Documentaries · Hardware and games, 1982–1999
The Beige Years
Researched histories of the machines, companies and games of the beige-box era, argued from the documents. Each video has a page here with its chapters, its full source list and every image credit.
The library
-
04No.
3dfx Interactive, 1994 to 2000: the Voodoo Graphics card, Glide and GLQuake, the Voodoo2 SLI era, the STB acquisition and the decision to make its own boards, the Voodoo3 and Voodoo5, and why it ended in Nvidia's purchase of its assets · 1994
3dfx: The Risk It Wrote Down, Then Took
3dfx's own merger filing said it would likely lose customers who competed with STB, yet the board signed anyway.
-
03No.
US Robotics, the modem company, 1976 to 2000: the Courier and Sportster, the HST and 56k standards wars, the Palm acquisition, the 3Com merger, and why the modem business ended · 1976
US Robotics: Sold at the Top, Bought at the Bottom
Buying US Robotics, 3Com recorded merger charges of $426 million in the first quarter of fiscal 1998.
-
02No.
Mortal Kombat · 1992
Mortal Kombat: The Fatality Began as an Office Gag
Mortal Kombat was filler to Midway: four people, a hole in the schedule, and a budget around $1 million.
-
01No.
Commodore 64 · 1982
Commodore 64: Discontinued in 1994 While Still Selling
The Commodore 64 sold about 12.5 million by its own sales records, not the 17 million the company put in print.
Method
- Sources
Every claim traces to a source.
Each video's page lists what it was built from: period magazines, court records, company documents, interviews and reference works, with links and the date each was read.
- Disagreement
Where the record disagrees, the video says so.
When two sources give different figures or dates, both are named and the video explains which one it follows and why.
- Voice
The narration is a synthetic voice. The research isn't.
The voice is generated from a written script. The script, the sources behind it and the argument are the work, and each video's page lists them in full.
Spotted a wrong date, a misread spec or a bad attribution? Send the video, the timestamp and your source. Corrections are logged on the video's page.
corrections@thebeigeyears.com