Much of the time back then, the people shooting footage like that only had a vague idea of how chroma keying actually worked, and they'd only consult the CG artists long after the fact. The artist's job very often involved fixing messes like that, where producers and directors gave us garbage to work with because they thought computers were magic. They were well-meaning but largely clueless. Anyway, this particular project reminds me of a number of pipe dream projects I saw from the 90s, where rich dreamers who read Neuromancer thought they were gonna single-handedly revolutionize everything from children's TV to theme parks and shopping malls. It always boiled down to "take this ordinary thing, but then just make it CG!" We gladly took their money and did whatever they wanted, up until it became clear to them that working with computers isn't exactly some effortless, automatic process - especially not back then.
I'm glad so many people are replying and saying "yep, it totally was like that" about much of this, haha. The tune never seems to change with this stuff - I think the only thing that changes is the sincerity; it's all grifting nowadays.
@@CathodeRayDude No, really, there was an epidemic of this. Lamentably, no one was ever tried for Video Toaster abuse in the Hague. Frankly, today's metaverse isn't much different near as I can tell, save for the networking and cloud computing behind it, of course. I'm 42 now (yikes), and you appear to be considerably younger than that; I suspect there's a lot you've missed simply because you don't know to look for it. Watching your videos invokes a kaleidoscopic torrent of memories. Up until about 14 (1994, when I discovered Linux, the internet, my supplemental social life, etc.), I was enamored with video production and multimedia in general. There's a slew of topics I could suggest, but I don't know how to contact you. Oh, BTW, have you done any videos on U-Matic? That's where the action is (well, that and betacam, but I'm partial to U-Matic because the machines were such beasts).. The earliest cart format I'm aware of is U-Matic, which was available for home use in 1970, maybe 71 (?) I might be confabulating, but I don't think so. The first VTR for home use was produced by Sony in the mid 1960s--almost positive. I suspect you're aware of this and simply couldn't procure a museum piece. 😂
I worked on something similar with augmented reality. I pointed out that the green screen set was way underlit. "It's fine, we don't want it perfect." It was impossible to pull mattes from the video. The game eventually got made but was way over budget and didn't get anywhere.
You know, the "take this ordinary thing, but then just make it CG!" thing really reminds me of how these days we have a lot of "take this ordinary thing, but tie it into a decentralized speculative trading platform!" going on.
Okay, this is a blast from the past. I worked at Sierra Online from 1991 to 1999. My work was focused on their "The Sierra Network" business. I made several of the games there. Ahh, so early in my career. I was on a nostalgia trip this evening with the family and came across your video. In any case, I hadn't thought of "Cyber Park" for decades. :) Your take was pretty much right. Ken and Roberta Williams invested heavily in pioneering online games via TSN. However, it was never a profitable venture. They started looking for a means to sell that piece of the business to a more "progressive" (read: idiotic) partner. AT&T was the right mark. Along the same time, Sierra had invested heavily in FMV games and tech infrastructure. The Worlds Away folks got involved, taking advantage of the significant resources that Sierra expended. Tons of prototyping work was done using FMV actors in Sierra's recoding studio. Oh man. Good times. As you predicted in the video, there was a transition happening from pre-rendered sprites to "full 3D" tech. INN decided to chase the new shiny, throwing out the substantial investment to upgrade Cyber Park to the new hotness. I'm not sure what executives were responsible, but I blame AT&T and AOL. They were all in on remaining relevant. Especially AOL. :) So the company pivoted toward 3D. Spun wheels for 5 years. Didn't achieve milestones and died a whimpering death. Sad. Thanks for your video. I really appreciated the unintentional revival of old memories from my early career.
Hahaha, wow, I can't believe this made it all the way back to you! Glad to see my intuition was right, hope I wasn't *too* disrespectful towards those early "cyberspace" efforts, and thank you so much for the reply!
I don't know how pinning comments work and maybe you can only pin one comment, but I think that this comment should be pinned since it answers your questions.
it's one of my favorite things about humanity. we screw up so much, but stuff like this is beautiful. this guy was a serial dickweed and we are NEVER letting him live it down.
So you know how you UA-cam shows you one comment preview before you tap on them? This was that, and I was about to ask what either you were on and if I could have some, but now I’m only almost finished and finally get it. Good thing I didn’t comment earlier.
@@JaredConnell The greatest storytelling twist in history is that Ea-Nasir was selling perfectly acceptable copper, he just ran into a bad string of complainers and tire kickers.
Your comment about virtual realities constantly being reinvented in the 90’s somehow gives me hope that Meta’s current obsession with the “Metaverse” will also die out soon 🤞
Already dead, hell even those who want to be on an another world are not even interested in Meta's offering and instead they spend their time on either VRChat or before that Second Life which actually employ creative freedom in terms of world or avatars.
I absolutely love that some shady merchant named Ea-nasir got a bad Mesopotamian era yelp from a customer named Nanni, and that his copper was such a ripoff that we still remember the bad review he got to this very day, nearly 3800 years later! 🤣
@@isaacandersen1 @Isaac Andersen Some of the earliest known examples of writing come from ancient Mesopotamia, and consist of clay tablets. One of the early examples of writing includes a letter that was written by a customer (Nanni) to a merchant (Ea-Nasir), complaining about his poor quality copper ingots, the way he hassled his messengers, and expressing anger over the way he's been treated. It reads as follows: _Tell Ea-nasir: Nanni sends the following message:_ _When you came, you said to me as follows : “I will give Gimil-Sin (when he comes) fine quality copper ingots.” You left then but you did not do what you promised me. You put ingots which were not good before my messenger (Sit-Sin) and said: “If you want to take them, take them; if you do not want to take them, go away!”_ _What do you take me for, that you treat somebody like me with such contempt? I have sent as messengers gentlemen like ourselves to collect the bag with my money (deposited with you) but you have treated me with contempt by sending them back to me empty-handed several times, and that through enemy territory. Is there anyone among the merchants who trade with Telmun who has treated me in this way? You alone treat my messenger with contempt! On account of that one (trifling) mina of silver which I owe(?) you, you feel free to speak in such a way, while I have given to the palace on your behalf 1,080 pounds of copper, and umi-abum has likewise given 1,080 pounds of copper, apart from what we both have had written on a sealed tablet to be kept in the temple of Samas._ _How have you treated me for that copper? You have withheld my money bag from me in enemy territory; it is now up to you to restore (my money) to me in full._ _Take cognizance that (from now on) I will not accept here any copper from you that is not of fine quality. I shall (from now on) select and take the ingots individually in my own yard, and I shall exercise against you my right of rejection because you have treated me with contempt._ We know all of this, thanks to those ancient tablets that were written to complain to this bad copper supplier. Some things never change...
@@isaacandersen1 Way back in the day there was a jackass named Ea-nasir who sold someone some really shitty copper. It was discovered that he actually made it a habit to rip people off on junk-quality or nonexistant copper. The oldest known written complaint we have is a tablet where one of his customers is roasting the fuck out of him. You can find a wikipedia article about it titled "Complaint tablet to Ea-nasir" and there are also modern-english readings of it on youtube.
I was an unpaid intern at a local news station when I was 15 back in 2001. One of my first tasks was to catalog their ENTIRE library of giant Beta tapes from the 80’s and 90’s. Every day was watching random tapes and making timestamps on little slips that went in the case that I’m sure no one ever looked at again. Definitely weird stuff on there: “Oh here’s when the local mall opened in the 80’s”….”Oh here’s a murder from the 90’s”
I would have *killed* for that job, even though I know I would have been bored to tears. You'd see the dullest stuff on the planet, plus the occasional "wow this is *incredible.*"
@@CathodeRayDude honestly, it was super awesome. I even stumbled across random b roll footage of myself from like 5 years prior. The tapes were all on those big rolling archive shelves that could be moved to reveal more shelves.
“This same person later shows up rocking a look that shouts nothing so much as ‘I’m on my way to the mesopotamian market to sell some poor-quality copper.’” That whole segment of riffing was a delight. Keep up the sass, CRD
One of (if not the) oldest remaining examples of human writing is the Kish tablet, in which a Sumerian is throwing shade at a dodgy copper merchant. In 3500bce. @@caltrous942
I almost died laughing when you had all the meticulously recreated walk cycles of those "totally normal people you'd see at a casino" sprites wandering around behind you.
Thanks for all the effort put into this! I would totally play a Communications Raygun Dude platformer. When you made reference to VRML, it reminded me of the RIPscrip/RIPscript BBSs that were around in the mid 90's. You used a special terminal app (RIPTerm) and it used previously-downloaded vector assets to display things in a similar sprite-like environment. You dialed up to the BBS, spent an hour downloading the assets while hoping mom didn't pick up the phone, and later explored a fairly uninteresting environment - all over a 2400 baud modem. It was pretty sweet for the time, but like the 3D 'third space' services you mentioned it never really caught on. The early to mid 90's were a wild time.
