The Ten Most Important Games

Taking a page from the National Film Preservation Board, the History of Science and Technology Collections at Stanford University and a group of five prestigious games industry figures have inducted ten games into a sort of 'canon'. The New York Times reports that some of these titles represent the start of weighty gaming genres, while all are laudable for their place in gaming history. "[Henry] Lowood and the four members of his committee -- the game designers Warren Spector and Steve Meretzky; Matteo Bittanti, an academic researcher; and Christopher Grant, a game journalist -- announced their list of the 10 most important video games of all time: Spacewar! (1962), Star Raiders (1979), Zork (1980), Tetris (1985), SimCity (1989), Super Mario Bros. 3 (1990), Civilization I/II (1991), Doom (1993), Warcraft series (beginning 1994) and Sensible World of Soccer (1994)." Most likely, future years will see additional titles inducted into this game canon.

Comments

pong

[mastershake_phd]

What no PONG?

Re:pong

[SageinaRage]

Pong is significant for bringing video gaming to the masses, and being the first large commercial success. This list is more for games of great cultural significance, artistic works deserving of praise. I wouldn't really include Pong, fun though it may be.

Re:pong

[Inferger]

I'd think Ralph Baer's Tennis(which came before pong on the first ever video game console released to the public) would be there.

Re:pong

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm kind of disappointed to note that Street Fighter II didn't make the list either.

- HC

Re:pong

[Umbrel]

I'd put pong on the list, but also Prince of Persia and Donkey Kong Country for artistic works and technical achievement.

What is Zork and what is so special about Mario 3?

Re:pong

[omeomi]

And Super Mario 3 instead of regular old Super Mario Bros? I mean, yeah, 3 was a great game, but the first one was a huge hit at the time. It's still a fun game to play.

Re:pong

[Threni]

> What is Zork

There's information about it in the internet. Use a "search engine" such as Google (www.google.com) and find out.

> and what is so special about Mario 3?

I didn't get that either. It's more significant than 1 or 2? I'd have thought they'd have been better of with games like Manic Miner or Elite. It's just a personal list though, albeit by more than one person. There's not the same problem with computer games as with films, as we can always play the originals using emulation. Every year someone will discover those old games for the first time.

Re:pong

[Rude Turnip]

If it brought gaming to the masses, then I'd say that it has cultural significance, since people carry culture. So what we have here is an elitist list whose validity I seriously question.

Re:pong

[Anonymous Coward]

What is Zork...

I think you need to look around and ask yourself "Do I really belong here?"

Re:pong

[NeoPaladin394]

Haha, Zork. I played it once. It seems to be something of an underground indie hit. It was a text based adventure where you had to enter commands like "go east," "examine fire," "pick up stick," things like that. No real plot (that I remember), just detective-meets-puzzle.

As for Super Mario Bros. 3, it was a big innovation from the previous Bros games in powerups, enemies, levels...it looked and felt new, at least for the time and genre. In previous games, it was "bounce on top of your enemy and don't get hit." Three let you use a little more strategy with different power-ups (one even giving you temp stealth).

What other 2d scrolling platformers were out at the time? I was in elementary when I played Bros 3, the memory is a bit fuzzy.

Re:pong

[textstring]

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

Re:pong

[Tackhead]

> What is Zork

There's information about it in the internet. Use a "search engine" such as Google (www.google.com) and find out.

> TYPE ZORK INTO WWW.GOOGLE.COM

Google suggests that the original poster try the Zork Wikipedia Entry.

It is almost 5:00 pm in your office. You are feeling a mite peckish.

> TRY THE NEXT LINK

Google's second link points to the Infocom-IF page on the history of Interactive Fiction.

It is almost 5:30 pm in your office. You are hungry. Because Congress fucked up Daylight Saving Time, it is not yet dark.

> TRY THE THIRD LINK.

Google's third link points to a live PHP-based implementation Zork, cleverly disguised as a 404 page.

By the time you're done with that, you will have either starved to death, or despite Congress' fucking up Daylight Saving Time, it will be sufficiently dark that you will have been eaten by a grue.

*** You have died ***
Your score is 2 out of a possible (+5, Funny)

Re:pong

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems to be something of an underground indie hit.

Heh, no, that's not quite it. It's just really old. There was no game industry at the time to have an "underground" or "indie" from.

Re:pong

[textstring]

i agree, surely the significance of the "scene" a game creates says something to it's importance. perhaps the first cracked games should be included in "this game canon".

Re:pong

[Umbrel]

ha ha but this extraction from wikipedia marks my point:

"Zork" was originally MIT hacker jargon for an unfinished program. The implementors named the completed game Dungeon, but by that time the name Zork had already stuck. Zork has also been adapted to a widely panned book series.

Re:pong

[Umbrel]

My point being that you shouldn't need to google for one of the 10 most important games

Re:pong

[Threni]

> My point being that you shouldn't need to google for one of the 10 most important games

Depends on how much you know about the history of computer games, I guess. Zork is a classic - probably the most important game on the list.

Re:pong

[coolgeek]

Funny that Zork somehow trumps Adventure on this list. But what do I know.

Re:pong

[coolgeek]

What point? Your point that you're 25-years old or younger? Because anyone who was gaming on a computer pre-1988 knows about Zork.

Re:pong

[dhasenan]

Which is why SPACETRAVEL (the game that is responsible for the creation of UNIX) is also not included.

Re:pong

[Anonymous Coward]

Not an impressive amount, apparently.

Re:pong

[poot_rootbeer]

"you shouldn't need to google for one of the 10 most important games"

And if you've been gaming for more than 20 years, you don't need Google to know about Zork.

Re:pong

[dhasenan]

It wasn't new. It was the first popular game of its genre, an early paragon of adventure games. And that's the point of the list.

Re:pong

[WhiplashII]

Yup - I remember playing on a minicomputer the size of a room.

Ah, those days!

Re:pong

[0111 1110]

I don't object to your being a newbie. What I object to is your insistence on talking about something about which you obviously know nothing. Zork was a major game at the time of release. Lots of people had it. I remember reading a review of it in Creative Computing (written by Isaac Asimov iirc) before I bought it. A glowing review. Just because you weren't alive at the time of a game's release doesn't mean it wasn't significant.

Re:pong

[gEvil (beta)]

but my point is that it is not such a important game, it is almost unimportant at all.

And everyone is rightfully pointing out to you how you are very very wrong on that point. It's funny that you're sitting there saying that Zork was unimportant, yet you want to put Prince of Fucking Persia on the list? Warning: Bad Car Analogy Ahead - That's like saying that Henry Ford is insignificant in the world of cars, but that John DeLorean should be on the list because he made a car out of stainless steel (not that you'd know who John DeLorean is)...

It's very clear that you were born in the early nineties and that anything that happened before that is "unimportant" in your world...

Re:pong

[admiralh]

So it might have been the first command line adventure game, but being the first doesn't make it important if it didn't included some technical breakthrough: AI, intuitive gameplay, impressive artwork that was not supposed to be posible for that system, original story or something like that. i.e. PoP introduced a new kind of animation fo the movements of the character looked realistic.

You are so wrong.

Zork was not the first text adventure, but the technical breakthough there was that it was able to pack lots verbose descriptions of places and events in a very small space (less than 48KB mem, 130KB floppy disks)). You forget the (lack of) power that home computers had in 1980.

AI: Zork's parser an incredible leap at the time. Previous adventures used commands like "USE SCREWDRIVER" unscrew a screw.

Zork did stuff like:

>> UNSCREW THE SCREW

Which screw, the Phillips screw or the standard screw?

>> STANDARD

>> You unscrew the standard screw. The control panel falls on your foot. Your scream of pain wakes up a grue, who decides to eat you.

ANd remember, artwork is more than graphics. Since the graphics on the computers of the time was either poor or non-existent, Zork made up for it with the verbosity of the descriptions.

In summary, here's a (likely incomplete) list of the technical breakthroughs of Zork:
1) A parser that could understand more that just two-word "Verb Direct-Object" commands (e.g. "GO HOUSE". Look at the old Scott Adams Adventures for more examples).
2) Paragraph-length (or more) descriptions of places and events, that allowed the player to become more immersed into the game. This all packed into the tiny computers of the late 70's.
3) Multi-platform. Zork ran on virtually every home computer from the Osborne to the Apple II.
4) Z-Interpreter. Zork was done as Z-code, ran though an interpreter. The same interpreter was used for several games.
5) Fun packaging. The manuals and other sundries that came with the game were interesting, and prized by collectors today.

I think you need a little more appreciation for the state of home computing in 1980.

Re:pong

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, they got Simcity, but no Sims or Sims2, I disagree with their OPINION anyway. I don't find all of those games that great at all or groundbreaking even.

Re:pong

[XnavxeMiyyep]

What is Zork

I think you mean what is Zonk?

Re:pong

[NMerriam]

It seems to be something of an underground indie hit.

Yes, a it's bit like Citizen Kane that way :P

Re:pong

[The Great Pretender]

See http://thcnet.net/zork/index.php although not the original it may help your understanding. And for further understanding of the thread, type in "what is a grue"

Re:pong

[LunaticTippy]

Maybe you have to be older. At the time, it was very exciting and new and groundbreaking. You could type plain english into the game and it'd parse it (ok, sometimes) It was a pretty detailed puzzle-story that you could interact with in a somewhat open-ended fashion. I'd say that it led to the whole role-playing and epic story genres of games.

Zork won't seem very groundbreaking or important to anyone who grew up with the playstation or whatever.

I'd say that an original story isn't important if it is similar to another game. Intuitive gameplay would be nearly irrelevant. Artwork? Give me a break. When we talk about important games it almost HAS to be the first/best games utterly unlike anything else already made. Final Fantasy 32768 will never be nominated for Most Important Game if it is simply another RPG, no matter how good the story, graphics, or gameplay.

Re:pong

[Umbrel]

Thank you, now I admit my utterly ignorance about Zork, since I wasn't aware of that.
Glad that finally someone pointed out why it was important.
So actually it did fit in my criteria (just by chance I guess), following your list
1)better AI
2)gameplay, AI
3)something like that :P
4)some technical breakthrough
5)gameplay, original story(original manuals O_o)

Still I was right (in a completely wrong way)

Re:pong

[slashbob22]

*** You have died ***

Cancel or Allow?

Re:pong

[STrinity]

My point being that you shouldn't need to google for one of the 10 most important games

Quite right. Anyone with knowledge of video game history should be familiar with the Underground Empire.

Re:pong

[drinkypoo]

That Zork is SERIOUSLY weird. Or buggy. I went into the forest and got a message "ukyo is here". Typed "look at ukyo" and the line "ukyo is here" vanished, and I got "What?" back from the interpreter. Easter egg?

Re:pong

[Umbrel]

They were not pointing out HOW I was very wrong, only that I was very wrong, I already had 1 reply refuting me, It was a nice not insulting but very informative reply.
It's not funny it's pathetic that I was wrong about Zork, and I specify that I wanted PoP because of the technique involved in the artwork. To correct your car analogy, It's like me saying that the Model T is unimportant beacause it was not a great car and asking the DeLorean (yes I do know, it's not that hard because of Back to the Future :)) to be in the list because of the seagull doors.

No, early eighties, but I didn't came with PC included, and of course anything before was uninportant that's why I didn't even thought about pong.
OK I was wrong about zork, it didn't have to do with when I came it's about what I knew about it.

Re:pong

[CheechWizz]

Actually karateka, also made by Jordan Mechner 4 years before PoP, already had the realistic rotoscoped animations.
I can still remember being absolutely blown away by it the first time I saw it running on a commodore 64.
I do think Populous should be on there, it's the game that essentially started the RTS genre IMHO) but that's the point of these lists: to get people thinking and talking about what the essence of a truly great game is.

Re:pong

[Umbrel]

No I don't need to be older I need to be better informed.
You are being incoherent, first you describe it like fitting my intuitive gameplay and original story requeriments an later you said those don't matter.
I've never had a PS, fisrt system was an atari back in the middle 80s.
I ment the tachnique required for the artwork not the artwork itself, FF 32768 will be nomitated for Most Important Game if it is the first to achieve 3D imaging on a regular 2D display (I mean including depth focus not just perspective), or something like that.

Re:pong

[gEvil (beta)]

While I'm sure that version is a little buggy, your question is answered by the leaflet in the mailbox:

This version is a PHP web hack of the original Dungeon, which allows you to LOGIN, SAVE, and RESTORE your game. You can see your fellow players, but since they are running their own instance of the game you can't do much other than SAY things to them.. or at least you will be able to once that bit has been coded. It is a work in progress.

Re:pong

[Umbrel]

I said i was wrong about zork not about the criteria I asked for an important game, zork fitted that criteria so I was right about the criteria, not about zork.
Those points are not known to everyone here, probably the peope who put together the list were aware of them. I'm saying I was wrong because I wasn't aware zork complied with them, it's not maybe I didn't knew well about zork, my criteria was ok, i haven't turned that around, but I agree it is sad to have not know better about zork.

Re:pong

[Umbrel]

Then I switch PoP for karateka, I still think the rotoscoped animations are a truly great technique

Re:pong

[gEvil (beta)]

It's like me saying that the Model T is unimportant beacause it was not a great car...

No, it's exactly like you saying the Model T was unimportant because you'd never heard of it before.

Re:pong

[Umbrel]

I think the list was not supposed to be just a popularity list.

Re:pong

[Umbrel]

ha ha, I guess you can interpret it like that, nevermind I was wrong about zork, I was trying to pointed out that it was popular because of circunstances not because of merit, which of course was not the case.

Re:pong

[Anonymous Coward]

What no Duke Nukem Forever?

Re:pong

[Umbrel]

It should not be gamer age dependant, If it is one of the 10 most important games of all times then new gamers (that did a proper games history check :P) would now about it too, but yes it was my fault for no knowing better about it.

Re:pong

[Umbrel]

No, I meant like having heard about it before but incorrect stuff (as far as I knew zork was not a great game), like that it didn't had any technical breakthrough.
I'll left the car analogy there before it goes too far.

Re:pong

[Byteme]

Dude... there were many gull-winged doors before the DeLorean. I'd put the 300SL tops in that category.

http://autospeed.drive.com.au/cms/A_2143/article.h tml

I thought I'd point that out... oh, and how old are you since everyone seems to be making that an issue?

Re:pong

[Umbrel]

I was siplyfing for a bad car analogy, but OK you are actually right.

Re:pong

[Purity Of Essence]

. i.e. PoP introduced a new kind of animation fo the movements of the character looked realistic.

Actually that was another Jordan Mechner game, Karateka, Prince of Persia's spiritual progenitor. Jordan Mechner is definitely an under-appreciated member of video game history for his bringing realism and cinematic technique to video games. Released five years before Prince of Persia, Karateka was among the first games to have a film-like story line, a personified villian, a hierarchy of henchmen for the player to confront, cut scenes, film-style editing during game play, and of course the rotoscoped graphics Prince of Persia is famous for.

Re:pong

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude.. Someone, maybe the first person ever, admits to being wrong on Slashdot and you argue more??

Re:pong

[Anonymous Coward]

It was very very influential. It really made text adventures take off, and was much more sophisticated than "Adventure". It had a real parser. It had complex interactions. It even had a rudimentary RPG-like "combat" system, though most people never realized that (basically, the higher your score, the easier the combat with the thief was). "Adventure" was more like a proof-of-concept, whereas Zork/Dungeon brought that to life.

You may think text adventure were nothing big, but they used to be HUGE. Text adventure games definately inspired a generation of MUD games. MUD games inspired Everquest, which inspired World of Warcraft.

The list wasn't about which game was the most impressive technically, but which were the most important. And it's good to finally see a list of games that includes older influential games; too many of the gaming magazines tend to have lists that include favorite games or only recent games.

Re:pong

[SoCalEd]

...probably [sic] the peope who put together the list were aware of them...

This is correct for at least two reasons:

1) The people who put the list together *did* include it on the list, and
2) Steve Meretzky was one of the Infocom implementors. In fact the one responsible for some of the other great releases such as Hitchiker's Guide and Planetfall. He also penned a Zork sequel, IIRC.

Re:pong

[Krux]

It's just letting you know someone else is playing zork and happens to be in the same location. I didn't write the ability to actually interact with other users yet. I kind of got side tracked by other shiny things.

Re:pong

[kypper]

I am in your debt, sir. That was excellent.

Re:pong

[Anonymous Coward]

It's very clear that you were born in the early nineties and that anything that happened before that is "unimportant" in your world...

Prince of Persia was released in 1989.

Re:pong

[pairo]

What point? Your point that you're 25-years old or younger? Because anyone who was gaming on a computer pre-1988 knows about Zork.

I resent that. :-P

Re:pong

[Warg! The Orcs!!]

Most amusing.

btw - how do I get the key from the tent in Trinity.......?

Re:pong

[moogs]

Forget about no pong, what happened to the Half-Life series? Heck, Starcraft? The list depends on opinion, if you ask me... To each his own, and all that.

Re:pong

[bigbigbison]

It all depends on your definition of "important." I'm sure that there are lots of people who think that the Mona Lisa or Michelangelo's David are very important works of art even though there were portraits and lifelike statues before them.
In this case important doesn't mean any kind of first. It means that, in their opinions, they thought it was very good and an achievement in the genre.

Re:pong

[coolgeek]

I resent that. :-P When it comes to resentments, tis better to give than to receive. heh heh

In general I'm not an ageist, I just wasn't gonna stand for Umbrel saying Zork is obscure and insignificant.

The one thing Zork, Adventure, Starcross (my fave) and Planetfall had is they really got your imagination going. Basically, they are non-linear interactive books, and the score is merely a way to tell if you've read the whole story or not. Or in the case of Adventure, whether you were worthy of receiving a copy of the source. Some googling will reveal that someone has made a modernized "player" for the old Infocom games, and I'm sure a little more digging will, ahem, reveal where you can find the data files for any of these games. If you've never played one, I strongly suggest it to anyone. In 10-15 years from now, when they start offering courses in geek culture at various universities, certainly playing one of these games will be part of the curriculum.

Re:pong

[Korin43]

The fact that our generation for the most part didn't play text based games doesn't make them any less important to gaming as a whole.

Re:pong

[tomaasz]

I believe pong was included in Doom as an easter egg, so they got that covered.

Re:pong

[rekenner]

Starcraft just built on what Warcraft started. And Warcraft was really popular, back in its day. Good game? Yes. Incredibly new or innovative? Not really. It's only claim to fame might be that the sides weren't just slight deviations of each other, but I'm not sure about that.

Re:pong

[Fjornir]

Its not the author of the list's fault that you're ignorant. Now go to bed, little boy so the grownups can finish talking.

Re:pong

[suckmysav]

"It should not be gamer age dependant, "

Why?

Would you say the same if someone made a list of the "ten most important bands in history" only to have some clueless teenager say "who are the Beatles?".

Just because the reader is too young/ignorant to know all of the entries it doesn't make them any less relevant.

Re:pong

[DeadChobi]

Which would be true except for all the Zork references in Geek culture.

Case in point:

It is pitch black, you are likely to be eaten by a grue.

How much of Geek culture refers to pong for inside jokes or shared experiences/insights? Just because something popularized something else doesn't mean that it had cultural significance. A good many movies are popular, but few, if any, actually have lasting cultural significance. Casablanca was one. It's been several decades since that movie was made, yet there are still people who will catch the reference when I say "Dammit Ilsa, you'd better get on that plane, or you'll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday."

The criterion for the list isn't just that it is a piece of culture. The criterion for the list is that it expanded our culture, or that it made a deep and lasting contribution to who we are and how we identify with each other, or that it expanded our expectations for a video game. Did pong do any of those things?

Re:pong

[Anonymous Coward]

That's true -- give Umbrel props for not being a jerk about it. :)

Re:pong

[Das Modell]

I think trying to compile a list like this is pointless. You have to consider if you should choose game X because it was the first, or game Y because it was more popular (or was it?), and 10 games isn't even nearly enough to represent all the important games. If you're going to choose Spacewar! then why not Pacman and Pong too?

Almost any list that claims to name the top 10 most important XYZ ever made makes me cringe. Just compile a list of important and influential games without arbitrarily restricting it to 10.

Re:pong

[popo]

"Seems to be something of an underground indie hit"

Apparently you're too young to have experienced spending an entire day in class just thinking of how to get across that damn ravine, or how to keep the lamp from getting wet, or how to get Floyd the robot to stay alive, or how to get the black rod. Infocom was probably as huge a part of my childhood as George Lucas (and if that statement seems silly to you, then you're really young and were tarnished by Jar Jar at too young an age). Underground? Indie? No. Just very early 80's. Unlike "video games", Infocom games were (at the time) as full immersion as you could get. It might seem funny now, but for me and many others the nostalgia runs deep.

Re:pong

[jweatherley]

'and asking the DeLorean (yes I do know, it's not that hard because of Back to the Future :)) to be in the list because of the seagull doors.'

You'd be wrong there too. Give me a Mercedes 300SL over a DeLorean any day.

Re:pong

[slothman32]

I read that switched.
I doubt Doom was included inside Pong.
Of course they may have powerful computers/arcades then.

Re:pong

[slothman32]

People can remember, "Dammit Ilsa, you'd better get on that plane, or you'll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday."
Of course they also remember, "Play it again Sam", and that was never in the movie.
Except for that tidbit I agree.

Re:pong

[Viceroy Potatohead]

To call Zork "probably the most important" is just your individual bias. I'm disappointed that Doom was chosen instead of Castle Wolfenstein. I'm disappointed that the Atari "Combat" game wasn't on the list. I'm disappointd that the Intellivision D&D game wasn't on the list (the 3-D one). I'm disappointed that King's Quest I wasn't on the list. ....Maybe they shouldn't be. But claiming Zork is more important than Tetris or SimCity or Mario is just a preference claim. They were all equally important, for different reasons. (I never played the soccer one, though, so I don't know about it.)

