Landmark 3D Games

rgfuller

I came across this article from 3D World Mag, it's a view of 50 3D games across many systems/arcades/consoles from the 70s to the millennium.
Handy youtube embedded 'shows' of each game too.

http://www.3dworldmag.com/page/3dworld?entry=50_3d_milestones_in_gaming

It covered many of the games I've played and consider landmark.

Xluna

For me it was Sega who made the landmark 3-D games,Virtua Fighter/Racing and Daytona. Personally I prefer 2-D graphics over the early to mid 3-D games. They just don't have the same level of detail.

LoGiE

They better put Virus and Hunter on there if there including computers....

rgfuller

Virus is there - but in it's original form aka Zarch on the Archimedes (page 3 of the list), page 4 has now appeared, so I guess there may be more pages added over the next day or so too.

Andrew76

LoGiE wrote: »

They better put Virus and Hunter on there if there including computers....

As soon as I read the thread title I thought of Hunter too. Thought it was a great game back in the day. The Amiga really was a brilliant machine.

Retr0gamer

Not a great list. I would have included some voxel games, Estatica and X for the gameboy. Also faceball as well.

Kevster

Wow, I remember that Actua Soccer game... ...It was awesome to look at but terrible to play (a bit like European Club Soccer on the MegaDrive)

CiDeRmAn

Is 3D Monster Maze in there for the ZX81?
How about the truely brilliant 3D Starstrike on the Speccy, a fantastic knock off of the Star Wars arcade game, but on the lowly Spectrum, stick that in your pipe you C64 owning losers!

I am also quite partial to the occasional game of Mario Tennis on the Virtual Boy, nice!

Batman was better than Knightlore, and Alien8 was just boring.
Starglider was very good, as were the Mercenary games on, well, mostly everything.
In fact, why can't they make the Mercenary games for the DS? Or Elite for that matter, I'd buy it, or at least say I bought it but put it on an R4 card, Mwa ha ha

polyfusion

CiDeRmAn wrote: »

Or Elite for that matter, I'd buy it, or at least say I bought it but put it on an R4 card, Mwa ha ha

There's a homebrew of that. Haven't tried it though, so don't know how good/bad/complete/buggy it is.

LoGiE

Starglider 2 was in there.....interesting

Malice

Here is the article text cobbled together. It's probably still worth reading the original source as most of the games come with videos which are handy for reminiscing over .

Night Driver (Atari, 1976)
Generally held to be the very first 3D video game, Atari’s Night Driver managed to conjure a 3D experience out of very little computing horsepower by stripping away all non-essentials. The car was a plastic overlay stuck to the screen and the night setting did away with the need for anything other than the illusion of a fast-moving 3D road, made solely out of strategically placed side markers. An elegant solution that still looks quite reasonable today, in a minimalist kind of way.

Battlezone (Atari, 1980)
More from Atari in the form of its seminal tank battling title. Again taking the minimalist approach, Battlezone used monochrome vectors to create a stripped-down 3D environment populated with basic geometric solids and, more importantly, vectorised tanks and other opponents that need blasting before they blast you. As with many of Atari’s vector titles its basic but sharp graphics set it apart from its raster-based arcade counterparts and it remained a favourite for many years, as well as being adapted into a tank gunner training version for the US Army. Original versions of Battlezone had the player viewing the action through a periscope attachment; because of this it’s often cited as being the first virtual reality game.

Turbo (Sega, 1981)
981 saw the arrival of colour raster 3D arcade games, creating a pseudo-3D look through the judicious use of cleverly scaled sprite graphics, in the form of a pair of racing games. Namco’s Pole Position was arguably the most successful with its workmanlike recreation of the Fuji Speedway and big, detailed cars, spawning a sequel and even a cartoon series. But Sega’s Turbo came first and achieved impressive results out of not very much, with an assortment of driving environments complete with scenery whizzing past and a busy road littered with other vehicles to overtake. Its sprite scenery often scaled strangely and the high-up view didn’t catch on, but by being less of a slave to realism it proved a lot more fun than Pole Position.

