Before polygonal graphics there was a bunch of FPS and flight sims like 3-Demon, Voyager I, Star Wars Arcade, GATO and Battlezone in vector graphics (wireframe).

Yes and I, Robot is a very early 3D TPS example.

But let's focus on Action Adventure and ARPG games.

That's true for textured 3D games. Polygon or wireframe games are a lot older.

For AA, check out this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_Construction_Kit

I had it for the C64, and it came with (iirc) 2 ready-made games, at least one of which would classify as action adventure (you had to shoot stuff). It's real 3D, with filled polygons.

One another note: Way earlier there were arcade machines with 3D graphics, but I suspect they all were pure action games.

Oh cool, I certainly will!

Yeah I've looked pretty thoroughly at arcade games and it seems so. Well, games like Xybots and Last Survivor, which are more 2.5D, are fairly close to AAs but not quite there.

And Voyager I is exactly that, the other ones are:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1JF75oZVoQ

Dodes anyone know if this second 3D Construction Kit came with any pre-made demo games?

I only found a video of the first(?) demo game https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HueBfvy_f8

In this case played in a different engine, and bugged (see video description) :-)

and here on emulator https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-cL0wqPMlg with 2600% speed (and still jerky...).

Yeah I've seen those, but thanks anyway.

What really surprises me, looking back at some of these older PC games is that (according to Wikipedia), Descent (1995) and Tomb Raider (1996) were both released for MS-DOS! The PS1 came out in 1995. Why the heck were those games released on DOS and not Windows 95?!

:O

For a 1996 game seems a bit odd, but Windows wasn't really a mainstream gaming platform even by 1995 and still had DOS built-in IIRC.

I noticed this making tier list templates for 90s DOS and Windows games separately earlier this year.

https://tierlists.com/create/top-pc-dos-games-1995
https://tierlists.com/create/top-pc-windows-games-1995

The win games are mostly on dos as well but not vice versa, and some games came 1-3 years later for windows.

DirectX API and Microsoft Windows (as an OS) were both not the standard for PC games yet.
DOS (which was still attached to Windows) and OpenGL were still common, during that time period.

It's still not true. Frontier: Elite II, Magic Carpet and The Need for Speed were using textured polygons before Descent was released.

Frontier: First Encounters, Hi-Octane, MechWarrior 2, Slipstream 5000 and Terminal Velocity also used textured polygons and were released the same year as Descent, although after the shareware demo.

Aside from the fact that Windows 95 was released in 1995, making it implausible for most games released the same year to be made for the platform, Windows imposed a severe performance penalty on the computers of the time and DOS versions of games ran better.

I would argue it's more accurate to say that Windows 9x, like previous iterations of Windows, were merely DOS GUI and memory management programs since MS-DOS was still the underlying operating system.