What games do you think were graphically well-ahead of their time?

[gvx64]

Or it doesn't even necessarily have to be ahead of its time, just games with particularly impressive graphics that stood out to you in some way (please explain why). Also, please feel free to include PC games, arcade games, etc here as well. I am more of a console gamer at heart and so my list below is just what I feel qualified to comment on. For me, some that really stand out are:

1) Shenmue for the Dreamcast. Technically, this game was released in December 1999 in Japan and I would argue that it is graphically the most realistic looking game of the 20th century (feel free correct me if you disagree). It looks like a really graphically advanced Gamecube title except it's on the dreamcast which is a half generation behind. Going from the N64/PS1 to this game must have been other worldly and I wish that I could have played it when it was released instead of discovering it as a retro title.

2) The Wind Waker: OK so this is a game that isn't graphically realistic at all and, in fact, its graphics were generally seen as a weakpoint in 2003 when it was first released (too "kiddie" for gamers of the day), but that was only because the Wind Waker was so far, stylistically, ahead of its time. Cell-shading is not where the gaming industry was in 2003 but today you see it from Dragon Ball to Pokemon to countless other modern franchises. Obviously, Breath of the Wild greatly advanced the use of cell-shading in gaming but that was directly inspired by Wind Waker HD and ultimately Wind Waker was the pioneer for this style of graphics.

3) Super Mario 64. Not much of a surprise here. Nothing even close to this had ever been seen before. Mario 64 was my first game and I remember getting friends over to play who had been gaming for years before me and their jaws dropped when they saw birds flying around outside in the castle grounds. Today, the game's graphics are not that impressive but Mario 64 was a key pioneer in 3D gaming in so many ways that it would be an injustice for it to not be on this list.

4) Pokemon Stadium 2. OK this is a bit of an obscure one that I thought that I would throw in. It was one of the last N64 games to be released in 2001 and its popularity has been heavily maligned as a retro game because it basically requires the Transfer Pak and Game Boy carts which makes playing it, to say the least, inconvenient in 2023. Also, there was a Pokemon Stadium 1 that was more popular and didn't really have particularly impressive graphics and so it is easy to overlook 2 which came out a year later. That being said, Pokemon Stadium 2 is a work of art. I highly recommend that you try it if you appreciate beautiful graphics on old consoles. Apart from the resolution it looks and feels like a Gamecube game. The character models, the special effects and the battle stadium environments all look stellar. Now the framerate is probably somewhere around 10fps but because all character and camera movement in the game are pre-determined, the game masks it really well with slow, panaramic motions. I can't believe that they were able to do this with the N64, the game was packed into a 64Mb cartridge which is the maximum size and was one of (I believe) 3 games to use that much space. It really makes you wonder what the N64 hardware could accomplish if developers had the ability to store larger amounts of data on the carts.

5) Yoshi's Story. OK, another N64 game, I promise that this is the last (I am the first to admit that I have a bias when it comes to the N64). Yoshi's Story was absolutely panned by critics and gamers in 1998 when it came out because from a game design standpoint it failed to live up to its predecessor (Yoshi's Island) specifically in terms of difficulty (that being said, I challenge you to eat all 30 green melons hidden on each level in Yoshi's Story and abstain from eating any other fruits and then tell me that this game is easy, you will learn new meaning for the word "challenge"). That said, something that was really overlooked and forgotten about Yoshi's Story was the major innovations that the game made in terms of artistic creativity in video game graphics. The levels on Yoshi's Story boasts an incredible arts and crafts motif that had never been seen in gaming (to this degree) before. Skies were made out of denim, trees made to look like claymation, ground made out of corrugated cardboard, and grass made to look like a sewn green patchwork. Nintendo eventually found its way back to this style of graphis years later when Goodfeel made Kirby's Epic Yarn on the Wii, later Yoshi's Woolly World on the Wii U and Yoshi's Crafted World on the Switch. Many people claimed that Nintendo was copying Playstation's Sackboy artistic motif when they released Woolly World but the true pioneer of this graphical art style actually traces back to Yoshi's Story on the N64 almost 20 years earlier.

 

[socK]

Obligatory Crysis post

I remember cranking everything during the final boss on my x1950xtx and my machine getting its shit pushed in.

Holy fuck was it a good looking slideshow

Destiny 2 also probably had some of the coolest environments I've ever seen in games. Their art team is fantastic.

 

[toast0]

Silpheed on sega cd is pretty neat



(I had sound off, I hope it's not bad)

 

[t1k]

Silent Hill (1999) used a simple form of per polygon, realtime lighting that was novel for its time. Silent Hill 2 (2001) introduced real-time stencil shadows, and it took 3-4 years for most other games' lighting systems to look as good. Both it and SH3 still hold up pretty well today visually, especially on PC with mods. I think the attention to detail with the models, animations, and more is really impressive given the technical limitations of the time.

And artistically, the games are masterpieces in my opinion. They raised the bar for survival horror pretty high, and without them I don't think the genre would be what it is today.

 

[Absalom]

Here are my top 5:

1. Doom (1993)



When Doom came out nothing else before it compared to it, not even its predecessor Wolfenstein 3D. Doom was doing things that we didn't think were possible on the hardware of its era (i486DX2). It was like black magic. You could run it on relatively affordable hardware at the time. Keep in mind that this was about 5 years before mainstream 3D accelerated graphics hardware even existed. What took Doom to that next level was its heavy use of dynamic lighting. That combined with the artwork, level design, audio, etc. it pretty much sold me at first sight. If you weren't playing Doom by 1994, you weren't cool. Even if you couldn't afford the game, you could get your hands on the shareware version via BBS or whatever, then play through the first episode. Then you'd play the Shareware over and over again until you drove your loved ones insane. I personally saw Doom as the birth of the modding community. It spawned more mods than you could keep count of. It wasn't even designed with mods in mind, but what the community could squeeze out of it was amazing. The modding community to this day are still squeezing more out of it.

