I’m getting more interested in isometric games all of a sudden.
It’s such a weird art style, when you think of it, but it was really popular for a while in PC gaming. There’s still plenty of games that use isometric or similarly angled styles, even if it’s not as common. I want to explore isometric games for a while, just as a way for my brain to jumble around. This is another one of my blogs-as-rambles. It’s probably connected to Yuri Kissaten, too.
Early on, isometric style was a good way to imitate 3D and give players the feeling of depth without going into polygons. You saw this a bunch with ZX Spectrum games in the UK:
The graphics were very simplistic on the ZX Spectrum, and the isometric style helped paint a better picture even with the 1-bit sprites everywhere. the biggest issue for me would be those annoying tank controls I’m sure were stapled onto every one of these. Pressing up moves the character forward, instead of up, and that has always messed with my brain in any game from played an overhead perspective.
Other early gaming systems were big on isometric graphics, too. The NES had plenty of games, often developed by Rare who made a lot of the ZX Spectrum games too. Here’s a nice lineage of retro isometric games as they developed through the 80s.
A lot of these were racing games, which gives them a cute toy-like feeling… Of course, the actual Micro Machines racers were full-on top-down.
As tech progressed, isometric games started looking better and better, and were able to imitate 3D graphics really well. The Amiga had plenty of cool isometric games, and so did consoles. I really like the look of some of those mid-90s titles at the peak of their craft.
On consoles, isometric games quickly faded away once 3D graphics came around. Why imitate 3D depth when you can just make 3D? It stuck around for strategy games, but not much beyond that.
On PC, however, the isometric viewpoint thrived for a good 10-15 years longer. I assume that’s because pre-rendered 3D sprites were a lot kinder on weak hardware, or because so many sprawling MMOs and RPGs were just too big for 3D to handle that many onscreen elements. Probably a mix of both.
I’m not a HUGE fan of those late 90s and early 00s isometric pre-renedered 3D games, but some do look pretty.
I just realized that this video goes over the history of isometric graphics better than I could:
While isometric games died on consoles and faded on PCs outside certain genres, they actually made a big resurgence in the early 00s on the Gameboy Advance! That system was extremely powerful for the time and price, and could handle full 3D, but it was a bit too unwieldy for most developers. So they usually went back to that tried and true isometric method. Some DS games followed in place, but by then, full 3D became dominant even on handhelds.
I’m really impressed with what modern developers can do with isometric styles, especially outside of the strategy and classic-style RPG boxes. I really like isometric platformers and puzzle games, as rare as they are.
What I’m really interested in is how isometric games represent large city environments. This is one of my classic rambling topics, but it’s one I’ve been researching more about recently.
City builder games are one of the most prominent uses of isometric graphics, but I’m most interested in the ones that get really granular, giving you the sidewalk view of a really big map.
I’m also interested very much in how isometric games handle height, not just depth. The Square Enix tactics games are famous for this:
Also, it’s not particularly prevalent these days, but for older games, instead of huge, sprawling, scrolling maps, they have little “island” maps connected to each other. For example, the Amiga Robin Hood game, or the PC indie game Hakoniwa Explorers.
This game Cadaver is even cooler, using the islands format to create a cramped musty dungeon to explore. Older games used walls to sort of obscure the small rooms, but here we are shown the border and the darkness beyond.
These games clearly did it due to hardware limitations, but what would it look like to create something like this as an intentional aesthetic bent? Probably sky island exploration or something would be best here.
Anyway, I don’t have any overarching thesis or anything. I just think isometric games are neat.
It’s interesting that you mentioned isometric perspective making racing games toy-like, and I think that applies across genres. Like a lot of top-down views, it’s clearly unrealistic, but on top of that, nine times out of ten it’s a big ol’ grid. That also makes it reminiscent to tabletop gaming and the strict measurements of a TTRPG tactical map.
Viewpoint looks amazing and I’m glad this post introduced me to it…………and other things too, but somehow I just really like it when 3D models are turned into sprites or are mostly just shaded shapes. Best of both worlds…or two arbitrarily chosen good worlds.
I really like the idea that isometric RPGs are like looking at minatures over a TTRPG table. The Amiga game HeroQuest, I assume based off the tabletop game, is exactly that: https://www.lemonamiga.com/games/details.php?id=1268
Its sequel on the Amiga doesn’t capture the feeling of this one and then the DOS version of the first game looks much poorer, so for some reason there’s this one-off toyetic retro RPG game that goes all-in on the toy aspect. I know only one other toy RPG, Crimson Shroud, which instead uses a super close-up POV and zero animation to enhance the lack of realism:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQYFPPJW5Ns
I love prerendered 3D graphics turned into 2D sprites, even if it’s pretty rare in modern games and of course rare in a lot of media in general… SHAFT anime series I guess use their artificial 3d backgrounds to nice artistic intent, depending on the series, though most anime with 3D backgrounds try desperately to hide that fact. Isometric 2D games these days tend to go for a real big hand-drawn look, unless they’re horrible mobile Farmville type games.