Unreal wans't the first 3d game (far from it), but it was hyped in a way Quake1 or 2 were never, so even before it was released, there was high ewpectations in terms of sales. I guess featuring your technology in it is a good marketing.
I know those games are concidered 3D, but i might see it differently. And i played DOOM, Quake, Duke Nukem, Heretic etc. alot, and for sure liked those games, and still concider them one of my favorite games. But i think, actual true 3D came with Unreal. Unreal introduced 3D environments which allowed to have rooms on top of eachother while this is impossible with DOOM like aproaches. Than theres also Dynamic lighting. Theres really tons of stuff that makes Unreal true 3D compared to the other games i mentioned.
And dont get me wrong, DOOM and the others were at their time awsome 3D games, and already had stereo sound, and super duper cool soundeffects, and supurb use of texture coloration. And seeing the limitations that the makers had, they pulled out the full 100000 million % out of it.
But for true 3D, you have to turn to Unreal, at that time it was unmatched like the first DOOM was at his time. And the companies like S3 and Creative, Microsoft saw this and threw in their latest(as said read future) stuff. Enginewise Unreal was only passed by the DOOM III engine and not a second before. And that means that the technology put in Unreal in 1995-1998 was years ahead of everything.
And even now we build on that 1995 technology. The use of the S3TC texures prooves that. I seriously doubt there will be a game withing 10 years that will come close let alone match what we have now. We have 4096 x 4096 pixel textures now, while games like UT3, DOOM III, GOW are stuck with a louzy 512/1024. And frankly i do not even concider those Low End because they are not. While we have Low End, High End and upcomming Extreme End.
And furthermore look at whats possible with the 227 patch, footstepsounds, footstepprints, S3TC textures, sprites, and a s h i t load more. And sure, Smirftsch is working on core level, but still lots of stuff is activating whats theoretically already there. Even shadows, its there, just awaiting activation.
And i know there is no game that does, or ever did contain that much technology. They really threw in all they had, and used it, or not, but its still inthere even if its not active.
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): on the Creative website, it says that Unreal was the first application to officially make use of EAX 1.0 features:
