papa "jhon" They matter but not as much as gameplay. you want to make a game with effort focused on graphics go make a movie. If you make a great game with awful graphics, people may complain but won't care too much. If you do the opposite people will REALLY complain (No Man's sky, COD infinite warfare, MGS ground Zeroes, Dead Rising 4, HATRED, etc.).
I'm a 57 year old man who had an Atari pong game and had to drive 8 miles to the nearest convenience store from my parents home in a small Oregon town to play the cutting edge games like Centipede, Defender, and Space Invaders. I didn't play for years, until I found Wolfenstein, Duke Nukem, and Quake, which blew my mind. I was working at a semiconductor company in the Silicon Valley at the time and going to school at night for an electrical engineering degree. I didn't even have a computer at home at first so I used to stay late at work to write papers for school on a Pentium 186 PC. I also played games on them. Eventually I got a computer of my own and upgraded the video card to play 3d games. I played Interstate 76, Quake, and Duke a lot. Use to play Duke with my friend over a 56K modem. It was so fun. Then a big skip forward and my first console, a modded PS1 and it was on. Then skip forward and I taught my two youngest to play FPS with Resistance Fall Of Man when they were just 7 and 8 years old. We also had a Minecraft period and now we all play Fortnite together. Now my thumbs are roasted from a year long NMS addiction, so I finally got a VR and all the other controllers that don't use the same muscles as the DS4. I know someday I won't be able to play but I don't know, maybe they will have mind controllers by the time I'm 80, and I will play until I go into the dark.
i love this. makes me respect the older people that made tech where we are today. also amazing that you are that age and still play games. (im not calling you old but im just saying i wish my parents were that cool lol)
That game may be graphically intense but it didn't innovate much aside of very realistic physics which i'm sure the developers took inspiration from Half Life 2.
It doesn't tbh. The trees, vegetation, terrain are all massive compromises, the geometry isn't that good too. Far Cry 2, released in 2008 is on part with today's games tho.
@@americafuckyeah4520 Far Cry 2 has live shadows, the trees in it look better than most modern games. The details in the game are amazing, the physics are on part with modern games too.
@@gausts you're talking about the fact it uses modern tech. Polygons and textures can be quantified, graphics are objective fact, not subjective opinion. It is a fact neither of those games are on par with today's even mid tier standards.
@@americafuckyeah4520 It's not about the resolution or amount of poligons you dumbass. It's the fact that the physics, vegetation, dynamic shadows, geometry and terrain are all good even for today's standarts. Don't tell me what I'm talking about.
Actually Marathon being from december 1994 was predated by about 2 months by the floppy version of System Shock where you also could look up and down...
Indeed it does, but because it came out on a Mac, nobody cared about it. It took The Terminator: Future Shock to make vertical looking a thing, and then Quake to make it a staple.
crysis pushed the envelope in terms of performance and cramming MANY graphics elements like the destructible trees etc into the game but didn't really add anything graphically that was never done before
I thought GTA 4s graphics was fucking incredible at the time, I remember one time my grandma came over when I was playing it and she asked what movie I was watching
Yeah and try playing it again now.. it looks really dated lol, damn.. I remember being stunned at the graphics and saw it in a recent video and it doesnt look nearly as good as i remember.
i remember playing San Andreas back in 2005 and thinking "this is so realistic" and then i returned to it after playing GTA 5 for a few years and i'm like "who smeared shit on my screen?"
As many people have pointed in several comments, there are many pioneering games that should be here: Donkey Kong Country and the use of prerendered sprites, Jet set Radio and the use of Cell Shading, Crysis and the use of Ambient Occlusion, Doom 3 and the use of normal mapping, Defender and the use of side scrolling, Pole Position and the use of sprite scaling, MYST and its use of prerendered environments, Half Life and it's use of skeletal animation, Quake, Mario 64 and Tomb Raider as pioneers in full 3d worlds with animated "human" characters... Instead, the list has some games that are somewhat redundant (like tessellation and curved surfaces, which is a primitive form of tessellation), and some that are incorrectly quoted (the features attributed to Far Cry belong mostly to Far Cry 2). Still, it was a cool list, and it aknoledged the awesomeness of Dark Forces, which is always a plus.
Xevious 1982, not donkey kong used first prerendered sprites, Virtua Figher 4 (2001) arcade first use normal mapping. not doom 3, Monaco GP 1979 (arcade) -first sprite scaling
@@ultimatehistoryofvideogame4160 I had no idea that VF4 had normal maps! Maybe because I knew the game through its PS2 port. Also, the enemies in Xevious are prerendered? I always thought they were just very well drawn pixel art! Amazing
RookieN08 Gamers did care about graphics before it, and it wasn't Crysis 1, Far Cry 1 was the game that introduced Crysis level graphics. In my opinion, it beats Half Life 2, Riddick and Doom 3 at the time.
Mostly Unreal engine 1 had portals and it's the first game who features portals., shiny surfaces, some of the best mirrors and an impressive particle system back then. There is also trespasser for its physics engine, very first to get something realistic and that was Before HL2.
Unreal was the benchmark test of it's era for a PC and Q/Q2 weren't. It's engine was also the go to engine for speedy game development for almost a decade.
IIRC quake did not manage the big-ish outdoorsy scenes of unreal, its 16bit colors even in software rendering (using dithering), the water effects and other texture animations. Overall it looked a lot more beautiful and real compared to quake 1/2. Back then, we were really all drooling when first seeing it, lol. Not to mention when the 3dfx VooDoo 1 came out and the thing would really shine, quite literally, with reflections on water and other shiny surfaces. Then there were a lot of details, more smaller graphical effects that quake didn't have like lens flares and stuff like that. In an interview, ID's (quake) John Carmack told that "from now on, all those things in Unreal will be expected in new games", that gives you an idea there were quite some. EAX 3D sound support was great stuff back then if you had e.g. a Soundblaster Live!, even with headphones you really thought you were in the damn game world sound wise, it added tremendously to the atmosphere.
OpenGL4ever Indeed but the graphics where a great leap at the time for console which is why I mentioned that version. I smashed it on both and the pc/console and to be fair the difference was not as noticeable as with most games.
Wheres Half Life 2 for its incorporation of the first "true to life" physics simulation and used it in puzzle solving and even went as far as to give you a physics "weapon" in the game to enhance the gameplay. The graphics were also one of the first to feature real time lighting and shadows. Doom 3 and Far Cry 3 were all halo titles in the graphics department for us PC gamers. No other titles, apart from Crysis 3, which is also missing from this list, kept our desire to upgrade our entire PC's to play at a decent, "cough Anything over 32fps was Winning" cough cough.
But this is supposed to be about games that changed graphics capabilities, not games that had cool object physics. Of course, their list is mostly about object physics ANYWAY, what with their entries about GeoMod, 3D, and ragdoll... so whatever...
@@mikem2849 yeah but I don't think anything looked that good back then. Compare half life 2 with GTA San Andreas which came out a year later. HL2 had next gen graphics in the ps2 era.
That's just plain wrong. Crysis did plenty new that no other game had done before. Go learn about the technical aspects of the CryEngine 2 and you'll see why.
Far Cry never used the effects Crysis did, are you dumb? Crysis was the first game to use SSAO. I also don't know if there was any game before Crysis to use subsurface scattering. And nobody before had the balls to use real-time soft shadows, god rays, interactive vegetation, 3D ocean with caustic, POM, volumetric clouds, DOF, real-time TOD all at once. It definitely should've been on the list.
Crysis isn't on this list because it didn't do anything that changed graphics forever. They did invent *some* new techniques to create a more convincing image, but nothing they did really set a new standard. Most of the things you listed, pakan357, have been done before. Crysis just took each one to an extreme and made it all work together. Crysis better belongs in a top 10 list of technologically advanced games for their time.
Exactly what I said in my second to last sentence. SSAO and real-time SSS changed video game graphics forever. GTA 5 would be the example you are looking for in your statement.
There was also a game called Severance: Blade Of Darkness, which came out three years before DOOM 3. That too had some damn impressive dynamic lighting for its time.
@kamikaze1171000 Yes it did. It was a long time ago but I remember being in High School at the time and playing it on PC. (it was a pc exclusive at the time. Later ported to ps2 and og xbox) I'm pretty sure it was the first game to feature slow motion. Inspired by the Matrix movie no doubt.
Crysis didn't really Change anything. It was a visual powerhouse that no PC could really run for 1-2 years. It Made a Major leap but didn't really Change or Impact anything besides looking stunning
Volumetric Clouds, Vegetation Physics, Procedural Destructive Physics, Subsurface Scattering, Water Simulation, Massive Open Distances, Caustic Effects, Water Drops, 24h Day Cycle, Parallax Occlusion Mapping. Yeah it wasn’t definitely a landmark. Infact, today, 11 years later no games have all these technologies combined together, only Red Dead Redemption 2 has similar capabilities.
