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[Disclaimer: I did not work in the video games industry in the 90s, but I did work in VFX studios hired to do cutscenes in the mid-00s]

Before engine-compatible assets were good enough to render in-engine, cinematics that involved character animation were authored with an entirely parallel path, using the same reference art, in a character animation program. Maya and 3d Studio Max were popular at the time and most reference art and lookdev was done with them anyway, so that was a popular choice, and Softimage (RIP) was an artist favorite in offline animation too.

Sometimes making the cinematics wasn't a core competence of the studio working on the game, so VFX or animation studios would be contracted to do this. Often this meant the studio was already set up to work for TV or Film, so it was staffed such that a 3D render would reach a compositor relatively quickly, where many manual corrections would happen in 2D space. Compositing software has largely consolidated nowadays to the few survivors (Nuke, Flame mostly) but at the time there were many, like Combustion and Henry (Quantel), and even After Effects was used a bunch in places I worked.

To this day, not all engines love creating cinematics, because even if an external/offline renderer can do the full render (like in Unreal Engine), some engines don't support the animation systems required to do cinematics, or don't support them at a velocity artists like. In other words, the same software workflows are used today.

IIRC all the character artists used one tool, 3D Studio Max, and all the background artists used Maya or maybe the other way around. I just remember the cutscenes were delegated to Blizzard South or the main studio in Irvine (they did them in house), and the guy who was like the story evangelist down there was so enthusiastic (he came up to our studio for a couple of meetings) about things that had little connection to the game play but was critical to the story he was telling in the cinematics, I remember looking at the quest list and comparing it to the plot of the cinematics and not seeing a lot of similarities but it's been 20 years so I may be getting some things wrong here. My memory is in early views we got of the cinematics there were also creatures that had no resemblance to any we had in game but that's what the guy in charge of cinematics wanted.
> 3D Studio Max, and all the background artists used Maya

What I've seen in my past glory days (years ago) was the opposite, Maya excelled at character animation (or general animation) and the rest was done in 3DS Max.

Someone deeper into the industry might want to correct my correction though.

Max was released in 1996 and Maya in 1998. From my foggy recollection, it took a while for Max to become widespread so my hunch is that 3D Studio for DOS and Lightwave ruled the roost for most of the 90s.
Maya had a popular (on SGI) predecessor called Wavefront (at least the company was called that, but IIRC it was also the name of their 3d modelling/animation product), the company Wavefront was then aquired and merged together with Alias Research (PowerAnimator) by Silicon Graphics into a company called Alias|Wavefront, which then created Maya from scratch, but Maya took a lot of inspiration from Wavefront (and PowerAnimator I guess).

As far as I remember, 3DSMax was still an outlier throughout the 90's, but it quickly gained popularity in the PC game development scene because it also ran on PC and didn't require a separate investment in SGI workstations or beefed up Amigas (and I guess the rampant software pirating on PC in the 90's also played a role to make 3DSMax popular).

Yeah, I recall 3DS being more PC-prosumer based. And SGI | Alias was super high end. $150k Irix machines with VR gloves & glasses. You'd only find them in the engineering & architecture departments. The others were distributed at siggraph on free cd-roms, with permissive student licenses you could use for months of self-training and hobbyist modeling ;)

No one could top Maya back then in terms of flame, water & particle effects:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHFLapfliN8

Yes by "Max and Maya" I misspoke, and should have said their predecessors 3D Studio (ported into Max) and Alias PowerAnimator (ported into Maya, among others)
3ds max was pretty popular before in-engine I remember trying to learn it before C++ and it was harder than any programming concept... can't tell if it was my laggy head or the obtuse UI.
> Sometimes making the cinematics wasn't a core competence of the studio working on the game, so VFX or animation studios would be contracted to do this.

That explains why FFX's cinematics had different character models compared to in-game designs.

Alias Power Animator I'd anyone remembers that
Interesting factoid: a codec called TrueMotion by the Duck Corporation encoded cut scenes for a number of games in that period, on PC and Sega Saturn+Dreamcast+3DO. This company later changed its name to On2, and developed the VP3/VP8 generation of codecs that were ancestors of AV1 (Google's open-source codec) (Disclaimer: I was founder/CTO)

Off the top of my head, we did intro & cutscenes for these titles/platforms (this is a small subset):

Spycraft | Activision PC

Gexx | Crystal Dynamics 3DO

The Horde | Crystal Dynamics 3DO

Street Fighter II | Sega

Final Fantasy 7 | Square (PC +/or PS2??)