Zaxxon (Sega, 1982)
Isometric 3D proved to be a popular technique in the 1980s. It enabled developers to create amazingly rich-looking pseudo-3D environments without the computational demands that other 3D techniques required. It proved especially popular on home computer formats, but Sega’s Zaxxon pioneered the technique in the arcades, taking the gameplay of titles like Scramble and forcing it into an isometric view as you piloted a fighter ship through a detailed and colourful space fortress. Its looks made it an instant success, but it Zaxxon lacked variety and its appeal turned out to be fairly short-lived.

Star Wars (Atari, 1983)
Before George Lucas felt the need to go back and slather CG all over Star Wars, Atari came up with its own CG recreation of the film’s climactic Battle of Yavin sequence. Once again Atari opted for a vector display, this time using its Color-QuadraScan technology previously seen in Tempest and Space Duel, resulting in a colourful, fast and action-packed game that put the player into the cockpit of Luke Skywalker’s X-Wing to battle TIE Fighters in space, fly low over the surface of the Death Star and then belt down the trench to deliver fiery death into the exhaust port. Truly immersive and rightly regarded as a classic, original Star Wars machines are much sought after by collectors.

I, Robot (Atari, 1983)
If you’re of a certain age then chances are you’ll have encountered every single one of these classic arcade games in person at some time in your life. Except, we’ll wager, for this one. Dave Theurer’s I, Robot is possibly the most groundbreaking title in this selection – it delivered, in 1983, filled polygons, flat shading and an adjustable camera, as well as a chill-out doodle mode as an alternative to the blasting, jumping, colouring-in and giant eye-avoiding of the slightly surreal and bonkers main game – and it was an immense commercial failure, with between 750–1500 units ever being produced. We’ve only ever seen one, ever, about 25 years ago in a Weston Super Mare arcade.

Marble Madness (Atari, 1984)
Stepping back from I,Robot’s polygonal achievements, 1984’s Marble Madness relied on tried and trusted isometric 3D to create a bright and cartoony look, but also managed to add immersive qualities to the mix. Your aim was to steer a marble through a series of Escheresque courses, and rather than use traditional joysticks Atari opted for trackballs, delivering precise and often extremely physical control over your marble. There was also a semblance of real-world physics, with your marble’s direction and momentum being affected by slopes and undulations as well as different surface types, the ability to use ramps to jump over gaps, and the threat of your marble smashing if it fell too far.

Hard Drivin’ (Atari, 1988)
Our last Atari offering heralded the move away from scaled sprite 3D prevalent in arcade racing games ever since Turbo and Pole Position and towards polygonal 3D. Promoted as the world’s first authentic driving simulation game, Hard Drivin’ featured a fully 3D polygonal environment seen through the windscreen of your car, realistic physics and instant replays of crashes (and polygon explosions) from an external camera. The simulation aspect made it somewhat unforgiving, but its lovingly-modelled world, complete with jumps, loops, other road users and hidden easter eggs, set a template for other games to follow.

Virtua Fighter (Sega, 1993)
Beat-em-up games were a genre dominated by Capcom’s determinedly 2D Street Fighter 2 games, and to a lesser extend Midway’s Mortal Kombat series, until Sega came along with its Model 1 system (previously seen in Virtua Racing) and Virtua Fighter. Instead of large 2D sprites, Virtua Fighter modelled its fully-animated characters out of lots of flat-shaded polygons, and put them into a 3D arena rather than have them fight on a 2D plane. Crucially, it also sported fluid controls and a large variety of moves for each character, giving it lasting appeal beyond the novelty of its 3D looks, and enabling Sega to release a series of sequels, each pushing the graphical boundaries ever further.

Daytona USA (Sega, 1993)
Sega’s Model 1 hardware was a short-lived technology with only six games to its name, and was quickly superseded by the much more powerful Model 2 board, which made its arcade debut in 1993 powering Daytona USA. Daytona instantly stood out thanks to its completely texture-mapped world running at a constant 60fps. Model 2 also enabled diffuse reflection, a technique that Daytona was able to show off to great effect with the sky reflected in the rear windows of its cars, and the realism was further enhanced with a rudimentary form of damage modelling and a choice of viewpoints, an option first seen, of course, in I, Robot.