@@kentzel930 hate to burst your bubble, but those techniques exist before crysis happened. all it did was able to blend those stuff together well. that's all.
Did anyone seriously discover the ice melting thing when they played MGS? I'd wish the devs had put that effort instead into the mind trip second part of the game.
yeah i agree, the first part of mgs2 is amazing, and you're thinking the rest of the game is gonna be the same, but the rest of it, in retrospect was kind of a let down. I did enjoy it when I first played it though, but its not my favorite mgs.
One memory that ingrained into my memory that really made me think that games are going to the next level was reading about GTA4 in game mags and how they were going to use realistic rag dolls (when you shoot some one in the leg they limp) , randomly generated faces and outfits so you wouldn't see the same copy of a person walking around over and over again and so many other small details blew my mind
In all seriousness, I don't know if it was the first to do so, but it was the first game I played with it, Tomb Raider, the 2013 one, had an option for better hair quality, which made it so the hair was rendered as many unique threads, affected by movement and momentum, instead of a pre rendered object with scripted motions, which my computer at the time absolutely couldn't handle, but I turned everything else down just so I could have that option turned on, my character felt way more real with it, even if it doesn't sound that way.
Crysis didnt change graphics forever. It looked nice but didn't do enough to make things common place. What did crysis do that many games before it hadnt already done?
I always felt the original Crysis sort of was the herald of the modern standard for realism aesthetics in video games but I may be wrong, I just felt that game was such a massive leap ahead of its competitors at the time in terms of graphics that it was an important installment in the history of this medium.
I remember the time I saw Lara Croft in the original Tomb Raider. The detail was amazing. What made the biggest impression on me was the quality of water :) Then Half Life was another major step and Quake 3 Arena. That was on a whole another level.
The very first Unreal game blew my mind with the high-resolution textures when the player looks at a surface merely inches away from it. Before Unreal, I remember the texture just being very blurry in previous games.
A cool thing about the original Unreal was that, if you were using an AMD processor, you could get a lot of the advanced effects (like the detailed textures and colored lighting) without requiring a 3D accelerator card.
Rayman Origins - It was the first game to use the UbiArt Framework which essentially allows artists to draw what they want, slap it directly into the game and make it work, allowing 2D game development to be more focused on artwork. They've made some excellent games (Valiant Hearts, Child of Light, Rayman Legends) using this engine on relatively thin budgets, and I feel this concept will lead to more quality hand-drawn games, especially if and when competitors make similar engines.
You could definitely look up and down. It was a pain to do though given that look up and down was tied to the page up and page down keys. It wasn't something you wanted to be doing with a bunch of enemies around you.
got my first pc in 1996 and played dark forces with a microsoft sidewinder 3D joystick. I put the look up/down on the coolie hat. even played jedi knight with joystick :D - that was way before wasd+mouselook was established :)
Gran Turismo 4. It was the first game that I ever considered to be "photo-realistic". It was one of the first games to support HD resolution on consoles, had impressive lighting and reflections, and even looks decent today despite being released in 2005. I'd even go so far as to say it was the best looking game on PS2 and even looks better than a handful of PS3 games.
In terms of graphics in 2014 I think infamous second son did an amazing job capturing wet environments. I'd say the graphics still can compare to the games coming out today. In my mind props to infamous second son
Guillaume Bregeon Unreal brought static meshes to games for the first time. And destructible self colliding body limbs with per poly hit detection. Previously in shooters you were just hitting an invisible bounding box.
Nothing new technically? UT had all sort of mechanical stuff, you should play with old UT editor which lets you play with the engine, you would see how much advanced this game was.
And don't forget the S3 Texture Compression! At that time we were amazed by the level of detail. I found the animated textures (water, blood,...) cool too.
Sadly just making bigger worlds made the environments really boring; world generation in oblivion was better imo! Had some cool speedtree tech as well.
Nothing technical though. But the gameplay was crazy. First game where i would spend hours running around picking up flowers. The world was so incredicble. The architecture! oh my! just crazy good.
Same, I remember first time playing UT2004 and thinking whoa! I just love the light/bump maps as well as the reflections it could generate on surfaces, not only that but how fast and responsive the rendering is in that engine. On my current PC I can get 2700 FPS facing a wall in the game and several 100 FPS on average looking around in full view of the map. Its just stupid the FPS output at the level of graphic UE2 is capable of. I am really enjoying the graphics in new UT4, still work in progress as pre alpha but some of the semi finished maps look fantastic without being over the top. FEAR was also another eye opening game for graphics at the time. The lighting in FEAR and the physics was just something else.
