On the left, we have Aki Ross, main character of Final Fantasy, The Spirits Within, developed over 4 years in the late 90's and released into theaters in 2001. Square's render farm consisted of 960 Pentium III 933MHz workstation PCs, which took 90 minutes to render each frame of the film.

On the right, we have Alyx Vance, companion character of Half Life 2 and Episode 1 and 2, developed over a period of 4 years and released in 2004. The published minimum specs for this game are a Windows XP computer with a 1.7GHz processor, 512MB of RAM, a graphics card compatible with DirectX 8.1, and 6.5GB of storage, on which the game runs at a framerate of 60Hz rendered in real time.

"Years before" They both came out while I was in high school. Their development cycles overlapped.