Innovation Mobile Blog

90ties were certainly era of “heavy” graphics, real-time rendering, texture mapping, and other techniques that made computer games more realistic and playing more attractive. Programming techniques were developed to take out the most from hardware, graphic processing engines were optimized to make playing more fluid in 3D virtual worlds. While on desktop computers 3DRealms engine was behind the most realistic games like Doom, Wolfenstein castle, the Spear of Destiny, Duke Nukem and other, gaming consoles were still limited to 2d graphics with classic arcade style games. Then Nintendo released N64 in 1997.
I could nor resist to buy that console with 64bit power for graphics under the hood. The label on the chip was Silicon Graphics (SGI). Five years earlier I’ve visited SGI in their headquarters in Mountain View in Silicon Valley. Huge corporate building park housed the R&D for famous IRIX operating system and powerful mainframes and workstations built for advanced heavy graphics tasks. That park is now home of well known Google Inc. One of the meeting rooms were PR of SGI welcomed my group of students was called “Terminator”, after the Hollywood blockbuster where SGI machines were used for special effects.

So I ended up owning one part of SGI graphic marvels hooked to my TV set. Sadly apart from famous Super Mario 64, Duke Nukem and few other nice titles optimized for N64 console, not that many titles hit the shelves in stores. Soon N64 was beaten by its PlayStation 2 rival in the number of units sold. Many years later, gaming industry reported that software development for N64 was far too complicated and hence not profitable.

Lesson learned. Nintendo realized that it is worth listening customers and not industry, and released Wii 10 years after N64. Far behind its rival PlayStation 3 in terms of graphics and audio capabilities but unique with its new user/machine interface in the form of its game controller equipped with accelerometers. The new gaming experience triggers more user attention than the super realistic graphics nowadays when the high definition becomes commodity. The latest reports from business news state that on average Nintendo Wii does not spend more than 1 hour on shelves in shops! I still keep my old N64 because its games were far ahead of their time and still kids (and not only they) like to play them. However PS3 is not only gaming platform…