Yeah, the AI is still really good. Haven't seen an AI react as realistic as the soldiers in that game, might just be the smartest enemies I've ever fought. :P
For me it was a now very old pc third person shooter game called MDK. Multiple levels with different design, over 5 different weapons and different grenades, and big bad bosses with fun flying shooting events that for the time gave you the sense of falling while dodging enemies and obstacles.
MDK was awesome. Still have the second game around somewhere. It's not as good as the first one, but still a nice game that one doesn't see today anymore.
MDK was actually first released on PS1. The PC was a port of it. +Squeak Stevens I got to thank you because you just gave me the name of a game I was looking for for YEARS. Evolva was a game I didn't bought (too young back in the time), but which I played the HELL out of its demo which I had from a Demo disk that came with a PC game magazine.)
i sure don't know the technical details but as far as i can remember,when Doom 3 came out,the whole world felt that we just arrived in the new age of video games - the graphics were top of the line
Mission Impossible on the C64. I used to literally sit and watch him run up and down corridors because the running animation was so smooth and beautiful.
Lassi Kinnunen To be fair Halo did affect the industry just not in the graphical development of games. Without Halo xbox would have been a flop and none of the games made by Microsoft would exist today because they likely would have backed out of the gaming industry. Also in my opinion it set the standard for first person shooter controls with dual analog sticks for movement and view, toggles for shooting, A or X on PS for jumping. But thats about it
lassi are you joking, when halo came out it was cutting edge gaming, i remember it like it was yesterday, back then and its not that long ago, halo was mindblowingly epic for graphics, and game play, you can even see it in halo anniversary, that one game alone was revolutionary for the fps genera and graphics and then there was gears... enough said
+netslave One of my most memorial moments in gaming and I would say the best for me, was when you would crash land on the Halo for the first time, hearing the sounds and music, seeing the scope of the land, looking up and seeing the inner side of the Halo ring reaching up to the sky! Then as you are walking around in awe you hear Cortana talking about the kinds of flora around you. Then you hear a dropship approaching and Cortana telling you to hide! I get goosebumps just thinking about it!
Another world didn't use rotoscoping; it was actually done by translating and rotating geometric shapes. Thats why it looked even smoother than PoP(and much blockier).
Splinter Cell: Introduced Dynamic Lighting Half Life 2: First physics engine to simulate real life. Like how things naturally fall and move. That's a HUGE one Halo 2: Background loading while still playing to alleviate long loading screens
Quake 1. I was at a LAN party, and all of us were sitting in IRC waiting for Id to upload the alpha test, which we were able to grab before the ftp crashed repeatedly. We spent the rest of the night completely blown away by the game. You could stand on each other's heads! You could lob grenades in creative ways. It was sweet.
Glad you mentioned Doom and Quake 3 Arena graphical achievements. Therefore you mentioned that Crusaders of Might and Magic is the first game that had Volumetric Shadows affected by light sources which is WRONG. Quake 2 (enhanced with GPU) and Thief: The Dark Project released 1 year before that game and had the technology.
Half life 2 was the first game that made me say "whoa." To be fair I already understood that the engine would be modified into many games that are still played.
Like when you look up and the rain hits the visor, or seeing your hand's skeleton when reloading with the x-ray visor on, or catching a glimpse of your reflection when something flashed on screen,?
none of these games compare to the groundbreaking achievement of Elite. they managed to make that YEARS before id software figured out how to make a PC sidescroller
The developers of Myst, Cyan, have very recently released a new game right along the same vein. Look up the studio on Steam, as I forget the name of their new title. Game on.
+Jan: Uru ages of Myst hurt Cyan pretty good financially, it was so bad they almost closed in 2005. Myst 3 and 4 I believe were licensed out to other developers and they were quite good. Dunno where they got the cash for Myst 5 but I assume all their profits from the originals went into URU, likely why they had to use Kickstarter to make Obduction. I think the same thing happened to Oddworld Inhabitants, they are still around as a company name but I think that's about it. Sadly been wanting another good and modernized Oddworld.
I can't believe Crysis wasn't even mentioned! It rocked the foundation of how realistic games could look, and it had a habit of melting GPU's! Of any game out there that pushed the envelope, Crysis was it. "Crysis received universal acclaim, hailing it as the first true next-gen experience" and due to it's insanely demanding requirements, spawned the timeless phrase, "But can it run Crysis?"
