Slashdot Mirror
The Top 15 PC Games Of All Time
jerkychew writes: "The UK Web site Gamespot recently released its list of the 15 most influential PC games of all time. It's a pretty extensive and well-prepared list, covering the obvious games, as well as a few I had forgotten about. The article can be found on their Web site."
I mean how can Half-Life, Quake and Doom be influential? All of the were improved copies of castle Wolfenstein.
Games missing:
Rogue: Ancestor of all turn based role playing games, nethack, diablo....
Bard's Tale: First great first person role playing game
Elite: First 3D vector graphics game which combined commerce and battle.
Infocom's Zork or Adventure: the first adventure games
Super Mario Brothers: Restored arcade machines
Way of the exploding fist: One of the first great combat games (Tekken...)
Mule, Pirates: Action and economy in one game
Fort Apocalypse,
Pole Position: First car racer with 3D (sortof) graphics!
Pong: First coimmercial game
ARCHON
The guy who made the list was not a day older than 20, and has absolutely no clue about the old classics from the eighties. I mean Wing Commander was nice and maybe influential, btu it was an Elite rip-off.
Moritz
I credit tetris with popularizing the whole genre of puzzle games. It spawned more clones than any other game I can think of, due to it's simplicity and addictiveness.
I'm not surprised it didn't make this list. The list wasn't a survey of PC gaming, so much as a subset of PC gaming for the teenage boys who comprise the most avid members.
Steve
But where's Leisure Suit Larry? :) I mean, come on, I started off with the "classic" adventure games, but Larry got me "gripped", so to speak, on the whole computer gaming scene.
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
And what about Lucas Arts Monkey Island series ? Or their 1998 Grim Fandango. Every game lucas arts makes is a breakthrough. Monkey Island was a 256 color game in 1989! Not to mention Day of The Tentacle, a full talking game in 93 or 94...
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
The list was "most influential" and while GPL certainly is one of the best racing sims ever, it has had almost ZERO influence on the genre simply because it is too difficult of a sim for the mass-market. Papyrus is just now getting around to using some of the foundation of GPL in another sim (N4), so GPL has had very little influence on other products even from the company that created it. Perhaps when a few of the high-end vaporware sims hit the market this year (World Sports Cars for example) then we'll see some other sims with a physics model close to what GPL offers.
Somebody else pointed out that the inclusion of Doom and the exclusion of Wolfenstein 3D is ridiculous, and I've got to back this up. Additionally, leaving out King's Quest I is most unfortunate. It spawned a whole genre of games, and also brought in a whole new type of gamer.
-Waldo
System Shock I and II were good games, but not influential. Their genre had already been established.
What? What games established the RPG FPS before System Shock? What FPS had a full, crowd pleasing plot before System Shock?? What game used sound to establish fear as in System Shock II (it was the sound that made that game scary)?
Look at Deus Ex (also done by Warren Spector)... what a fantastic game that is! Warren Spector breaks the barriers of game genre's. System shock series combined the action of a FPS, and added the intricate strategy and skills of a RPG. Deus Ex allowed for at least three solutions to every puzzle (because it is another RPG FPS). These games will influence every new FPS that comes out.
People don't want to play a straight shooter like Quake anymore. They need something else, and I think System Shock broke the barrier for FPS. Because of System Shock, FPS aren't just kill everything in site, and collect keys to get to the next level. Halflife is a great FPS because it had an excellent plot, but SystemShock was the first FPS to have a good solid plot. Look at Counter-Strike, and Unreal Tournament (sure, UT has Deathmatch mode, but it has a bigger population in the other modes).
System Shocks broke the ground on making a FPS more than just hack and slash.
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Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
OK, Midi Maze was on the Atari ST, but we're talking about the 15 most influential games, not most influential DOS/Windows games.
In fact the article states "15 most influential PC games". If this weren't the case, I'd be jumping in with dozens of more important 8 and 16 bit games, as well as many console games.
I think this may explain the absence of Lemmings, since it was ported from the Amiga (?). The same may go for Monkey Island.
I think nowadays 'PC' is taken to mean x86 IBM PC descendants, and not the more general "personal computer" which could include everything from the Spectrum, through Atari ST, to a modern PowerPC Macintosh...
