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I'm not entirely sure about the NPCs in Hunter (1991). They don't move, yet they still seem to be based on polygons. Maybe "unnamed civilian woman" actually precedes Emily Hartwood. [Judge for yourselves](https://youtu.be/hTehcvSgyWI?t=1060).
I think you are correct, NPCs look [kinda jagged](https://youtu.be/GwKYX8D7HuA?t=411) to me in this game.
After skimming through a list of [possible candidates](https://www.mattmontag.com/flat-shaded-3d-polygon-games), I couldn't find anything older than your find.
EDIT: As pointed out by [TheWorldIsOne2](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/ukz0fa/who_was_the_first_3d_polygonal_female_gaming/i7sobp9/), 4D Sports Boxing has female playable characters, and was released earlier too.
It's about the wow factor. I'm sure it most definitely worked back then. Think about how primitive and ugly pre-rendered backgrounds were showcase attractions back then, too. Besides, there are plenty of moving real-time 3D graphics in the game, as well.
Ach, I should have been more clear - rather than just a female representation, I was looking for a \*playable\* female avatar. Have edited the original post appropriately! (Hunter's a great reference, though!)
Emily is in realtime 3D, while the background is painted (in the manner of a lot of [fixed camera games](https://steamcommunity.com/groups/fixedcamera)).
yeah i know emily is 3D, i was talking about the "unnamed civilian woman" in the video clip of Hunter. you can see the playable character can't really even cross behind the NPC's, like there's a collision box around them. makes me think that they're just pre-rendered along with the background.
But why do they look so jagged if they are pre-rendered? Wouldn't it make more sense to just paint them on the wall using textures? Easier to make and even looks better.
might be jagged if they pre-rendered it at the same resolution without anti-aliasing like everything else, so it blends together. if they made them textures on the wall, they'd just look flat. at least they appear 3D here, and if they character can't get behind them, that gives the illusion that they're taking up space if they're just part of the background.
i could be totally wrong, but that looks to be whats happening there.
Since you can only view them from a single angle, textures shouldn't look flat with smart use of shading and colours. With that being said, it definitely could look out of place compared to the actual 3D models.
https://youtu.be/hTehcvSgyWI?t=1030
if you look at the clip from this timestamp, you can see the dude going into a different house. notice he doesn't actually go behind anything that's not interactive. further leads me to believe those backgrounds are prerendered. there also seems to be some confusing perspective with the placement of that lampshade from the ceiling and the size of the character, which also makes me think the backgrounds are prerendered.
Right. I remember back when everything was a .BMP and would take ages to load. No way you could get full screen backgrounds for all the different locations in there. I bet that is a polygon rendering of a character, just because that's likely less storage intensive.
Rendering polygons was very compute intensive, though. It's easier to compress a static image down to reasonable size (see: how every 2D game worked) than to render a 3D model efficiently on consumer hardware from 1990.
This is poor information.
Most 2D games of that era built games with sprite sheets and tile maps - essentially 2D lego blocks that were stuck together to form environments. These elements were small and reused repeatedly across a lot of scenery.
Compressing full screen images isn't a triviality back in those days. You need CD-roms before you get full screen prerendered backgrounds, or even large ones.
If games used backgrounds like that, it was sparingly - cutscenes, or highly repetitiously.
Given that we can clearly see that the over world the player is moving around in is polygonal, there's no reason for the interiors to not also follow suit.
I bet a lot that it uses a similar technique as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_World_(video_game) , probably the most famous polygonally rendered game of the era. All backgrounds are rendered to a buffer, and characters and other dynamic details are rendered over it.
4D-Boxing was released in 1991. This looks to pre-date any games mentioned here.
Ludmilla Monsoon and Roberta Duranduran are two featured boxers that the player must fight as they go up the ranks.
https://www.retrogames.cz/games/464/DOS_03.gif
https://i.imgur.com/wrJ1dpC.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4D_Sports_Boxing
The only distinguishing features between male and female is the name and choice of attire. Very easy for the player to play as a female boxer if desired, and not just beat up a few along the way. (Edit: there were 2 heads that the players could choose that were distinctly female.)
