1993 was the year gaming changed forever. A pre-rendered point and click adventure game called Myst was released and went on to ship millions of copies and become the best-selling game of all time. It was not until the uber-popular ‘The Sims’ franchise came along that its record was bested.

I was an impressionable 9 year old at the time, and I remember ‘oohing’ and ‘aahing’ while my friend demonstrated Myst to me on his PC. Here was a game world full of sights and sounds that had a fidelity I had never experienced before. The textures on the stone pillars and trees actually looked like their real-world counterparts. Was I dreaming? No, this was the revolution in gaming graphics that the CD-ROM had made possible.

Continue reading El33tonline’s editorial: ‘The Glory Days of Pre-rendered Backgrounds.’