This post will focus on 3D software used to produce commercial video games in the 90s up until the 2010s due to the focus of this site being retro game development.
The table below shows some of the most popular 3D software for the games industry along with who made them and the price they sold for:
| Name | Company | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Visual Reality 2.0 | Visual Software | very little information on this after 1996 (website in 1999 doesn’t mention it: Wayback Machine) | |
| Lightwave 3D 4.0 | DPS | £816.63 | 1995 |
Before game engines were capable enough to be used for in-game cut scenes, game development studios would need to use software to render video files that would play back inside the game.
Studios would either contract the job out to third-party animation studios, which normally did animation for TV and movies, or work on them in-house with specialized artists. These teams would be given the same concept art as the game artists but would have much more polygons and computing power to work with due to not having the limitations of real-time rendering.
The most popular 3D software for developing retro game cutscenes included:
Most of the compositing software used for the VFX and animation industries was also used for game cut scenes. A few of these are listed below:
The software in this section are used by hundreds if not thousands of games and could be considered the industry standard.
3D Studio (later 3D Studio Max) is an incredibly popular 3D modeling software in the games industry and it is still going strong today (as of 2025).
We have a separate post on 3D Studio Max which you can find below:
3D Studio (Max)
For more information on 3D Studio check out this post.
The software in this section are more obscure and may have only been used for a handful of games, but they were viable choices for smaller studios due to their cheaper price.
At only $70 3D-Brush was a very cheap alternative to Zbrush and Mudbox and was developed by Dmitriy Yanev’s, who was the former lead coder from the Ukraine based game development studio GSC Gameworld (Cossacks game series).
It was later rebranded to 3D-Coat in early 2008 and it is still a viable product in 2025! However it is unclear which commercial games, if any, used this during the development process.
Here is a screenshot from the old 3d-brush.com website showing the 1.82 Beta version interface:
