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.
Robot Odyssey.
Many other games have “defined” their genres, but few have done so quite as completely as Doom (1993). And on top of birthing the entire FPS genre, the practice of making Doom run on any electronic device with a screen and a CPU has long been a fantastic exercise in programming and hacking. The possibility of implementing Doom in everything from calculators to pregnancy tests to Captcha in a browser window has kept the game in the public consciousness for decades, and will continue to do so for decades to come.
Of course the real answer is Clash of Clans, because it popularized mobile gaming and skyrocketed that platform’s revenue to the point that it outpaces every other gaming platform combined, but I’ll boycott BAFTA if something riddled with microtransactions gets any recognition
Castle Wolfenstein came out the year before how is that not the first?
It didn’t catch on the way Doom did. Maybe it had something to do with the ceiling not having a texture in Wolf3D. 🤷🏻♂️
If we want to talk about first, then Maze War takes the trophy. Wolfenstein 3D may have come before Doom, but it lacked the influence and staying power. Wolf may have been earlier, but Doom birthed the genre as we know it
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
Mario Bros.
Literally every gamer has played it or a game like it. Even non gamers recognise it. It’s copied and iterated on to this day.
It certainly wasn’t the first 2D platformer, but it’s success made everyone else go “that’s what we’re making now”
Slight correction; you’re referring to Super Mario Bros. (1985).
The plain ol’ Mario Bros. (1983) was the arcade platformer about bunking mobs coming out of pipes:
Seriously. For a lot of people, SMB single-handedly answered the question of whether home consoles or arcades were the future.
Don’t we have enough wars already?
I think naming a single game is hard, but most influencial franchise in gaming would have to be Mario. Between the platformers, smash, kart and the music it is just so widely recognizable.
Eh, Super Mario Bros was super influential, and kicked off the Mario franchise. So I’d probably pick that.
Or maybe Pong, which normalized digital gaming. Or maybe Space Invaders.
I think those are both valid picks. If you can only pick one game it’s going to have to be one that changed how the world looked at video games.
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
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
they make more money than every other platform combined
An abuse which demands correction.
I can’t see Space Invaders so I’ll say that. It was a tour de force when it first came out, raking 13 billion dollars in today’s money (citation needed).
Tetris
personally I think its Doom
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.
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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:
- tiled graphics
- party combat (Wizardry also had it)
- time travel
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.
Not one mention of WoW anywhere in this article or this thread, I find that at least somewhat surprising!
Minecraft might be a good contender in terms of spawning the survival genre and also having so many mods used to pioneer entirely new game modes and even having a major part in machinima and Let’s Plays and such things on Youtube.
Machinima pre-exists Minecraft by a significant stretch though? Red vs Blue was ongoing when Notch thought of Minecraft.
