Unless you are a youngster or new to the world of video games, you probably recall a moment in your life when you saw a new video game and went "Whoa!" because the graphics just blew you away. Looking back, that game that impressed you was probably painfully rudimentary compared to what you are playing today, but that's how the industry grew, with improvement building upon improvement over the last 50 years. For me, it was when the arcade across the street got a new game called Dragon's Lair. I never got to play it because the line was always too long, but there were almost as many people standing around just to watch someone else play it.
Maybe you marveled at the way the pixelated characters moved like real human beings in Prince of Persia in 1989. Or it could have been the lush backgrounds in Donkey Kong Country in 1994. Or Shadow of the Colossus in 2005, which elevated video games to an art form. There have been some obvious milestones in the never-ending advance of video game graphics, 15 of which are highlighted in a timeline at Den of Geek. It's a trip back in time to the breakthroughs in video graphics that led us to what we have now.