First time I saw Daytona USA in arcade.
I was like... how!? going from sprites or very simple flat polys to seeing that.
Can hardly tell it's a game.
It still looks good today at high resolutions, it's a very sharp looking game.Getting worked by pre-release Ubisoft footage in 2017.
lol
EDIT: To actually contribute something useful to the thread. Max Payne 1 blew me away when it first came out. One of the first games I can recall that actually used photographs for the textures.
Toonstruck:
Real like actor (Christopher Loyd) in a Cartoon world ala Roger Rabbit.
Tbh I don't think I've ever seen any racer quite like it when looking at parts of the scenery. I would just be in photo mode for hours and look at the buildings in Tokyo and NY and at times it looked 100% real, probably mostly thanks to textures being actual photographs, but still.
Wouldn't consider it old though.
Gt1 replays would be my pick.
The Dark Eye featured stop motion animation
First time my jaw dropped on the ground :
Dead or Alive 2, on Dreamcast.
Links 386 was the first VGA game I ever saw, and its glorious 256 colors blew my young mind
rtcw was nuts. max payne had digitized faces and textures a few months earlier, but rtcw blew it away with characters that could actually blink and move their mouths
i've been playing games since the mid 80s and i've certainly been impressed by a ton of things, often wondering how they would ever be surpassed, but i think rtcw was the first time i ever considered anything to be truly life-like
this.
I remember using the flamethrower and going "damn, that's REAL!"This gets my vote. I was similarly blown away by rtcw when it first came out. Also, it was possibly the first game where enemies of the same type had different faces. It added a lot of variety in the people I shot because they didn't all look like clones of each other.
Mgs4 eggs
It's video, that's why it looks real.
#TeamCGIIt's video, that's why it looks real.
I couldn't find any screenshots that weren't low res, but back during the Xbox 360 launch, my whole family gathered around the TV to watch me play Call of Duty 2, and we were floored that such a thing was possible.
First time my jaw dropped on the ground :
Dead or Alive 2, on Dreamcast.
Big points to Mafia too, which was similarly mind blowing in its asset quality.
It's video, that's why it looks real.
The rebel assault games blew me away back then.
Feel like people aren't quite grasping OP's point. At no point was Daytona ever photorealistic, amazing as it was.
Mafia's a great example - textures lighting and art could come together in a way that really was startling at the time. Doesn't come across in screens unfortunately
Half life 2 is one that can really still do this for me, surprisingly (though I recognize there have been post release updates)
http://images.bit-tech.net/content_images/2005/09/lost_coast_benchmark/eyecandy1.jpg[img][/QUOTE]
That's from their HDR tech demo, isn't it?
Your point still stands, though. The game was (and arguably still is) a looker. Love it, wish someday we could get more of it. ;_;
I know "photorealistic" is being used hyperbolically here as "just really realistic," but personally I'd define photorealistic more strictly as being indistinguishable from a photo, and that hasn't happened yet.