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Well, it is "PC Games"...
A couple of early Apple II games that sort of got forgotten ...
...
... the original Ultima for the Apple II, which was the first really big explore-the-landscape game. Ultima also, if I remember correctly, was the first game to implement a 3d first person shooter perspective, although it wasn't in real time.
Eamon -- a text adventure game designed to be extendable. Lots of people wrote lots of game modules for this one. Anyone remember it? Guess it wasn't so influential
Castle Wolfenstein (the overhead-shooter game, not the first person shooter) -- ACHTUNG! AAAHHHGGGH!!
And
Actually, Wizardry I: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord was the first first person role-playing game, released in 1981, while Might and Magic I was released in 1986.
And without Wizardry there wouldn't be a CRPG industry; I cannot fathom why they left it off the list entirely. Oh, yeah, it was released before 1990, wasn't it?
Death is but a doorway.
Death is but a doorway.
Here, let me hold that for you.
I think if they felt they could include both Doom and Quake, then they should have included both Dune II and Command and Conquer. Personally, I think C&C was much more than a more popular version of Dune II. It wasn't simply a question of popularity versus precedence.
The innovations that improved C&C over Dune II were colossal. First, they did all the obvious stuff. Improve the graphics, the sound, the animations. Second, they added more variety in terms of objectives (in the single player levels). Finally (and I think this is the most important), they improved the user interface.
Requiring three clicks to issue a single command to individual units (select unit; select command; select target) was tremendously cumbersome. Reducing it to two and allowing the selection of multiple units (and in the process, allowing the player to keep the mouse pointer on the playing field at all times), made game play so much better, that I consider C&C and Dune II to be completely different games. In addition, they had user-definable hotkeys, and a much improved button bar.
Red Alert, on the other hand, was hardly any improvement at all over C&C.
You might argue that C&C's innovations are fairly obvious after having played Dune II. But you can't deny that Westwood was right on the ball, being the first one to release the much improved version, whose user interface set the standard for all the RTS games that followed.
--
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
You give the impression that nethack is not under active developement, version 3.3.1 came out rather recently. It can be found at http://www.nethack.org. Other roguelikes worth mentioning are ADOM (don't worry, he's better at designing a game then a website), and Angband. There are several derivatives of Angband and Nethack, while ADOM is closed source. A good list of other roguelike games (with links) is available at http://www.skoardy.demon.co.uk/rlnews/links.html. All of the popular roguelikes and most of the rest have linux binaries, and the source code is often available too! Nethack is even released under the GPL license.
The other side of text-based gaming are text-based MUDs, a nice list of them can be found at The Mud Connector.
The article also fails to mention that there is a free version of civilization that will run on Linux and has multi-player capability. Check out www.freeciv.org for information and downloads.
The list is almost painfully incomplete without Worms, Tetris and Magic Carpet. Wolfenstein belonged where Doom is, and like it or not - Windows Solitaire belongs up there as well.
All that said, however, Advent/Zork was still far more influential than Diablo ( a mere graphic derivative ), IMHO. That reflects the biggest problem with "Top X Important Things" lists: they're always VERY subjective. I find myself wasting too much time worrying about other people's misguided opinions. (Slashdot included :-)
John
John
I think that Zork had a tremendous influence in its day... but, sadly, that entire lineage is now dead.
;-)
Zork spawned games like 'Wizard and the Princess' and 'King's Quest', games which added graphics to the text. All of these were more like interactive novels than video games; they were stories which unfolded around you if you were clever enough to find your way through them. They weren't quite role-playing games in the traditional sense, since they didn't involve hit points or levelling up. These works of interactive fiction were a distinct genre of their own.
Unfortunately, aside from work being done by fans to keep the genre alive, I don't think there have been any interactive fiction games of this sort released in the past several years. Myst and Riven pale by comparison; next to Zork's clever parser, those two games are mere slideshows.
I think modern gamers just don't like having to type -- or maybe kids these days just can't spell.
