I still remember the first time I saw a “3D” game. It was at our local arcade in 1993, and there it stood—Virtua Fighter, looking like nothing I’d ever seen before. These weren’t the flat sprites I was used to; these were actual characters made of geometric shapes moving in what seemed like real space. Sure, they looked like they were built from shoeboxes with maybe ten polygons total per character, but man, it blew my thirteen-year-old mind anyway. I pumped quarter after quarter into that machine, mesmerized less by the gameplay (which, let’s be honest, I was terrible at) and more by the sheer technological magic of it all.
That sense of wonder lasted about fifteen minutes into my first rental of Bubsy 3D a few years later. “This is the future?” I remember thinking as I struggled with a camera that seemed determined to show me everything except where I needed to go, while Bubsy himself jerked around like he was having some kind of geometric seizure. My younger cousin Tommy came over, watched me play for about five minutes, then asked if we could “play something good instead.” Smart kid.
The transition from 2D to 3D wasn’t just a visual upgrade—it was gaming’s awkward puberty phase, complete with growing pains, identity crises, and embarrassing yearbook photos that developers probably wish they could burn. The early-to-mid 90s were this weird, experimental time when game creators were essentially trying to figure out a whole new language of game design on the fly. And boy, did it show.
Take Star Fox on the SNES. Nintendo actually had to stick additional hardware (the Super FX chip) into the cartridge itself just to make basic 3D work. The result was a game where you piloted what amounted to folded paper airplanes through environments made of colored rectangles at a blistering seven frames per second—on a good day. And yet… it worked? Something about the simple charm of those untextured polygons, combined with the game’s personality, made you forget you were essentially playing a slideshow with occasional input.
I remember bringing it over to Tom’s house for our weekend gaming marathon, and his dad—who never showed interest in our games—stopping to watch over our shoulders. “That’s incredible,” he said, genuinely impressed. Tom and I exchanged knowing glances. Adults, am I right? But looking back, he wasn’t wrong. It WAS incredible for the time. We just didn’t have the perspective to appreciate how massive that technical leap really was.
The PlayStation and Saturn era is when things really got interesting (and by “interesting” I mean “wildly inconsistent”). Suddenly developers had hardware that could actually handle real 3D environments and texture mapping, but nobody had established best practices yet. It was the Wild West of game design.
The camera alone was enough to drive you insane in those days. I still have nightmares about trying to line up jumps in early 3D platformers. My roommate Josh and I spent an entire Friday night trying to get through one particular section in Tomb Raider where you had to make precise jumps between columns. After about three hours, we had progressed maybe twenty feet in the game world. Our neighbors probably thought we were being murdered based on the creative profanity echoing through the walls every time Lara plummeted to her death because the camera decided to swing wildly at the exact moment we pressed jump.
“Just a few more tries,” became our mantra, passed back and forth as we traded the controller, our knuckles white with tension. When Josh finally made the sequence of jumps around 2 AM, we celebrated like our team had won the Super Bowl—jumping up, hollering, high-fiving. All that for moving a blocky character across a tiny section of digital space. That’s the kind of emotional investment early 3D gaming demanded.
The technical limitations of the era led to some, uh, creative solutions. Ever wonder why so many early 3D games had fog or darkness obscuring the distance? That wasn’t an artistic choice—the hardware literally couldn’t render very far ahead without chugging to a halt. Silent Hill famously turned this limitation into a feature, using the fog to create atmosphere. Smart move. Other games weren’t so clever about hiding the seams.
I distinctly remember playing Resident Evil for the first time at my friend Mike’s house. His parents were out of town, so we waited until midnight, turned off all the lights, and fired it up for maximum scare factor. The fixed camera angles—originally implemented because rendering real-time 3D environments with moving cameras was too taxing for the hardware—actually amplified the horror. You couldn’t see around corners, creating genuine tension as you moved from screen to screen. What first emerged as a technical workaround became a defining aesthetic of survival horror.
