Games that changed the industry.

Maverick

Maverick

I'm A Pimp, Bitch
Registered
Jul 10, 2005
1,816
0
0
44
The Steel City
www.myspace.com
What do you think are the most influential videogames of all time? What games helped/made the industry evolve?

Street Fighter 2- control scheme was compied a hundred times over
Super Mario Bros.- 'nuff said
Tetris- gave a real spark to puzzle games
Resident Evil- IMO it deserves most of the credit for making survival horror what it is today
Grand Theft Auto- real sandbox gameplay
Pong- because it got so many people into gaming
 
Well, you can really divide this into genres.

RPGs have Final Fantasy 1, 5, 7, and T for the job class system, changeable job class system, recognition it brought to the series and genre as a whole and laying out the framework for almost every tactical RPG afterwards respectively.

Fighting games have Street Fighter 2 and Tekken. SF2 is important for laying the framework for every 2d fighting game since, and Tekken (or Virtua Fighter?) for its innovation in making fighting games take place on a 3d realm.

Shooters have Goldeneye and MGS. Platformers have Mario and Sonic. Racing has poll position, Mario Kart and Gran Turismo. And so on.

There are games that were important for how they pretty much saved their respective comsoles. Like Halo, Madden 2001, FF7 and Mario 64.

Then there were games that were important for other reasons. Like said, mortal kombat for its spawning the ESRB. And there is Starcraft, since it was pretty much the first huge online game.
 
Half Life. It showed the industry that a smooth engine and fun weapons with only the bare bones of a story ( ::: cough!Quake!cough! ::: ) was no longer enough to make a fulfilling FPS. While it is true that not many other developers managed to rise to the high-water mark of Half Life, it does seem tat even the most sparse FPS has at least some attept at character development now.

I'd also say Soul Calibur. Fighting games are all about smooth control and balance, and no other game did more to define what these attributes were at their best than this franchise. Mortal Combat was all about violence and over the top finishing moves, Virtua Fighter was the first to go fully 3D and the Street Fighter games were the pinacle of 2D sprite-based combat, but Soul Calibur really took al these elements and raised the bar across the board on all facets.

Last, I'd have to say Warcraft/Starcraft from Blizzard. RTS games were certainly nothing new when they were released, but Blizzard virtually redefined the entire genre with their unique, mult-tiered build trees, their quirky, high-impact graphics and sounds and (with Starcraft especially) the addition of a compelling storyline to drive the game forward and put all of the various battles into a larger context, one that made theplayer actually care about the actions they were taking. Even today, look at any RTS game and you'll see direct homages to BLizzard's vison.
 
ImagoX said:
Half Life. It showed the industry that a smooth engine and fun weapons with only the bare bones of a story ( ::: cough!Quake!cough! ::: ) was no longer enough to make a fulfilling FPS. While it is true that not many other developers managed to rise to the high-water mark of Half Life, it does seem tat even the most sparse FPS has at least some attept at character development now.
Click to expand...

More than that, I think Half-Life (along with Unreal) showed that developing a solid engine and licensing it can be a viable marketing startegy, and this licensing of game engines allows smaller comapnies to create games without sinking huge amounts of money into development. We wouldn't have America's Army or Counterstrike if it weren't for Unreal and Half-life.
 
BCampbell said:
More than that, I think Half-Life (along with Unreal) showed that developing a solid engine and licensing it can be a viable marketing startegy, and this licensing of game engines allows smaller comapnies to create games without sinking huge amounts of money into development. We wouldn't have America's Army or Counterstrike if it weren't for Unreal and Half-life.
Click to expand...

Good point, although if anything I think that the Quake engine and more importantly the way that Carmack LICENSED that engine did more in this respect. The entire business model of how you develop a game was never the same after id started licensing the Quake engine- every game since Quake has been, more than anything, just a really impressive tech demo for the engine- that's why 3rd party developers always end up doing better story and even level-design stuff than id does in their games.

While we're talking aboutid games and their innovations, I think you have to mention Doom and Doom II as well, mainly because of the way that they brought multiplay action to the masses. I'm not sure how mant readers here are old enough to remember a time before multiplayer games were possible, but it was very primitive before Doom. When Doom II's multiplayer really got refined, EVERYONE was running servers- colleges, business IT departments would come in late and play all night (I did this in fact back in the day to take advantage of our fast LAN- I only had 14.4 dial-up at home)- it was really something. Then Gamespy came out aroud the time of Quake II and lo and behold- you could actually BROWSE for open servers rather than having to know the specific IP address of the person you wanted to connect to... what a concept!!
 
BCampbell said:
I think there's a lot of room for disagreement in this topic, plus it feels like it came up before... ah yes: Most Influential
Click to expand...

May 2005, I wasn't even a member then. Sorry Spud. Great minds think alike I guess.

Silent Scope (arcade)- great peripheral
Steel Battalion- again great peripheral
Jet Set/Grind Radio & Viewtiful Joe- for their amazing style
DDR- for helping gamers get off their lazy butts
E.T.- for teaching a valuable lesson (one that the industry is just learning) to developers/publishers about making quick movie based games.
 
Last edited:
i believe populous was the first "god game" maybe i'm wrong.

and i dont think goldeneye deserves props for the FPS market. i think doom, quake, or even duke nukem deserve more recognition there. i guess goldeneye was great cause it was the first largely popular FPS, but it was on a largely unpopular system.
 
This was covered in the other thread (or maybe not) but just being the first game to do something doesn't necessarily mean that game was revolutionary. It's all about how it affected the industry. Populous may have preceded Sim City and Civilization, but when you're talking about Sim-style "God Games" those two were much more influential. While Doom, Quake, and other FPS's were very influential and deserve their own spots for their own reasons, Goldeneye deserves a spot as well for the quality of its multiplayer action. If you're just going by "firsts", Wolfenstein 3D is credited as being the first FPS and Doom had the fist deathmatch multiplayer. Those are revolutionary games but Goldeneye is as well, for its own reasons.
 
IMHO the two "gold standards" for console FPS games (Goldeneye and Halo) are incredibly over-rated. Literally everything that both titles did right was done years before in the PC space. In some cases, they were giant steps BACKWARD because of the tech limits of their systems (Halo was multiplayer, for example, but was incapible of online multiplayer even after Xbox Live went into production). Yes they were both solid titles, especially when you consider that they were both on consoles, but they were in no way revolutionary...

Thought of another game that WAS though... Herzog Zwei for the Genesis. Waaaaay back in 1990 this game came out and it was unlike any other... Lots of people say that Dune 2 was the first Real Time Strategy (RTS) game that ended up defining the genre, but many of the underpinnings came right from ol' HZ. True, Dune 2 was the first game I can recall that let you base build, follow a tech tree, horde rush an enemy base with vehicles (wait... you COULD do that in HZ too!), but the "feel" of the RTS was captured perfectly in this much earlier title.
 
When it comes to influential FPSs, you'd have to do with Doom/Quake first (since they were the first big ones), Goldeneye (because it was the first HUGE console one, and set the stage for FPS as a party genre) and that's about it. Sure, there were bits and pieces of unique things that became somewhat mainstream, like Rainbow Six for its emphasis on squads, or Halo and its nifty vehicles. But for the most part, the only real influential FPSs were Doom, Quake and Goldeneye. I'd definitely say Halo was more influential than Half Life...

But Maverick, King of Fighters was on the team-based fighting thing a long time back. GT, Goldeneye is teh uber influential FPS. And Imago, you could play Halo 1 online.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom