How 90s Video Games Moved from 2D to 3D

The shift from 2D to 3D wasn't a single event; it happened unevenly across genres and years, and several specific games are commonly pointed to as turning points rather than one universal "first 3D game."

Camera and movement

Super Mario 64 (1996) is widely credited with establishing a workable template for free 3D camera and movement design on consoles: a dynamic camera, controlled in part through the in-game character Lakitu, combined with Nintendo 64 analog stick controls that let a player move Mario in a full 360 degrees at variable speed, according to widely cited design retrospectives. That combination is commonly described as influencing nearly every 3D platformer that followed it.

Level design

Not every studio adopted Super Mario 64's fully open, explorable approach right away. Naughty Dog's Crash Bandicoot (1996) instead used a more linear, corridor-style 3D level structure, a deliberate design choice commonly described as a way to manage the PlayStation's hardware limits while still delivering a 3D game, distinct from Mario's more open design.

Control experiments

Before the Nintendo 64's analog stick became a standard expectation, some genuinely 3D-feeling games used purely 2D input, most notably the pseudo-3D first-person shooters Wolfenstein 3D (1992) and Doom (1993), which simulated a 3D environment from a first-person view using a keyboard rather than any dedicated 3D control scheme, covered in more depth in our PC Games category.

What remained in 2D

Many genres and specific franchises stayed deliberately 2D well past the mid-90s, either for stylistic reasons or because 2D still served the genre better: fighting games like Street Fighter III (1997) kept 2D sprite-based combat even as 3D fighters existed elsewhere, and several PlayStation-era RPGs, including Final Fantasy VII (1997), used 3D character models over pre-rendered 2D backgrounds as a hybrid approach rather than fully 3D environments.