Then one day, on a trip to my local arcade, I saw something completely new: Virtua Fighter. The first ever 3D fighting game sacrificed a lot of visual detail in order to achieve real depth rendered via multiple polygons on a projected z-axis.

When I first saw Virtua Fighter I was not impressed. The graphics were terrible compared to my favourite at the time, the also just released Mortal Kombat II, but it was the start of a new era that still continues today: the vast majority of new videogames are first or third-person perspective 3D.

James Russell has come up with an interesting analogy for Apple’s prioritization of depth in iOS 7 (and, as an old-time watcher of the Nintendo vs. Sega wars, one that I can understand and reminisce).