What did you put in? I wrote an essay on how inevitable praise of Dark Souls also applies to Metroid but then deleted it as too pretentious even for BAFTA.
I think the notion of a “git gud” game largely came from Contra. Yes, the genre didn’t last, but people crowding around the arcade machine translated to people making videos of themselves beating a hard game.
and i dont even say doom because of doom the game itself. theres one factor that doom has that almost all the others dont, which is how relevant doom was for creating a game engine, which would evolve into other game engines.
doom engine is basically responsible for quake, goldsrc, id tech, IW, source, all of which had many defining games.
the fact that games still being released till this day, has roots on an engine developed over 30 years ago
Well, pretty much everything in Ultima was either innovated or popularized there. It came out in 1980, there really wasn’t a lot before it with any kind of complexity.
But each game from the Ultima series was additive, and Ultima also pulled from Akalabeth, so it’s hard to pick a specific game to be “most influential.” Is it Ultima I because it started the series that largely standardized CRPGs? Or is it Akalabeth because its success led to Ultima?
And that’s why I had a problem with this from the start as Ultima 1 really wasn’t that ground breaking compared to others but by 4 you have an unspoken karmic system that tracks level advancement that blew my mind as a kid once I realized that was a thing.
Ultima absolutely pushed significant boundaries but I have a hard time saying it was more influential than tetris.
There’s a lot of good arguments out there. Pong for being the “first”, Pac-Man for making arcades insane and bringing in big money, Tetris for its wide appeal, Mario 64 for convincing everyone 3d games work, Doom for popularizing the fps, Wii Sports for its ubiquity, Farmville for starting what would become mobile games (which as much as gamers hate to admit, they make more money than every other platform combined). It’d take a pretty convincing argument for me to fully believe any of them but of mine I’d make an argument for Pac-Man, but my heart wants it to be Tetris
The beautiful tapestry of video game history is not woven from a single thread alone. Each person will have their favorites, naturally, but every delightful (and sometimes not delightful) digital block has contributed to where we are today.
That is, to say, I agree with you. They should break it down into categories tbcf
Hard to argue with this. I’m going to, anyway, and give a doubly contrarian answer - the most influential video game of all time is Dungeons & Dragons.
There is not a single element of CRPGs that wasn’t nailed down by 1976, on various mainframes. All those teenage dorks were ripping off the freshly-released tabletop RPG and adding first-person dungeon crawling, random map generation, and everything else that Akalabeth popularized but did not invent. Some of them had real-time multiplayer. Because mainframes.
Rogue was only the best of an entire spate of games just like it - a popular and well-built point of reference more than a surprising innovator. The continuing explosion of CRPGs was surely less about deliberately saying “let’s make a game like Rogue” and more about other people seeing your broader-zeitgeist dungeon-crawler and saying “oh, it’s like Rogue.”
By contrast, Doom is a clear inflection point. “Doom clones” were absolutely trying to clone Doom. id themselves wound up cloning Doom. But I’m not sure Rogue, arriving in 1980, was anything more than an excellent example of the wider genre it came from.
In fact, for direct contrast, damn near every JRPG traces back to Wizardry. That game’s creators explicitly namedrop earlier mainframe titles. The Japanese did not have the same tabletop game trend. The PC-8801 port of Wizardry came out of fucking nowhere, for them, and apparently blew their dicks off.
Doom was also born out of D&D sessions. And the What genre is Doom? video argues pretty well for RPG.
Almost every game nowadays has some kind of story. Pure abstract games like Tetris, however long lasting and multigenerational they are, are the vast minority. Even in something like Pong you play the role of a tennis player.
If Pong is an RPG, then tennis is an RPG. When I use reflexes to move the paddles, I’m not playing the role of a tennis player, I am playing tennis (some form of it at least).
I genuinely think FarmVille is a contender, as I said in the other thread, but realistically gaming has existed long enough that picking just one is kind of impossible. There have been several shifts and revolutions. With how much of the revenue in gaming currently flows through mobile games, gacha games and live service games etc I really do believe FarmVille might be the strongest influence on the current landscape of gaming. But historically, it’s possible Doom was more important for its development. Or even Super Mario Bros for putting home consoles on the map. I could even see an argument for Minecraft - it’s completely ubiquitous and an absolutely global phenomenon.
Gaming is already big enough and has existed long enough that the question is fairly unanswerable. It’s like picking the most influential movie. Is it Birth of a Nation for inventing cinematic language? The Jazz Singer for popularising “talkies”? Is it Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon for being the “first”? Is it The Wizard of Oz? Is it just Citizen Kane? The truth is, it’s none of them. It’s all of them.
