In civilized countries that’s called dumping, and it’s a crime.

Retroactively.

When Day Breaks.

Neal Stephenson made up a bunch of vaguely plausible alt-history events for Cryptonomicon, and I was shocked to learn this wasn’t one of them.

Oh wow, I didn’t know Guerilla Games was owned by Sony since 2005. I thought it was a Naughty Dog / Insomniac situation where they were second-party.

… they really lost the console war, didn’t they? I mean, sales figures, yeah, their number is bigger. But it’s over. They lost the war to have a console. They’re publishing on the other guys’ machines, the other guys are publishing on their machines - it’s just branding, now. Developers won.

Abolish software patents.

You can’t argue with results, but you can talk behind their back.

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.

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.

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.

The crinkles leave me both unnerved and salivating.

Careful, you might get metalosis.

Or for a one-off, copy the image in one program and paste it into another. Then it’s just pixels.

Even before… all this… anyone still on Twitter was an asshole.

Stop visiting the Nazi bar.

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.

Surprisingly realistic.

Black metal wouldn’t, but Einsturzende Neubauten might.

And now Gaza is saved!

… oh. Oh no.