Slashdot Mirror
The Future of PC Gaming
Warrior-GS writes "GameSpy has two new articles up talking about the Future of PC Gaming. The first talks about the The Future of PC Game Engines, talking to Tim Sweeney, Chris Taylor, Stuart Moulder and others about everything from physics to lighting to AI. The second is an interview with Peter Molyneux about his areas of expertise and what lies ahead. The series will continue next month with a look at the Future of User Created Games and an interview with Warren Spector on PC Gaming's future."
Warren Spector is a true game innovator.
Look at thief, system shock, ultima underworld, deus ex. I'm always for the lookout of his latest games.
Thief 2 was especially heinous. I used to play that game for hours. My first wife eventually gave me the "you love that game or me" speech, and I ended up choosing the game. That divorce led me down the road to many other ones. Its sad really. But damn was that game fun!
Yeah, I'm a Republican AND a geek. It is possible.
Does anyone else miss 2D scrollers like Super Mario 3 or overhead adventure games like Gauntlet? I have grown so weary of 3D shooters, I wish somebody could offer a decent 2D game that engaged my brain.
evil adrian
What are the game producers going to do when they finally get to the point where the games look like real life, but still have the entertainment value of the movie "Glitter" or "It's Pat"?
An exquisitely rendered turd is still a turd.
Seriously though, I know the Holodeck doesn't make for good Star Trek episodes, but how many of you Slashdotters wouldn't LOVE to game in that manner. Totally escaping reality, you could experience any aspect of life that you wanted, consequence free. I'm very sure that would cause widespread peace of mind and mental health, because people would have an easy way to vent any destructive urges in a non-destructive manner. Hopefully, I'll be able to see stuff like this in my lifetime (I am about to turn 21), but perhaps I'd only see the humble starts of true "Holodeck" type technology.
A game that mirrors reality to exacting detail, where the only limits are those of your own imagination-- THAT'S what I want! Hurry up, developers! ;)
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
The future andy.
IN THE YEEEEEAR 2000!!!!!!!!
In the year 2000 robots will do 80% of our housework. But we will do 90% of theirs.
For those who haven't heard of it, I recently picked up an older game called "Nocturne." The gameplay was clunky, and the storyline at times annoying, but the lighting effects were quite awesome for its time. In fact, in comparison to some games I've played today, the lighting is quite superior.
From what I've read up on the game, all scenes are rendered from complete darkness. This means that only the point and spot light sources exist (no ambient). Shadows in the game are incredible. If an object passes in front of a light, the shadow blocks it.
While some newer games have good shadow effects, having a realistic shadow that follows the characters movement (in the game, your character has a trenchcoat which swishes around, making the shadow move too) is extremely cool in comparison to the often used "dark blob" shadow effects in many games. I'm hoping Doom 3 uses these "dark and sinister" effects too. It would be extremely cool to be able to site who is coming around the corner by their shadow cast on the wall or ground.
In short, polygons and texture rendering play a great part in detail, but realistic light and shadow rendering make scenes much more lifelike.
The "engines" article talks about 20 passes per polygon and so on. Great! But the majority of machines being sold by Gateway and Dell are not even T&L equipped cards. We're talking pre-Radeon era ATI cards. Now you have people buying awesome, awesome machines with 1.8 GIGAhertz at the very bottom end, systems that John Carmack and Tim Sweeney couldn't have imagined ten years ago, but only the hardcore gaming types are bothering to get the $200-$400 video cards that games like Doom 3 are going to require. For Carmack it might work, but for everyone else it isn't worth three years and millions of dollars to develop a PC game that ends up selling 20,000 copies. That's a pretty realistic number these days.
Is Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Nothing else comes close.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
i was surprised that none of the gaming gurus had anything negative to say about PC losing out as the gaming platform like this earlier slashdot article .
PCs have so far been one step ahead of consoles in terms of hardware/processing power, hope those innovations (like AI, ability to use more polygons etc) hit the PCs before consoles.
