaster. If all these nice people were allowed to be smart people they’d deliver the PvE that Overwatch lied about.

I’m told the pace was a lot slower. Less twitchy, more tactical. Higher time-to-kill.

I’m also told it was ugly as sin. That’s one way to stand out from Overwatch’s waifu parade.

This video and the Portal trailer blew people’s dicks off when they came out, but at least the Portal trailer, younger audiences can see why. So much of HL2’s tech is now ‘Yep, that’s a thing. Was it new?’

If you want the proper contemporary experience, here it is in potato quality, with live commentary.

Never give Nintendo money.

Do things that are never finished. Optimize the everloving bejeezus out of some code. Endlessly fiddle with webpage layouts. Explore and review all the ways not to reticulate a spline.

‘Systemic dysfunction? Sounds like a personal failing.’

Jiggling TBD.

Blindly copy whatever notes you already have. Letter for letter, typo for typo, doodle for doodle.

Don’t use inline code / code blocks formatting for text. There’s no line breaks and the syntax highlighting is nonsense.

“Oh come on, why the fuck, there’s no possible reason this code should-- wrong variable.”

I have too many comments reading “… how did this ever work?”

Temporarily acknowledging the game you actually bought. It’s allowed to exist, for a FOMO-appropriate period of time. Then it gets yanked away from you, again.

Never give Nintendo money.

Cheese is definitely the right word. The scope is great - the plot is fine - the cast is stacked - but I don’t think Twohy is the right director for his own scripts. If you start poking around Wikipedia, wondering why the energy’s askew sometimes, there’s nobody else to pin it on. The writer/director also wrote The Fugitive. One of the editors was Oscar-nominated. Some of the head-scratching scenes involve Judi fucking Dench.

It’s nearly a Joel Schumacher situation, where the production needed one more person, to occasionally go “I dunno, Dave. Is it supposed to be that silly?” Either answer is fine, but if people have to wonder, you missed.

Years later, I’m still flabbergasted this isn’t the default take. The movie has deep problems, but the themes are right there in your face.

The only way it doesn’t put “anyone can be a hero” onscreen in eight-foot-tall letters is the ending. Which sure feels like Disney checked in, went “Oh SHIT,” and forced a sudden fourth act that over-corrects back toward the status quo.

Imagine if Rey hadn’t arrived on Krait. Kylo offers her the universe, she inhales to answer, hard cut. We don’t see either of them until the next movie. Instead, when the last gasp of the Rebellion was pushed deep into the caves, some rando side character saves them. A nobody with significant screen time watches the whimsical native fauna casually nudge giant boulders, and decides to just fuckin’ try. In an ideal reading, this character would not have dialog. She would not even have a name. Who she is aggressively does not matter. Only that she understood what Luke said and Rey ignored: the Force is in all living things.

Nobody can own that.

Headline case makes this nigh incomprehensible.