battlefield 1942 came out in 2002. i remember playing it as soon as it was available (pirated it) and thinking "holy shit... this looks incredible"
crysis came out in 2007. i remember playing it some time after it came out (pirated it) and thinking "holy shit... this looks incredible"
the witcher 3 came out in 2015. i remember playing it two years after it came out (bought it) and thinking "holy shit... this looks incredible"
looking back, i now think that battlefield 1942 looks like an atari 2600 game. and i knew that, at the time; i knew it looked Like A Videogame. i knew what a polygon was in 2002, and i knew it didn't have a lot of them, but fuck, it just felt so organic and big and real. now it would feel like i'm walking around inside a portapotty; for christ's sake, i've played Open World Games, wake island is a postage stamp.
crysis... feels like a 1991 honda accord. dated, sure, but honestly still pretty solid. a looker, even, and that was 17 years ago. people played that game on fucking radeon x1350s. and the witcher 3, which is coming up on a decade old, looks breathtaking. it's been patched, sure, but the original still looks great. i don't look at it and go "lol, old." yet in 2012, BF1942 already looked like an atari 2600 game.
i realize it's just a nonlinear curve of improving quality made even more nonlinear by comparison to Real Life. but the thing that always weirds me out is this: i was there for all of it.
i know that I - the entity with this name and unique identity - was there in 2002, yet the past is a foreign country; 2002 feels impossibly far away. i know that i used daemon tools to install battlefield_1942.mds in 2002, but it might as well have been some jerk on reddit talking about it. it's not any more actionable. i can't reach back there and go "self, take notice of this thing, and this one. look at it from this point of view. stand up and look around, compare to other things. notice, observe, remember."
i was just doing what i was doing. it was not important that i was playing a game that would someday seem incomprehensibly old fashioned, and thus fascinating; it's just what was on the docket, what was on the table, what was next. it was the next thing to do. so i did it. and it feels like i did it about six hours ago. it feels no more distant than what i did last weekend, except that i had learned to pay attention to what was going on around me last weekend. i hadn't in 2002, and there's nothing i can do about it. i am someone i wish i could interview about a place i was and a thing i did, except that, being me, i know that i wouldn't have anything to say about it. it didn't matter enough to notice when i was doing it.