History of "Gods Eye View" 3D Game Perspective?

Milo_Mindbender asks: "A lot of games today feature a 2D or 3D 'instant replay' system that lets you watch the game you just played on a map or from a third person 3D view. Some multi-player games also let you watch live games in play this way. I'm trying make a time-line on the history of this feature and was hoping the Slashdot crowd could help me out with names, dates and other info on games that had replay features. I think the Army SIMNET tank simulator was the first to have this (called the 'flying carpet') sometime in the late '80s early '90s. References to games with replay are harder to find because it usually wasn't advertised. I'd particularly like to find the first game with user controlled 2D and 3D game replay/spectating and the first replay systems with automatic camera controls creating cinematic 'wide world of sports' quality real-time movies of the game."

Comments

BBC TV Game Show

[seanellis]

I worked on a prototype networked 3D environment for a TV game show called Cyberzone, which had the "spectator" feature.

There were 5 3D computers in the network, one each generating a first person view and a map view for each of two teams, and then a "virtual camera" in the vision gallery. This was used to get a view into the game zone for the tape, and could select any of the player's viewpoints and many others.

The pilot episode was filmed in late 1991 at Anglia TV in Norwich (England) and was a star network based on 9600 baud serial cables.

By the time the series was actually comissioned in 1993, we had a more robust thin Ethernet solution to the networking problem, and the BBC made one series of the program before it became a casualty of regime change in the organisation.

The program was critically panned, but there was one positive outcome - Craig Charles (of Red Dwarf fame) bought me a drink.