Most of their lineup of IPs scream the grunge adolescent ‘tude wanting to stick it to the establishment that speaks to the 12 year old male inside of us with Tomb Raider, Legacy of Kain, Gex, and more. Now, Crystal Dynamics is a company that can only be born of the 90s. But Namco’s mascot platformer wasn’t the first to this one-half of a dimension, as it was beat to the punch by the first Pandemonium!. This brief period of transitional gaming was rarely used to its full potential - at least a nice balance of 2D and 3D in one package - with the Klonoa games being the most acclaimed and best remembered of true 2.5D. Thus, the term “2.5D” was spawned for the middle-ground of mostly 2D gameplay in a 3D environment, a term that’d be later watered down to include the likes of Street Fighter IV and the New Super Mario Bros. series, despite no use of the Z-axis whatsoever. However, until everyone followed the path Nintendo made with its 3D Mario, developers were still unsure the best means to use their new dimension, creating many evolutionary dead-ends for 3D movement like in Bug!. Suddenly, Toy Story became the benchmark to gauge graphical prowess and anything 2D (or at least not prerendered CGI-looking) was now SOOOO last decade. 1996 was watershed year for gaming, giving the world the classics Super Mario 64, NiGHTS…Into Dreams, Crash Bandicoot, and Quake. As Nintendo, Sega, and the new kid on the video game block Sony debuted their new 32/64-bit consoles and 3D graphic accelerator cards became available to PCs, the push for polygons and the Z-axis went into full swing. By the mid-90s, the Golden Age of 2D was about to meet its demise.
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