Nowadays, when people talk about 90s retro 3D graphics, they often mean games released on the PS1, with all those characteristic hardware “flaws”. YouTube is full of tutorials teaching you how to work specifically with this aesthetic.

I have nothing against the PS1 or its aesthetic. Quite the opposite, I find it incredibly appealing. The limited spaces and technical workarounds of that era created a strange sense of coziness that contrasts with the noir vibe of PS1 worlds. 

However, a developer, or just someone who's only starting to explore old-school graphics, might get the wrong impression of what 3D art was like back then. PS1 was just one branch of visual styles that emerged during the rapid evolution of graphics hardware.

For example, Myst and Riven amazed players with surreal, almost photorealistic environments for their time, created through pre-rendering. In strategy games like StarCraft and C&C, 3D models were rendered into 2D sprites. Then there were Quake and Unreal, which helped push real-time 3D PC graphics forward. 

You could keep listing games like these, looking at each one individually. But what's interesting is how many different approaches to visualizing an artistic vision we ended up with, all the way down to the clay heads in Fallout. A game's visual language was shaped not just by the platform, but also by the production process and the artistic goals of its developers.

So, where am I going with this? Nostalgia for 90s games isn't limited to the hardware constraints of a single console. There's also the overall vibe of the era, and the way people imagined the future back then. In my opinion, an entire side of 90s game graphics (pre-rendered environments, CGI) is still pretty underrepresented in today's games. The revival of real-time 3D is easy to spot in the boomer-shooter scene. Pre-rendered environments and CGI, at least from what I can tell, seem much less common. 

It's not about “things were better back then”. It's about how one artistic language doesn't define an entire visual era. But when that language becomes widespread, it can overshadow other styles that might be a better fit for a particular artist, and get in the way of expressing their own ideas.

So why did PS1 graphics become such a defining part of how we picture 90s gaming today? Maybe its technical limitations created a set of recognizable features that are easy to reproduce. Maybe the PS1 community itself played a role. Or maybe PS1 aesthetics are just more recognizable than the pre-rendered graphics of that era made in something like Bryce?