The Final Barrier (article)

[Eidolon]

Reproduced from my original posting on the Oculus Rift Forum: https://developer.oculusvr.com/forums/v ... =26&t=2559

WHEN I was a kid, I lived and breathed video games. Not just the games, I had a love affair for the hardware these games run on, as constrained by technology as they were. As a Generation X'er, I grew up just as the fledgling Consumer Computer industry found its feet, so was exposed to some outstanding, significant silicon: Spectrum, Atari ST, Amiga. Every game was good, every last one offered something worthwhile, new, and - most importantly - they were fun.

My brother and I would often compete against each other for hours on end in racing sims such as Geoff Crammond's seminal F1 Grand Prix, or Micro Machines, or any number of amazing titles over the years. I loved the fact that with some booksmarts and a bit of perseverance, you could even use these early computers to write your own games too. As a young adult I even managed to work in the video games industry for a time, a period of my life I look back on fondly.

But despite it all, as I grew older, I found myself playing games less and less. I'm 38 now, but by about the time I was in my early twenties, the rot had already started to sink in: I was devoting less time to gaming, despite not having any responsibilities past the obligatory job and a few bills. As a (self-professed) long-standing hard-core gamer, this realization caused me some frustration. The good games were still out there, but they were getting harder to find, and there seemed to be more and more average-to-bad titles compared to those old, carefree, rose-tinted days. Fast forward to 2013, and my PS3 is slowly gathering dust in the corner.

I've long wondered why that is. I've posited several reasons to myself. Growing older, for a start: it's true that people move on, priorities change, and sometimes life just gets in the way. But that didn't explain why I still considered myself an avid hardcore gamer, despite only playing perhaps two to three titles a year. The love never really went away, so what else could it be?

It's equally true that the Games Industry has changed beyond all recognition since those carefree days of the bedroom coder. With the possible exception of a handful of Indie games, anything made in the last twenty years would have required a small army of coders, artists and musicians. Some of the games EA and others have been putting out recently have such obscene budgets as to put most mainstream triple-A Hollywood blockbusters to shame. The return on investment required on a $100 Million title is obscene: Homefront sold three million units, and there are some in the industry that point to this 'failure' as the reason for THQ's demise. With so much at stake, it's not surprising that the vast majority of new games are the same clones and endless sequels of games that I've played countless times for the last umpteen years. Maybe familiarity breeds contempt?

That wasn't it, either. I can hand-on-heart say the absolute best games I've ever played have been hosted on modern silicon, and some of them were sequels too. Half-Life 2 I've replayed so many times I'm scared I'll wear out the CD (or at least I would, where it not hosted on Steam). Portal 1 & 2 frustrated and amazed me in equal measure with its beautiful puzzles and hilarious one liners. I absolutely can't wait to get my hands on The Last Of Us, the new Tomb Raider and Destiny, amongst others.

Some decry the lack of innovation in the hardware industry: the PS3 is broadly similar to the PS2 which is broadly similar to the original PlayStation; each is merely more powerful than the last. It wasn't until Nintendo started innovating with unusual control mechanisms with the Wii that Microsoft and Sony started to even think about alternate ways to control the on-screen action. But even then, what we have from the big three is largely gimmicky and ultimately forgettable. So I can't even pin it on apathy.

Over the years I hadn't really been able to put my finger on the root cause. So I ambled along, playing the odd game here and there (well, mainly waiting for Half-Life 3 if I'm being honest). And then some American kid in his Dad's garage duct-taped some smartphone components to a ski mask and accidentally invented The Future. Or the past, more accurately: Virtual Reality as a concept had been in the public lexicon for nigh on twenty years; it was a concept that had over promised and under delivered year after year. After a brief dabble with some horrendously expensive kit in the early nineties, VR was quickly and quietly forgotten. And rightly so, too - the technologies necessary for a fully immersive experience at a reasonable price point simply didn't exist back then. High-resolution, thin LCD screens, near-instant motion tracking sensors and hugely fast CPU/GPU's have only really been available since the rise of the smartphone, which commoditised and brought economies of scale to many of these components that Palmer Luckey put to such effective use with his home-grown lashups.

It was when I saw Luckey's slick Kickstarter campaign last year that the penny finally dropped. That was what was missing, the reason why I didn't connect to videogames like I did as a youngster. For years I'd seen gaming make enormous strides, from eight-colour blocky graphics to sixteen-colour sprites to rudimentary 3D wireframe graphics to fully texture-mapped worlds, all facilitated by the incessant march of Moore's law. To a certain extent my younger self had filled in the gaps in those early crude games with my imagination, but there came a point where everything that needed to be presented in the game was on-screen - more or less - in full technicolour 3D with surround sound audio. Only the Final Barrier between the player and the gameworld remained, and only VR could possibly hope to smash through that.

