Nothing else matters
From the flickering, rudimentary electro beams of oscilloscopes that birthed the earliest gaming prototypes to the ultra-fine resolutions of modern titles rendered with millions of polygons by dedicated hardware, the visual appeal of video games has long been the cornerstone of their development. For decades, gaming companies and hardware manufacturers have poured resources into achieving ever-more stunning graphics, often at the expense of innovation in gameplay, storytelling, or mechanics. This relentless pursuit of the shiniest toy has driven remarkable technological leaps but has also led the industry into a crisis. Gamer fatigue, driven by repetitive and uninspired experiences, has left players craving a return to the creative spark that once defined the medium. The industry faces a pivotal moment, with a question looming: has the tipping point been reached? Has the obsession with visual fidelity stifled innovation, leaving gaming on the brink of stagnation or a dramatic transformation? To understand this moment, why it happened, let’s dive into the era when 3D graphics and game design bloomed together, shaping gaming’s tech and culture.
If we are talking about computer graphics, there is one studio and one guy in particular we have to mention, who, with his team single handedly changed the evolution of computer games in the 90s. id Software was founded in 1991 by programmers John Carmack and John Romero, game designer Tom Hall, and artist Adrian Carmack (no relation to John Carmack). With John Carmack as the mastermind behind all projects, they created games during the company’s heyday that became legendary classics and hallmarks of the era: Commander Keen (1990), Wolfenstein 3D (1992), DOOM (1993), and Quake (1996). They also pioneered a lot of things that profoundly shaped the future of video games, especially PC games. Thanks to their inventiveness, they were the first ones to come up with a lot of original ideas in technology and business alike. In three short years, they went from a cute platform kid character with an oversized helmet to full-on berserk mode, decorated with bodily fluids and parts of enemies from hell.
Historically speaking, Maze War was the very first first-person shooter game (FPS), developed in 1974 by Steve Colley, Greg Thompson, and Howard Palmer on an Imlac PDS-1 minicomputer. Because it was expensive hardware, the game stayed in obscurity. id Software created games at the dawn of the new PCs, which were a lot more affordable to a wider audience. After the moderate success of their first games, the Commander Keen series (a family-friendly platformer), Wolfenstein 3D was a completely different breed: a graphic, violent game that produced the first critical and commercial success for them. They distributed the game as shareware, with the first few levels for free; this might also have contributed to the game’s achievements.
The game was a spiritual successor to the 2D Castle Wolfenstein (1981) by Muse Software, which inspired the first mod, Castle Smurfenstein (1983). This pseudo-3D game was followed by another “fake” 3D game, DOOM, which utilized clever texturing tricks to make it a convincing 2.5D environment game without using real polygons and 3D models that ran lag-free on even low-powered PCs of that time. It was a major success with even more gore than Wolfenstein. They released this game as shareware too, and later on they even released a level editor for the game. DOOM also put a big emphasis on modding with the level editor, even allowing players to monetize their level designs. It was a clever business decision from id Software, as it allowed a big and loyal community to grow around the game. But it wasn’t the last innovation they introduced to the gaming industry. As the pioneers of FPS shooters and making it a whole genre, they were the first to license their game engine to other developers, they popularized online multiplayer gaming, violence and gore in video games, and started the ‘deathmatch’ craze. They also led the way with releasing the source code for DOOM in 1997 under a custom license, later transitioning to the GNU General Public License (GPL) in 1999. The impact it had on the open-source community and other games to follow is undeniable. If you are interested in an in-depth documentary about the story of id Software, watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIuCOsB4nHs
John Romero and John Carmack
“Sometimes, the elegant implementation is just a function. Not a method. Not a class. Not a framework. Just a function,”
John Carmack
Their last game made together as a team was Quake, a truly 3D FPS shooter game that didn’t surpass its predecessor’s success but paved the way with technical advancements in 3D rendering and its impact on multiplayer gaming. The tension among the team members caused the original founders to disband (the company still exists), but their cultural and technological legacy lives on in every game they’ve influenced.
Games like id Software’s titles were a primary driving force of advancements in computer graphics during the 1990s. The rising demand for better visuals, particularly in gaming and other graphically intensive applications, resulted in the development of dedicated Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) that could handle these demanding tasks. With their own computing chips, the Pandora’s box of graphical progress had been opened, leading to a spiral of innovation where improved hardware spurred more complex and visually stunning software, which in turn drove further hardware advancements. Yet, this intense focus on visuals has trapped the industry in a cycle of diminishing returns. For AAA studios, driven by shareholders, investors, and managers who speak only the language of profit, it was an easy fix because it was a low-stakes fix. As long as the new game in the franchise had better visual fidelity than before, it was good to go. For a time, the shiny new toy kept people glued to their screens. But every wonder lasts three days, as they say, and the novelty slowly faded away. The industry has just started to realize it was a dead end. But was technology the driving factor for focusing on the graphical progress, or vice versa, the requirements pushing the evolution of technology?