I don't think VRML and RIPscript were directly comparable. VRML is exactly what was in the video -- a polygonal 3D rendering environment brought to web browsers for.... reasons. (?) There was a lot of talk of "next-level interactivity" and things like that. The closest functional use I can imagine for it are the 3D views of products, or websites where you can navigate the globe by grabbing it and twirling it around. It came and went with barely a whimper, and now HTML does all of that and far more. RIPscript was trying to upgrade a text-only experience to a GUI. Instead of the typical BBS menu page, where you would press "F" for the files section, "M" for mail, "G" for door games, etc. etc., you could just click on the button. Was this is a necessary improvement? Not really. Was it an improvement at all? Ehhh... They did bundle a fairly reasonable selection of assets (graphical icons) with the client, so it wasn't necessary to pack your BBS with lots of custom graphics that needed to be downloaded separately (but of course, nearly every Sysop was going to do his own art anyway), and at least it was a one-time download (until something changed.) Then, if you were to time how long it took to fill an 80x25 screen with custom ANSI art, or a handful of vector graphics commands, the RIP interface often really was quite snappy in comparison. But at least in my local BBS scene, it didn't exactly dominate. I did enjoy the novelty when it was supported, enough to prefer using RIPterm, even with it being a distant second in quality and features to something like Telix.
I worked with these tapes daily in a post-production facility between 2005-2015 and I cringed a bit when I saw you don't have those tapes in "write-protect" mode. The little red tab needs to be pushed down in order to make them "read-only". But to get to the point: wonderful video you made! :D
Oh my god did I really? What on earth, I could SWEAR I had set them correctly when I received them. It stings to see I could have wiped these by brushing the wrong button. Thank you, I'll fix that when I'm back at the studio.
I accidentally did that to a cassette of shortwave broadcast recordings I made ca. 1996. Years later, about 2005, I was trying to digitize a China Radio International jingle, and for all those years I had neglected to take off the scotch tape over the write-protect holes. I accidentally dabbed REC while toggling REW and PLAY and munched away 2 seconds of the very pleasant and melodic jingle before I realized what was happening. I digitized what was left but I can only play the full version on an imaginary Realistic tape player in my head.
I loved that "oh you" look at the betcam player as you tapped the tape in. I miss the lived-in experience of physical media like that. Not all the problems that caused but y'know, I liked handling the stuff
I had done about six takes, finally got the delivery perfect, and on that take only, the tape didn't index. Right after the cut, I lost it laughing, and knew I had to use *that* take.
@@CathodeRayDude Oh that's perfect. Watching the rest of the video, it's wild how this metaverse crap keeps coming around in exactly the same way. I love my social VR spaces but I can't comprehend the folks trying to sell VR as "the new internet". It's nutty.
@@CathodeRayDude the tape ops use to smash the tapes into the elevators so hard they would break the limit switches, or worse break the wires to the switches! I fixed a lot of VTR's back in the day, after rescuing countless tapes with cotton swabs so that finger grease or metal didn't touch the tape! Most of those tapes were alsways masters, and the operators would be sweating bullets hoping you were able to remove the tape, fix the machine, in a timely fashion, so they could pull the hundred or so daily dubs, and get the tapes out to the couriers in time!
After watching video game review videos for years yours is the first to show the actual technique for the classic term “hand drawn sprites”. Tip of the hat, Sir. Keep up the good work! Stellar content!
I swear I've seen some of these "walk cycles" floating around somewhere before as low-res gifs, but you *definitely* have the highest-res capture of them right now. The video is just packed chock full of high-effort edits for a shitpost. I love all the spritework throughout, and the patreon scroll snuck in at the end is phenomenal. You're just flexing the entire time and I love to see it.
The style of editing you’re talking about with “The Net” feels intentional. Living in the UK I can assure you that programmes about technology kept a similar style well into the 2000’s. I remember watching an episode of “The Money Programme” on Second Life that was the exact same style. Let me tell you, as a young lass, I had many a sleepless night over some of these editing choices. The regular BBC science programme “Horizon” still has some absolutely wild photography for what is essentially just a jazzed up science lesson. I’d also recommend watching any prime time Channel 4 documentary in that late 90’s as many of those stray uncomfortably far into horror
The UK has a pretty long history of creating weird, almost art-house style documentaries. Watch enough BBC Four and you see this kind of bizarre, David Lynchian, Adam Curtisy-style editing a lot.
@@theblah12 Oh yeah, how could I forget about BBC Four? Like, it positions itself as the old people’s channel and then along comes 10 pm and then out comes the nightmare fuel. Then again, some of the imported shows have been pretty good, I enjoyed The Bridge and Lillyhammer quite a bit
Yeah I was going to say this. Back in the day BBC prided themselves on this amazing new video technology they had and went way overboard cramming it in to random shows. There is some old footage knocking around of BBC themselves showing it off
I'm pretty sure that swagger is almost exactly replicated in one of the saints row games. Also some of the clothing choices too. Absolutely fantastic work by all actors.
Very cool, this was definitely an entertaining ride into a period of sprite work. I do recall playing on the Sierra Network in the mid 90s, so I'd suspect AT&T was then the owner when I was playing on it. The video was nicely wrapped up into this bundle of mystery that had me wondering is there going to be more to this footage. But by the end it really was the entirety of all the different touch points that made it great. Awesome work, keep it up!
I started with Sierra on my C-64. Usually i spent most of my time at the volcano playing Fates of Twinion. I didn't play the other RPG, The ruins of Cawdor all that much. The only other game i remember spending any time with was the WWI plane simulator (which was ok i guess). To be honest between fidonet and backdoor games i only spent about three or four hours a week on INN. Fun stuff for the time though. Edit: weird. I was proof reading (yeah I really need to wait to hit save after i've proof read) and i seem to have missed the first game in the series... right so i got the service to play "The Shadow of Yserbius". I was a member for about a year when the other two games came along as sequels to shadows. Man the nostalgia train is real right now...
Fantastic video, your production quality is splendid! Way above even some high-budget TV programs. This feels like an episode of Sherlock the way you researched all of these obscure 90s games to find the origin of the tape.
Your videos just keep on getting better and better. This was awesome. That wall has worked out great! Leaving that uplighter there makes it more interesting somehow. And as mentioned in Patreon - wow a video Snappy. I had one or more of these.
Bruh... nice rack. A couple weeks ago I managed to snag a beta camcorder at a pawn shop for $60. Full setup, bag, a few lenses, a few blanks, several batteries, and a mountable mic(no boom pole though). Jumped on it like I found gold. Lol Awesome find on those tapes, always loved the photo realistic sprite look.
32:45 I used The Sierra Network a bit around this time, and you're right. IIRC there was a chatroom of sorts, but it wasn't any kind of "virtual space." Just a chatroom. Otherwise it was just basic games with 2D art and the painterly hub world, as you put it. Plus the Red Baron game was 3D polygonal, of course. (And, for the record, online deathmatch dogfights in 1991 was mind-blowing. 😀)
The two RPG's (you had to "go" to the volcano to get there) were a lot of fun. I spent most of my time there. What's funny is that i used INN on a C-64 back then. Sometimes i miss the level of calm and patient waiting was required back then. It was most certainly a different time.
I remember Sierra Network about the same way. It was initially mind blowing as an online space compared to BBS’s at the time, but ultimately not much more than a fancy graphical menu. I eventually found 4 player Doom deathmatches via BBS matchmaking to be more rewarding.
@@lumpmoose Well, and it was just so expensive. A monthly fee + an hourly fee, as well as whatever telephone charges applied. I get that running a dial-up network at the time was absurdly expensive, but TSN/TIN just didn't offer enough substance for the price. I only used it when I had a free trial subscription.
It's still online (as an emulated telnet/modem service). You can even use the original disks for it. I think it's called INNProxy. I just used it to play some Yserbius last year.
@@joe--cool it's honestly surprising how many of the old services are still puttering along either officially or via fan efforts to keep them going. Even some of the VRML dead ends that were barely functional in the first place (speaking as someone that did visit them in the 90s and early aughts). SMH
The blue screen was used to offer the director real time game backgrounds. Those did not need to be perfect but would add additional context for costumes/colors.
26:45 😂I laughed out loud and felt very pleased with myself for getting that reference. Be careful selling low-quality copper, someone might write a strongly-worded complaint and you never know who might see it!
I used to be a master control operator at a TV station and I used those Betacam tapes all the time. The normal sized ones were mostly used for syndicated shows, and the giant ones were used for commercials. There are tons of obscure formats in the broadcast industry that most people don't even know about. There was a VHS-based counterpart to Betacam called MII, which I believe also had a giant version. My station had a robotic machine to automatically play those, though they had stopped using it when I started there. During the HD transition we also used a format called Professional Disc, which was basically a rewritable Blu-ray in a cartridge.
ROBOTIC HANDLED MII ...i'm terrifed :D MII was the most freaking CURSED format and a robot that handles MII is just *chef's kiss* double cursed. Love it. MII is a case of "what on earth were you thinking?!" from Panasonic and they themselves seem to have known it! It was basically an effort to shoehorn existing S-VHS into a professional format, they produced the decks for exactly four years then abruptly turned around and washed their hands completely of it.