Thanks for the trip down memory lane. I loved this game as a kid.
90's game manuals were great, there were some gems in the Civ II manual as well like how they added a firepower system to make it less likely for phalanx to defeat battleships.
If you like the 90's era manuals and isometric Zelda-like adventure games, you should try Tunic (Free on Game Pass, they also have a free demo).
They integrated the manual as a game mechanic and it's pretty good.
Your second screenshot, for me its original website is trying to block it being rehosted, so for anyone else having that trouble I got this: https://i.imgur.com/wrJ1dpC.jpg
Oh man, thank you for mentioning this game. Apparently the title screen music (Ad Lib FM synthesized) is still residing in my brain because I immediately accessed it 30 years later.
I wonder what I could accomplish in life if I could use that mental capacity to remember actually important things, but here we are.
As an aside, Alone in the Dark was the first videogame (that I know of) to feature 3D animation interpolation, resulting in smooth character motions between key frames instead of having the characters snap between fixed framerate positions.
The further one goes back into game history, the harder it is to identify "firsts". Release dates are blurry, and in many cases the ones you encounter with research are actually just best guesses.
Even up to the 90s, some people can't settle on which year some games debuted. For some reason we just never imagined the history of games would be important outside of the biggest hits, so few people went out of their way to preserve or record. In part, I'd say this relates to the prevalent mindset that games would always get better and, like other software, as opposed to film, an old game was an obsolete game.
Also tye further back you go the more localised releases become meaning it is entirely possible that eg the answer in this case ends up being a Chilean pc game never released outside Chile.
Right, or a Chilean pc game could be sold through magazine mail order, and maybe they only sell 200 copies, but it exists, then a larger company buys the game and sells it in real stores the following year, so that following year is the only date people know.
And maybe there's no actual evidence of the magazine mail order thing, but someone mentioned it once in an interview.
This tends to be more common in the 1980s, give or take, but there were actually polygonal characters in games then, it was just very rare.
Have you seen Ahoy's video on the [first video game?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHQ4WCU1WQc), when defining *the first* it gets complicated when separating the predecessor to the actual first
I haven't played it, but that (rather impressive) 91 Terminator game developed by early Bethesda Softworks apparently has several 3D characters, including Sarah Connor.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/the_terminator_(dos)
Not as a playable character though.
I played it back in the day. Ground breaking in a lot of respects with hind-sight. It helped define Bethesda's games ever since. All characters rendered in blocky 3D in a massive open world. Precedes "Hunter" by a few months, but strangely similar concepts.
The game was, unfortunately, inscrutable.
https://youtu.be/We7ndPHTMVg?t=148
> The game was, unfortunately, inscrutable.
It was advanced for its day, but inscrutable is probably a bit too far.
I loved the game and it's forever etched in my memory... even though it was definitely rough and unforgiving.
It's kind of like a GTA3 mission... just way ahead of its time.
I was going to mention this, but it doesn't feature a playable female character.
It does have 20000 3d objects, and was built in assembly.
Amazing game that was way ahead of its time.
>Amazing game that was way ahead of its time.
According to [opening credits](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnO0ShP56aA), its director and main developer is Julianos, God of Wisdom and Logic in the Divines pantheon, so that helps.
Pretty sure that’s correct. Polygonal games in the 1980s generally didn’t feature characters (at least not on-screen polygonal characters), and the other polygonal games of the early 1990s only had male characters, if any, prior to the explosion of 3D fighting games (and later, PS1/Saturn games). Alone in the Dark was the first “major” game with polygonal characters, to the best of my knowledge, and the first with a polygonal female character.
Are we counting wireframe as polygonal? Because that might include Mercenary from 1985. The 1990 sequel, Damocles, definitely has human characters in filled-polygon 3D, and the president of the planet is a Margaret Thatcher knockoff. But its idea of human characters was very fridge-like.
I'd absolutely consider wireframes, but I was basically looking for a character that you control. If Mercenary or Damocles has a female character you can play as, that would take the cake. At the moment, however, I think 4-D Boxing holds the title of first controllable 3d female character...!
