You can chart the progress of PC gaming in many ways: the force of a shotgun; the substance of dialogue; the scale of an RTS.
But behind all the obvious stuff, wafting leafily the background, is the humble tree. And trees are important. They tell us more about the inexorable march of progress than gunfeel ever could. Firstly, because they illustrate the lengths developers will go to immerse us in a game by adding extraneous detail we might ignore. And secondly, because ‘gunfeel’ isn’t even a word.
Join me, then—a digital lumberjack, armed only with a Collins Gem copy of All You Need To Know About Trees and 11 synonyms for wood—as we learn to tell frond from bough in the history of trees in games.
For more hot tree-based content, head over to James's piece on where trees come from in games, this piece ranking chopping down trees in survival games, Tim's ode to the trees in Firewatch, Chris painting 100 trees and this interview with a Skyrim modder photographing lots of trees. Holy what, why does this website like trees so damn much?
Early days: roots manoeuvre
Genus Maledictis
An interesting-to-someone-who’s-spent-too-long-looking side effect of the simplicity of early games is that trees are more than set dressing. In some titles, they’re the closet thing you have to an enemy. Examples of this go back to the ZX Spectrum. In 3D Deathchase, for example, you foolishly ride a motorcycle through a dense forest and trees are the only thing that can kill you; you’re not so much chasing death, as driving directly into it. The looming threat of these homicidal trunks is lessened somewhat by the fact they look like IKEA table legs, which also explains why my BJURSTA Extendable gives me night terrors. It was a formative time.
Pinus Chillaxus
To find a PC-specific example of an early tree, we need to scamper forward to Skifree. Most of us remember it for that bastard yeti, but it’s likely trees were responsible for more anguish. They’re sad, mean, twisted little saplings that poke out of the snow, threatening to cut short your perfect slalom in an eruption of bark and shattered bone. They resemble a prison tattoo of a child’s drawing of a tree, and are more memorable and threatening for it. If it isn’t already there, burn this image into your mind right now—we’ll need it to compare with The Witcher 3 later on.
The '90s: Copse Out Conflictus ridiculam
As graphics improved during the '90s, the gaming tree burst into life: think of this like blossom season, with the swollen buds emerging into a fantasy of colour and shape (so long as the colour is green and the shape is treeish). Lovely 2D foliage is everywhere, but 1993’s Cannon Fodder can be singled out for being so absurdly generous with its jungle. Even the box art is aggressively green, like it wants to fight you for not being made of leaves. At the time, snaking between those lurid branches felt like being in Platoon. And then there’s Mortal Kombat 2’s living forest, which brought trees literally to life in 1995. You could argue this planted the seed for other lumber-based elements in fighting games—like Tekken’s possessed wooden training dummy, Mokujin, or Forest Law—but only if you’d spent too long researching trees in games.
Prunus puzzlus
‘Enough of your 2D fronds, you bunterish copse enthusiast!’, you probably cry. And you’re correct to do so. We need to examine 3D trees to understand how far we’ve we’ve still got to go, and Myst gives us a useful example. Now, Myst is a pretty game. But the trees here look more like wizards’ hats than actual foliage, and that’s a different feature altogether. Rocks, buildings, skies: all wonderful. But if you want realistic woodland, you’re going to have to wait, or click onto the next page.
Elsewhere, we’ve got the likes of The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall. Its leafy illustrations look smart, but they are all suspiciously similar. This is a great place to take stock, though. No series demonstrates coppice development quite like the Elder Scrolls. It’s the gaming equivalent of Understanding Tree Improvement 101 (if we ignore the brief diversion to the Mushroom Kingdom in Morrowind). We’ll come back later.
Turok: 1997’s Dinosaur Hunter was also impressive. Looking back, it felt like you were pushing past endless fronds in thick jungle. But 21 years later, those palms look rather lonely poking out of that misty landscape, like Jurassic Park via Silent Hill.
Bellum Blowupem
And while we’re still in the 90s, let’s stop off at Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines. This provides a great contrast to the snotty green smears of Cannon Fodder, and puts five years of progress into context. The variety of greenery is impressive enough to recall the tiny trees available at those quietly sinister model train shops. We’re not at the actually-looking-like-real-trees stage of development yet; but they do look like models of actual trees, and that’s something.
The '00s: Wood you kindly?