Ballblazer (LucasFilm Games, 1984)
Way back in the olden days, before it existed almost solely as a source of Star Wars game, even before it was pioneering the point and click adventure game, LucasArts (or LucasFilm Games as it was then) was a trailblazing developer of 3D games for home systems. Ballblazer, developed for Atari 8-bit machines and then ported to most other 8-bit systems, was an early triumph; a split-screen 3D game of futuristic one-on-one football where you zoom around in what can only be high-speed hovercrafts, trying to fire a floating ball into moving goals. By keeping its graphics simple – scaled sprites on a chequerboard field – it managed to move at a scorching pace.

Leaderboard (Access Software, 1986)
Golf’s a leisurely pursuit, which probably made it an attractive prospect for 3D simulation back in the 8-bit days; after all you can get away with a lot more detail if you’re not tied to a need to redraw the screen instantly. Leaderboard wasn’t exactly slow at drawing its scenes, although watching it back we’re amused to note that we’d completely forgotten about how it drew them bit by bit. It kept thing nice and simple, constructing its flat courses entirely out of land and still blue water, and it looked excellent, with the added bonus that it played brilliantly too. Later versions added scaled foliage and better landscaping, allowing for recreations of real courses. We love the simplicity of the original version, though.

Stunt Car Racer (Geoff Crammond, 1989)
Geoff Crammond already had a hit 3D racing game under his belt – 1984’s Revs for the BBC Micro, a Formula Three game with impressive physics simulation and AI opponents – when in 1989 he came up with Stunt Car Racer, a quite different game of 3D driving. While it was again strong on the physics front, realism wasn’t the aim here; instead the tracks were elevated rollercoaster monstrosities confronting you with the constant threat of falling off, and they were rendered in fast filled polygons that even managed to run at an acceptable pace on 8-bit computers. After Stunt Car Racer, Crammond went on to make a series of acclaimed F1 games; a PC remake of Stunt Car Racer was mooted a few years ago but never came to fruition.

Wipeout (Psygnosis, 1995)
The coming of the Playstation marked a massive turning point for games, in that it was the first console built specifically for 3D, and Wipeout was arguably its first major hit. Anyone will tell you that its instant widespread appeal was down to Pysgnosis’ recruitment of The Designers Republic to brand the title specifically to appeal to the achingly hip and fashionable clubbing audience, and the canny licensed soundtrack, but beneath the trendy veneer lay a compelling game of high speed anti-gravity racing; a Stunt Car Racer on disco biscuits that showed off the Playstation’s 3D hardware to excellent effect, making Wipeout the point at which 3D truly hit the mainstream.

Mario’s Tennis (Nintendo, 1995)
We can’t really do a round-up of 3D games without mentioning Nintendo’s greatest mistake ever. The Virtual Boy was an ill-conceived attempt at a handheld virtual reality console, resembling a pimped-out View-Master and only capable of displaying its VR wares in retina-scorching red on black. Launched in 1995 and withdrawn barely a year later, it’s not a proud moment in Nintendo’s history. But bless them for at least trying, and you know what? Mario’s Tennis is actually not a bad game, and almost caused us to impulse buy a heavily-discounted Virtual Boy in Los Angeles over a decade ago; almost, because the shop didn’t actually have any in stock beyond the display unit. Damn it.

Actua Soccer (Gremlin Interactive, 1995)
Football games (by which of course we mean soccer games, American readers) have been bravely attempting 3D for almost as long as there have been video games. Back in 1979, Mattel released Soccer for its Intellivision console, proudly boasting of its realistic 3D pitch, and over the years many other titles tried to do football in 3D using a variety of forced perspectives. Gremlin Interactive, however, were the first to develop a fully 3D football game, complete with polygonal 3D players motion captured from actual Sheffield Wednesday players.

