At least in my mind the nascent days of the web was the early 90's when a large portion of games were still mostly text based with most of the graphical fidelity coming from clever uses of flat 2D images that had sprites overlaid on them. You certainly had 3D games going back to 1981 - but there were still quite rare compared to isometric 2.5d games.
Even the side scrolling games of the early 90s required ingenious hacks to make them work on the hardware of the time.
Game consoles at the time had hardware accelerated sprite scrolling; personal computers did not and had to redraw sprites manually to scroll but the games used some very interesting hacks to avoid having to redraw most of the screen and create the illusion of fluid movement by only redrawing parts of it.
Some of the absolute hacks to make games run on the Gameboy were even more impressive.
