The transition seems to map well to the point where engines got sophisticated enough, that highly dedicated high-schoolers couldn't keep up. Until then, people would routinely make hobby game engines (for games they'd then never finish) that were MVPs of what the game industry had a year or three earlier. I.e. close enough to compete on visuals with top photorealistic games of a given year - but more importantly, this was a time where you could do cool nerdy shit to impress your friends and community.

Then Unreal and Unity came out, with a business model that killed the motivation to write your own engine from scratch (except for purely educational purposes), we got more games, more progress, but the excitement was gone.

Maybe it's just a spurious correlation, but it seems to track with:

> and only became so again when OpenAI's InstructGPT was demonstrated.

Which is again, if you exclude training SOTA models - which is still mostly out of reach for anyone but a few entities on the planet - the time where anyone can do something cool that doesn't have a better market alternative yet, and any dedicated high-schooler can make truly impressive and useful work, outpacing commercial and academic work based on pure motivation and focus alone (it's easier when you're not being distracted by bullshit incentives like user growth or making VCs happy or churning out publications, farming citations).

It's, once again, a time of dreams, where anyone with some technical interest and a bit of free time can make the future happen in front of their eyes.

The timescale you are describing for 3D graphics is 4 years from the 1997 cover you posted to the release of Halo which you are saying plateaued excitement because it got advanced enough.

An almost infinitesimally small amount of time in terms of history human development and you are mocking the magazine being excited for the advancement because it was... 4 years yearly?

It's a very strange thing I've never understood.