Everquest 1999... That game changed the way i critique other games. If you werent tgere at launch of eq1999 you will never understand how eq changed mmorpgs for ever
by that point dynamic shadows was already a thing - the flash light in halo CE generates dynamic shadows. Bump mapping wasn't new either - games like Halo 2 which launched several months before had bump mapping and so did engines like UE2.5. While the ID Tech 4 engine (doom 3 's engine) was impressive it was rather late to the party because of the insistence of a small development team.
Thel 'Vadam Doom on PC around 2000 ...was a top graphic game. Same for all Tomb Raiders and Call of duty mw 1 2005. God of war on consoles . For me FF of 2009 was 3 years before any game in graphics terms. We can't forget the car games... Every year better than the year before. Dirt on PC 1 and 2 was a jaw drop...like need for speed Pro Street. Last years of ps3...so many top graphic games like beyond two souls. Oh god!
At the time I remember I thought Myst looked incredible. We never had a super high powered PC growing up so the only games we really had were like, Lemmings and Pinball and Monopoly/Life board game type games so Myst looked amazingly real in comparison. Oh and Mario 64 was the first real 3D game I played and I remember my dad commenting about how amazing it looked. He was playing Atari in college so seeing Mario 64 was wild for all of us.
Physics is a part of graphics? The more accurate physics you have, the more accurately you can simulate graphics for correct responses whether thats lighting or physics based particle effects.
"Another World" blew me away at the time. With its cinemagraphic cut scenes, amazing character animations and great environments. It was just a great piece of story telling - I'll take my rose tinted glasses off now :)
This game was an absolute work of art. My whole dorm was addicted to it in college. If someone lost, the next guy would take over and it was his job to get us further than the last guy did.
My favorite was Descent. I still play it as kept the Windows system to play it on. I've always wondered why Descent doesn't come back. Way ahead of it's time.
The original NBA 2k for the Dreamcast had graphics that blew my mind at the time. Before it, all we had was muddy PS1 and N64 basketball games, but NBA 2k not only had crisp, clear graphics, but ALL the players looked like themselves, ALL the coaches looked like themselves, and even all the ARENAS were in the game as well :O
Final Fantasy XIII blew me away with the cgi cutscenes, because at the time it came out I still had my ps2 so I wasn't used to that much detail in a game
That was pretty good, but at some points it feels like they were just using any excuse to add CGI. Guess they had extra space to fill on those first three disks. The CGI backgrounds while you were running around controlling your character however were pretty sweet, it made everything look just a bit more real.
Everyone knows Skyrim blows your mind with its appearance the first time you play it man, especially in comparison to Oblivion or Morrowind. Hell it's still breath-taking sometimes. :)
What's great is switching between the newest and best graphical mods and the vanilla version of Skyrim and then trying to remember that feeling of how good the vanilla Skyrim looked the first time you played it.
Heavenlyhounds96 I honestly dont think its the graphics for Skyrim (lets be real, they could use an upgrade), but more the atmosphere and story. Bethesda are masters of story telling and lore, which is what keeps us engaged for hundreds of hours.
well for me it was vanilla wow the fact that you could play a gigantic detailed 3D MMORPG , with astonishing soundtrack , lore , visual effects at the time (2004) blew my mind also let's not forget the cinematic for the game which at the time was out of this world .
Meridian59, which was the first real 3D MMO in '96 Ultima Online in '97 which brought us the huge player count that we link with MMOs together. Everquest in '99 which could be counted as the first modern MMORPG with a big persistent world, social interactions and graphics, which were great for it's time. WoW in 2004/05 which simplified the complicated MMOs and made it accesible to a broad crowd of players. It showed that MMOs could be marketed. The achetype of the modern MMO, with so many other games trying to copy it.
i did not say that wow was the first one to do this but it was the best at it , the hype that was built around wow was sooooo huge and it delivered the day it came out , i've played everquest and alot of other MMOs (Guildwars , Ultima , LOTR online , Warhammer .... ) just to name a few but i always go back to wow after a while , it is without a doubt the best MMO ever made it changed the genre and brought new mechanics to it , i dont think any game not mmo but any GAME has a lore that rivals Wow's (Warcraft) story and characters development especially now with Legion's lore it got 10x better ... but at the end of the day it comes down to preference i personally enjoy every genre as long as it's clever enough to entertain me and boiii did wow entertain me through the years. (And yes i know Blizzard fucked up on some expansions and updates but hey it's the overall experience that counts ) . So would you please enlighten me on why and how wow sucks ?