That's a reasonable list, as far as it goes. But I'd have to add another game or two, based on one type of game that's omitted. None of the games listed were pioneers in creating characters that people truly love, characters for which they play and continue to play the game(s), time and again. By and large, computer games have nameless non-individuals for the player to live through--a grunt, a soldier, an alien, etc. Tomb Raider is on the list and has Lara Croft, sure, but people didn't play the game because of her character's personality or alluring history--she's just a hot CG chick with large polygons, no one actually cares about her life and character traits that much.
So, there are two games I'd include on the list, for pioneering memorable characters whose lives are important to the game. *The* pioneer here would be the young Commander Keen, 8-year-old boy wonder who built a rocketship out of old soup cans and dons his football helmet to become Commander Keen, defender of Earth and galactic hero. Much of the allure of the Keen games is the character's personality--he's the kid in all of us, and the uber-geek to boot, in a game that's full of his kitschy and quirky predicaments. Without Keen and his character as revealed in numerous text screens, the Keen games wouldn't be as likable and successful. They were clearly character-driven.
Second would be an all-time favourite, Duke Nukem 3D. An immersive 3D world, but inhabited by 2D characters and sprites, the game is technically inferior to many of its contemporaries, including of course the original Quake. Resolutions are low, adding to the game's technical inferiority. And yet, many people continue to play Duke Nukem 3D to this day, and new mods, user levels, and total conversions continue to be made all the time. There are arguably more mods, user levels, and TCs floating around for Duke Nukem 3D than there are for Quake. Why? Because Duke Nukem is an awesome character. Just as Commander Keen is the kid, and the uber-geek, in all of us, Duke Nukem is the swaggering and macho male in all of us. Babes in bikinis, strippers, and posters for adult films litter every Duke level, and Duke is heard to say "shake it, baby!" and give strippers wads of cash. The user mods and TCs have become an integral part of the Duke Nukem community, allowing Duke's macho lewdness to be taken further than the game company itself could, even though the mods are hosted on their servers. Basic mods for DN3D take the clothes off the strippers, while more advanced and very popular TCs like the Vixens and Vixens 2 packages add more female characters, more sexist scenarios, and the ability to screw the strippers for health points instead of just giving them cash to "shake it." Penthouse Magazine commissioned and sponsored a special map. Some user levels are almost insanely elaborate, and impossible to play without using cheat codes there are so many enemies--such as the 666 TC. Whether you love Duke's sexist machismo for the playfulness it really is, or whether you hate it because you take it too seriously, Duke Nukem is a very character-driven game which has remained popular solely on the strength of its character and the user community's support of him through mods and TCs to a technically inferior game. Its publisher has largely abandoned the PC for creating console Duke Nukem games, and stated that Duke Nukem 3D will never benefit from the enhancements made to its textures and sprites for the console versions. But many PC gamers have yet to abandon Duke Nukem 3D, because of Duke's character.
I think those are the two best examples of character driven games, games whose attractive main personalities have earned them a place in gaming history. Just MHO.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
Gamespot's list seems to be heavily skewed toward titles which sold very well and managed in the same breath to be influential. All of the games are personal computer games, meaning that console and stand-up arcade games are completely ignored. Because of the factor of sales, they are of course going to be limited to the last decade, by and large, since the computer gaming industry didn't really become a huge playing field until then.
All the same, they do give a nod to the 80's with "SimCity" and "Ultima III." By both of their apparent criteria, they wouldn't really be able to avoid these games.
They completely ignore some of the biggest genres of the past, however. Some are because they were primarily console games, but they completely ignore some of the most influential titles in favor of flashier, more recent games.
Text adventure games, from the simple "Hunt the Wumpus" to "ADVENT" to "Zork" and Infocom's entire line are given the shaft, despite their contribution in showing the possibility of translating a rich world (and in many cases, complex plot) into a computer game. To my knowledge, no game company has developed a text parser which even comes close to matching the sophistication of Infocom's earliest engines.
They also ignore the hybrid text-adventure games pioneered by Sierra, such as the early "King's Quest" line and such classics as "Leisure Suit Larry" (which showed the viability of an adult-only game).
Early turn-based strategy games, such as the ASCII "Starbase" and its clones are likewise ignored, along with "Rogue," "Nethack," and its (still maintained) successors in the "Angband" line.
