Evolution of the tree

Breasts

Barbarian, C64, 1987
Ah, Barbarian. You lop off arms and heads as if they’re going out of fashion and a maiden in triangle bikini watches you. What else does a game need? Well, some curves would be nice. Those boobs look a bit too… sharp.

Dead or Alive, PSone, 1998
Contrary to popular belief, this wasn’t the first 3D fighter to feature boob jiggle – Soul Blade’s Taki certainly came beforehand. But none did it so brazenly. Boing. Boing. Boing. There was an option to turn off the bounce in the options menu. Arguably the most pointless option ever.

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Rumble Roses, PS2, 2004
The girls in Rumble Roses are all about the show. They’ll happily dress up in string bikinis and wrestle in mud pits – it’s all in a day’s work. But PS2 never rendered boobs so well. Still, they bounce, they jiggle – they even go under their arms a little when they lie down.

NeoWave: The King of Fighters, PS2, 2006
The KOF series’ famously detailed sprites ‘peaked’ with Mai’s preposterously over-animated chest. Technically impressive as it is, try telling the man in SNK Japan tasked with drawing her preposterous honkboxes pixel by pixel over tens of thousands of scarcely-altering animation frames.

Soul Calibur IV, PS3/360, 2008
Sophitia and friends return with even more outlandish boobage than before. Ivy’s threatening to tip over at any minute under the weight of her mammoth heavers, but it’s okay. The soul will still burn. There’s also more underboob, following on from Calibur III’s marvelous outfit changes. Get in.