That being said... Really, Pac-Man should be on that list. Nothing has popularized computer gaming like Pac-Man.

Re:pong

[lahvak]

...artistic works deserving of praise.

In that case, nethack is clearly missing from the list.

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[zippthorne]

"You may think text adventure were nothing big, but they used to be HUGE. Text adventure games definately inspired a generation of MUD games. MUD games inspired Everquest, which inspired World of Warcraft."

Which is..disappointing.

Since they all seem to end up in the old rehashed "roll die, compare to stat" mode to simulate variety. When will we get a completely deterministic RPG?

Re:pong

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm 28, and don't know Zork (except by name)

I did play Collosal Cave a lot, and even cheated at it using the MS-DOS 3.2 built-in debugger. Ah, good times.

Re:pong

[Jarlsberg]

Zork is a refined version of Adventure. Well, Zork 1, 2 and 3, to be precise. It's also heaps better. And why there are no Sierra games on that list is beyond me.

OTOH, a top ten classics list with only one console game is nice for a change. It's even got an Amiga game. :)

Re:pong

[Don_dumb]

Yeah, for me and many of my friends SFII wasn't just the SNES killer app, we had never seen anything like this and it led to a whole new genre of games.

I am not really up on my gaming history, but is there any reason why Zelda does not make the list? It is always in the 'great games of all times' lists. I know that this historical list is of course different, I would just like someone who does know their game history to enlighten me as to why Zelda isn't in the reckoning.

Re:pong

[ArAgost]

What you say! No Zero Wing?

Re:pong

[Threni]

> To call Zork "probably the most important" is just your individual bias.

A subjective list of `more important` games is always going to reflect someone's individual bias.

> That being said... Really, Pac-Man should be on that list. Nothing has popularized computer gaming like Pac-Man.

The list isn't about what popularized computer gaming. Don't get me wrong, I love it (I have the mame version on my phone) but it's not important in any way, just popular.

Re:pong

[imakecomments]

http://www.d-e-f-i-n-i-t-e-l-y.com/

Re:pong

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the above discussion of "technical merits" is missing the point really. I only encountered Zork for the first time at 17 when I bought a box-set of Infocom classic text adventures.

I played all of them extensively and completed the vast majority. Zork was one of the few which really stood out as an absolutely cracking game that was fairly easy to finish without needing to find hints, walkthroughs, invisiclues etc.

Not to say that it was an *easy* game, just that it was much easier to understand how to progress. I've not had that experience with many text adventures, and I've played quite a few of them.

This is nothing to do with the parser (which was primitive compared to the later Infocom games) or the verbosity of the descriptions (again superceded in the future) or the merits of fitting so much in so small a space. It was (and IS) an absolutely first-rate example of how to write a good adventure game that doesn't throw the stupid "guess which precise combination of words/objects I'm thinking of today" type puzzles at you (e.g. one of the Dizzy series with the wonderful "put the sharp glass sword on to the gravestone" puzzle. Mmm. Intuitive!)

Re:pong

[r00tman]

What, no Transport Tycoon?

Re:pong

[CarpetShark]

PCs are crap. The only reason they're important is that lots of people have them, and eventually, they get everything that the better designs of computer had before.

Re:pong

[TheJasper]

Pong was, as you say, a big commercial success. As such it had, and has great cultural significance. Cultural significance has littel to do with artistic merrit, excellence, gameplay, depth, etc.. It has to do with its impact on the culture, and pong definately had that.

Re:pong

[C0rinthian]

It's also not a technical list. It's a list of somewhat genre defining games.

Re:pong

[zippthorne]

Spelling mistakes in quotes are supposed to be preserved.

Re:pong

[PriceIke]

Unfortunately, one cannot be told what Zork is. You have to see it for yourself.

Re:pong

[Anonymous Coward]

> btw - how do I get the key from the tent in Trinity.......?

This site has all of the Invisiclues hint booklets.

(If you mean the key that your ex-workers took with you before you started playing Infidel, not Trinity, you should probably try smashing the lock with something heavy like a pick axe, shovel, or blackened rock :-)

Re:pong

[hedwards]

Clearly the creators of Zork bothered to type the geeks magic string.

Re:pong

[stonecypher]

Well, if the question is who made the technology first, which is the way adventure would come before zork, then almost none of these games belong. Please remember how obscenely popular Zork was - for nearly five years after its release, it was the most popular software of all time, including operating systems. There were two TV shows, a movie, 14 sequels, a series of six novels, three comic books, a moderately popular clothing franchise, and the launch of a game engine which eventually hosted almost 80 games. In 1979, the best selling PC game of all time had sold roughly a hundred thousand copies. By 1984, Infocom peaked at 10 million SKU a year, or roughly a 66x increase in 5 years, though thanks to genius accounting, they somehow managed to actually earn only half a million dollars that year.

People thought Infocom was just going to keep growing. Zork was the first real video game franchise, before pac-mania, before super mario. There was a point at which Infocom was offered $70 million to sell (in 1983 dollars, no less.) Two years later, when they realized they were actually undisciplined buffoons with a failed business software division and no more social cachet, they sold their rights to Activision for about 7 million in early 1986.

Infocom may have been the first real gaming business. To suggest that adventure is a better candidate misses a lot of how gaming actually happened.

Re:pong

[stonecypher]

Nobody said anything about less important. What grandparent actually said was "if you had been around in that time frame, you would have known." Settle down.

Re:pong

[Chris Mattern]

All that plus the chance to get killed in one blow by the princess if you made the mistake of approaching her in a fighting stance!

Chris Mattern

Re:pong

[Chris Mattern]

Street Fighter II for the SNES was the sole, exclusive reason I bought an SNES, which was the first game console I ever owned.

Chris Mattern

Re:pong

[gravityzone]

Zork ( Commercial, closed source) was based on "Colossal Cave Adventure" or "Adventure" ( Free, open source!!). In fact, because of the limitations back then on PC software, Zork implemented only a portion of Adventure. Zork II and Zork III filled in the missing portions of Adventure.

Re:pong

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you could put the little [sic] thing right after it to acknowledge that you, the quoter, are aware of the spelling mistake, but it was the original author who made it.

Re:pong

[Purity Of Essence]

All that plus the chance to get killed in one blow by the princess if you made the mistake of approaching her in a fighting stance!

Dude, that's a SPOILER!

The first time I defeated Akuma and that happened to me I can vividly remember feeling first shocked, then angry, then terribly amused. It certainly made me want to play the game over again. Jordan Mechner packed a lot of emotion into that alternate ending. Surely one of the great moments in gamedom.

Re:pong

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, this one thread got his karma eaten by a Grue.

Re:pong

[Umbrel]

Actually since PoP was not the first game to use the rotoscope the analogy is ok because the DeLorean was not the first with the doors, but that means I got it double wrong the first time :-/

Re:pong

[Umbrel]

Sorry I didn't noticed your question (on time to reply before the posting limit), I'm only 24
And I was just trying to stick with DeLorean and mentioned the first attribute that I could thought about it, I don't think I would ask the DeLorean to be in the list of 10 most important cars.

Re:pong

[Umbrel]

My point being that still our generation should know about past great/important games, then I failed meeting that asumption.

Re:pong

[Umbrel]

But a non clueless teenager would know, that what I ment: I was not at fault for being too young, I was too ignorant, those are two diferent things (not mutually exclusive though)

Re:pong

[Umbrel]

Im not blaming the author of the list of anything, I asked why he would include a game I thought to not be important, my misinformation was corrected long before your post by someone who knew why zork was important and posted in the way one would expect from an adult.

Re:pong

[zippthorne]

The original text was one inch above my post. You literally had to read it before reading my post. There was no need for gratuitous Latin verbiage.

Re:pong

[Umbrel]

Yep, but its funnier that way :)

Re:pong

[NeptuneSunset]

Apparently it's too good for the list :(

Re:pong

[MemoryDragon]

Ultima 4 should have been added to the list.

Simcity

[CastrTroy]

Simcity, and moreso, Simcity 2000 was awesome. I never really got into Simcity 3000, because I found that you had a little too much to manage, there was too much to control, and you couldn't keep it all in your head. I wasted many days on my simcity (2000). I never got to the point where the Arcologies would launch into space, although that may have been a myth, like the ability to pick up and throw the puck in fight mode in blades of steel.

Re:Simcity

[vidi22]

I never got to the point where the Arcologies would launch into space, although that may have been a myth Actually that wasn't a myth, I did it once, but I cheated, made a map with loads of launch arcos, and they all went away, and the worst bit was I hardly got any money as compensation :(

I still play 2000, mainly because my cd-drive ate my 3000 cd some time back, and because it is a great game, I hope there's a SimCity 5000 on day, that would be awesome.

Re:Simcity

[darkrowan]

No, the Arcology 'Launching' does happen, but takes about 250 (or 301 if you read the wikipedia article, I always thought it was less) to do it. That's quite a lot of money there.

Re:Simcity

[jfeldt]

It was no myth: I have seen mine launch into space, but I needed to level the cool older parts of the city, flatten the hills, and make nearly the entire map arcos.

Now, who has seen Guile pull out the handcuffs? That is a rumor I want to see substantiated.

Re:Simcity

[Uriel]

I've seen it. It was only on one version, which was not in any of the places near where I lived. On a trip to Las Vegas, however, I found a machine that could do it. Essentially, you were locked in your head-tilted-back frame and unable to do anything, moving back and forth as the Guile played moved.

Re:Simcity

[textstring]

download a genesis(or whatever) sf rom
grab the sprites from vram and cram dumps of a genesis emulator http://www.emulationzone.org/consoles/genesis/util .htm
enjoy (or not)

Re:Simcity

[thephotoman]

With the SimCity 2000 Urban Renewal Kit, it didn't cost a damn thing in the game. That's how I confirmed the myth, which occurs at 250. Someone needs to fix the Wikipedia bit.

Re:Simcity

[umbra_dweller]

Not a myth, but pretty hard to do, and you have to have a huge flat area to do it. I think I only did it once without using a cheat.

Re:Simcity

[Wah]

Someone needs to fix the Wikipedia bit.

Does anyone know the editor over there?

Re:Simcity

[zx75]

No myth, my father got that far and showed it to me :). I had the patience to bring my city up to the arcology stage once my city was self-sustaining, but I never had enough to demolish everything and replace them entirely with arcologies myself.

Re:Simcity

[malsdavis]

"Does anyone know the editor over there?"

I "wiki-know" him.
He says he's a tenured professor of religion at a private university somewhere.

Re:Simcity

[vimh42]

Simcity 2k was great. I got to the point where my entire map was filled with the 200k person achologies. I ended up terraforming the entire map so there were no hills or water. The only problem was I had to remove all my airports (including military base) because planes were smacking into the archologies. After a I had an archology (and presumably the 200k people inside) go up in smoke, I had to get rid of those pesky planes.

Re:Simcity

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know myself...

Re:Simcity

[Anonymous Coward]

After a I had an archology (and presumably the 200k people inside) go up in smoke, I had to get rid of those pesky planes.

SimCity 2000: build high-density commercial zones right next to the airport. Laugh evilly as planes repeatedly crash into the big white skyscrapers causing mass havoc. Rebuild. Repeat.

SimCity 2001: suddenly start to feel a little bit guilty about that.

Re:Simcity

[ggvaidya]

I think there was a saved game included with SimCity 2K (possibly only with the SimCity 2000 Special Edition) which had the right number of Arcos; once you loaded it up, all the buildings would start taking off in a minute or two.

Re:Simcity

[Sobrique]

I really liked SC 3000, but only because of the options in 'rush hour' - namely the 'traffic flow' utility. That was totally fantastic for putting in effective transport networks.

Re:Simcity

[iago-vL]

Oh my God, you know what this means, don't you? I'm going to have to re-install Sim City 2000, and waste another good chunk of my life, just to try that!

Re:Simcity

[Anonymous Coward]

gamewiners says this about it: http://www.gamewinners.com/arcade/StreetFighter2.h tm, and heres a wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guile_(Street_Fighter ). I used to play on a machine where guild actually could do stuff in this "glitched" mode- it was in a 711 down the street from my house. Nintendo and Capcom said it was a "bug" suposedly some of the machines marked as Street Fighter 2 were actually hacked imports. Probably not unlike reports like http://www.overclock.net/other-hardware-mods/1492- arcade-machine-modding.html and http://tech.quarterarcade.com/tech/game.aspx?g=281 4. hope that helps-for what it's worth

WarCraft vs StarCraft

[moore.dustin]

I am happy to see that they recognize WarCraft as the basis for which the success of StarCraft was built upon.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[freedumb2000]

And I am not happy to see Dune II by Westwood Studios not beeing recognized as the basis for which the success of WarCraft was build on.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[Cheapy]

I'm sad to see that they don't recognize Dune II as the basis for which the success of Warcraft was built upon.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[textstring]

but dune 2 isn't fun to play, i think westwood figured that part out in their c&c series. i understand the importance of giving credit to the firsts (and why choose dune 2?) but it usually takes a while for a genre to start producing gems as long as the genre does not become tiresome.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[Z0mb1eman]

No mod points, but hear hear.

Dune II was the first PC game (that I'm aware of) that had all the elements of today's strategy genre.

Warcraft was Dune II with orcs.

Command&Conquer was... the next version of Dune II. :p

Everything since has simply been a refinement of the same formula.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[gatzke]

What about Dune II? That was the first top down strategy game for me... Same type of play, build base, create troops, manage resources, kill people.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[Nasarius]

Warcraft was Dune II with orcs.

You've never actually played Dune 2, have you? Or you've never played Warcraft. C&C and Warcraft are comparable, but Dune 2 was very primitive. It's not clear that Warcraft was influenced by Dune 2 at all; the resource gathering, construction, unit control, sense of humor, etc. is all very different.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[Danse]

but dune 2 isn't fun to play, i think westwood figured that part out in their c&c series. i understand the importance of giving credit to the firsts (and why choose dune 2?) but it usually takes a while for a genre to start producing gems as long as the genre does not become tiresome.

Neither is Warcraft anymore. But both were fun in their day. I spent a lot of hours with Dune II. It was fun.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[Wah]

Dune 2 was primitive because it was the first "real-time strategy" game. And they had to put that in quotes on the box too, since no one really knew what it meant.

The only thing Warcraft had different was the humor and a fantasy instead of sci-fi storyline.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not clear that Warcraft was influenced by Dune 2 at all;

This has got the be the single most stupid thing I've ever read on slashdot.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[Anonymous Coward]

First, if you forget games like Dan Bunten's Modem Wars, The Ancient Art of War and Utopia.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[Anonymous Coward]

As well as Herzog Zwei, for something a bit more mainstream.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[NMerriam]

My friends and I stayed up all night long for days on end playing Dune 2, it was certainly the *eureka* moment for the RTS genre that later dominated the entire game industry. Starcraft was the pinnacle of the genre, but Dune 2 was clearly the moment it all began.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[Anonymous Coward]

hear hear.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[drinkypoo]

but dune 2 isn't fun to play, i think westwood figured that part out in their c&c series.

Yeah, they figured out just how to make a whole SERIES of games that aren't fun to play!

Seriously though, I think you have to wait a year after Dune 2 is released to find one worth playing, and that's Syndicate. But then you have to wait a whole bunch of years for Total Annihilation to come out before one is actually fun :D

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[rhyder128k]

When I first played the original Warcraft, I began to wonder if it was the same game engine as Dune II with a different sprite set.

I think some people get WC and WCII mixed up.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[DeadboltX]

I second that. It was the first game I thought of when I read the headline. Dune II was definitely the granddaddy of RTS.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[bVork]

Herzog Zwei says hi.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[Jussi K. Kojootti]

C&C and Warcraft are comparable, but Dune 2 was very primitive. It's not clear that Warcraft was influenced by Dune 2 at all

No. You're the one who is confused: Dune 2 and Warcraft were very similar. Maybe you're remembering Warcraft II?

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[Anonymous Coward]

what about M.U.L.E. for Atari 800?

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[naoursla]

But Dune was inspired by Herzog Zwei on the Genesis.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[sqldr]

Surely Dune II was based on "Cannon Fodder"? Ok, you only got to control 4 units in cannon fodder, but I doubt Dune II would've arrived without it :-)

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[Beetle B.]

Dune 2 was primitive because it was the first "real-time strategy" game.

Nope. The first was The Ancient Art of War from way back in 1984. If there ever was a game that deserved a remake, this is it!

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[Wah]

The Ancient Are of War was one of the games that convinced me (at 10) that a good part of my life would be spent sitting in front of them. However, it is not really recognizable as a "real time strategy game" as the deployment and control of troops was far more limited. They were more (IIRC) directed by simplistic AI rather than direct player control. The only real choice the player had was what types of troops to deploy and when to deploy them. Resource collection was also largely absent (at least as a function of the RTS control).

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[ShadowMarth]

You've never actually played Dune 2, have you? Or is it that you have never played Warcraft? Because the two were quite similar. Certainly, they had differences, but they had a hell of a lot more in common.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[tibike77]

1992, ??? : Dune 2, the FIRST actual RTS.
Annoying to play because you had to move one unit at a time. Still, a major success in '92. I know I couldn't stop playing. Drawback ? Single-player only.

1994, January 15 : Warcraft (I), the first MULTIPLAYER RTS.
The only big improvement over Dune 2 was the fact that you could select a whooping 4 units at the same time and move them together.
Oh, and it was a lot heavier on the comedic effect, and set in a fantasy world. Meh.

1995, August 31 : Command & Conquer, the first DECENT multiplayer RTS.
The gameplay much more intense and diverse as Warcraft, the singleplayer campaigns were engaging, cinematics were downright cool, and the multiplayer mode was also very well handled.
Not only that, but it featured a major improvement that not even most of today's RTSs have: you could select and group a HUGE number of units, and control them at the same time. That alone provided the diversity, I can recall winning countless single and multiplayer scenarios by sheer numbers of infantry focused fire alone.

1995, December 9 : Warcraft II
While this game was a big leap from the first Warcraft in terms of visual eyecandy and comedic effect, it still persisted in the limited "squad" selection (max 9 units) that even Starcraft would use much later on (12 units).
Personally, I was seriously dissapointed by Warcraft 2, and played C&C almost exclusively.

No matter how you put it, Warcraft does not deserve the "title".
It's either Dune 2, or it's Command and Conquer.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[Fjornir]

Populous gets the title.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[Anonymous Coward]

Them's some strong words, given the postings that have gone flying across this forum...

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[Shrubber]

Try Herzog Zwei, released in 1989. The true grand daddy of the RTS genre, years before Dune 2.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[Shrubber]

No f'in crap. People really have no sense of history.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[king-manic]

I suppose you say "first PC" but Herzog Zwei was the earliest RTS. Although arguements can be made that it really wasn't an RTS.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[gringer]

Ah, good to see someone else considers Populous to be an RTS. I've seen that game as being an early version of Dune II.

But if you're considering real time strategy as in a wargame requiring resources, played in real-time, what about Carrier Command?

My... I feel rather old now.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[king-manic]

It a matter of taste. By sales the Warcraft series is more popular then the C&C franchise. The unit selection limit is more of a design decision versus a technological problem. They simply wanted more interaction. Micro management is a huge part of the attraction of Warcraft/starcraft games and thats is partly the reason why there are more people who play warcraft 3 online then c&c generals or in fact any individual c&C title. The number of starcraft online players easily dwarfs the total pool of people who bought c&c generals.

No matter how you put it, it's subjective and many criticise c&c as being a very "noob" game with limited depth and a tech tree that emphasises monoculture and rushes over any significant strategy. A common criticism of almost every title in the series.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[boldra]

Haven't heard of most of those, but what about mega-lo-mania ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mega_Lo_Mania ) aka Tyrants: Fight Through Time. Had almost all of the elements of dune 2, except the smooth scrolling map.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[comradeeroid]

And Cannon Fodder was inspired by the battle sequences in Cinemaware's "Lords of the Rising Sun" (not that these philistines would know anything about Cinemaware... and Lords was inspired by the battle sequences in that Jeanne d'arc game which name I can't even remember at the moment. I've had this discussion before and to be honest it bores me to tears. Almost every success in this industry was build upon the back of giants and thus we could either settle for only protecting "Space War" or we could just accept that it will be pretty arbitrary and "who got there first" isn't really as important as what made the biggest splash?

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[Anonymous Coward]

Ehm, I think you will find that 'Ancient art of war' and 'Ancient art of war at sea' beat dune2 to the punch on RTS by like 5 years. /just saying.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[Sobrique]

Actually, I rather think that's because C&C generals just isn't all that good. They tried to turn the C&C franchies into something like the TA franchise, and failed.

I'm sorry, the game just totally broke when you could build 20 superweapons from the vast piles of cash that was pouring in from you 'unlimited cash' engines.

I though it was a totally terrible idea to have unrestricted superweapons and a 'free flow' economy. Then I started playing Supreme Commander, and found that it can, and does actually work. But requires a whole lot more 'depth' than you've got in C&C Generals.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny how MILLIONS of people disagree with you.

And yes, that makes you the one with no taste, sorry to break it to you.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[Wah]

Unlike most RTS games that would come later, rather than commanding the action with a disembodied mouse arrow, Herzog Zwei put the player in direct control of a carrier aircraft that they would fly around the battlefield. While capable of transforming into a robot and engaging the enemy on the ground, its greatest strength lay in its ability to transport units. This one element more than anything betrayed the game's console roots, and probably resulted in the game being frequently misjudged as an action title.

It was more of a transitional title than something that would be considered RTS nowadays, kinda link a Dipnoi.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[the1rob]

This has got the be the single most stupid thing I've ever read on slashdot.