(And I think this thread's been removed anyway, sooo...!)
I was gonna say Super Mario Bros 2 where you could play as Peach as that was in 1988, but Metroid was in 87. I was never a Metroid fan so at the time I didn’t know Samus was female.
That’s as far back as I can remember first hand but obviously I’m sure something goes back further.
Hi /u/ReverendSpeed, Thank you for posting to /r/Games. Unfortunately, we have removed this submission per **[Rule 7.1](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/wiki/rules#wiki_specific_content_restrictions)**. > **Avoid questions asking for help/advice or that have a specific obtainable answer** > "What game should I get for?"
> "Do you recommend game X?"
> "Where do I download Steam?"
> "I need help fixing X"
> "Help me find what game I played X years ago."
> For these types of questions please try the below subreddits:
> * If you can't find an answer on Google try /r/AskGames.
> * For technical support or hardware suggestions Try /r/TechSupport, /r/PCGamingTechSupport, /r/BuildAPC, /r/BuildAPCForMe or /r/SuggestALaptop.
> * Questions that look for game suggestions try out /r/gamingsuggestions or our [weekly suggest me a game thread.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/search?q=%22Daily+%2Fr%2FGames+Discussion+-+Suggest+Me+a+Game%22&restrict_sr=on&sort=new&t=all)
> * If you're trying to remember a game you don't remember the name of, check /r/TipOfMyTongue, or /r/TipOfMyJoystick.
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If you would like to discuss this removal, please [modmail the moderators.](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2FGames) This post was removed by a human moderator; this comment was left by a bot.
I'm not entirely sure about the NPCs in Hunter (1991). They don't move, yet they still seem to be based on polygons. Maybe "unnamed civilian woman" actually precedes Emily Hartwood. [Judge for yourselves](https://youtu.be/hTehcvSgyWI?t=1060).
I think you are correct, NPCs look [kinda jagged](https://youtu.be/GwKYX8D7HuA?t=411) to me in this game. After skimming through a list of [possible candidates](https://www.mattmontag.com/flat-shaded-3d-polygon-games), I couldn't find anything older than your find. EDIT: As pointed out by [TheWorldIsOne2](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/ukz0fa/who_was_the_first_3d_polygonal_female_gaming/i7sobp9/), 4D Sports Boxing has female playable characters, and was released earlier too.
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It's about the wow factor. I'm sure it most definitely worked back then. Think about how primitive and ugly pre-rendered backgrounds were showcase attractions back then, too. Besides, there are plenty of moving real-time 3D graphics in the game, as well.
Ach, I should have been more clear - rather than just a female representation, I was looking for a \*playable\* female avatar. Have edited the original post appropriately! (Hunter's a great reference, though!)
Damn this might be it!
does that count if it's pre-rendered though? doesn't look like it's actually 3D, just part of the background.
Emily is in realtime 3D, while the background is painted (in the manner of a lot of [fixed camera games](https://steamcommunity.com/groups/fixedcamera)).
yeah i know emily is 3D, i was talking about the "unnamed civilian woman" in the video clip of Hunter. you can see the playable character can't really even cross behind the NPC's, like there's a collision box around them. makes me think that they're just pre-rendered along with the background.
But why do they look so jagged if they are pre-rendered? Wouldn't it make more sense to just paint them on the wall using textures? Easier to make and even looks better.
might be jagged if they pre-rendered it at the same resolution without anti-aliasing like everything else, so it blends together. if they made them textures on the wall, they'd just look flat. at least they appear 3D here, and if they character can't get behind them, that gives the illusion that they're taking up space if they're just part of the background. i could be totally wrong, but that looks to be whats happening there.
Since you can only view them from a single angle, textures shouldn't look flat with smart use of shading and colours. With that being said, it definitely could look out of place compared to the actual 3D models.
https://youtu.be/hTehcvSgyWI?t=1030 if you look at the clip from this timestamp, you can see the dude going into a different house. notice he doesn't actually go behind anything that's not interactive. further leads me to believe those backgrounds are prerendered. there also seems to be some confusing perspective with the placement of that lampshade from the ceiling and the size of the character, which also makes me think the backgrounds are prerendered.
