Wibarm, Star Cruiser 

Back in the ‘80s, game developers innovated at a blistering rate, rapidly evolving their nascent artform at a speed that seems dazzling today. So it was that Japan’s technically ambitious Arsys Software delivered Wibarm in August 1986, an eclectic PC-88 adventure that has a reasonable claim to being the world’s first polygonal RPG.

You explore Wibarm’s large, 2D, side-scrolling levels as a mech (guess its name) that can transform into jet- or tank-like vehicles. Enter a building and your perspective suddenly changes—whoa!—to a real-time 3D, smoothly animated, behind-the-back view. Wibarm’s large, nonlinear-feeling levels dotted with true 3D mazes are an early precursor to fully open-world 3D RPGs like The Elder Scrolls: Arena almost a decade later. Not bad for 1986.

Not content to rest on its achievements, Arsys went all the way exactly two years later, releasing the entirely polygonal first-person action-RPG Star Cruiser. Its 30-odd explorable planets each featured real-time 3D towns and dungeons with space flight sequences in between. In 1990 NCS ported it to the Mega Drive. Starfield on your Sega Genesis? You bet. — Alexandra Hall, Senior Editor