[trevormcneal]

> Expectations have changed, technology has changed

This I agree, nowadays people start with a lot already done, no need to write a custom audio codec, or image compression trick or whatever, not only there is plenty of code ready for doing so, but there are plenty of computational resources to use on runtime.

Back then you would see advances first in the games and later on being documented, now they are released as papers, you hope that it will be implemented on some engine somewhere, and games using these techniques will be at least 5 years away from the paper release.