Then I got a Nintendo 64 and Super Mario was the most realistic thing I've seen.
It's really hard to communicate the incredible size of the graphical leaps in the early days of mainstream consoles. Every generation was just amazingly better than the last for quite a while there. I remember booting up Mario 64 for the first time and just sitting there with my whole family, jaws hanging open. You could see Mario breathing. The world was enormous, three-dimensional, and open. Coming off the SNES, it was just mind-blowing. The move from PS3 to PS5 looks like hardly a tune-up by comparison. It was wild.
Do you ever sit down to think about how Doom and Half-Life 1 were only 5 years apart? And half-Life 2 was only 11 years after Doom.
Silent Hill 3 was 4 years after the first one. Super Mario 64 was only 6 years after Super Mario World on SNES. These times were wild and it's hard to describe how the times felt to kids nowadays. It felt like the earth was going to crack open at any second.
The Xbox 360 came out only 9 years after the N64. By comparison, Red Dead Remeption 2 is already 6 years old. Those sorts of giant leaps just haven't happened for a while.
Yup. I recognize that this sort of thing must eventually run into diminishing returns, but it's still really wild to compare the old timescales to the new ones. It's especially salient with something like Skyrim to Starfield, which despite being developed by the same company almost 15 years apart, look like they could have been made within a year or two of one another. As you said, the time between 8-bit original Mario and Mario 64 was actually less than the time between Skyrim and Starfield.
The time between Mario being created as a character (Donkey Kong, 1981) and Mario 64 (1996) is the same length of time between Fallout 3 and Starfield. I saw most of this happen and I still can't fathom how fast everything used to move.
It's really hard to communicate the incredible size of the graphical leaps in the early days of mainstream consoles. Every generation was just amazingly better than the last for quite a while there. I remember booting up Mario 64 for the first time and just sitting there with my whole family, jaws hanging open. You could see Mario breathing. The world was enormous, three-dimensional, and open. Coming off the SNES, it was just mind-blowing. The move from PS3 to PS5 looks like hardly a tune-up by comparison. It was wild.
n64/ps1 and gamecube/ps2 were easily the best times to be alive for a gamer
Do you ever sit down to think about how Doom and Half-Life 1 were only 5 years apart? And half-Life 2 was only 11 years after Doom.
Silent Hill 3 was 4 years after the first one. Super Mario 64 was only 6 years after Super Mario World on SNES. These times were wild and it's hard to describe how the times felt to kids nowadays. It felt like the earth was going to crack open at any second.
The Xbox 360 came out only 9 years after the N64. By comparison, Red Dead Remeption 2 is already 6 years old. Those sorts of giant leaps just haven't happened for a while.
Yup. I recognize that this sort of thing must eventually run into diminishing returns, but it's still really wild to compare the old timescales to the new ones. It's especially salient with something like Skyrim to Starfield, which despite being developed by the same company almost 15 years apart, look like they could have been made within a year or two of one another. As you said, the time between 8-bit original Mario and Mario 64 was actually less than the time between Skyrim and Starfield.
The time between Mario being created as a character (Donkey Kong, 1981) and Mario 64 (1996) is the same length of time between Fallout 3 and Starfield. I saw most of this happen and I still can't fathom how fast everything used to move.
I saw it happen too, but holy fuck that's crazy to see put into words.