Like I said in the other thread, I vote pokemon. I don’t think you can go too much older, because the audience was just so small relative to more modern games. Scale is a major factor to influence.
Not OP, but Mario is one of the most recognizable characters in the world. He’s had comics, 4 cartoon series, countless toys and merchandise, theme park attractions, etc. The original Super Mario was the undeniable standard bearer for the platforming genre and would spawn the largest game franchise in world history, responsible for over 800 million games sold. I’d call it a pretty influential property, staying as strong as ever 40 years after Mario’s big starring debut.
Agreed. Super Mario Bros on NES is universally recognizable, kicked off the Mario franchise, and really brought gaming into relative mainstream success.
It’s not the best game ever, but that wasn’t the question.
Sierra was making ganes like kings quest v extremely difficult so you would call their hotline and pay some crazy amount to figure out what to do next.
Half-life.
Maybe it didn’t innovate specifically anything, but it’s the first real maturely designed game, with incredible attention to detail and focused on conveying a cinematic story in fully interactive environments.
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FIFA, for pioneering the idea you can release the same game every year with minor cosmetic tweaks.
What did you put in? I wrote an essay on how inevitable praise of Dark Souls also applies to Metroid but then deleted it as too pretentious even for BAFTA.
Metroid is too new, Contra was much more of a “git gud” game. They were released around the same time, but I think Contra is more iconic.
The question is influential though not iconic. Metroidvanias are popular. Contra doesn’t have a genre named for it
I think the notion of a “git gud” game largely came from Contra. Yes, the genre didn’t last, but people crowding around the arcade machine translated to people making videos of themselves beating a hard game.
It’s a different kind of connection.
Git Gud started with Donkey Kong. Younger gamers have no idea how hard some of the coin driven games were
personally I think its Doom
deleted by creator
Correct - it’s Doom and it’s not even close. They’re still making Doom levels and doom clones.
And running doom on all kinds of things, like a microwave
and i dont even say doom because of doom the game itself. theres one factor that doom has that almost all the others dont, which is how relevant doom was for creating a game engine, which would evolve into other game engines.
doom engine is basically responsible for quake, goldsrc, id tech, IW, source, all of which had many defining games.
the fact that games still being released till this day, has roots on an engine developed over 30 years ago
100%.
Hexen, Heretic, Strife, list goes on. All great games too.
Ultima. Easy.
Then why Ultima and not Akalabeth?
While I would love to agree there’s no way that was the most influential game and I played 1-7
Did you play any games past ultima? It pioneered a laundry list of features that game are still using.
Yes I have but I’d be interested to hear what they innovated as Im not sure what exactly Ultima I created for the first time.
Well, pretty much everything in Ultima was either innovated or popularized there. It came out in 1980, there really wasn’t a lot before it with any kind of complexity.
What do you think specifically because I can’t think of anything they did first with Ultima I?
Mostly the open world.
III was a bit more influential with:
But each game from the Ultima series was additive, and Ultima also pulled from Akalabeth, so it’s hard to pick a specific game to be “most influential.” Is it Ultima I because it started the series that largely standardized CRPGs? Or is it Akalabeth because its success led to Ultima?
And that’s why I had a problem with this from the start as Ultima 1 really wasn’t that ground breaking compared to others but by 4 you have an unspoken karmic system that tracks level advancement that blew my mind as a kid once I realized that was a thing.
Ultima absolutely pushed significant boundaries but I have a hard time saying it was more influential than tetris.
There’s a lot of good arguments out there. Pong for being the “first”, Pac-Man for making arcades insane and bringing in big money, Tetris for its wide appeal, Mario 64 for convincing everyone 3d games work, Doom for popularizing the fps, Wii Sports for its ubiquity, Farmville for starting what would become mobile games (which as much as gamers hate to admit, they make more money than every other platform combined). It’d take a pretty convincing argument for me to fully believe any of them but of mine I’d make an argument for Pac-Man, but my heart wants it to be Tetris
The beautiful tapestry of video game history is not woven from a single thread alone. Each person will have their favorites, naturally, but every delightful (and sometimes not delightful) digital block has contributed to where we are today.
That is, to say, I agree with you. They should break it down into categories tbcf
An abuse which demands correction.
Don’t we have enough wars already?
Rogue. You’ve heard of Roguelikes? It influenced more than just them. Probably every action RPG owes it something.
Hard to argue with this. I’m going to, anyway, and give a doubly contrarian answer - the most influential video game of all time is Dungeons & Dragons.
