Via reddit user visionik:

"This game was a technology masterpiece in its day. The 3D engine was originally implemented with TTL logic chips (lots of little individual logic chips put together to make a 3D engine).
It was a technology masterpiece but a financial flop. Only about 1,000 were made, and only about 500 were sold. They did not do well commercially for three reasons:

* the "newfangled" 3D nature actually confused many players.
* the hardware was not reliable. RAM chips, ROM chips, and the special "hall effect" joystick all tended to die quickly.
* The arcade game market crashed in 1984 shortly after its release.

Due to the limited production run and almost 100% hardware failure rate in the first two years, very, very few I, Robot arcade games still exist. I am fortunate enough to own one - and it is a complete bitch to keep it running properly.
Despite the troubles it is an extremely enjoyable game to play.

The software was created by Dave Theurer - who previously coded Atari's 1981 hit, Tempest.
The hardware was designed by Dave Sherman.

http://bit.ly/lV4tW -- wikpedia entry
http://manfreda.org/LordFrito/I,%20Robot/index.html -- some history and tech details
http://www.ionpool.net/arcade/irobot/anderson/joystick.html -- about the joystick
http://www.ionpool.net/arcade/irobot/anderson/cabinet.html -- about the arcade cabinent
http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?letter=&game_id=8172 -- lots of misc info"

Battlezone is more the first mainstream 3D game. This game just added faces to the wireframe models.

This game was cool. I never played it during the arcade days.

You could also choose to use an "art mode" instead of playing the game. You could draw images by choosing objects and then moving it around and spinning it, leaving trippy trails behind it. I think I spent more time on that than the game.

Moving this video to EDD's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

Yeah, Battlezone FTW. Also Pole Position was a 3d perspective, but I think it used something like sprites - and not true polygons.

they had an i-robot console at the Dayton mall back in the day.
I remember giving it a funny look and playing something fun.

BTW sublogic flightsimulator on the apple and trs-80 goes back to 1980.

now this one i fucking played!

Wait, that Star Wars had anti aliasing? =0