I remember reading about this somewhere (could be from an older HN post), but this time I decided to add a comment so that I don’t lose it.
Being a flight sim fan, I still remember playing Comanche for the first time and the wow factor. It was something from the future or from the movies, you got the feeling that you were leaving in the computer era :-)
Novalogic used this technique for terrain rendering for quite a while, my favorite is the first episode of Delta Force. It looks like Comanche 4 and the original Black Hawk Down did away with this method and switched to a polygonal engine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comanche_4#Reception
I remember Commanche and how it reminded me of being wowed by "Rescue on Fractalus"[0] (aka Behind Jaggi Lines pre-release) procedural generation on the 8-bit Atari.
