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Comment by Agentlien | Hacker News Reader

I don't know which game did it first, but I the first mirror I came across was in Duke Nukem 3D, 4 years before Deus Ex.

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The parent commenter means to say that for most of the game in Deus Ex, the player doesn't see the protagonist. (Can't remember if the cutscenes shown him from a third-person view.)

Point! YT confirms there were cutscenes on Liberty Island before.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jnbCwPwJNFY&t=3m30s

So maybe it was the first player-controlled viewing of yourself.

The cutscene experience was funny if one happened to have both legs shot—so JC crawls around for hours, then stands up during a cutscene, and afterwards plops down again and proceeds to crawl to completion of the level.

I believe there may have been an unfortunate GEP gun incident where I found that out.

I kinda miss stuff like that.

Sadly, when things break like that now (looking at you, Bethesda) it usually leaves the game in an unplayable state, versus reverting to a known-good state.

Wow, I completely misread that comment.

Fun fact: afaik many games, starting with Duke Nukem 3D, implement mirrors by just having the entire room built out behind the glass, with duplicates of the objects moving on that side. In DN, with some noclip trickery or something, one can move into the ‘mirror room’, or observe the whole level with the double rooms.

Yes, that's why you need to make such a room when making a map with a mirror in Duke Nukem 3D.

Modern games also do a lot of tricks when it comes to mirrors. Real reflections are expensive. Though they're becoming increasingly common thanks to the ray tracing hardware on recent graphics cards.

As a player I recently noticed that in The Last of Us Part 2, when you're in front of a mirror the windows give off an unnaturally bright light to hide that the outdoors area wasn't reflected.

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