Quake 3 Arena (id Software, 1999)
id Software’s John Carmack is the superstar of 3D engines in gaming, and arguably the man who made the PC an attractive gaming proposal for many of us back in the 1990s. Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake made a genre out of the first-person shooter, the latter two bringing with them networked deathmatch play, and then in 1999 id launched Quake 3 Arena, ditching the story mode of previous games and concentrating on deathmatch as sport. Quake 3 is also notable for spelling the end of software rendering; the first Quake was quickly patched to support an assortment of 3D cards, and Quake 2 came with full OpenGL support, but it wasn’t until Quake 3 Arena that Carmack felt confident enough to ditch the software renderer altogether, take full advantage of hardware rendering with a swathe of 3D techniques including shaders, spline-based curved surfaces and volumetric fog.

Metropolis Street Racer (Bizarre Creations, 2000)
It wasn’t the first game to have a go at 3D recreations of real cities – Microsoft’s Midtown Madness had a go at simulating Chicago in 1999, but it would be kindest to overlook that particular attempt – but when Metropolis Street Racer roared onto the Dreamcast in 2000 it was streets ahead (sorry) of every previous attempt, enabling you to tear around painstakingly modelled and photographed copies of London, Tokyo and San Francisco in equally well-modelled cars. And if that wasn’t enough realism for you, MSR threw in a full day/night spectrum and showed you each city as it ought to appear at that exact point in time. Which meant that, assuming you were in the UK and playing in the evening you pretty much always saw Tokyo at night when, to be fair, it looks best, and San Francisco in broad daylight.

Jet Set Radio (Smilebit, 2000)
Realism is overrated, and it’s often the case that 3D gaming has looked its absolute best when it’s put the relentless pursuit of realism to one side and tried something a little different. Jet Set Radio is a perfect example of this, a peculiar and fun game of rollerblading and graffiti vandalism made all the more vivid through being entirely cel-shaded. The bright, limited palette and strong outlines gave Jet Set Radio a cartoon look and made it the most distinctive looking game of 2000.

Wreckless: The Yakuza Missions (Bunkasha, 2002)
We had Grand Theft Auto III lined up for today’s final spot, with it big open 3D city, but it was a reluctant inclusion, knowing that its approach had already been taken by Hunter on the Amiga and ST in 1991, and then by Body Harvest on the N64 which, in many ways, was a proto-GTA3 from the same developers. But then Billy Thomson from Ruffian Games took a couple of minutes out from designing Crackdown 2 to remind us about Wreckless: The Yakuza Missions, published by Activision in 2002. It’s another driving game that’s never likely to feature on anyone’s top ten list; however in its Xbox incarnation it was quite possibly the first game to use depth of field blur, and that’s reason enough for us to include it. Thanks, Billy!

Flight Simulator 1 (SubLOGIC, 1980)
It’s not much to look at these days but Bruce Artwick’s Flight Simulator for the Apple II, with its monochrome wireframe landscape and basic instrumentation, is the ancestor of Microsoft’s Flight Simulator series. It kicked off as a series of articles on computer graphics by Artwick that proved so popular that readers wanted to buy his software, and so SubLOGIC was born and, a few years later, Flight Simulator was released. Microsoft soon bought a license to produce a PC version, and the longest-running series of PC games came into being.

Elite (Acornsoft, 1984)
Had we decided to order this week’s round-up as an ordered top 50, rather than taking this much more egalitarian, genre-based approach, chances are that Elite would be at number one. From a purely technological point of view, Ian Bell and David Braben created a marvel: a space trading game set in a massive procedurally-generated universe, featuring space flight and combat rendered in fast wireframe graphics complete with hidden line removal for that added feeling of solidity, all crammed into the BBC Model B. And if that’s not enough for you, someone even wrote a musical based around it.

Rescue on Fractalus (LucasFilm Games, 1984)
Let’s be blunt – we’ve been aware of Rescue on Fractalus ever since it was released, we knew all about its fractal landscape generation, enabling the display of a solid and realistic – by home computing standards – landscape, and yet, having played it on the Commodore 64 we came away distinctly underwhelmed. Nice idea but man, it was slow. It wasn’t until we looked it up on YouTube that we realised what we’d been missing; that it was an American game developed to run on 60Hz NTSC systems, running on a 50Hz PAL system with a concomitant 17% performance hit. It all makes perfect sense now.