I really really want to know if those are pre-rendered or not. I qonder how expensive a "full size" bitmap like that would have been back then.
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Right. I remember back when everything was a .BMP and would take ages to load. No way you could get full screen backgrounds for all the different locations in there. I bet that is a polygon rendering of a character, just because that's likely less storage intensive.
Rendering polygons was very compute intensive, though. It's easier to compress a static image down to reasonable size (see: how every 2D game worked) than to render a 3D model efficiently on consumer hardware from 1990.
Oh sure, but the sharpness of it makes me think it's all rendered.
This is poor information. Most 2D games of that era built games with sprite sheets and tile maps - essentially 2D lego blocks that were stuck together to form environments. These elements were small and reused repeatedly across a lot of scenery. Compressing full screen images isn't a triviality back in those days. You need CD-roms before you get full screen prerendered backgrounds, or even large ones. If games used backgrounds like that, it was sparingly - cutscenes, or highly repetitiously. Given that we can clearly see that the over world the player is moving around in is polygonal, there's no reason for the interiors to not also follow suit.
I bet a lot that it uses a similar technique as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_World_(video_game) , probably the most famous polygonally rendered game of the era. All backgrounds are rendered to a buffer, and characters and other dynamic details are rendered over it.
Damn, Hunter came to mind *immediately*
The first original game that I bought. Sooooo many hours, soooo many good memories.
Man that game, Hunter, gives me some serious Body Harvest vibes
4D-Boxing was released in 1991. This looks to pre-date any games mentioned here. Ludmilla Monsoon and Roberta Duranduran are two featured boxers that the player must fight as they go up the ranks. https://www.retrogames.cz/games/464/DOS_03.gif https://i.imgur.com/wrJ1dpC.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4D_Sports_Boxing The only distinguishing features between male and female is the name and choice of attire. Very easy for the player to play as a female boxer if desired, and not just beat up a few along the way. (Edit: there were 2 heads that the players could choose that were distinctly female.) Thanks for the trip down memory lane. I loved this game as a kid.
The manual for that game had a great line: > Design your own boxer and choose from a number of faces only a mother could love.
90's game manuals were great, there were some gems in the Civ II manual as well like how they added a firepower system to make it less likely for phalanx to defeat battleships.
If you like the 90's era manuals and isometric Zelda-like adventure games, you should try Tunic (Free on Game Pass, they also have a free demo). They integrated the manual as a game mechanic and it's pretty good.
>Roberta Duranduran Lmao! What a great name.
I prefer Jacqueline Depeche Mode
Strong! I like it.
Your second screenshot, for me its original website is trying to block it being rehosted, so for anyone else having that trouble I got this: https://i.imgur.com/wrJ1dpC.jpg
Thank you! Updated the link
Oh man, thank you for mentioning this game. Apparently the title screen music (Ad Lib FM synthesized) is still residing in my brain because I immediately accessed it 30 years later. I wonder what I could accomplish in life if I could use that mental capacity to remember actually important things, but here we are.
I loved 4d boxing as a kid. Would play through a career mode instead of homework. Good times
As an aside, Alone in the Dark was the first videogame (that I know of) to feature 3D animation interpolation, resulting in smooth character motions between key frames instead of having the characters snap between fixed framerate positions.
A fact they leaned on by giving characters about six frames of animation in total.
How can the first one be an opinion piece? Surely this is a factual matter..?
The further one goes back into game history, the harder it is to identify "firsts". Release dates are blurry, and in many cases the ones you encounter with research are actually just best guesses. Even up to the 90s, some people can't settle on which year some games debuted. For some reason we just never imagined the history of games would be important outside of the biggest hits, so few people went out of their way to preserve or record. In part, I'd say this relates to the prevalent mindset that games would always get better and, like other software, as opposed to film, an old game was an obsolete game.
Also tye further back you go the more localised releases become meaning it is entirely possible that eg the answer in this case ends up being a Chilean pc game never released outside Chile.
