i don't think i've seen anyone mention Half-Life ... what, no love for gordon freeman? IMO, it was one of the first FPS that sucked you in with a deep, compelling storyline.
Well, important, huh? I'll go ahead and define that as revolutionary and groundbreaking to the industry, presenting new ideas/concepts/technology not seen previous to the game's release. A milestone in gaming that has an appeal and impact on a wide range of people. Sim City Pacman Doom Prince of Persia Mortal Kombat Tetris Half-life Grand Theft Auto 3 Super Mario Bros. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
You have the right idea for this type of list. IMHO most of the posters in this thread must be 20 or younger because I see very few mentions of truly classic and innovative games. And whats with the lack of love for PC games? My list for console/arcade games (no particular order): 007 Goldeneye Prince of Persia Tetris Space Invaders Super Mario Brothers Final Fantasy Series Castelvania Series Zelda Series Gran Turisimo Street Fighter Series PC list: X-Com UFO Defense Civilization Series Baldur's Gate Series Spacequest Series Starcraft/Warcraft Master of Orion II Half-Life Unreal Tournament Ultima Online Doom
Important Games /Best games not in order in my gaming career 007 Goldeneye -N64 Zelda Aot - n64 Perfect Dark-N64 Mario Kark-Both SnEs and N64 Zelda A Link to the pasT - Personal favorite -SNES Mario All Stars - N64 World Of Warcraft- PC Civilization - PC Ninja Gaiden - Xbox Halo -Xbox Must include my favorite Xbox game of all time : SW -Knights Of The Old Republic.
^^^The pinnacle of video games as far as I'm concerned. Madden Pac Man The Legend of Zelda Super Mario Bros. Halo Final Fantasy World of Warcraft Pokémon Red & Blue (counting as one) Grand Theft Auto 3 Street Fighter II honorable mentions: The Sims, Resident Evil, Metroid, EverQuest, Gran Turismo, Tetris... too many to mention, really. Some I listed as the entire franchise, but the point is these are the 10 video games I consider to be the biggest, the most important.
Nice that you added Pokémon Red and Blue because they did revolutionize Gameboy for a while . Had everyone crazy. Not to mention so did Street Fighter the series in general played a major role for Nintendo back in it's time. Forgot to mention Donkey Kong Country on my post.
It's kind of video games' dirty little hush hush factoid, but as the medium strives ever forward for public legitimacy as an 'art form', the usual video game history glosses over the fact that handhelds have a ginormous market share, with the Game Boys leading that market, and the Pokémons responsible for that. I never really got hardcore into the game, I was more into the cartoon.
My top five was pretty consistent for a while - Ocarina of Time, Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy VII, Mario 64, and Goldeneye. Since then... MGS3, GTA:Vice City, and most significantly Resident Evil 4 have made their way into my top picks.
I agree that handhelds were/are huge ... but Tetris is what made the Game Boys a success. no tetris, and there's no gameboys for Pokeman.
Not by hierarchy: 1 - Final Fantasy VII 2 - Call of Duty 3 - Half-Life 4 - Civilization 5 - GTA 6 - Super Mario Bros 7 - Sonic 8 - Mortal Kombat 9 - Tetris 10 - The Legend of Zelda The most important in my opinion. 1 - Final Fantasy VII 2 - Call of Duty 3 - Medal of Honour 4 - Max Payne II 5 - Shadow Hearts II 6 - Half-Life II 7 - Fallout II 8 - Colonization 9 - Monkey Island 10 - GTA: Vice City The ones that gave me more pleasure in my lifetime.
What has it influenced though? Yeah, it's the most popular MMORPG in history, but how has it changed the industry? There were tons of MMORPG's before it and there will be tons after it. People were just as ludicrously addicted to EQ and UO when those games were in their prime. Heck I played WoW for 2 years and UO for 4. That's when the term "EQ widow" or whatever it was came about. WoW was a perfect storm matching an established franchise with a excellent game. Star Wars Galaxies had the established franchise but not the excellent game. EQ had the excellent game but not the established franchise. Grinding levels and accumulating shinies ends up as a psychological addiction and it isn't anything WoW introduced. The one thing that WoW can maybe be singled out for is having a simple class structure that lends itself to first time players. Heck SWG ditched their old class structure during one of its numerous revamps and dumbed it down to copy WoW. However in the end I think WoW's influence will mostly lie in making online gaming more popular, but that was a direction gaming was going with or without WoW.
1. Goldeneye (N64) 2. Legend of Zelda (NES) 3. Halo 4. World of War Craft 5. Sim City 6. Street Fighter 7. Super Mario World (N64) Those are so far I can think of. If you are saying 'most important video games ever' to influence the industry, then you are going to have to go with Farmeville on facebook. I'm serious. It has like what, 80 million players? Now that is influential.