There is not a single element of CRPGs that wasn’t nailed down by 1976, on various mainframes. All those teenage dorks were ripping off the freshly-released tabletop RPG and adding first-person dungeon crawling, random map generation, and everything else that Akalabeth popularized but did not invent. Some of them had real-time multiplayer. Because mainframes.
Rogue was only the best of an entire spate of games just like it - a popular and well-built point of reference more than a surprising innovator. The continuing explosion of CRPGs was surely less about deliberately saying “let’s make a game like Rogue” and more about other people seeing your broader-zeitgeist dungeon-crawler and saying “oh, it’s like Rogue.”
By contrast, Doom is a clear inflection point. “Doom clones” were absolutely trying to clone Doom. id themselves wound up cloning Doom. But I’m not sure Rogue, arriving in 1980, was anything more than an excellent example of the wider genre it came from.
In fact, for direct contrast, damn near every JRPG traces back to Wizardry. That game’s creators explicitly namedrop earlier mainframe titles. The Japanese did not have the same tabletop game trend. The PC-8801 port of Wizardry came out of fucking nowhere, for them, and apparently blew their dicks off.
Doom was also born out of D&D sessions. And the What genre is Doom? video argues pretty well for RPG.
Almost every game nowadays has some kind of story. Pure abstract games like Tetris, however long lasting and multigenerational they are, are the vast minority. Even in something like Pong you play the role of a tennis player.
So, yeah, almost every game is an RPG.
If Pong is an RPG, then tennis is an RPG. When I use reflexes to move the paddles, I’m not playing the role of a tennis player, I am playing tennis (some form of it at least).
I genuinely think FarmVille is a contender, as I said in the other thread, but realistically gaming has existed long enough that picking just one is kind of impossible. There have been several shifts and revolutions. With how much of the revenue in gaming currently flows through mobile games, gacha games and live service games etc I really do believe FarmVille might be the strongest influence on the current landscape of gaming. But historically, it’s possible Doom was more important for its development. Or even Super Mario Bros for putting home consoles on the map. I could even see an argument for Minecraft - it’s completely ubiquitous and an absolutely global phenomenon.
Gaming is already big enough and has existed long enough that the question is fairly unanswerable. It’s like picking the most influential movie. Is it Birth of a Nation for inventing cinematic language? The Jazz Singer for popularising “talkies”? Is it Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon for being the “first”? Is it The Wizard of Oz? Is it just Citizen Kane? The truth is, it’s none of them. It’s all of them.
Like I said in the other thread, I vote pokemon. I don’t think you can go too much older, because the audience was just so small relative to more modern games. Scale is a major factor to influence.
But it barely influenced any other games. The genre of creature collector games in this style is quite small.
Pokemon has influence far beyond a genre. Palworld being called pokemon with guns is a good example.
But Palworld is still literally one of maybe half a dozen other games remotely like Pokemon.
Pokemon is The Bard’s Tale meets Tamagotchi.
Pacman’s audience was colossal as was Tetris
Robot Odyssey.
Probably Mario
Especially if we consider “influence” beyond influencing other games.
Apart from a few rather mediocre movies and a few orchestras playing the theme tune what did you have in mind there?
Not OP, but Mario is one of the most recognizable characters in the world. He’s had comics, 4 cartoon series, countless toys and merchandise, theme park attractions, etc. The original Super Mario was the undeniable standard bearer for the platforming genre and would spawn the largest game franchise in world history, responsible for over 800 million games sold. I’d call it a pretty influential property, staying as strong as ever 40 years after Mario’s big starring debut.
And if it was about being the most recognizable I might agree but the influence on other games or even media in general was relatively limited.
Agreed. Super Mario Bros on NES is universally recognizable, kicked off the Mario franchise, and really brought gaming into relative mainstream success.
It’s not the best game ever, but that wasn’t the question.
Oblivion: introduced predatory micro transactions
Sierra was making ganes like kings quest v extremely difficult so you would call their hotline and pay some crazy amount to figure out what to do next.
gacha mechanics have existed before oblivion in many asian mmos
unironically i think this might be it. That horse armor was an ill omen of things to come.
Tetris
Half-life. Maybe it didn’t innovate specifically anything, but it’s the first real maturely designed game, with incredible attention to detail and focused on conveying a cinematic story in fully interactive environments.
And don’t get me started on HL2.
All y’all acting as if the answer isn’t Candy Crush or some other mobile bullcrap.
Mobile is the biggest platform by far. Mobile games make more money than console and PC combined.
Can’t wait for some console/PC gamer to tell me that playing Bloons TD doesn’t make you a gamer, but playing Fortnite somehow does