2. Quake (1996)



Quake came out right before 3dfx launched its first 3D accelerator, the Voodoo 1. For a short while though, Quake had unquestionably the best 3D software renderer on the planet.

As a side note, Doom, Doom2, and games like it (i.e. Duke Nukem 3D, etc.) weren't really fully 3D games. Id presented Quake as its first fully 3D rendered game.

Id Software recognized many of Doom and Doom 2's shortcoming when it came to modding and from the ground-up Quake was built with modding in mind. This proved to be such a legendary decision as the modding community ran wild with it. While the game itself was nothing spectacular, it's another example of a game introducing technology that was way ahead of its time. Many future updates to Quake would place it in the hall of legends. Getting that first OpenGL update gave gamers who invested in 3dfx Voodoo 1 accelerators something to chew on. While Quake's software renderer was already legendary, once you go 3D accelerated you don't go back.

However, it was the introduction of QuakeWorld that really deserves applause. Up until this point multiplayer gaming over the internet sucked. You'd use Kali, Kahn, or whatever IP connectivity hack you could come up with to force a game (typically designed for LAN) to work over the internet. Looking back on it, it was truly the dark ages of internet gaming. QuakeWorld changed all that. Id single handedly proved that multiplayer gaming over the internet didn't have to suck. And you didn't need a T1 internet connection (and deep pockets) to have a good time. QuakeWorld's modding community introduced the world to QW Capture The Flag, which then led to QW Team Fortress, which led to Action Quake. So many worthy 3D fps multiplayer genres spawned from this era. It is what I personally consider the golden era of online FPS gaming.

3. Metal Gear Solid (1998)



While I never found the PS1 hardware to be anything special, what Kojima-san and his team pulled off in 1998 still amazes me to this day. I swear they threw in every crazy idea they could come up with and, more importantly, made it work. While there are some technological innovations at work, it's the innovations in game design that stand out to me. The non-traditional story telling. The heavy use of fully rendered (in realtime) cutscenes. Even the sound design is amazing. There's even a way out in left-field game mechanic that involves using a second controller (fans know what part I'm talking about). Truly ahead of its time.

4. Unreal (1998)



While Doom and Quake blazed the path for 3D gaming to be the dominating landscape, Unreal set the new standard for game design. While Unreal by itself was a fine game, the technology is what placed it ahead of its time. It put Epic Games on the map as a technology innovator. Their engine, tools, and expertise were lent to many new and emerging game studios that would go on to create some of the best looking games of its era. Deus Ex, Clive Barkers Undying, Wheel of Time to start out. I recall when the S3TC texture pack came out for Unreal it was like a "holy shit!" moment because up until that point we'd never seen 1024x1024 textures rendered in realtime.

5. Far Cry (2004)



You thought I was gonna put Crysis on this list? Hah. Yeah, right. Far Cry was more ahead of its time than Crysis. Not only was it a good single player experience, my god, it was beautiful in its day. It was one of those games that made me glad I spent the extra money on an ATI 9800 Pro. It was brutal on hardware requirements, but it scaled pretty well even on modest hardware. By the time it came out, everyone had decent 3D accelerators. So really its timing couldn't have been more perfect. I still like to go back and replay it just for the nostalgia. It's still a good looking game even by today's standards.

Honorable Mention:

Star Wars (1983)



This was probably the most famous of the Vector graphics gaming era of the late 70s and early 80s (Tron deserves honorable mention though). This game still looks good even today. There's something about the Vector graphics of that era. I think it has to do with our brains filling in the blanks. Immersion and what not. Super high framerates on hardware that was comically peasant. It was kind of a jack of all trades. A flight simulator. A shoot 'em up. A Star Wars geek's wet dream. You'd walk into an arcade and amongst all the bleeps and bloops you'd hear that unmistakable music of John Williams. You knew what was up over there.

 

[KazeoHin]

Unreal, the original, blew my mind.

Perfect Dark was a game well ahead of its time. An N64 FPS with full reload animations, mocap cutscenes, voice acting, bots in multiplayer, it was just wild.

DOOM 3, for all the crap it gets as the bastard child in the doom franchise, was graphically beyond anything in its era

Halo 2 had a FAR more advanced engine than it had any right to have on the original Xbox.

Metal gear solid 2 was... Well it still is a mystery how that game looked as good as it did on the PS2. pretty sure Hideo Kojima sacrificed like 50 goats to a demon to get that game looking that good.

Gran Turismo 3. If you were there, you know. That game's graphics on an old 480i CRT were IN-DIS-TINGUISHABLE from reality. So much so that many people seeing the game running thought it was a trick, like an FMV game with a lot of angles or something.

The original Gears of War on Xbox 360. That game... Holy crap. Playing that game in 2006 on a 1080i HDTV blew my teenage mind. It was like watching a supercomputer tech demo, only you were playing it.

Crysis. We all know.

 

[t1k]

1) Shenmue for the Dreamcast
2) The Wind Waker
3) Super Mario 64
4) Pokemon Stadium 2
5) Yoshi's Story

All these games seem like they would be interesting to visit today...except for maybe SM64 since I've seen it played so much already. Pokemon Stadium 2 and Yoshi's Story seem most interesting to me since I've played the other Pokemon games on the 64 and Yoshi's Crafted World a little on a Switch. I seriously need to hunt for a 64 and Dreamcast one of these days...on the plus side I'm pretty much finished collecting PSX games. I think I own 90% of the PSX games that I care to own at this point.

