PC World reported last week that nVidia’s newest GPUs are having a problem playing games from the early 2000s that use the PhysX API. While I agree with the author’s main takeaway, that this is not the ELE that many YouTubers proclaim it to be, it did make me reminisce about how much I play older games.
A bit on that first part. The article attributed PhysX to nVidia. Even the Wikipeia entry says this in its first line. But they bypass the actual origin of PhysX (the Wikipedia getds it right further down). It came out of a small startup called Ageia in the early 2000s (it went retail in 2004), who sold PhysX cards as an add-in card to go into a short-length PCI slot and run alongside your GPU. When Ageia need to close-up shop after the bubble burst and after the industry suffered mass consolidation or outright dissolution of the GPU, SoundCard, and add-in card PC market, Ageia sold its IP to nVidia. I couldn’t afford the Ageia card at the time and was happy to see it get absorbed into the GeForce stack. Also gobbled up by consolidation were S3’s API, S3TC, which went into DirectX and OpenGL, as well as elements from the 3Dfx stack (Voodoo technologies and the Glide API) when nVidia also laid claim to them.
OK. With that settled…again, I don’t think there is much ado about this. As a technologist, despite all this ongoing hubbub about game preservation, some level-setting needs to be done. Just how long should a game be playable? Many will assert that a game should be playable forever.
This mostly from the outrage bandits and engagement merchants. But that just isn’t practical. We have a hard enough time keeping things working from OS to OS upgrade. A game working into perpetuity is preposterous. It is also ridiculous to think that we will be able to set some standard, like “20 years” and apply that to all games as a rubric. Every game is different. Of different scope and scale. To say nothing about all of the technical elements that are beyond any one developer’s or publisher’s sphere of control. Things like APIs get broken every day. And so any effort in that vein will eventually fall apart.
But I do like playing me some older games. A lot, really. I’m that quintessential gamer who has started dozens of games and will play through the first 50% of the game but not finish it. And yet that will not keep me from coming back to it. Usually because I get distracted and do not want to stick with any 1 game for a single sitting when there are so many other games constantly passing by my windshield. But those beginnings, those openings…can still be like a warm blanket on a freezing cold night. Comfort food. I will often go back and revisit games that are 20 years old or more. And often re-start a game several times before finally embarking in a run to actually finish it. And, yes, I have often come up against the game I was trying to go back to once again and begin again and finally hit that magical point in the timeline when it was broken.
But in a lot of ways, while I lament this missed opportunity, I just chalk that up to the unfortunate reality of the passage of time. I also quickly get over it when I am reminded, once again…I now have time to get to the other 300 things in my backlog. Sometimes being a gamer is both a blessing and a curse.
But mostly, it is just a blessing that there are so many games to play.
Rounding Off Infinity 