Siggy Say, Siggy Do
A video card's ability to crunch polygons is not as important as it used to be. What is important is what you can do with those polygons. Polygons are just a medium to deliver your textures, lighting effects and shaders. Particle effects are also a staple in modern video games.These are the things that will be improved in future game engines. Imagine a game engine with full global illumination (not faked)
If you remember, virtua fighter had more polygons per charachter than virtua fighter 2. Virtua fighter 2 looked so much better because it acually had textures instead of just flat shaded polygons.
I also play with the emulators of legacy classic console systems.
Yeah, I'm more interested in the old classics. Modern games are fairly complicated as compared to, say, Pac Man and the ilk. I mean, I work hard at a computer all day, thinking and thinking. The last thing I want to do is go home and have to think in front of a computer again. Those old games were addictive because of their simplicity -- like Tetris. I know lots of people love the modern games but for me the old, basic games will always be a much better way for me to unwind at the end of the day.
GMD
watch this
.. the past of gaming. When I my brother moved back closer to me and I got his setup with a computer I introduced him to the "hottest" game of the time. DOOM and DOOM II. Of course at the same time I was playing Unreal, but I wanted him to have the same experiences and appreciation that I have for modern games. Also I needed a head start, that bastard learns to damn fast... Anyway, after he mastered DOOM, HEXEN, Betrayal at Krondor, and a few other classics, I let him in on the magic of Unreal and we have played more matches of UT than I can count now. He would not have been so good if he didn't know where all of the things we take for granted came from. He isn't awed by just graphics, he enjoys story, gameplay and originality as well.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Ah yes, Gamespy. That lovely little company that is so desperately trying to spread it's vile disease all over online gaming, trying to force all us online gamers to use their appalingly poor connection services. Those people are just as guilty as monopolizing as Microsoft, except it actually worked out for Microsoft...
Secondly, that Peter Molyneux is a comedian. Black and White 2? Since when do you create sequels to horribly flopped games? I have yet to meet anyone IRL or on IRC who has played B&W and liked it still after 2 weeks. Oh, and before people start yelling at me; being horribly overhyped is NOT a definition of a succesful game. (Daikatana anyone?)
Hate me!
Given the current trend of releasing a game engine without much of a gain included (Morowind, Neverwinter Nites, Dungeon Siege), with the expectation that people paying for the product will finish it. I predict the in the future you'll just get a copy of GCC and some artwork when you purchase a game. The game developers will cover their asses by sticking a "some assembly (ASM) required" sticker on the box.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
if you ask me games were better off in a simpler time... i can never seem to replace the excitement i got when i first saw a naked girl in a video game back in good old "colonel clusters last stand" for the atari. actually i think it was the first and last naked girl i've ever seen, or likeness of one even... hey, she had nice breasts... a whole 4 bit, errr a-cup? who needs grand theft auto 3! /paul
fact: microsoft > linux
One big problem is that we want opponents to learn "online" but how many of us are willing to deal with the long learning curves of a lot of AI? Most people want to 1. sit down at a game 2. be challenged 3. maybe see the opponent due something new.
But to do something new would probably require a lot of trial and failure... and a lot of moments where users will think "damn, this thing has gotten stupider!"
So then you can enforce a baseline behavior... which is more static, more predictable and basically where AI is now (lots of scripting, etc).
I guess the best solution would be for developers to come up with a dozen or so strategies and a system for switching/blending between them. Heck, maybe even have the developers run improvements and then upload them to all the users.
Of course "meat" opponents online do that already: they're called gaming forums. The ability of a person to come up with a great strategy and then propogate it to everyone else online may be the most difficult thing to implement in any game AI.
What is music when you despise all sound?
What I'm wondering about is when we'll see environments that are far most plastic -- ie, reactive to the weapons/tools used in the games.
For example, why can't I blow a hole in a door or a wall? Why don't wooden materials in a game start on fire (and continue burning, causing health damage) when exposed to explosive or flame weapons? Shouldn't continued exposure to explosive or high-powered weapons cause some buildings to collapse entirely?
While an obvious reason not to is it wouldeliminate the find-the-switch-to-open-the-door trivial puzzles, think of it as adding dimension to the game -- sure, blow the door open but you might get killed when the ceiling collapses.
I've been playing a lot of MOH:AA, and even some of the demo levels like Stalingrad would be more interesting if repeated RPG strikes blew walls over, if grenades blew open the floor, heavy machine gun rounds went through walls, and so on.
