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What was the first game to offer a choice of screen resolutions? I'm mostly interested in DOS (which is where I expect the answer will be) but also curious if any other platform (e.g. Mac or Amiga) did it first.

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    This is an interesting question and I would think it probably coincides closely with the introduction of hardware 3D acceleration support, with the shift from MS DOS to Windows 95. I'm thinking perhaps something like Mechwarrior 2, which was one of the first PC games to use hardware acceleration? It was released on DOS initially, then ported to the multitude of early 3D graphics APIs that sprung up with Win 95.
    – Time4Tea
    Commented Sep 3 at 11:02
  • Well Duke 3D (96) had the option if you wanted really low framerates instead of really low pixel counts. I feel like a choice between 320x200 / 320x240 and 640x400 / 640x480 had been an option before that though.
    – Sam
    Commented Sep 3 at 11:20
  • Disregard that - didn't realise MW2 was older than Duke 3D! The 3D acceleration patches complicate the question if they introduced resolution switching not available in the original .exe but if the original software renderer had resolution options then that could definitely be a contender for first.
    – Sam
    Commented Sep 3 at 11:34
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    Probably something from 1982 with support for both CGA (640x200) and Hercules (720x384).
    – Mark
    Commented Sep 4 at 3:45
  • Very good point. I didn't even think of the really old games that have you make graphics, audio and KB/M/stick selections each time you start the game (I was just thinking of setup utilities).
    – Sam
    Commented Sep 4 at 8:27

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The earliest example I have been able to find of a game that allows the player to choose the resolution is good old Minesweeper. Minesweeper is a windowed puzzle game where the player has to deduce which squares contain mines, which explode if you click on them. It allows the player to choose different difficulty levels, which takes the form of adding more squares to increase the difficulty. The changing number of squares causes the window to re-size, changing the game's pixel count (and therefore resolution), based on the selected difficulty level. Minesweeper was first released as part of Microsoft Entertainment Pack 1 in 1990, but was later bundled with Windows 3.1 and subsequent versions of Windows.

However, that isn't the screen resolution, which was specified in the question. As mentioned in the comments, I don't think including a setting to allow the user to choose different full-screen resolutions became widespread until the introduction of hardware-accelerated 3D graphics with Windows 95. Early examples of games that provided a choice of display resolution are Mechwarrior 2 and Doom 95 (the Windows 95 port of Doom).

I don't think many MS DOS games supported multiple resolutions; however, it seems that the original System Shock (1994) did. This is the earliest example I have found so far that supported a choice of full-screen resolutions.

Earlier systems, such as Commodore 64, did support different display resolutions and it is possible there may have been an older game for those systems that supported multiple resolutions. But I haven't been able to find anything concrete. I had a look at some older games such as Elite, which was one of the earliest examples of a game to use 3D vector graphics and released in 1984 on the BBC Micro, but I don't believe it did.

Most games prior to Windows 95 used 2D pixel graphics, which don't lend themselves to easy rescaling for different resolutions. So, I suspect an older candidate would have to be either an early software-rendered 3D game (flight sim?), or a 2D game where the visible playing area could have been extended via a higher resolution (e.g. a top-down game like Civilization or Sim City). The hardware would also have to have supported multiple screen resolutions, so I suspect examples would be rare.

To give more context on 2D games: even by the late-90s, many notable 2D PC games still didn't support multiple resolutions. I don't believe Fallout, Baldur's Gate, Diablo or Starcraft supported multiple resolutions on their initial releases - it was generally patched in later (with the effect of extending the viewable area). 640 x 480 was really the standard for quite a long time. It wasn't until we started to get into the 2000s that higher-resolution PC monitors (and the video cards to support them) dropped in price and started to become more affordable.

This my best attempt at an answer, but I'd be interested if anyone can find an earlier example!

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    Brilliant answer and great find with System Shock! Good point also about scaling sprites. Something like Syndicate had both low and high res but I think it was low-res-only on Amiga and high-res-only in DOS (not certain though on the latter).
    – Sam
    Commented Sep 5 at 10:19
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    Yes, it's quite likely that different versions of some earlier games may have supported different resolutions for different systems. I also just added a para at the end about late-90s 2D games.
    – Time4Tea
    Commented Sep 5 at 11:14
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    Yeah I think you're right about those. Baldur's Gate and Starcraft definitely 640x480 and I think Diablo was 1996 so would be very surprised if it went above 640x480 (and certainly didn't go below that).
    – Sam
    Commented Sep 5 at 11:54

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