Nostalgia

I just watched the first 3 episodes of Fallout and was pleasantly surprised. The vibe felt mostly there and it threw me back to Fallout 3, which stands as one of my favorite games of all time. The contrast between old music and the post-apocalyptic world was so brilliant, I'm glad they kept it in the show. But as I was watching and thinking about the past, I got some nostalgic feeling. Growing up in the Internet era, a lot of things online were new, games were finally throwing you into immersive environments and things generally felt quirky and experimental. I remember creating my first web pages just to be part of that world, and I was just a kid!

Beyond that, I got to think about how creative people were when technology was so limited in resources. If you haven't read "Masters of Doom" I highly recommend it. Exploring the journey and the clever usage of technology back then is incredibly fascinating. Today we sometimes take for granted how much computing power we have at our disposal. We don't have to come up with ingenuous solutions most of the time, and that's ok. I believe we democratize the creative act with computers while still leaving room for exceptional minds to come out on top. On the other hand, it comes at a price, a lot of poor content gets published and it is increasingly difficult to distinguish the good from the bad.

I think overall it's a good direction, poor content gets to die out by itself eventually. In a way, I hope we reach a point where we are "capped" by our machines and we have to go back to brainstorm how to get past the limitations we have. Nowadays the direction is at times to just throw more data, memory, or CPU at a problem and hope that solves it. At the pace we are going with AI, I believe it might be a while but I also see the industry starting to hit some bumps. I'm very curious to learn who will eventually prevail.

Thoughts

Thinking back at the early days of the Internet era and the video game industry, it's fun to look at how we made clever use of the tech at our disposal to bring something new to the table. I remember the reuse of assets in Super Mario where bushes and clouds were the same (if my memory doesn't fail me). While some of those ideas seem obvious today, they were pretty brilliant in their simplicity. I trust that these bright problem-solving approaches are not lost but just harder to find. The need to innovate within boundaries often led to iconic breakthroughs. These constraints didn't hinder creativity; rather, they fostered a distinctive style that is celebrated and revered today. Looking at the future, I'm cautiously optimistic about constraint-driven creativity emerging again.