Most games have some trivial things you can "destroy" (boarded up windows, glass panes), but the basic architecture/structures are totally impervious, which strikes me as the single most unrealistic aspect.
I've never understood this, either -- if I can move to one side of a wall or the other, why does the wall have to be permanent?
My other gripe is with health, which should be more easily fixed. I think health should have two components -- an overall 'health' aspect which should gradually go down, and a 'current stamina' value which should quickly go down during rapid movement, climbing, firing of big weapons, but recharge by stopping and doing nothing. The stamina value should impact the health value, as well as how fast you can run, accurately shoot, etc.
I'm not the most exposed gamer, so I only know by the games I've played, but the simple health metrics and static environments have always surprised me.
No, nothing in the realm of computing or digital media or even technology in general as we know it today is like slavery. Nothing.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
It has become common belief that the better tech, the better graphics. It's simply not true. There's much more than a technological aspect of graphics in games, there's also something called aesthetics.
SNES era games come to mind. Games like Zelda 3 and Super Metroid had wonderful graphics - they are in low resolution and in few colors when compared to today's games, but the design work is excellent.
I have no doubts that DOOM 3, for example, will have a great combination of technology and design. My point is just that graphics aren't bad just because they're old!
So, considering this, those guys who are building better and better engines are actually going to be helping out both of the above types of game developer, and surely more as well.
I am waiting for the day in the not-so-distant future, where someone releases a game with a story and characters compelling enough (decent engine too) that it causes the larger audience of people to realize that games aren't just for kids. The next thing after that is Sex in games. Wait, that's here already, but wait until it gets even more real.
I used to play a lot of computer and console games but I got pretty bored of the same old thing again and again. Rarely there would be a true gem that I would play even after completing it, e.g. Diablo 2.
Nowadays I tend to play Go (The oriental board game) a lot. I am kind of addicted to it. I am still so rubbish that GnuGo can whip my ass on its max difficulty setting, but it's still fun playing against other people on the internet.
I have found something in Go that I couldn't find in any computer game, but still lacking is the eye-candy you get with modern games. Sometimes I have to get the latest 3d shooter and play it for a bit just to watch shiny things rotate.
graspee
Dont't forget the unbelievable funny Monkey Island 1 & 2 which were greatly written and sometimes ridiculously hard (how it the @#$@! was I to know you're suppose to use an actual *monkey* as a monkey wrench to shut off that valve by the waterfall to get at the secret passage behind it! arrgghh!).
I remember good old Mario 1 with the negative world and Mario 2 with all those cool boss enemies! Mario 3 was probably the most popular game ever on NES...
This may soud fruity but, you know a game is good when it leaves you with some cool memories of how cool and fun it was even if its through rose-tinted VR goggles...
why run from Vincenzo?
The Doom and Quake series of games are not good examples of retail products. Selling boxes at retail is only part, it may even be the smaller part, of the income. Licensing the engines found in these games is the other part of the income. These games are partly "advertisements" for the engine. That is how they can get away with such high system requirements. The requirements won't seem so steep by the time the products based on a licensed Doom III engine appear.
Funny thing is that I've seen these same articles and the same reactions for over twenty years know. Ever since Bill Kunkel et al started the first video game magazine, there always has been articles with a prognostication about the future of gaming and how crappy the games of today are.
It seems that the future articles state that: the games will be bigger, faster, have more features and be more realistic and interactive. The complaints seem to be the games of today lack innovation, have no plot or substance and have poor quality. The best articles have a up-and-coming game designer revealing the latest and greatest and a wily veteran designer with a "return to the basics" mantra.
Do yourself a favor. Next time you see an article with the "Future of Gaming!" title, just read the above paragraph which will sum it all up neatly for you and you've saved ten minutes of your life that you can now apply to playing Vice City.
This reminds me of an odd college lecture...
;)
I had a PC achitecture class at my college. When we got to the history of video adapters, our professor explained in graphic detail how each successive graphics adapter (mono to cga to ega to vga) was pushed along by the need for more detail in pornography!
