Sega Super Scaler
Sega's mid-1980s line of arcade boards that scaled sprites in hardware, faking three dimensions until polygons caught up.
Hang-On and Space Harrier arrived in 1985, OutRun in 1986 and After Burner in 1987, all with Yu Suzuki as the driving force. The boards' trick was drawing hundreds of sprites per frame at arbitrary sizes: a distant tree is the same bitmap as a nearby one, just smaller. Grow them as they approach, bend the road with per-line offsets, and the brain fills in the rest. The OutRun board carried two 68000 CPUs to keep up.
Home consoles couldn't scale sprites, and the ports looked like it. The era ended when the Model 1 board drove Virtua Racing with real polygons in 1992 — also out of Suzuki's department.