Video games that were visually ahead of their time

Summary

• The graphics in games, when advanced, contribute to an ultra-realistic experience, especially when combined with games.
• Some games age well graphically, remain relevant for years to come, and showcase the skill of the studios behind them.
• With advancements in hardware slowing down, game developers must find new ways to create stunning and impressive visuals.

While the graphics don't complete the game, the visuals add to the immersion factor. Along with gameplay, a graphically advanced game can feel ultra-realistic and a new technological step. With the creeping advances of graphics these days due to diminishing returns on hardware, it's hard to remember that the video game industry used to see profound shifts in fidelity in just a year or two.

Sometimes a game is so well designed and its graphics so advanced that it takes years for the rest of the competition to catch up. Because of this, there are titles a decade or older that can feel like modern games today, making them a true testament to the craftsmanship of the studio that made them.

Updated December 18, 2024 by Hilton Webster:With graphics having reached a plateau at this point, games have to go back to finding new ways to create impressive visuals. Many games have already surpassed that, with striking styles that will shock you with how incredible they look, whether they are a brand new game or older than you can imagine.

13 Forbidden Siren

After the success of the original SIlent Hill, Keiichiro Toyama left Konami to make his own game with Sony, Forbidden Siren. It was a horror game unlike many others, even today. It involved “sightjacking”, which allows you to see through the eyes of any character in the area. It was terrifying to say the least.

What the game accomplishes visually is equally remarkable. The surfaces and design are impressive, although it's the faces that really stand out. Instead of animating 3D models, images of human faces making different expressions were mapped onto the character models. This resulted in faces that were incredibly detailed, adding to the unnatural feel of the entire game.

12 Final Fantasy 13

Final Fantasy 13 has for the longest time been one of the most maligned entries in the series, much of it centered around the game becoming much more linear than previous entries. And even if the game opens later, it may have been too late for some. What no one can deny is the absurdity of the game's visuals.

Final Fantasy 13 is not only one of the most graphically impressive games in the series, it is one of the best looking games on that generation of consoles. It was the first FF game on both PlayStation and Xbox, but somehow it looked and ran well everywhere. It was at this point that the in-game cutscenes had finally caught up with the CG footage.

11 Silent Hill 3

Horror games tend to age well, don't they? There were plenty of games during the PS2 era that really pushed the system to its limits, achieving things that frankly don't seem like they should have been possible. And Silent Hill 3 is another one of those games. While CG scenes dominated many of the cutscenes in previous games, Silent Hill 3 did away with them entirely. The game looked so good.

The detail of Cheryl's face, the way the light bends around corners and casts shadows. Even the opening scene with Cheryl in the dining room and the way the light casts through the slats of the blinds is just remarkable, even by today's standards. It just goes to show that pre-baked flashes can really achieve incredible images.

10 NFL 2K

The Dreamcast was the most advanced home console by far when it was first released. Sega made sure to capture the attention of sports fans with their NFL 2K title, which featured excellent gameplay and impressive visuals. When you look at the competition of the time – namely Madden – the players were blocky, and animations looked stilted.

NFL 2K made the game of football look natural and smooth; the polygon counts for the players were very advanced for their time. Players were actually proportional as players, and on today's CRT TVs it was pretty hard to tell if it was a broadcast TV or Dreamcast.

9 Super Mario 64

Considering it came out in 1996, Super Mario 64's graphics were artistic and beautiful. It took the graphical capabilities of the Nintendo 64 and set the tone for 3D platformers for an entire generation. Most modern Mario games can trace their art style back to this game and, frankly, they look like a high definition update with all the new graphical effects thrown in.

For those of us who got hold of an N64 and played this game for the first time, it was impressive with its 3D models and animations. Mario 64 looked great and was a must-have, making it the Halo of its time.

8 God Of War

God of War was not only advanced for its time but advanced for the console it was on. How was this put on Playstation 2? The textures are amazing, the game could run at the then high def of 480i, and the character models are very detailed. This could pass for a third-person adventure game today, and no one would look at it.