Early first-person adventure games, such as "Wizardry" and "Bards Tale" were left off completely, as were their predecessors in the table-top RPG world ("Tunnels and Trolls," "AD&D," and the like).
The shareware craze of the late-80s and early-90s is also left off, despite the fact that folks like Apogee and id Software brought the entire gaming industry kicking and screaming into the world of "this demo is more than a guided walkthrough for the first five minutes of the game; it's actually the first quarter of the game, uncut." What game reviewer worth their salt could ignore this craze?
They also completely ignore ganes which were influential in their development on the computer, such as ChessMaster, its predecessors, and its successors. The AIs developed for chess have shaped our perception of Man vs. Machine indelibly, especially recently, with the defeat of Kasparov.
All these (and many other genres) aside, of the list they selected, there are many games I would have chosen from other deveopers. They give - in my opinion - sufficient props to id Software for Doom and Quake, but they seem to ignore other game developers that deserve kudos. Blizzard they credit only with Diablo, and they don't mention Looking Glass at all. While Dune II might have been the formative stages for real-time strategy games, Blizzard's XxxxCraft line defined it.
I could go on, but it has been better covered in other posts, and I have to do some actual work today. :)
I might even do this if I get a bit of free time (meaning...when I get bored enough to bother :).
Draw a chart showing what games or other concepts each game was based on. Something similar to the
unix chart displaying all the different flavors of unix and what they were derived from. Almost every video game in existance is based in one way or another on some previous game, even though it might not be directly derived from a computer based game.
For instance, Myst might have been an influential game, but consider the fact that Myst is really an overglorified Mystery House with a different theme. KQ1 (which influenced most of the Sierra games after it) was influenced from the text based adventure games and had a graphical element added to it.
Wolfenstien 3D was definitely influenced by Castle Wolfenstein and possibly Ultima Underworld, and it in turn influenced Doom, which influenced Hexen, Quake and Duke 3D (influenced by Duke 2D as well)... And so on and so forth.
Like I said.. when I get around to it, it might be a fun project.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Just a note about dying. Diablo2 has a hardcore mode where if you die, you are DEAD.
It is possible to ressurrect your dead guy in the single player hardcore mode, but if you play hardcore on the secure battle.net servers--dying is permanent.
I had a level 20 Barbarian a couple nights ago due to a firewall spell from the Summoner, a mage boss.
You want a challenge? Go play Diablo2 in hardcore mode.
/// Zoid.
wow. another case of moderaters with out a clue.
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
The Underdogs provides downloads and reviews of the best underrated games for PCs and other platforms. Particularly relevant is their Hall of Belated Fame.
For the true geek, writing programs is the best and most enduring entertainment that a PC has to offer.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Thank you, I wasn't about to click fifteen times to get "the list" when they just string it out to the point that it isn't a list, more like a psychology test.
I will admit that I have only played a couple of them and have not heard of a few. Actually I have only played Doom, Quake, Wing Commander, Sim City and maybe Mechwarrior II.
Are any of these combat overhead view strategy games like WarCraft, Command & Conquer or Total Annihilation? Sorry I don't know the 'lingo', but I really liked this style game.
Aaaaah!
And you have to start all over again until you get it.
And then you get within one second of your best score... noooo!
And then, your dear sister goes and beats your best score...
I'm sorry, but this game must have wasted more hours of people's lives than any other.
I loved the article though :)
dynamo
I'm very surprised they left Wolfenstein 3d off their list. Their top two entries, Doom and Quake owe their existance to it. Wolfenstien 3d is crude by current standards, but it was influential, and controversial. It was banned in Germany for obvious reasons... Mein Leiben!
They might as well have called it "what we think are the best games that we have played since being in business on computers" Where is Wolfenstein? Isn't that what MADE Quake/Halflife/Doom what they are. Yes, I know Teminator2064 was kindof a FPS too, but noone payed attention to it, making Wolfenstein more INFLUENTIAL. Where was Monopoly? There is no doubt that Sim City and Civilization could not have been produced without that well known game. Where was The Colossal Cave? It spawned Alone in the Dark, Tomb Raider, the first Ultimas, etc. Where was LIZA? The first attempt at simulated AI I thought /. was news where I didnt have to read about pop BS.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
I would have said 7th guest and 11th hour where influenced by myth. At least the puzzle solving with some flashy graphics.
ha! i wish I had some mode points for your post :)
/still/ play it.
