Mode 7
The Super Nintendo graphics mode that scaled and rotated a single background layer to fake a 3D ground plane.
Mode 7 was one of the Super Nintendo's (1990) background modes: it treated a tile layer as a texture and applied an affine transformation — scale, rotation, shear — per scanline. By changing the matrix on every line (via HDMA), programmers tilted the plane toward the horizon, producing the pseudo-3D racetracks of F-Zero and Super Mario Kart and the world map of Final Fantasy VI.
It's a 2D trick, not real 3D — no polygons, just a warped flat image, so sprites riding on the plane are scaled by hand. The effect is the console-hardware cousin of software raycasting: both fake depth cheaply. "Mode 7" became shorthand for any affine-mapped ground plane, and modern engines reproduce it with a shader.