Starstrike II (Realtime Games, 1986)
The astonishing thing about the 8-bit era is how far programmers went to wring results out of fairly meagre hardware that shouldn’t, in all fairness, have been possible. Realtime first made its mark on the ZX Spectrum with 3D Tank Duel and 3D Starstrike, impressive wireframe clones of Battlezone and Star Wars respectively, and then went on to create a sequel to Starstrike of its own design. Ignoring the fact that the Spectrum clearly wasn’t capable of it, Starstrike II managed to use filled polygons – not exclusively, but enough to look good and still maintain an acceptable framerate.

After Burner (Sega, 1987)
Getting away from cutting-edge techniques for a while, we have to give a mention to this arcade offering from Sega. We’re back in the world of scaled sprites again, simply because by this time arcade hardware was becoming powerful enough to shift a lot of them around really quickly, and in the mid to late 1980s Sega was the absolute king of creating fast 3D arcade games in this manner with the likes of Out Run, Space Harrier and of course After Burner. It’s not making any claims to realism, but really: this is what flying an F-14 really ought to feel like.

Zarch (David Braben, 1987)
Initially appearing on the Acorn Archimedes and therefore only ever played on the sly in school computer labs, Zarch was notable for two important reasons. Firstly, it had the most difficult and twitchy control system ever seen, whereby you piloted a ship with a single downward-pointing thruster, moving it by tilting it with the mouse and firing the thruster. Simple, elegant and monstrously difficult to master. Secondly, it featured a fully 3D light-sourced polygon landscape, which you often saw close up as you once again smashed your polygon ship into it after overcooking the controls. A move to the ST and Amiga saw it renamed as Virus, losing the lighting effects at the same time.

Starglider 2 (Argonaut, 1988)
Of all today’s games, this is the one we’re least sure about including. It has a lot going for it; a massive 3D universe where you can zoom around in space and then swoop down to a planet for some low-level dogfighting, and all displayed in colourful filled vectors. It was created by Argonaut Software, who went on to make their own contribution to 3D console hardware, of which more in a bit. It was like Elite but without all the boring trading. But most of all, in a nod to Star Trek IV it featured giant space whales complete with their own space whale song, and we have a nagging feeling that it’s the whales that fuels our particular fondness for Starglider 2. Which, on reflection, is fair enough.

Star Fox (Nintendo, 1993)
With 3D gradually gaining in popularity in the early 1990s, the two main players in the console business had a bit of a problem in that their current machines – Nintendo’s SNES and Sega’s Megadrive – couldn’t do 3D particularly well. Nintendo came up with a nifty solution – they hired Argonaut to create a coprocessor chip and co-develop a game to showcase its capabilities. The resulting chip was the SuperFX, the first consumer graphics accelerator, and the game was Star Fox (known as Starwing here thanks to trademark issues). Moving literally hundreds of polygons simultaneously, its looks were more than enough to take your mind off the annoying animal characters.

Descent (Parallax Software, 1995)
Quake generally gets held up as the first textured and fully polygonal video game outside of an arcade, but let’s hear it for Descent, which did almost as much as Quake a whole year earlier and gave you a full six degrees of freedom as you flew a little spaceship through a series of labyrinthine space caverns. It wasn’t quite fully 3D, using bitmaps for explosions, power-ups and hostages, and instead of BSP trees it used portal rendering to cleverly create its levels out of a series of cubes. It did however feature simple dynamic lighting and scalable detail levels to enable it to run remarkably well on slower systems – all in all, not a bad achievement.

Incoming (Rage, 1998)
Oh, lens flare. A handy component in the 3D toolbox, but also the one that’s been most overused, especially in games. We’ve lost count of the number of games in the last decade that have been guilty of reckless lens flare abuse, and we were more than a little relieved when developers started moving away from it and slapping loads of bloom on everything instead. We asked around some knowledgeable friends to try and ascertain the first appearance of lens flare, and Rage’s Incoming came up as the likely perpetrator. Rage, of course, were quick to cotton on to the possibilities of 3D accelerators, and Incoming was their first 3D extravaganza, putting you in control of an assortment of air and land vehicles in an epic strategic shooting match against alien aggressors.

