Virtua Fighter (video Game) - Legacy

Legacy

Though its blocky, plainly detailed polygon fighters were revolutionary in 1993 and were responsible for game's distinctive look, Virtua Fighter's graphics would quickly become obsolete due to rapid advances in polygon technology that allowed for rounder, more detailed, higher-polygon-count character models. In spite of this, Virtua Fighter forever revolutionized the fighting game genre. Up until that time, fighting games (such as Capcom's Street Fighter series) were designed and rendered on sprite-based 2D graphics hardware—both the character animation and background scenery were composed of 2D sprites and tilemaps, which when using multiple layers produced a parallax scrolling effect as the screen moved to follow the characters.

Virtua Fighter dispensed with the 2D primitives, replacing them with flat-shaded triangles rendered in real-time, by the Model 1's 3D-rendering hardware, allowing for effects and technologies that were impossible in sprite-based fighters, such as characters that could move left and right rather than just backwards and forwards, and a dynamic camera that could zoom, pan, and swoop dramatically around the arena.

The popularity of both Virtua Fighter and Sega's 3D racing title, Virtua Racing, were smash hits with arcade gaming audiences, and marked the beginning of video games rendered with 3D graphics.