Considered one of the greatest games of all time, God of War is a visual feast on every level, and critics of the time praised the title for that. It's impressive, both in this game and in future installments, to see Kratos take on enemies much larger than himself. One has to marvel at how this game was a much more dynamic visual experience than the isometric graphics of Diablo 3 several years later.

7 Quake 3

It's no surprise that many games were created using the Quake 3 engine. When this all-time classic came out, the visuals and deathmatch action were the gold standard. With the game using shader technology, high resolution textures and excellent effects, it became the pride and joy of someone who had just upgraded their graphics card.

It can't be said enough that the Call of Duty series engine was just a heavily modified Quake 3 build. It was very advanced when it came out, and for some of you old enough to remember, if you heard that a game was using the Quake 3 engine, you thought, “oh, this thing is going to look good.”

6 Crysis

Your PC is still not running Crysis. This game was such a step forward that it became a benchmark program for graphics cards and computers many years after its release. The sheer number of visual features crammed into the Crysis engine was so huge that most computers at the time – even powerful ones – couldn't use them all.

CryEngine 2 was used for this game and included 850,00 shaders and a texture data game. Sure, technology moved on, and this thing was eventually ported to the power-hungry Switch, but back in 2007 this was some kind of peak into the future. If you're still picking it up, you'd have a hard time believing this game is creeping in two decades old.

5 Far Cry

Foliage has been a major problem for video games for many years. It looked too flat and fake, which broke the immersion factor when you took out your character. Far Cry changed all that in 2004 as Crytek's first-person shooter excelled at showcasing an organic-looking environment.

These days, nature looks perfect in video games, and you can thank the steps taken in Far Cry for this. Crytek also followed up this title with Crysis, so you can tell the studio must either have a time machine or care about graphics.

4 Unreal

Every game uses the Unreal engine these days, but the series' first entry was both groundbreaking and unique. Developed by Tim Sweeney, the first Unreal engine was based on software rendering but utilized many 3D cards at the time. It was at the epicenter of the graphics card revolution in the late 90s, along with Quake.

Its weird, dark art style looked good, and its outdoor environments looked better than the somewhat cramped corridors of the Quake engine. The game used 16-bit color, bright flowers, and varying amounts of fog volumes, which is wild for a game that came out in 1998.

3 Donkey Kong Country

Although released relatively late in the Super Nintendo's lifespan, Donkey Kong Country was a marvel of graphics. Designer Rare had decided to use pre-rendered graphics for the game and came up with a way to compress the sprites. This resulted in the best pre-rendered sprites ever created.

It has to be said that Donkey Kong Country looks more like a Playstation game than a Super Nintendo game, and it's also one of the best platformers of all time. Rare brought 3D graphics to a console known for 2D games, and the result was one of the most impressive SNES games of all time.

2 Red Dead Redemption 2

Some still consider this to be the best-looking video game of all time, and it was released in 2018. Red Dead Redemption 2 was in development for a long time and cost a mountain of money, but the result was one of the most immersive looking. wild west environments ever created. The attention to detail is almost endless, and people are still finding new details to gush about.

This is also not an on-rail experience; no, Red Dead Redemption 2 is an open world game, which means Rockstar has to make everything look good, not just a hall here and a field there. RDR2 was basically true to life and replicated on someone's flat screen. We'll probably have to wait a decade or two before this game even starts to feel dated.

1 Doom 3

When screenshots of Doom 3 first hit the public, many couldn't believe what they were seeing. The effects that John Carmack had put into the id Tech 4 engine were used to perfection to create creepy indoor environments. At the time, this felt like a monumental step forward in 2004 in terms of how uniform lighting and shading could be used.

Although some critics didn't like that it was as fast as Doom 1 and 2, this game is getting more love years after its release, as people started to realize that this was meant to be more survival horror and less drudgery. It still looks amazing today, and we jump when monsters jump on the screen.