Inevitable Evolution was the name of a GeForce3 Tech Demo created by Inevitable Entertainment (AKA Midway Studios Austin) in 2001, to pitch their skills to publishers. At the time it was quite impressive, with detailed 3D models and light effects, and by today’s standard it still has that “early ‘00s 3D aesthetic” look that somehow makes it fascinating for us.
As wrote at the time by GeForce:
“Inevitable Evolution showcases the amazing power of the GeForce3, using the nfiniteFX Vertex and Pixel Shaders to achieve some of the most complex real-time character generation seen to date. The Vertex Shader provides skinning with up to 9 matrices per face, more than double the number previously available in hardware. The Vertex Shader also assists geometry and texture decompression. The Pixel Shader helps bring life to the character by providing multiple layers of per-pixel lighting effects, including: base, dot3, anisotropic and specular layers. The GeForce3 offloads all of these tasks from the CPU, leaving it free to run other tasks such as calculations necessary for the real-time self-shadowing seen in the demo.”
As far as we know this was just a tech demo and not a full video game, but we can speculate Inevitable Entertainment could have been pitching it as a possible project to publishers. In the end their first commercial game was “Tribes Aerial Assault” for Playstation 2, released in 2002. Two years later the team was acquired by Midway Games and developed such titles as Area 51 and BlackSite: Area 51, before being closed by their parent company in 2008.
This tech demo was also shown in real-time on the original Xbox at the Tokyo Game Show Spring 2001 (as seen in the second video below):
This is the four-minute Xbox graphics presentation that Microsoft Japan director Naoto Yoshioka presented at the Tokyo Game Show Spring 2001. First the original video from Inevitable Evolution is shown (actually developed for the NV20 hardware from Nvidia), after a short break you can see the smooth implementation on the Xbox graphics engine with effects and detail zooms.
Thanks to Liqmatrix for the contribution!
Images:
Videos:
What do you think about this unseen game? Give your vote!
(3 votes, average: 4.33 out of 5)
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if it’s just a tech demo it’s not a game and it doesn’t belong here IMO
In most cases I would agree with you, but in this case there are a few points that make this different from your average tech demo.
1.) NVidia listed this under the heading “games” on their website.
2.) This was a tech demo targeted at the original Xbox and was most likely going to be developed into a game for that platform before they took on the bigger Tribes project.
With that in mind this was more than likely a game you never got to play and why it is notable.
I also want to remind people that many of the Earthsiege, Starsiege and Tribes universe games are completely free now for download thanks to Hi-Rez Studios. This includes Inevitable Entertainment’s “Tribes Aerial Assault” for the Playstation 2 as mentioned in this article.
https://www.tribesuniverse.com/
@monokoma
Thanks for adding the Xbox tech demo. This shows better angles of the demo than the PC version.