The original Gears of War on Xbox 360. That game... Holy crap. Playing that game in 2006 on a 1080i HDTV blew my teenage mind. It was like watching a supercomputer tech demo, only you were playing it.

I remember that game looking incredible on release too. I have to imagine it still holds up pretty well.

Star Wars (1983)

This was probably the most famous of the Vector graphics gaming era of the late 70s and early 80s (Tron deserves honorable mention though). This game still looks good even today. There's something about the Vector graphics of that era. I think it has to do with our brains filling in the blanks. Immersion and what not. Super high framerates on hardware that was comically peasant. It was kind of a jack of all trades. A flight simulator. A shoot 'em up. A Star Wars geek's wet dream. You'd walk into an arcade and amongst all the bleeps and bloops you'd hear that unmistakable music of John Williams. You knew what was up over there.

Never tried this but I think I may have seen it at my local arcade, which has a bunch of old cabinets. I'll give it a spin next time if I see it. It's definitely fun to fill in the blanks with your own imagination sometimes...that is something lost by a lot of modern games.

Silpheed on sega cd is pretty neat

For a port of a game from '86 this looks pretty awesome.

This is a great thread.

 

[UnknownSouljer]

In terms of games I was around for:
PC:
Quake, Quake II, Quake III
Every Quake release was a quantum leap forward. Carmack was ahead of his time, every time. And the thing is he didn't just make "pretty" game engines, but highly optimized ones as well. The guy just saw the future. Still in saying that every successive Quake release brought all collective hardware to its knees. Even the [H] used Quake III for CPU based load testing some 5+ years after release.
Because a lot of my youth was spent playing PC games, there were a lot that I think are incredible for nostalgia reasons that were really just evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Sad to say now there isn't really anything that impresses me anymore.

NES:
Blaster Master - Honestly, how did they fit all of this game play into one cart? It had so many different modes. In a vehicle, out of a vehicle, overhead, collection of stuff. It definitely used every layer NES was capable of rendering.
Metal Storm - This is mostly because the visuals and mechanics seems so revolutionary for its time. It has a very unique "gravity reversing" mechanic that still has never been imitated by a sidescroller to this day (at least in this sort of player controlled implementation).

SNES:
Super Mario RPG - It made the SNES do "3D". Though that technically also happened with Starfox and going to Super 7. It was really just a clever trick, but it managed to look like an early PS1 game while being played on a 16-bit console.

N64:
Mario 64 - I can't really describe how much of an impact this game had on me. I couldn't even afford it at the time. My rich friend who had everything got an N64 at launch and I just wanted to go there and play it constantly. I was also a heavy PC game player and nothing wowed me like Mario 64. 3rd person, fully rotateable camera, huge deep move set, snappy, responsive, and quick. For a launch title, Nintendo sure knew how to pull out every console trick from the start. There was so much variation between worlds, so many enemy types. There has never been another platformer since that made as big a leap as Mario 64. And the graphics of Mario 64 are what sold the N64. PS and Saturn couldn't do what this game did. And every PC title that could come close visually (and technically be much higher resolution) weren't nearly as fluid.

PS1:
MGS - This and MGS2 below were just two titles that pushed their respective platforms to the max. Not sure who works on Kojima's game engines, but that guy knows hardware and engine design to an absurd degree. In a world of very fake feeling games, MGS felt really grounded in its world. And that's saying something considering that it's about Mecha with world ending capabilities, overly dramatic love plots, and enemies with psychic or otherworldly powers. The mashup was brilliant, and like I say, the gameplay felt serious and grounded that few games do. And it did this with graphics that scaled. From the close and minute to the super sized. Shadows, sounds, vision, all of it mattered. All of it was recognizable. And all of it was beautiful.

PS2:
MGS2 - Look at MGS1. The same but more-er.

EDIT: Adding info about whys.

 

[M76]

Car & Driver 1992 - it had SVGA graphics option for a 3D "open world" game it was unheard of back then
Operation Overlord 1994 - it just looked better than other WW2 flying games of the time, because it had textures, the rest mostly used flat triangles.
Flight Unlimited 1995 - First game to utilize actual aerial photos as ground texture, and it made all the difference
Need for Speed 1995 - it looked way more realistic than other games, with a neat graphics implementation similar to megarace, the road is basically an FMV.
Unreal 1996 - Detail textures FTW
Max Payne 2001 - It was just a technically flawless game, it might not have been ahead of its time in anything specific, but it was equally bleeding edge in every aspect of the graphics
Max Payne 2 2003 - Higher res models and textures and havok physics made all the difference
Far Cry 2004 - I don't think this needs any introduction
F.e.a.r 2005 - High resolution, crisp textures, very clean graphics, with highly detailed interiors lots of objects.
Crysis 2007 - Flawless destructible flora
GTA 4 2008 - driving during the night graphics and the drawing distance, the vehicle model details would still hold up today imo.
L.a. Noire 2011 - The facial animations were way ahead of their time even if it looked a bit uncanny at times.
Ghost Recon Wildlands 2017 - The most amazing implementation of a huge seamless map with so much detail that you just want to explore every bit of it.
Horizon Zero Dawn 2017 - Looked better than any PC game at the time
Detroit Become Human 2018 - The first game where people look almost as good as real actors
The Last of Us 2 2020 - not necessarily the graphics, but the animations are out of this world, the way they are seamlessly tied together with no jankiness even with abrupt control inputs, it movement just looks more like reality than any videogame
Cyberpunk 2077 2020 - The graphics and detail of the world is no.1. I don't think it will be surpassed any time soon by another game especially at this scale.