Man, you're so effing cool, CRD. I love the feel of your videos - that you've researched an incredible amount and put it _all_ in the video in an immensely entertaining way. Keep being your awesome self. Love it!
More about CyberPark: CyberPark is designed like a city, with buildings and various "neighborhoods" that will house entertainment activities and games appealing to specific communities of interest. It will be "staffed" with fully animated non-player inhabited characters (NPIs), including sorcerers, waiters, butlers, janitors and others, that interact with the 3D animated character personas that can be customized by individual players. Founded in 1991, The ImagiNation Network is the first and largest online service totally dedicated to interactive entertainment. INN currently features more than 30 multi-player games, including strategy, card and board games, action and sports games, flight simulations, role-playing games and others. I imagine out of all of the projects going on with CyberPark, this is what the recorded takes were probably for.
Oh, my, god. When you said "skip ahead if you know this" I naively started skipping to I dunno, save a little time, you were being very kind to warn me. As soon as I saw you were actually demonstrating by creating sprites of yourself in costumes I backed that train right back. I had to see all that effort you poured into that, well done sir! They looked awesome, I totally woulda played the shit out of the game if you were the main character
Fantastic video as always. Audibly cackled at your choice of Combat Pacific Bell Technician with the butt set and all as your character for demonstration. Looking forward to at least playing the demo of that when it's out...
This whole video is a slow and bizarre head trip. Each little surprise has comedic timing, dry delivery and long lead up time and not a single one of the strange things you've brought up here gives a proper clue as to what you're about to bring up next. Nicely done.
Top quality stuff as always. The breakdown of hand drawn VS captured sprites was wonderfully done, and the editing used to demonstrate was very fun. If nothing else these tapes certainly drove an interesting topic, and it would be fun to see someone make sprites from the raw footage and use them for something, even as a joke.
I'd guess if they didn't need the blue for keying the MK footage, that choosing to have the performers on the neutral gray floor would minimise blue casting/spill onto the actors. This method would also give them high quality video they could use in things like TV commercials and still have the ability for background replacement to match the MK style behind the "fighting surface" in that footage.
Yeah MK3 switched to Betacam recordings, MK1 and MK2 used plain grey backgrounds with manually captured single frames. 1&2 were manually cut out while 3 used some chroma key and then tidied it up.
I love how you have that lamp on your wall, as a sort of way to anchor us down (much like a computer desktop.) Your chroma key work remains second to just a few other creators. I'm hoping to get some space so I can -steal- borrow your shooting and framing style.
Neat story on a very bizarre find, and your video quality is as stunning as ever. Was pretty shocked when I saw those cursed Super Mario Brothers Special sprites for the sprite explanation though, weird deep cut!
Lost media like this is some of my favourite stuff. I know you said you were just a bit disappointment that what you found wasn't something from something more known, but this kind of discovery of lost bits from an unknown and mysterious project just gets the gears turning and gets me all excited.
Love the "Out of This World"/"Another World" reference. That game was IMPOSSIBLE for the SNES but that didn't stop us spending dozens of hours trying to figure it out!
I already liked the video before watching, because I've never been disappointed by one of your videos, then I see "forgotten game" and hear "ripping tapes" and know it's gonna be great. Liking before I get engrossed in the video ensures I don't forget.
this was one of your best edited videos. Such great works done in this video. And I love the "The Net" reference and clip inclusions. I hadn't thought about that whacky show in forever!
I love your high-quality content, you put so much effort and passion into you're editing and research. I imagine it takes you hours of work. Totally worth every minute bro.
Great video! My own speculation would be that the Cyber Park concept may have been intended for a Sierra/Imagination Network 2.0 revamp. I would've only been about 10-12 years old, but my family subscribed for some time to the Imagination Network, roughly 1992-1994, and I remember enjoying it greatly, especially dog fights in Red Baron. However, there was a facet blocked off to me - there was at least one, possibly two "adults-only" areas to the Imagination Network, one of which I believe was casino-type games without actual gambling (or no real-world money was involved), the other a social-focused space. The characters in your tape footage strike me as the sort more intended for at least teenagers, whereas my recollection of Imagination overall was that it was meant to be family friendly and enjoyable by say kids of 7 years old and up. The main world and spaces open to everyone had a very Disney feel. My memory is also that Sierra Network/Imagination was *only* distributed on diskettes, the copy my family had being something like at least 5-8 disks. My hunch would be that there was interest in perhaps both making a move to CD-ROM and expanding the experiences the service offered. I lean toward CD-ROM being a part driver of this because those sprites still wouldn't have been lightweight if it were being brought to customers by diskette and had to be installed on a hard drive (my family's was just 120mb then). The original PC port of Mortal Kombat, which was just plain VGA, I remember as having a good number of 3.5 disks, off hand I'd wager 7, plus Sierra was relatively quick to embrace SVGA. Additionally, my memory is vague, but I recall hearing as part of the history of Phantasmagoria that Sierra had built a special FMV studio at great expense. Given the year of 1991 on the tapes, which well pre-dates the 1995 release of Phantasmagoria, what you have in those tapes could be the prototype use of that studio, before Phantasmagoria was in full production and potentially even pre-dating its early use on games like Police Quest 4 and Gabriel Knight 1 (which had small bits of FMV). After Phantasmagoria, I believe the studio was only used for Gabriel Knight 2 The Beast Within and Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh. While I could be mistaken about this, the later 3D version of Cyber Park you showed little demo bits of could've also been a later iteration possibly built using the 3D tech of GK3 Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned, or at least it tracks with Sierra's abrupt change to using 3D that was, even in its day, very ugly and IMO led to their first-party titles becoming largely lackluster and the company eventually being sold off, I think to Vivendi. Separately, just a bit of odd trivia: I'm a fellow Seattleite and attended college in Everett, a now closed school called Henry Cogswell College, where I did their Digital Arts program with a selected emphasis on filmmaking. My Digital Cinematography teacher was Greg Roach, lead director/designer of The X-Files FMV game and who also had made the early CD-ROM FMV games Quantum Gate and Vortex: Quantum Gate 2. He never brought up his experience making games in his class far as I can recall, but he was a fantastic instructor. I learned a ton and had great fun doing so. Around the time I graduated and had become aware of his background, I reached out to Mr. Roach to ask if I could demo the Virtual Cinema system he and his team had made for their games, specifically tailored to interactive FMV experiences, but unfortunately that didn't pan out. He was very polite, but that was a highly specialized propriety toolset I'm sure they were much more interested sharing with well established companies for potential licensing and not some student just curious about poking around how it functioned. Still, being someone forever curious in interactive storytelling, I wish I'd been able to learn more about it and if there were any chance Virtual Cinema could've been deployed for DVD-ROM with superior video quality and minimal if any disc swapping.
I was a news photographer "back in the day" and when betamax came out for ENG or electronic News Gathering. We used 3/4 inch decks with a separate camera connected to a camera via a large camera cable. a field 3/4 inch tape held a whopping 20 mins!! beta was such a shift for us!! we then came back and edited from our small 3.4 to larger production tapes. larger 3/4 inch tape carts for use on air. They were 5 min tapes and went into a umatic machine. the machine was about the same size at the beta machine you show but it had a way larger tape slot! LOL!! I think I have a portable umatic field dech stuffed in one of my storage barns from then... just to move forward we went to svhs field cams and edited onto Panasonic MII tape for on air work. we edited machine to machine back then too... no non linear editing back then!!
Dude I’m so glad I stumbled upon you today! You are my new favorite person on the Internet! Thank you for this video I would love to see 1 million more of these!
congrats on being pushed to my youtube home page by the mysterious algorithm. having grown up with Sierra games (and even playing The Sierra Network), this video was a blast. instant subscribe!
4:05 that reminds me of Slot-In CD/DVD Drives that support both 8cm and 12cm CDs (e.g., the Nintendo Wii could read GameCube discs). Neat stuff, and seeing a tape go smoothly into a VCR is always satisfying to see
@@CathodeRayDude The original Wii is the only one I'm aware of, and apparently it was pretty expensive. Later Wii's removed GameCube compatibility, not sure of those still take 8cm discs.
@@menhirmike Internally the RVL-101 (aka Family or Sports) still has all the hardware for GCN support as the RVL-001, Nintendo didn't switch dies, just ditched the ports not sure if the slot drive still supports GCN discs (I don't feel like having to potentially disassemble mine to retrieve a disc to check) there though the efforts to get it running games via homebrew again all went to 12cm discs. It's often interesting how much money is saved just by dumping physical interfaces like that without screwing with the main hardware for cost reductions.
The great irony of all these would be makers of "digital worlds" from this time period is that technology, as well as basic internet infrastructure as a whole, was woefully underpowered and underdeveloped at the time to achieve anything like what they were actually promising. You could get something like a Runescape, sure, but the actual content and what you could do with it was soooo much more shallow than what their high-flying promises made you imagine instead.
this channel is going to blow up and i am going to enjoy watching its subscriber base increase. your on screen presence is excellent, the information is clear and you make it very digestible. you should be proud of the quality of your content.
