There are tons of early examples of interactive 3D depending on what techniques and technologies you want to consider. DragonStrike is most like a flight sim,

There are tons of early examples of interactive 3D depending on what techniques and technologies you want to consider. DragonStrike is most like a flight sim, of which the Microsoft Flight Simulator series dates back to 1976-77(for 8080 and Altair!), with FS 3 and 4, from 1988-1989 being most like DragonStrike in terms of tech. Contemporary examples within other genres include: Arctic Fox. M1 Tank Platoon, F-15 Strike Eagle II, Midwinter, Carrier Command, Stunts, and Test Drive III. "Flight sim" style 3D, with wireframes, flat polys and some sprites, was considered the main way to do interactive 3D for a long time, with each renderer having to pick and choose which details to focus on - the most common compromise being to impose heavy distance fog in order to convey detail in screenshots. In the arcade, flat-shaded, color 3D was done in Atari's I, Robot in 1983! One year later, a simplified raytrace model was used to prerender terrain lighting for Marble Madness - a subtle solution to a problem that otherwise would consume a lot of artist time. Most of the 80's in arcades was dominated by sprite-scaling games with pseudo-3D road engine hardware like Outrun and Space Harrier, though. Wolfenstein 3D and Doom are in many ways more in the pseudo-3D genre than the flight sims, since they exploit a very specific hack with raycasting that gives decent quality and flexibility. Edit: Wolf3D style raycasting was purportedly used in Alternate Reality: The Dungeon in 1986. You wouldn't know it at a glance, though, since it's a slow-paced RPG where your view is glued to 90-degree angles and snapped to the horizontal center of the grid cells.