Tales of the Rampant Coyote

Adventures in Indie Gaming!

3DFX – Lest We Forget…

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 16, 2011

Aw, man, remember when companies still talked about gaming on the PC and it had nothing to do with Facebook? I sure do…

I loved these commercials.

“Blast his freaking head off!”

And this one starts out a little more over-the-top, with giant all-white-meat chickens and flying children…

What’s kinda funny is I remember at GDC (I think the last year or second-from-last year it was still called CGDC) meeting one of the head guys at this tiny little upstart company who was trying desperately to compete with the juggernaut that was 3DFX. Unfortunately, their little card didn’t quite cut the mustard. However, we really liked him, and we thought his card was the strongest (but still distant) second place  among a sea of contenders, so we did what we could to support it.

‘Cuz they seemed like scrappy little punks with some good ideas and a developer-friendly attitude, and we liked ’em. Even though we didn’t expect them to survive.

Who was the  scrappy little company we didn’t expect to make it? It was NVidia, of course. Duh!


Filed Under: Retro - Comments: Read the First Comment



  • LateWhiteRabbit said,

    This is some clever advertising and marketing. I love that they pull the classic switch-a-roo, starting as the kind of over-the-top PR snooze-fest commercials that big companies put out to make themselves look good, the kind of commercial most of us would generally ignore to go make a sandwich, then turn everything on its head. Hilarious.

    Though in a way, gaming technology is enabling all the things they mentioned in the “serious” parts of their commercials. How many research labs are running banks of PS3s networked together for cheap and powerful processing? How much more powerful are computers today than they would be if their only purpose had remained word processing, spreadsheets, and math calculation?

    I dare say that many of these computer tech companies couldn’t afford to exist without the constant influx of money from gamers desiring to always have the best and fastest technology.

    “Be a graphics-whore – help save the planet!”

    That’s a funny story about Nvidia. Makes you wish you could go back and make some choice investments, doesn’t it? I remember a story of Bill Gates going around trying to sell shares of Microsoft when it was first started to help it get off the ground – he offered to sell a guy $1000 dollars worth of stock, and the man seriously considered it, but decided to spend it on a used car instead. Ouch. That turned out to be one expensive used car.

top