15 Video Game Firsts We Take For Granted

There's a reason why games look better than they used to, and that's motion capture technology.

Now widely implemented across the industry, motion capture allows a game's developer to capture nuanced performances by actors, creating a more realistic character who moves and expresses themselves more like we'd expect an actual person to.

You'll all have seen the videos of actors messing about in weird suits covered in dots or ping pong balls, but when did this first start being used in gaming?

In Prince of Persia (1989), the game stood out from others thanks to its incredibly fluid information. At a glance you'd probably think this was due to motion capture, but in reality, this was done by a technique known as rotoscoping. Using this technique, an animator goes over existing footage frame-by-frame using tracing.

The real answer as to where motion capture began is actually the arcade game Virtua Fighter 2 (1994), closely followed by Soul Edge (1995).

Amazingly, Yu Suzuki, director of Virtua Fighter 2 (also the director of Shenmue) has gone on record stating that the motion capture technology came from the American military!

"With the collapse of the Soviet Union, America's military simulation industry was placed in the private sector so the timing was perfect. However, our budget for procuring a chip was only around 5,000 yen and the chip they had in a jet fighter simulator worth several billion yen, so settling on a price proved to be quite difficult," said Suzuki. "They said they could offer a cheaper mass-produced chip that was only 200 million yen, so all we had to do was make up the difference [laughs]. In the end, the game was a hit and the industry gained mass-produced texture-mapping as a result."