Expectations Memes

The evolution of gamer expectations is brutal. In 1997, blocky polygons had us gasping in awe like we'd seen the face of God. By 2013, we're complaining about "pixelated" graphics that would've melted our 90s brains. Fast forward to 2020, and we're cursing our $2000 rigs for struggling with photorealistic landscapes that NASA couldn't have rendered 10 years ago. It's the tech equivalent of kids today not understanding why we were excited about 56k modems. "What do you mean you had to WAIT for images to load? Like, more than 0.001 seconds?" Meanwhile, developers are in the corner having nervous breakdowns trying to render individual pores on NPCs that players will rocket-launch into oblivion anyway.

The expectation vs reality of game development is brutally accurate here! On the left, we have the beautiful, detailed vision of what your character should look like when planning your game. Then there's the right side—the hysterical breakdown when you realize your masterpiece has morphed into a pepperoni-faced monstrosity after two years of development hell. Every game developer knows that initial spark of genius: "I'll create the next indie masterpiece!" Fast forward through 730 nights of debugging collision detection, memory leaks, and shader compilation errors—and suddenly you're crying while staring at what can only be described as a pizza with existential dread. Feature creep, scope explosion, and the inevitable "just one more system to implement" have claimed another victim. But hey, ship it anyway! Version 1.0 is just the beginning of your pizza-faced character's journey to eventual Steam obscurity.