Games that, for better or worse, changed the landscape of gaming, invented new genres, had major influences on other games etc.
My shortlist (in no particular order)
-
Super Mario 64, basically invented 3D platformers, I mean, Nintendo designed the damn controller around that game
-
Resident Evil 4, all 3rd person action games owe a debt to RE4, and for worse probably, set the stage for brown color palate shooters that dominated the subsequent generation
-
Doom, the Charlemagne of FPS games, basically every FPS is descended from it
-
Fortnite, killed the "loot box" style of predatory monetization in favor of the battle pass model that a ton of other games have switched over to, and was a genuine cultural phenomenon
-
Minecraft, the tsunami of survival crafting games of the 2010s all basically emerged from the shadow Minecraft's popularity
-
Dune 2, godfather of the RTS genre, no Command and Conquer or Starcraft if Dune 2 isn't a huge success
-
World of Warcraft, probably the most influential and well known MMORPG of all time, so many imitators tried to take its crown and failed, and was/is a cultural phenomenon
-
Dark Souls, invented the Soulslike genre, launched the career of Hidetaka Miyazaki, and its considered one of the greatest games ever made
-
Pokemon Red/Blue, Pokemon is the most profitable media franchise of all time, and Pokemon long served as the flagship of handheld gaming
-
Breath of the Wild, I kind of wanted to slot Elden Ring in here because I think ER's influence on the open world genre will be felt for years to come but I think its too early to tell. But BOTW was a genre defining open world game, is on the shortlist for one of the greatest games ever made, and even influenced Elden Ring
I think Team Fortress 2 is the most influential Valve game ever made.
TF2 broke the games-as-ongoing-service model out of MMORPGs and set the standard for monetization and micro-transactions in the industry almost a decade before other publishers would adopt them. It literally invented lootboxes.
dwarf fort. in terms of games as an artform rather than a consumer product, anyways. And I'm not sure how everyone forgets The Sims??? I guarantee you that the Girls Game that's actually designed to run on crap computers has had more impact on mankind than half of OP's list. Not just the gameplay, I'd argue that the extortionate expansion pack model was the forerunner to a lot of battle pass/microtransaction shit down the line. Was EA's first taste of that kinda thing, and all the other publishers were watching. Also, thanks to a single gay programmer, completely normalised same sex relationships without being weird about it in a mainstream game from 2000, and that stuck with the entire series (despite Will Wright himself being a republican donor lmao)
Oh fuck how could we forget Oblivion and the fucking Horse Armor? The original sin of MTX!
Dark Souls, invented the Soulslike genre,
:data-laughing: this is where we're at now huh? people literally don't even know about demons souls
The impact of Demon's Souls was limited because it was a PS3 exclusive, it was Dark Souls that was the true launchpad of the phenomenon
Then I guess fortnite invented the battle royale genre too
Minecraft invented the survival genre
Rogue invented the roguelike genre
Fortnite invented neither the battle Royale genre nor the battlepass system but it was such a mind boggling success with the amount of money it brought a lot of other games tried to copy it in some way
But important =/= inventing something. PUBG was the breakout Battle Royale style game but Fortnite's popularity was on another level and it's battlepass system brought in so much money that loot boxes disappeared overnight because companies had a new way of over-monetizing their games. On top of that Fortnite was a genuine cultural phenomenon (especially among children) that its had a pretty huge impact on the landscape of gaming
important =/= inventing something
Exactly, that's what I've been saying the entire time. So why did you say dark souls invented the genre?
sort of a sleeper hit, but Outer Wilds has really moved the bar forward in exploring narrative in games (plus it's just plain technically astounding). I think its public reach was somewhat hampered by having a similar title to that game Obsidian made and everyone forgot about after a week...
C'mon, not real :jfk-gaming:
DOTA. Not only proving that mods of games can actually be more popular, successful and widespread than the games themselves, but creating the entire genre of MOBA, which I believe is still the most watched genre of E-sport, unless something has changed.