3D Deathchase (Mervyn Estcourt, 1983)
We’ve mentioned the phenomenon already, but it bears repeating that you have to admire the sheer lengths early 8-bit coders went to in order to achieve the impossible on classic home computers. Because no-one in their right mind would even attempt to create a game inspired by the Endor speeder chase from Return of the Jedi on a ZX Spectrum in first-person 3D, would they? It would be madness. Thankfully, though, that minor obstacle never occurred to Mervyn Estcourt, and he went ahead and did it anyway, fitting it into just 16K as well. The 3D’s basic but colourful and just convincing enough; the game itself makes regular appearances whenever anyone decides to create a list of the best Spectrum games.

Forbidden Forest (Cosmi, 1983)
Another early example of impressive effects being created with ingenuity and not a lot else. Look at screenshots of it and Paul Norman’s Forbidden Forest gives the impression of being an ugly mess, combining horrible expanded sprites and lots of character graphics. In action, however, it all worked; clever parallax scrolling and sprite scaling gave the forest and its denizens a real sense of depth, and Forbidden Forest used music and fading light levels to gradually ramp up the tension. It also forced you to watch your character do a stupid unskippable dance after every single level, creating a precedent for rubbish cutscenes that’s almost unforgivable.

Doom (id Software, 1993)
It would be far too easy for this round-up to include just about everything that id Software’s 3D engine genius, John Carmack, has ever done, and so in total we’ve restricted ourselves to just two of his games. After Quake 3 Arena, we’ve plumped for Doom. Even though it wasn’t quite fully 3D – the maps were in fact 2D planes with added height values, the game was displayed in two-point perspective and all the characters and items were 2D sprites – it was damn near close enough in 1993. The fully texture-mapped game world was a revelation, its variable light levels were used to great effect and, perhaps most importantly, it made it easy for players to create their own content. We’ve met a lot of people in the games industry who started out by creating their own Doom levels.

Super Mario 64 (Nintendo, 1996)
There aren’t really that many truly revolutionary games in existence, but Super Mario 64 is definitely one of them. Created as a launch title for the SGI-powered Nintendo 64, it took the 2D platform gaming genre and extruded it into the 3rd dimension, creating a template for countless games to follow and, amazingly, getting everything pretty much right first time. Just look at Super Mario Sunshine and Super Mario Galaxy; they’re prettier and more refined with their own special twists, but they’re both clearly from the same mould as their 13-year-old predecessor. Of course, Mario also introduced us to problematic third-person cameras, something that’s plagued the genre down the years, but nobody’s perfect.

Tomb Raider (Eidos, 1996)
We’re in two minds about Tomb Raider. On the plus side it created arguably the first 3D gaming superstar in Lara Croft, giving her a wealth of motion-captured character and setting her off through a series of brilliantly-realised environments in an excellent first outing that was almost, but not quite, as fantastic as the majority of reviews claimed. It was a bit rough around the edges, much of the gameplay was rage-inducingly fiddly, but on the whole a fine debut. The problem was that with a major hit on its hands, Eidos appeared to be terrified of developing its franchise in any way whatsoever, releasing a series of sequels that amounted to little more than a fresh set of levels released just in time for Christmas, year on year. In its original incarnation running on early 3D accelerators, however, it was pretty special.

Jurassic Park: Trespasser (Dreamworlks, 1998)
In theory, Trespasser should have been amazing. It had an advanced 3D engine capable of displaying realistic outdoor environments filled with trees and foliage, it featured realistic physics and inverse kinematics, it had bump mapping and specular highlighting, it did away with the HUD for added immersive qualities and it had big 3D dinosaurs. Sadly, nothing at the time was capable of running it even remotely well, and this combined with a number of serious design flaws resulted in one of gaming’s great disasters. Full points for ambition, zero points for execution.

Unreal (Epic, 1998)
The 1990s saw 3D engines become big business, with a handful of engine developers doing very nicely out of licensing their technology to third parties. id Software was quick to capitalise on the middleware revolution, swiftly followed by Epic with its Unreal engine, originally showcased in 1998’s Unreal. Highlights of the tech included a software renderer that was capable of coloured lighting, and its use of detail texturing, superimposing a second high-resolution texture onto level textures to prevent things from becoming blurred when viewed close up. Unreal suffered from poor API support, looking its best using the 3dfx Glide API but suffering badly under Direct3D and OpenGL; despite a mixed start, however, the Unreal engine has become gaming’s 3D middleware of choice.