I mean it was basically a toolkit *for* fever dreams. It's kind of wild how heavily covered it was (there were dozens of huge how-to tomes, gobs of software, websites...) for how little it seems to have been genuinely used. I'm not aware of any application (except Sony Sapari) other than tech demos, just, there were *tons* of tech demos.
@@CathodeRayDude 3D Studio Max used to come with a VRML exporter by default in the late 90s. Of all the hundreds of proprietary 3D formats that were around of course this one was included right off the disk, just to taunt you
@@CathodeRayDude there were a few attempts at chat spaces involving VRML (which is still around as X3D), some still seem to work if you really want to dive down that rabbit hole since I'm not sure who's running Active Worlds for instance, since Blaxxun went under in 02.
I've been watching your content since ~August 2021, and every time you release a video I am always amazed at the sheer production quality and effort that went into the video.
4:20 Looking forward to the tape size video! I got interested in U-Matic around 20 years ago, and I know how it handles small cassettes in large decks. But I have never found a good description of how Betacam does it
I often start watching your videos, thinking that the subject noted in the title might be rather boring, but without fail, you've managed to make EVERY one very interesting. Great job!
11:45 *It's possible to be more flexible than this* Absolutely, they could have filmed the actor from different directions, 8 or 16, and use those everywhere. Toonstruck did this for Christopher Loid and it basically works the same as with any other point and click adventur game. It was also done in the early Tex Murphy games.
28:39 Hey, Cathode Ray Dude, the man standing in public talking to a projection of a European MP, is actually standing at the 1990s Schuman Roundabout in Brussels, and the strange building on which the image is projected is the Berlaymont, the headquarters of the European Commission (back then and still today). Funny to see a flash from the past of this neighborhood!
A couple of points that sprint to mind here. Firstly, this kind of video was often used purely as a reference for artists to copy for motion, rather than simply being cut out as digitised video. Also, assuming this was some kind of online social space, that would be quite remarkable for 1991. This was before the web, when only a tiny fraction of a percentage of people were online in any form, and most of those were at universities using terminals. There were online games, but the actual market for the kind of people that would want to play this - and had the equipment to do so - seems like it would be miniscule.
AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy all existed well before 1991, and The Sierra Network launched in 1991. Back before "online" meant the internet/web, BBSes like those mentioned, and even smaller ones, were reasonably popular.
I LOVE the LGBT VHS Cover! In General, I am very happy that you often put progressive symbols in your backgrounds. A very important symbol, bc there are A LOT of reactionaries in the tech/nerd-world...
Really great content! The amount of effort and research required to present the story and also the technical details to understand really shows through, keep it up
All the footage of them making these games is full of stuff like this, it seems so playful - and why not? Imagine you're a typical jolt-cola-and-testosterone 24 year old in 1990, already working your dream job, and suddenly you get to go into a TV studio to make a kung fu game with these ludicrous 80s movie characters. Everyone must have been having a blast. I'm actually regretting now that I didn't find a place to include the "office door bodyslam" clip from the MK3 behind the scenes video.
a few years ago i saw a tumblr post that put this whole "virtual world" thing pretty clearly-- nobody really wants the internet to be a 3D space where everyone interacts using custom avatars, everyone just uses emoticons or reaction gifs or memes to convey the nonverbal part of communication. so in a way that 90's dream of "cyberspace" exists, but in a much less visually exciting format! i can't find the post now but it was neat
It's really interesting how people sort of found their own way to the median they wanted. The people who could make the technology at a large scale didn't quite meet everyone where they were, so people found a way to get what they wanted - quick, bite-sized communication that integrates well into a larger multi-task workflow, yet maintaining the ability to express with faces and (with the advent of stickers) body language. Posting played-out reaction GIFs on social media is exhausting, yet, in a sense it's pursuing the same goals as every VR environment sought to achieve. People use a picture of Keanu Reeves looking tired to express that they feel or look tired - even VRChat can't quite do that yet.
"You missed that one, try another!" missed opportunity for a meme that was an FMV 😂 When I saw that footage, references was the first thing that came to my mind. From my experience I can say drawing poses and/or animations with that footage would've certainly been helpful; they're very clear, decently lit, and the cycles are exaggerated(helping with adding character in the animations) It would be my guess too it was hand drawn digitally. For a game? Maybe 🤔 the clothes might hint at that.. To add to this stew of speculation. Sometimes animation studios capture footage to be played back again and again by animators for study. For myself I may use that footage in the future since I'm currently working on drawing humans 👀
Huh. I was a Sierra Network / ImagiNation Network user from its beta to the day it shut down (was folded into AOL.) and this would have been interesting. I remember them having an "adult hangout" section that was just a chat room, I could have seen it using this interface later. (I was so excited when I turned 18 and could enter that hangout, only to discover it was just a chat room - _WITH SWEARING!_
I love your videos and I enjoy your in depth look at things as well as intelligent speculation about the things that can't be confirmed. I have learned a lot from you and appreciate the videos you make. Thanks so much!
I remember playing "Journey" in the arcade back in the day. That was the first time I saw digitized sprites like that. Funny that they were in B&W for some reason?
The system that Journey was built on was originally conceived to be a game with a camera in the cabinet that would put the player's face into the game, and would use the face next to their high score initials. That concept was scrapped after test-marketing when some people snapped pics of their.... not faces instead.
@@guspolly I mean I get that it was the 80s and this was a new thing at the time but how could you be that naive to put a camera in a machine that is open for the public to use without realizing that someone might take a picture of their junk.
I like how your hard-hat-wearing, raygun-wielding character also has a butt set on his belt. Is there a level where he has to explore a PBX connection room and identify all the faulty lines?
![Lp. Сердце Вселенной #60 РОЖДЕНИЕ ЛОЛОЛОШКИ [Финал] • Майнкрафт](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/YoR0pAV9FVQ/mqdefault.jpg)
Much of the time back then, the people shooting footage like that only had a vague idea of how chroma keying actually worked, and they'd only consult the CG artists long after the fact. The artist's job very often involved fixing messes like that, where producers and directors gave us garbage to work with because they thought computers were magic. They were well-meaning but largely clueless.
Anyway, this particular project reminds me of a number of pipe dream projects I saw from the 90s, where rich dreamers who read Neuromancer thought they were gonna single-handedly revolutionize everything from children's TV to theme parks and shopping malls. It always boiled down to "take this ordinary thing, but then just make it CG!" We gladly took their money and did whatever they wanted, up until it became clear to them that working with computers isn't exactly some effortless, automatic process - especially not back then.
I'm glad so many people are replying and saying "yep, it totally was like that" about much of this, haha. The tune never seems to change with this stuff - I think the only thing that changes is the sincerity; it's all grifting nowadays.
@@CathodeRayDude ALL Lives Matter YOU RACIST
@@CathodeRayDude No, really, there was an epidemic of this. Lamentably, no one was ever tried for Video Toaster abuse in the Hague. Frankly, today's metaverse isn't much different near as I can tell, save for the networking and cloud computing behind it, of course. I'm 42 now (yikes), and you appear to be considerably younger than that; I suspect there's a lot you've missed simply because you don't know to look for it. Watching your videos invokes a kaleidoscopic torrent of memories. Up until about 14 (1994, when I discovered Linux, the internet, my supplemental social life, etc.), I was enamored with video production and multimedia in general. There's a slew of topics I could suggest, but I don't know how to contact you. Oh, BTW, have you done any videos on U-Matic? That's where the action is (well, that and betacam, but I'm partial to U-Matic because the machines were such beasts).. The earliest cart format I'm aware of is U-Matic, which was available for home use in 1970, maybe 71 (?) I might be confabulating, but I don't think so. The first VTR for home use was produced by Sony in the mid 1960s--almost positive. I suspect you're aware of this and simply couldn't procure a museum piece. 😂
I worked on something similar with augmented reality. I pointed out that the green screen set was way underlit. "It's fine, we don't want it perfect." It was impossible to pull mattes from the video. The game eventually got made but was way over budget and didn't get anywhere.
You know, the "take this ordinary thing, but then just make it CG!" thing really reminds me of how these days we have a lot of "take this ordinary thing, but tie it into a decentralized speculative trading platform!" going on.
Okay, this is a blast from the past. I worked at Sierra Online from 1991 to 1999. My work was focused on their "The Sierra Network" business. I made several of the games there. Ahh, so early in my career. I was on a nostalgia trip this evening with the family and came across your video. In any case, I hadn't thought of "Cyber Park" for decades. :)
Your take was pretty much right. Ken and Roberta Williams invested heavily in pioneering online games via TSN. However, it was never a profitable venture. They started looking for a means to sell that piece of the business to a more "progressive" (read: idiotic) partner. AT&T was the right mark. Along the same time, Sierra had invested heavily in FMV games and tech infrastructure. The Worlds Away folks got involved, taking advantage of the significant resources that Sierra expended. Tons of prototyping work was done using FMV actors in Sierra's recoding studio. Oh man. Good times.
As you predicted in the video, there was a transition happening from pre-rendered sprites to "full 3D" tech. INN decided to chase the new shiny, throwing out the substantial investment to upgrade Cyber Park to the new hotness. I'm not sure what executives were responsible, but I blame AT&T and AOL. They were all in on remaining relevant. Especially AOL. :)
So the company pivoted toward 3D. Spun wheels for 5 years. Didn't achieve milestones and died a whimpering death. Sad.
