Weekend Blasts From The Past: Unreal & Second Reality

by Marco Chiappetta — Saturday, December 16, 2006, 12:00 PM EDT

Hello everyone! I hope you're all having a good weekend so far. I was gearing up for some benchmarking and writing, and thought I'd poke around the web for something fun before getting down to business. I stumbled across a couple of videos at YouTube that I just had to share. I'm probably showing my age a bit, but I don't care! I've always been a proud geek; not about to get shy now. :)

Anyway, how many of you remember BitBoys Oy? They were working on the "Glaze3D" 3D accelerator which never materialized back in the days when 3dfx was on top. And more recently were acquired by ATI for their expertise in mobile graphics. Well, some of the company's founders were actually members of a talented team of programmers called the "Future Crew" that developed a few of the coolest demos at some of the early Assembly Demo conventions. Some of the members of the Future Crew also went on to found or co-found Futuremark (3DMark) and Remedy (Max Payne).

If you want to check out some of what they did back in the day, watch the two videos below. Unreal was the winner of the PC Demo group at Assembly 1992, and Unreal ][: Second Reality won first place the very next year. Really cool stuff considering they were run on PCs equipped with 386 and 486 processors and Tseng Labs SuperVGA cards nearly 15 years ago.

Watch Unreal Here.

Watch Second Reality Here.

And if you're hankering for more after watching these two videos, you can always watch this guy beat Sword of Sodan on his Amiga in under 17 minutes. Wow, I can't believe it was almost 18 years ago that I was into that game...

Tags: eco, real, unreal, SEC, rom, EA, reality, K

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com