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I'm actually going to amend my list, and put the moment in The Cave down as #4, too. Because The Cave is awesome.

If calling CMI meh is being a monster, then Frankenstein was in the right when he threw that little girl in the water. Or something like that.

I love The Cave. Very under appreciated if you ask me. You're still a monster, though

The article, as threatened. Also, special thanks to Remi for inspiring me to replay CMI this weekend. Man, what a game.

Same. I was too young to work with any of this stuff when any optical process was involved, but caught the very tail end of it. So there were little relics of optical prepress around but mostly we just scanned it in. At the newspapers I worked on in the early-mid 00s, the "this used to be done very differently" showed up for just the last step: the people who operated the printing press still would refuse to accept a PDF, and instead required that all pages be delivered as full size printouts that were run through a waxer and pasted up on a gridded sheet, that they'd stand on an easel in their studio and shoot a plate of. It was really fun to have that one little "relic of the past" to some degree, but I was also very excited when they finally moved off requiring pasteup and just took a PDF via FTP. The mid 90s are probably my favorite era of tech for this reason - the mixed media stuff. Print design was a weird hybrid of digital and optical, and games were also in a huge transitionary period, moving from the pure pixel art of the 70s and 80s into something else, but not yet fully transitioned to high res or graphics card-driven imagery. So you get things like Monkey Island 2 up through Full Throttle, which are still honed at the pixel level in Deluxe Paint by people who are masters of the 320x200 canvas, but they're incorporating more and more techniques from anywhere they can find into their work. Starting with the hand painted backgrounds in MI2, up through the use of 3D combined with very traditional pencil-drawn full screen keyframe animation (which was converted into pixel art in dpaint when inked and colored!) sometimes used for sprites and sometimes used for FMV sequences and sometimes used for a hybrid of them. It's such a weird and cool era in both print and digital design.