WebGL is the reason a browser tab can now draw a city, a motorbike leaning into a corner, or four hundred soldiers running at a gate, at sixty frames a second, with nothing installed. It is a standard that hands JavaScript a direct line to your graphics card - the same hardware a native game uses - through the same `<canvas>` element a 2D game draws on. Every game on this page runs on it.
That matters because of what it replaced. Browser 3D used to mean a plugin: Flash, Unity Web Player, Shockwave. You installed something, it asked for permissions, it broke on the next browser update, and on a phone it simply did not exist. WebGL is built into the browser itself. Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari have all shipped it for over a decade, on desktop and on mobile, which is why a link to one of these games works when you send it to somebody - no download page, no launcher, no account.
What you actually get from it is honest 3D rather than the appearance of it. A game like Moto Titans simulates lean as a real dynamics state, so counter-steering and lowsides emerge from the physics instead of being animations someone drew. Fare City keeps a whole drivable city in memory with weight transfer under the cab. Gatecrash puts hundreds of animated characters on screen in a single draw call. None of that is a video or a clever 2D trick; it is geometry, lit and transformed on the GPU, several million times a second.
Most of these are built on three.js, the library that does the heavy lifting of turning scene descriptions into WebGL calls, with a few on Babylon.js and two Unity builds compiled to WebAssembly. That is an implementation detail from the outside - all of it is WebGL by the time it reaches your screen - but it is why the shelf is as varied as it is.
You need nothing to play them. If your browser is from the last ten years, WebGL is already on. A laptop without a dedicated graphics card is fine: these are built to a budget that assumes integrated graphics, because that is what most people have. If a game does run badly, it is usually worth closing other tabs first - every open tab with a 3D scene in it is competing for the same GPU.