BOTW should not be on this list as it is literally cribbing off of the Assassin's Creed formula. Yup, Assassin's Creed, the inventor of 'tower system to slowly reveal the map' which is now nearly universal in open world games. Definitely one of the most important genre titles ever, even if it has been beaten to death. Although in BOTW you can just, go to the end. Which is pretty new.
but creating the entire genre of MOBA
How can there be so much bad history in one thread lol
DotA did not invent the genre. Aeon of Strife came first. DotA was just one of multiple imitators.
Ah shit, I totally forgot about Aeon of Strife (never really played Starcraft). Even I'm not a real gamer. :gamer-gulag:
True about Aeon of Strife, but to say DotA was just one of multiple imitators downplays it. DotA was an absolutely massive hit that outstripped all others by orders of magnitude, it 'popularised' the concept for sure.
I don't understand how people are having so much trouble understanding the difference between inventing and popularizing
As an avid Starcraft 2 enjoyer (which somehow has just slowly and silently gotten better over the years even with Blizzard's neglect) that is correct. But we are not talking about good or bad, we are talking about 'important' and any list of important and influential games literally has to have DOTA in it because it rocked the fucking world and split the fucking LAN party.
Absolutely. Warcraft 3 was an amazing game in its own right - the fact you could have DotA as just one small part of that game is proof of that. But it also had strong core gameplay and campaigns, and a million other successful and fun custom maps and campaigns, now we just have the small part and the rest of the potential for RTS games is entirely gone :( When will I play the modern equivalent of a fun RTS campaign? Or Footman wars again? Or Battleships? Or Parasite 2? Or Undead Assault? Or any of 1000 original TDs.
Word. I've never like MOBAs. Trash genre, and it's a shame that RTS games are essentially dead now.
Not only proving that mods of games can actually be more popular,
Counter-Strike for this would maybe be a more apt example, but yeah Dota is also very popular.
Team Fortress 2
Perfected high skill ceiling movement based first person shooters. Also highly inventive first person shooter classes. Made it fun for casuals and had a sky high skill ceiling to unlock fun and impactful movement
Heavily influenced Overwatch and Valorant movement mechanics and character skillset design
Also showed that lootboxes and microtransactions were viable in shooter games
Agreed, although honestly I'd just say Half Life instead because of its influence on the genre and all the mods/new games it spawned.
Was Half Life the game where modded gamemodes like Gun Game and Hide and Seek were created? It's either this or some other Valve game right?
Myst was revolutionary at the time. I remember watching over my parents' shoulders as they took turns deciphering the puzzles
Honestly surprised nobody said Braid. I remember that being really important for cementing games as art pieces, and for really establishing the indie scene as something that could move past flash games and Bejeweled clones.
Speaking of the indie scene, Cave Story should probably be on this list
most importantly, led to the creation of this video https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xSXofLK5hFQ
The comments are actually pretty good
Soulja Boy had more fun playing Braid than I think Jonathan Blow has had in his entire life
:data-laughing:
in terms of direct swaps on your list for games that I feel could receive similar justification:
- Swap Fortnite for TF2 as TF2 unleashed the lootbox and hero shooters
- Swap BOTW for GTA3 or GTA:SA for being definitive open-world games that are cultural touchstones
- SM64 or Crash Bandicoot are kinda both arguable against eachother, but i think I agree with having SM64 in there
- I'm swapping Souls for Morrowind just because I feel like the soulslike genre wouldn't even have taken off if Bethesda first-person WRPGs didn't get literally too big for their own good (edited to add: I mean big as in sales and popularity, i fuckin wish the map in skyrim was as detailed as morrowind), and that started with Morrowind
Zork. Zork was really, really important. The Bard's tale. M.U.L.E is one of the OG economic sims and you'll still see references to it to this day, such as Molly in DRG, who resembles the robots from M.U.L.E.
SpaceWar, obvs, the OGest OG.
Centipede, Asteroids, Missile Command, PacMan, Joust, a bunch of the old old arcade games.
Metal Gear Solid was pretty much the original stealth game. There were some antecedents but it codified the genre.
Thief was a near perfect stealth game that has never really been matched since.
The OG Deus Ex was a groundbreaking storytelling and immersive sim achievement.
Half Life pioneered a new standard for scripted events
Counter-Strike, for obvious reasons
Dwarf Fortress is one of the most beautiful works of art of the 21st century to date.