Huh, did I really not post in this thread originally? Shocking. At any rate, in no particular order: Adventure (Atari 2600, 1979) Created non-linear level design and established both the fantasy and action-adventure genres. Spiritual grandfather to the Legend of Zelda. Doom (PC, 1993) Okay, so Wolfenstein 3D was really the ur-FPS, but it was Doom that pioneered most of the things that we've come to know and love about the genre. Everything from the standard FPS arsenal (pistol, energy gun, shotgun, rocket launcher, and some type of BFG) to deathmatches, high-contrast lighting, and height differences were all first introduced here. Street Fighter (Arcade, 1988) More or less singlehandedly popularized the fighting game genre and introduced many of its core concepts, such as special moves, multiple characters with distinct fighting styles, and eight-way directional control. System Shock 2 (PC, 1999) With the possible exception of Deus Ex, this is the most genre-busting video game ever made. Equal parts sci-fi, survival horror, FPS, puzzle game, and RPG, it's amazing that it wasn't more popular. DikuMUD (PC, 1990) The MUD is where the MMORPG started, period, and DikuMUD was by far the most popular MUD codebase due to the fact that it was easy to set up and easy to modify. This tiny little bit of code (clocking in at only 1/3 of a megabyte) was responsible for tens of thousands of players having text-based, multiplayer, D&D style adventures and changed the face of gaming forever. Baldur's Gate (PC, 1998) Nowadays, most of the innovation in the RPG genre is being done by Westerners, with the venerable Japanese RPG sticking to tried-and-true formulas and looking like it ran out of ideas a long time ago. Prior to 1998, though, the shoe was most definitely on the other foot - a seemingly endless series of misfires before the eventual success of UO had left the venerable Ultima franchise looking like a dinosaur, and D&D suffered badly from ill-fated experiments with FPS engines that, quite frankly, didn't suit it at all. In the meantime, the Final Fantasy juggernaut had just reached its commercial peak and was revolutionizing RPGs both graphically (with VII) and gameplay-wise (with Tactics). The Western RPG was hurting badly. Enter Baldur's Gate, which both resurrected Western-style role playing and radically recentered the RPG world around it. Spiky-haired bishonen protagonists would never quite satisfy Western gamers again. NBA Jam (Arcade, 1993) There are really only two ways to approach sports from a video game perspective - aiming for as realistic a simulation as possible, or eschewing realism for the sake of over-the-top, goofy fun. NBA Jam is where the latter approach peaked, was perfected, and has never been touched since. BOOMSHAKALAKA! Tetris (Various, 1984) Quite possibly the greatest puzzle game ever made. Arguably the most timeless video game ever made. Almost certainly the most played video game ever made. No more need be said. Guitar Hero (Various, 2005) Rhythm games had already been around for a decade before Guitar Hero, but they were more or less exclusively an Asian phenomenon up until then (admittedly, Dance Dance Revolution made inroads globally, but it really was meant for the arcade, and by 2000 the console was king). Guitar Hero not only catapulted the rhythm genre to worldwide acceptance but is quite possibly the only game that can be said to have been revolutionary in two different media industries - video games and music. It's helped boost the careers of some artists, revive the careers of others, and even rekindled interest in learning guitar in an age where many people now prefer hip-hop to guitar-driven rock. Not bad for a little old game. Halo (Xbox, 2001) I'll say it now: Halo is, in and of itself, one of the most overrated games of all time. As FPS'es go, it's good, but nothing truly extraordinary. What WAS extraordinary about it, though, was that it represented something that a lot of gamers simply didn't think was possible: a viable console FPS. Before Halo, the limitations inherent in a controller as opposed to a mouse made it seem like the FPS was to forever remain a PC genre, and for that alone, Halo is a massively influential game.
minorthreat, if you played Adventure then you're the grandfather of all of us Apart from that and DikuMUD, I've experienced everything else.
I can't even estimate how many quarters I pumped into the machine at my local arcade back in high school. This game was perhaps the most fun I ever had playing video games, and that was largely because it provided ample opportunity to trash-talk the two guys at machine playing the other team. My favorite teams: Golden State, Phoenix, Indiana, and Orlando (Shaq and Scott Skiles? Hells yes!). "He's on fire!"
DikuMUD was less famous as a game in and of itself than as the code base for hundreds, if not thousands, of MUDs. If you ever played a MUD, chances are it was based on Diku.
Being from NY, I always played the Knicks. It's hard to imagine that they were actually good back then.
An RPG with an endless amount typing to do things , and a reason to be made fun of if you played them.
^^^ referring to NBA Jam me, too... i bet i spent over $500 on that machine... i actually cared about the charts, winning streaks, etc...