1.21 GIGAWATTS!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 14, 2015

A friend ordered me a book for my birthday. Unfortunately, it hadn’t arrived on time, but they’d given her a PDF of the book in the meantime. So to tide me over until the hard-copy’s arrival, she gave me a thumb drive with the PDF on it.

“Do you want the thumb drive back?”

“No, it’s only 8 gigs,” she answered.

I gave her an amused look. I think others in the room caught it and got the joke. Most of us are old enough to remember the era where memory was measured in K, not M or G (or, increasingly, T). But 8 gigs today? Hardly worth the effort. I mean, those things cost like $0.50 a gig now?

Q: If every one of my 170k floppy disks for my Commodore 64 were loaded onto that thumb drive, how much room would I have left over?

A: Almost all of it. I mean, I’d guestimate that I had somewhere in the neighborhood of 120 disks. Assuming they were all at full capacity, that’d be less than 21 Megs. Not quite enough to fill up my first 40-meg hard drive for my 386, which is itself further back in history from the present day than the Commodore 64 was from its own. That would take up something like 0.2% of the thumb drive space.

And Yet….

I’m not going to complain that things were better in the C-64 days (or my old Sinclair ZX80 days with 1K of RAM). No, some might, but I won’t. The C-64 gaming space was kinda like the indie game scene today. Only… the indie scene is even more crowded. There were tons of games, some good ones, some that looked phenomenal for such limited graphics capabilities. I won’t even say games haven’t improved much since then. They have.

Although… it does feel like progress has slowed.

Not for things that can be measured in megabytes or gigabytes. AAA games have kept pace with the increase in computing power and memory / storage capabilities just fine. We have realistic sweat on characters who have faces with more vertices than the Atari 800 had pixels. For what it’s worth, cool. We’re putting that stuff to good work. Better graphics. Better sounds. Better UI. There’s nothing BAD here. They can present their own challenges, but at their heart, they are good things.

But they aren’t the extent of the quality of the experience.

I saw a review of Pillars of Eternity the other day that said it was the best RPG Obsidian had ever done. Sorry, can’t locate the review right now.  Anyway – whether or not you believe that, there’s something very interesting about the fact that PoE – on its very limited, indie budget, which is rooted strongly in older technology  (2D with 3D bits and effects) could knock it out of the park so handily (it has a metacritic score of 90, and I don’t think it’s just got nostalgia going for it).

It’s not just PoE. Or Minecraft. Or Thomas was Alone. Or any other low-budget (relatively speaking) hits that are far behind the bleeding edge of the tech race. It’s simply that there are a lot of layers to quality, and sometimes those can be hidden behind a lot of Michael Bay-style explosions. But playing some of the best indie games these days that have held back from the bleeding edge, I see some fascinating experiments (whereas the bigger games, for all their higher production values, tend to adhere closely to the tried and true) or a honing of older styles to a razor-sharp edge.

Even for those games, it’s nice to have the luxury of all of that memory and CPU speed and graphics hardware. But it really just means that you can focus on making the most of the technology rather than making it all work.

I titled this after the McGuffin of the movie Back to the Future – which was released as long ago this summer (30 years) as the era Marty McFly traveled to in the movie. While we don’t have a Mr. Fusion today (sigh…), in the movie, in 1985, 1.31 Gigawatts was a big deal but attainable (with plutonium stolen from terrorists). 30 years in the past, it was a complete impossibility without for pre-knowledge of a lightning strike. 30 years in the future (2015), it was supposedly trivial. But throughout the sixty years touched on in the movie, there was this totally frickin’ awesome time machine. It’s just that the tech needed to power it was easier to obtain.

Okay, in my head, it sounded like a cool analogy. And worked with the 8 gigabyte story. Bottom line: Tech doesn’t create coolness. It simply makes coolness easier to power.

 

Filed Under: Geek Life, Indie Evangelism - Comments: 6 Comments to Read



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