Exactly this moment in time is where it really all started for me... the 3Dfx Voodoo series graphics card, back in the day THE add-on card to get for 3D graphics (or actually accelerator it was called back then). It opened up a new world of gaming, as games could now be 3D accelerated, properly. This moment in time is exactly where the 3D gaming revolution that we now take so much for granted started.

Some interesting facts; 65K maximum colors, highest resolution supported 800x600 (640x480 was the norm), 4 MB EDO memory.

3DFX Voodoo graphics 4MB - 1997

I still own the entire series of these cards, Voodoo, Banshee, Voodoo 3, Voodoo 4 and Voodoo 5.

3Dfx was the pioneer of the technology you guys know and love today. Unfortunately for 3Dfx (later on 3DFX/STB), the competition could smell success and a lot of companies started designing such videocards as well, we now call them consumer graphics cards. Among them ATI, PowerVR, Matrox, S3, NVIDIA.

Who does not remember the, even to date, fantastic box designs of Voodoo graphics? 3Dfx was a pioneer in the field for several years in the late 1990s until 2000 when it underwent one of the most high-profile demises in the history of the PC industry... the verge of bankruptcy, many of its intellectual assets (and many employees) were acquired by its primary competitor, NVIDIA. And literally nobody understood how this could happen to a company so successful as 3Dfx.

Now back to the website...

So back in 1997 I immediately understood that the technology shown from 3Dfx was the future. However, support was lacking. And with that new thingy called Internet, I decided to start up a website. I remember it well, because back in the day you had to dial-in with a telephone and modem to get connected to the internet. I had an account with Bart Internet services here in the Netherlands who also offered some webspace for a website.

The support site I created was called 'The Voodoo Guru'. I wanted to cover everything 3Dfx related, and offered driver patches for games that were 'Voodoo graphics' compatible. In the first days I had 50 visitors per day on the website, after a week 500 per day. One week later Bart Internet Services decided to halt my account due to excessive bandwidth usage, whooops!