Brushes with Fame - 3DFX

In the mid 1990’s I played a lot of PC based video games, mostly first person shooters (FPS), kindled by the launch of Doom.

In 1996, a new bit of kit was launched, the 3DFX Voodoo card. Naturally, I whipped out my plastic, and bought a card from the local Fry’s Electronics (this was way before the time of Amazon) and I immediately enjoyed the amazing, butter smooth 3D animations.

Today, I was looking up when the first Voodoo card was released (October 1996) I noticed that one of the founders was Ross Smith. Ross Q. Smith. In 2009, he worked with me when I was at Veeco Instruments. A legend.

Alas, 3DFX was going bankrupt and in 2002 was sold to nVidia.

I had the original card, and the Voodoo2 where I actually had two cards running in SLI, and for Quake II and Quake III Arena, it was the SHIT.

Good times.