r00ty

That’s weird. I’m getting to the age where I wouldn’t see the point in 4k, I’d need to have my head on top of the screen to see it. But refresh rate can be felt in fluid scrolling etc and definitely even if only on the unconcious level, improves awareness in games too.

I would say older than that (well maybe not elite), as much as the tech could handle it you should include:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Esprit

Here you had several town maps, including dual carriageways, main roads, side roads, one way streets. And you could just drive down any of them. They were all nondescript, but the amount of memory really limited what could be done.

There was also the games using the freescape engine. Driller, Darkside and Total Eclipse. These were all about as open world as you could achieve on the hardware of the time.

In terms of “open world” the definition is open to interpretation. I’d argue that text based adventures were open world too in their own way. So it really depends on what features people agree makes an “open world” game as to what the first game that contains all those features was.

There have been “open world” games since the 1980s. Just of course, memory limited how big that world could be, and how much you could do in it. The genre as a whole is ancient.

I used to write z80 asm without an assembler back when I was a LOT younger. The ZX spectrum manual I had, had the full instruction list with the byte values.

I think it was oddly easier than some higher level languages for some tasks.

But, making changes was an utter nightmare.

I feel like I skipped right over this comment.