Absurd NVIDIA Steam game about unboxing a 20-year-old GPU requires RTX 4070

NVIDIA is celebrating the 20th anniversary of its legendary GeForce 8800 GTX with a bizarre new Steam game where players can experience the "thrill" of unboxing a graphics card from 2006.

Steam is no stranger to ridiculous games. We've already seen a simulator that lets you be a banana for 100 hours, but NVIDIA's latest promotion might be one of the strangest yet.

Released on November 5, GeForce 8800 GTX - 20 Years of a Legend is a free experience developed by Unreal Engine artist Dylan Browne with support from NVIDIA.

As the name suggests, the entire premise revolves around unboxing the iconic graphics card, inspecting it, and installing it inside a computer.

Players are transported to a recreation of a 2006 gaming bedroom, complete with a CRT monitor, old PC magazines, Windows Vista, and plenty of nostalgic Easter eggs.

There's even a reference to Crysis, the notoriously demanding 2007 shooter that gave birth to the iconic "Can it run Crysis?" meme.

However, there's one particularly hilarious catch.

https://youtu.be/xPsc2QOzh0I

You need a modern GPU to play this game about unboxing a 2006 graphics card

According to the game's Steam listing, you'll need at least an NVIDIA RTX 4070 just to run the unboxing simulator.

The experience also demands 32GB of RAM and a whopping 30GB of storage space. All that just to virtually open a cardboard box containing a 20-year-old GPU.

For comparison, the original GeForce 8800 GTX launched on November 8, 2006, with just 768MB of video memory.

Of course, there's a reason behind the absurd requirements.

As NVIDIA explained in its announcement, the experience is technically a semi-interactive demonstration of modern rendering technology rather than a traditional video game.

It uses DLSS 4.5, path tracing, Ray Reconstruction, and other advanced graphical features to recreate the nostalgic environment in incredible detail.

The project is available for free on Steam and is also coming to GeForce NOW Ultimate.

At least there's one advantage to opening a GPU box virtually. Unlike the unlucky customer who bought an RTX 5070 Ti and found a water bottle inside, you're guaranteed to get the graphics card you were expecting.