Sega puts real-time polygon racing into arcade cabinets

What happened

Yu Suzuki's team had spent years building elaborate hydraulic cabinets around scaled sprite graphics, and the ceiling of that approach was in plain view. The Model 1 board took a different route, computing the position of every surface each frame and filling it with flat color. Cars had actual shape rather than a set of drawn views, the circuit could be seen from any direction, and a button let drivers move the camera from inside the cockpit to a position behind and above the vehicle.

Nothing about it was cheap. The hardware cost operators a great deal, deluxe cabinets ate floor space few locations could spare, and untextured surfaces looked stark beside the airbrushed detail of contemporary sprite games. It earned anyway, because the sense of speed and space was unlike anything else in the building, and because linked cabinets let a group of drivers race one another with a display tracking their positions on the leaderboard.

Within a couple of years polygon hardware was the assumption rather than the experiment. Sega's own fighting game used the same board, competitors moved to comparable systems, and the console generation then in design was built around triangle throughput. A home conversion eventually arrived with a dedicated processor built into the cartridge, an expensive solution that showed exactly how far ahead of living-room hardware the arcade business still was. For a few years the gap between a cabinet and a television was as wide as it had ever been.

The world at the time

Arcades in the early 1990s were competing with home consoles that had closed much of the visual gap, so operators needed experiences a television could not deliver. Sega's answer had been motion cabinets and scaled sprites. Workstation-class three-dimensional graphics existed in flight simulators and film production, but cost far too much for a coin-operated machine.

What it changed

Polygon boards became the arcade standard and the reference point for the consoles that arrived in 1994 and 1995. Sega applied the technology to fighting and driving series that ran for years. The company's arcade dominance did not survive the decade, but the industry-wide move toward three-dimensional rendering that this machine accelerated proved permanent.