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Andy Gavin: "[SGI's] stuff from the early '90s was all filled with this giro shading, as it was called, where things all looked like plastic, like colored plastic."

"giro shading" ? What is he referring to ? Is it a real thing ?

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Google has five results for "giro shading" and four of them are this article, so I doubt that's a common name. It sounds like he's talking about untextured polygons with smoothing applied to hide the edges; the result tended to look like smooth, shiny plastic, without the usual sharp pixelation of low-res textures and low-poly models. It was definitely a common effect in the early '90s, though I mainly remember it from the N64, particularly Super Mario 64 and similar cartoony mascot games.

Edit: Kierenelby is right, he meant "gouraud shading". Here's an example: http://imgur.com/h8vNeaD It's pretty distinctive because a gouraud-shaded ball mostly looks like a sphere, but the outline is clearly polygonal, and the surface highlights follow the otherwise-hidden polygon edges in a weird way.

Perhaps it was another term for gouraud shading?

I assumed the name didn't translate if the interview was face-to-face. He did mention using "the shaded mode" instead of the textured mode.

Almost certainly a transcription error, since "giro" is fairly close to the pronunciation of gouraud.

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