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)
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Super Mario 64, basically invented 3D platformers, I mean, Nintendo designed the damn controller around that game
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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
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Doom, the Charlemagne of FPS games, basically every FPS is descended from it
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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
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Minecraft, the tsunami of survival crafting games of the 2010s all basically emerged from the shadow Minecraft's popularity
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Dune 2, godfather of the RTS genre, no Command and Conquer or Starcraft if Dune 2 isn't a huge success
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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
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Dark Souls, invented the Soulslike genre, launched the career of Hidetaka Miyazaki, and its considered one of the greatest games ever made
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Pokemon Red/Blue, Pokemon is the most profitable media franchise of all time, and Pokemon long served as the flagship of handheld gaming
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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
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.
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:
That's cool I didn't know that.
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.
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