The incubatory team would then work closely with game studios to plug it into their games. When he started at the company in 2004, he was part of a six-person incubatory team that created the technology, taking inspiration from a piece of NaturalMotion's existing tech dubbed Endorphin and reinventing it so it could be used in real-time. Harry Denholm worked on GTA4 as engineering lead at NaturalMotion, the company behind Euphoria. Euphoria at its best - in every sense - sees the player drunkenly stumbling around town. It was a revelation, but outside of a few rare examples - Backbreaker and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed - it's rarely been seen outside of Rockstar's own games since. Powered by Euphoria and working in synergy with Rockstar's in-house RAGE engine, characters would react to situations dynamically - grabbing at bullet wounds, tripping down staircases, stumbling while intoxicated, bouncing off objects, and reacting to their surroundings once prodded. When the open-world crime 'em up released in 2008, it felt like the next step. When you see the slapstick tumble of a GTA4 NPC falling violently down a flight of stairs, though, you know this is what the developers wanted. Playing the original Assassin's Creed, I used to use the 'gentle push' interaction to send its street-wandering drones to a watery death, but you could tell this wasn't its intended purpose.

Rockstar knew exactly what it was doing when it added a button to allow players to shove NPCs.

Grand Theft Auto 4's greatest crimes happen when you channel your inner Agent 47 and push people to their deaths: over the edge of a bridge, onto the railway tracks, down some stairs - whatever works for you, you miserable sadist.

Going on a rocket rampage in Liberty City is so cliché. Grand Theft Auto 4, though, was different. You might be able to bring down massive structures by taking out support beams on Red Faction: Guerilla's open-world Mars, and Microsoft may be promising to let us topple entire skyscrapers with the power of the cloud for Crackdown 3's multiplayer, but character models are left to flop to the floor, float above the ground, wibble through scenery, or keel over in a canned animation. Yet while this visual arms race continues, character physics are being left to stagnate. Look at all those pixels, all that detail, and marvel at how far we've come. Blazkowicz sat next to his coarsely drawn early incarnation. If not, perhaps you've seen Wolfenstein: The New Order's B.J. You've probably seen an image of PlayStation-era Lara Croft in all her stark polygonal beauty contrasted side-by-side with her modern character model. Charting the phenomenal progress of video games these past few decades is easy enough.

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