Well the earliest one I've managed to track down seems to be little known by most of todays gamers, it was on the Atari ST and is called 'Alpha Waves'*¹ It was originally released in Europe way back in 1990 by Infogrames*².
The game itself was the brainchild of Christophe de Dinechin and not only is the first 3D Platformer but one of the first true 3D games that made it to the PC, beating 'Hovertank 3D' by a year and only having 'Elite', 'Falcon' and 'Starglider 2' all space/flight simulators before it. The game itself had a two-player split screen mode, six different models the player could chose to play as and 2 modes of play Emotion and Action.
• Emotion Mode: Allowed the players can choose to explore any of the 12 regions without a time limit but only allowed access to rooms within the chosen region.
• Action Mode: Allowed the player much more freedom to explore the 256 rooms over the 12 regions by the use of keys that could be picked up the downside being that you had a time limit and has to collect the 16 crystals and 16 cubes that were scattered about the various rooms, the player gained extra time each time they entered a new room and the game continued until time expired.
The Atari ST version was the work of Christophe de Dinechin which he'd presented to Infogrames as a demo that was pretty much a near complete game at the time. It was later ported to the Amiga & PC*³ with some changes made to both versions. The Amiga version had the 2 player mode removed but added intro music. The PC version had a turn based 2 player mode and featured music on each zone the models for the ships the player could pick and some of the room layouts were also altered slightly.
The earliest Japanese 3D-Platformer (That I could find) for the 'modern' age was 'Jumping Flash' released for the original Playstation in 1995 using a 1st-person view similar to 'Elite' & 'Starglider 2' and which was also recently revived again in the Xbox360/PS3 game 'Mirrors Edge'. 'Jumping Flash' also predates 'Super Mario 64' by almost a year thus busting the myth a lot of people seem to believe which is that 'Super Mario 64' was the first modern day 3D Platformer.
*¹ Known as 'Continuum' in the North America.
*² Data East released it in North America.
*³ PC port was by Frédérick Raynal who later created 'Alone in the Dark' and 'Little Big Adventure'.
Related Links:
Christophe de Dinechin's blog where he gives a little background into the origins of 'Alpha Waves'
Wikipedia Entry of 'Alpha Waves
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