Streets of Rage was influential in the brawler genre
Ultima Online was one of the first big MMORPGs, and an important learning experience for everyone involved.
Mario Bros
Donkey Kong was kind of one of the first platformers
The old Gold Box D&D games. They had a strong influence on all subsequent CRPG/Western RPG games
Diablo more or less originated the "Run around collecting semi-random loot" genre
ARMA is essentially unique as a detailed tactical combined arms simulation, and is directly responsible for PUBG, DayZ, Tarkov, and a few others
I think Onward was the game that finally cracked smooth player movement without causing motion sickness and freed us from the tyranny of teleporting
Second Life is just unlike almost anything else.
EVE Online and the drama it spawned is legendary
Mechwarrior was one of the original giant combat mech games, and still defines the genre
Tribes was an absolute phenomena and there really isn't anything equivalent to it currently going around. Which is a shame. I'm not familiar with any modern games that are even close to as fast and mobile as Tribes
Planetside and Planetside 2 were both outrageously ambitious massively multiplayer combined arms FPS games that broke records for the number of simultaneous players in an FPS by huge, huge margins. Nowadays you're lucky to get 64 players in an FPS multiplayer match. In PS2 there was an op where I was in command of two hundred players, and I we were just one unit in our faction. Battles in those days routinely involved hundreds of players on foot, in tanks, and in the air.
Battlefield 1942 and the OG Call of Duty were both very important in their time.
Fallout. Classic of the CRPG genre
Planescape: Torment is widely regarded as one of the best novels of the 20th century
Civilization.
Age of Empires.
X: Beyond the Frontier opened up a new kind of 4x economic simulation
Star Wars: Tie Fighter and X-wing vs Tie Fighter were extremely popular space combat sims in their day
Gothic and it's sequels influenced a lot of games that came after, including "hard choices" games and open world exploration games.
Morrowind, Obvs
X-Com was and remains a stand-out tactical simulator and the addition of the global strategic layer and economic aspects was a big innovation from what I recall.
Crysis was the standard to measure your PC against for years and years.
Goat Simulator was just a weird, fun moment in history
Left4Dead invented and codified the horde shooter, with some antecedents like the Sven Coop coop mod for Half Life
The Oest Gest Rainbow Six was an innovative tactical shooter. Modern Tom Clancy games are a grotesque parody of what Raindbow originally was.
Mount and Blade was unique in it's time, both in it's gameplay and in being one of the earliest games to do an "early access" to pay for development years before the term early access was even coined. There still really aren't many games like Mount and Blade. Sid Meyer's Pirates comes close.
Superhot is the most innovative shooter I've played in years!
Gauntlet is a classic that influenced many games that came after.
Ninja Gaidan had a strong cultural influence.
Death Stranding is just on it's own level
Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor invented the Nemesis system which we sadly haven't seen much of in other games.
Kenshi is a unique and beautiful work of art
Total Annihilation was an early RTS to use 3d graphics and defined the other kind of RTS, in contrast to Warcraft
Warcraft, without which we wouldn't have Starcraft
Titanfall and Titanfall 2 are FPS games unlike anything else. Apex is a pale shadow of what Titanfall achieved.
Homeworld was an outstanding space RTS with excellent gameplay and a haunting soundtrack beloved to this day
The OG Space Hulk game was influential and widely played
The Hidden was a mod for half-life that pitted one powerful player against a bunch of players with normal FPS characters, something which has been repeated a number of times.
Heat Signature was a brilliantly constructed action puzzle game that few other games can come close to.
Assassin's Creed has had a huge cultural influence
Nebulous: Fleet Command isn't well known yet but even if it remains niche it's an amazing game
Descent and Descent: Freespace were both very important. Descent was an early 6DOF game that was very influential while Descent: Freespace was a widely loved space combat sim with a compelling story.
Wing Commander and Wing Commander Privateer were very important space sims that included live action video cutscenes. I think Mark Hamil was in it.