Go half a page up on your browser...there's a dumber thread on how Zork was insignificant.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[stonecypher]

And I am not happy to see Dune II by Westwood Studios not beeing recognized as the basis for which the success of WarCraft was build on.

I guess you're a little too young for Herzog Zwei, Empire Live, Mega-Lo-Mania, Stonkers, Braden's League, Geist (the commodore 64 game, not the playstation game,) The Ancient Art of War and its three sequels, Utopia, Battle Master, or that damned Megadrive game whose name escapes me. Of course, there were also massive multiplayer online RTSes on AOL, GeNIE, Delphi, Compuserve and Telix as early as 1985. It can be argued that several BBS doors are RTSes too; if you only count graphic games when it starts with the introduction of Avatar by Opus in 1983, but if you're willing to deal with text-mode realtime strategy, BBSes had it as early as Yankee Crossfire! in 1981, and possibly earlier.

There were, in fact, dozens of RTSes before Dune 2. That kids today think Dune 2 invented the genre is pretty amusing, but really, if you can't name a game that doesn't show up on IGN's game list, you're really not qualified to be talking about the origins of gaming.

There are good arguments for RTS starting on the Vic 20, FFS.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[stonecypher]

Dune II was the first PC game (that I'm aware of) that had all the elements of today's strategy genre.

There are quite a few earlier RTSes, going back as far as the Vic 20 and early 1980s BBSes. There is no major game component in Dune 2 that isn't in an old game called Stonkers, but since you can't get Stonkers anymore to verify, please look into a Sega Genesis game called "Herzog Zwei," which Dune 2 might as well be the sequel of, they're so similar.

Don't call people copycats if you don't know where it actually started. You're off by at least 20 years, and arguably quite a bit more.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[stonecypher]

Dune 2 was primitive because it was the first "real-time strategy" game.

You're off by about 12 years.

Dune 2 was a blatant knock-off of the earlier Sega Genesis game "Herzog Zwei." It is commonly believed that Stonkers, a ZX Spectrum game from 1983, was the first modern RTS; Stonkers has every game feature in Dune 2 other than network play, despite looking like ass. There are, however, good arguments for older games as modern RTSes missing simple features. Some people believe that Stonkers' game balance is closer to a tactical rush game, and that The Ancient Art of War is a better candidate for first RTS.

The earliest networked RTS I'm aware of with all the major features of Dune 2 is a largely forgotten BBS door called Yankee Crossfire!, from 1985.

Dune 2 was primitive because Westwood was underfunded and poorly managed. It was, at the time, basically a bunch of talented developers trying to bootstrap a company by working really really hard. That game gave them enough money to build Westwood into a real company with real management. Pity it didn't last. Basically, contracting Eye of the Beholder to SSI got them enough money to pay for a bunch of artists and musicians.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[Anonymous Coward]

        It's not clear that Warcraft was influenced by Dune 2 at all;

    This has got the be the single most stupid thing I've ever read on slashdot.

This has got the be the single the most redundant the thing I've ever on slashdot. To. Read. Evar.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[Anonymous Coward]

"If a thousand people say a stupid thing, it is still a stupid thing.
If a million people say a stupid thing, it is still a stupid thing.
If a billion people say a stupid thing, it is still a stupid thing."
- Bob Leone

I'm not saying he's right or wrong, just that your point is stupid.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[Chillum]

You must be new here.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

[wkearney99]

This has got the be the single most stupid thing I've ever read on slashdot.

Oh, you MUST be new here...

WarCraft

[MattyCobb]

Not that I don't love WarCraft (because I do, all of them... even WoW), but shouldn't Westwood's Dune 2 have been in its place? Was it as good a game as even WC1? No, but I am not sure a WarCraft 1 would have existed (at least in that form) without Dune 2.

Re:WarCraft

[Nasarius]

Look at the reason stated: "The first three Warcraft games represent the introduction of real-time strategy overlaid on a narrative"

As I recall, Dune 2 didn't really have a plot. Command & Conquer would be a more appropriate comparison, but came slightly later than Warcraft: Orcs & Humans.

Re:WarCraft

[king-manic]

Warcraft had taken RTS is grand new directions while C&C stagnated and became nothing but cheese and rehash. they problably went with what came first and what had soem artistic merit. WCI was intersting btu ugly. WCII was pretty and despite it's age still looks alright. WCIII still stands up and is played by hundreds of thousands still, years after it's release. While the C&C series doesn't have as much lasting value.

Re:WarCraft

[mikael_j]

I'd have to say that this is your very subjective opinion, I remember not really getting what the appeal of Warcraft and Warcraft 2 was, but I gladly paid for my C&C games.

/Mikael

Re:WarCraft

[king-manic]

I suppose some of it is subjective depending on what you enjot about RTS games. although I think most would agree everything between C&C red alert 2 and C&C generals wasn't very good in an objective way. Tiberium sun, renegade, etc.. all were objectively terrible.

Re:WarCraft

[king-manic]

Actualyl let me clarify,
C&C tiberium sun
C&C renegade
Weren't so good. Since there wasn't much between RA2 and Generals.

Re:WarCraft

[demonbug]

Dune 2 had at least as much of a plot as Warcraft. At any rate, I remember it better than I remember the plot from Warcraft. You play the Noble Atreides, the Evil Harkkonnen, or the Insidious Ordos, and try to take over the world. You pick which territory to invade (not that it actually mattered), and towards the later levels the emperor or whatever starts helping out your opponents (IIRC). Not great, but then I don't even remember anything about the plot in Warcraft.

Yeah, I played a hell of a lot more Dune 2 than I did Warcraft - who doesn't love running over Fremen with a harvester, or building rocket towers in the middle of the enemy base and watching the fun (yeah, the game had some issues)?

Dune 2 was a whole lot more significant than Warcraft, as it really broke open the genre (I'm sure it wasn't the first). Warcraft had a sense of humor, but other than that it had all been done before.

Re:WarCraft

[maglor_83]

Although Renegade isn't even an RTS, so doesn't really belong in the discussion.
It's kinda fun though. And the faces are butt-ugly.

Re:WarCraft

[Clazzy]

I played through Warcraft once, I still play the C&C games (TD onwards). People complain that the C&C series was rehashed continuously but the honest truth is that it worked just fine. Whether you were building Stealth Tanks to do hit and run attacks against GDI Medium Tanks or using Cruisers to annihilate Tesla Coils before engineer rushing the construction yard there was fun to be had. Total Annihilation got massive and destructive battles perfected, C&C got the basic RTS formula right and has kept it going ever since.

Re:WarCraft

[Anonymous Coward]

multiplayer
multiplayer
multiplayer

thats what made warcraft a more important game than command and conquer. notice the "Strategy" in Real Time Strategy. Playing RTS against computers gets boring, fast, because it doesn't offer the same challenge as matching your wits against a human oppenent who reacts to your strategies and comes up with new strategies of their own.

The strategic possibilities in Warcraft 2 and Starcraft (i didnt play War1 online like war2, so i cant speak for it. i consider War2 to be the definitive RTS), were much more interesting than in C & C, or any other RTS of that time (and still better then many that came later)

Its clear that most of the people speaking down on War2 never played a significant amount online, which means they really shouldnt be talking about the RTS genre.

Re:WarCraft

[Anonymous Coward]

Warcraft had a plot ?

Re:WarCraft

[mikael_j]

Actually, I spent most of my time playing C&C (and sequels) against human opponents, sure there were some obvious flaws (tank rush) but by making up your own custom rules (works when playing against "real people" over a LAN where you can throw stuff at people as punishment for breaking the rules) like "No one attacks anyone else for the first five minutes" or "2 vs 2, you are not allowed to stab your ally in the back." you could create some really interesting strategic problems, how do you tank rush someone who has had ample time to fortify his base and also has an ally with just as many tanks as you do?

/Mikael

Not a bad list but.

[LWATCDR]

Limiting to just 10 is silly.
What about
Summer Games?
Combat?
Pong?
But two big thumbs up for Star Raiders!

Re:Not a bad list but.

[sesshomaru]

I think that's just this year's ten, if I read the article correctly.

Re:Not a bad list but.

[KingSkippus]

Aw, hell, this is as good a post to reply to as any.

Myst. It was artistically gorgeous, and it was rather unique in that it just tossed you in with no fancy instruction manual or tutorial. Hell, you didn't even know what the objective of the game. It was just kind of like, "Here, play this. Don't know what to do? Well, you're smart, figure it out."

Very cool game.

Re:Not a bad list but.

[sfled]

Agreed!

The puzzles in the game were fun, all if the "levels" were intricately designed and the atmosphere was other-wordly without being alien.

Shoot-'em-ups are OK for the kiddies, this was a game for adults. Perhaps that's why it wasn't on the list.

Re:Not a bad list but.

[glwtta]

That's what you get when artists make a game on their own.

dang, kinda makes you wish more artists made games.

Re:Not a bad list but.

[DilbertLand]

I thought Myst looked pretty, but after years of playing the "King's Quest" and "Space Quest" series of adventure games (and others), I thought many of the puzzles were laughable. Let's see, there's a box of matches on the floor and a wood burning stove in the corner...hmmmm....maybe I should try to light it! If something was that easy in other games it usually meant it was a trap and you were going to die. :) However, I guess it never would have had the mass appeal if people had to spend days trying to solve individual puzzles.

Re:Not a bad list but.

[jobin]

Amen to this! Myst really deserves to be on this list. It was the best-selling computer game of all time until The Sims came out, and though I know sales numbers are far from everything, that does say something about the game. What's really important is the combination of an incredibly simple and intuitive point-and-click interface, a set of challenging but not impossible puzzles, a complex story for the player to piece together, and downright beautiful graphics (especially for 1993) that makes Myst a real gem of a game.

Re:Not a bad list but.

[Felonious Ham]

Right on, right on. Unfortunately, its sequels didn't share its success, and I don't know of any later games that could claim a Myst as a major influence.

Re:Not a bad list but.

[Wicko]

How about Faxanadu? Cmon, with a name like that you, definitely needs to be on the list.

Re:Not a bad list but.

[Hobbitgh0d42]

That just means you didn't make it very far. By the time you are into the different books, it gets VERY difficult.

You really need to know how to think outside the box for some of the puzzles.

Re:Not a bad list but.

[Hellpop]

Anyone remember "Hacker" and "Hacker2" from in the 80's. There were no manuals, no instructions, no background. You just get thrown into "accidentally hacking into" someone's system and have to uncover the entire conspiracy. I spent a lot of long nights on those games...

Missing option

[Overzeetop]

Life

Re:Missing option

[Sponge Bath]

Life

I don't think board games were considered.

Re:Missing option

[gardyloo]

Though it's a funny post (whether meant to be or not), Conway's "Game of Life" is tremendously important due to its influence on the study of cellular automata. Nice simple rules *can* lead to amazing complexity.

WarCraft series?

[paladinwannabe2]

How come WarCraft gets the series counted? Not that I don't love the WarCraft games, but why does WarCraft count as multiple games while Super Mario Bros. only counts as one?

Re:WarCraft series?

[Jarlsberg]

Because every SMB is more or less the same thing, with the same characters, the same plot and the same soundtrack? ;)

Pong Parody

[StCredZero]

Cheesy Blaxploitation + the grandaddy videogame = great parody.

Or scroll to the bottom of this page for better resolutions:

What are they smoking?

[Sciros]

And where can I buy some?

How can Mario Bros 3 be considered one of the 10 most important games of all time when the original Super Mario Bros is the foundation is was built on in the first place? It wasn't even all that innovative if we're talking "grand scales" such as this (it was innovative, but not nearly the leap that the original was).

Then there's Donkey Kong Country, which to my knowledge popularized actually using 3d models for characters in a game.

The Legend of Zelda, anyone? Action/adventure one of those genres that never really took off or spawned a descendant that is considered widely to be the greatest game of all time? Ocarina is yet to be dethroned according to most critics (and gamers I know).

How about Doom? Or is FPS a fad? :-P

I just find it hard to justify putting in WarCraft when it didn't even spawn the genre it "represents" in the first place, and on top of that not putting in the games that spawned much more prominent genres.

Re:What are they smoking?

[RingDev]

"I just find it hard to justify putting in WarCraft when it didn't even spawn the genre it "represents" in the first place, and on top of that not putting in the games that spawned much more prominent genres."

Good call. Warcraft was a nice series and all, but hardly one of the most important games ever. Start Craft really set the standard for Multiplayer RTS while WoW has clearly set the standard for MMORPGs.

And as great of a game as Doom was, it's Quake that really was the break out point of FPS and the GPU requirements. If it wasn't for Quake where would nVidia and ATI be now?

-Rick

Re:What are they smoking?

[Allicorn]

How about Doom? Or is FPS a fad? :-P The first person shooter isn't a fad. Actually reading TFA before posting was a fad, but appears to have long since gone out of fashion. ;-)

From the article...

...Civilization I/II (1991), Doom (1993), Warcraft series (beginning 1994)...

Re:What are they smoking?

[omeomi]

How about Doom? Or is FPS a fad? :-P Doom is already on the list... The Legend of Zelda, anyone? Yeah, that should definitely be on the list, though.

Re:What are they smoking?

[grumbel]

And to add a question: Why Sensible Soccer? Why it and not International Soccer or one of the dozens of other soccer games that came long before it? Of all those games Sensible Soccer makes the least sense to include to me, but maybe I am just missing something, since I haven't played it all that much. With Warcraft one could argue that it was the beginning of what later became World of Warcraft, but for strategy games its really a bad pick.

Re:What are they smoking?

[Sciros]

Meh gaming articles are blocked where I'm at :-P So I gotta just assume they're morons based on what I gather from the summary :-)

Re:What are they smoking?

[Anonymous Coward]

Start Craft really set the standard for Multiplayer RTS

No way. Dune 2 was the first, and Warcraft was the first mass success. Starcraft came long after that.

while WoW has clearly set the standard for MMORPGs.

You are clearly too young. Ultima Online was the first (not counting MUDs), and Everquest was the first with the appearance of WoW. WoW has been (by far) the greatest success, but it didn't set the standards that it follows.

Re:What are they smoking?

[necro2607]

"I just find it hard to justify putting in WarCraft when it didn't even spawn the genre it "represents" in the first place"

Sure, but it was the first huge hit of that style of game. It spread through my school like wildfire when it came out, with ALL of the computer-game-playing kids obsessing over it for the longest time. This never happened with Dune, or... whatever other RTS game supposedly created the genre.

Re:What are they smoking?

[Erioll]

Warcraft was a nice series and all, but hardly one of the most important games ever. Start Craft really set the standard for Multiplayer RTS I think the guy you were responding to was actually referring to the RTS games before Warcraft. That's just a guess though.

while WoW has clearly set the standard for MMORPGs. With EXTREMELY few exceptions, absolutely everything in WoW was pioneered with EverQuest. And EQ was a commercial success too. Not the runaway cultural phenomenon that WoW has become, but with 400k active subscribers at peak (less now), it can hardly be thought of as a marginal game either way. UO might have taken this spot (it also at one time was in excess of 100k at the least, and it WAS first), but extremely few of its conventions survived to other MMOs. Virtually everything about EQ has been in successors. And yes, I've played all 3 of the games I mentioned for significant amounts of time (and more games besides those too). WoW put everything together in a good package, and that alone is a talent, and obviously has brought success, but innovation? Very very little.

Think Microsoft vs Apple, with WoW being Microsoft and EQ being Apple. It has many points of comparison which I'm sure others can elaborate on.

Re:What are they smoking?

[Anonymous Coward]

"How can Mario Bros 3 be considered one of the 10 most important games of all time when the original Super Mario Bros is the foundation is was built on in the first place?"

This isn't supposed to be a list of games that were the first implementations of their genre. These are games that introduced something that seemed to go beyond the gameplay mechanics that were present in earlier titles. SMB3 was chosen because it was one of the first games to be non-linear and allow the player to decide how they were going to progress through the game. It also allowed you to go backwards through a level to find secrets and other bonuses. The first Mario game may have made platform games popular (and no, it wasn't the first platform game), but it didn't offer anything as fundamental as the features mentioned above.

Re:What are they smoking?

[Shrubbman]

How about Doom? Or is FPS a fad? :-P

Re-read the list, Doom's there.

Re:What are they smoking?

[murdocj]

With EXTREMELY few exceptions, absolutely everything in WoW was pioneered with EverQuest.

Kinda... in the sense that the core elements (NPCs, walking around in a virtual world, having persistent characters, etc) are common to all MMOs that I'm aware of. Of course, WoW not only introduced new elements, but managed to get the old ones right.

Re:What are they smoking?

[sphix42]

SMB was modeled on Mayhem in Monsterland. That is an epic swan song.

Re:What are they smoking?

[Erioll]

With EXTREMELY few exceptions, absolutely everything in WoW was pioneered with EverQuest.

Kinda... in the sense that the core elements (NPCs, walking around in a virtual world, having persistent characters, etc) are common to all MMOs that I'm aware of. Of course, WoW not only introduced new elements, but managed to get the old ones right.

Actually no, those things came with UO, and while common to all MMOs (or else you don't have a game at all), that's not what I meant.

I actually meant the core mechanic of killing monsters to level up, rather than a purely skill-point-based game with no experience (like UO was). Alternate Advancement beyond pure levels, called Talents in WoW, was in EQ1 beforehand, and the concept of non-gear and non-level-based character customization is in many MMOs. Even a gear-centric rather than item-centric game is core to the design. An area-based design, necessitated by the hardware/software requirements of EQ1's day has carried over even into the "seamless" worlds of WoW and others with discrete hunting areas, rather than a truly continuous world. Some have gone either direction since then, but the concept was EQ1's. Raiding being an integrated part of the game mechanic (more than one group in a formalized unit), rather than just players near one another also started in EQ1 in the PoP era (maybe before). Mounts for characters, rather than just running around (this was UO I'll admit). Even the core "tick" mechanism of game updates (rather than precise real-time triggers based on each person) is something that EQ started with. Level guidelines for items was only a feature that EQ1 had LONG after release (and probably after somebody else had already done it), but it still beat WoW to the punch. PvP flagging? EQ1 again (probably). One of the largest criticisms of UO was how you couldn't say "no" to PvP. EQ1 was lauded and derided for having "blue" servers. Where do you think that term came from? In UO, "blue" was "not a murderer" and thus "safe". And I'm sure the list goes on.

These things seem stupidly obvious now, but as is the case with many things (kinda like how historically, "zero" is a relatively advanced mathematical concept), somebody had to think of it first, and believe it or not, most of the things listed above (not all) were NOT there upon EQ release, or only STARTED with EQ1. A few were from UO, as I have mentioned, but to say WoW deserves credit is VASTLY overstating the case. They refined it well, and have created something that many people like, and I don't deny that, but just as Nolan Bushnell didn't invent video games (Ralph Baer did, and has the patent to prove it), WoW is NOT a pioneer in the MMO industry for ANY of the core mechanics. You might be able to credit them with cross-server PvP battlegrounds (or not, somebody else may have had those too), but that would be close to the only thing you could credit them with.

Re:What are they smoking?

[pnevin]

I would have thought that they'd have Wolfenstein 3D before Doom. Oh well.

Re:What are they smoking?

[pla]

I actually meant the core mechanic of killing monsters to level up, rather than a purely skill-point-based game with no experience (like UO was).

I hate to sound like a pretentious asshole "old-schooler", but every single "advancement" you mention existed, in a multiplayer online form, LONG before WoW, EQ, or UO.

The modern MMORPGs added one and only one feature to the classic MUD - Isometric pseudo-3d graphics.

Really, that about covers it. EVERYTHING you describe predates the modern commercial era of MMORPGs. Well, okay, one more - People used to host the servers for free, just for the fun of it. But aside from that, "Been there, done that".



Now, if you don't count multi-(simultaneous,interactive)-player, it absolutely floors me that this list left out Hack/NetHack (or for the purists, Rogue, but Hack went so far beyond Rogue that the distinction seems worthwhile). WoW owes its very existence to Hack, like it or not.

Re:What are they smoking?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re-read the list, Doom's there.

Doom's here, too. I still play it when I get bored. It rocks!

Re:What are they smoking?

[Erioll]

Now, if you don't count multi-(simultaneous,interactive)-player, it absolutely floors me
that this list left out Hack/NetHack (or for the purists, Rogue, but Hack went so far
beyond Rogue that the distinction seems worthwhile). WoW owes its very existence to Hack,
like it or not. Sure, as do most to things like Akallabeth, but dismissing the massively-multiplayer aspect is somewhat hard, as that's most of the point. And furthermore, there is a direct straight-line relationship from EQ1 to virtually the entire MMO community, and very few "grandchild" lines are warranted. But it is a clear relationship from EQ1 in every case to the rest of the MMO industry. WoW may be the son that made millions (billions?), but the father set the groundwork for the genre by toiling where nobody thought it'd succeed.

Re:What are they smoking?

[CodeBuster]

I just find it hard to justify putting in WarCraft when it didn't even spawn the genre it "represents" in the first place

While this is technically true, it is also true to say that very few people either played or remember the prototypes of the modern real-time strategy genre during the 1980s. Indeed, even the first game which mostly resembled the genre in its modern form (i.e. using the mouse to move units, gathering resources, etc...), Dune II from Westwood Studios in 1992, was not widely played and would not be immediately recognized by the average gamer. It was really the WarCraft series, beginning in 1994, from Blizzard that exploded the genre into the mainstream and cemented its long-term popularity. The Wikipedia article on real-time strategy games really sums up the history quite nicely (including some obscure early games that I was previously unfamiliar with).

Re:What are they smoking?

[RedDirt]

With EXTREMELY few exceptions, absolutely everything in WoW was pioneered with EverQuest.

