It's interesting to note that the CG for the ballroom scene was contracted out to Pixar.
As others have mentioned TRON has this one beat by almost 10 years. The Littlest Mermaid (1989) had a few CG elements as well.
Here is the opinion of someone who has worked in the industry for a few years.
I've worked on many titles - some good, some bad, some commercially/critically successful, some not.
The article that spawned this discussion wasn't terribly informative. The author shows very little understanding of how the games industry works, and thus achieves very little insight.
As an aside, I'll lump the nostalgic "good 'ole 2D days" and the "there's no innovation anymore" people into this category as well. They are suffering from selective memory. If you are one of the above, please take this little quiz:
1. how many derivative 2D side-scrollers, fighters, and lame movie licenses were developed in the 80s for the 8/16 bit consoles? (answer: seemingly billions)
2. how many of these games sucked? (answer: most of them - not unlike today, no?)
Back to the topic at hand.
A lot of things have to happen to create a quality, successful game. Some of these things are within an average (that is, not swimming in an ocean of money) developer's control, some not. When it all comes together (the concept, budget, team, marketing, implementation), it is a truly great thing, but it doesn't happen often. Here are some realities of the business:
1. Game development is usually date-driven not quality-driven. Games have to ship on the contract-agreed completion date, not when they are ready from a quality standpoint. A publisher will rarely fund development much past the X-mas buying season and developers can't afford such things.
2. Games are hard to make. We usually have to ship our successes as well our failures. Some games will never be of high quality regardless of how much effort is spent to improve them, but most of those will be shipped.
3. Games are expensive to make, margins are razor-thin, developers don't have much money in the bank.
4. Contracts are usually front-loaded, which means developers base their revenue on shipping the game, not on its success in the market. This does not incent quality. Game companies can choose to operate under a riskier back-end revenue strategy. That is, the developer funds the game out of their own (or a bank's) pocket, hoping for a bigger cut of the sales royalties. This is great if you can create a hit every time. See point 2. It doesn't take too many failures to kill a developer under this model. See Looking Glass for an example.
Most game company eek out a living by shipping the best game they can make under the 12-18 month contracts offered by publishers. Sometimes you can make a good game under these circumstances, sometimes not. Whatever the case, the game is going to hit the shelves no-matter-what.
Unless you have tonnes of cash, you can't operate a company like Blizzard does.
Catch-22? To some degree. Eventually, a well-run developer can put enough pennies in the piggybank to to develop a title on their own terms, spending enough time to "get it right". Alternatively, your founders can be independently wealthy (see Valve). Ultimately, it's just another brutal business, where many of us that actually care about what we create stick around hoping that we'll get our one shot to hit one out of the park.
That screenshot from Simpsons Road Rage dates from around E3. There were a lot of changes made to the art between then and the release at the end of October. See the arrow at the top of the screen? In the final version of the game, it is a pointing hand. Unless they stole a pre-alpha build of the game and somehow made it work on the emulator (it wouldn't work on a real Xbox - we were on pre-production hardware then), then someone's not being entirely truthful here. Nice hoax though.
Slashdot Mirror
It's interesting to note that the CG for the ballroom scene was contracted out to Pixar. As others have mentioned TRON has this one beat by almost 10 years. The Littlest Mermaid (1989) had a few CG elements as well.
Calm down folks. From what I can tell from poking around on Google, the guy who wrote this code works at Havok.
Here is the opinion of someone who has worked in the industry for a few years.
I've worked on many titles - some good, some bad, some commercially/critically successful, some not.
The article that spawned this discussion wasn't terribly informative. The author shows very little understanding of how the games industry works, and thus achieves very little insight.
As an aside, I'll lump the nostalgic "good 'ole 2D days" and the "there's no innovation anymore" people into this category as well. They are suffering from selective memory. If you are one of the above, please take this little quiz:
1. how many derivative 2D side-scrollers, fighters, and lame movie licenses were developed in the 80s for the 8/16 bit consoles? (answer: seemingly billions)
2. how many of these games sucked? (answer: most of them - not unlike today, no?)
Back to the topic at hand.
A lot of things have to happen to create a quality, successful game. Some of these things are within an average (that is, not swimming in an ocean of money) developer's control, some not. When it all comes together (the concept, budget, team, marketing, implementation), it is a truly great thing, but it doesn't happen often. Here are some realities of the business:
1. Game development is usually date-driven not quality-driven. Games have to ship on the contract-agreed completion date, not when they are ready from a quality standpoint. A publisher will rarely fund development much past the X-mas buying season and developers can't afford such things.
2. Games are hard to make. We usually have to ship our successes as well our failures. Some games will never be of high quality regardless of how much effort is spent to improve them, but most of those will be shipped.
3. Games are expensive to make, margins are razor-thin, developers don't have much money in the bank.
4. Contracts are usually front-loaded, which means developers base their revenue on shipping the game, not on its success in the market. This does not incent quality. Game companies can choose to operate under a riskier back-end revenue strategy. That is, the developer funds the game out of their own (or a bank's) pocket, hoping for a bigger cut of the sales royalties. This is great if you can create a hit every time. See point 2. It doesn't take too many failures to kill a developer under this model. See Looking Glass for an example.
Most game company eek out a living by shipping the best game they can make under the 12-18 month contracts offered by publishers. Sometimes you can make a good game under these circumstances, sometimes not. Whatever the case, the game is going to hit the shelves no-matter-what.
Unless you have tonnes of cash, you can't operate a company like Blizzard does.
Catch-22? To some degree. Eventually, a well-run developer can put enough pennies in the piggybank to to develop a title on their own terms, spending enough time to "get it right". Alternatively, your founders can be independently wealthy (see Valve). Ultimately, it's just another brutal business, where many of us that actually care about what we create stick around hoping that we'll get our one shot to hit one out of the park.
That screenshot from Simpsons Road Rage dates from around E3. There were a lot of changes made to the art between then and the release at the end of October. See the arrow at the top of the screen? In the final version of the game, it is a pointing hand. Unless they stole a pre-alpha build of the game and somehow made it work on the emulator (it wouldn't work on a real Xbox - we were on pre-production hardware then), then someone's not being entirely truthful here. Nice hoax though.