Factor quickly realized that Aviator could do more than just pass the time—it could also help Sun move workstations. The game was a fantastic means to demonstrate the GX’s graphical capabilities, running at a high resolution (1,280 × 1,024 pixels) and at 256 colors, at a time when most other PC games could only manage resolutions up to 320 × 200 pixels. Aviator also allowed clients with multiple networked Sun workstations to play against each other in real time, using Sun’s new “multicasting” protocol—a kind of rudimentary local area network (LAN) that presaged the LAN party craze of the 1990s
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