I appreciate the attempt of the author to record the history of 3D games (this is how I took it). With that being said, from the title, I thought I was going t

I appreciate the attempt of the author to record the history of 3D games (this is how I took it). With that being said, from the title, I thought I was going to be reading a history of 3D graphics software. Instead it felt like I was reading a story about the 3d game industry, at least at the end... So, might want to think about that. It didn't feel like a cohesive whole, to me. There seems also to be a lot of personal bias in this piece toward commercialism of software.. > We can learn much about the tech zeitgeist from those algorithms the conventional wisdom thinks are most valuable. At the very beginning of the 1990s, when “multimedia” was the buzzword of the age and the future of games was believed to lie with “interactive movies” made out of video clips of real actors, the race was on to develop video codecs: libraries of code able to digitize footage from the analog world and compress it to a fraction of its natural size, thereby making it possible to fit a reasonable quantity of it on CDs and hard drives. This was a period when Apple’s QuickTime was regarded as a killer app in itself, when Philips’s ill-fated CD-i console could be delayed for years by the lack of a way to get video to its screen quickly and attractively. I'm sorry, in my experience, Quick Time was a mainstream mess to be avoided it like the plague. There were way better solutions out at the time, that were not so well known. > Predictably enough, it all turned into a bit of a fiasco. Crackers quickly reverse-engineered the algorithms used for generating the unlocking codes, which were markedly less sophisticated than the ones used to generate the 3D graphics on the disc. As a result, hundreds of thousands of people were able to get the entirety of the most hotly anticipated game of the year for $10. Meanwhile even many of those unwilling or unable to crack their shareware copies decided that eight levels was enough for them, especially given that the unregistered version could be used for multiplayer deathmatches. > Carmack’s misplaced idealism cost id and GT Interactive millions, poisoning relations between them; the two companies soon parted ways. Misplaced?, please... I feel like this really biased toward assuming games, and the people that make them, need to be commercially viable to be any good, its almost like this piece is coming from some PR guy.. People reversed-engineered games because that was their contribution to the technological movement of the time, it was, and is, just as important as making software. Also, I don't think it had anything to do with poison relationships. Its more of a difference of perspective: There were people in the software industry only concerned about making money off of developing software, and there were people that were interested in changing the world from an idealistic perspective. Looking at where we are at now, I'd say the poisoning is done by the people who's only interest in software development is making money.