now realizing that the vast majority of you either had never heard of Jurassic Park: Trespasser (1998), or read some magazine review back then that summarily trashed it, it is honestly one of the most fascinating FPS games i've ever played

back then, 3dfx glide and d3d cards were beginning to (undeservedly) rule the graphics hardware space. if a game didn't support hardware 3d rendering, it was assumed that gamers weren't going to buy it.

the Trespasser development team (mostly seamus blackley iirc) had written an incredible software renderer for the game. volumetric lighting and fog effects were incredible, and i've personally never seen a better software lighting renderer.

the problem was - at the time, a Pentium (or PII if you were rich) CPU would have been what most of the install base had. the game ran like molasses on anything but the fastest hardware.

so to please everyone, the software renderer was nearly completely nerfed. all of the advanced lighting and texturing effects were stripped out, because 3dfx glide/d3d didn't support any of those functions.

in the end, we got a poorly-lit, low-poly and ugly-textured (but fairly fast) game that ran on 4 and 8 meg 3d cards.

thankfully, a few screenshots of the original software renderer were released to the press while the game was being developed. these were generated in-engine.

remember: this was 1997, and the fastest processor at the time was a PII-300 mhz.

credit to SharkyExtreme and Internet archive for the WBM backup

@atomicpoet Their Voodoo cards made Quake II a lot more fun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iY6XRdPogv8