But Strip Fighter's digital breasts were still static images, animated crudely like a cartoon. It required a great deal of imagination to even pretend you were seeing breasts. Groping blindly for realism, it sometimes seemed like we were actually going in the opposite direction.
Then polygonal graphics made their debut, giving us that step towards realism we had always been hoping digital boobs would make - existing in three dimensions. It was not glamorous from the beginning, however. The early polygonal games such as Virtua Fighter were so unrefined that they were hardly erotic.
Sarah and Pai were the only females available for play in the arcade version of Virtua Fighter, and their forms were certainly quite sculpted. A far cry from the triangles of yesteryear, breasts had finally become pyramids. But these monuments, however grand, were still immobile, barely portraying the glorious reality of breasts as we know them.
It didn't matter. Virtua Fighter marked a paradigm shift in graphical breasts. And while Japanese developers were still light-years ahead of their American counterparts when it came to cleavage, the next major evolution would come from the other side of the world - the United Kingdom.
Designer Toby Gard noticed the dearth of bountiful breasts in the game-space and saw an opportunity. Utilizing the hardware of the Sony PlayStation, Gard created Lara Croft, the first sex symbol of the videogame world. Lara sent shockwaves through the male gaming populace. For the first time, we could control a hot, big-breasted woman instead of another butch space marine. Granted, her breasts were still conspicuously geometric and her body equally low on the polygon count. But she was a hottie.
Quickly it became apparent that the age-old adage "sex sells" applied even to videogames. And as game engines and systems grew more powerful, gamers were treated to all manner of extraordinary breasts. Whether they were the oversized mammaries featured in Dead or Alive or the swinging masses gracing the chest of Rachel in Ninja Gaiden, breasts had come a long way.
Today, we have Soul Calibur 4, the current pinnacle of breast tech. Look no further then Ivy, the dominatrix with a whip that doubles as a sword. As she amply spills out of her string of protection, simply turning her body in game yields a demonstration of how far we've come. Remember, boobs tend to show us how close we're getting to reality - and the gap is closing quite quickly.