Er, not really. EQ was novel because they married a text-based MUD to a graphical engine and were able to scale that environment to around 2k folks per server. I'd call that more of a logical extension than any kind of pioneering.

And EQ was a commercial success too. Not the runaway cultural phenomenon that WoW has become, but with 400k active subscribers at peak (less now), it can hardly be thought of as a marginal game either way. UO might have taken this spot (it also at one time was in excess of 100k at the least, and it WAS first), but extremely few of its conventions survived to other MMOs.

Actually, UO wasn't the first. It was arguably the first really popular graphical MMORPG, but it wasn't first to market. Wikipedia has a very nice writeup on the history of MMORPGs.

Virtually everything about EQ has been in successors.

I think you'd be hard-pressed to identify any sort of similarity between EQ and City of Heroes (outside of a the obvious of player-characters driving around mashing bad-guys) but that's just me being picky.

And yes, I've played all 3 of the games I mentioned for significant amounts of time (and more games besides those too). WoW put everything together in a good package, and that alone is a talent, and obviously has brought success, but innovation? Very very little.

Somewhat amusingly, there are these sworn statements over on the Diku MUD homepage which stem from accusations that the EQ server software was lifted from Diku. I still remember the mudslinging which, as I recall at least, centered around some description typos which were in EQ and were identical to typos in Diku.

EQ, just like WoW, is built on ideas and concepts explored by others. I would be very tempted to say that the true origin of today's MMO is Crowther and Woods' Adventure game. It wasn't multi-player (massively or otherwise) and it isn't the number-crunching spreadsheet-esque RPG so popular now, but you did don the mantle of the nameless spelunker and go explore a cave. Spiff up the UI, add a bookstore worth of quests and allow a bunch of folks to interact in the same environment and you've got the modern MMORPG. At least that's what I think.

Re:What are they smoking?

[shurikt]

Um, Doom's kinda on there. Way to RTFA.

Re:What are they smoking?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the New York Times got it wrong. Mario 64 was the first popular non-linear game involving an immersive 3-d world. In what way was super mario 3 non-linear? it was side scrolling. This must be a reporting error on the part of the new york times.

Re:What are they smoking?

[Anonymous Coward]

From the summary:

Spacewar! (1962), Star Raiders (1979), Zork (1980), Tetris (1985), SimCity (1989), Super Mario Bros. 3 (1990), Civilization I/II (1991), Doom (1993), Warcraft series (beginning 1994) and Sensible World of Soccer (1994)

Also, I'd say WarCraft is fairly notable as far as popularizing the RTS genre goes(though it's odd having WarCraft included when StarCraft isn't, having both games there would be overkill, and StarCraft can be viewed as an extension of the WarCraft series(I certainly thought of it that way when it came out), while the opposite is clearly untrue).

Sensible World of Soccer was the one that struck me as a strange choice, though. Notable absentees: Counter-Strike/Half-Life(probably the former for popularizing mods of commercial games), The Sims.

Re:What are they smoking?

[7Prime]

And as great of a game as Doom was, it's Quake that really was the break out point of FPS and the GPU requirements. If it wasn't for Quake where would nVidia and ATI be now?

Yeah, Doom makes no sense to me either, it was neither the first: Wolfenstien came out long before, nor probably the most popular: Quake or Halo probably recieve that honor. Wolfenstien was a huge hit... maybe not as much as Doom, but still large enough to be recognized in its spawning of FPSs. I'd also argue that Marathon and Rise of the Triad, which came out nearly the same time as Doom, were far more advanced, if we want to talk about technical advancements in a series, and were huge influence on the genre as well. But the bottom line, for FPSs, I think the honor goes, unquestionably, to Wolfenstien 3D.

Re:What are they smoking?

[CheechWizz]

Well depends on where you're from, but here in Europe Sensible soccer was absolutely huge when it came out.
I know alot of people who bought an Amiga just for that game. It popularised sports games in a way none did before and while Kickoff 1/2 (whatever happend to dino dini?) were big as well Sensible soccer was viewed as the definitive soccer game at the time.
It also did alot for human vs human gaming, IIRC no other title before it spawned as many competitions and after school gaming session with friends as Sensi did.
Even though I don't like real life soccer and never did, I loved Sensible soccer, it just felt so right in everything it did.
So I guess it's there to represent the sports game part of the market, which is quite big (although not here on slashdot i think).

Re:What are they smoking?

[7Prime]

I dunno, dude, I remember WarCraft II being a huge hit when it came out, and after that, many people went back and got Warcraft I, but at what point do you call a game a break-out success? I wouldn't say that WarCraft was a household name until after WarCraft II came out. More than Dune, maybe, but not by all that much.

It's really hard to point to a game and name one that was the "breakout success". Super Mario Bros was a breakout success, but for its time, so was Donkey Kong, one could make an arguement for Mario 3, since it was one of the first games that had a HUGE ad campaign, and got everyone playing. But it's much easier to point to the game that really had the most influence on the genre: Super Mario Bros 1 is that, without question, Dune II would probably be in there (even I remember Dune II, and I never play RTSs). Wolfenstien 3D would be there instead of Doom (this was a real "WTF" choice for me), Final Fantasy I or Dragon Warrior should have been in there. And WTF is Sensible World of Soccer?

SimCity, Zork, Tetris, and Spacewar make perfect sense to me, but the other just seem to be favorites of the list's creators.

Re:What are they smoking?

[drsmithy]

Yeah, Doom makes no sense to me either, it was neither the first: Wolfenstien came out long before, nor probably the most popular: Quake or Halo probably recieve that honor. Wolfenstien was a huge hit... maybe not as much as Doom, but still large enough to be recognized in its spawning of FPSs. I'd also argue that Marathon and Rise of the Triad, which came out nearly the same time as Doom, were far more advanced, if we want to talk about technical advancements in a series, and were huge influence on the genre as well. But the bottom line, for FPSs, I think the honor goes, unquestionably, to Wolfenstien 3D.

Maybe it was the multiplayer aspects of Doom that bumped it up over the others ?

Re:What are they smoking?

[shmach]

How can Mario Bros 3 be considered one of the 10 most important games of all time when the original Super Mario Bros is the foundation is was built on in the first place?

I'm going back and forth with myself, trying to figure out if I agree with you. On the one hand, I can see what you mean. Looking back on it now, Mario Bros 3 doesn't seem too innovative, but try and imagine what it was like when it first came out. Yeah, it was still about jumping on turtles and grabbing mushrooms, but there were so many new things! Power ups galore, an over-world map that provided multiple paths, and so many levels that you were almost guaranteed to leave your nes on for days if you wanted to play straight through it.

My mom worked in a video rental store when I was a kid, and so I spent hours upon hours playing any games that weren't rented in the back room. Mario Bros 3 was almost impossible to get a hold of though. It seemed like the minute it came in, it'd be right back out the door again. I mean, it was just an insanely popular game, and for good reason. It was everything that made the original Mario Bros so fun, only bigger and better.

Re:What are they smoking?

[fferreres]

The list is not about "popular" games per se. Dune II was popular, though. I remember playing with many friends. Warcraft was not orders of magnitude more popular. And decidedly lacking any innovation except for a good implementation mixed with humor and fantasy.

Re:What are they smoking?

[Jarlsberg]

If you'd been around when Doom shook the gaming world, you'd know why it's on the list, and why Wolfenstein is not.

Re:What are they smoking?

[Mitreya]

While this is technically true, it is also true to say that very few people either played or remember the prototypes of the modern real-time strategy genre during the 1980s. Indeed, even the first game which mostly resembled the genre in its modern form (i.e. using the mouse to move units, gathering resources, etc...), Dune II from Westwood Studios in 1992, was not widely played and would not be immediately recognized by the average gamer.

Uhm... Not only would DuneII be recognized by an average gamer, it should be recognized by any gamer that was old enough to be playing in the early 90s. That was the only game of such kind back then and so very fascinating. Well before WarCraft.

In my opinion WarCraft wasn't quiate as memorable if more technologically advanced. StarCraft was comparably memorable for having an actual story to go with real-time strategy game

Re:What are they smoking?

[tubs]

I agree that it's strange that SWOS is on there - not becasue it doesn't deserve to be, but because it's US based list. (likwise if a Europe based list, I would be as surprised to see "American Football" or baseball on it)

SWOS, for it's time was fantastic, slick, fast gameplay, stats coming out of your ears with pretty much every football(soccer) playing country and player covered, management of your team (purchasing players etc). I also think it got converted to nearly evey console available at the time.

I remember playing FIFA around the same time on the 3DO and it didn't hold a candle to SWOS.

Re:What are they smoking?

[Anonymous Coward]

This list is about "important" games. "Important" does not mean "popular", but it doesn't mean "innovative" either. Being either popular or innovative to a great extent, being both, or even having some other quality that gives it importance, can make a game important.

Re:What are they smoking?

[Dogtanian]

Whilst there's some ignorance from the Americans about how popular Sensible Soccer and its descendants were elsewhere, it's still pushing things to say that it belongs in the top 10. It's obviously heavily-influenced by Kick Off/Kick Off 2 and I'm not convinced that it in turn has had *that* much long-term influence. Sure, a lot of people remember it fondly, and I'm in no doubt that it was probably the best-regarded overhead football game if you're into that sort of thing, but Top 10 most culturally important/influential? Nope.

Re:What are they smoking?

[Shadow99_1]

I was around back then... However I was in high school when Doom came out and while I thought it was good, I never thought it was as incredible as people make it out to be now... Why? Mostly because I had no access to it multi-player and that was key to why so many people loved it...

I'd played Wolfenstein before it and really the games aren't that different (though Doom was 2.5D and Wolf wasn't). Later titles like Rise of the Triad and Duke Nukem 3D were much bigger for me than Doom ever was... And Quake is still the first game I can remember trying to play online on the first real ISP (non-AOL, GENIE, Compuserve, etc network) with a 9600 baud modem... All hail the 1000 ms ping time...

Re:What are they smoking?

[RingDev]

Yeah because setting up a 4-way game over serial cables was such a fun way to handle LAN parties. Once again, Quake was there at just the right time to see Ethernet becoming the standard, and with it came the easy (comparatively) to set up LAN party, games with more than 4 people, and long distance gaming.

-Rick

Re:What are they smoking?

[CheechWizz]

Oh don't get me wrong, I was just giving reasons why they might have put it in there but I agree with you that it doesn't really belong in this list. But if I look at the list, most games that are in there are questionable. I think the list is more of a conversation starter than an actual canon but that's just me. I miss games like populous, Pac man (talk about cultural impact, pac man was everywhere in the 80's and still is one of the most recognized icons of gaming culture) and ALOT of other titles.
There's just a single arcade game in there for crying out loud. This list is a starting point, and a crappy one at that.

Re:What are they smoking?

[C0rinthian]

You forgot the map between levels with multiple paths? THAT was non-linear, and pretty groundbreaking.

Re:What are they smoking?

[DanloRingess]

Actually, Akalabeth is a contemporary of Rogue. They both predate Hack by about 2 years.

Re:What are they smoking?

[Liebenwalde]

Hello, Since I was the panelist who put Warcraft on the list, I just had to respond to this post. Not because I object to it, but the opposite reason: because CodeBuster reveals a historical point that I would have had to use 100 times these past days -- once for every "why did you include Warcraft when Dune II was published before it." The point is that there many predecessors to both Warcraft and C&C (and not the same group), including real-time roleplaying and a bunch of real-time tactical and strategy games made in the 1980s. The problem with the earlier games (like, say, David Hille's Combat Leader and Battalion Commander, both from SSI, or Dani Bunten Berry's Modem Wars or Command HQ) was that the systems did not have the computing resources to offer good AI opponents and multiplayer was not a serious option (Berry's games start to get closer at least to playable multiplayer). Likewise, it's true that Dune II was not nearly as popular as even Warcraft I would be. If you look at the Warcraft series as a whole, there are a number of other accomplishments that must also be mentioned, from the game-based franchise and story-line capable of spawning a virtual world and numerous other media products (books, boardgames, cardgames) to the very active competitive scene. Those points were outlined in the presentation and will be posted soon to the IGDA Preservation SIG (which was the locus for the panel), along with those for the other games. However, I did want to acknowledge Codebuster for getting the history right. I was expecting more calls for including C&C, but haven't read a comment to that effect yet! Oh, I don't smoke. Never have. Henry

Re:What are they smoking?

[Chris Mattern]

I was about 30 in the early 90s. What's more, RTSes are among my favorite genre. I have never played and never even seen a copy of Dune II. I own Warcraft: Orcs and Humans and have played completely through both campaigns.

Chris Mattern

Re:What are they smoking?

[7Prime]

I was most definitely around back then, and I was around when Wolfenstien shook the world, as well. I remember my younger 2nd cousins on the computer yelling "Die, Doggy, Die!" as they shot at the guard dogs. The buzz was huge in high school. Among other things, everyone was trying to figure out how to get Wolfenstien 3D on their graphing calculators... obviously, that wasn't possible until a couple years later.

Re:What are they smoking?

[Anonymous Coward]

SMB was modeled on Mayhem in Monsterland.

Huh? Are you in some kind of temporal vortex?

Mayhem in Monsterland came out in 1993. CREATURES came out in 1990.

But SMB1 came out in 1985, revolutionising the platform genre, and SMB3 in 1988.

A closer clone on the C64 would be Great Giana Sisters (1987) but not as pretty as Mayhem.

Re:What are they smoking?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I really like "the settlers" (1993) which was popular but it did get a bit slow at times, and they ruined some of the sequels :-(

Re:What are they smoking?

[totally bogus dude]

I was about 30 in the early 90s. What's more, RTSes are among my favorite genre. I have never played and never even seen a copy of Dune II.

I think you're missing the point: you say RTSes are among your favourite genres, but when Dune 2 came out there was no "RTS" genre. It didn't exist. Another poster in this thread mentioned that they actually put "real time strategy" on the box in quotes, because it wasn't a term anyone would understand. It's not hugely surprising that a game which virtually created a genre would not be well known amongst the masses (at least, pre-internet).

I was in high school and I got a copy of Dune 2 from a friend, so I'm aware of its significance. But I never got into Warcraft at all, despite being aware of its existence and having played it, and despite liking RTS games in general.

Re:What are they smoking?

[murdocj]

You give EQ1 WAY too much credit. I suspect that "core ticks" go back to any multiplayer game (e.g. rpgs). Zoning is something that is core to EQ1, and completely foreign to WoW. Yes, EQ1 eventually implemented instances, but from the player base reaction I don't believe they were original from EQ1.

I'm not saying that WoW was the originator of lots of concepts, but I don't think EQ1 was the originator either. EQ1 introduced some concepts, synthesized some others. WoW did the same... but did a MUCH better job of synthesizing. As far as the "seamless" concept, you have to give WoW credit there. I'm sure there are games before WoW that didn't have zoning as clunky as EQ1, but WoW really makes the "you are in the world, you just travel around, no zoning" concept work, and work REALLY well, in an MMO.

Re:What are they smoking?

[murdocj]

And there's a direct line from from earlier MUDs and MMOs to EQ. I'm not dismissing EQ... I played it for more years than I want to think about. It was a great achievement for its time. Just as WoW is a great achievement for its time.

Shory-who-ken?

[Reason58]

I wonder what metrics they are using to determine importance, and why Street Fighter II was not on that list.

Re:Shory-who-ken?

[nuzak]

> I wonder what metrics they are using to determine importance,

The author's favorite games. These lists are complete filler -- the publishers just thank their lucky stars that slashdot is here to gulp them up and drive up ad impressions.

Missing genres

[HungWeiLo]

What about:

- Street Fighter Hyper Turbo Super Deluxe vs. Capcom Marvel DC Comics Heroes edition-type fighting games?
- racing games?
- Final Fantasy / Dragon Warrior / Leisure Suit Larry, etc.?
- shooting games (Lethal Enforcers, T2, whatever-that-game-in-Back-to-the-Future-was-calle d, etc)
- niche non-Nintendo-licensed NES gems like "Bible Adventures"?

Re:Missing genres

[nbehary]

- Final Fantasy / Dragon Warrior / Leisure Suit Larry, etc.? Why would you group LSL in with the other 2? I had made a seperate group for Sierra/Lucasfilm type adventures. If you're gonna throw a PC game on there, I'd put the Ultima's or Wizardry's.

Holy crap these people are clueless

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

Mr. Grant, the editor of the popular Web site joystiq.com, who selected Super Mario Bros. 3, said the game was important for its nonlinear play, a mainstay of contemporary games, and new features like the ability to move both backward and forward.

Enough said.

Re:Holy crap these people are clueless

[lorien420]

I disagree. You didn't say enough. Please explain why you think they're wrong.

Re:Holy crap these people are clueless

[7Prime]

Okay, I'll buy that. It was a huge deal at the time, I can remember that. But I wouldn't say that it's the most important advancement in the genre. 2D platformers, and many 3D platformers, even today, are fairly linear. The ability to pick one level or another may be cool, but is it really all that important? I wouldn't say so, especially when 90% of the map, you have a linear progression anyway, and the same is still true today with most platformers.

Now, if we're talking non-linearity within the levels themselves... I'd say without question, it's a big deal... but it's simply an evolution from the non-linearity demonstrated in Doki-Doki Panic (Super Mario 2). This was the first game to have long sections of levels branch and reconnect. Mario 1 did it a little bit with pipes and vines, but these areas were really minor, so I wouldn't exactly call them branches in the same sense.

Mario 3 could be said to have perfected the art of non-linear level design, sure, I'll buy that. But in looking at other choices from this list, "perfected" doesn't seem to be key here.

Re:Holy crap these people are clueless

[insignificant_wrangl]

I've gone back and forth on the non-linearity of SMB3 as well. It does seem like, if this is a concern, that King's Quest / Space Quest should be on the list, or, as many others have noted, Ultima. I'm also surprised that FF doesn't make an appearance. Final Fantasy VII ranks up there as my favorite story of all time, regardless of media... but, again, this seems to be an informal list collected by individuals so I don't think there was deliberation on a metric scale. Good thread though, occupied a few hours of thought!

Re:Holy crap these people are clueless

[7Prime]

I'm also surprised FF doesn't make an appearence... but it wouldn't be with FF7. FF7 was the result of a genre in full swing, due to FF6 and Chrono Trigger. If you want to talk about huge leaps in story telling, take a look at the difference between the styles of FF4 or FF5, to FF6, and the jump between FF6 to FF7 looks almost non-existant in comparison (I would argue that it is almost non-existant), similarly, FF3 to FF4 is a huge huge deal. FF7 wins hands down on a popularity contest, but I would argue that it was little more than a stepping stone, which was already pretty well layed out by the previous installment.

Regardless, this is pointless, everyone has their opinions on the series. But I believe that the original Final Fantasy is the only one that belongs anywhere close to that list, as the jRPG could have died right back then, if it hadn't been for that game.

Huh?

[msauve]

Where's Hunt the Wumpus? Where's Lunar Lander? Where's Star Trek? Pong?

And most egregiously, where is Crowther and Woods' Colossal Cave Adventure, to which Zork owes everything?

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Where's Hunt the Wumpus? "

My girlfriend and I play that all the time, and just after I hide the wumpus, she finds it. After she finds it, I always acknowledge with a "Nice Hunt" kind of thing.

Re:Huh?

[antime]

This is the worst euphemism for sex I've ever read.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the worst euphemism for sex I've ever read.

You must be new here.

Re:Huh?

[wolfemi1]

This is the worst euphemism for sex I've ever read.

Thanks to the nested comment structure, I thought you were talking about "Crowther and Woods' Colossal Cave Adventure"...

Which works just as well.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

So you've met his girlfriend too?

Re:Emphasis?

[richdun]

tags aren't allowed in HTML strict, the DTD used for /. tags are.

One of these is not like the others

[ucblockhead]

"Sensible World of Soccer"?

Re:One of these is not like the others

[rtechie]

Yeah, this one is pretty obscure. I think it's listed as the "prototype" for later sports games, but I still don't get it. Where's Madden? Maybe they just wanted an Amiga game.

Re:One of these is not like the others

[Anonymous Coward]

While I was reading this, I imagined that Americans would probably have that reaction, but I can assure you that SWS (the original) and SWOS (the early ones) are without doubt the best football games ever made, and probably the best sports game ever made, in terms of game controls and pure fun.

Oh man, the hours I lost on those games on my 286(SWS) and Pentium(SWOS).

Re:One of these is not like the others

[Anonymous Coward]

They chose "Sensible World of Soccer" ... and NOT

Centipede / Millipede
Space Invaders / Galaxian / Galaga
M.U.L.E.
PacMan / Ms. PacMan
Frogger
Pong
Pro Pinball series
Rogue / Hack / Nethack (text dungeon games)
Spectre V.R.
Trek (Xerox Alto game with later Mac adaptation)
Ultima series
Infocom text adventures (assorted)

(and the list goes on and on)

WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?

Re:One of these is not like the others

[Anonymous Coward]

Sensible soccer was a huge hits in the parts of the world that aren't called USA.

Re:One of these is not like the others

[Zixia]

I don't get it. There were many football games before Sensible World of Soccer. Really. Loads of them. We used to play tournaments in the computer shop I worked in at the time, and I remember a far more important game coming out.

We were playing Microrpose Soccer, and enjoying it, but soon after came Kick Off, by an unknown company in less-than-impressive packaging. Nevertheless, we loaded it in to the display Amiga and gave it a go.

Wow. No more was the ball stuck to the player's foot, the pitch wasn't two screens wide, and the player's didn't 'run' like sloths. Kick Off was fast, big, and required skill to hold on to the ball. It took a while to get used to, but it was the most enjoyable football game created up to that point, and it was as different from any other football game as you could get.

Microprose Soccer wasn't loaded in the shop again, we couldn't face the mediocrity after having played Kick Off. Sure, Sensi Soccer improved on some factors, but Kick Off was the game that led the revolution.

