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Tuesday’s Trope: Tech Demo Game

[Tuesday's Trope is a weekly department highlighting an amusing video game trope from TVTropes. Aggrogate is not affiliated with TVTropes.org in any way. All trope examples come from TVTropes and are shared via the Creative Commons license.]

It's almost a forgotten art these days, but there's still a certain cachet to having the biggest, fastest, most expensive, most powerful computer around. However, raw numbers and benchmark results can only get you so far. To really impress your friends, you need a computer that can run games others can't, and run them smooth as silk. That's what Tech Demo Games are for.

Tech Demo Games can be good or bad, but what matters is that on PCs, they require a ridiculous amount of processing power to run. When they're released, generally only top-tier hardware can display the games a decent framerate. Of course, a year or two later, both the games and the hardware necessary to run them seem downright quaint. Technology is a harsh and fickle mistress.

Console Tech Demo Games are a bit different; since consoles generally have the same capabilities besides minor variations, console tech demos simply focus on showing off every new trick the platform can offer. Remember how much the Super Nintendo hyped Mode 7? Welcome to the world of console Tech Demo Games.

Examples of Tech Demo Games include:

• Crysis is regarded by a lot of people to be a tech demo in the disguise of a game. When released, only a handful of computers could actually handle the "High" setting at 1280x800. Even fewer could run the "Very High" setting at 1280x800 above 10FPS.
• Supreme Commander is a tech demo game at the fact that the more cores you have in your processor, the better the game runs.
• Doom 3 was pretty much a stress test for video cards at the time due to its reliance on complex lighting.
• Unreal was basically an advertisement for video cards.
• Serious Sam is simply a tech demo for the engine with some game elements tacked on (there's even a built-in tech map, accessible from the menu, which is literally a gallery of the engine's graphic effects.)
• Name any first-generation Super Nintendo game. These games would show off the Mode 7 capabilities of the system. Some notable examples would be Super Mario World, F-Zero, and Super Castlevania IV.
• Final Fantasy VII was Square's first game on the Playstation, as well as a Killer App for the console. Square really took the opportunity to show off some of the stuff they couldn't do on the SNES, like polygons and pre-rendered cutscenes.
• The original Donkey Kong Country was an effort to prove the aging SNES was capable of high-quality graphics.
• Wii Sports and Wii Play show off the Wii Remote's motion abilities. Wii Sports Resort shows off Wii Motion+