Rotating Ground Plane

One large bitmap is treated as a floor and sampled row by row, with each scanline reading the texture at a different scale and angle. Result is a plane that can rotate around the camera and recede toward a horizon, all without polygons. Everything above the floor is still a sprite, so buildings, vehicles and scenery stay flat, and the illusion depends on keeping the viewer low and close to the ground.

Nintendo EAD's F-Zero launched with the Super Nintendo in 1990 and was built to demonstrate the console's affine background mode. Racing was a natural fit, since a track is mostly floor and the camera stays low, which hides the technique's weaknesses. Hardware performed the transform for free on every scanline, so the game ran fast and smooth at a time when software 3D on home machines could do neither.

Effect of the trick was to make console racing and overhead flight feel three-dimensional years before dedicated 3D chips arrived, and it defined the look of a console generation. Constraints were strict: one plane, no elevation, no geometry to collide with, and poor results if the camera rises. Once polygons became cheap the technique turned into a period style rather than a working tool.