When you think about the first 3D graphics game, your brain probably jumps straight to Doom. Or maybe Wolfenstein 3D. If you’re a bit older or a real history nerd, you might even whisper the name Elite or Star Raider. But you'd be wrong. Dead wrong, actually. To find the true ancestor of every modern shooter and open-world epic, we have to go back way further than the 1990s. We have to go back to 1973.
It was called Maze War.
It didn't run on a PC. It didn't run on a console. It ran on a NASA Imlac PDS-1. This was a machine that cost about as much as a small house at the time. Steve Colley, an intern at NASA's Ames Research Center, was just messing around. He wanted to see if he could represent a 3D perspective on a vector display. He succeeded. But honestly, the first version was just a maze. You walked around. That was it. Boring, right? It wasn't until his friends Greg Thompson and Howard Palmer got their hands on it that things got spicy. They added the ability to see other players. They added the ability to shoot them. Suddenly, the first-person shooter was born in a research lab while the rest of the world was still playing Pong.
Why We Keep Getting the First 3D Graphics Game Wrong
Most people confuse "3D" with "texture mapping." When you see Doom, you see walls with bricks and bloodstains. That’s what we call 2.5D or pseudo-3D. It’s a trick of the light. But Maze War and its immediate successor, Spasim (1974), were using actual coordinate geometry to render lines in space.
There is a huge debate in the retro-gaming community about which one is truly first. Spasim, created by Jim Bowery for the PLATO system, was a 32-player space sim. Think about that for a second. In 1974, while people were wearing bell-bottoms and listening to ABBA, Jim Bowery had thirty-two people flying wireframe spaceships in a shared digital universe. It’s mind-blowing.
The reason these games don't get the credit they deserve is simple: accessibility. You couldn't just buy Maze War at a store. You had to be a high-level researcher or a university student with access to mainframe computers that filled entire rooms. Because these games weren't commercial products, they faded into the background of history, leaving the spotlight for the 1980s home computer boom.
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The Technical Magic of Vector Lines
How did they do it? No GPUs. No shaders.
The Imlac PDS-1 was a vector terminal. Instead of drawing pixels like your TV does, it physically moved an electron beam to draw lines directly on the phosphor screen. It’s like a high-tech Etch A Sketch. To create the first 3D graphics game, Colley had to write algorithms that could calculate perspective—how objects get smaller as they move further away—in real-time.
- He defined the maze as a grid.
- He calculated the player's position $(x, y)$ and orientation.
- He rendered only the lines within the player's "field of view."
It was primitive, sure. But it worked. If you saw another player, they appeared as a floating eyeball. Why an eyeball? Because if you can see them, they can see you. It was a literal representation of the first-person perspective.
The 1980s Revolution: 3D Goes Home
By the time the 1980s rolled around, the hardware started catching up to the ambitions of the programmers. We saw the release of Battlezone in arcades in 1980. This was a massive moment. Atari took the wireframe concepts of the 70s and put them in a cabinet with a periscope. It felt real. It felt like you were actually in a tank.
But the real shift happened on home computers like the Apple II and the BBC Micro.
In 1984, Ian Bell and David Braben released Elite. This game changed everything. It wasn't just a 3D game; it was a procedurally generated universe with thousands of planetary systems. It used wireframe 3D graphics to let you dock with space stations and dogfight with pirates. Elite proved that the first 3D graphics game concepts weren't just a gimmick—they were the future of storytelling.
Texture Mapping: The Great Illusion
As we moved into the late 80s and early 90s, the "look" of 3D changed. Wireframes were out. Solid shapes were in. Games like Alpha Waves (1990) started experimenting with solid polygons. But the real "holy crap" moment for the general public was Wolfenstein 3D in 1992.
John Carmack, the legendary programmer at id Software, figured out a way to take the 3D math and "paint" images onto the walls. This is texture mapping. It made the world feel tactile. It made it feel dirty and dangerous. While Maze War was the ancestor, Wolfenstein and Doom were the ones that convinced the world that 2D gaming was a relic of the past.
Myths and Misconceptions
Let’s clear some things up. You'll often hear that Star Fox on the SNES was the first 3D game. It wasn't. It was just the first time a home console used a dedicated chip (the Super FX) to handle polygons effectively. You might also hear that Quake was the first 3D game. Also wrong. Quake was, however, the first major FPS to use a "true" 3D engine where the world wasn't just a 2D floor plan with height added.
In Doom, you couldn't look up or down. You couldn't have a room directly above another room. In Maze War, despite being twenty years older, you were navigating a mathematical space that was, in many ways, more "purely" 3D than the 2.5D tricks of the early 90s.
Why Does This History Matter Today?
Everything you play now—from Call of Duty to Elden Ring—is a direct descendant of that floating eyeball in a wireframe maze. The evolution of the first 3D graphics game isn't just a timeline of better graphics; it's a timeline of human ingenuity. These guys were building the foundation of virtual reality before the term even existed.
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Think about the constraints. They had kilobytes of memory. Not gigabytes. Not megabytes. Kilobytes. To get a 3D perspective to render at a playable frame rate on that hardware is nothing short of a miracle. It required a level of mathematical optimization that most modern developers never have to worry about because our hardware is so powerful it's basically "lazy."
How to Experience This History Yourself
You don't need a time machine or a NASA security clearance to see where gaming started. The legacy of the first 3D graphics game is surprisingly well-preserved if you know where to look.
- Play Maze War Plus: There are modern recreations and ports of Maze War that run on modern hardware. It’s bizarrely haunting to play. The silence, the jagged lines, the sudden appearance of an eyeball—it’s like playing a digital ghost.
- Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (The MADE): Located in Oakland, California, they have actually restored Maze War to run on original hardware. They even host multiplayer sessions occasionally.
- Emulation: Use tools like MAME to play the original Battlezone or Star Wars arcade (1983). The vector lines on a modern screen don't quite have the same "glow" as the original CRTs, but you'll get the idea.
- Read "Racing the Beam": If you're a tech nerd, this book by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost is essential. It explains exactly how early programmers squeezed 3D-like visuals out of hardware that was never meant to handle them.
What's Next for 3D?
We've gone from wireframes to polygons, and from polygons to ray-tracing. We are now at a point where light is simulated in real-time, bouncing off surfaces just like it does in the real world. But ironically, we are seeing a massive resurgence in "low-poly" and "retro-3D" aesthetics.
Indie developers are intentionally ditching realism to go back to the look of the late 90s. There’s something evocative about those sharp edges. They leave more to the imagination. As we push toward 8K resolution and photorealistic VR, looking back at the first 3D graphics game reminds us that the "magic" isn't in the number of pixels. It's in the perspective. It's in the feeling of being inside a world rather than just looking at a picture of one.
To truly understand gaming, you have to stop looking at where we are and start looking at the lines. Those thin, green, flickering lines on a NASA terminal in 1973. That's where the world changed.
Actionable Insights for Retro Enthusiasts:
If you want to dive deeper into the technical side of 3D history, your next step should be researching Bresenham's line algorithm. It is the fundamental piece of math that allowed early computers to draw the lines that made 3D possible. After that, look up the Source Code for Doom—it’s open source and widely available. Even if you aren't a coder, seeing how Carmack organized his "BSP trees" to render 3D environments will give you a profound respect for the leap from wireframes to the textured worlds we inhabit today. No more guessing. Go see the bones of the machine.
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