Virtua Cop

Virtua Cop is a 1994 light gun shooter video game developed and published by Sega for arcades. It was developed for the Sega Model 2 system, and was ported to the Sega Saturn in 1995 and Windows as Virtua Squad in 1996. The Saturn version included support for both the Virtua Gun and Saturn mouse, as well as a new "Training Mode" which consists of a randomly generated shooting gallery. Virtua Cop was notable for its use of real-time 3D polygon graphics with texture mapping, with Sega advertising it as "the world's first texture mapped, polygon action game". Emphasizing the real-time nature of the game, enemies would react differently depending on where they were shot. It was one of the first games to allow the player to shoot through glass. Its name is derived from its 3D graphical style, which was previously used in Virtua Racing and Virtua Fighter, and later Virtua Striker. Despite some initial skepticism over its introduction of 3D polygons in a genre that previously used realistic digitized sprites (most notably Lethal Enforcers), Virtua Cop went on to become a commercial success and received critical acclaim for enhancing the genre with its 3D graphics, camera system, realistic animations, and ability to target specific body parts with realistic consequences. It was influential on later shooter games, with 3D polygons being adopted by subsequent light gun shooters such as Time Crisis (1995) and The House of the Dead (1996) instead of the digitized sprites previously used in the genre, as well as inspiring the first-person shooter GoldenEye 007 (1997). Virtua Cop was followed by Virtua Cop 2 and Virtua Cop 3. The game was later bundled with Virtua Cop 2 in Japan and Europe on the PlayStation 2 as Virtua Cop: Elite Edition (Virtua Cop Rebirth in Japan) on...