Actor (2000) - Physics Demo Longplay
Demo now available on Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/ActorPhysics
Actor was a tech demo developed by Vivid Image in 2000, made to showcase the rigid-body physics of MathEngine, one of the major early physics middleware companies in the turn of the millennium.
This is the earliest known surviving game physics demo on the Internet, and the oldest known physics sandbox. Trespasser (1998) was the only other title to allow object grabbing and manipulation this way. You might consider Actor a predecessor of Garry's Mod (2006), as it also allowed custom scenes to be written and loaded.
This footage was captured as part of a research project into the history of video game physics engines, including Havok, MathEngine, and Ipion.
HISTORY:
Actor was first released as a demo at MathEngine's booth during GDC 2000, showcasing their Dynamics Toolkit 2.0, and was simultaneously made available on Vivid Image's website.
According to a Forbes article on MathEngine, Vivid Image intended Actor to be a "mystery-and-adventure" game, but the company fizzled in 2002 after making a second demo for the Pentium 4.
MathEngine was financially ruined by the dot-com bubble bursting in 2000. The next year, they would spin-off a research/academic division (CM Labs Simulations/Vortex) and rename its game physics Karma. Karma was used in Unreal Engine 2, but MathEngine was soon fully absorbed into Criterion Games and Karma became the physics module of RenderWare, which quietly died as the seventh console generation began.
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Website: https://pophistory.club
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