[megameter]

It's a assessment calibrated towards his goals at the time, which were focused on getting fast real-time images. It was only a little over a decade later that he was getting excited about "Megatextures" because he saw the possibility of streaming everything in - but he was always firm about getting the result at a high framerate, in a way that produced few compromises for game design.

And this is a good quality for developers generally speaking and game developers especially. It's easy for a game to get away from a principled result and just throw in even more smoke and mirrors because the justifications come so easily: "It's just a game", "nobody will notice" etc. And that is exactly the kind of justification that crept in with CD-driven game design that focused only on quantity of bits used. A lot of what filled the CD in 90's games was bad cinema and bad pre-rendered CGI.