In the old days, when videogame consoles were styled to look as though they were made partly out of wood, we didn’t worry about framerates too much. We didn’t have to. The most popular console of the era, 1977’s Atari VCS, generated its visuals in such a way that they sort of had to run at 60fps, and the entire gaming community benefited by not being distracted by tedious arguments over which version of the newest game managed to fit in two or three more frames per second than the other. In the arcades, the original Star Wars coin-op of 1983 even managed to display full-blown 3D fluidly – in colour, no less. Back then, we didn’t consider a future when games weren’t presented smoothly. They could only improve from this point onwards, right? That’s just logic.
Wrong. The problems began to arrive when we decided that wireframe 3D just wouldn’t do, and that we really should be thinking about filling in all those empty spaces between the lines with stuff. And so began the transition to filled 3D, as exemplified in Atari’s Hard Drivin’, a game whose juddery polygonal world pretty much invited you to make a cup of tea as you waited for the next frame of action to be drawn on the screen. In the home, the Freescape 3D series proved similarly traumatic. Frankly, it sometimes felt that we should be talking in terms of spf rather than fps.