Far Cry (Crytek, 2004)
Far Cry started life as a technology demo for the Nvidia GeForce 3 called X-Isle, designed to show off the new hardware’s capabilities with an open landscape rendered with enormous draw distances and detailed vegetation, and swiftly grew into a full game. Notable for its open and realistic environment and cutting-edge looks, Far Cry also featured a powerful physics engine and smart enemy AI; its main weakness, at least in earlier iterations on less powerful systems, was that it couldn’t do indoor locations as well as outdoor ones. Give it a big empty skybox and it was perfectly happy on your mid-range PC; ask it to render a ceiling and things started getting choppy.

Galleon (Confounding Factor, 2004)
After Tomb Raider it took Lara Croft’s creator, Toby Gard, eight whole years to come up with his next game. Galleon switched platforms twice during its development, and when it was finally released for the Xbox in 2004 it barely dented the public consciousness. To be fair, on the surface it looked a little dated, and from a brief glance you’d be forgiven for dismissing it as a swashbuckling Tomb Raider clone. Look a little closer, though, and you’ll see something quite special – proper use of inverse kinematics in a video game. As a result, Galleon’s character animation was something to behold, with your character interacting with the world in a wonderfully realistic manner. It’s a shame that so few people got to appreciate it.

Shadow of the Colossus (Team Ico, 2006)
Video games as art, eh? Shadow of the Colossus is one of those games that almost certainly qualifies as art, partly because it seems to provoke massively polarised opinions (one producer friend loathes it with such a passion that he has a special nickname for it so damning and so obscene that we can’t even hint at it here), and because it has such a keenly focused visual style that calls on a host of visual techniques to achieve its looks. Bloom lighting, HDR rendering, desaturation and motion blur are all called on with impressive results, and a powerful physics engine and painstaking design complete the package, resulting in a strikingly atmospheric experience, marred slightly by an unpredictable frame rate, tricky controls and repetitive structure. You’ll either be seduced by the whole experience or dismiss it as a triumph of style over substance.

3D Monster Maze (Malcolm Evans, 1981)
To call 3D Monster Maze an achievement is something of an understatement; the world’s first first-person adventure, it somehow managed to fit in a 16K ZX81, a machine not often noted for its graphical prowess. By using the ZX81’s limited character set to great effect, 3D Monster Maze managed to create a random maze complete with an enormous T-Rex looking for a tasty human snack. The gameplay was a simple case of getting to the exit in one piece, with text warnings of the T-Rex’s proximity to you (no sound on the ZX81, remember), but the result was surprisingly immersive and occasionally frightening.

Ant Attack (Sandy White, 1983)
You just know a game’s going to be good when it gives a name to its rendering technique, don’t you? Ant Attack, we were told on the title screen, saw brought to you in SOFT SOLID 3D (pat. pending), and that’s fair enough, really. Described by creator Sandy White as the first true isometric 3D game, Ant Attack presented you with a sizeable 3D city created out of cubes, viewable from four directions and inspired by the work of M.C. Escher, something that becomes apparent when you realise that some of the structures couldn’t possibly exist in the real world. And in an early piece of sexual equality in gaming, it enabled you to play as a boy or a girl – truly ahead of its time.

Knight Lore (Ultimate Play The Game, 1984)
Ant Attack was technically impressive but suffered from programmer’s graphics; they did the job but not much more. It was a year later that Spectrum legends Ultimate Play The Game (now known as Rare) managed to couple full isometric 3D with decent graphics in their Filmation engine. Knight Lore was its first outing, a 3D quest to find the magic potion to stop you from turning into a werewolf, and it revolutionised 3D on home formats, its cartoon-like isometric style becoming one of the most copied techniques ever.