Scorched Earth rocks and I
gorilla.bas you could always turn to in a pinch, if you were off somewhere using someone elses pc or at work and happened across a machine. good stuff.
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
Ok, so it might not be influential, but it certainly is a blast to play and it is a PC game (it even says it's written for the IBM PC in the title screen).
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Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
Garriott's response was that he didn't think there would be a market for networked games (he didn't think that gamers would be willing to invest in networking equipment for games :)
That's hard to believe. I remember frequent conversations at Origin as early as 1987-1988 about how insanely cool it would be to build a "Multima" product. We knew exactly what we wanted to do way back then; UO is a pretty faithful incarnation of what was being discussed. I was no longer working there in '92 but I'm fairly sure there was an active R&D effort on Multima by then (as in, at least one programmer actually tinkering with code.)
Richard wasn't always right about the direction the market would take, but he called this one a good 10 years before it happened.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Some people think it this is some sort of internal, hardware based program that is the reason their employers bought them that 900 Mhz PIII.
Juln
the ultimate dungeon crawler - Dungeon Master? And my FAVORITE game of all time, the Sundog for the Atari ST by the same group, FTL. Anybody that hasn't played Sundog is missing out. Of course the list wouldn't be complete without Civilization II and Homeworld.
Damn! My Java is too hot again!
When will people compiling these lists realize that sales isn't everything? They seem to think that sales=influential, simply due to the fact that the more eyes that see your game, the more influential it will be towards others.
Well, DUH!
Still, there are a lot of games out there that didn't sell boatloads, but are arguably more influential than, say, Falcon 3.0. M.U.L.E?
More people played bought and played Diablo, but I have yet to find an Angband player that preferred Diablo.
Bear in mind that Angband does not have flashy graphics, does not have a major amount of marketing, did not get every games magazine on the planet raving about it - it just casually sucked up the lives of pretty much everybody I knew at university, and quite a few since.
Angband provides depth and gameplay I still haven't come across in commercial games. I'm still playing Zangband (disclaimer : I helped introduce one of the Zangband maintainers to Angband in the first place) and yet even Baldur's Gate 2 (infinitely better than Diablo/2) only had 3-4 months of longevity. I have been playing Angband (and its variants) since 1992, and can still get so hooked into a session that I forget to go to bed.
I do agree that Diablo gained more success; given the introduction to Angband I suspect that most (non online) Diablo gamers would love the game and forgive its primitive graphics. (Although I don't even see them now - D is an ancient dragon, no matter what you claim!
Having said that, and to stay on topic, Angband is a 'roguelike' game. As is Nethack, and even Moria. Rogue is truly one of the most influential games I've even known.
~Cederic
Trying to load that site reminds me of CmdrTaco's all-time favourite PC game (and what a fun one it is):
SLASHDOT THE BASTARDS!(tm)
From hell's heart I fstab at /dev/hdc
btw, re: interview. Why not Geoff Hill or Sean (eek, forgotten his surname) who did so much work to prepare Angband for its first wide release (2.4.frogknows).
~Cederic
Except that Diablo doesn't have the Keystone Kops!
Tom
I have discovered a wonderful
Games before VGA:
- Ultima III: Exodus (CGA: 320x200x4c)
- SimCity (64K EGA: 640x350x16c)
- King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella (64K EGA: 320x200x16c)
- Test Drive (EGA: 320x200x16c)
--
begin 644
I've never heard of that either. I always thought of consoles to be platforms (ps2, sega, nintendo, etc), not the type of game (side scroller as in mario, crash bandicoot, sonic, etc), but doing a quick google search comes up with this page at about.com which seems to list 'platform' games as the original poster describes. I guess I learn something everyday I read /.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
On the offhand chance someone else hasn't done it:
And the top-ten runners-up were:
Karma: Excellent, but still won't get you laid.