Re:One of these is not like the others

[Toby_Tyke]

Are you from the UK? Were you playing video games in the UK in the early 90s? If the answer to either of those questions is yes, then sensi is anything but obscure. It was the first really good football game, and, in my not-so-humble opinion, its gameplay has yet to be surpassed.

Re:One of these is not like the others

[Mikelikus]

SWOS was a truly ground breaking sports game. It was the first to introduce the offside rule, it had management capabilities, it had a career mode. All before it became mainstream. The fast paced gameplay was just what made it addictive.

It's not that obscure if you're not in America, north of Mexico.

Zork?

[koreth]

What about the original "Adventure" (aka "Colossal Cave") by, if memory serves, Crowther and Woods? Nothing wrong with "Zork" but it wasn't the first of its genre.

Re:Zork?

[ajs318]

Zork was probably included for its unnecessarily-complicated parser. Colossal Cave worked on simple VERB NOUN commands (good job it wasn't written in Forth, else it'd've been NOUN VERB) and part of the fun of playing the game was derived from distilling what you needed to do down to just two words. Being able to process commands like "TAKE EVERYTHING EXCEPT THE DUCK, GO EAST AND DIP THE BRASS RING IN THE FOUNTAIN" was just showing off.

No Ultima, eh?

[arlo5724]

Decent list but if you ask me Ultima (choose almost any of the first 4) should be tacked on. Not only did I waste many hours of my youth playing those games, but they were one of the big reasons I gained any interest in computers at all. Just my two cents though.

Re:No Ultima, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that's a big problem with the list: there's no RPG representation at all. Something tells me the first four Ultimas were a wee bit more influential than Sensible World of Soccer.

Sensible World of Soccer?

[ereshiere]

What is this game? The article offers no explanation of its greatness, so what's the deal?

And no Zelda? For shame.

Re:Sensible World of Soccer?

[STrinity]

Zelda is just Zork with a GUI.

Re:Sensible World of Soccer?

[king-manic]

Zelda is just Zork with a GUI.

Wow is just LORD with a GUI.

Re:Sensible World of Soccer?

[Carewolf]

Sensible soccer was the first soccer game where the ball didn't magically stick the players feet.

Re:Sensible World of Soccer?

[iainl]

It was, and remains, the greatest sports game of all time. It introduced proper management elements to the football genre, when playing and management were previously kept seperate games with very different outlooks. It destroyed as many promising University degrees as Elite with its sheer addiction levels.

There were footy games before, and indeed at the time the Kick Off 2 vs. Sensi rivalry was strong. Ironically, EA's official FIFA games ended up winning the popularity contest in the end, due in no small part to Sensi's Megadrive/Genesis release being postponed from a week before the first FIFA game due to the relatively trivial issue of one team flag being back-to-front. But Sensi plays the game that _feels_ like football, rather than looking like someone watching football on TV.

It's virtually impossible to overstate the impact the game had on a generation of European gamesplayers, even if it doesn't have the same resonance with a nation that doesn't care for the beautiful game.

Strange criteria

[omnilynx]

There's obviously something going on with the criteria that's not being mentioned in the article. The one that sticks out most to me is Super Mario Bros. 3, when that game is obviously based on Super Mario Bros. (1, of course) Similarly, Zork is based on the earlier Colossal Cave Adventure. Apparently part of the criteria is not just genre-defining but rather some sort of popularization of a genre. So, like any supposedly defining canon, this comes down to a matter of opinion on what is "important".

Re:Strange criteria

[jeffeb3]

Why not go back to the original Mario Bros? Or Donkey Kong? It's all the same characters right?

Probably because Super Mario Bros took a big leap forward from the first two. And I think the list creators would suggest that there is a bigger, more important leap to Super Mario Bros 3. I may not agree, but that's at least up to qualitative evidence.

If you look at all the posts in this thread you will notice a lot more than ten games that people will swear need to go on the list. That should proove that there are a whole lot of influential games. Sitting in my chair, I say the soccer thing is a little weird, but I don't have the scope of an average person. I have the scope of a technical engineer with a wealthy North American video gaming experience. I'm guessing some other demographic really thought that game was important.

Re:Strange criteria

[SteelCougar307]

If you look at all the posts in this thread you will notice a lot more than ten games that people will swear need to go on the list. That should proove that there are a whole lot of influential games. I agree completely. There are tons of games that have been influential to many people since gaming has been around. I think that these are just 10 of the most important video games...who's to say more couldn't be added?

From the article:

Mr. Lowood's canon was closely modeled on the work of the National Film Preservation Board, which every year compiles a list of films to be added to the National Film Registry, managed by the Library of Congress since 1989...The first list of films included "Casablanca," "Citizen Kane," "The Searchers" and "Nanook of the North." (emphasis added)

Personally, I think it is about time that video games were recognized as something worth preserving. Since Lowood's list is similar to the National Film Registry, I can only hope that we get to see this list expand every year.

Wolfenstein was what attracted many people to id

[twolfe]

Doom was basically just a graphics upgrade and subsitution of aliens for german soldiers. Doom/2/3, Quake/2/3, Return to Wolfenstein, Quakeworld (arguably the precursor to the Battlefield series), teamfortress, Duke Nuke'em, Unreal et al would never have existed without the popularity of Wolfenstein which resulted in hundreds of thousands of pirated installs globally and raised the perception of FPS as a genre to levels that enabled all of these a viable demographic in the business.

At least that's my opinion, I could be wrong... I'm not though.

Re:Emphasis?

[drinkypoo]

Actually, italic, underline, and bold tags are deprecated and should not be used, in favor of CSS. But we're not allowed to use CSS here. The proper way to handle this (probably) would be for slashdot to accept those tags, but then convert them to spans with an appropriate class.

Series... but no series

[Fozzyuw]

Super Mario Bros. 3 (1990), [...] Warcraft series (beginning 1994)

Odd, why only pick Super Mario Bros. 3 and not the entire Super Mario Bros. series like they did with Warcraft? From the article...

Mr. Grant, the editor of the popular Web site joystiq.com, who selected Super Mario Bros. 3, said the game was important for its nonlinear play, a mainstay of contemporary games, and new features like the ability to move both backward and forward.

Super Mario Bros. 3 added some interesting new elements to the side scroller, but I would argue that it didn't define the side scrolling genre. I think Super Mario Bros. 3 improved upon the genre defining Super Mario Bros. game, even if I enjoy Super Mario Bros 3 more. Could 'nonlinear' games be found before Super Mario Bros. 3? What about any RPG game like Dragon Warrior? It would have been better to just include the entire Mario series for their significance on the video game world. I think Mario 64 is far more revolutionary than Mario 3, but the entire franchises importance shouldn't be underestimated.

Cheers,
Fozzy

Re:Series... but no series

[stratjakt]

There were nonlinear platformers before SMB3. I could go back to the Jumpman series on C64, where how you finished one stage would influence the next, other times it could be random. I'm trying to remember a game where you moved around a map, and performed little levels, very much like SMB3, but can't think of it. You did stuff like that in Bionic Commando, though, that predates SMB3.

This isn't really about firsts so much as it is about first big commercial hits - Doom was by no means the first FPS.

If I were to credit Nintendo for platformers, I'd go all the way back to the original Donkey Kong - which broke a lot of new ground. It had different levels, with different objectives on each - in an era where a video game was by and large "same level over and over, but harder and faster"

It, following Pac Man's lead, also had characters - ones you could market over and over.

It was also the first time I know of that the movie and game industries clashed in a big way, Universal suing over the name Kong, then losing a huge countersuit to Nintendo in the end.

Also, DK was supposed to be Popeye, but the licensing fell through, so they changed Brutus into an ape, and replaced Popeye with a charicature based on one of their US warehouse managers and named him Jump Man (so the legend goes). After a new license was cooked up, they made a whole new Popeye game (another one of my favorites).

Re:Series... but no series

[DeadboltX]

It would seem as though the people making the list simply didn't know about some video games. Dragon Warrior should have been on there, I believe it was the most influential RPG back then and certainly demonstrated WAY more non-linear game play than Mario 3, and several years prior!

Re:Series... but no series

[Mitreya]

Odd, why only pick Super Mario Bros. 3 and not the entire Super Mario Bros. series like they did with Warcraft? From the article...

Well, they missed the mark here, too. As pointed out by many others, the real precursor of the WarCraft genre is Dune II from Westwood Studios. Warcraft was somewhat better in terms of the interface and graphics, and changed the setting from Dune world to fantasy.

Re:Emphasis?

[richdun]

I hate you /. Now with previewing before I post: <i> tags aren't allowed in HTML strict, the DTD used for /. <em> tags are.

Re:Emphasis?

[HTH NE1]

<i> tags aren't allowed in HTML strict, the DTD used for<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/. <em> tags are.

Then what is this in strict.dtd, a mirage?

<!ENTITY % fontstyle
  "TT | I | B | BIG | SMALL">

They're not even deprecated.

Meanwhile, where's the WBR tag in that DTD? Did slashcode generate that?

The Ten Most Important (home video) Games.

[Anonymous Coward]

What no arcade games?

Space invaders?

[pubjames]

No Space Invaders? No PacMan?

Re:Space invaders?

[ClosedSource]

Apparently games like these that created the industry didn't qualify.

Re:Space invaders?

[emjoi_gently]

Space Invaders was a pioneer in so many ways.

The explosion of Video Arcades.
The birth of "Tactics" being developed for video games.
Songs written about it.
T Shirts.
Video Game Addiction.
Really cool sound effects...

And on top of it all, go try it on mame some time... it's still a fun game.

It really is the Mother of all Games.

Re:Space invaders?

[PhilipMckrack]

That's the game I thought they were missing. It may not have been the first to do much of what it did, but it was by far the biggest. It pushed the big box video games into pizza shops and carry outs.

Best game

[26199]

I have yet to have more fun gaming than playing Deus Ex (although a few games have come close).

To me that makes it an important game :)

Re:Best game

[Danse]

I have yet to have more fun gaming than playing Deus Ex (although a few games have come close).

To me that makes it an important game :)

I second that emotion. Deus Ex was probably the most engrossing game I've ever played. The only others to come close are probably the Baldur's Gate games, and maybe Oblivion once I got the right mix of patches/mods to fix the gameplay.

Re:Best game

[Puff of Logic]

I'm curious, what mix of mods did you use? I imagine that CTmod is mandatory, but what others? I've played a bit of Oblivion (had to stop, studying for the stupid MCAT) but never really felt like I had a good mix beyond CTmod and Natural Environments.

Re:Best game

[dbIII]

I have yet to have more fun gaming than playing Deus Ex

If your sound it out properly and run the words together it makes perfect sense.

Re:Best game

[unicomp]

Thank you for voicing that sentiment, sir. Deus Ex also captivates me to this day; it forever changed the way I feel about games as art. I still get the impression that DX was an actual chapter in my life rather than just a game I played for a while. Top honors.

Re:Best game

[Danse]

I'm curious, what mix of mods did you use?

I'm using Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul, Francesco's mod, Martigen's Monster Mod (those three are collectively known as FranOOOMMM! and can be downloaded together under that name along with a couple other mods that make them play nicer together), the Unofficial Oblivion Patch for a gajillion bug fixes, and BTMod for the interface improvements. I may also be running a couple other little ones, but those are the major ones. It's a whole different game when running these mods, and a MUCH better game at that. Some of them have options you can set to your liking or to tweak the difficulty. All those modders out there who have been helping to make Oblivion the game it should have been deserve a LOT of credit. They've done some amazing things without much help from Bethesda. I'm considering using Natural Environments as well, but had read a while back that it still had some conflicts with other mods, so I held off. I need to check in on it again.

Re:Best game

[Puff of Logic]

cheers!

Re:Best game

[Anonymous Coward]

dx was superb, great music great atmosphere great story, long gameplay

and then you can play it again in a different stlye for an extra challenge. still play it every 6-12 months. just downloaded the soundtrack for a torrent site, just listening to some of it puts my hair on end thinking about the challenges on the particular level.

is it possible to make a game as good now? possibly not with so much effort going into the graphical/lighting/random objects side, the landscape seems a bit bare now by modern standards. but gameplay wise it sure beats just running down the same track as most fps' with no other way of completing challenges.

Re:Best game

[nuzak]

I saw FranOOOMMM and tried it, but it seems to have real problems. The bigger and tougher mobs are quite literally impossible in some places, and also bring anything but a really top-of-the-line PC to a crawl.

So instead I'm using: OOO (of course), Unofficial Overhaul Expansion (UOE) which integrates various mods into OOO, Kobu's Character Advancement System (which pretty much removes the need to "power-level"), and some mod that turns off the compass from the main UI ("Immersive UI" or something like that).

I do have one question: I'm not actually sure if that set of mods fixes the leveled lists problem of quest loot being underpowered at low levels, and bandits carrying full daedric gear. Will I need Francesco's mod or MMM for that after all? Might just be time to reinstall all my mods in that case and try FranOOOMMM again once they fix the mobs.

And a general gripe: from the crazy leveled lists to the compass+markers in the main UI, I get a real bad vibe from Bethesda. Also I hear that for stability and space reasons, cells reset themselves after a time. No more kings of spoons, I suspect (google for 'morrowind "king of spoons"' for a good laugh) Oh well, at least it's still crazy moddable, and still a freaking amazing game. Except for the voice acting. Dear lord, they blew their voice acting budget on Patrick Stewart's two minutes of dialogue, and must have had interns do the rest.

Re:Best game

[Shadukar]

I couldn't agree less.

I love deus Ex 1 and i re-play it every few months :)

I love the atmosphere, i love the story, i love the writing, i love the way the free gameplay.

I love how you can try any mix of skills and still have fun. I love finding new areas or texts even after probably close to 20 full re-plays of that game.

The game is full of little secrets, small references, books, emails. And i am not talking about dumb trash like in Oblivion where they just copied and pasted some background lore into a few books. I am talking about finding an npc in the back alley restaurant of Hong Kong who gets into a full on philosophical debate with you or hacking a pc of an arms dealer to find he has been exchanging emails with an experimental AI that wants to know his thoughts about color orange.

Stuff you can miss the first time, second time, third time, without noticing it. There are TONS of obscure stuff in DX1 :)

Some examples:

In the first level, it is possible to finish it without killing anyone, in any way: your brother who normaly tells you "you killed a lot of people today, pace yourself" at the end of that level tells you something different if you don't kill anyone.

In the UNATCO hq, if you walk into the female toilets while Sharon(i think) is in there, she lodges a complaint with Manderley who gives you a talk about it.

Your brother can survive! You have to be caught at just the right moment though, when the agents are outside of his house, you need to be caught before he dies. If you run away from his appartment and get caught later on, he is dead.

Another thing i love about the game is how you can approach every situation from a variety of ways: You can sneak past, you can just run in with a pistol or shotgun, you can set mine-traps, you can lure enemies into turrets or robots, you can use any combination of these! This goes for almost every situation in DeusEx - it is one of very few games that really give you freedom.

I would easily say Deus Ex, with it's smallish levels, set storyline, inability to get back to all levels, gives players more freedom to play how they want to than games that have been heavily marketed as being trully free, eg GTA SA and Oblivion.

Plus it ran great on the hardware it was released for! And nowdays, when you play it on hardware that was only dreamt about when the game was released, DX1 plays fantastic - the graphics scale up to use the new hardware!

Sadly, DX2 was a piece of trash :( Unresponsive (even on top hardware with all patches), mind numbingly boring gameplay where all the possible ways of dealing with set encounters are pre-coded/scripted and neatly pre-chewed for you. Dont get me started on the console interface, console-complexity(lol) character customisation, consolish inventory management (universal ammo? come on). The levels were tiny even compared to original DX1. The only saving grace of dx2 was the storyline - especially the part of the two fiercely competing coffe companies ...and then you find that ... :) oh yeah, and idoru in dx2 was absolutely incredible :o Oh yeah, one more good thing about dx2: machinae supremacy soundtrack/music.

Re:Best game

[nuzak]

Ah, answering my own question, it looks like OOO does get rid of the gratuitous monster leveling, and UOE adds a leveled loot fix for quest items.

Now if someone would put out a patch to fix the voice acting. Yowza.

Re:Best game

[CronoCloud]

Don't blame consoles in general for DX II, blame the Xbox and lazy devs.

Ever play the PS2 version of Deus Ex? See those USB ports on the PS2? Plug in a mouse and keyboard, they work. They did modify the UI a bit so it was playable with just the dual shock, but it's not too different from the UI of the PC version. I use a hybrid style of control, dual shock in the left hand, mouse in the right.

Re:Best game

[orielbean]

What sucks is that the second Deus Ex is a pale imitation of the excellent original. I loved that there was always about 10 different ways to accomplish the objective, and you could NEVER get all of them, no matter how many nanoupgrades you had at one time. And the conversations w/ the characters were engrossing.

Re:Best game

[Shadow99_1]

I say the same thing about System Shock & System Shock 2...

Rogue

[Procyon101]

Nuff said.

Re:Rogue

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn straight. It spawned a whole genre, and even spinoffs like Diablo.

Re:Emphasis?

[HTH NE1]

Underline and the strikes are deprecated, but the others are only "discouraged in favor of style sheets".

Re:Emphasis?

[Dorceon]

A better question is why does ./'s CSS make I tags display:block? Why not just use blockquote?

Dune 2

[sitturat]

I thought Warcraft was just a clone of Dune 2.

MIA

[richcoder]

M.U.L.E. should be there. Or is that too old school?

Re:MIA

[suparjerk]

I agree with you that M.U.L.E. was a damned good game (my sig has been my sig for several months), but it didn't really spawn a multitude of future games with the same idea. While I certainly don't agree with the article's choices of the 10 most important games, they seem to be listing games that were original at the time, the start (arguably) of a long-lasting wave of similar games. M.U.L.E. was and remains far too unique, IMO.

Re:MIA

[Purity Of Essence]

It is interesting that a game which was so innovative and is so popular among game designers has failed to be much of an influence on later games. That makes it a true oddity.

By the way, in M.U.L.E. it's called a Mountain Wampus. It's cousin, the Wumpus, favors cave networks of dodecahedral topology.

What about ___??

[necro2607]

Yeah, cue the "what about ____?" posts, ad nauseam... :(

Re:What about ___??

[Adeptus_Luminati]

What about Lemmings? Or has everyone forgotten the dead?

Didn't that inspire an entire genre of teen age suicide and self-hatred as well as give the terrorists motivation to blow themselves up? (oh no wait, part of that was the Nirvana band)

Terrorist Leader: "If the 10 of you blow up yourselves in sequence on the same spot, we (Alah and us) will be able to have a tunnel that goes all the way to America where we may ...."

Myst

[dzelenka]

That game really drove users to buy sound cards and CD drives. It really raised the expectations of how good a game should look.

Re:Myst

[able1234au]

Yes, many of the games listed were derivative but Myst was ground breaking and should have been included. First game with realistic, beautiful graphics and a haunting environment. In terms of sales it was a big seller and the combo of the two means it deserves to be on the list. I guess we need to see a top 50 and then we can see the top 10 in perspective. Also, where does games like Space Invaders, Pong etc fit into this list?

Re:Myst

[lavid]

In fact it was the first game for CDROM and correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Riven the first game for PCs on DVD?

Aaah, remember the days when you bought "Multimedia PCs?"

Anyone up for some Jezzball? Sam & Max Hit the Road? Day of the Tentacle?

Re:Myst

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact it was the first game for CDROM No, it wasn't. The 7th Guest was released in 1993, Myst in 1995.

Re:Myst

[Anonymous Coward]

Riven came on a whopping 5 CD-ROMs. I believe these may have been distinctive as some of the first PC/MAC hybrid discs (at least for a game).

It was only much later released on a DVD.

Why Doom instead of Wolfwenstein?

[sitturat]

To me, Doom was just the next iteration of Wolfenstein. Wolfenstein started the whole violent, popular fps id thing.

Re:Why Doom instead of Wolfwenstein?

[Blakey Rat]

And Doom isn't even that great a choice for early FPS games. If you're looking for innovative games, Marathon is much better. It had 8-player LAN play (complete with voice chat and several different game modes), friendly critters, a great well-developed story, the ability to look up and down, and you didn't straddle the grenade launcher in-between your legs. Doom came out in late-1993, and Marathon came out a year later in 1994 but is a vastly superior game. (For reference, Quake I came out in 1996.) Marathon is 2.5D with a hack so that you can look up and down.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_(computer_ga me)

Re:Why Doom instead of Wolfwenstein?

[RobinH]

True, but only hard core geeks like us played Wolfenstein. Doom really popularized the FPS.

Re:Why Doom instead of Wolfwenstein?

[Bazman]

And you can trace FPS back to 1982 with:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_Monster_Maze

  there's no shooting (since you are up against a T-Rex) but there are 3d graphics in a 2d walled maze format.

  and all in 16k....

Re:Why Doom instead of Wolfwenstein?

[Wah]

If you follow the lineage, Quake was probably one of the more important games, at least from a hardware standpoint (i.e. it started the "you need a graphics card to really play this game...and that's before you get to the online hop in/hop out deathmatch).

Re:Why Doom instead of Wolfwenstein?

[Saxerman]

I agree that Wolfenstein 3D was probably the first of the many FPS games that would follow, but coming from a Commodore /Atari background I recall playing 16 player MIDI Maze a full five years earlier.

By that same token I would also consider Dungeon Master for the list, although then you have to start competing with the likes of Alternate Reality, Bard's Tale, Ultima, and Wizardry... which might all be traced back to Rogue.

Re:Why Doom instead of Wolfwenstein?

