Patrolling the cliff’s edge, a lone marine from the Hazardous Environment Combat Unit (HECU) idles outside the Black Mesa Research Facility the contours of his crisp uniform stand out against the anti-aliased skyline.
On a contemporary computer, the sharp cliff faces and stiff bipedal figures that populate the foreground are rendered at a much higher resolution than those twenty-year-old, interpolated buttes in the background. The smell of ozone and petrichor of the desert is replaced by the odor of a freshly unboxed graphics card or stack of memory sticks in anti-static wrap. An anamorphic image posing as perspectival space, this imaginary New Mexico unfolds into a cruciform that wraps around the geometry of a skybox. The colors are odd, the shadows are off, and the entire scene is slightly stretched like the painted panorama of a museum diorama, Hollywood backlot, or chapel ceiling.
Atmosphere occludes the horizon where a purple, pixelated smear articulates the union of red and blue. Below, specular highlights and ray-traced reflections define a river’s surface-a sheet of frozen ripples sinking beneath banks of rust-colored sand. Fat tubes of rich, red earth jut into the sky as if extruded along the sharp contrasts of a height map.
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Peering out from a canyon cradled between two mesas, a series of striated buttes punctuate the Southwestern landscape. Gabe Newell, “On Productivity, Economics, Political Institutions and the Future of Corporations” Realism is a terrible, terrible design trope. Their only experience of humanity was a crowbar coming at them down a steel corridor.
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