The texture warping, though? Not so much a brilliant design choice. More like an unavoidable eyesore. PlayStation games in particular suffered from affine texture mapping, which is a fancy way of saying “textures that wiggle like they’re printed on Jell-O.” You’d walk toward a wall and watch as the brick pattern stretched and wobbled with each step. We just accepted it as normal back then, the same way we accepted that characters’ hands were usually either mittens or pointy blocks with approximately three fingers total.
Let’s talk about those character models, actually. Creating recognizable human faces with 300 total polygons led to some… interesting design decisions. Eyes were often just textures painted onto flat faces. Hair was either a solid helmet or a series of triangular spikes that made characters look like they’d stuck their finger in an electrical socket. And nobody—NOBODY—knew how to do mouths properly. Characters either had no visible mouth at all or a terrifying black void that opened and closed mechanically like a ventriloquist dummy having an existential crisis.
And here’s the thing—these weren’t just technical curiosities. These limitations fundamentally shaped how games were designed and played. Control schemes were all over the place because developers were figuring out how to navigate 3D space using 2D input devices. Some games used the D-pad for movement and buttons for camera control. Others tried various tank-control schemes. Nobody had settled on a standard yet, which meant renting a new game required at least 30 minutes of rewiring your brain to understand basic movement.
I remember bringing home Mario 64 the day it launched—waited outside Electronics Boutique at the mall for two hours to get it—and being completely disoriented for the first hour of play. “You mean I control the camera… separately from Mario? With these four yellow buttons? What kind of sorcery is this?” But then it clicked, and suddenly I understood what 3D gaming could be. That game was a revolution wrapped in a silly plumber costume.
The N64 controller itself was like archaeological evidence of this transitional period—it couldn’t decide if it was a 2D or 3D controller, so it tried to be both, resulting in that bizarre three-pronged design that seemed to require three hands to use properly. I actually developed a technique where I would shift my grip mid-game depending on what I was doing. My friends thought I was crazy, but it worked for me!
Early 3D games that embraced stylization rather than realism definitely aged better. Compare something like Crash Bandicoot, with its cartoonish character design and vibrant colors, to something like Fade to Black, which aimed for gritty realism and ended up looking like animated action figures moving through environments constructed of cardboard boxes. There’s a lesson there about working within limitations rather than fighting against them.
I had a friend in college who was absolutely convinced that we’d reached the pinnacle of graphics technology with games like Quake II. “How could it possibly get more realistic than this?” he’d say, gesturing to the screen where blocky monsters with 256-color textures shambled around environments lit by what amounted to moving flashlights with no actual light diffusion. We’d laugh about that years later when Half-Life 2 came out. And I’m sure fifteen years from now, I’ll be laughing at myself for being impressed by today’s visuals.
But for all the jankiness and visual compromises, there was something magical about that period. Every new game felt like it was pushing boundaries, trying things that had never been done before. Some experiments failed spectacularly (I’m looking at you, Superman 64, with your endless rings of fog-shrouded frustration), while others established foundations we still build on today.
I still have my original PlayStation hooked up to a small CRT TV in my office. Sometimes after a long day, I’ll fire up something like Crash Bandicoot or Spyro the Dragon—games from that transitional era that somehow managed to find their footing despite the technical quicksand. There’s a charming earnestness to them, like watching a talented teenager’s first film project. You can see the ambition and creativity pushing against the constraints of the medium.
That transition from pixels to polygons wasn’t just a technical evolution—it was a fundamental reimagining of what games could be. It expanded the grammar of game design from two dimensions to three, from linear paths to open worlds. Yeah, it was awkward as hell sometimes. The gaming equivalent of braces, acne, and voice cracks all happening simultaneously. But without those growing pains, without developers stumbling through the dark trying to figure out how to make a camera that didn’t actively fight the player, or how to design levels that made sense in three-dimensional space, we wouldn’t have the rich, immersive 3D worlds we take for granted today.
So here’s to gaming’s awkward adolescence—to the affine texture warping, to the fog-shrouded draw distances, to the characters whose knees bent backward when they jumped, to the cameras with minds of their own. They might make us cringe in retrospect, but they were taking the first wobbly steps toward something amazing. And honestly? I wouldn’t trade those low-poly memories for anything.
