Obvious challenges my statement about introducing 16-bit color and 3D graphics hardware to the game industry:
Oh, you did? Which game was that? Do you have anything at all that backs that up?
Yes, I did. Concerning the hardware, see Computer Gaming World’s 1994 article on the 3GA and its reference to my title as “Trans-Dimensional Evangelist”. Concerning 16-bit color, I direct your attention to the September 1997 Computer Gaming World review of Rebel Moon Rising.
“Rebel Moon Rising makes use of Intel’s new MMX technology. Fenris Wolf used MMX to gain a reasonable frame rate at high resolutions with 16-bit color. This let them create dynamic lighting effects that could change on the fly and even move with the different characters. For example, a moving orange glow might indicate a nearby enemy jump trooper.
Another new technology feature is voice recognition. One early Windows 95 game, ACES OF THE DEEP, used speech recognition, but the implementation was very limited. In Rebel Moon Rising, the list of usable words is quite large. While you can actually give orders to AI squad mates in a limited way, it’s mostly used to communicate with other players in multiplayer games. You can speak into the microphone to chat, rather than having to hunt for keyboard commands – something especially handy for Internet play, which the game also supports.”
Now, none of this proves the feature we are going to introduce to the game industry in our upcoming announcement of our forthcoming game is going to make that game successful. And it demonstrates that even if we are the first to introduce it, we will not necessarily be the primary beneficiaries of it, or be generally known to have introduced it. I have, in fact, repeatedly expressed my belief that every game company is going to follow our example very quickly; that is the primary reason the innovation is going to be significant. The mere fact that people like Obvious see fit to doubt what was once known by literally everyone involved suffices to prove that credit primarily tends to be given to those who are both innovative and massively successful. And sometimes only the latter.
But Jensen Huang, Hock Leow, Steve Mosher, Chris Taylor, Marc Rein, John Carmack, Andy Grove, and those who were executives at companies like Intel, Rendition, 3D Labs, Diamond, and Hercules, all know what happened. And thanks to Mike Weksler at CGW, it’s a matter of public, if obscure, record.
This is another fundamental difference between Right and Left. The Right is mostly indifferent to the various successes of the Left, whereas the Left is desperate to not only deprive the Right of any opportunity to succeed, but also to deny every last vestige of whatever success was already achieved. Obvious’s petty desire to disbelieve one minor chapter in the history of the game industry is the goblin to the ideologically censorious behavior of the SF/F publishing ogre lords.