Mercenary (Novagen, 1985)
Mercenary gets off to one of the best starts in gaming, putting you in deep space before a guidance systems fault occurs, a planet looms out of nowhere and you’re forced into a crash landing, at which point the fun’s only just begun. You find yourself in the middle of a civil war, and the only way to escape the planet is by taking paid missions for the opposing sides in a vast, open 3D world with multiple routes to success. The wireframe 3D is basic, but this is more than compensated before by Mercenary’s sheer scope and ambition. If you’d prefer something better-looking, check out its 16-bit sequels, Damocles and Mercenary III.

The Sentinel (Geoff Crammond, 1986)
Geoff Crammond’s usually associated with realistic 3D driving sims, but he took a brief diversion in 1986 with The Sentinel, a unique and stylised first-person game of strategy and energy management. Set across 10,000 procedurally generated 3D landscapes, the aim was to take control of each level by absorbing objects, gradually working your way upwards until you can absorb and usurp the Sentinel who stands at the very top of the level. It was a bit slow at creating the full-wrap-around view for each position – especially on 8-bit systems – but it was always worth the wait.

Driller (Major Developments, 1987)
With a fully 3D environment created with filled polygons, and 360 degrees of free movement, Driller was definitely a major development in 3D gaming when it appeared on the ZX Spectrum in 1987. Its impressive 3D came at a price though, in the form of a frame rate in the region of 1–2fps, making Driller more of a slide show than a game. Despite that it proved remarkably popular, spawning sequels and other games using the Freescape engine, which finally started performing acceptably when it moved onto 16-bit platforms.

Dungeon Master (FTL Games, 1987)
Before 1987 RPGs were never the most visually arresting or action-packed games, generally featuring functional graphics and dividing the action into turns. That was before Dungeon Master, of course. It spruced the genre right up by doing away with the prose and replacing it with a 3D view of your adventure, and added a degree of urgency to the mix by having everything take place in real time rather than in turns. It was a potent development that proved monstrously successful; the original ST version is estimated to have had a market penetration of over 50%

Midwinter (Maelstrom Games, 1989)
It had to happen sooner or later; this is the only game in the list that we’ve been unable to find any video of whatsoever, and tellingly it’s also the one that we had absolutely no recollection of. It comes highly recommended to us, however. Created by Mike Singleton, who made his name on 8-bit systems with Lords of Midnight, a sprawling adventure/wargame cross, Midwinter is similarly massive and genre-straddling. Most notably it features a 160,000 square mile polygonal landscape, which sounds a little too large for our liking, but the enormous open world lends itself to numerous approaches and strategies, which probably explains its appeal 20 years on.

Alone in the Dark (Infogrames, 1992)
The popularity of the fixed 3D survival horror game has always baffled us slightly. We get how the use of fixed camera angles enabled developers to put a lot more detail into their worlds by overlaying polygonal characters on bitmap locations, but the trade-off is that you always feel disconnected from the action, especially when the game uses a deliberately obtuse camera angle. Perhaps it’s to make things feel more like watching a horror film, but we’ve never really got on with. Resident Evil, of course, popularised the genre, but Alone in the Dark was there five years earlier with nearly all the elements in place; it was possibly a bit too early, since there’s a massive gulf in quality between the detailed locations and the extremely low-poly characters.

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (Nintendo, 2002)
This is going to annoy a number of people who’ll be upset that we’ve including The Wind Waker and not Ocarina of Time. Too bad, because this is about the 3D, and in that regard The Wind Waker triumphs utterly. For the Gamecube’s Zelda outing, Nintendo opted for cel-shaded 3D in a move that divided fans of the series, and completed the look with the liberal use of depth of field blur and lighting effects. The result is a game that looks like a painstakingly animated cartoon and that’s still visually impressive seven years down the line, even if the game itself, with its focus on sailing all over the place, hasn’t aged quite so well.

CiDeRmAn

I was always impressed by the efforts taken to produce a 3D gameworld on old old hardware, it took real genius and innovation to do it.
Nice to see a couple of my most fondly remembered games from my teenage years made it, especially the large contingent of Speccy games, that little machine really punched above it's weight.
StarStrike 2 though, it was cool to see the filled in polygons but it just didn't have the speed of it's prequel, and so was not as much fun, still an impressive technical feat though.