[Anonymous Coward]

I understand where you're coming from, but for me (and many others, I gather), Doom was THE killer app. It single-handedly made me, an otherwise satisfied Amiga user, buy a PC in 1994. I'd seen Wolf3D played by friends before, and that game didn't do anything for me... I contently went back to playing Amiga games like Lionheart, Hired Guns (a 3D game that I consider better than Wolf3D, though it didn't have smooth scrolling), Chaos Engine, and other kickass Amiga games of that era. But when I saw Doom just once, I knew I was going to have to buy a PC.

Re:Why Doom instead of Wolfwenstein?

[ADRenalyn]

Actually, the 'Spear of Destiny' preceded 'Escape from Castle Wolfenstein'. But they were very similar games.

What about Donkey Kong?

[Anonymous Coward]

DK was the first videogame in using graphics as a means of characterization, including cut scenes to advance the game's plot, and integrating multiple stages into the gameplay. It was also a great success (and the beginning of a genius and two of his most successful IP, two of the most successful IP in the history of videogames). Four in a row, it MUST be in the list.

Duke Nukem Forever?

[Matt_R]

What about Duke Nukem Forever?

DNF is a very important game.. If it ever gets released, hell will instantly freeze over.

Re:Duke Nukem Forever?

[Patrik_AKA_RedX]

*Looks at stack of Anti-freeze and salt*
And as soon as that game is released I'll have something else to trade for superpowers than my soul.

Re:Emphasis?

[drinkypoo]

Underline and the strikes are deprecated, but the others are only "discouraged in favor of style sheets".

They're also not part of the HTML 4.01 spec (didn't look at 4.0) and are not even listed therein; at least not in the section on text. Maybe they're in the appendices or something?

The criteria for greatness shifts

[Astarica]

For most games I assume it's because it's some game that first came up with the idea of whatever. But Warcraft does not have anything innovative in the first 2 games unless you count a quasi-story as innovative. It may have been popular but from the innovation point of view, it contributed roughly nothing to the RTS genre. If you're to pick a RTS game that really revolutionized the genre it has to be Starcraft, which is not Warcraft in space. So here Warcraft seems to get a pass due to its massive sales and popularity. That's fine but then where's the Pokemons and Final Fantasies? It seems to me Warcraft is only on there probably because whoever made this list actually plays Warcraft but not Pokemon, even though the two games are very similar: massive sales and popularity and not much contribution in terms of innovation to the genre. Which is fine. No one says a great game has to come up with something no one else thought of before. But don't bend the rules just to get your favorite game inducted.

Re:The criteria for greatness shifts

[illerd]

Not to mention that dune 2 invented the RTS. I think. Maybe something else came first, but dune 2 definitely came before warcraft. At least, I played it before warcraft...

Re:The criteria for greatness shifts

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're to pick a RTS game that really revolutionized the genre it has to be Starcraft, which is not Warcraft in space.

Well, for not being just Warcraft in space, it seem pretty similar to me. I'm waiting for you to come with significant differences yet. I played them both, up to the end, and I don't see SC too far from WC.

plays Warcraft but not Pokemon, even though the two games are very similar: massive sales and popularity and not much contribution in terms of innovation to the genre

I do not remember any RPG where you collect creatures who fight for you prior to Pokemon. I really don't know if Pokemon was the first or not, and I'd appreciate if you can give me an example. But, as far as I know, Pokemon was the first in its genre (sub-genre if you prefer).

Re:The criteria for greatness shifts

[Wah]

That's fine but then where's the Pokemons and Final Fantasies?

And the Wizardry's and Ultima's....or even a nod to Nethack-style games.

Re:The criteria for greatness shifts

[blibbler]

Starcraft didn't revolutionize the genre, it perfected it. It didn't add that much additional stuff over WC2, but what it added, and how it was designed makes it a very popular and engaging game almost 9 years after its release.

Re:Wolfenstein was what attracted many people to i

[BarneyL]

But then if you want to be picky, Wolfenstein was just an updated version of Catacomb 3D which was in turn and updated version of Hovertank 3D both also released by ID.

XCom: UFO Defense

[FlightDataRecorder]

What about one of the best games ever to be released on floppy disks? XCom: UFO Defense occupied a lot of my time in high school and college. It is still one of the best games ever made. Also, what about the Half Life series? It seems to me this list is a bit outta touch with most people.

Re:Emphasis?

[HTH NE1]

They're in Alignment, font styles, and horizontal rules : Fonts : Font style elements: the TT, I, B, BIG, SMALL, STRIKE, S, and U elements.

What the hell?

[DavidTC]

No graphical adventure games? Where is King's Quest, a game that is, literally, one of the first graphical games at all, and launched an entire genre? It is, in a way, the 'DOOM' of adventure games.

Okay, I get that they wanted to start with ten games, and I can't deny that all the games they listed were pretty damn important, but the only logical reason to have Zork beat King's Quest if they were going for the first game in each category (Which is valid way to define 'important'.), but, if so, why Super Mario 3? And that's technically wrong, 'ADVENT' is, of course, the first adventure game, although I guess they'd be

Alternately, they could be treating 'graphical adventure games' as a I guess if this is the starting point, I don't mind so much, but King's Quest better be in the first five games they add.

Also, does anyone have any ideas what 'Sensible World of Soccer' is doing on there? I don't know anything about that game, I don't really play sports games.

Re:What the hell?

[DragonWriter]

Where is King's Quest, a game that is, literally, one of the first graphical games at all, and launched an entire genre?

King's Quest wasn't even close to "one of the first graphical games at all", even in the adventure genre (Ultima I, for instance, considerably predated it.) It might be one of the first 3d adventure games (though not one of the earliest 3d games, plenty of those earlier too.)

Re:What the hell?

[Perseid]

While I wouldn't disagree with the inclusion of King's Quest it is no more the first adventure game than Doom is the first FPS. It isn't even the first one by Sierra. If you go back further you get stuff like Wizard and the Princess which was a graphic text-adventure. You typed commands. The game did not animate. You did not move a little guy around. KQ may have been the first graphic-adventure if by that you mean Sierra-style and Lucasarts-style games, but it was not the first graphic adventure if you mean an adventure game with graphics.

And Sensible World of Soccer? Your guess is as good as mine. I've played some of the Sensible Soccer games. They're soccer. They're competent soccer. That's all I got. :)

Re:What the hell?

[NuShrike]

I agree.. if anything King's Quest was just a graphical evolution of Zork from a long line of text games with intelligent parsers. Albeit KQ's parser was not really on par with Zork's.

Somewhere around King's Quest V? the text parsing aspect disappeared to be replaced by point and click which Myst and that The Dig eventually derived and evolved further.

I miss the parser interface, but some of the text type interface still survives such as in NeverWinter Nights.

Re:What the hell?

[DavidTC]

Showing pictures is not what people usually mean by 'graphical'. But I will rephrase: King's Quest was the first animated adventure game. In fact, it is the first animated real-world-ish game, as far as I know.

Other games were showing images and maybe moving icons around, but there weren't people actually walking around in a 'real environment' with things to interact with. There certainly weren't any with two dimensions to move within a perspective-based image.

In fact, I can make the argument that King's Quest should be on the list twice, King's Quest 1 for the graphical innovation of what is essentually Zork, and King's Quest V for starting the genre of point-and-click adventure games.

And I know DOOM wasn't first FPS, I didn't mean to imply it was. It was just the one that exploded onto the market in the way that King's Quest did a decade earlier. Everyone was playing DOOM for about two years there.

Re:What the hell?

[Perseid]

I know I'm being a real dork here, but: http://www.gamebase64.com/game.php?id=3655&d=18&h= 0

You used a joystick to move your dude and typed commands when you were near something actionable.

Don't misunderstand me, though. I would agree KQ probably goes on that list. Sierra paved a LOT of roads back in their day. More than any other developer I can think of. And KQ was of course a big part of that.

Re:What the hell?

[DavidTC]

Heh, yeah, that's essentially what I'm talking about with 2D movement. Although calling that 'real-world-ish' is stretching it. :) And King's Quest actually animated things in its world. People would play it and just be blow away by something that actually looked like a cartoon instead of blocks on the screen. (Which was why IBM used it as a demo of the PCjr.)

From our point of view, it is horribly pixilated and unrealistic, but look at the other two 'graphic' games posted here. They were black and white tile-based games with no 'movement' at all. King's Quest broke like three different restrictions at once with smooth movement and animation, color, and pixel-base positioning. And topped it off with nice graphics and a reasonable plot. Yeah, maybe some games managed to break one or two of those before, but really, it was a huge effect on the game world, it's the difference between a flipbook and an cartoon on TV.

But, hey, why I am trying to convince you, you agree with me. :)

Re:Emphasis?

[drinkypoo]

How funny. I guess this is why no browsers follow the spec :)

Global Thermonuclear War

[SigNuZX728]

How'd they leave that out. It's pretty important...

My top 15 most important games...

[krunoce]

In no particular order:

1) Pac Man
2) Sim City
3) Wolfenstein 3D
4) The Legend of Zelda
5) Super Mario Bros
6) Mortal Kombat
7) Grand Theft Auto
8) NBA Jam
9) Tetris
10) Warcraft
11) Myst
12) Pong
13) Space Invaders
14) Tecmo Super Bowl
15) Final Fantasy

Re:My top 15 most important games...

[7Prime]

Wow, I like that list. Thank you for including NBA Jam. I'm not a sports gamer, myself, but I remember the hubbub when that game came out... it was really the first mega-hit sports game and was able to win over a lot of new players. You can't really trace the very first sports game easilly, but I think this was THE major milestone in the genre. Although, in some ways, including NBA Jam is sorta like including Final Fantasy VII, which, I think, most of us agree shouldn't be anywhere near that list.

Also, I love the inclusion of Myst. It's neither the most influential game to adventure games, nor was it the biggest, nor the first. But it's the first game that made a whole lot of people look up and question whether video games could be an art form. That's a big question, and many have answered in one way or another. So, in a way, Myst could be considered the beginning of a new era of gaming, in which video games could be looked at in more ways than just "a fun pastime for the kiddies". Quite possibly one of the most important games since their invention. But again, it's often not mentioned because, within its own genre, it was neither the first nor the most influential.

But yeah, your list is a hell of a lot better than the one in the artical.

Re:My top 15 most important games...

[Fwonkas]

... sorta like including Final Fantasy VII, which, I think, most of us agree shouldn't be anywhere near that list.

Wow, no, I couldn't disagree more.

While arguments can be made over what the best FF game is, FF VII was, as far as I know, the first console RPG to become popular with the non-indoor kids.* The first FF game I played was FF II/IV, and I've played pretty much every one since, but calling FF VII unimportant is silly.

Now, if you're arguing that no FF game should be on this top-ten list, I might agree.

* Sorry -- bad "Wet Hot American Summer" reference.

Re:My top 15 most important games...

[Aokubidaikon]

What, no Sensible World of Soccer?

Re:My top 15 most important games...

[poot_rootbeer]

6) Mortal Kombat

Why Mortal Kombat instead of Street Fighter II, the game that inspired it (and about 1,000 other fighting games in the following 10 years?) While MK was notable at the time for introducing fatalties and featuring digitized pictures of real people as its character art, neither one was an idea that remained popular for very long. SFII was the true progenitor of the character-selectable one-on-one fighting genre.

7) Grand Theft Auto

Really, the top-down game from 1998? I don't think the title really achieved any cultural importance until the perspective changed to third-person 3-D in 2001 with GTA III.

Re:My top 15 most important games...

[krunoce]

It was hard to pick between MK and SF II, maybe both should be in the list. I wasted many quarters and nights playing both. But the reason I ended up picking MK is because I think there was more of a "cult" associated with MK. The darkness of the game, the gore, the fatalities, the "cheats" to unlock characters, and especially the fact that the characters were REAL PEOPLE made MK an original in my opinion.

But now that you mentioned it, SF II did spawn a bunch of "cartoonish" 1-on-1 fighting games. And the characters were great. I still remember Blanka chewing my head, damn that took a lot of power off.

As far as GTA, it didn't get really popular till 3D, but the same idea was implemented in GTA 1 & 2 (a criminal roaming the city). So it's kinda arguable. I actually played GTA 2 more than any of the others. I guess saying the "GTA series" would be more correct.

Thanks for your comments.

Re:My top 15 most important games...

[7Prime]

Each continued installment of the series became more and more wellknown up through FF8. FF6 (III), contributed a lot to making the series a household name, just as did FF4. Why FF7 has become a threshold, of sorts, is beyond me. I remember the hype surrounding FF6, it was huge, I saw moogle pictures everywhere, and everyone was talking about it. By the time FF7 came out, the genre was already snowballing, names like FF6 and Chrono Trigger continued to push the genre out into the mainstream, with no end in sight. FF7 simply continued that trend, and, once again, struck a chord with its audience. Sure, FF7 was even more so, but where do you draw the line?

I just say you don't draw one. The only revolutionary game in the series was the original, as it completely rejuvinated a genre. Without Final Fantasy, the jRPG genre would have died in infancy. I believe this list is about influential and revolutionary games, which is less subjective than bsst or most popular. FF7 was the result of a genre in full swing... it, in itself, did very little. Not that it isn't an incredible game and one of the better installments in the series, but the only one that belongs anywhere close to this list is the original, as lame as it looks to our standards, today.

Re:My top 15 most important games...

[Anonymous Coward]

Take out Mortal Kombat and put in Karate Champ and you've got something there.

Re:My top 15 most important games...

[way2slo]

Nice list... Here's mine:

1. Asteroids - space maneuvering and shooting at it's 2D best. The numerous clones were fun to play, my favorite of which was Maelstrom.
2. Pac-Man - the first fast paced game I played. (shout-outs to: Sea Quest, Kaboom, & Super Breakout)
3. Super Mario Brothers 3 - This game had great controls. SMB3 was the pinnicale with Super Mario World a close second. Perhaps I am old school, but when they went 3D with this series I think they lost something. Perhaps it was the camera angle thing and the inability to tell precisely where you were. (shout-outs to: Blaster Master, Life Force, and Gauntlet)
4. Sim City 4 - Just plain fun. Each iteration surpasses the previous. SC4 with the Rush Hour expansion rocks.
5. Doom - My first FPS game. (I missed Wolfenstein 3D somehow) Doom 3 is best incarnation.
6. Masters of Orion 3 - I have no nostalgia for 1 or 2. 3 has it's issues, but I still enjoy it.
7. Civilization 3 - Excellent series. I love 3.
8. Quake 2 - For the multi-player. 1 was an eye-opener. 2 was a blast to play, especially for all the mods like Lithium, Chaos, & Action. The gold standard for FPS games. (shout-outs to: Counter Strike, Unreal Tournament 2K4, Duke Nukem 3D, & Tron 2.0)
9. Grand Torismo 2 - Being able to own and upgrade your cars is what sold me on this one. Graphics came later.
10. Super Metroid - Excellent series.
11. Super Baseball Simulator 1.000 - only because of the ability to create a team and the super power plays. (shout-out to: RBI Baseball, All-Star Baseball, & Backyard Baseball)
12. Animal Crossing - I cannot adequately explain why, but when you spend 2 years of your life playing a game for a few hours every day it has got to make your "most important game list". It's crack for people with OCD.
13. Prince of Persia the Sands of Time - I don't know about the others, but Sands of Time is fantastic.
14. Ice Hockey - Yes, the NES one. (shout-outs to: Stanley Cup, Blades of Steel, & the NHL series)
15. Diabo 2 - a formula perfected.
16. StarCraft - yet another formula perfected. (shout-outs to: Warlords Battlecry, Total Annihilation, & WarCraft)
17. Tetris - fast and furious. (shout-outs to: Dr. Mario, Bejewled, & Minesweeper)

Re:My top 15 most important games...

[Anonymous Coward]

Quake 2 Multiplayer was my cocaine. I couldn't..stop...playing. I liked the mod with the grappling hook, the maps that were auto-downloaded from the server if you didn't have them, and the freaky 3D models. So much fun. I was a master of the railgun.

I used to be an intern at some boring job, and all I remember from it was Quake 2 and Burger King. My friend would cough whenever he saw a manager walking towards our cubicles.

huh?

[JustNiz]

Sensible world of soccer? Super Mario 3?
WTF?
These are much less cultural icons than Adventure, Space Invaders, Pacman, Donkey Kong, Unreal and many other games.

Lousy Article

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder what metrics they are using to determine importance, and why Street Fighter II was not on that list.

I wonder too, especially as Virtua Fighter is enshrined in the Smithsonian Institution.

By the way, that article is really lousy. It almost seems to be a promotion puff piece for the judges and where they work, rather than honoring the people who actually designed the games. As Indira Gandhi said,

My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was less competition there.

As an aside, this year is the 25th anniversary of the movie "Gandhi". Check it out (Indira Gandhi's father was Nehru, portrayed in the film).

List hacked together...

[fahrbot-bot]

Hack / NetHack
[God I'm old.]

Re:List hacked together...

[rickb928]

Yeah. I won't hold them to task for not remembering Balance of Power, but why not Avatar?

Oh yeah, that's right. It wasn't for Windows.

-rick

Re:List hacked together...

[Oracle of Bandwidth]

...
.@.
...

That entry got lost, otherwise it'd have to be on there. Maybe it's blind.

Re:List hacked together...

[lahvak]

No, it's there, but you are hallucinating and it looks like Sensible World of Soccer.

Re:List hacked together...

[Anonymous Coward]

I hear you. I still play modern versions of Nethack with 'leet 3D graphics (i.e. Falcon's Eye), and *still* haven't beaten it. Say what you will, Nethack defined the dungeon-crawler and introduced a vertigo-inducing depth of game play not seen in any game before or since.

If Nethack isn't important enough for them, they could have at least put in Rogue. In fact, where are the RPGs, period?

The Importance of Being Sensible

[omnilynx]

"Sensible World of Soccer" was important as the first game that nobody ever heard of. Before it was published, the game market was small enough that a new game being introduced was a big event, but "Sensible World of Soccer" managed to dodge that trend by combining one of the dullest genres of video gaming with a staid virtue.

Sensible World of Soccer

[bigwave111]

Sensible World of Soccer was one of my favorite games ever. First appearing on Commodore and Amiga, it was a hit in the UK and eventually made it to the US. It allowed you to build teams and play as either Club or World Cup teams with a perspective (bird's eye) not often used in soccer games. It eventually made its way onto SNES and Genesis, but the gameplay is addictive (very quick paced and responsive) and overall ball control is fantastic. One game I wish hadn't been left off was "Alone in the Dark." That game built the entire genre that the highly successful Resident Evil and Silent Hill series are based on.

Re:Sensible World of Soccer

[will.perdikakis]

Alone in the Dark made one hell of a movie as well. Uwe Bolle is a genius.

Re:Sensible World of Soccer

[Cyclon]

I wish they would release a version of Sensible World of Soccer for the Nintendo DS. I loved that game!

What is the world coming to?

[BinaryCodedDecimal]

What about Elite or Frontier?

Mercenary or Damocles?

*sigh*

Re:What is the world coming to?

[STrinity]

Elite is definitely the most glaring omission.

Re:What is the world coming to?

[iainl]

Nonsense. Sensi destroyed my A levels. Elite and Mercenary merely destroyed my 11+ exams.

Re:Wolfenstein was what attracted many people to i

[swb]

But couldn't you also say that Wolfenstein was also stolen from the original Apple ][ Wolfenstein that I played back in 1982?

Coincidence?

[will.perdikakis]

So SWOS made the list and will soon be released on XBOX Live? Is this a shameless promo?

Emulators

[ClamIAm]

From the article:

thousands [of old games] can only be played through computer programs called emulators, which, while readily available on the Internet, technically violate copyright laws.

This is not true: emulators only violate "copyright" law when (A) there exists DMCA-like anti-circumvention language in said law, and (B) the machine in question actually uses anti-copying mechanisms. So unless both of these apply, you're pretty much in the clear to write emulators for whatever you want.

Re:Emulators

[Perseid]

Yeah, you beat me to it. Shows that the NYT doesn't know jack about computers or copyright law. There have, in fact, been multiple court cases trying to get an injunction on an emulator and they were all thrown out. Emulators have been proven 100% legal.

Subjective lists are good for arguments--that's it

[saunderscc]

How can one deny Pong or Space Invaders or PacMan or Atari Adventure a spot on a list of important games? Like any list, the 10 presented may have some reasoning behind the selections. However, the list is still subjective. I can make a case as to why these four (and many others) should be on an important games list. Is it impact on pop culture? Innovative gameplay? Innovative technology? Graphics? We can argue about it and agree on nothing. In the end, I can still find the invisible dot using the bridge in the black castle maze which enables one to discover one of the great original easter egg rumors in video gaming--Adventure was "created by Warren Robinett." Sorry, I just had to tell someone who might get it.

Catacomb 3D: Descent?

[tepples]

But then if you want to be picky, Wolfenstein was just an updated version of Catacomb 3D Why does the title screen say "Catacomb 3D: The Descent" when Descent would become another company's product?

rogue?

[belmolis]

I'm stunned at the absence of rogue.

Look at the photo on the article

[Chicken_Kickers]

Did you guys see the photo on the article? It looks like three of guys are pissing out of the window while the rest seems amused about it.

anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Leisure Suit Larry? 16bit pr0n

Colossal cave, not Zork

[grouchyDude]

Putting Zork on that list instead of the Colossal Cave is an ridiculous and myopic
mistake which I presume is due to the fact that the guys making the list did not play
games 25 years ago. Colossal Cave is not merely the antecedent of Zork, but it was
a neat game in it's time and it had a great history.

It was based on a real cave ( http://www.colossalcave.com/ ) and it was ported to
many (now obsolete) different computers using several different languages, picking up different variations and endings along the way. Tis history page is a really good read: http://www.rickadams.org/adventure/a_history.html I think knowledge of this game is a prerequisit for being a full-strength gamer, and perhaps good knowledge for anybody who claims to be "up" on computer science.

