What do the Large Hadron Collider and Duke Nukem have in common? They both took 13 years to complete. Originally set for mid-1998, the game’s release date has since been postponed numerous times. It will finally, be released in May 2011 (seriously, this time).
Back in 1998, you loaded games via CD-ROM and played them on a CRT monitor with a ball mouse and keyboard. If you wanted to handle 3D rendering, you’d need at least 4MB of graphics RAM. If you had a top of the line processor, you were probably rocking a Pentium II at a whopping 400 Mhz.
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To put this in further perspective, in 1998 Justin Bieber was only four years old; 1997’s Titanic was still a box-office smash; and the United States had a booming economy with a budget surplus.
That seems like eons ago, especially in the world of technology. It’s 2011, and games that used to slow systems to a crawl back in ’98 are now playable within a Web browser using Flash. Gigabytes of HD video can be transported on an SD card about the size of a postage stamp and then uploaded to any number of video sharing sites. Heck, our phones are now more powerful than some desktops from 1998.
In 13 years, we haven’t seen just small evolutionary leaps in technology, we’ve seen revolutions in many major tech fields. Let’s take a look back at the tech milestones that have occurred since Duke Nukem Forever’s original release in the slideshow.