Ah, gotcha. It also looks like it was considered to be very difficult (though any game from that era is gonna generally be a lot harder than present-day games).

I also remember a one-bit, not even polygon, but wireframe Star Wars third person rail shooter. It was on the early Mac, but I think it was a port from DOS or something.

kagis

Oh, wow. Apparently, it was actually a color arcade game, Star Wars, from 1983, and I'd just only seen the black-and-white Mac port until today. I wonder if those are true vector-display graphics, like Tempest.

kagis

Apparently yes. For the younger crowd, there was a point in time with CRTs where some video games actually plotted graphics on specialized CRTs by controlling the electron beam and plotting out the graphics with the point of the beam, kind of the way an old analog oscilloscope works. I bet that there have been antialiased remakes or clones of probably most of those vector-display games by now.

EDIT: Oh, I lied. It was first-person, not third person. You did have to dodge obstacles, but you weren't looking at your ship from behind.