You can even play it in the web using this link http://sundae.triumf.ca/pub2/cave/node001.html

Re:Colossal cave, not Zork

[Anonymous Coward]

> Putting Zork on that list instead of the Colossal Cave is an ridiculous and myopic
mistake

Yes! I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks that.

Don't get me wrong, I really dug Zork in the early 80's. But I don't think it was as groundbreaking.

Streetfighter

[gamer4Life]

I would nominate Streetfighter as the originator of competitive fighting games like Streetfighter 2, Tekken, Virtua fighter, Killer Instinct, Mortal Kombat, as well as movies based on them.

Elite?

[Anonymous Coward]

Elite -- What about this classic?

Warren Spector

[StreetStealth]

The same goes for me: I would peg Deus Ex as the present pinnacle of cultural achievement in any history of gaming I might write. Good sign, though: Warren Spector was on this panel!

Urr, no Tomb Raider?

[Anonymous Coward]

C'mon, a 3d runaround game where most of the time you're looking at an athletic female character's butt doesn't get into the list?

Here's what doesn't belong..

[PopeRatzo]

Most likely, future years will see additional titles inducted into this game canon.

Gee, ya think?

It's no wonder techies are said to have no soul. Think about the stunning shallowness of the above quote.

Three revolutionary things about Zork

[morcheeba]

1. Zork understood english sentences. All other text-based games used 2-word commands, like "take beer" and then "drink beer". Zork would understand things like "pick up the beer and drink it".
2. Zork used an interpreter (Z-code), so the game content was separate from the code. This allowed them to port to far more platforms than their competitors (and back then, there were a lot more platforms!)
3. Zork was marketed more like a book. When new games came out, the old games remained on the shelves because they still had value. This was a revolution in marketing game software.

Also, read this. It's a fascinating story about the company behind zork.

Re:Three revolutionary things about Zork

[Umbrel]

Tahnks, very informative, though someelse had already pointed out those, still you are the first with that link

Re:Three revolutionary things about Zork

[drxenos]

All other text-based games used 2-word commands

You must not have played very many.

Re:Three revolutionary things about Zork

[morcheeba]

Just Sierra On-Line (1980) and Scott Adams (1978-81) games. And Hunt the Wumpus (1972). :-) Remember, this was all before the IBM PC (1981). (Zork was released for desktop computers in 1980)

Re:Three revolutionary things about Zork

[drxenos]

Sure, but it was on mainframes years before. Ah, Scott Adams. Loved those.

Multiplayer

[Khomar]

I was a huge fan of both Wolfenstein and Doom (having wasted many hours of my college life on both), but I have to agree with their choice. Doom brought one huge factor into the FPS that Wolfenstein lacked: multiplayer capability. Before Doom, we used to hike up to Macintosh lab so we could play Bolo, a simple player-vs-player real network game where you fought each other in little tanks. It was actually a very fun and addictive game. But it was Doom that brought this concept to the mainstream. In Wolfenstein, once you solved the maps, there was no replay unless you downloaded your own level builder, but with Doom and multiplayer, you could play the same levels again and again. It made Doom highly addictive at the time.

I remember a couple friends of mine created a network of four computers in our dorm(at a time when they still gave out college credit to CS students who fought through the headaches of networking a couple computers), and for the next semester, there was a death match running until about 2 am every night. It was huge. Of course, later came Descent (a revolutionary game in its own right), Hexen, Quake, etc., but it was Doom that truly kicked off the revolution. Without multiplayer, it would have been a pretty substantial upgrade to the graphics, but the player-vs-player death match would change the gaming world forever.

Re:Multiplayer

[Anonymous Coward]

Spectre (1991) was a FPS (although the term didn't really exist yet) with multiplayer network play. Doom came two years later.

PCs weren't all that easy to network back in '91, so there was little reason to develop such a game for them. Macs had the advantage of easy networking--all you had to do was hook two computers together with your printer cable--so it was reasonable to make a network game.

Genre-breakers

[TitusC3v5]

It makes me sad that the genre-redefiner known as the Thief series by the now defunct Looking Glass Studios has once again been overlooked.

MOD PARENT UP

[suparjerk]

hahahaha!!

Write Emulator != Play game

[raehl]

You're write that creating an emulator isn't a copyright violation. (You're wrong that writing an emulator that violates DMCA is a copyright violation; it's not, it's a DMCA violation.)

But the copyright violation GP is referring to is not creating the emulator. The violation is copying the game ROM to use on the emulator, as the game ROM is most definitely copywritten.

Re:Write Emulator != Play game

[ClamIAm]

But the copyright violation GP is referring to is not creating the emulator. The violation is copying the game ROM to use on the emulator, as the game ROM is most definitely copywritten.

Where in the article does it state this?

What we need is a rubric

[Glowing Fish]

The original list, like so many other lists I have seen naming the "Top 10" etc, seems to be unbalanced. Some things are put in that shouldn't be (Sensible World of Soccer)?!?!!? and there were many exclusions, (Zelda, Super Mario Brothers, Pac-Man, many Microprose games). And we can all argue over what goes where, but what you really need is some sort of rubric to judge games.

For example, how do you compare Super Mario Brothers and Super Mario Brothers 3? Obviously Super Mario Brothers 3 was much more polished, but it only owes its success to the originality of the first. How do you compare a game with great graphics, sound and story lines, but whose gameplay is selecting from a menu over and over (like Final Fantasy VII) to a game that is almost pure concept (like Tetris)? How would you compare The Legend of Zelda, a great adventure/RPG game that everyone has played, with a game like Terranigma, a fascinating adventure/RPG game that was never released in the United States? Tomb Raider could be translated into a movie, which Civilization couldn't, do does that make it a better game?

For all of these questions and more, you have to have a rubric, a means of grading, that you can explain your choices. A rubric would include graphics, sound, gameplay concept, originality, cultural impact, popularity, immersiveness, technical achievement, amongst other things, so that we could fairly rate games against each other. Without that, its just tossing out suggestions and haggling.

Re:What we need is a rubric

[Tickenest]

I am willing to bet that you've never even heard of Sensible World of Soccer.

Re:What we need is a rubric

[Aeonite]

How do you compare Super Mario Brothers and Super Mario Brothers 3? Obviously Super Mario Brothers 3 was much more polished, but it only owes its success to the originality of the first. How do you compare Star Wars and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back? Obviously Empire was much more polished, but it only owes its success to the originality of the first.

Re:What we need is a rubric

[7Prime]

You said Final Fantasy VII... fuck you.

The only thing that game ever did was to spawn the term "fanboy", as well as to give teenage boys the idea that it was now okay to whack-off to video game characters. ;)

Re:What we need is a rubric

[Glowing Fish]

It should also be pointed out that the list is of "important" games, not "best" games.
The lists aren't totally the same!

please mod parent up... grandparent is an idiot.

[Anonymous Coward]

dune II was fun. and warcraft was clearly a dune two with orcs. i played both and had a lot of fun with both, but it's very clear that they were more or less the same.

Re:Wolfenstein was what attracted many people to i

[Kismet]

This kind of thing is very subjective. While it does seem that Wolfenstein represented the birth of the genre as well as any of the early fps games, the hype surrounding Doom was enormous. I think it was a huge leap ahead of Wolf 3d, and I think this is reflected in the fact that fps today looks a whole lot more like Doom than like castle Wolfenstein. Wolfenstein was only "kinda" 3d. Doom really did bring the 3rd dimension, and that defined the genre more than anything. It was the breakout point.

I thought another good argument was for Dune II over warcraft. Dune II was very, very significant for the rts genre (and hugely popular, as I remember). Dozens of games copied that idea. Warcraft was significant because it was the first rts that allowed network play... and this was the missing link in rts. The whole idea becaomes immeasurably better when you add that one little thing.

Personally, I would have preferred to see Sierra Online representing the Adventure Genre. I think they defined the graphical adventure game. We have very few text adventures left. If they can choose Doom and Warcraft over Wolfenstein and Dune II, then surely King's Quest ought win out over Zork.

Re:Wolfenstein was what attracted many people to i

[jemenake]

Frankly, I'm a little surprised that they included Doom, yet didn't mention Wolf3D. Like you said, Doom is just the game where the graphics and sound got really slick, but that's more a result of them putting more money into it.

On the other hand, when I played Wolf3D for the first time, it was one of those "Holy mother of god!" moments, when you realize that gaming would never be the same. Where historians sometimes look at the discovery of the Americas or the end of World War I or II as "turning points", where they can look at the way the world was before and after and notice distinct changes that occured, I think Wolf3D was one of those turning points for gaming.

Before then, you had games like Wizardry or Ulitma, which sometimes did some 3D rendering, but it was turn-based, instead of real-time, and you could only turn in 90-degree increments, and there was little, if any, texture mapping on the surfaces. In a stroke, the arrival of Wolf3D suddenly created a world in which that just wouldn't suffice anymore. Granted, Wolf3D wasn't necessarily the first... but I think it was the first that almost everybody got to see.

Re:Wolfenstein was what attracted many people to i

[Tom]

The difference between Wolfenstein and Doom was mostly that Doom was the first 3D game. Yes, I know the engine was 2.5D, but it created the impression of 3D gameplay, while Wolfenstein was flat and didn't really add anything we hadn't seen on the C64 years before, except more impressive graphics.

a list for late thirty something gamers

[0111 1110]

Sounds like the makers of that list are over 30 at least. I played and enjoyed SpaceWar (an ASCII star trek game like Super StarTrek) on my friend's DEC PDP-11. IIRC, there was no monitor, just a dot matrix printer (or teletype?) that crudely printed out the klingon ships as plus/minus signs or maybe asterisks (I can't remember which). I liked it a lot at the time, although I must have been like 9 years old or something. Those huge floppy disks were really something special as well (8"?). I would list some classic older games as (in no particular order): SpaceWar, Zork, Cranston Manor, Wizard and the Princess, Akalabeth, Crush, Crumble, and Chomp, LodeRunner, Choplifter, Archon, Castle Wolfenstein (both 2D and 3D), Pole Position, Breakout, Pong, Space Invaders, and Doom. Of course the original Adventure should be mentioned as well. For me the order was: DEC PDP-11 games like Adventure and SpaceWar, then Atari 2600 games, then Atari 400/800 and Apple II games. I think Wolfenstein3D and Doom really started the modern era of computer games. After that games became more graphically advanced. Although one of my favorite games of all time, Ultima Underworld beat (in terms of time) both games to that style of flight sim 3D graphics. But it was an RPG, not a shooter. I envy the children of today, who have games so much more graphically advanced.

Re:a list for late thirty something gamers

[unicomp]

Don't waste time envying the children of today -- look forward to your retirement. Our generation will settle for nothing less than top of the line gaming rigs and fat connections whilst enjoying our golden years. It's gonna make childhood seem boring!

Myst (et al)

[kjcole]

Myst was one of the few games I ever purchased. I'm not into the "run-run-run, shoot-shoot-shoot, run-run-run" type of game play. Myst, for it's day, had beautiful visuals, a nice soundtrack, and, if played without hints, no obvious purpose. One had to discover everything, and could do so at your own pace. (True Zork had some of the same characteristics, but I think Myst stands on its own.)

The only other game I ever dropped money on was "Dragon's Lair", as Dirk the Daring was just fun to watch, what, with the clueless expressions and grunts. ;-)

Re:Myst (et al)

[7Prime]

I'd actually agree about Myst, even though you should probably hire a bodygaurd to ward off all the adventure-game fans who are now going to try to murder you in your sleep. But I'd agree if only for the reason that it was one of the first games to make people wake up and realize that video games could be artistic. Suddenly, parents, who had said that video games were nothing but mindless fluf, had a conundrum on their hands. As for the genre of adventure games? It innovated and influenced surprisingly little.

Oregon Trail?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, they didn't include the game that introduced computer games to an entire generation of non-geeks?

1010 games...

[MeanderingMind]

... in binary.

Judging from the previous comments, there is a lot of confusion over the selectino criteria. Some of these games appear to have been selected for their cultural impact as the first "mass hits" of their genre. Others simply for being technically advanced or "first". It seems rather contradictory.

1) Spacewar - While a pivotal moment in gaming history, I don't remember the MIT guys mass producing Spacewar machines. It seems odd to have Spacewar on the list but not Pong.

2) Star Raiders - I don't know much about this one. The online sources I've read leave little doubt it was an important game, but I'm not sure if it is as important as many games that were left out.

3) Zork - Text adventures are certainly important enough to have an entry here. I'll let those more knowledgable argue over which one it should have been.

4) Tetris - This can not be argued. It's cultural significance is crazy. TO my knowledge it spawned its genre, was a massive hit, came from Russia during the cold war, made the Gameboy popular, and gave my dad CTS.

5) SimCity - The stated reasons in the article make sense to me, but I would also consider Life. In it's own way that was a god game. You had direct control of your world's structure, although not the behaviour of the life that formed. You could at a whim destroy the entire ecosystem leaving only chaos. It seems to deserve a mention somewhere on the list.

6) Super Mario Bros 3 - The only confusion here is why this was singled out over any other. The stated reasons don't really mesh with the dynamics of the other games on the list (especially when Warcraft gets an entire series in). The original Super Mario Bros was the first mass hit, if not the first, of the side-scrolling platformers. It introduced secrets hidden in ways that were completely outside the box compared to any other game at the time. While Super Mario Bros 3 was tied into a movie, why couldn't we specify the series? Was Sunshine that bad?

7) Civilization - I won't argue this one, I lost too much of my youth to it.

8) Doom - The first of the truly controversial games, and the first to be tenuously tied to a school shooting. Whether by fame or infamy, it deserves a spot.

9) Warcraft - The original game, for all it owes to Dune II, made the genre popular. The second and third games had all sorts of spiffy stuff they did, but I wonder why we couldn't have left those out for the first. They may be excessively popular, but the first brought the genre out of the shadows. All in all, listing a series as one of the top ten games is confusing.

10) And here's where I get confused. This game is a serious shock moment on the list, because I have absolutely no idea what it is. It's supposedly a really popular sports game, but I never heard of it. It was released in 1992 according to wikipedia. There were plenty of popular sports games before it (tecmo super bowl or Nintendo World Cup) and one year later the first incredibly popular sports game, NBA Jam, was released. I never heard of this game before. For it's release date the graphics look incredibly dated. The only thing it seems to have going for it is an upfield view as opposed to a cross-field view. This game really doesn't seem to deserve its place.

Re:1010 games...

[antiaktiv]

I bet everyone who says they didn't play Sensible World of Soccer are from a certain country where soccer had very little impact before the 1994 world cup. We played that game like crazy here in Europe.

And for RPG...

[CoolCat23]

...no Arena / Daggerfall ?
I think the RPG community owes Bethesda a huge deal for the Elder Scrolls series, just like Nintendo for Zelda on consoles !
These games were the first to offer such a huge world to live & fight in, with thousands of books to read, houses to buy, horses to mount, and even a boat !
(and buggy savegames... *ahem*)

Re:And for RPG...

[7Prime]

Okay... I'll give Bethesda a thanks:

"Thank you, Bethesda, for fucking up a perfectly good genre of games."

There, ya happy?

Multiplayer

[phorm]

Multiplayer (It's what made the game for me). Being able to gib my friends massively added to playability. Otherwise, wolfenstein was still around the same as similar-genre games such as "corridor 7" etc.

(as far as fun gibbing goes, I quite enjoyed ROTT, although I do believe it was after wolf3d/doom)

Quake, not Doom or Wolfenstein

[unicomp]

Shooters up to and including Doom were two dimensional games that tried hard to look 3D. Quake was was the first truly three dimensional FPS, which set the mold for every FPS that followed it. Nobody makes FPS's in 2.5D any more, unless we're talking about limited platforms like mobile devices. In a sense Doom teased us with possibilities, while Quake actually delivered the goods. There were a few truly 3d games such as Descent which preceded Quake slightly, but none of them had ALL the essentials of the modern FPS the way Quake did.

Re:Quake, not Doom or Wolfenstein

[7Prime]

Give me a break, okay? Who cares about the technology used. "2.5D" (what a stupid name), played pretty much like the "true 3D" games of their time. Basically, the only fundimental difference was that they used sprites for characters and objects instead of polygons. But the world was fully 3D. Some "2.5D" games even allowed for vertical movement and allowed the bridging of platforms (Rise of the Triad and Duke Nukem 3D). I hate the term 2.5D, it's so missleading. Even today, many games use sprites to denote objects (Final Fantasy XII, even, has a surprising amount of them), but the gameplay and environment, now and then, are fully 3D.

No Quake?

[SC.Kane]

How can they exclude quake? Wasn't it one of the first FPS (if not the first) that was supporting 3d models? Not to mention how many thousands of people played some version(ie Team Fortress or Threewave CTF) of it on the net. Quake gave birth to QSpy which lead to gamespy.

Re:No Quake?

[shish]

A 2.5D FPS is basically the same game as a 3D FPS; Turning sprites into models is a very small jump compared to the jump of "nothing" to "FPS"

What about Sleeping Gods Lie?

[Anonymous III]

An FPS that predates Doom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_Sleeping_Gods_Lie / Im sad

The Most Meaningless Articles

[6-tew]

I guess it's been about a month since the last greatest or most influential or most superbest game article got some play here. These are about as important as Game of the Year awards. Every month a new one comes out and repeats, with minor variations on a worn theme. YAWN.

Re:Subjective lists are good for arguments--that's

[denttford]

Pong, Pac-man, absolutely. Space Invaders, maybe. Atari Adventure? Decent game but hardly in that company.

I just have to wonder where the hell Street Fighter 2 is. The genre may be taking a rest but thats only because it was beaten to death (no pun intended) by imitators through the 90s. Also, the polygon versions of the genre were a big aspect in the rise of the PSX and helped bring about 3D gaming as a whole.

Also, I'm a bit suprised that the Carmen Sandiego series was snubbed. They are educational games which didn't suck, have been released for nearly 20 years, and proved to be something of a public phenomenon - spawning three television shows.

ignoring Herzog Zwei and RTT

[NuShrike]

... ignoring that Herzog_Zwei on the Sega Genesis heavy influenced Dune II which preceded to kick off the RTT (Real Time Tactics) genre.

Real Time Strategy games is a misnomer since strategy involves moving troops around like Risk and resolving battles at the macro level; not micromanagement of individual units as most of the games currently play. Making units dance in Warhammer 40K to confuse the AI lock-on? Come on!

Re:ignoring Herzog Zwei and RTT

[nuzak]

Real Time Strategy games is a misnomer since strategy involves moving troops around like Risk and resolving battles at the macro level; not micromanagement of individual units as most of the games currently play. Making units dance in Warhammer 40K to confuse the AI lock-on? Come on!

There's hope with Supreme commander.

RED: "Haha, you can't hit me"
BLUE: [launches nukes]
BLUE: "dodge this"

Re:Wolfenstein was what attracted many people to i

[Anonymous Coward]

I would agree except for one thing and that's that Doom gave us networked co-op and deathmatch play (above and beyond interesting maps and guns). So if they want to say "Doom created a multiplayer FPS that set the stage (and bar) for every FPS of its time and to follow," yeah, I suppose I can buy that.

Other than that, yeah, I also tend to get a bit annoyed when people think that a genre starts only when it becomes cool...

ummm...

[Cynonamous Anoward]

Legend of Zelda?
Final Fantasy?

Those two games alone did more for modern gaming than any, with the exception of super mario 1, which was also left out. They brought viable formulas for the RPG and adventure games, giving us a whole new way to play: long quests, detailed plots, epic battles. For the first time, games were so huge, they needed yet another new feature: the NES battery-backed RAM.

and what about tomb raider? Let's not be blinded by it's embarrassing recent history. tomb raider 1 and 2 cracked the 3D world wide open. Until tomb raider, the only thing you could really do with a 3D engine was make First Person Shooters. As innovative as Wolf3D and Doom were (there's two more for your list, btw), 3D engines didn't really come into their own until Tomb Raider. It showed the world how a little creative thinking could make any concept, not just shooters, viable in 3D.

Re:ummm...

[7Prime]

Yeah, but you see, those are console games, and we all know that console games are for children, right folks?

Yeah... I couldn't agree more. This list is extremely PC biased.

By "Life" do you mean...

[svunt]

Life by John Conway, or life by your mom?

It's called the tipping point.

[ClioCJS]

Tipping point, dude. Importance is not defined as first, or they would just use the word first. Importance is a different word. Certain games achieved certain statuses by reaching a tipping point where they became "big".

A game that 80% of people played, that was the second game in a genre of which >50% of people ultimately played -- is going to be considered more important than a game that only 2% of people played, that was the first game in a genre that 100% of people play today. Popularity means a lot in importance.

The most important horror movie isn't the first horror movie.

Oh, and it's all based on DONKEY KONG, actually! :)

Re:It's called the tipping point.

[TheJasper]

While I think any attempt at making a list like this is going to run into...criticism, I do believe they were either entirely clueless or they got messed up making decisions in committee fashion. At the very least they missed dome important titles. As to where you decide importance...Why should it be number of people that played it. Dune II was the tipping point for rts. It was a popular game that did well at the time. Even if later overshadowed by Warcraft, or preceded by more primitive games, Dune II was very obviously the place where rts took off.

No Populous?

[Tim C]

I know the god-game genre isn't exactly huge, but Populous is generally credited with being the first; how can you ignore a game that created an entire genre?

(And no Elite either? For shame)

Re:No Populous?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you! That list is utter garbage.

No "Elite" or "Populus"? "Sensible soccer" representing sports games instead of the King of football games "Kick Off"? "Doom" chosen over "Castle Wolfienstein"? What exactly did "Warcraft" bring to the table that "Dune II" didn't have? Why no representative for online RPGs? Surely "Everquest" (or similiar) should gets some kind of mention?

