3D Games History

It should be noted that in the history of computer gaming 3D has stood for quite different things. Roberta Williams' original 1984 King's Quest for example was marketed as a 3-D animated adventure since the display was layered: the hero sprite would move behind some of the decorations. More consistently it was used well into the 90s for what is nowadays known as the isometric view, mostly in the term 3D action adventure, a popular genre at the time.

The Beginnings

Some of the first 3D games were developed for the BBC, a platform that, like the PC, had decent computing power but no hardware sprites.

1992: Wolfenstein 3D

With Wolfenstein 3D came the FPS genre, and this is where 3D development now mainly took place, though RPGs also liked to experiment with this technology.

Intermezzo: The Classic Platforms

There had always been 3D games on the Amiga, ported and original. From about 1995 on, many developers tried to recreate the Doom experience on their platform. The results were in general not very successful.

1995: New Engines

Hexen was the last game built on the Doom engine. The developers tought the old dog a few new tricks, like dead leaves blowing in the wind, but VGA simply wouldn't cut it any more. The future belonged to higher resolutions. Ken Silverman's Build Engine supplied them. It did a good job in faking a true 3D environment as well and allowed for fairly realistic maps.

 

Parallely Bethesda developed their XnGine, which they used the first time in 1995 for Terminator: Future Shock. It had a true 3D environment and totally free mouselook, but supported only VGA up to 1997.

 

1997: Hardware Acceleration

1996/97 there are several important changes in 3D games:

 

While previously most games had been map-based, not allowing rooms above rooms (2½D), the subsequent ones increasingly model their world in true 3D. The first games to do this had been Ultima Underworld, Quake, and Daggerfall; the Build engine had done a very good job at faking it.

Sprites are increasingly replaced with 3D actors. Alone in the Dark had already used them on pre-rendered backgrounds, now the pioneers are Tomb Raider and Quake.

Games usually support, and increasingly require, hardware acceleration, the by far most popular being 3Dfx Voodoo cards and their Glide API. Again, the first ones to do so had been Tomb Raider and Quake, the latter in its Windows version only.

The Sony Playstation becomes the dominant console. It is 3D by default, typically using 3D actors over pre-rendered background, a combination previously only used by Alone in the Dark. Many Playstation games are ported to Windows.

Additionally, 2D games now increasingly use 3D effects, Diablo, for example, for the lighting of the dungeons.

2000: 3D Goes Mainstream

Around 2000, the previously dominant Glide standard was more and more replaced by Microsoft's Direct3D, which in turn was now supported by most video cards on the market. Thus 3D games were no longer restricted to gamers with specialized hardware.