I remember playing one of the early first-person shooter (FPS) games like DOOM,
in which an environment moved relative to the actions of a character you were playing.
They came to be called "first-person" because your vantage point in the game was that of the
character; the environment you were presented was as if you were seeing it as the character.
I also remember getting that game back out some ten years later, after computers had matured
greatly, and learning hilariously that the rate of movement in that game was probably tied to
the speed of the system bus in use in computers of the time.* So playing the game on a
relatively ridiculously overpowered machine made for absolute comedic "replayability" (a
complete win; there's nothing like giggling your butt off while playing a gruesome video game).
Fast-forward to 2016.
I just dug out an old animated GIF that resembles a stick figure on a traffic warning sign.
The animation shows the figure using a large pair of scissors to stab himself in the crotch and
retract them; it repeats, as though the figure does this repeatedly.
I just saw the image run for the first time since then and it immediately made that whole
DOOM rebooted thing come to mind. Today the unsettled stick figure hacks his genitals more
ambitiously than ever:
* I don't know this for a fact; I just mean to say the rate of
movement must have been tied to something that was fairly standard at the time, like you'd find
in the architecture of the PC — something that would seem to lie outside of the quantity of RAM
or the speed of a processor built on the same architecture, so that players on multiple
platforms of the time would have a consistent experience. But an upgrade in the system
architecture could explain why a system ten years more advanced would have the awesome
effect I observed.
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