However, I think in shoot-em-up category there's probably Castle Wolfenstein - actually a predecessor of doom - which introduced the 3D scenario into gaming. Also Duke Nukem should probably be on the list.
What I missed is the best game ever crafted:
The Castles of Dr. Creep
BroderbundThat sucker merged adventure into arcade into role playing. And - it was proof that frizzy graphics and dorky sound effects are not really essential as opposed to the actual scenario of a really great game.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Well, nintendogen.com has a slightly different definition:
Still, quite a bit different than what I had always assumed was meant by 'platform'.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
Looking Glass Studios' games weren't even mentioned.
These people mentioned Half-Life, a 1998 game but didn't mention System Shock I, published much earlier (1994?), with similar graphics (even though it lacked OpenGL/Direct3D support and was a DOS game) and a MUCH better plot/gameplay/engine.
I agree that perhaps Counter-Strike should've been mentioned, as its counterpart, Rainbow 6, is pretty weak, but there is _no way_ that Half-Life is better than System Shock I.
And there's also Flight Unlimited, which defined the standard regarding photographic landscapes and non-military flight models.
And what about Thief?
I'm outraged.
Flavio
I love those old WWIV BBS gamez!
Tradewars
Leech
Piss Wars
Dick Wars
Sex Wars
cpeterso
Oh my God !
EMM386, MSCDEX, sound & mouse drivers !
Memmaker was my favourite game... I once did a very good score of 614 Ko with all drivers loaded (on a 486 : on a PI, my best score was only 592 Ko IIRC).
I had forgotten memmaker. I really miss memmaker. Sure. Really.
Stéphane
Instant Karma's gonna get you, Gonna knock you right on the head (John Lennon, 1970)
What on earth is Diablo doing in the list? It's a half-hearted rip-off of Angband (or any of the other rogue-like games), but with all the gameplay removed and replaced with flashy graphics. The game has *no* depth to it at all, and I can't see me still playing it in a few years. In fact, I don't play it any more now. In contrast, I'm still playing Moria (in it's Angband form) over a decade after I first played it. That's the mark of a true classic...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
this is really rubbing it in. When most of these games were released I was hacking away on a C-64 and the UNIX boxen I could connect to with my 1200/75 baud modem. I occasionally got to play on a PC at a user group or a friend's house (a friend of mine actually owned a computer shop but we weren't allowed to play games on the PC's). When I finally did get a PC (why parents sold the family home and splashed out to buy me one) I was utterly suprised to find that I could program in C on it. Luckily the first game I got on my new PC was Another World. A truely revolutionary game, both in it's graphics and story line and in the fact that it was put together by one man (ok ok, and a musician).
How we know is more important than what we know.
Ultima III wasn't really the Ultima that kicked off the series. Ultima IV was. Ultima III was just an enhanced version of ultima II. It WAS an improvement, don't get me wrong. But U3 didn't yet have the depth that U4 did.
The ironic thing is U4 and U3 had almost the exact same engine, but U4's subtle yet powerful background theme is what made it such a great game and it set the stage for all the games to follow in that series. It set up the system of virtues and strayed from the old hack&slash mentality of the first 3 games. You HAD to be virtuous or you couldn't win the game. However, nothing in the documentation implied this. You had to discover it for yourself through gameplay.
They managed to maintain this level of gameplay through Ultima VII. After that something went wrong. I'm not exactly sure, but it couldn't be only a coincidence that Origin was bought out by EA at approximately the same time the powerful story in the series took a nosedive and instead arcade gaming style, 3D graphics, and multiplayer revenue streams took priority.
Pity.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
OK, Midi Maze was on the Atari ST, but we're talking about the 15 most influential games, not most influential DOS/Windows games. If you want a good list, use CNet's Hall of Game Innovation list.
Jumpman.. no doubt and IK+.. god I love that game.. at least once a year I download a C64 emulator and IK+ and have a few games. It's just not the same without the Atari joysticks though.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I know it's not a PC game, but if you want influential, check out the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man. Horrible game, but you can't watch a movie or TV character play a video game these days without hearing the "death" sound from it.