There were at least 20 others

FF7 used the Duck codec for the PC release, which can sometimes have a fun bug where all the videos play upside down. I assume the PS1 original uses the consoles built in Motion JPEG decoder.
One key factor which many commenters seem to be oblivious to is nurbs vs. polygons. Maya in the 90's had excellent nurbs modeling tools which made it specifically well suited for film work which required highly detailed organic models. 3D Studio Max on the other hand was all about polygons which made it the weapon of choice for video game studios which had to squeeze every last bit of performance from the game engines and PC's of that era. It wasn't until the mid aughts that Maya incorporated sub-division surfaces when it's use really took off in the games industry. Japan as it's often the case was a bit of an outlier as they were a pretty big market for Softimage/XSI. Valve being valve was also a Softimage customer. They even partnered with Autodesk to release a custom XSI version specifically for modding their own games. https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Softimage_Mod_Tool
I still have my boxed copy of Softimage|XSI that I bought when I was a senior in college. It was such a great tool.
Softimage was so ahead of their time and it's such a shame that they ended up being acquired by Autodesk only to kill it a few years later.
From when I used it, Maya was perfectly fine at doing polygons just as well as 3D Studio Max. It was just a more expensive. That being said Maya didn't come out until 1998 so all the early PS1 games I know mostly used 3D Studio Max. One exception that is well documented is Crash Bandicoot which had an art pipeline using the predecessor to Maya, Alias PowerAnimator running on SGI IRIX workstations with all custom written tools. They even used PowerAnimator to make the levels - not just the character animations.
I got my introduction to Maya in 1998 at around version 2 if memory serves me right. While it is true that it shipped with some polygon tools they were quite basic and quite subpar when compared to other DCC tools available at the time. I remember when the "edge loop" tool was finally introduced after it had been on 3D Studio Max for ages. The silver lining was MEL which technical artists could use to code up their own tools . This is probably what Naughty Dog ended up doing in the example you provided. Those guys truly broke a lot of new ground with the severe limitations of the tech at the time.
Something to consider generally about 90's game production is the interplay between the in-game assets, the cutscenes and the production models that were evolving at the time.

The software itself is a factor in this - and there was hardware, too, a lot of Silicon Graphics workstations were used in the mid-90's - but the device constraints at play dictated the idea of pre-rendering 3D assets for games like the Diablos and Resident Evils, which in turn made it easier to consider reusing them for FMV. That in turn produced the "parallel pipelines" mentioned in omershapira's comment whenever the engine was actually capable of 3D: often games were pitched to publishers by producing a cutscene trailer, and then the development team figured out what the engine tech could actually do as they went along. Because the in-game assets were still very basic and produced relatively cheaply given a design spec, this served a combination of development and marketing goals. Lara Croft got on all the magazine covers because of the high-poly CGI, not her in-game version.

(Why would publishers focus on assets? In this period, acquisition was extremely common as the industry got bigger and financing new projects got more risky, and so publishers gravitated towards a practice of shopping around for IP development and staffing at a low price. What they were banking on was not getting just one hit or a powerful engine, but a franchise that would sell well for years and experienced developers that they could put on their own projects. Likewise, studios were hungry to get publisher support and their heads often settled for an acquisition rather than shutting down. Focusing on asset production was a way of meeting in the middle, since the tech was so often an unknown; if you acquired a team that could make good assets, then plugged them in with an in-house tech team, a product could be made.)

According to a postmortem on Gamasutra: "Almost all of Diablo II's in-game and cinematic art was constructed and rendered in 3D Studio Max..." They then used Rad Game Tools Bink to encode those renders and optimize them. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/postmortem-blizzard-s-i...
On SGI it was TAV (The Advanced Visualizer) from Wavefront. Wavefront bought TDI Explore which was used by a ton of studios. Wavefront then released Kinematic and Dynamation which were both game changers for IK and particles. Softimage was also big, which was bought by Microsoft. Houdini was very powerful but expensive and hard to use. SGI bought Alias Research and Wavefront and merged them together. That's where Maya came from. Autodesk eventually got all of the AW assets after SGI's first bankruptcy.
Same 3D-modelling and -animation software that's used today, most have even survived one way or another: 3DSMax, Maya (or its predecessors Wavefront and PowerAnimator), Houdini, SoftImage, Cinema4D, Lightwave3D, Real3D etc... in the early 90's the hardware would be either Silicon Graphics workstations or Amigas, by the end of the decade everything had moved to PC.