PS honorable mention to voxels, and the 4K mars demo from way back. Voxels seemed the way ahead but turned out to be a dead end street with the advent of 3D Graphics accelerators.

 

[Westwood]

Not sure if it was ahead of its time, but my jaw dropped first time playing HL2.

 

[Armenius]

Not sure if it was ahead of its time, but my jaw dropped first time playing HL2.

Far Cry was far more impressive than Half-Life 2, and it came out 8 months earlier.

 

[LukeTbk]

Unreal 1996 - Detail textures FTW

I feel that was later on (at least official release), 1998 according to wiki (the year of the Voodoo 2, maybe why I do remember it well has a landmark), Quake 2 released in 1997.

Typing that just show how fast it was going.

On PC my first feeling was Catacomb-Wolf 3d, 1991-1992, the "near full screen" aspect of the "3d" specially Wolf

 

[relapse808]

Silent Hill (1999) used a simple form of per polygon, realtime lighting that was novel for its time. Silent Hill 2 (2001) introduced real-time stencil shadows, and it took 3-4 years for most other games' lighting systems to look as good. Both it and SH3 still hold up pretty well today visually, especially on PC with mods. I think the attention to detail with the models, animations, and more is really impressive given the technical limitations of the time.

View attachment 542303 View attachment 542304 View attachment 542305 View attachment 542306

And artistically, the games are masterpieces in my opinion. They raised the bar for survival horror pretty high, and without them I don't think the genre would be what it is today.

I remember a game I had called Nocturne. It was not very good but the lighting was impressive for the time. Similar in style to SH and RE.

 

[socK]

Oh man how did I miss Unreal.

Unreal 1 million percent. The map and world design was just awesome, with those synthy tracks on top.

Chefs kiss

 

[chameleoneel]

Or it doesn't even necessarily have to be ahead of its time, just games with particularly impressive graphics that stood out to you in some way (please explain why). Also, please feel free to include PC games, arcade games, etc here as well. I am more of a console gamer at heart and so my list below is just what I feel qualified to comment on. For me, some that really stand out are:

1) Shenmue for the Dreamcast. Technically, this game was released in December 1999 in Japan and I would argue that it is graphically the most realistic looking game of the 20th century (feel free correct me if you disagree). It looks like a really graphically advanced Gamecube title except it's on the dreamcast which is a half generation behind. Going from the N64/PS1 to this game must have been other worldly and I wish that I could have played it when it was released instead of discovering it as a retro title.
View attachment 542276

Shenmue is nuts. The majority of modern openworld games are only a fraction as detailed. RDR2 is probably the only thing which finally meets Shenmue on its level.

 

[gvx64]

Silent Hill (1999) used a simple form of per polygon, realtime lighting that was novel for its time. Silent Hill 2 (2001) introduced real-time stencil shadows, and it took 3-4 years for most other games' lighting systems to look as good. Both it and SH3 still hold up pretty well today visually, especially on PC with mods. I think the attention to detail with the models, animations, and more is really impressive given the technical limitations of the time.



And artistically, the games are masterpieces in my opinion. They raised the bar for survival horror pretty high, and without them I don't think the genre would be what it is today.

Yes! I totally forgot to consider pre-rendered games. Honestly, I should have included Baten Kaitos Eternal Wings on my list as well for the Gamecube. Resident Evil on the 64 and Gamecube (although the latter wasn't pre-rendered) were extremely impressive games, visually!

Here are my top 5:

1. Doom (1993)



When Doom came out nothing else before it compared to it, not even its predecessor Wolfenstein 3D. Doom was doing things that we didn't think were possible on the hardware of its era (i486DX2). It was like black magic. You could run it on relatively affordable hardware at the time. Keep in mind that this was about 5 years before mainstream 3D accelerated graphics hardware even existed. What took Doom to that next level was its heavy use of dynamic lighting. That combined with the artwork, level design, audio, etc. it pretty much sold me at first sight. If you weren't playing Doom by 1994, you weren't cool. Even if you couldn't afford the game, you could get your hands on the shareware version via BBS or whatever, then play through the first episode. Then you'd play the Shareware over and over again until you drove your loved ones insane. I personally saw Doom as the birth of the modding community. It spawned more mods than you could keep count of. It wasn't even designed with mods in mind, but what the community could squeeze out of it was amazing. The modding community to this day are still squeezing more out of it.

2. Quake (1996)



Quake came out right before 3dfx launched its first 3D accelerator, the Voodoo 1. For a short while though, Quake had unquestionably the best 3D software renderer on the planet.

As a side note, Doom, Doom2, and games like it (i.e. Duke Nukem 3D, etc.) weren't really fully 3D games. Id presented Quake as its first fully 3D rendered game.

Id Software recognized many of Doom and Doom 2's shortcoming when it came to modding and from the ground-up Quake was built with modding in mind. This proved to be such a legendary decision as the modding community ran wild with it. While the game itself was nothing spectacular, it's another example of a game introducing technology that was way ahead of its time. Many future updates to Quake would place it in the hall of legends. Getting that first OpenGL update gave gamers who invested in 3dfx Voodoo 1 accelerators something to chew on. While Quake's software renderer was already legendary, once you go 3D accelerated you don't go back.

