Night Driver, Atari Inc., 1976
Night Driver was the first racing game with "first person" perspective, showing the road as if actually seen from the car. Before Night Driver there had been many racing games with bird perspective (seen from above), e.g. the popular Atari game called "Sprint 2" from 1976. The night theme was chosen to hide the limitation of the hardware to create more complicated images. For many years, most 3D games built on the basic concept of Night Driver, using computer hardware to "scale" flat images called "sprites" in order to simulate movement in the 3D.