Cutscene creation was usually outsourced to dedicated studios because it was completely disconnected from the actual game development process.

There's a great series from the Corridor team talking to the artists involved in just this topic

https://youtu.be/DJEdzyuYfZk

I remember bink video was a fairly common tech for a number of years.
That's the video format, not the authoring tool.
Was? Isn't it still very common?
Hasn't been necessary in quite a while. Playing fullscreen video isn't the challenge it was in the 1990s.

(Besides, a lot of games are moving away from FMV cutscenes anyway. Rendering cutscenes in realtime using the game engine makes them easier to author and integrate into gameplay.)

Epic bought them at some point. Before this, I remember seeing their logo before getting to the main menus.
Total guess, but maybe 3DS Max?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodesk_3ds_Max

This is what Red Storm Entertainment (Tom Clancy's game studio) used for their late 90s / early 2000s games.
3DS Max (or Maya, same company though, and basically sister-projects at this point) has basically been used in one way or another for a ton of games and movies. Basically industry standard to use of them, and lots of knowledge can be transferred between the two.

Funnily enough, the "Games" marketing page for 3DS Max features WIP images of The Witcher 3 character rigging: https://www.autodesk.com/campaigns/autodesk-for-games

Yea, I spent ages getting warez copy of 3dsmax so I could start playing around with making maps for Rogue Spear.
FWIW, quite a few of the collaborators on Love Death + Robots come from the video game cinematic world including Blur, the main producers of the series.

Blur for one heavily uses 3DS Max.

If the game studio made the cut scenes themselves, they used usually both Maya and 3DS.

If they were made externally by a 3rd party production studio that also worked for TV and Cinema, they probably used some SGI workstation running Maya or Softimage 3D or Lightwave.

Maya only came out in the last 2 years of the nineties. So before then you would have used PowerAnimator.
Not 1990s but close: World of Warcraft cut scenes in 2002-2005 were rendered using 3DS Max using I think Brazil R/S renderer and for sure the Deadline render manager (as I sold them this.). At some point around 2008 I think they switched to Maya and Arnold and Tractor?
Good question! In the 90s/00s it was quite visibly different from in-game material.
That's because cutscene production was usually outsourced to specialized companies that offered the entire cutscene production process as a service to game studios and publishers (not just for game cutscenes and intros, but also marketing trailers) - those companies usually created all cutscene assets from scratch, and at most used artist sketches for 'inspiration', but no 'ingame assets'.
I remember 3dstudio (followed 3ds max) being talked about in the (then paper) press.
I wonder what they used for Witcher 1 (sorry not really 90s but awesome intro)
I'm guessing it's this one? https://player.vimeo.com/video/14483640?autoplay=1

Produced by a Polish studio that seems to have done a ton of video game cinematics, not just for The Witcher.

Can't find any specifics from their website, but browsing job listings (https://platige.com/careers/) usually give an indication of what kind of tools they're using. Seems to be these as of today:

- Nuke

- Maya

- 3DS Max

- Unreal Engine

- Houdini

- ZBrush

Maya and Houdini is mentioned in a lot of them, but the cinematic doesn't have a lot of general VFX/destruction and such, so my guess is that they mostly used just Maya, rendered with Arnold and composited with Nuke. It's a very popular setup in the VFX industry and particularly at that time, before Unreal Engine was as useful as it is today.

I would love to read more about the Ninja Gaiden cutscenes.
3D studio or lightwave 3D?
or Alias PowerAnimator then Maya (1998) or Softimage 3D
Blizzard was a Maya (and it's predecessor PowerAnimator) shop in the 90s and the RE3 cinematics were done with lightwave. Lightwave pivoted from general cg to more of a architectural focus in the last decade.
OMG when LightWave was given away as a coverdisk on Amiga Format I couldn't believe it.

So many many hours of fun with that one.

https://docs.lightwave3d.com/display/LW2018/LightWave+Histor...

Lightwave was a big deal in the broadcast TV industry for many years as a result of being born out of VideoToaster.

VideoToaster didn't really survive the transition to HD due to lack of investment from NewTek and Lightwave sort of lost a niche. Many of its users transitioned to Modo and other tools.

If you happened to remember the source/link, please send it because I would love to read more on game cinematics development history. The only info similar info I had previously been able to find was on Square Enix [1], but it didn't go into much technical detail.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Enix_Image_Studio_Divis...

I'm not sure about that, if I recall they used 3ds max everywhere at least for Diablo 2.