Last month Nvidia set out to find a producer for its Lightspeed Studios, a game dev operation set on taking classic games and dipping them by the ankle into the river ray tracing. But just what videogame “that you know and love” is the RTX studio working on? We took to Twitter to poll the people with some of our own suggestions (unchecked by any formalities prerequisite to remastering someone else’s game), and the results were clear.
We the people decree that the next title out of Lightspeed Studios should be Half-Life RTX. Yes, who saw that one coming. The renowned 10/10 FPS spearheaded by Gabe, the Valve team, and published by the now defunct Sierra Studios topped our four-game poll by quite some margin, with 36% of the 525 total votes in its favour. Honorary mentions go to World of Warcraft winning 24% of the vote, The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind with 21%, and, trailing behind, Max Payne with 19%.
But what classic the studio is actually working right now remains a mystery, but we know there’s something in the works thanks to a job posting spotted by DSOGaming. And we can expect a similar level of RTX integration in whatever the green team settles on next to its most recent project: Quake II RTX.
Nvidia Lightspeed Studio’s first title was Quake II RTX: a game close to Nvidia’s heart due to its role in bringing 3dfx to the fore. The studio, building upon previous open-source projects, integrated reflections, refraction, shadows, AO, and global illumination into the game with real-time ray tracing powered by its own RTX 20-series GPUs, and subsequently gave it away for free.
Which classic game would you like to see @NVIDIAGeForce add ray tracing into?👀
— PCGamesN (@PCGamesN) October 14, 2019
Whether or not the studio plans to continue its free-to-play release of RTX remasters we don’t know for sure, but it seems wise given the age of the titles it’s likely looking into.
So, with the backing of everyone that voted, we here at PCGamesN – without any of the prior knowledge of licensing/legal requirements required to make this decision – would like to formally nominate Half-Life for an RTX makeover. Please.