Thanks for your video. I really appreciated the unintentional revival of old memories from my early career.
Hahaha, wow, I can't believe this made it all the way back to you! Glad to see my intuition was right, hope I wasn't *too* disrespectful towards those early "cyberspace" efforts, and thank you so much for the reply!
This very much reminded me of later roger wilco
This comment is equally as valuable as the video. Tysm both for sharing.
I don't know how pinning comments work and maybe you can only pin one comment, but I think that this comment should be pinned since it answers your questions.
side note: I love that we're still bagging on that guy's poor quality copper like 5000 years later
it's one of my favorite things about humanity. we screw up so much, but stuff like this is beautiful. this guy was a serial dickweed and we are NEVER letting him live it down.
So you know how you UA-cam shows you one comment preview before you tap on them? This was that, and I was about to ask what either you were on and if I could have some, but now I’m only almost finished and finally get it. Good thing I didn’t comment earlier.
Well to be fair it was only 3,800 years ago, but if he wasn't selling shoddy copper then we wouldn't still be talking crap about him.
@@JaredConnell The greatest storytelling twist in history is that Ea-Nasir was selling perfectly acceptable copper, he just ran into a bad string of complainers and tire kickers.
@@BobofWOGGLE Sounds like Yelp reviewers have ancestors going back millennia!
Your comment about virtual realities constantly being reinvented in the 90’s somehow gives me hope that Meta’s current obsession with the “Metaverse” will also die out soon 🤞
Hopefully it will take the entire company with it when it does.
Already dead, hell even those who want to be on an another world are not even interested in Meta's offering and instead they spend their time on either VRChat or before that Second Life which actually employ creative freedom in terms of world or avatars.
Just because Meta is stillborn doesn't mean they're not gonna keep trying for 8 years and falling on their face every step of the way.
Yeah, but where else can Mark force everyone to use his chosen crypto-currency and limit their virtual wardrobe to NFT status?
How so? What is it that makes you wish it would die out soon? I'm genuinely interested if it is something other than hate.
"to sell some poor quality copper"
I'm dying my man. What a deep cut. Also the perfect energy somehow. I had to pause the video.
I absolutely love that some shady merchant named Ea-nasir got a bad Mesopotamian era yelp from a customer named Nanni, and that his copper was such a ripoff that we still remember the bad review he got to this very day, nearly 3800 years later! 🤣
I subscribed to this channel as soon as I heard that joke. Clearly, this is my kind of people.
Pls explain joke
@@isaacandersen1 @Isaac Andersen Some of the earliest known examples of writing come from ancient Mesopotamia, and consist of clay tablets. One of the early examples of writing includes a letter that was written by a customer (Nanni) to a merchant (Ea-Nasir), complaining about his poor quality copper ingots, the way he hassled his messengers, and expressing anger over the way he's been treated. It reads as follows:
_Tell Ea-nasir: Nanni sends the following message:_
_When you came, you said to me as follows : “I will give Gimil-Sin (when he comes) fine quality copper ingots.” You left then but you did not do what you promised me. You put ingots which were not good before my messenger (Sit-Sin) and said: “If you want to take them, take them; if you do not want to take them, go away!”_
_What do you take me for, that you treat somebody like me with such contempt? I have sent as messengers gentlemen like ourselves to collect the bag with my money (deposited with you) but you have treated me with contempt by sending them back to me empty-handed several times, and that through enemy territory. Is there anyone among the merchants who trade with Telmun who has treated me in this way? You alone treat my messenger with contempt! On account of that one (trifling) mina of silver which I owe(?) you, you feel free to speak in such a way, while I have given to the palace on your behalf 1,080 pounds of copper, and umi-abum has likewise given 1,080 pounds of copper, apart from what we both have had written on a sealed tablet to be kept in the temple of Samas._
_How have you treated me for that copper? You have withheld my money bag from me in enemy territory; it is now up to you to restore (my money) to me in full._
_Take cognizance that (from now on) I will not accept here any copper from you that is not of fine quality. I shall (from now on) select and take the ingots individually in my own yard, and I shall exercise against you my right of rejection because you have treated me with contempt._
We know all of this, thanks to those ancient tablets that were written to complain to this bad copper supplier. Some things never change...
@@isaacandersen1 Way back in the day there was a jackass named Ea-nasir who sold someone some really shitty copper. It was discovered that he actually made it a habit to rip people off on junk-quality or nonexistant copper. The oldest known written complaint we have is a tablet where one of his customers is roasting the fuck out of him. You can find a wikipedia article about it titled "Complaint tablet to Ea-nasir" and there are also modern-english readings of it on youtube.
I was an unpaid intern at a local news station when I was 15 back in 2001. One of my first tasks was to catalog their ENTIRE library of giant Beta tapes from the 80’s and 90’s. Every day was watching random tapes and making timestamps on little slips that went in the case that I’m sure no one ever looked at again.
Definitely weird stuff on there: “Oh here’s when the local mall opened in the 80’s”….”Oh here’s a murder from the 90’s”
I would have *killed* for that job, even though I know I would have been bored to tears. You'd see the dullest stuff on the planet, plus the occasional "wow this is *incredible.*"
The dull moments interspersed with bouts of extreme interest
@@CathodeRayDude honestly, it was super awesome. I even stumbled across random b roll footage of myself from like 5 years prior.
The tapes were all on those big rolling archive shelves that could be moved to reveal more shelves.
@@CathodeRayDude Sounds like someone did kill for that job
To be fair those videos of mall openings from the 80's would probably be pretty treasured today.
As an ex-journalist, I love how you meticulously try to let your audience into all background technical detail in a digestible manner.
“This same person later shows up rocking a look that shouts nothing so much as ‘I’m on my way to the mesopotamian market to sell some poor-quality copper.’”
That whole segment of riffing was a delight. Keep up the sass, CRD
Some say they're still selling copper to this day!
This cracked me up too, but what is the reference from?
One of (if not the) oldest remaining examples of human writing is the Kish tablet, in which a Sumerian is throwing shade at a dodgy copper merchant. In 3500bce. @@caltrous942
Man, this was a tour de force. A combination of old tech archeology, video game history, and video editing talent. Bravo 👏
Seriously, was so impressed with how effective some of the simple demonstrations were for hammering home the core concepts
That slight pause before listing Furcadia really ties the section together.
"Unsatisfied with how big it was, I made mine bigger."
-Cathode Ray Dude, 2022
Surgeons HATE his one weird trick!
I almost died laughing when you had all the meticulously recreated walk cycles of those "totally normal people you'd see at a casino" sprites wandering around behind you.
Thanks for all the effort put into this! I would totally play a Communications Raygun Dude platformer.
When you made reference to VRML, it reminded me of the RIPscrip/RIPscript BBSs that were around in the mid 90's. You used a special terminal app (RIPTerm) and it used previously-downloaded vector assets to display things in a similar sprite-like environment. You dialed up to the BBS, spent an hour downloading the assets while hoping mom didn't pick up the phone, and later explored a fairly uninteresting environment - all over a 2400 baud modem. It was pretty sweet for the time, but like the 3D 'third space' services you mentioned it never really caught on. The early to mid 90's were a wild time.
oh my gosh that's incredible. I wonder if there's any traces of this left online. Thank you so much for enjoying the vid!
@@CathodeRayDude There's active boards that are telnet accessible that support RIP.
@@f15sim there are also dial-up BBS still in operation.
I don't think VRML and RIPscript were directly comparable.
VRML is exactly what was in the video -- a polygonal 3D rendering environment brought to web browsers for.... reasons. (?) There was a lot of talk of "next-level interactivity" and things like that. The closest functional use I can imagine for it are the 3D views of products, or websites where you can navigate the globe by grabbing it and twirling it around. It came and went with barely a whimper, and now HTML does all of that and far more.
RIPscript was trying to upgrade a text-only experience to a GUI. Instead of the typical BBS menu page, where you would press "F" for the files section, "M" for mail, "G" for door games, etc. etc., you could just click on the button. Was this is a necessary improvement? Not really. Was it an improvement at all? Ehhh...
They did bundle a fairly reasonable selection of assets (graphical icons) with the client, so it wasn't necessary to pack your BBS with lots of custom graphics that needed to be downloaded separately (but of course, nearly every Sysop was going to do his own art anyway), and at least it was a one-time download (until something changed.) Then, if you were to time how long it took to fill an 80x25 screen with custom ANSI art, or a handful of vector graphics commands, the RIP interface often really was quite snappy in comparison. But at least in my local BBS scene, it didn't exactly dominate.
I did enjoy the novelty when it was supported, enough to prefer using RIPterm, even with it being a distant second in quality and features to something like Telix.
@@nickwallette6201 Ah the good ol days of mud's moo's and mushes... Damn, i think i may look into some nostalgia....
I love the way you use chromakey in this video. Beautifully illustrative.
I also love Slam Beefchest. I wonder if he's friends with Blast Hardcheese.