However, it was the introduction of QuakeWorld that really deserves applause. Up until this point multiplayer gaming over the internet sucked. You'd use Kali, Kahn, or whatever IP connectivity hack you could come up with to force a game (typically designed for LAN) to work over the internet. Looking back on it, it was truly the dark ages of internet gaming. QuakeWorld changed all that. Id single handedly proved that multiplayer gaming over the internet didn't have to suck. And you didn't need a T1 internet connection (and deep pockets) to have a good time. QuakeWorld's modding community introduced the world to QW Capture The Flag, which then led to QW Team Fortress, which led to Action Quake. So many worthy 3D fps multiplayer genres spawned from this era. It is what I personally consider the golden era of online FPS gaming.

3. Metal Gear Solid (1998)



While I never found the PS1 hardware to be anything special, what Kojima-san and his team pulled off in 1998 still amazes me to this day. I swear they threw in every crazy idea they could come up with and, more importantly, made it work. While there are some technological innovations at work, it's the innovations in game design that stand out to me. The non-traditional story telling. The heavy use of fully rendered (in realtime) cutscenes. Even the sound design is amazing. There's even a way out in left-field game mechanic that involves using a second controller (fans know what part I'm talking about). Truly ahead of its time.

4. Unreal (1998)



While Doom and Quake blazed the path for 3D gaming to be the dominating landscape, Unreal set the new standard for game design. While Unreal by itself was a fine game, the technology is what placed it ahead of its time. It put Epic Games on the map as a technology innovator. Their engine, tools, and expertise were lent to many new and emerging game studios that would go on to create some of the best looking games of its era. Deus Ex, Clive Barkers Undying, Wheel of Time to start out. I recall when the S3TC texture pack came out for Unreal it was like a "holy shit!" moment because up until that point we'd never seen 1024x1024 textures rendered in realtime.

5. Far Cry (2004)



You thought I was gonna put Crysis on this list? Hah. Yeah, right. Far Cry was more ahead of its time than Crysis. Not only was it a good single player experience, my god, it was beautiful in its day. It was one of those games that made me glad I spent the extra money on an ATI 9800 Pro. It was brutal on hardware requirements, but it scaled pretty well even on modest hardware. By the time it came out, everyone had decent 3D accelerators. So really its timing couldn't have been more perfect. I still like to go back and replay it just for the nostalgia. It's still a good looking game even by today's standards.

Honorable Mention:

Star Wars (1983)



This was probably the most famous of the Vector graphics gaming era of the late 70s and early 80s (Tron deserves honorable mention though). This game still looks good even today. There's something about the Vector graphics of that era. I think it has to do with our brains filling in the blanks. Immersion and what not. Super high framerates on hardware that was comically peasant. It was kind of a jack of all trades. A flight simulator. A shoot 'em up. A Star Wars geek's wet dream. You'd walk into an arcade and amongst all the bleeps and bloops you'd hear that unmistakable music of John Williams. You knew what was up over there.

You made some really good mentions here. I completely forgot about Doom, yeah that was another transformative game, probably at least as much as Mario 64 was. It gave us 3D before we had "true 3D" and basically established the first person shooter genre.

Silpheed on sega cd is pretty neat



(I had sound off, I hope it's not bad)

That's actually really impressive, it almost looks on the level of Star Fox for the Super Nintendo. You always hear about the Sega CD not pushing the bar much beyond the Genesis in terms of graphics but this definitely looks like an example of where the add-on lived up to its potential.

 

[toast0]

pre-rendered games

That's actually really impressive, it almost looks on the level of Star Fox for the Super Nintendo. You always hear about the Sega CD not pushing the bar much beyond the Genesis in terms of graphics but this definitely looks like an example of where the add-on lived up to its potential.

It's cause they cheated were very creative, the background layer is streaming FMV, with sprites on top as needed. Given that it was pre-rendered, they could have made the FMV look more realistic, but I think they were going for the polygon look, it was hip and trendy, and compressed well (important to match data rate from the disc and also have enough room for the whole game), but also IMHO, it makes it look more like real time rendering, but they'd have to be absolute wizards to make that happen with the hardware; I'm not sure if the foreground sprites were scaled and rotated using the sega cd additions, or just traditional pre rotated and scaled sprites.

They did make a ps2 game some years later, which I don't think used FMV at all during gameplay.

 

[Nytegard]

In no particular order:

King's Quest (1984)

Simple by today's standards, 16 colors and required 128 KB of memory. Plus, you could move behind objects as well as in front of them. Sierra called it a 3D Adventure, which sounds stupid today, but when you look at video games of the time, it was miles ahead of every other computer game. This is the game which I use as proof that graphics always mattered, when people talk about how in the day, it was about game play. This brought about the end of text adventures. King's Quest was the Crysis of its day, provided Crysis was released half a decade earlier, just because that's how much of a leap it was ahead of every other computer game at the time.

Dragon's Lair (1983)

Pretty much just quick time events, but it had actual cartoon graphics. While you could say it's cheating because it was just loading video from a laserdisc, that's why it's ahead of its time. Technology just wasn't there to actually display real cartoon graphics.

Ultima Underworld (1992)

In the book, Masters of Doom, it's brought up that a demonstration of this game's engine is what inspired Carmack to create Wolfenstein 3D (along with a few games like Hovertank 3D being a precursor in his programming). While it wasn't released before Hovertank 3D, it did come out before Wolfenstein 3D. And technology just wasn't there to go full screen, so it was windowed. But unlike Wolfenstein 3D, the ceilings and floors were textured, there were multiple layers of elevation, you could interact with the world, you could look in any direction. Carmack wouldn't be able to surpass this engine until Quake in 1996. Unfortunately, for such as impressive engine, a faster paced Wolfenstein was more popular, and Ultima Underworld never got the credit it deserved until years later by dedicated fans, at which point, all its innovations in computer graphics were forgotten.

