A NEW DIMENSION: 3D GAMES TAKE OVER

ALEX TROWERS

Working at Bullfrog in the Nineties, Alex was a designer for games such as Magic Carpet, Hi-Octane and Dungeon Keeper 2.

IAN ANDREW

Together with brother Chris Andrew, Ian designed pioneering 3D games in the Eighties and early Nineties using the Freescape engine.

SHINICHI OGASAWARA

As a game designer at Sega AM3, Ogasawara worked on 3D games including Gunblade NY, The Lost World and Jambo!.

Plenty of graphical fads gained popularity in the Nineties, but have virtually disappeared today. We quickly learned that FMV was a poor basis for a game, and it’s rarely used today. When was the last time you saw digitised sprites, or prerendered 3D ones for that matter? But today, many console games use 3D polygonal graphics – and that’s been true ever since that turning point when 2D sprites fell out of favour, in the latter half of the Nineties.

For almost as long as we’ve had videogames, people have been attempting to represent 3D spaces in them. Early developments began in the Seventies – on the mainframes, Maze War was a precursor to first-person shooters and Spasim used wireframe models of spaceships, while arcade players got a first-person driving experience in Night Driver. 3D games developed further in the Eighties, with the arcades leading the way. Battlezone used a vector display