Back in the early 1990s, when many of those now making games were in their teens, 3-D was mainly the provenance of specialized arcade machines and high-end workstations. It wasn't uncommon for home-computer gamers to be treated to lush 3-D scenes for things like introductory movies and then get booted back to Donkey Kong-like graphics for the actual gameplay. In 1993, in fact, 15-bit "high" color was state of the art, and the hardware focus was on video cards that could pump out enough individual pixels -- the dots that are the building blocks of 2-D graphics (think Lite-Brite) -- simply to bring color to that flat world. To be fair, this wasn't just a concern of gamers; burgeoning applications such as desktop publishing and computer graphics saw more colors and higher resolutions as a boon, too.

But true-blue gamers wanted to bring home what they saw (and lost innumerable quarters to) in the arcades. Those games at first presented the 3-D world as a construct of green-on-black vectors, as in the original Star Wars and Battlezone uprights. Then came the color Virtua Racing and Virtua Fighter from Sega, both of which presented an exciting hint that programmers could attain their dream of creating lively interactive worlds that might actually look real. The machines that drove those worlds, however, were custom-designed and expensive. Unless people were willing to shell out a few thousand dollars for a machine that could run just one game, a different solution would be needed for home gaming.

There was absolutely no consensus among 3-D technologists at the time; the goal of creating more realistic games was simple but no one quite knew how to achieve it. Call it anarchic or innovative, but during this period a flurry of 3-D techniques with Lewis Carroll-like names -- voxels and surfels, ray-tracing and tiling -- were all claimed as the holy grail at one point or another.

This experimentation (or confusion) was exemplified by the different tacks taken by two companies that sprang up, one in 1993 (Nvidia) and one in 1994 (3Dfx). The latter was founded by the arcade fan, engineer and amateur game programmer Scott Sellers along with Gary Tarolli and Ross Smith, all of whom had developed graphics hardware for the soon defunct company MediaVision. Nvidia's founders likewise had engineering backgrounds -- Jen-Hsun Huang had worked at LSI Logic's "system on a chip" project; Chris Malachowsky had been a senior engineer at Sun Microsystems; and Curtis Priem, who also came from Sun, had been instrumental in creating the first graphics chips for the original IBM PC.

Some longtime industry observers say, in retrospect, that Nvidia's first offering in the 3-D acceleration market was ahead of its time. As usual, that roughly translates to "It was a flop." Or, as Brian Hook, a 3Dfx lead programmer in 1996 who now runs his own game company puts it, "Nvidia nearly died with their first product."

For that first product, the NV1 processor, Nvidia took a leap of faith and chose to rely on "quadratic texture maps" as a way of describing 3-D objects. Instead of breaking a 3-D object into straight lines and building them up from triangles (polygons), "quads" define an object by breaking it into curved surfaces. It is, theoretically, a more advanced method that could provide a smoother look than polygons.

In contrast, 3Dfx didn't go about reinventing the wheel. It stuck with what seemed to be the most popular, if not the most powerful, solution -- polygons. But 3Dfx did contribute something important of its own. In the mid '90s, PC gaming lacked a standard set of 3-D APIs (application programming interfaces). An API is a specific set of commands that enable a software program to work with an operating system -- in this case, the 3-D APIs might tell the computer to draw a line somewhere, or to move it vertically. 3Dfx wrote its own APIs, reasoning that this would give all programmers a standardized set of ways to describe the images they wanted to build on-screen. They called these proprietary APIs Glide; it was both what led 3Dfx to the top and what played the biggest role in its downfall.

Glide allowed game developers to write accelerated versions of their games for computers sporting 3-D cards equipped with 3Dfx's new-for-1996 Voodoo chip set. In so doing, it set the stage for a great gaming leap forward.

"Glide was necessary early on because -- and this is something that many people forget -- [Microsoft's own API] Direct3D didn't exist when Glide was released," says Hook. "It wasn't until after Glide was released that Direct3D finally arrived -- and the first iteration was abysmal."

But Glide's superiority over Microsoft's offering was far from a deal clincher. When 3Dfx first began courting game developers, asking them to write games that would take advantage of 3Dfx chips, the company met with resistance. The developers not only saw more work in coding an extra version of their games for the as yet nonexistent owners of as yet nonexistent 3Dfx cards, but they also felt the card's projected price of about $400 would severely limit the market.

The high price also caused problems when 3Dfx tried to get third parties to manufacture cards based on 3Dfx's generic, or "reference," design. (This handing-off to a manufacturer was standard practice among most video chip makers; later, when deviating from this paradigm, 3Dfx would make a costly gamble.) For consumers, the expense would be even greater, since computers equipped with a 3Dfx product would still need a 2-D graphics card -- and this limitation remained until very late in the game for 3Dfx, long after competitors had released successful 2-D/3-D cards.

Hook says that at the time 3Dfx estimated it would sell about a thousand units a month if it was lucky. The rest of the company's revenue, 3Dfx thought, was going to have to come from selling its chips to coin-op manufacturers, who could then make easy versions of its games for personal computers.

Then came 3Dfx's lucky break. The price for memory chips -- RAM -- fell through the floor in 1996. The expected retail price for a Voodoo card dropped by almost $100, smashing through a psychological barrier. Manufacturers lined up to build cards with Voodoo chips, and game developers such as Core Designs turned out Glide-specific versions of games that stunned the gaming press from the fan boys to the jaded old coots.

Core's Tomb Raider, with the curvaceous Lara Croft, became a worldwide model of the killer app for the new 3-D tech. PC owners without acceleration could still run the game, but they would see flat and opaque ponds rather than the Glide version's translucent, shimmering water; their scenes would not have colored lighting; and, not least, the lower polygon count in unaccelerated versions meant that Ms. Croft's greatest assets appeared a bit ... pointy.

Another coup came when id Software's game god, John Carmack, built a software compatibility layer that enabled 3Dfx cards to accelerate a version of id's blockbuster game Quake. Thanks to Carmack's reputation and the previous success of Doom and Doom II, Quake was a must-have, and it set a new standard for how a game should look; it alone prompted unknown numbers of gamers to shell out for a 3Dfx card. The company was on a roll.

As Thomas Monk, a writer for the Web site Accelenation, puts it: "In 1996 3Dfx produced a great product with fantastic image quality and performance. The transformation of Tomb Raider was evident for all to see and the Voodoo chip set was the most eagerly anticipated that year." Other game developers jumped on the Glide wagon, writing effects-heavy games that created a demand for the Voodoo card, which, in turn, created a demand for more and more advanced-looking games. The cycle had begun.

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