The magic of the microscopic pixel
The blocky dawn of three dimensions
Painting with light and shaders
Cultural tapestries in virtual worlds
nintendo Pop retro pixels into 3D to discover how game art evolved while keeping its wonder.
nintendo Voxel Art
Paint a 3D world with cubes of light! (Cubes of light!) / Turn a pixel to a voxel, shining bright! (Oh, so bright!)
nintendo To run Star Fox on limited hardware, artists built spaceships and animals from simple, untextured triangles and cubes.
Which custom microchip did Nintendo install inside Star Fox cartridges to render real-time 3D polygons?
What term describes the flat, multi-sided geometric shapes used to build 3D virtual objects?
nintendo Tomb Raider stretched simple textures over Lara Croft's blocky 540-polygon model in 1996.
Approximately how many polygons made up Lara Croft's character model in the original 1996 Tomb Raider?
Polygon counts: A single character in a modern game can have over 100,000 polygons, compared to just 250 for characters in 1997's Final Fantasy VII.
Which 2019 indie game gained massive popularity for its minimalist, flat-shaded low-poly goose?
A flat geometric figure bounded by three or more straight lines. In 1996, Nintendo used these geometric shapes to build the pioneering 3D world of Super Mario 64.
Which 2011 game became the best-selling video game in history using a world made of voxel-like blocks?