Begone, polygons: 1993's Virtua Fighter gets smoothed out by AI - Ars Technica

In 1993, Sega's Virtual Fighter arcade game broke new ground with fully 3D polygonal graphics, a first for a fighting game.

Thanks to a Twitter thread from an artist named Colin Williamson, we can take a look at what those original boxy characters might look like with their angles smoothed out.

To create the images, Williamson took vintage Virtua Fighter game graphics and fed them through an "img2img" mode of the Stable Diffusion image synthesis model, which takes an input image as a prompt, combines it with a written description, and synthesizes an output image.

"Just describe the character, and img2img does its best," Williamson told Ars.

Last month, we reported on an MS-DOS game fan that used a similar technique to "upgrade" EGA graphics into more detailed representations.

After all, you can see how the Virtua Fighter characters look "smoothed out" in later games.