He pointed out how EGA looked lousy, and 256 color VGA was bad for round things with light, such as women's stomach's or breasts. He was pretty into this explanation. He wasn't kidding! This class had about an equal number of men and women.
I would have thought desktop publishing or gaming or something like that would have pushed graphics adapters along. So, maybe based on my professors great theory, maybe its not the gamers that are pushing on realtime rendered 3d graphics, but maybe the porn-mongers. And all this time I thought it was quake upping the odds!
Of course, if you listen to liebermen games such as GTA3 are supposedly pornography.... Maybe I highly realistic, pornographic 3D will be the killer app to get a GPU into every home.
Easy guys, I put my pants on one leg at a time. The difference is after I put on my pants I make gold records!
http://www.the-underdogs.org/ is a great web site that hosts hundreds of the games of yester-year. So go ahead and get the timeless classics like the original Civilization, Pizza Tycoon, Defender of the Crown, Populous, Lords of the Realm, Ultima, System Shock, Eye of the Beholder, Master of Magic, X-Com...to name just a few :)
"The power of accurate observation is frequently called cynicism by those who don't have it." - G.B. Shaw
Agreed. I love the GameBoy Advance because it has some sweet 2D games that are very similar to those of the Super NES. It is a shame that Nintendo did not add any sort of lighting to the thing. Oh well, I still love it.
Metroid Prime looks awesome, but a part of me would rather see something more along the lines of Super Metroid.
If you look at Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and Capcom vs. SNK 2, you can see that Capcom did a great job of making 2D games that take advantage of 3D effects. The sprites were all 2D, but the backgrounds and special move effects were 3D.
Even Symphony of the Night (which was great because it was a Castlevania game that had lots
of the elements that made Super Metroid great as well) used some 3D effects to complement the mostly 2D graphics.
Nintendo could make a totally awesome Metroid game using 2D Samus and enemy sprites. They could use 3D effects for the backgrounds and weapon effects.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
oviously the person whom thought i was trolling instead of making a joke has not seen this video making fun of the apple switch commercials.. (i was reffering to..)
..
http://drunkgamers.com/switch0001.shtml
(drunkgamers.com)
pick your mirror from there.. pretty funny
You want sick? Here's a thought...
Imagine a holodeck program with a beowulf cluster of penis birds and hot grits on Natalie Portman. The title, "A Slashdotter's Dream".
"The words of the prophets are written on the Slashdot walls."
This article is about the future of tech journalism. Notice the byline at the end? "This article is the editorial opnion of gamespy network. Sponsored by the Intel Pentium 4"
Obviously, it was a well written and insightful article. And it was about all the reasons that new games will need bigger and faster processors. And Intel paid Gamespy to write it. Interesting, not wrong.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
"or 3rd person, which gives pretty good periphieral vision, but then makes lining up a jump a real pain"
Actually, with 3rd person I can usually get the above-head, looking down shot that I can't get with 1st person (where I look down, and try to land when the platform just sinks out of view so it'll be under my virtual feet). Any 1st person game I've played that has required special jumping tricks has always ended up being thrown away in disgust. 2D are much easier to line up the landings on, and 3rd person is the closest you can get to a fixed plain (straight down, an easy line-up).
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
He's right. It's like asking Colenol Sanders "Which do you think is healthier, chicken or beef?". Whether it's conscious or unconscious, the answer is going to be Chicken.
If your company writes the engines, you want the industry trend to move towards buying your engines.
...Also, I didn't know Buggalo could fly.
id software has a large following so I seriously doubt it will only sell 20,000 games.
:P
You missed the "For John Carmack it might work..." part of the original post
All the "future of gaming" articles I'm constantly seeing are about improving the physics models in games and creating more realistic graphics and actions?
Civilization 3 is an extremely popular game with no physics or highly advanced graphics engine, just some nice animated units that entertain you while your conquering Egyptians.
Heroes of Might and Magic is also a very popular game that also does not require physics, and barely has any animation.
Diablo 2 is unimaginably popular and their physics consists model consists of pushing you in the opposite direction when you get "knocked back" and all the characters/monsters die in roughly the same way with similar animations.
I'm not sure about Warcraft 3 but I can't imagine it requires a sophisticated engine that makes the goblins blow up in just the right way.