The truth is that graphics never really mattered that much.
Most who have lived and played in the 70s, 80s, and 90s usually say the games were better back then. The retro nostalgia felt by them is not just a sentimental statement. The games in those times were made by enthusiastic groups of people who lived and breathed gaming. They were ambitious and not afraid to experiment. The stakes were also lower than now, when every move of big budget corporations is meticulously planned on spreadsheets by folks who don’t give a rat’s ass what they are making as long as it’s lucrative. The early games were confined by the limitations of the graphic capabilities of the state of hardware of their time, but that hindrance only made them work and innovate in other aspects of game design.
If we analyse any given game, the gaming mechanics can be dissected into basic, core elements. Have you ever wondered why the simplest real-life games can deliver just as much fun and excitement as flashy, hyper-realistic games on sophisticated and high-tech machines? Modern games, except for a few and far, are usually nothing more than simple core-game schemes in disguise. Take a look at any fighting game, for example, and it’s nothing more than a game of rock, paper, scissors with bells and whistles. The look, the speed, and the effects have improved in these games over the decades, but the game mechanics are still the same as they were in the first iterations.
There is another phenomenon called visual or perceptual closure, when the brain automatically fills in and completes an observed image or scenario. Even the games with the lowest pixel counts are no problem to our brain, as with a minimal visual cue (ex.: a square with a triangle on top is a house), the brain interprets the form with the most familiar from memory and experience. And of course, our imagination is at work too; our brain decodes the view and enhances it. It’s no wonder, when there’s a new game released (usually an indie one) with novel game design, people notice it right away and resonate with it. It’s like a breath of fresh air among a stinky pack of mediocre products.
The question stated earlier is, in fact, a rhetorical one. It was probably both, but in the end, it is irrelevant; what’s more important is that the industry dug a pretty big hole under itself, yet no one cared or saw it coming. The retro games that thrived on limited hardware and the indie titles that captivate players are the true epitome that graphics alone won’t make good games, but innovation and originality is the heart of game design. Yet, the industry’s current structure, bloated with profit-driven AAA studios, cannot pivot without breaking. Many of these studios, weighed down by their excess with overbudgeted projects, recycled franchises, and corporate tunnel vision, will likely crash and burn before any reinvention can take root. Only then, from the ashes of this collapse, smaller, hungrier teams, unburdened by shareholder demands, might revive the experimental spirit of the 1990s and rebuild gaming around creativity and imagination.
The devil is in the details
The time has arrived to roll up my sleeves and dig into the hardest part of the design. With the housing more or less ready, it was time to create all the mechanical parts, the position and size of the PCBs, the placement of the DC electric motors, etc. I eagerly jumped right into the task and estimated it would take me around 4-5 weeks. It was, of course, my ignorance talking, as it turned out to be more like 6 months. It wasn’t an easy project for an engineer; imagine doing it without professional experience. Maybe I was a bit too optimistic, as the case design went fairly smoothly.
It was a big help that I had the earlier versions, so the dimensions and locations of buttons, sticks, triggers, and the pivot point of the stick-lever’s rotation were already set, so I had a good base to build on. I even changed some things that didn’t quite work out in the previous models. I started with shaping the front buttons and trigger. The trigger was a tricky shape, as it lies at the edge where the top and bottom parts of the case meet. It is an awkward shape, resembling a chip with curvatures in two planes. The triggers use hall sensors with magnets instead of potentiometers. The button next to the main shoulder button is a 5-way hat switch, which was a bit tricky to keep close to the main button while accounting for its four-directional movement. I think I found a sweet spot for finger placement: the tip of the finger rests on the hat switch, and the primary button can be actuated with the second digit of the index finger. It’s unusual but works great and feels natural. It’s a nice feeling to reach 6 buttons with one finger without moving its position. The entire concept of the controller’s ergonomics is that it’s designed so every analog and digital input can be used without modifying hand or finger positions.
Since it’s a prototype, it has several individual PCBs, but the plan is that, if the force feedback functionality is validated, all the different circuit boards will be redesigned to fit on one main board, if possible. The T-shaped PCBs, for example, that control the shoulder inputs are positioned perpendicular to the base plane of the controller, so those will have to stay separate.
It might seem that the hardest part was designing the gimbal at the end of the stick lever, but that just follows the blueprint for a basic 2-axis gimbal mechanism. The hardest part was finding the position of the six electric motors inside the housing and working out the power transmission from the motors to the gimbals, without interfering with any parts while they move. Unfortunately, they couldn’t be fixed to the case, as the power transmission would be either impossibly complex or expensive. So, the only viable option was to fix them on the moving stick lever. This adds significant extra weight, so it might pose a problem for the motor controlling the Z-axis movement of the stick lever. If the performance or power drops too much, I may need to replace it with a more powerful one. If I had chosen the bottom-up design method that I mentioned earlier, then fitting the motors would have been easier, but since the ergonomic aspect of a controller is of utmost priority, I had to work it out the hard way.
Stay tuned…