Command and Conquer, very influential for a long time
Metal Hellsinger is as far as I know unique as a rhythm shooter
Dance Dance Revolution was an absolute phenomena back in it's day
Minesweeper and Solitaire on Windows were both huge
And so, so many more. There are entire genres that I just don't really play that were phenomenally important
Oh yeah, FEAR. Can't forget FEAR. Really impressive AI that we really hadn't seen before. Half Life also had noteworthy AI, as the marines were extremely aggressive, would use grenades to flush you out, and "communicated" and acted in a coordianted fashion. They were fucking terrifying compared to the essentially brainless AI that came before.
Marathon was also a very important and influential early shooter. I think it started the "learn the story by interacting with terminals in the level" thing, and Durandal remains one of the most iconic characters in the history of gaming
Twisted Metal was an important entry in the car combat genre which I don't think is really around anymore. Which is weird, someone should have made a car combat battle royale by now.
Alone in the Dark was an early noteworthy 3d Horror game. I would be shocked if it wasn't a strong influence on Biohazard/Resident Evil
The whole Final Fantasy series, but especially 3 and 7.
Club Penguin. Neopets. There was an old humans vs. zombies browser game that I can't remember the name of, but it was a big thing in it's time. Notably it huge numbers of players would coordinate together in the fight between humans and zombies, staging assaults and sieges, claiming territory. It was very involved while the actual gameplay was very simple. Spawned a bunch of descendents.
There was an old Shadowrun multiplayer FPS game that was the first experiment with crossplay and it was a complete disaster. PC players were utterly dominant over console players and no one tried crossplay again for years. Even now crossplay mostly just gives console players aimhacks because there's no way to compete with the precision and speed of M+KB
There were many Maze games that were predecessors to the FPS/Doomlike genre
Metroid and Castlevania, hence the entire MetroidVania genre.
FNAF, created it's own genre basically
Tenchu was probably a strong influence on Assassin's Creed
I'm missing the entire flight sim genre because I haven't really played any in years, but Microsoft Flight Simulator was a big deal, and it was preceded by many others.
There were a whole bunch of noteworthy submarine games back in the day. It's another genre that has pretty much faded, like flight sims and RTS games.
There were a bunch of very detailed tank sims, too. Really the whole sim genre has become extremely niche. Farming Simulator, Euro Truck Simulator, and some of their kin probably deserve a mention.
Oddworld: Abe's Odyssey was very popular. I don't know if I can draw many direct lines but I suspect it's enthusiastic weirdness had some influence on Borderlands
Jagged Alliance 2 is probably noteworthy for having a bunch of interactions and relationships between your mercenaries. I don't know if it was anything like the first game to do it, but the seeds of all the character interaction people love from Mass Effect were there.
Ooh, Populous, the OG God Sim, another genre we haven't seen much of lately.
Wasteland was sort of Fallout 0.0 and very influential on the whole post apocalyptic setting
Dragon's Layer was a big deal. It was "Quick Time Events: The Game" but it had gorgeous animation and I think it did some kind of thing wtih early 3d or something? idk
Battlezone was the first truly 3d first person perspective arcade game and made innovative use of vector graphics
There are so many games that were important in there time but just aren't remembered bc the genre died out or lost popularity.
Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor invented the Nemesis system which we sadly haven’t seen much of in other games.
They patented it, which is why we haven't seen (and are unlikely) to see adoption or growth of it. Kind of a shame really
They patented it, which is why we haven’t seen (and are unlikely) to see adoption or growth of it. Kind of a shame really
The fact that you can patent shit like this is so fucking grotesque and reason enough alone to hate patent law and the idea of intellectual property. Imagine if Capcom had patented "martial arts fighting game with lifebars at the top of the screen" for fucks sake. There's so much fucking potential in the nemesis system that can't be explored because of this sort of greed. It would fit insanely well in an open world shooter like the far cry series, or even Halo infinite.
I don't think you technically can patent it, bc you can't patent ideas or the rules of a game, only processes, but it's probably one of those things where no one wants to risk the lawsuit.
Read about software patents. The courts allow this horseshit and there's a whole movement against it.