This is self-serving tripe about first person shooters. There are dozens of genres out there that don't require physics engines to make their games the absolute best. Hell I just want a game that doesn't crash or contain so many damn gameplay bugs; can we have an article about the future of better QA processes please?
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Well...it might have something to do with game realism. Making a game indistinguishable from reality is the Holy Grail of game developers and a large portion of gamers. Granted, there's those (myself included, as a matter of fact) that are content playing strategy games like Civilization 3, Alpha Centauri, or MOO. Point is, it's difficult to improve on something that's already good. Civilization 3 can only look so good, there's not much else that can be improved about it. FPS games, on the other hand, attempt to mimic the real world - and, in most cases, fail miserably. That's why there's such an overwhelming desire among the designers to make them look more realistic.
"The power of accurate observation is frequently called cynicism by those who don't have it." - G.B. Shaw
If you're looking for a good side scroller may I suggest Soldat, a multiplayer real-time "Worms" type game, guns guns guns and John Rambo's bow to boot!
Beats Abuse for multiplayer IMHO. Win32 only at this point unfortunately.
Wah!
Tell that to those poor electrons we have slaving away, whipped to faster and faster speeds. They don't even get overtime or even an uptime bonus. Poor sods.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
On page three of the GameSpy article, they get into AI a bit. I wonder if we're ever going to have AI cards like we do now with nics and graphics cards.
Why not? Why not have a whole processor dedicated specifically to the type of algorithmic applications that AI requires?
My
Limekiller
Are the most immersive. Think Zelda 64. Think GTA3. These are games with a lot of action and a lot of attention to detail. The designers made it entirely entertaining to do nothing more than explore the landscape all day long. The attention to every detail is there in some of our other favorites, too... Space Quest I-III spring to mind, not to mention the Z-word, Zork. Even the abstract, near-wordless Out of This World -- a game I'd happily spend hours arguing is the most entertaining game of the last twenty years -- had this quality, full of the little details in the periphery that made playing the game such a successful escapist fantasy.
I remember playing Prince of Persia back in the day on my green monochrome, system speaker sound, POS computer. It was a ton of fun. Then I went over to my cousin's house, who had a screaming fast 286 with EGA and an original 8-bit soundblaster, and you know what? It made Prince of Persia A LOT MORE FUN.
The game had a style that screenshots just can't reproduce fully... the characters were 2D polygonal models, not sprites, and the animation was superb. Cinematic cut scenes were a novelty in 1991, and the cut scenes in OOTW were fantastic.
The game looked like nothing else ever seen in video game world, broke all sorts of storytelling boudaries for video games (remember how it left it to the user to figure out where the cinematics ended and the game began? Totally immersive) and was a blast to play for hours on end. It had action elements, strategy elements, puzzle-solving... and a compelling, minimal storyline.
good game.
Granted, a good game engine goes further than just putting pixels on the screen, but the future of gaming doesn't rest in the ability of programmers to design wonderful new game engines. It lies in the creativity of the designers to take gaming in directions its never gone before.
This comment was generated by a squadron of trained super elite albino ninja chickens for you.
FreeDOS. Seriously. It even has experimental FAT32 support. And its free. And the latest one is CD bootable. Pop the cd in, load Ultima V to your FAT32 HD (unless you're using NTFS) and play. I believe you can even customize the boot cd and make an Ultima V "live cd". Saving might be a problem there tho...
FreeDOS.
Why not fork?
One thing I sorely missed here was NURBS. A lot was said about polygons, but that's old tech which shouldn't really be used. Just because MS forced DirectX polygons in the business. Little known fact is that Nvidia had spline support on their first gfx card, but was forced to abbandon it as MS wouldn't incorporate it.
What I also missed was more on user made content, more to the point: user made content which finds itself automatically into the game, instead of evryone who wants to see it having to download it. Broadband territory, sure, but essential for the huge worlds being dreamed up. Cheating is an issue, but I'm sure systems can be defined which limit opacity, size, wireframe and other cheats. Just imagine being able to REALLY create your own house/player character/house which you can use in the MMORPG.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
Warren Spector is a very smart man, with many fine accomplishments to his credit. I'm looking forward to his next projects quite eagerly.
