As an aside, a few early 90s games did experiment with spheroid sprites to approximate 3D rendering, including the DOS game Ecstatica [1] and the (unfortunately named) SNES/Genesis game Ballz 3D [2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVNxnlgYOyk

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfhiGHM0AoE