Luckey's description of the Oculus Rift on Kickstarter was one of those 'Why the Hell didn't I think of that?' moments. At very little cost he'd taken some off-the-shelf, readily available components and accomplished what several large Corporations had resolutely failed to do for two decades, and they'd had one hell of a head start on Luckey: those very early VR experiments by Virtuality et al predated his birth. The most annoying thing was that what Luckey had accomplished could have been realized by anyone at any point in the last five years or so. Possibly the only reason he hadn't conceived of the Rift sooner was just due to his sheer youth: it's hard to change the World when you're still studying at School.

I, like a lot of veteran gamers, have been waiting for VR for what feels like forever. As a concept it looked like it had been killed off for good until the Rift started blowing minds at the 2012 E3 onwards. It was a bizarre sight to see the combined reveals of two next-gen Consoles earlier this year be totally overshadowed by a peripheral. The Oculus team seem to be bracing themselves for competition from some big hitters, but I suspect the Corporations will take a 'wait and see' approach. Sony and Nintendo in particular have already dabbled with the technology and got nowhere with it: any possible competition will likely come from a small outfit largely copying what Luckey and co. have been doing for the last couple of years. But with the headstart and the backing they have already amassed, it's looking like Oculus will dominate the first of the modern generation of VR headsets, at least.

Oculus are going to be the Atari of their day, back when Atari owned the entire video games industry in the early 80's. It was poor content that did for Atari back then, and the team at Oculus are painfully aware of their History and have spent almost as much resources developing a robust SDK and getting the great and the good of the games industry on board as they have developing and building the Rift hardware itself. This bodes well. There are still many things the team have to resolve before the Consumer Rift launches, from adjustable optics to positional headtracking to the thorny issue of nausea to varying degrees, but with the funding in place and a large number of obscenely talented engineers hired, I'd be shocked if V1.0 of the Oculus Rift proper wasn't an absolutely mind-blowing, game-changing experience.

It was a long and rocky road, but it appears VR's time has finally come, and by all accounts it's been worth the wait.

[adventurer]

wow what a lengthy post but I enjoy reading it . Love your emotion toward VR!

[Bleppe]

I'm about the same age as you, I'm 36, and I can relate to this article a lot.
Started gaming in the early 80's with Intellivision and Vectrex, then it was Nintendo ofcourse an later on Amiga and so forth.
I'm willing to bet the discussions between my buddies and I back then would've sound "How cool wouldn't it be if we could be inside this game!".
And finally now some long years later it's finally happening
I also agree with what you wrote about games being more fun back then... and my take on it is that perhaps we didn't have such high expectations back then.
We were just happy if we could play a game with our favorite characters in them like Link, Mario, Samus Aran and so on.
Anywas I'll quit my ramblings
I really enjoyed reading this! Thx for sharing.

[squibbfire]

I hope Palmer Lucky becomes the Rocky Balboa of Video Games.
Turn up the volume and just listen to the excitement...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioE_O7Lm0I4

[Bleppe]

I hope Palmer Lucky becomes the Rocky Balboa of Video Games.
Turn up the volume and just listen to the excitement...

Actually I think I'd prefer him as the Rambo of videogames, however that theme song isn't as cool as the Rocky theme song.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCyeW12DlhE

[Eidolon]

I'm about the same age as you, I'm 36, and I can relate to this article a lot.
Started gaming in the early 80's with Intellivision and Vectrex, then it was Nintendo ofcourse an later on Amiga and so forth.
I'm willing to bet the discussions between my buddies and I back then would've sound "How cool wouldn't it be if we could be inside this game!".
And finally now some long years later it's finally happening
I also agree with what you wrote about games being more fun back then... and my take on it is that perhaps we didn't have such high expectations back then.
We were just happy if we could play a game with our favorite characters in them like Link, Mario, Samus Aran and so on.
Anywas I'll quit my ramblings
I really enjoyed reading this! Thx for sharing.

I had a Vectrex forced upon me as a child too, I left it out as I didn't think it qualified as 'outstanding, significant silicon'!

[Bleppe]

Outstanding might be exhaggerateing but I had alot of fun with Vectrex
Still wish I owned one.