That said, his involvement with the first Ultima Underworld game was quite small (Origin's liaison with Looking Glass), and his involvement with Thief, while not actually nil, was extremely close to it. He had no involvement with Thief 2 at all. And, of course, there were a lot of other people who helped make all these projects happen.
Warren's job includes talking to the press, so his name gets out there a lot, but if you actually pay attention to what he *says*, he's always trying to spread the credit around, because he *knows* that he tends to get way more than he deserves. Warren is indeed a true game innovator. But singling him out in this way is both misleading, and an insult to the dozens of other brilliant people who contributed to those games.
Warren is certainly due a lot of credit. But you do him (and other readers) a disservice if you try and give him so much more credit than he is due.
{This is an edited version of a post I've made before -- and doubtless will again.)
I want an MMPORG set in George Romero's universe featuring AI-controlled flesh-eating zombies who grow in number with each passing gamecycle and against whom I and the other players fight a persistent battle for resources, territory and survival. I want it to be as grim yet mordantly funny as Dawn of the Dead, emphasizing both communal action and blood-curdling thrills.
Yes, Resident Evil Online is pointing in this direction, but it's severely limited to small-scale squad play. Give us whole cities with thousands of human players banding together against stiffs. When there's no more room on Counterstrike servers, the dead will walk the earth!
How the mighty have fallen. From the beautiful, original, and stable populous, to the eye-candy (though the shape-changing hills are super lame) black and white which can't manage to remain stable with the latest patch. Next time use the APIs properly, guys.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Speaking of OOTW, you do know they made a real sequel, right? Not Flashback, but an actual game that picks up where the other one left off. It's called "Heart of the Alien", and it was unfortunately only released for the SegaCD.
But now it's it's available for free at The Underdogs. Just download, burn to a CD, and run on an emulator (I recommend Gens.)
Enjoy.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
...was one awesome game!
This space available.
The game industry can be summed up as thus:
1) Small company makes great, original game. They are not sure how they did it, and couldn't do it again; most game companies are one-hit-wonders with regards to original ideas.
2) Every other company makes a "me-too" product in order to cash in on the success of the original
3) The original game spawns a genre, in which the only improvements are to graphics, and sometimes (but not often) the AI. New versions force you to buy more expensive hardware. One or two companies dominate, and smaller fish nibble at the edges.
Someone decides that a bunch of game developers have some special insight into the future of gaming, while those same game developers seem to be able to do nothing but make a prettier, more CPU-intensive version of someone elses game.
This is one article I'll skip. All it will say is, "Yah, and we are going to re-write *insert game title here* but with real time vertex lighting, and more polygons..."
Actually WC3 has what looks like a few-years-ago 3D engine as the front end, and you can pan and zoom on your guys as they walk over hills, build stuff and lay into thier enemy. You can even watch your ice-wyrm gain altitude to fly over a wall.
But most of the time you don't bother, as that's not what the game is about. What the game is about is basically the same as WC1, and that's what makes it fun to play. If the game is going well, you don't have time to play with the eye-candy, you are caught up in the action. The 3d rendering of the same action just makes it this years model
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Well you answered you own question
'character to character interaction'
If there is more than one NPC in the game then each can run it's own AI thread. So from you example of sequential logic"
from there own perspective
Charater 1, checks that A and B are true
Charater 2, also checks that A and B are true
Both sets of checks can be run at the same time.
You can also run a logic statement as 2 or more substatements and combine the results.
Say I have
(A AND B) OR (C and D)
I can work out (A and B) at the same time as (C AND D) and then combine the results to run an or.
A B C and D will usually be 'complex' function e.g.
A could be somthing like can I see xyz and B might an I under water, C might be can I hear xyz and is it 'dark'.
Also most AI's don't run on straight logic, they run on neural-nets and heristics other techniques such as HMMA can be used in AI's to give a more natural learened response which all take a hell of a lot of processing power.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
The copy protection on B&W caused quite a lot of problems. Try applying a no-CD crack. When I bought B&W it wouldn't run on my W2K system at work (I worked at a games company at the time) without applying a no-cd crack.