-- ShadyG
Nerd Rock In Progress
Most influential games of all time? Most of those games are in the last decade. In fact many of them were after I stopped playing games in every minute of my spare time, so I've never seen them. I don't suppose the writers at Gamespot remember text adventures like Zork, or wire frame space arcade/sims like Star Wars, scrolling shoot em ups like Space Invaders (Xenon II Megablast!), or the old days of platform games, or ...
Why are there no platform games ???
Where are "Manic Miner", "Commander Keen 4", "Prince Of Persia", "Lemmings", "Flashback" ? Also, what about all time favorites like "Bratacas, "Breakout",, "Asteroids", "Space Invaders" , "Pac Man"?
Come on, let an older journalist write such articles !
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Trolling using another account since 2005.
What an off-kilter list! First of all, Diablo was nothing more than a straight dungeon crawl, believe it.
Secondly, they negate all the arcade classics... Spyhunter, pacman, Pong! Where the hell are these "influential games?" Every single one of these earlier games did a lot more influencing than these new-age brethren.
And QUake is nothing more than an extension of doom, incorporating both is both lazy and idiotic. By the way, they missed all Sid Meier games, Rise of the Triad, Duke 3D, and Solitaire
It seems very odd to me that there isn't a *single* point & click adventure in there -- no Maniac Mansion, no Monkey Island, no Sam'n'Max, no Day of the Tentacle.
These games are influential both in the sense that they were hugely popular, and in the sense that they influenced the games of today -- Monkey Island 4 is just out and selling well.
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Hi? Greatest game ever made? Ringing any bells here? 12-odd years since I first laid eyes on it and I'm still engrossed by it. Dungeon-based RPGs, ah... hell. 90% of FPS games take place in a dungeon, so there's no mistaking the influence this one had; the rogue(like)/variants are superinfluential badboys. Also, Myst? Huh? Honestly now. What games did it influence? Riven? Anything else? I mean, the game was gorgeous and were it not for the COP OUT ending, I'd have bought RealMyst already. But come on. Also, totally not getting the Cult of Half-Life. The game was good, but not mind-blowingly so...
Easy does it!
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Absolutely... Falcon 3.0 had flaws but it was the attempt to be realistic that's noteworthy. (Okay... there were some obvious failures.)
I can't recall realistic flight models being a selling point before Falcon 3.0. Maybe Chuck Yeager's Air Combat is worth noting.
I don't think any of the "realistic" sims have hit the mark, but there are a few that have come close.... Jane's F-15, Jane's Longbow II, Microprose's Falcon 4.0.
IMHO, Falcon 4.0 has probably hit closer to the mark than any other sim. It's a shame that Hasbro bought Microprose, released a faulty sim and then promptly killed further development. Hell, Hasbro does not offer support for Falcon 4.0 at all. No patches... nothing anymore. It's a shame. The continuing work of ad-hoc organizations have made Falcon 4.0 more stable, more realistic and more complete. The Realism Patch Group is an excellent example of open source success. Without their work and the work of iBeta, Falcon 4.0 wouldn't be as good as it is.
Defecation occurs.
Perhaps in a few years time we will see some sort of free game released that never would have been developed because it just wouldn't sell.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Here is my list of the games that have consumed the most hours, days, and weeks of my life. All of them were good games. The one thing most had in common, they all had a "just one more level/planet/room/battle" mindset.
15. Tetris (we had it installed at my work-study job in college)
14. Total Annihilation
13. Outlaws (a lucasarts western FPS)
12. Zork (and a few other infocom games)
11. Privateer and Privateer II (really cool Wing Commander spin offs but I still haven't finished either...)
10. StarCraft (thanks to battle.net)
9. WarCraft (especially once we got two computers connected on a null-modem)
8. Diablo
7. Baldur's Gate
6. SimCity and SC II (days)
5. XCOM (days)
4. Master of Magic (days/weeks)
3. Master of Orion (days/weeks)
2. Civilization and Civ II (weeks, months?)
1. NetHack,Rogue,zangband,moria, etc. etc.
Probably spent more time on these than all the others combined. Can download quickly onto any computer, can play at work without anybody noticing, always interesting, and very, very hard to break away from...
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
Interesting, how there was nothing influential before VGA.
I guess we were all stuck playing text-based solitaire... and not enjoying it.