Maxis Decimus Deciduous
Remember the dark days of page one, and 3D Deathchase, when trees held dominion over men, motorcycles, and men on motorcycles? Well, 2000 was the year the woodworm turned. The Sims gives us control over trees, letting us purchase, plant, and gently rotate trees in a way that signals our ultimate triumph over nature. Large or small, indoor or outdoor, alive or dead: every type of tree is ours to manipulate. And, in a further act of ghoulish humiliation, The Sims even lets you decorate a murdered tree in the name of Christmas. Mankind’s victory is absolute.
Then there’s Halo: Combat Evolved. Released on PC in 2003, the first Halo captivated people with grass you could stare at for days—but the forests are equally appealing. Thick forests in Halo (the level), menacing vines in 343 Guilty Spark, icy pines in Assault on the Control Room: Combat Evolved has more types of tree than it does guns.
Spectatus Tropicana
And now things get real. The branchmark by which every other game that followed would be measured, and, back in 2004, easily the most realistic jungle ever rendered. Hang gliding over Far Cry’s indecently dense foliage felt like nothing else: the dream of a hallucinating druid, trapped inside your home computer. It was reason enough to spend all your money on a PC powerful enough to play it at maximum settings, and few technical leaps forward since have felt quite so overwhelming. If only Far Cry’s mutants looked as good.
Settingus Maximus
The forest moon of Endor from 2005’s Star Wars: Battlefront II deserves a quick mention for bringing to life one of the most recognisable woodlands in cinema, and World of Warcraft offered a variety of forests that still feel nourishing now (as well as the ability to turn into a tree if you’re a Druid). And, in 2006, the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion showed us an overwhelmingly lush Cyrodiil. But we can’t linger here too long; 2007 is waiting. The All Ghillied Up level of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare shows trees reclaiming the shattered landscape, and wins extra points for basically letting you play as a tree. And Resident Evil 4 set the standard for bark detail in games—yes, it’s a thing. Leon could probably take rubbings of those things. But once again, Crytek steals the show with an unparalleled PC classic. Crysis lets you shoot down trees, making the foliage tangible, and on max settings it still looks better than most games now.
Arbor Hominem
And finally for the 2000s, we pay homage to Harold. Perhaps not the most realistic tree in games—and certainly not the most handsome—but he does give us one of the best sidequests in 2008’s Fallout 3.
The '10s: Barking orders
Pinus Draconicus
Progress in the 2010s is harder to spot. Partly because the advancements are more subtle, and partly because Crysis still looks better than everything. But The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, released in 2011, at least makes it easy to see how far the series had come in terms of herbal fidelity. Skyrim is a love letter to the nordic spruce; a landscape of leafy grottos, autumnal forests, and those majestic, lofty pines. You can even chop logs and use a sawmill, reminding us of man's largely one-way relationship with trees.
Scribo Misticus
Minecraft’s blocky forests were a visual somersault backwards, but they did let us interact with wood in ways that meant crafting mechanics would be a part of every game for the next 200 years. You can punch, chop and reshape wood, and there’s a fine variety of planks on offer—it’s like B&Q, but with fewer pigmen. If you haven’t made a treetop retreat in Minecraft, you’re playing the game wrong. Another standout is Alan Wake, released on PC in 2012, which delivered deep, misty forests that are as atmospheric and evocative as they come. We also had the Kmart/Lidl Twin Peaks of Deadly Premonition a year later, which helpfully undermines my earlier point about everything in the 2010s looking great. And then there’s Proteus, also released in 2013, which reminds us that trees don’t have to be meticulously detailed to look striking.
Apocalyptus Herba
As we approach the end of our forest bathing stroll, we return again to Crytek, who accidentally made the first Crysis so pretty that everything that’s followed has looked guff. Crysis 3 is almost an exception, but the foliage has lost some of its depth and lustre, even though the game is set in a post-apocalypse when nature has reclaimed the cities of humanity—perhaps in revenge for the humiliation suffered in The Sims. Battlefield 4 also has excellent foliage, but you were probably too busy flattening buildings and complaining about the linear campaign to notice.
Gusty Venefica
And finally, we come to it. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is the sort of game you stop playing just to watch the trees. When you first reach Velen and see those weatherbeaten leafy landscapes, you feel like dragging your rambling relatives to your 4K monitor so they can appreciate the glory of nature without going outside. And CD Projekt Red clearly love a good thicket, as evidence by the variety on offer: we’ve got hanging trees, sacred trees, dead trees, possessed trees. No game has ever featured boscage in so many starring roles (I told you I used a thesaurus). Cast your mind back to the grasping shrubs of Skifree, and revel in 22 years of planking progress.
But also: it still doesn’t look as good as Crysis.