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“Smith suggests this might have been Siggraph, which was in New Orleans in 1996, but 3dfx originally announced the Voodoo name in 1995, so I assume it must have been a different event. “Alma and I are walking around New Orleans,” says Smith, “and there’s a shop on Bourbon Street, which is Marie Laveau’s House of Voodoo. Marie Laveau was a famous witch doctor and practitioner of Voodoo in New Orleans in the 19th century. This place sold all kinds of voodoo stuff. Alma and I saw that and we said, ‘It’s a Voodoo. It’s Voodoo Graphics.'”
Image: Marie Laveau’s House of Voodoo
The rest of the team weren’t initially sold on the idea. “We brought that back to the team – Scott, Gary, and Gordie, and they said, ‘No way. It’s way too dark.’ Alma and I had to fight for that, man. We fought, and finally we won. They understood that what we were doing was Voodoo, right? That really was the essence of the name, and that became the core identity for the products that we built. It changed everything.
“There’s really a lot of power in the name. We could have just given up on it and called it the Kingfisher or whatever, but calling it Voodoo Graphics made it readily identifiable in so many people’s minds. I just remember Scott, because Scott’s kind of a corporate guy – he’s a Princeton grad, and he really struggled with it. But Voodoo is what it was, and that was the right name for it. Sometimes all those cogs line up, and you get something magical, and that was a great name.”
We all know what happened to 3dfx in the end, of course. It was a big, bright flame that burned out a few years later, with Nvidia hoovering up most of its assets. PC gaming could have been very different without the 3dfx Voodoo graphics chipset, though. Since then, graphics tech has given us hardware transform and lighting, programmable shaders, ray tracing, and now AI with upscaling and frame gen.
I don’t want to play down these achievements, because they’ve all had a tremendous impact on the 3D graphics pipeline. However, for me, none of them have quite made the same difference as my first 3dfx Voodoo Graphics card – the jump from CPU software rendering to 3D hardware acceleration was incredible, and there hasn’t been anything quite like it since. For that, 3dfx Voodoo Graphics, we thank you.“
Source: https://www.club386.com/3dfx-voodoo-history-ross-smith-interview/
Image: Marie Laveau’s House of VoodooThe rest of the team weren’t initially sold on the idea. “We brought that back to the team – Scott, Gary, and Gordie, and they said, ‘No way. It’s way too dark.’ Alma and I had to fight for that, man. We fought, and finally we won. They understood that what we were doing was Voodoo, right? That really was the essence of the name, and that became the core identity for the products that we built. It changed everything.
“There’s really a lot of power in the name. We could have just given up on it and called it the Kingfisher or whatever, but calling it Voodoo Graphics made it readily identifiable in so many people’s minds. I just remember Scott, because Scott’s kind of a corporate guy – he’s a Princeton grad, and he really struggled with it. But Voodoo is what it was, and that was the right name for it. Sometimes all those cogs line up, and you get something magical, and that was a great name.”
We all know what happened to 3dfx in the end, of course. It was a big, bright flame that burned out a few years later, with Nvidia hoovering up most of its assets. PC gaming could have been very different without the 3dfx Voodoo graphics chipset, though. Since then, graphics tech has given us hardware transform and lighting, programmable shaders, ray tracing, and now AI with upscaling and frame gen.
I don’t want to play down these achievements, because they’ve all had a tremendous impact on the 3D graphics pipeline. However, for me, none of them have quite made the same difference as my first 3dfx Voodoo Graphics card – the jump from CPU software rendering to 3D hardware acceleration was incredible, and there hasn’t been anything quite like it since. For that, 3dfx Voodoo Graphics, we thank you.“
Source: https://www.club386.com/3dfx-voodoo-history-ross-smith-interview/