@@DannyBeans Or Big McLargeHuge?
Bonus points for attempting the walking man.
@@DannyBeans Dirk McFlapjack
I don't know how this went from weird old tape formats to video games but I love it.
Also that LGBT E420 VHS box is gold!
I worked with these tapes daily in a post-production facility between 2005-2015 and I cringed a bit when I saw you don't have those tapes in "write-protect" mode. The little red tab needs to be pushed down in order to make them "read-only". But to get to the point: wonderful video you made! :D
Oh my god did I really? What on earth, I could SWEAR I had set them correctly when I received them. It stings to see I could have wiped these by brushing the wrong button. Thank you, I'll fix that when I'm back at the studio.
I accidentally did that to a cassette of shortwave broadcast recordings I made ca. 1996. Years later, about 2005, I was trying to digitize a China Radio International jingle, and for all those years I had neglected to take off the scotch tape over the write-protect holes. I accidentally dabbed REC while toggling REW and PLAY and munched away 2 seconds of the very pleasant and melodic jingle before I realized what was happening. I digitized what was left but I can only play the full version on an imaginary Realistic tape player in my head.
I loved that "oh you" look at the betcam player as you tapped the tape in. I miss the lived-in experience of physical media like that.
Not all the problems that caused but y'know, I liked handling the stuff
I had done about six takes, finally got the delivery perfect, and on that take only, the tape didn't index. Right after the cut, I lost it laughing, and knew I had to use *that* take.
@@CathodeRayDude Oh that's perfect. Watching the rest of the video, it's wild how this metaverse crap keeps coming around in exactly the same way. I love my social VR spaces but I can't comprehend the folks trying to sell VR as "the new internet". It's nutty.
@@CathodeRayDude I was wondering why I didn't hear a horrendous racket as the spindles changed locations lol, that explains it!
@@CathodeRayDude Also, watch your fingers in that tape slot. Go fishing for something in there and it might bite you.
@@CathodeRayDude the tape ops use to smash the tapes into the elevators so hard they would break the limit switches, or worse break the wires to the switches!
I fixed a lot of VTR's back in the day, after rescuing countless tapes with cotton swabs so that finger grease or metal didn't touch the tape! Most of those tapes were alsways masters, and the operators would be sweating bullets hoping you were able to remove the tape, fix the machine, in a timely fashion, so they could pull the hundred or so daily dubs, and get the tapes out to the couriers in time!
After watching video game review videos for years yours is the first to show the actual technique for the classic term “hand drawn sprites”. Tip of the hat, Sir. Keep up the good work! Stellar content!
I swear I've seen some of these "walk cycles" floating around somewhere before as low-res gifs, but you *definitely* have the highest-res capture of them right now.
The video is just packed chock full of high-effort edits for a shitpost. I love all the spritework throughout, and the patreon scroll snuck in at the end is phenomenal. You're just flexing the entire time and I love to see it.
The style of editing you’re talking about with “The Net” feels intentional. Living in the UK I can assure you that programmes about technology kept a similar style well into the 2000’s. I remember watching an episode of “The Money Programme” on Second Life that was the exact same style. Let me tell you, as a young lass, I had many a sleepless night over some of these editing choices. The regular BBC science programme “Horizon” still has some absolutely wild photography for what is essentially just a jazzed up science lesson.
I’d also recommend watching any prime time Channel 4 documentary in that late 90’s as many of those stray uncomfortably far into horror
The UK has a pretty long history of creating weird, almost art-house style documentaries. Watch enough BBC Four and you see this kind of bizarre, David Lynchian, Adam Curtisy-style editing a lot.
@@theblah12 Oh yeah, how could I forget about BBC Four? Like, it positions itself as the old people’s channel and then along comes 10 pm and then out comes the nightmare fuel. Then again, some of the imported shows have been pretty good, I enjoyed The Bridge and Lillyhammer quite a bit
Yeah I was going to say this. Back in the day BBC prided themselves on this amazing new video technology they had and went way overboard cramming it in to random shows. There is some old footage knocking around of BBC themselves showing it off
@@monotiller Lillyhammer the Netflix show was on BBC4? Huh, neat.
I'm pretty sure that swagger is almost exactly replicated in one of the saints row games. Also some of the clothing choices too. Absolutely fantastic work by all actors.
Ikr, the options for swagger in saints were endless; at least 15 different walking animations.
Very cool, this was definitely an entertaining ride into a period of sprite work. I do recall playing on the Sierra Network in the mid 90s, so I'd suspect AT&T was then the owner when I was playing on it. The video was nicely wrapped up into this bundle of mystery that had me wondering is there going to be more to this footage. But by the end it really was the entirety of all the different touch points that made it great. Awesome work, keep it up!
I started with Sierra on my C-64. Usually i spent most of my time at the volcano playing Fates of Twinion. I didn't play the other RPG, The ruins of Cawdor all that much. The only other game i remember spending any time with was the WWI plane simulator (which was ok i guess). To be honest between fidonet and backdoor games i only spent about three or four hours a week on INN. Fun stuff for the time though.
Edit: weird. I was proof reading (yeah I really need to wait to hit save after i've proof read) and i seem to have missed the first game in the series... right so i got the service to play "The Shadow of Yserbius". I was a member for about a year when the other two games came along as sequels to shadows. Man the nostalgia train is real right now...
Outstanding work here. Part Captain Disillusion , part Game Historian , with very original analysis. This was thoroughly entertaining.
Fantastic video, your production quality is splendid!
Way above even some high-budget TV programs. This feels like an episode of Sherlock the way you researched all of these obscure 90s games to find the origin of the tape.
Your videos just keep on getting better and better. This was awesome. That wall has worked out great! Leaving that uplighter there makes it more interesting somehow. And as mentioned in Patreon - wow a video Snappy. I had one or more of these.
Bruh... nice rack.
A couple weeks ago I managed to snag a beta camcorder at a pawn shop for $60. Full setup, bag, a few lenses, a few blanks, several batteries, and a mountable mic(no boom pole though). Jumped on it like I found gold. Lol
Awesome find on those tapes, always loved the photo realistic sprite look.
32:45 I used The Sierra Network a bit around this time, and you're right. IIRC there was a chatroom of sorts, but it wasn't any kind of "virtual space." Just a chatroom. Otherwise it was just basic games with 2D art and the painterly hub world, as you put it. Plus the Red Baron game was 3D polygonal, of course. (And, for the record, online deathmatch dogfights in 1991 was mind-blowing. 😀)
The two RPG's (you had to "go" to the volcano to get there) were a lot of fun. I spent most of my time there. What's funny is that i used INN on a C-64 back then. Sometimes i miss the level of calm and patient waiting was required back then. It was most certainly a different time.
I remember Sierra Network about the same way. It was initially mind blowing as an online space compared to BBS’s at the time, but ultimately not much more than a fancy graphical menu. I eventually found 4 player Doom deathmatches via BBS matchmaking to be more rewarding.
@@lumpmoose Well, and it was just so expensive. A monthly fee + an hourly fee, as well as whatever telephone charges applied. I get that running a dial-up network at the time was absurdly expensive, but TSN/TIN just didn't offer enough substance for the price. I only used it when I had a free trial subscription.
It's still online (as an emulated telnet/modem service). You can even use the original disks for it. I think it's called INNProxy. I just used it to play some Yserbius last year.
@@joe--cool it's honestly surprising how many of the old services are still puttering along either officially or via fan efforts to keep them going. Even some of the VRML dead ends that were barely functional in the first place (speaking as someone that did visit them in the 90s and early aughts). SMH
The blue screen was used to offer the director real time game backgrounds. Those did not need to be perfect but would add additional context for costumes/colors.
Yeah, I realized that was probably the case late in production - all I could do was stick some text over the MK3 footage and hope it got noticed haha
@@CathodeRayDude haha, sorry totally missed the text, sorry
26:45 😂I laughed out loud and felt very pleased with myself for getting that reference. Be careful selling low-quality copper, someone might write a strongly-worded complaint and you never know who might see it!
I used to be a master control operator at a TV station and I used those Betacam tapes all the time. The normal sized ones were mostly used for syndicated shows, and the giant ones were used for commercials. There are tons of obscure formats in the broadcast industry that most people don't even know about. There was a VHS-based counterpart to Betacam called MII, which I believe also had a giant version. My station had a robotic machine to automatically play those, though they had stopped using it when I started there. During the HD transition we also used a format called Professional Disc, which was basically a rewritable Blu-ray in a cartridge.
ROBOTIC HANDLED MII
...i'm terrifed :D
MII was the most freaking CURSED format and a robot that handles MII is just *chef's kiss* double cursed. Love it.
MII is a case of "what on earth were you thinking?!" from Panasonic and they themselves seem to have known it! It was basically an effort to shoehorn existing S-VHS into a professional format, they produced the decks for exactly four years then abruptly turned around and washed their hands completely of it.
Man, you're so effing cool, CRD. I love the feel of your videos - that you've researched an incredible amount and put it _all_ in the video in an immensely entertaining way. Keep being your awesome self. Love it!
