Towards the end of the year 1994 four people put the foundation-stone to a company, which should change the world of computer graphics forever. Gordon Campell, as the initiator, Gary Tarolli as chief developer, Scott Sellers as chief engineer and Ross Smith as marketing leader built up the company 3Dfx Incorporates.

On 27 March in the next year, 3Dfx Interactive was brought into being by a seed capital of 5,5 million USD.

In the time of its establishment 3Dfx Interactive was willing to develop graphics and interface systems for Arcade gaming machines, since they were still clearly superior to commercial computers which served as game platforms at this time. Nevertheless 3Dfx Interactive already attached importance to build products which use PC-compatible interfaces like the PCI bus and they also built interface modules for connecting console input devices with computer interfaces.

One of the first well-known modules was the JAMMA Game-Control-Interface GCI. It translates signals of the control sticks and keys of a play hall console by a Microcontroller of Intel (type 80C51) into a RS232 compatible signal for a PC.

As in the later process of the history of 3Dfx will show up, it is exactly this segment of computer hardware which is still today carried on by another company as a basic idea of 3Dfx … creating virtual worlds at the computer to entertain people, who are using it.

As already mentioned before, in the middle of the 90's the play hall consoles were still far superior to the computers in displaying virtual worlds. There were graphics cards which possessed a certain self-intelligence, however, these were still not able to compute three-dimensional objects to compute or representing it without assistance of the main processor in the computer.

Some companies such as S3 with the Virge chip or NEC with the PowerVR had already tried to develop such "3D-Chips" , so far these experiments weren’t affected by success, yet.

In this market 3Dfx saw its chances and already presented on 6 November 1995 a truebred "3D-accelerator" for the first time to the COMDEX, as well as for the computer and for Arcade systems:  The Voodoo Graphics accelerator and consequently the beginning of the 3D-computergame-era.

However, 3Dfx only supplied the graphics chip set consisting of a texture and a pixel unit to third manufacturers, as well as a recommended reference layout. The graphics cards were then built and distributed through third companies.It was specially at this time that these graphics cards were not able to represent a normal computer screen. They only worked together with compatible games, thus the graphics cards were pure auxiliary products to existing computer systems.

Even at the same day the COMDEX took place the first Voodoo graphics cards for computers were announced by the company Orchid. They delivered a mass of graphic cards briefly on it to the market besides other manufacturers.

The game-industry showed up highly pleased by the new technology and announced a mass of products which will support the 3Dfx products.