Quake 2 was the first shooter that used a dedicated 3D graphics card. Which, in my case, was the awesome 3DFX Voodoo in 1997. It only accelerated 3D and you still needed a separate 2D card in the PC. Before the Voodoo, everything was pixeltastic. After the Voodoo, everyone and his brother jumped on the bandwagon and the graphics card wars began. The difference between Quake 2 2D and 3D was mind blowing.THAT was the greatest graphics advancement of all time... Until the VR revolution.
even Turok is technically older then Quake 2 (and looks better, but what doesn't compared to any Quake). And that was a year after Voodoo release so there pretty much had existed others with support.
Tomáš Skála What are you on about son? Quake 1 was the best looking game of its time until Quake 2 and then Unreal came along. Quake 4 also looked amazing. Arena focused on other things but was more than apt for its time too?!
many games had celshading before borderlands, from zelda wind waker, to musashi samurai legend. borderlands was just, another one using that visual style. also, alot of japanese anime based games used it(and still use).
Fear Effect didn't have cell shading. Cell shading is a light/rendering technique, one that the PS1 couldn't handle. What Fear Effect did was use "cell shading" like textures that they mapped to the models, simulating the technique.
Sorry to be a stickler but I keep seeing this mistake; borderlands isn't cel-shaded, it just has hand drawn textures. The term you're looking for is cartoony art style.
The term cel-shading (one L only btw) refers to "cels" and how they typically color in cartoons on these celluloid sheets they use in traditional animation. It's more so an art style/look than a software rendering technique. The "shading" part of cel shading doesn't refer to shaders in software and games, it simply refers to the technique of shading (as in painting shades of a color - transitions from light colors to dark colors, same or others, to create depth) That is in fact where software shaders get their name from, not the other way around. There are for instance 2D games with cel-shaded assets that are not the result of a filter or shaders, it's simply drawn/painted that way. So a game using any "tricks" like that to look cel-shaded does not mean it isn't cel-shaded, it just means the cel-shading isn't a result of something done real-time. Also, Borderlands is actually not cel-shaded, though it's generally considered to be due to the popularity of the misconception of what cel-shading is. Cel-shading does not mean that something has defined outlines or a drawn texture look, it's all about - yes you guessed it - how the shading looks . Not only does Borderlands have smooth shading, it doesn't even have cel-shaded textures either. What it does have however is a comic book look. The more you know 👌
Which is funny considering how much of an unoptimized mess the vanilla graphics engine really is. All you'd see if you play Morrowind on a 2002 PC is fog.
Compared to newer systems it isn't anything special, modders even had to improve that to make it look good by modern standards. The original system doesn't have particle collision so you get things like rain falling straight through ceilings.
Silkworm, SWOS, Lotus, Cannon Fodder, just to name a few on my good old Amiga 500. Maybe not (r)evolutional, but those I will never forget. I get chills when remembering all the countless hours I've put into these games.
lauri tuononen Finally someone sane! Fuck 4K. What's the point if it is still 30fps? Also, you still need a 4K TV on top of that. Why not use the extra power and make games get better framerates?
almost a full decade before wolfenstein and even before super mario bros and they had to fit elite on 22Kb. a 3D game make in 22Kb is more groundbreaking than any of these in the list IMO. thats smaller than the size of a regular email
Elite used 3D wireframe graphics, with hidden line removal, not quite the same as polygonal graphics. Having said that, Elite was a visionary procedurally generated open world game, written more than thirty years ago, waaay back in 1984. Developed in the great gaming tradition, of making the best of limited resources, Elite had eight galaxies, each with hundreds of planets, and ran in 32kb of ram (on the BBC Micro). Elite still stands the test of time as one, if not 'the', greatest game ever made. If this game is not in your top three, then you know nothing about video games.
Lets not forget Star Fox either... it was actually 3d and The Super FX chip could kinda sorta do textures. Released in '93 similar to Doom except doom is only 2.5D If you count arcade games Hard Drivin' (1989) is an early use of 3d graphics there... powered by a then very advanced TMS34010 graphics processor which could have powered PS1/N64 had Sony and Nintendo not went with other options. The TMS34010 is much more powerful than the SuperFX.
The first Mafia game was so impressive that my mate can't believe it when I told him while showing him the cutscenes at the start of the game that they were actual in-game footage.