More about CyberPark:
CyberPark is designed like a city, with buildings and various "neighborhoods" that will house entertainment activities and games appealing to specific communities of interest. It will be "staffed" with fully animated non-player inhabited characters (NPIs), including sorcerers, waiters, butlers, janitors and others, that interact with the 3D animated character personas that can be customized by individual players.
Founded in 1991, The ImagiNation Network is the first and largest online service totally dedicated to interactive entertainment. INN currently features more than 30 multi-player games, including strategy, card and board games, action and sports games, flight simulations, role-playing games and others.
I imagine out of all of the projects going on with CyberPark, this is what the recorded takes were probably for.
Oh, my, god. When you said "skip ahead if you know this" I naively started skipping to I dunno, save a little time, you were being very kind to warn me. As soon as I saw you were actually demonstrating by creating sprites of yourself in costumes I backed that train right back. I had to see all that effort you poured into that, well done sir! They looked awesome, I totally woulda played the shit out of the game if you were the main character
25:50 to 27:00 has got to be some of the best smartassery I've seen in a tech/retro video, and that's saying something :D
Fantastic video as always. Audibly cackled at your choice of Combat Pacific Bell Technician with the butt set and all as your character for demonstration. Looking forward to at least playing the demo of that when it's out...
This whole video is a slow and bizarre head trip. Each little surprise has comedic timing, dry delivery and long lead up time and not a single one of the strange things you've brought up here gives a proper clue as to what you're about to bring up next.
Nicely done.
Top quality stuff as always. The breakdown of hand drawn VS captured sprites was wonderfully done, and the editing used to demonstrate was very fun.
If nothing else these tapes certainly drove an interesting topic, and it would be fun to see someone make sprites from the raw footage and use them for something, even as a joke.
The only attempt at something like this I’ve ever enjoyed is VR-Chat. It’s nonsense fun, and satire.
Your videos keep getting better exponentially! Great stuff, and I see that you spent lot of effort on this. Your success is well deserved.
I'd guess if they didn't need the blue for keying the MK footage, that choosing to have the performers on the neutral gray floor would minimise blue casting/spill onto the actors.
This method would also give them high quality video they could use in things like TV commercials and still have the ability for background replacement to match the MK style behind the "fighting surface" in that footage.
Yeah MK3 switched to Betacam recordings, MK1 and MK2 used plain grey backgrounds with manually captured single frames. 1&2 were manually cut out while 3 used some chroma key and then tidied it up.
I love how you have that lamp on your wall, as a sort of way to anchor us down (much like a computer desktop.)
Your chroma key work remains second to just a few other creators.
I'm hoping to get some space so I can -steal- borrow your shooting and framing style.
Good artists copy; great artists steal.
Neat story on a very bizarre find, and your video quality is as stunning as ever. Was pretty shocked when I saw those cursed Super Mario Brothers Special sprites for the sprite explanation though, weird deep cut!
At first I thought it would be funny, and then I realized it would decrease the likelihood of Nintendo DMCAing my video
I love the part where you tear apart the Cyberspace concept. It's a scam that investors with no concept of technology seem desperate to fall for.
It's kinda weird to realize just how long people have been trying and failing to make it happen.
Second Life and it's open source equivalent, OpenSimulator, have become niches after the hype, but they still live.
VRChat seems to be working, but the lack of moderation makes it a toxic waste dump.
I could watch this ten times and enjoy it every time. Your videos really make me happy dude.
I’ve been missing you. Glad to see some new content. Hope things are going well. CRD 3.0 has been a huge success!
Lost media like this is some of my favourite stuff. I know you said you were just a bit disappointment that what you found wasn't something from something more known, but this kind of discovery of lost bits from an unknown and mysterious project just gets the gears turning and gets me all excited.
Love the "Out of This World"/"Another World" reference. That game was IMPOSSIBLE for the SNES but that didn't stop us spending dozens of hours trying to figure it out!
I already liked the video before watching, because I've never been disappointed by one of your videos, then I see "forgotten game" and hear "ripping tapes" and know it's gonna be great. Liking before I get engrossed in the video ensures I don't forget.
this was one of your best edited videos. Such great works done in this video. And I love the "The Net" reference and clip inclusions. I hadn't thought about that whacky show in forever!
your topics, production quality, flow, and overall way of telling a story are amazing.
Glad to see the return of the shelf 💜
I love your high-quality content, you put so much effort and passion into you're editing and research. I imagine it takes you hours of work. Totally worth every minute bro.
Great video! My own speculation would be that the Cyber Park concept may have been intended for a Sierra/Imagination Network 2.0 revamp. I would've only been about 10-12 years old, but my family subscribed for some time to the Imagination Network, roughly 1992-1994, and I remember enjoying it greatly, especially dog fights in Red Baron. However, there was a facet blocked off to me - there was at least one, possibly two "adults-only" areas to the Imagination Network, one of which I believe was casino-type games without actual gambling (or no real-world money was involved), the other a social-focused space. The characters in your tape footage strike me as the sort more intended for at least teenagers, whereas my recollection of Imagination overall was that it was meant to be family friendly and enjoyable by say kids of 7 years old and up. The main world and spaces open to everyone had a very Disney feel. My memory is also that Sierra Network/Imagination was *only* distributed on diskettes, the copy my family had being something like at least 5-8 disks. My hunch would be that there was interest in perhaps both making a move to CD-ROM and expanding the experiences the service offered. I lean toward CD-ROM being a part driver of this because those sprites still wouldn't have been lightweight if it were being brought to customers by diskette and had to be installed on a hard drive (my family's was just 120mb then). The original PC port of Mortal Kombat, which was just plain VGA, I remember as having a good number of 3.5 disks, off hand I'd wager 7, plus Sierra was relatively quick to embrace SVGA.
Additionally, my memory is vague, but I recall hearing as part of the history of Phantasmagoria that Sierra had built a special FMV studio at great expense. Given the year of 1991 on the tapes, which well pre-dates the 1995 release of Phantasmagoria, what you have in those tapes could be the prototype use of that studio, before Phantasmagoria was in full production and potentially even pre-dating its early use on games like Police Quest 4 and Gabriel Knight 1 (which had small bits of FMV). After Phantasmagoria, I believe the studio was only used for Gabriel Knight 2 The Beast Within and Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle of Flesh. While I could be mistaken about this, the later 3D version of Cyber Park you showed little demo bits of could've also been a later iteration possibly built using the 3D tech of GK3 Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned, or at least it tracks with Sierra's abrupt change to using 3D that was, even in its day, very ugly and IMO led to their first-party titles becoming largely lackluster and the company eventually being sold off, I think to Vivendi.
Separately, just a bit of odd trivia: I'm a fellow Seattleite and attended college in Everett, a now closed school called Henry Cogswell College, where I did their Digital Arts program with a selected emphasis on filmmaking. My Digital Cinematography teacher was Greg Roach, lead director/designer of The X-Files FMV game and who also had made the early CD-ROM FMV games Quantum Gate and Vortex: Quantum Gate 2. He never brought up his experience making games in his class far as I can recall, but he was a fantastic instructor. I learned a ton and had great fun doing so. Around the time I graduated and had become aware of his background, I reached out to Mr. Roach to ask if I could demo the Virtual Cinema system he and his team had made for their games, specifically tailored to interactive FMV experiences, but unfortunately that didn't pan out. He was very polite, but that was a highly specialized propriety toolset I'm sure they were much more interested sharing with well established companies for potential licensing and not some student just curious about poking around how it functioned. Still, being someone forever curious in interactive storytelling, I wish I'd been able to learn more about it and if there were any chance Virtual Cinema could've been deployed for DVD-ROM with superior video quality and minimal if any disc swapping.
This was an amazing video. Great detective work, and everything was told in an engaging and funny way. Your videos are have been so good lately.
I was a news photographer "back in the day" and when betamax came out for ENG or electronic News Gathering. We used 3/4 inch decks with a separate camera connected to a camera via a large camera cable. a field 3/4 inch tape held a whopping 20 mins!! beta was such a shift for us!! we then came back and edited from our small 3.4 to larger production tapes. larger 3/4 inch tape carts for use on air. They were 5 min tapes and went into a umatic machine. the machine was about the same size at the beta machine you show but it had a way larger tape slot! LOL!! I think I have a portable umatic field dech stuffed in one of my storage barns from then... just to move forward we went to svhs field cams and edited onto Panasonic MII tape for on air work. we edited machine to machine back then too... no non linear editing back then!!
This was a good UA-cam video that I enjoyed watching.
....I did *not* expect an Ea-nasir joke in the middle of a retro tech history video, well played!
hey it's just significantly more-retro tech
A lot of your videos are bloody amazing. This is one of those, keep up the good work.
Dude I’m so glad I stumbled upon you today! You are my new favorite person on the Internet! Thank you for this video I would love to see 1 million more of these!
You've got the coolest collection of stuff! I love this channel.
congrats on being pushed to my youtube home page by the mysterious algorithm. having grown up with Sierra games (and even playing The Sierra Network), this video was a blast. instant subscribe!