I, Robot (1983)

This is what's arguably the first true 3D game, which was released by Atari in the arcade. Sure, it's flat shading, but used polygons vs the older 3D simulated games like Battlezone and Star Wars and other vector games. It was amazing to look at originally, but 3D would end up dying for about a decade until Virtua Fighter and other arcade games came out.

Legend of Kage - NES version (1985)

The first NES game to have 8 way scrolling, all done without the custom chip that later games such as Super Mario Bros. 3 used to get the same effect. Prior to SMB3, the NES was only capable of scrolling either left and right or up and down. Some games prior, such as Paperboy, used clever methods such as drawing black sprites over the edge of the screen to cover up glitches.

 

[funkydmunky]

Most all mine have been said for obvious reasons but I'll add
Intellivision sports games NFL/MLB/NBA/NHL. There was actually recognizable little people on the screen on an instantly recognizable playing field. Mind blowing.

Zaxxon for ColecoVision. Scrolling looks quite choppy today but on a home system back then it was mind blowing to see. The "oooh's & ahhh's" I got from friends and relatives that x-mas has stuck in my head as being mighty impressive.

StarGlider Atari ST. Me and my friends lost our shit when we saw this very early 16bit release.

F-Zero Snes. The smoothness and speed along with graphics that looked incredibly close to 3D. Holds up today and that sound track!

 

[gvx64]

N64:
Mario 64 - I can't really describe how much of an impact this game had on me. I couldn't even afford it at the time. My rich friend who had everything got an N64 at launch and I just wanted to go there and play it constantly. I was also a heavy PC game player and nothing wowed me like Mario 64. 3rd person, fully rotateable camera, huge deep move set, snappy, responsive, and quick. For a launch title, Nintendo sure knew how to pull out every console trick from the start. There was so much variation between worlds, so many enemy types. There has never been another platformer since that made as big a leap as Mario 64. And the graphics of Mario 64 are what sold the N64. PS and Saturn couldn't do what this game did. And every PC title that could come close visually (and technically be much higher resolution) weren't nearly as fluid.

Yes, you really nailed it here. What made Mario 64 so great is simply how big of a leap it was from what came before it. It did so many things for the first time and it did it with so much polish and mastery that it honestly felt like you were playing something that was developed like 10 years in the future and sent backwards in time so that we (the gamer) could see what 3D gaming might one day become.

Sadly, unless you experienced Mario 64 in this era it is hard to recognize how much of a masterpiece this game is today in 2023. It basically set the standard for 3D third person gaming and there are so many games after it straight up adopted the unique gameplay elements that were introduced in Mario 64 that if you're a younger gamer it's hard to see how much this game stood out in 1996. Today, what stands out to people is that the camera controls are slightly obtuse but people need to realize that, before this game, camera controls basically didn't exist. Most of the games we play today incorporated and, over time, polished up to 100% the concepts that were not only introduced for the first time but basically 98% perfected in Mario 64.

Gran Turismo 3. If you were there, you know. That game's graphics on an old 480i CRT were IN-DIS-TINGUISHABLE from reality. So much so that many people seeing the game running thought it was a trick, like an FMV game with a lot of angles or something.

Yes! This game definitely belongs in this thread. I watch gameplay footage of this game today and I am still impressed with it. I owned a Gamecube during that gen and I remember renting a swath of racing games like Burnout and nothing came close to Gran Tourismo 3, which was made on hardware that was supposed to be way slower than the Gamecube. Such a beautiful game, it looked at least a generation ahead of its time!

 

[Comixbooks]

 

[Comixbooks]

 

[Comixbooks]

 

[Comixbooks]

 

[Comixbooks]

 

[MacLeod]

I'll go way back to the early 80's.... One on One: Larry Bird and Doctor J.

When the basketball video games I was playing in the early 80's looked like this:

I saw this on the Commodore 64 and was absolutely blown away by how good the graphics were and knew I had to be a PC gamer.

 

[Comixbooks]

 

[harmattan]

Outcast (1999) - Graphics not only looked significantly advanced, but different from the early DX API at the time. It uses a novel pure software-based engine with ray casting. Considering the engine uses virutally no 3D acceleration, it is seriously impressive. On the other hand, it required a powerful CPU and loads of RAM for the time to run efficiently.



[Insert potentially controversial item] Assassin's Creed Unity (2014) - Extraordinarily taxing for GPUs (and CPUs) at the time with textures going beyond the limits of most cards' VRAM with NPC density off the scale. The graphical requirements and beauty of this game even notably surpassed the two preceding games in my view: AC Syndicate and Origins, only to be passed by Odyssey. This envelope-pushing created a scenario much the same as Crysis: the bad press from initial launch bugs was aggrevated by people with five year-old hardware complaining they couldn't run the game at high settings. "Badly optimized" became synonomous with this game. But it was optimized just fine, you just couldn't run it on your by-then bunk GTX 670.

 

[Armenius]

Outcast (1999) - Graphics not only looked significantly advanced, but different from the early DX API at the time. It uses a novel pure software-based engine with ray casting. Considering the engine uses virutally no 3D acceleration, it is seriously impressive. On the other hand, it required a powerful CPU and loads of RAM for the time to run efficiently.



