In case you don't have a teenage boy in the house, Redneck Rampage is a PC game that takes two white-trash avatars named Leonar d and Bubba and plops them down in a kind of back-country "Doom." There's a whole lot of cussin' and shootin' going on, as they try to liberate their prize-winning pig, Bessie. (Crude wit must be its own reward, because 500,000 people have already taken Interplay Productions' Web site up on its offer to, as they put it, "Get the damn preview.")

The Neverhood, which emanates from Steven Spielberg's Dreamworks Interactive (hey, maybe it should be called "The Mogulhood"), involves a Gumby-lookalike claymation figure who tries to escape from a locked room to retrieve some mysterious artifacts while a funky musical score plays in the background. Critics have used every superlative in the book for this one. Me, I didn't get the game, though clearly some heavyweight design talent was involved.

The most traditional of these pacesetting offerings is Quake, which is signi ficant mainly because it's from id Software and is the successor to that company's wildly successful Doom. Quake is also important because it has an extensible "engine," for which independent software developers can create their own add-ons, in the form of new game "levels" that can be sold as third-party products.

I've chosen these three games--which run the gamut from raunchy, to ridiculous, to just plain violent--to illustrate the lengths to which innovative software developers are pushing the PC platform.

But the best is yet to come, as 3-D accelerators, the AGP graphics port, and ever-faster CPUs challenge the games-development community in 1997.

These architectural advances will be on the minds of the 5,000 programmers, graphics artist, marketeers and developer-wannabes who attend the Computer Games Developers Conference, which runs April 25 through 29 at the Santa Clara , Calif., Convention Center.

But foremost on their agendas will be the tough task of assessing the sea change the games business is undergoing, as it morphs from an arena still flexible enough for garage-based startups, into a tough battleground where major-league resources are required.

Two factors are behind this shift. For one, the entry of Spielberg and company into the games market has pushed the typical development budget beyond the $1-million mark. However, big bucks are no guarantee of big sales, and many companies downsized or failed in 1996.

This year, the proliferation of 3-D accelerator architectures threatens to confound developers and consumers even further. Microsoft says it has a solution in its Direct3D and DirectX application-programming interfaces. However, a battle is brewing as advocates of OpenGL--which originally evolved in the Unix world-- tout that stand ard as offering a simpler architecture and better performance, to boot.

Mostly, the games arena seems locked in a chicken-and-egg dilemma. Games developers are waiting for new technologies to build up installed bases before they take the plunge. Meanwhile, silicon vendors need cutting-edge games to provide the sizzle that enables them to gain critical mass.

As Jon Peddie, the respected computer-graphics market-analyst who runs Jon Peddie Associates, told me: "Games developers are holding back the growth of the market in two ways. For one, they continue to limit the genre of games to existing themes (killing alien invaders or driving fast cars). The second thing is, games developers are too timid in adopting novel, advanced hardware technology that would deliver enhanced effects. There are exciting controllers out there now from TriTech, NEC, 3Dfx, and, soon, Microsoft, with its Talisman, which are not being given adequate usage." (Also see NVidia Corp.)

Along with hardware advances, developers will have to grapple with a change in the way games themselves are designed. I was particularly interested in the take Tim Sweeney, chairman of Epic Megagames had. "Both technically and in business terms, the challenge for developers will be in jumping to the next game-development paradigm," he said. "Since the beginning, game development has almost been largely a self-contained activity--a bunch of programmers, artists, and designers get together and build a project from the ground up, pixel by pixel, line of code by line of code. Nineteen ninety-seven and 1998 will be the age when that development methodology falls apart and takes down a great many unprepared developers along with it. This is similar to the impact that t he move from DOS to Windows had on apps developers who were accustomed to doing everything themselves. Some companies, like Intuit, caught on to Windows, realizing that it could save them a great deal of development effort and create new opportunities, and jumped on the bandwagon. Others, like Borland, tried to resist and, as a result, their market was yanked out from beneath them."

Of most immediate impact will be the new ports, cards and other do-dads finding their way into the PC platform. Indeed, at the conference Intel will be touting something it calls the Game Platforms '98. Essentially, this is a configuration that Intel hopes will serve as a baseline for games developers trying to determine which new technologies they should support, including hybrid Internet applications, scalable 3-D graphics, MMX-enhanced processors and the Universal Serial Bus.

Since USB and MMX are already moving out into the market, Intel's push clearly has more to do with marketing than technology. As Peddie put it: "Intel's Games Platform definition is both self-serving and beneficial. It's self-serving because Intel wants you to believe MMX will cure everything from baldness to insomnia. In fact, MMX contributes very little to game play, but try telling that to some 'expert' editors at certain magazines. It's beneficial because Intel is big, and if Intel says a Game Platform will have thus and such, then at least we have a starting point."

Such highfalutin' technology packaging is of a piece with the big-business mentality that's beginning to pervade the games world. I just hope it won't stifle innovation, the way Hollywood's focus on blockbusters has turned the silver screen into a wasteland of cookie-cutter action movies.

I'm hoping a less alarmist reality will prevail. "In the end, great game-play usually wins," said Leslie Evans, DirectX games product man ager at Microsoft. "Like the movie industry, there will be big winners and big losers because there is no clear formula for winning the end user."

Now that you've heard what the experts think, come over to our Wintel Watch Forum and give us your take on the future of PC gaming.

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