4:05 that reminds me of Slot-In CD/DVD Drives that support both 8cm and 12cm CDs (e.g., the Nintendo Wii could read GameCube discs). Neat stuff, and seeing a tape go smoothly into a VCR is always satisfying to see
Didn't actually realize they made any of those, I thought all the slot loaders were limited to 12cm!
@@CathodeRayDude The original Wii is the only one I'm aware of, and apparently it was pretty expensive. Later Wii's removed GameCube compatibility, not sure of those still take 8cm discs.
Ahh, it would make sense that nintendo would put their backs into it in order to make that work!
@@menhirmike Internally the RVL-101 (aka Family or Sports) still has all the hardware for GCN support as the RVL-001, Nintendo didn't switch dies, just ditched the ports not sure if the slot drive still supports GCN discs (I don't feel like having to potentially disassemble mine to retrieve a disc to check) there though the efforts to get it running games via homebrew again all went to 12cm discs. It's often interesting how much money is saved just by dumping physical interfaces like that without screwing with the main hardware for cost reductions.
This was a fascinating adventure and I love the whole premise here of conducting a found footage forensic analysis, what a ride
The great irony of all these would be makers of "digital worlds" from this time period is that technology, as well as basic internet infrastructure as a whole, was woefully underpowered and underdeveloped at the time to achieve anything like what they were actually promising. You could get something like a Runescape, sure, but the actual content and what you could do with it was soooo much more shallow than what their high-flying promises made you imagine instead.
I didn't think your videos could get better, but you're really killing it.
The Tayne reference got me, but the line "positively RANCID swagger" nearly killed me.
Dude, you go evolving by leaps and bounds with your videos, at this rate you will have 1 million subs without a problem.
Excellent. 10/10
That thunder transition might be my favorite jump cut ever, I need to edit that into my PowerPoints lol
this channel is going to blow up and i am going to enjoy watching its subscriber base increase. your on screen presence is excellent, the information is clear and you make it very digestible. you should be proud of the quality of your content.
Kudos for the shout out to Ea-nasir and his timeless poor quality copper ingots!
found your channel recently and it has quickly become one of my favourites
Amazing effort with this video's production value! You could get way more views by titling the video "Uncovering a CANCELLED 90s metaverse!"
That's a valid perspective, haha. I might rename it!
This was fascinating as not only did you present an interesting history lesson on video games etc but you also created an interesting mystery.
I always feel like VRML was a fever dream because nobody ever talks about it
I mean it was basically a toolkit *for* fever dreams. It's kind of wild how heavily covered it was (there were dozens of huge how-to tomes, gobs of software, websites...) for how little it seems to have been genuinely used. I'm not aware of any application (except Sony Sapari) other than tech demos, just, there were *tons* of tech demos.
@@CathodeRayDude 3D Studio Max used to come with a VRML exporter by default in the late 90s.
Of all the hundreds of proprietary 3D formats that were around of course this one was included right off the disk, just to taunt you
@@CathodeRayDude there were a few attempts at chat spaces involving VRML (which is still around as X3D), some still seem to work if you really want to dive down that rabbit hole since I'm not sure who's running Active Worlds for instance, since Blaxxun went under in 02.
I've been watching your content since ~August 2021, and every time you release a video I am always amazed at the sheer production quality and effort that went into the video.
4:20 Looking forward to the tape size video! I got interested in U-Matic around 20 years ago, and I know how it handles small cassettes in large decks. But I have never found a good description of how Betacam does it
Moveable spindles and a cassette size sensor would be part of the solution, I think.
@@Desmaad that's it exactly, the spindles move on two diagonal tracks.
I remember seeing your tweet-thread rabbit-hole on these tapes, and was so stoked to watch this video. Thanks!
That footage from "The Net" gives me strong "The Day Today" vibes
I often start watching your videos, thinking that the subject noted in the title might be rather boring, but without fail, you've managed to make EVERY one very interesting. Great job!
This episode is a flawless victory.
11:45 *It's possible to be more flexible than this*
Absolutely, they could have filmed the actor from different directions, 8 or 16, and use those everywhere. Toonstruck did this for Christopher Loid and it basically works the same as with any other point and click adventur game. It was also done in the early Tex Murphy games.
28:39 Hey, Cathode Ray Dude, the man standing in public talking to a projection of a European MP, is actually standing at the 1990s Schuman Roundabout in Brussels, and the strange building on which the image is projected is the Berlaymont, the headquarters of the European Commission (back then and still today). Funny to see a flash from the past of this neighborhood!
CRD, thanks for a really nice presentation. Found myself smiling again and again. Good luck to you. Subscribed, of course.
A couple of points that sprint to mind here. Firstly, this kind of video was often used purely as a reference for artists to copy for motion, rather than simply being cut out as digitised video. Also, assuming this was some kind of online social space, that would be quite remarkable for 1991. This was before the web, when only a tiny fraction of a percentage of people were online in any form, and most of those were at universities using terminals. There were online games, but the actual market for the kind of people that would want to play this - and had the equipment to do so - seems like it would be miniscule.
Indeed. The creator of The Prince of Persia hand-copied the contours of his brother from still frames.
AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy all existed well before 1991, and The Sierra Network launched in 1991. Back before "online" meant the internet/web, BBSes like those mentioned, and even smaller ones, were reasonably popular.
Thank you for putting up the raw footage. That is so interesting.
I LOVE the LGBT VHS Cover! In General, I am very happy that you often put progressive symbols in your backgrounds. A very important symbol, bc there are A LOT of reactionaries in the tech/nerd-world...
Really great content! The amount of effort and research required to present the story and also the technical details to understand really shows through, keep it up
12:43 I love him reaching for Kano's foot as he falls over
All the footage of them making these games is full of stuff like this, it seems so playful - and why not? Imagine you're a typical jolt-cola-and-testosterone 24 year old in 1990, already working your dream job, and suddenly you get to go into a TV studio to make a kung fu game with these ludicrous 80s movie characters. Everyone must have been having a blast. I'm actually regretting now that I didn't find a place to include the "office door bodyslam" clip from the MK3 behind the scenes video.
Thanks for this vid. I listened whilst on a long run and it kept me very much entertained and out the pain cave!
a few years ago i saw a tumblr post that put this whole "virtual world" thing pretty clearly-- nobody really wants the internet to be a 3D space where everyone interacts using custom avatars, everyone just uses emoticons or reaction gifs or memes to convey the nonverbal part of communication. so in a way that 90's dream of "cyberspace" exists, but in a much less visually exciting format! i can't find the post now but it was neat
It's really interesting how people sort of found their own way to the median they wanted. The people who could make the technology at a large scale didn't quite meet everyone where they were, so people found a way to get what they wanted - quick, bite-sized communication that integrates well into a larger multi-task workflow, yet maintaining the ability to express with faces and (with the advent of stickers) body language. Posting played-out reaction GIFs on social media is exhausting, yet, in a sense it's pursuing the same goals as every VR environment sought to achieve. People use a picture of Keanu Reeves looking tired to express that they feel or look tired - even VRChat can't quite do that yet.
You're by far my most favourite youtube channel. Keep up the good work man.
"You missed that one, try another!" missed opportunity for a meme that was an FMV 😂
When I saw that footage, references was the first thing that came to my mind. From my experience I can say drawing poses and/or animations with that footage would've certainly been helpful; they're very clear, decently lit, and the cycles are exaggerated(helping with adding character in the animations)
It would be my guess too it was hand drawn digitally. For a game? Maybe 🤔 the clothes might hint at that.. To add to this stew of speculation. Sometimes animation studios capture footage to be played back again and again by animators for study.
For myself I may use that footage in the future since I'm currently working on drawing humans 👀
Sweet video effects and editing on this one. Slick, good looking and useful for example.
Huh. I was a Sierra Network / ImagiNation Network user from its beta to the day it shut down (was folded into AOL.) and this would have been interesting. I remember them having an "adult hangout" section that was just a chat room, I could have seen it using this interface later. (I was so excited when I turned 18 and could enter that hangout, only to discover it was just a chat room - _WITH SWEARING!_
I love your videos and I enjoy your in depth look at things as well as intelligent speculation about the things that can't be confirmed. I have learned a lot from you and appreciate the videos you make. Thanks so much!
I remember playing "Journey" in the arcade back in the day. That was the first time I saw digitized sprites like that. Funny that they were in B&W for some reason?
The system that Journey was built on was originally conceived to be a game with a camera in the cabinet that would put the player's face into the game, and would use the face next to their high score initials. That concept was scrapped after test-marketing when some people snapped pics of their.... not faces instead.
@@guspolly I mean I get that it was the 80s and this was a new thing at the time but how could you be that naive to put a camera in a machine that is open for the public to use without realizing that someone might take a picture of their junk.
i love the detective work tbh daydreaming about what could've been while looking at the past, really great find
Idk why but I like that u used the only pc Mario game as an example
Your videos get better and better, dude. Love your style.
I like how your hard-hat-wearing, raygun-wielding character also has a butt set on his belt. Is there a level where he has to explore a PBX connection room and identify all the faulty lines?
Yes, literally, that is the game I had in mind for this outfit
@@CathodeRayDude noticed that too, love it!