[Insert potentially controversial item] Assassin's Creed Unity (2014) - Extraordinarily taxing for GPUs (and CPUs) at the time with textures going beyond the limits of most cards' VRAM with NPC density off the scale. The graphical requirements and beauty of this game even notably surpassed the two preceding games in my view: AC Syndicate and Origins, only to be passed by Odyssey. This envelope-pushing created a scenario much the same as Crysis: the bad press from initial launch bugs was aggrevated by people with five year-old hardware complaining they couldn't run the game at high settings. "Badly optimized" became synonomous with this game. But it was optimized just fine, you just couldn't run it on your by-then bunk GTX 670.

Unity exceeded the draw call limit in DirectX 11, which was increased to whatever the hardware is capable of in DirectX 12. That is why it had issues. In that sense it is a literal example of being ahead of its time. Unity is still one of the best looking games ever made, in my opinion.

 

[harmattan]

I recall getting Sewer Shark on my Sega CD (with 32x!) and was blown away with the graphics. Then I figured out the gameplay and mechanics were basically the same (or worse) to Dragon's Layer with timed clicks and wanted to return it straight to Sears.

 

[Comixbooks]

I picked up a 32x from Kmart with my brother was pretty disappointed lack of games mainly.

 

[Domingo]

The FMV games on the Sega CD (and Turbografix/PC Engine, too) always impressed me when I was younger. That's in spite of them being grainy as hell in a tiny little mid-screen window. Well, that and most of the games were garbage. Still, it was real video.

The other big moment for me was seeing Quake running on a 3DFX card for the first time. Quake running on vanilla hardware was yawn-worthy in spite of being "real 3D" but on a Voodoo card it was something else entirely. I had just ordered a new rig from my local mom and pop PC shop and decided to go YOLO and have a Righteous 3D installed. We all just stared at the timedemo loop for the better part of 30 minutes after they put that card in. Pretty sure they sold 2-3 more cards that day just via other people seeing it.

 

[harmattan]

The FMV games on the Sega CD (and Turbografix/PC Engine, too) always impressed me when I was younger. That's in spite of them being grainy as hell in a tiny little mid-screen window. Well, that and most of the games were garbage. Still, it was real video.

The other big moment for me was seeing Quake running on a 3DFX card for the first time. Quake running on vanilla hardware was yawn-worthy in spite of being "real 3D" but on a Voodoo card it was something else entirely. I had just ordered a new rig from my local mom and pop PC shop and decided to go YOLO and have a Righteous 3D installed. We all just stared at the timedemo loop for the better part of 30 minutes after they put that card in. Pretty sure they sold 2-3 more cards that day just via other people seeing it.

I recall only ever owning 2-3 Sega CD games (including the incomparable Bram Stoker's Dracula that burnt the Wilhelm scream into my memory). Likely the same number for 32x. They looked and sounded impressive for the time, but played like utter s*^t.

 

[LukeTbk]

Even 10 years later in 1993, It would have looked impressive to me (some aspect, those who rely on large data)

 

[Domingo]

I recall only ever owning 2-3 Sega CD games (including the incomparable Bram Stoker's Dracula that burnt the Wilhelm scream into my memory). Likely the same number for 32x. They looked and sounded impressive for the time, but played like utter s*^t.

I actually owned a pile of Sega CD games...and many were legitimately amazing. The FMV games got all the attention and Sega never really figured out how to market sequels on the system. They usually just slapped "CD" on the end of everything, both sequels and ports, which confused everyone. I think Sonic CD, Shining Force CD, Eternal Champions CD, Silpheed, Lunar 1/2, and Dark Wizard were all 5-star games. Trick is, most of those titles didn't gain much from the CD functionality. Spoken voice audio, mostly.

I only ever owned 2 32x games, Cosmic Carnage and Fahrenheit (which used the 32x + the Sega CD!). Most of those games were available on other systems and Sega pulled the rug out from under it by launching the Saturn without warning. I have a buddy who loves classic games and he still has my 32X/Genesis/CD combo up and running at his house.

 

[sharknice]

Shenmue is nuts. The majority of modern openworld games are only a fraction as detailed. RDR2 is probably the only thing which finally meets Shenmue on its level.

Shenmue deserves to be #1 on every "ahead of it's time" list.

Not only were the graphics amazing, it was open world like you said.
And it had voiced dialog for every single character. At a time when most games didn't have any voice acting at all.


This wasn't a pre-rendered video. This is in-game engine and you can control the camera. In 1999 on a Dreamcast.

It was the most expensive game ever made at the time. They put in around $50 million into it's development which was insane for 1999.

 

[gvx64]

Gran Turismo 3. If you were there, you know. That game's graphics on an old 480i CRT were IN-DIS-TINGUISHABLE from reality. So much so that many people seeing the game running thought it was a trick, like an FMV game with a lot of angles or something.

You know, I thought a little more about what you were saying here. I get it. Gen 6 was the console generation where gaming systems started to surpass the capabilities of SD televisions. I remember that my Dad bought FIFA 2002 soccer on the Gamecube when I first got the console back in 2001. I remember thinking, WOW, this game looks pretty close to a televised broadcast. The grass was so real looking and player detail was incredible. That said, year's later I played the same game on a 1080p LCD TV and it was painful: when the camera zoomed away the detail on the player's faces completely disappeared, the goal posts were giant, and the grass texture didn't look all that great or realistic anymore. I thought at first that maybe my standards were just so much higher in the HD age but I think a big part of why I thought the game looked so nice in 2001 is that it was designed to look amazing on SD screens by exploiting the screen's inherent limitations, it was never optimized for HD. Gran Tourismo 3 is obviously a whole different level of graphical realism and I think that it still looks nice on HD screens but that game could have very well been indistinguishable from a reality on an SD screen just because of how limited SD was in the day.