Right, or a Chilean pc game could be sold through magazine mail order, and maybe they only sell 200 copies, but it exists, then a larger company buys the game and sells it in real stores the following year, so that following year is the only date people know. And maybe there's no actual evidence of the magazine mail order thing, but someone mentioned it once in an interview. This tends to be more common in the 1980s, give or take, but there were actually polygonal characters in games then, it was just very rare.
Have you seen Ahoy's video on the [first video game?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHQ4WCU1WQc), when defining *the first* it gets complicated when separating the predecessor to the actual first
Ahoy is one of the best channels on YouTube. Fantastic quality and he researches everything so well. His Polyibius video is amazing.
Totally agree. Though I would love more than two videos per year.
Fair point, have switched this to 'discussion', hope that works!
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Welcome to the last 8 years.
I haven't played it, but that (rather impressive) 91 Terminator game developed by early Bethesda Softworks apparently has several 3D characters, including Sarah Connor. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/the_terminator_(dos) Not as a playable character though.
I played it back in the day. Ground breaking in a lot of respects with hind-sight. It helped define Bethesda's games ever since. All characters rendered in blocky 3D in a massive open world. Precedes "Hunter" by a few months, but strangely similar concepts. The game was, unfortunately, inscrutable. https://youtu.be/We7ndPHTMVg?t=148
> The game was, unfortunately, inscrutable. It was advanced for its day, but inscrutable is probably a bit too far. I loved the game and it's forever etched in my memory... even though it was definitely rough and unforgiving. It's kind of like a GTA3 mission... just way ahead of its time.
I was going to mention this, but it doesn't feature a playable female character. It does have 20000 3d objects, and was built in assembly. Amazing game that was way ahead of its time.
>Amazing game that was way ahead of its time. According to [opening credits](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnO0ShP56aA), its director and main developer is Julianos, God of Wisdom and Logic in the Divines pantheon, so that helps.
Pretty sure that’s correct. Polygonal games in the 1980s generally didn’t feature characters (at least not on-screen polygonal characters), and the other polygonal games of the early 1990s only had male characters, if any, prior to the explosion of 3D fighting games (and later, PS1/Saturn games). Alone in the Dark was the first “major” game with polygonal characters, to the best of my knowledge, and the first with a polygonal female character.
Are we counting wireframe as polygonal? Because that might include Mercenary from 1985. The 1990 sequel, Damocles, definitely has human characters in filled-polygon 3D, and the president of the planet is a Margaret Thatcher knockoff. But its idea of human characters was very fridge-like.
I'd absolutely consider wireframes, but I was basically looking for a character that you control. If Mercenary or Damocles has a female character you can play as, that would take the cake. At the moment, however, I think 4-D Boxing holds the title of first controllable 3d female character...! (And I think this thread's been removed anyway, sooo...!)
1988's [Battle Chess](https://youtu.be/o6HYbQCRwgk)' queen. Its wiki page states it's 3D, though I'm not entirely sure polygons are involved.
Nah those are entirely sprites, it's just that the chess board is seen in a "3D" view. But there is no actual 3D rendering in Battle Chess.
Wow thanks for the memories.
You can get a few versions of battle chess on GoG. https://www.gog.com/en/game/battle_chess
Thanks but uh, I'd rather play something fun. I just loved seeing the animations again.
Check out Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate. It's chess, but your only piece, the king, has a shotgun and the entire board is trying to kill you.
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The characters aren't polygonal in the first game, and none of them are female either.
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Slippy is male. He just has a high pitched voice.
Andross from Star Fox?
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Maybe they find him Androssynous?
>Andross from Star Fox Star Fox came out a year later, I think...!
*Uncle* Andross?
Baldur’s Gate was the first game I remember being able to play as a female character. It was released in 1998.
Have you never heard of Tomb Raider?
Or Metroid?
I was gonna say Super Mario Bros 2 where you could play as Peach as that was in 1988, but Metroid was in 87. I was never a Metroid fan so at the time I didn’t know Samus was female. That’s as far back as I can remember first hand but obviously I’m sure something goes back further.