I was just thinking about M.U.L.E. the other day and reminiscing about playing it as a little kid and how it likely even informed some of my understanding of economics later on (that's not to say I understand it very well). Groundbreaking game for sure. It was also created by a very talented and pioneering game developer Danielle Bunten Berry who also happened to be a trans woman working in a heavily male dominated industry of 1980s-1990's US.
Edit: Some more tidbits from Berry's wikipedia article:
Berry was a strong advocate of multi-player online games, observing that, "No one ever said on their deathbed, 'Gee, I wish I had spent more time alone with my computer.'"[9]
A port of M.U.L.E. to the Mega Drive/Genesis was cancelled after Berry refused to put guns and bombs in the game, feeling it would alter the game too much from its original concept.[10] In 1997, Berry shifted focus to multiplayer games over the Internet with Warsport, a remake of Modem Wars that debuted on the MPlayer-com game network.
Less than a year after the release of Warsport, Berry was diagnosed with lung cancer presumably related to years of heavy smoking.[11] She died on July 3, 1998. At the time, she was working on the design of an Internet version of M.U.L.E..[5]
MAG on PS3 did full on 128 vs 128 games on one server back in 2010. Basically was a first person SOCOM with too many players. Unfortunately was shut down in 2014
Yeah, Mag was an important predecessor to Planetside 2, and apparently a lot of the technology Sony used to make PS2 work came from the Mag team.
Sadly MAG was Zipper's first attempt at a first person shooter, and thus had very awkward movement and animation. They should've just made it third person like SOCOM, but unfortunately first person was what was popular back then in the call of duty heyday, so yeah...
I don't think crysis was important, I think it was just a meme.
:lt-dbyf-dubois:
I am still on Hexber.Net, right? 83 comments so far and no one has mentioned Disco Elysium?! How many other games have built 0.01% of communism?
It's just too recent for it's impact to be fully realized yet. There will be a lot of games clearly inspired or derived from it pretty soon though and I'm sure someone is going to reply with some already released.
I don't really know how much of an impact it's had. It's done well, and it's rare for being such an explicitly leftist game. It's got a good narrative style, but I think it remains to be seen how innovative or important it is.
I love the game, but in essence it's just a modern, streamlined version of games like Planescape: Torment or Fallout, which are both games that still have massive impacts decades later. Any game that tries to imitate Disco Elysium is going to have the DNA of those isometric RPGs by proxy.
Its real impact is that it's a game with good writing, which is very rare. I can only name about a dozen games like that.
I admit, I was responding more to the title alone asking about how important a game is in general, and not the bottom text regarding the influence a game has had on successors. It's true, DE hasn't had a chance to have made an impact on other games yet and it remains to be seen if it will in ways not already pioneered by its predecessors. But for sheer importance I think the amazing writing you pointed out was good enough that it really helped elevate the very medium of video games, pushing it further along in being accepted as a true art form. And it did so while being explicitly communist! (mostly).
In this post I'll shill for my only childhood MMO, Guild Wars 1. I honestly think GW doesn't get the recognition it deserves, mostly due to being a direct and less successful competitor to WoW.
GW was also revolutionary because it tried to go against the rethoric you needed a subscription in order to maintain an online service.
It was a bold move, WoW was a huge hit and the previous big MMOs were also either F2P asian shit or the standard subscription model.
TL;DR:
-No DLC, no cash shop, no monthly subscription, just buy an expansion once or twice per year.
-Organized PvP was a novelty at the time, WoW literaly copied the arena from GW because it was very successful and one of the reasons people didn't want to switch.
-GvG was actually great, perhaps the precursor of e-sports, too bad it didn't last.
-"Skill based combat" Sounds like gamer shit, but in regular MMOs with open world PvP combat is decided heavily based on 1) numbers on each side and 2) who got the better gear. GW's completely instanced PvP along with giving access to a standard set of weapons/armor means its closer to fairness.
-Completely instanced PvE/PvP: This was obviously to reduce server load, but it also gave many benefits, no sharing quests/monsters, no griefing, very easy way to play with your friends in private etc.
-Regular combat updates/balancing. Theorycrafting different and new team comps was a whole group effort thing.
:todd: buy skyrim
I think Skyrim made open world with rpg elements mainstream for better or worse
Also vampire survivors for how much survivor clones are made now.
