An interesting question that comes up is, what influences the development of a high-tech game--a cool, new technology or an original game design? This is a debate that rages in many development studios. Ed Del Castillo, president of Liquid Entertainment and producer of the upcoming Battle Realms, says, "I think the technical challenge that faces all of us today is being in an 'imagination [in] transition.' In the past, the limitations of the technology were such that designers had a very limited set of things they could do. So their imagination was devoted to taking this limited set of tools and making something emotionally compelling out of them. Now, we are at a point where the technology has an amazing amount of power (relatively speaking) and the designer can request all sorts of things."

But in practice, it's not necessarily a "chicken or egg" problem for developers; rather, it's a balancing act of implementing a new technology into a game design. However, of all the recent or upcoming games, only a few look promising, and even fewer feature technologies that are truly innovative. So what makes a game "high tech?" Fundamentally, it's one that utilizes a brand-new technology or improves upon an existing technology to introduce new experiences to players.

In the following pages, we discuss 10 recent or upcoming games that represent high-tech gaming. These are truly innovative and technologically unique games--ones that will probably inspire other developers and a dozen copycats and move game design forward. Almost every game mentioned here has been or will likely be released this year. Among them, a few trends for 2001 and beyond are worth noting: Artificial intelligence has been the biggest focus of improvement in RPGs and real-time strategy games; living persistent worlds will affect the player's decisions as you would expect in real life; and the use of photorealistic graphics is on the rise.