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petrochemicsoul
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cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

the fucked thing about memory is that you don't recontextualize it. when i first saw grand theft auto 3 i thought "damn......... this looks amazing." now i know that it looked like Dog Ass, i know that even then we were capable of better and more immersive experiences. if i play it now, i go "wow... dog ass" but if i think back on the memories of seeing it for the first time, when i played it for an hour on my friends ps2 (which i couldn't afford for myself) after installing a modchip for him, it's still amazing.

i am here. but i am also there, simultaneously. that's not a different person, yet the memories only exist without the 23 years of knowledge that came after them. when i think back to them, i become the person i was. so i don't feel like it's a different person. but in every single way that matters, it was

cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

talked to my mom on the phone. her mom remembered riding a horse to town. she remembered the horse getting scared when cars started showing up. she also remembered getting on a 787

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joewintergreen
@joewintergreen

my earliest memory of gta3 was of what i guess must have been trade show footage, taken of someone playing the game on a projector, with a Dog Ass camera, compressed lossily for the internet, and i still remember it and it looked fucking incredible. out of this world

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cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

god this is always so weird to think about. how many games did we marvel over in those days, having only seen 45 seconds of 360p, MPEG1ed-to-fuck footage. i'm not sure i ever saw Red Faction's destructible geometry in any other context and yet i still hold some kind of reverence for it in my soul

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cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

mario 64 was incomprehensible. i still can't really understand what it is. nothing moves like it, nothing feels like it. it is the most amazing and groundbreaking thing that has ever been done with polygons

when i look at it now, i see a simple, early 3D game made without any of the knowledge we now have. i can see how close it is to something as awful as Lemmings 3D; a flailing, almost amateurish attempt to understand a whole new dimension of interactivity, made even more dreadful by being saddled with a laughable controller that simply doesn't have enough axes of input to serve its intended purpose. it's like something i'd find on itch.io from an account with no other uploads

but it's also the most groundbreaking thing that's ever been done with polygons, at the exact same time.

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-pegasus
@-pegasus

GTA3 looking dog ass has history behind it, there are screenshots of it's assets dating back to 1997.

even when it was an announced PS2 game the early screenshots look like liquid dogshit compared to what came out, and they weren't mockups - you can recognize specific city streets and every art asset in shittier form. They were people with zero previous 3D experience teaching themselves by going back and reworking the same meshes over and over again. The scar tissue in the assets and engine is immense.

(credit where it's due, they were very strong in pixel art, and they had programmers so good they made their own language to control missions and events. but they had no idea what to do with 3D)

if i had to compare gta 3 to anything it's a webcomic someone starts in their teens and then never stops making. they eventually become good writers and artists but the origins as badly made trash are still in there and inform the whole thing going forward

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