People also need to remember that SD in 2002 is not the same as the 480p that we occaisonally game at today in Retropie or lower-end gaming systems. SD is not only interlaced but most people at the time used those horrid composite cables that multiplexed the RGB data over a single wire causing insane levels of color bleed and a washed out look. Somehow, by some miracle, it balanced out a bit on an old CRT and didn't look absolutely terrible but there were still enormous limitations in image quality. It wasn't necessarily that hard for a developer (especially by gen 7) to exploit the limitations of TV's of the day to the point that their game could look near FMV quality on the TV's that people used.

I am familiar with FMV games of the 80's and 90's but I honestly didn't think they could be as fun as what you're showing here. Really, Fire Fox looks like a game that I would actually want to play even today. You could get a very similar experience as you would playing a game like Star Fox 64 or Panzar Dragoon more than a decade later, which is incredible. Thanks for sharing this.

Shenmue deserves to be #1 on every "ahead of it's time" list.

Not only were the graphics amazing, it was open world like you said.
And it had voiced dialog for every single character. At a time when most games didn't have any voice acting at all.


This wasn't a pre-rendered video. This is in-game engine and you can control the camera. In 1999 on a Dreamcast.

It was the most expensive game ever made at the time. They put in around $50 million into it's development which was insane for 1999.

Agree 100%. Another insane thing that some people don't know is that Shenmue was actually originally developed for the Saturn but never released. We got to see a tech demo for Shenmue on the Saturn and, while it is not at the quality of the Dreamcast version, I would say that it still beats the pants off of anything that you would see on the N64 or PS1 and, frankly, it is closer to looking like a Dreamcast game than it is either of those two consoles. I can't believe that they were able to do this on a console that could barely pull off 3D and was leagues behind the other gen 5 consoles:

 

[Hulk]

No one remembers Mega Race(1993)? Lance Boyle? MS-DOS?

Just listening to the intro gives me chills!

 

[Flogger23m]

Going back very far is hard because I don't quite remember what the oldest games looked like but I will post some I thought were impressive at the time.

Incoming - This came out in 1998 but I thought it looked amazing for the time. The buildings and many objects were destructible and had 2-3 layers of destruction, which I thought was amazing. I thought the lighting, textures, explosions, and energy weapons looked amazing.

Ace Combat 4 - This came out in 2001 but I thought the graphics looked stunning at the time. 3D models, map detail, lighting, everything looked better than all of its competitors. Exception being the explosions which looked 2D and fairly bad.

Half Life 2 - Amazing technology for 2004. Reflections, water, animations, facial animations, physics, 3D models, small details, all looked so stunning.

Crysis - Really pushed graphics forward. Lighting, water, destruction and the small details were great. It took other games a few years to catch up.

Metro 2033 - Great lighting and art design. It looked good in every way with the exception of animations which were dated..

Battlefield 3 - Lots of destruction, life like environments, highly detailed weapon animations, amazing 3D models, explosions.


More recent additions would be A Plague Tale - Requiem and Metro Exodus.

These days I am seldom blown away by graphics. Few games seem to have such a substantial leap. You may have a game like Assassin's Creed which have nicely done environments but low quality character animations. Few seem to look raise the bar in every way.

 

[chameleoneel]

Yes, you really nailed it here. What made Mario 64 so great is simply how big of a leap it was from what came before it. It did so many things for the first time and it did it with so much polish and mastery that it honestly felt like you were playing something that was developed like 10 years in the future and sent backwards in time so that we (the gamer) could see what 3D gaming might one day become.

Sadly, unless you experienced Mario 64 in this era it is hard to recognize how much of a masterpiece this game is today in 2023. It basically set the standard for 3D third person gaming and there are so many games after it straight up adopted the unique gameplay elements that were introduced in Mario 64 that if you're a younger gamer it's hard to see how much this game stood out in 1996. Today, what stands out to people is that the camera controls are slightly obtuse but people need to realize that, before this game, camera controls basically didn't exist. Most of the games we play today incorporated and, over time, polished up to 100% the concepts that were not only introduced for the first time but basically 98% perfected in Mario 64.


Yes! This game definitely belongs in this thread. I watch gameplay footage of this game today and I am still impressed with it. I owned a Gamecube during that gen and I remember renting a swath of racing games like Burnout and nothing came close to Gran Tourismo 3, which was made on hardware that was supposed to be way slower than the Gamecube. Such a beautiful game, it looked at least a generation ahead of its time!

Something which really stands out about Mario 64------is its all about traversal. Its practically a parkour game. Its brilliant to actually play, because its so dependent upon detailed mechanics. Few modern games have had the balls to require so much mechanical breadth from the player.

Gran Turismo 3 was a revolution, man. Looking at that game was incredible. Even though GT4 is absolutely a better playing game (and refined, visually). GT3 absolutely re-defined car game visuals. So much, that non-car game people were paying attention.


When I played Uru: Ages of Myst, I remember thinking it looked as good as pre-rendered stuff from PS1 and early PS2 games. It came out in 2003, which is a little later than I rememered. But still, not a lot of games were quite delivering on that visual impression, just yet. Especially for outdoors/natural type environments. It has a really clean presentation. The models/geometry are nicely crafted. And there is very little fog or other tricks to hide LoD, etc.


RE: Half Life 2
I thought the game was delayed too much and was at least a year too late, visually. Aspects of it were impressive, at release. But overall, I felt like it was kind of barely squeeking by. I mean, the flashlight looked terrible. and a lot of the environments have a really flat feel to their geometry. Nice water. but, that was a time when a lot of games were delivering 'nice' water, in various ways.