This is just a list of somebody's fav games over the years and nothing more.

Re:No Populous?

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. Populous & Elite were truly ground-breaking.
Elite especially. I mean, a true (wireframe) 3D space combat/trading game in 16k of RAM!!
Braben & Bell were geniuses.

Re:No Populous?

[Dogtanian]

Elite was done in 32K of RAM (though the screen probably swallowed much of that). Although Star Raiders is a much simpler game, it was equally (if not more) innovative for the time it came out, and probably influenced Elite.

That having been said, I think this list is stupid; Sensible World of Soccer, whatever its merits does not credibly belong there.

Re:No Populous?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because more than ten genres exist if you allow such genres as "god game". If spawning a genre meant automatic inclusion, this would be a list of "the games that spawned the ten genres we considered most important", which is not necessarily the same as "the ten games we consider most important".

I can agree with you that Elite should've been mentioned, though.

That whooshing sound

[Overzeetop]

I'm not sure which is funnier, the fact that such a simple premise was a pretty serious deal when it was automated (and so many expensive computer cycles "wasted" playing the game way back when) - or that there are that many /. moderators which don't know about the game, and modded me a troll. I didn't explain it because I thought it wouldn't need an explanation here. Of course, that last part is "sad" funny, not "ha ha" funny.

[cue jokes about /. mod without a life...]

Re:That whooshing sound

[Anonymous Coward]

First, it's not really a game. It's more of a screensaver.

Second, I'm perfectly well aware of game-of-life and I thought you were trolling too. You need to be clearer when you're communicating with just text.

Re:That whooshing sound

[Overzeetop]

If you think it's a screen saver, you must be too young to remember (or too old...that happens to me too) that there were actual scandals over people using what was then very expensive computing cycles to run their models.

Don't forget Larry

[tr1907]

What about Leisure Suit Larry???

Re:Wolfenstein was what attracted many people to i

[Dalroth]

Hardly. Doom introduced multi-player death match to the masses and ushered in the era of online multiplayer gaming. That is Doom's real legacy.

Bryan

OK now I'm confused

[Umbrel]

Could the one who modded up explain what part of it is flamebait?

Re:OK now I'm confused

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't post and mod the same topic.

Re:OK now I'm confused

[PresidentEnder]

Flamebait (and troll) moderations usually mean "I disagree with you," while Offtopic moderations mean "I don't understand the purpose of moderation" and In(sightful|teresting|formative) means "you and I have the same opinion."

However, your attack on Zork, because you didn't know it existed, probably qualifies you as a troll. Seriously, I was born in '87, and I know about Zork.

To answer another one of the original questions, SMB3 was special because it featured non-linear gameplay. The ability to move around the game world, instead of just being carried to the next level by some benevolent deity, gives one a very free feeling, regardless of whether or not you actually use this ability to move backwards or sideways in the story.

Re:OK now I'm confused

[suckmysav]

Yes you can, as long as you post AC

Empire, the Wargame of the Century

[WalterBright]

Empire pretty much invented the strategy type computer game back in 1977, and was selected as Computer Gaming World's 1987 game of the year.

http://www.classicempire.com/

Yes, I wrote it :-)

Re:Empire, the Wargame of the Century

[neoRUR]

I'm glad you mentioned Empire. This was the basis that all RTS games were built on, and it still has more depth then all of them.

Also don't forget Hack and all it's variants. This is what Diablo and all hack and slash games were based on.

And Crossfire - Multi user dungeon crawl.

Nettrek - enough said.

abbermud or any variant.

And X-Pilot.

And there were tons of games in the original unix disto that were the basis for all today. Including maze.

And, this is the best part, they were all OpenSource and anyone could change them.

Re:Empire, the Wargame of the Century

[Anonymous Coward]

zOMG!!11

So you're the evil genius who stole years away from my life!! Oh, god, it's all coming back to me...

Heh, on the home page it even says: "Warning: Empire has been known to be addictive. Typical games can take several hours." I remember when a _single turn_ would take hours! Moving all those gazillion units and trying to keep sane while remembering what maneuver were each of them part of!

I still remember what the unit logos represent! Moby Games seems to have a nice little page about Empire http://www.mobygames.com/game/empire-wargame-of-th e-century

Love it or hate it, it's a classic. Or should I say, THE classic!

*MUST -- NOT -- REDOWNLOAD -- OH NO-- IT -- BECKONS -- TO -- ME*

Surely you actually meant...

[alispguru]

...rogue?

The precursor to hack, which added at least a year to my sentence^Wstay at the University of Maryland in the 1980's?

The game referenced in the classic AI paper ROG-O-MATIC: A Belligerent Expert System?

Re:Surely you actually meant...

[fahrbot-bot]

You are correct Sir! I had thought of Rogue, but someone had already posted it. I initially played Rogue, but switched to Hack as it was more challenging. Don't get me wrong, it was easy enough to get killed in battle in either game, but I felt that Hack was really trying to put its foot in my ass.

For example, if you didn't eat in Rogue, you'd faint, wake in a number of turns, stumble and faint - repeat. Eventually, though, you could find food and play on. In Hack, no food and you die -- plus you had to deal with your hungry dog (or cat) the next time you played.

In fact, I still have and play a copy of NetHaxk on my home PC.

"NetHack is widely considered one of the hardest games of all time, due to its intentional lack of a facility to reload a saved game after making a mistake." -- NetHack

Psh.

[kitsunewarlock]

Zork was just another attempt to bring DnD to a computer world. Warcraft was Warhammer...3D...

I'm only grumpy in the morning.

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out Major Nelson's "Blogger Breakfast" podcast for some *choice* sound clips of Zonk. ;-)

Street Fighter II

[snitmo]

Street Fighter II, which defined the Fighting Game genre, should be in the list.

Re:Street Fighter II

[swordgeek]

What genre is that? The "complete crap that didn't die when it should have" genre?

Every fighting game out there has sucked, because the genre sucks. It's like the gaming equivalent of rap music.

Marathon?

[v1]

Though I detest Bungee for selling out to microsoft, they had one of the most ground-breaking games of their time. Marathon featured 3D maps (not merely 2D, it had stairs and lifts) as well as real physics models, (your bullets and you were affected by gravity) ammunition limits (what, no 999 bullets in your pistol? really!) and used a physics model that allowed for adjustment of things like gravity and weight. I beleve it was also the first game to allow you to be submerged in a "medium" such as water, muck, and lava. (with the physics models adjusting accordingly, try firing an RPG in the water...)

There was nothing even remotely like it until after the realease of the second in the series, Marathon II Durandall. They even published the map editor with M2 and you could make your own levels and even modify the physics of the game. Monsters could be set to trigger on a variety of events, including each other, and it was possible to "pull" several other mobs so if you were spotted, by the time the mob found his way to you (and he WOULD find a way to get to you) he may have pulled several other mobs with him. MMORPG fans will recognize the "train" effect.

Mobs could even aggro each other. If a fighter's missile weapon hit a grunt one too many times the fighter would be on the grunt's aggro list and it was quite possible to get them sufficiently pissed off at each other that they would mostly kill each other.

Even with all that it had a flawless network play for up to 16 people. (admittedly poor internet performance, but LAN was smooth) Unfortunately multiplayer was only for the arenas, not for the actual game.

And the game... the depth of the plot and storyline was unheard of at that time. Even moving as fast as you could you might get to the end in a week. Most players took months to beat the game, and spent the next several months discovering the amazing variety of hidden rooms, secret weapons, and amazing powerups hidden on every level, of which there were what, 20? Large and unique, each map with a theme that set it visually apart from the other levels. (how could you not get tired of seeing the same room over and over and over again in Halo??) The different levels used different color pallates for the walls, ceiling, floors, etc, and all of them had a unique background sound.

Although it did not have dynamic lighting, individual map squares (3-8 sided polys actually!) could be lit individually, and even dynamically change by itself or due to player action. Ambient sounds were also present, and were variable by distance and in stereo - you could follow a sound to its source if you were wearing headphones.

It took almost four years for anything like Marathon I to come out on any platform, it was groundbreaking on every front. Doom was the only thing like it at the time and that was sad by comparison.

It occurs to me that in some ways Marathon was more real than even today's games. Think of a FPS game you like. Can you turn while you are falling? How is that possible? You can't turn while falling in Marathon. And ignoring the 999 bullets in your pistol, what happens after you have shot seven of them? You shoot #8 right? In marathon you see his hand come out, drop out the clip, jam in a new clip, and cock the gun. You can't shoot while you're doing that, so emptying a clip in preparation for a tough encounter was one of many strategy decisions you had to make. It was years before any other FPS decided that guns needed to be reloaded. Authentic sound FX too, and bullets that ricocheted off a wall would have one of several random visual effects result on the wall.

Not only did you have to worry about ammo and health, but some levels were hard vacuum and you had to manage your air as well. Certain mobs were resistant to certain weapons also, so you had to be peticular about who you used your limited fusion pistol shots on.

If something exploded on the floor beside you, you didn't just take damage. You were tossed up into the air and over

Re:Marathon?

[lawnboy5-O]

Ditto, Ditto, Ditto I still have all three Marathon Games in its collector pack - this was the game that started the RPG frenzy we know of today. There is no doubt in my mind this should be on the list - even if it was not known to all or played by all.

Re:Marathon?

[7Prime]

As much as I love Marathon, I'll have to call you on some things. Actually, the maps were completely 2D. Even though they had stairs and lifts, you could never bridge one object over another. They did a lot of great level design to make you forget that, but the map design was still 2D, but with height modifiers for each section of ground (which Doom did as well). You could never walk under a lift, or have a bridge above a section of ground. Now, the envirnonment could include polygons above the ground, but they could never be walked on. The first game that I remember that allowed for this was a little known game called Rise of the Triad, in which there was full vertical movement, spring boards, and sections of floor and lifts that you could walk under (and be crushed by, in the case of lifts). It was also the first game to make marks in the wall where the bullet hit. Duke Nukem 3D was, unfortunately, probably the first well-known game to encorporate these elements.

Marathon did, however, introduce a whole lot of new things to the genre It was the first to have a dual-trigger system, and wield two weapons at once. This isn't exactly an innovation, but it was the first FPS to have adventure game elements, where a "complex" story would unfold over the course of the game, and effect the gameplay. It was also the first to include NPCs (which were good for little more than killing and getting ammo... but still).

Yeah, Marathon was definitely a genre-altering game... sadly, it's Mac-only appearance (until the third installment), made it far less known. I have no doubt Doom would have been completely overshadowed, had either bungie ported it to windows, or had the mac been more popular than it was.

Re:Marathon?

[Badge 17]

If I had to pick what game came after Marathon that was worthy, I would have to say Deus Ex. But I don't see that on the list either... the author of this list clearly lacks experience! Just so you know, one of the authors of the list is Warren Spector. I think he knows Deus Ex better than you.

Also, you can turn while falling.

Re:Marathon?

[orielbean]

Here is a cool little bit I stumbled on whilst researching Durendal. Durendal was the sword of the paladin Roland (under Charlemange). Famous sword; featured in the Song of Roland several times. Cortana (of Halo fame) is a Danish sword, which features an inscription likening it to Durendal and Joyeuse (a French sword). Random, yes, but seems quite deliberate on the part of Bungie.

Re:Marathon?

[Anonymous Coward]

sadly, it's Mac-only appearance (until the third installment), made it far less known.

Small correction, the second installment, Durandal, made it over to the Wintel side. Marathon Infinity, (game #3,) was again a Macintosh-only affair.

Re:Marathon?

[monktus]

Another thing about Marathon was that it was scary. Sure, I was maybe 14 when I originally played it, but I gave it a go again recently and it still creeped me out.

And although many people aren't familiar with the Marathon series, fewer are familiar with Bungie's equivalent of Wolfenstein, Pathways into Darkness. While not as technically accomplished, it was also very atmospheric and way ahead of its time.

Re:Marathon?

[virg_mattes]

> Also, you can turn while falling.

I think he means the physically impossible rotary pivot. To test this against diving, get up on a diving board, jump off, pivot ninety degrees to the right by the time you're halfway to the water and then stop pivoting. Most game engines allow this sort of thing, even allowing a player to jump forward, turn to the side to shoot, and then turn to the front again to land and run, which is completely unrealistic.

Virg

Re:Marathon?

[v1]

Marathon itself for me was tense but never really scarry. The game being open sourced, several whole new scenario games popped up. One of them was Aleph-1. THAT game scared me. The background music and ambient sounds would make most horror film directors jealous. Play it sometime. If you DON'T at least jump back a few inches from your screen when the first big nasty jumps you from around the corner, you must be dead. (or soon will be...) And that first level was downright claustrophobic.

Re:Marathon?

[v1]

I suppose we would call this a "2.5-D" map. The map itself was 2-D but had height attributes for different areas, and the player's movement was 3-D. It wasn't true 3-d mapping like say, Descent, but you wouldn't really notice it playing.

Bridges weren't possible, but they did a good job of faking it. There's one room you can't get into on one level that has windows you can look inside, and from the two perspectives you can see into the room, there is a functional bridge in the room. It serves no purpose on the level other than to say "haha, look what we can do with the map editor!". It's a fraud of course, but a good fraud.

Re:Marathon?

[7Prime]

Probably the most interesting 2d/3d map editing came out of a game called Avara, a Mac-only Mech/platformer game distributed by Ambrosia Software. The game read files created by a simple, vector-based drawing program, "ClarisWorks Draw", to create a true, polygonal 3D map. Rectangle objects were used to denote all walls/floors, and other structural polygons. With each object, the designer would include a small text object that contained a set of instructions: things like depth or slope of the object. The result was that fully 3D maps could be created with a simple multi-layer drawing program. Objects could bridge each other without problem, so fairly highly sophisticated platformer style maps could be constructed. Unfortunately, the lack of any textural data made the game look graphically outdated, and there-for could never have been a runaway success.

I have no idea how Marathon or Doom maps were edited, but I imagine it was a similar concept, although I have no clue why layering objects on top of each other was such a difficult task.

Re:Marathon?

[v1]

Marathon's map editor viewed the map from straight above, and the vertical axis could not be adjusted. The map was actually drawn on a 2D plane, and was composed of 3-8 sided polygons. Where two polygons shared a side, there was technically a wall but it usually had no texture and the player could move and see through it. On sides that did not meet with other polygons, formed a wall that a texture could be applied to in a very flexible way. Each map had a pallate of around 30 detailed textures following a theme for that level, the textures can be zoomed, rotated, or shifted.

Each polygon had a height, all polygons started at the "absolute floor" and extended up to their height. because they had no bottom height, bridges could not be made. To clarify, every polygon had a floor and a ceiling height, and the floor was always below the ceiling, creating a single void area between the two. Therefore all polygons extended to the very bottom of the map and to the very top of the map, with an empty space in between.

Unlike most games of the time, 4D space was possible. It's hard to describe here, but if you built a chain of polygons slowly looping in a circle, you could get back to where you started. But unless you linked the last polygon with the first one by sharing a side, they really weren't in the same place. This made for a strange effect because the ambient sounds were not limited by the polygons in any way, and were placed at specific x,y locations on the map, and so if you had a 4d map it was possible to hear the same sound effect from an apparently different location. This included the sound of munitions going off, so you could hear a grenade blowing up right next to you when you were a good 40 second travel from where the explosion occurred. One of the bundled maps was called "4D Space", and had three different areas (somewhat ring shaped) overlapping each other. The map was very compact as viewed from the editor, but seemed very large when you were in it. You could run around a post three complete times before returning to your original location. That map made it very hard to judge where other people were at by the sound of the weapons going off, and made it extremely easy to lose someone that was chasing you.

Since the polygons only had a single height attribute, all surfaces you walked on were flat level. Stairs were possible because they were just strings of linked polygons with slightly different heights, and the game engine allowed the player to run between polygons as long as their height was an acceptable transition. (short amount up, or any amouny you wanted down, AAAaaahhhh!) but ramps were not possible. Though you could fake a ramp by using a lot of polygons spaced closely that differed very little in height.

Doors were also polygons. A typical door was a poly 4ft wide and 3 inches thick. Polygon heights could be adjusted by events and controls in game, so you would walk up to a differently textured area on a wall and hit the action key, and the height of the poly would adjust to its other setting. (or you could hit a switch on the wall or just wait for it to move) Speed of travel was adustable, as was an accompanying sound while it moved. So as you might imagine, all doors were more like you see in sci fi shows, they were doors that slid upward or downward, since it was not possible for a poly to move sideways. Interesting restriction, but it was almost effortless for them to implement what could have been a very difficult concept to integrate into the map engine.

Lifts/elevators were also possible by moving onto a poly and triggering an action that adjusted the poly's height. Polys getting taller would lift you up at their speed, polys moving down would drop out from under you and if they were too fast they could leave you behind. (remember marathon used real physics, including gravity and inertia, to manage the player)

Makes me want to play it again. I've never tried playing marathon on an intel, hope it works...

Descent was like m

Hmmm, some odd choices...

[7Prime]

I'd agree with the list for the most part, but no Final Fantasy or Dragon Warrior? They spawned/rejuvinated (how ever you want to look at it) an entire genre. I mean, they're no Super Mario Bros or (which is also strangely absent from the list), but I don't understand how they're any less significant than Civ or Warcraft.

The inclusion of Mario 3 really throws the list off balance as well. If we're speaking about the most influential games, then Mario 3 needs to go (even if it is possibly the best in the series) since Mario 1 is far more influential. If we're talking a top 10 list of games from an aesthetic standpoint, then half of the other games shouldn't be on there. The inclusion of Warcraft AND Civ AND Sim City, three games from closely related genres that all influenced each other, just leads me to believe that there's a lot of cherry picking going on.

Also... what the heck is Sensible World of Soccar? I've never even heard of it, and it looks like a pretty recent game, not like there haven't been gobs of sports games since the beginning of time.

Re:Hmmm, some odd choices...

[orainsear]

Sensible World of Soccer was released in 1994 on Amiga (I remember buying it). Basically it's a top down view football (soccer) game - and was/is brilliant in the playability department. Perhaps it's not to everyone's taste, but I'm surprised Elite doesn't doesn't get a mention.

Re:Hmmm, some odd choices...

[iainl]

SWOS (Proper '94 SWOS, not the recent PS2 update) was a life-destroyer (and stick destroyer) of Elite proportions in the UK. It was really the first computer football game to be great, and remains the best to many. Legions of British males bought Amigas purely for the game, and those tiny characters inspire devotion that even Final Fantasy would dream of.

As for the balance of the list, the implication seems to be that everyone chose one each, without regard for what anyone else had picked.

Re:Wolfenstein was what attracted many people to i

[eloki]

In terms of cultural significance, I think Doom had greater impact than Wolfenstein. Yes, most /. readers know that Doom is just an enhanced version of Wolfenstein, but Doom was a much bigger hit than Wolfenstein. It's not just a technical achievement per se, but the impact on the industry and culture. As other posters have pointed out, Doom popularised multiplayer deathmatch in a way that no previous game had done. I don't think industry competitors sat up and took note after Wolfenstein, but Doom spawned a bunch of clones - turning FPSs into a mainstream genre for the industry. Doom eventually even spawned that movie.

If you look at it as more than just "who made this kind of game first?" then I think the choices they made are at least reasonable, even if you don't always agree. Such judgements will always be subjective.

bolo

[awtbfb]

Gah! Where's Bolo??? We're talking serverless multiplayer games at the tail of the 80's. Not exactly P2P, but everything else back then was client-server. Stuart Cheshire got a thesis out of it, no less!

Re:bolo

[meese]

Finally! Someone who gets it! Bolo was pretty much the best game I have ever played. Sure, newer games have flash and other things, but I was talking to some folks recently about why they like Super Smash Bros and the answer was 'the depth' of the game. Well, that's what Bolo had: simplicity yet depth, strategy yet action, and most of all, balance.

That makes some sense...

[Rix]

But why would you want to pay homage to the yearly vomit of dull, repetitive sports games? And why not acknowledge the full vision, infinite fps massively multiplayer version that's been available since the invention of the ball?

And yet again..

[sqldr]

Another US-centric "top ten games of all time" which misses out what was happening everywhere else. How can a list like this exist without Elite? Last Ninja? Pole Position? And the "physical" games - Dance Dance Revolution! Could go on all night..

First Council of Nicaea

[Baldrson]

the History of Science and Technology Collections at Stanford University and a group of five prestigious games industry figures have inducted ten games into a sort of 'canon'. The New York Times reports

This sort of reminds me of the 'canon' produced by the First Council of Nicaea and it has about as much validity.

No Street Fighter 2, No Double Dragon

[Anonymous Coward]

Street Fighter 2 and Double Dragon are not on the list - wtf.

This list gets no respect.

Preservation?

[Thoros]

How do they plan on "preserving" these games?

wumpus!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hunt the wumpus!

(No, I'm not serious. Just wondering how many others remember it...)

...shares the title with...

[Riktov]

Lee Carvallo's Putting Challenge

http://carvallo.ytmnd.com/

Where's Myst?

[SnowDog74]

Myst was not only the first million-selling CD-ROM game ever, but it is also the best selling computer game in history until it was overtaken by The Sims.

The ingenuity of Myst was that it ushered in an era of adventure-puzzle games but in my opinion there wasn't even a close second until the sequel, Riven, came along. Some other notes of distinction attributable to Myst:

1. Prior to Myst's release on the Macintosh, CD-ROM drives were optional on computers. The timing of Myst's release with the emergence of Macintoshes that came standard with CD-ROM drives and the explosion in sales of Myst drove consumers to demand CD-ROM drives in their computers which quickly led to CD-ROM drives becoming standard equipment.

2. Myst was not originally ported to Windows and until it was, many consumers bought Macintoshes just so they could play Myst.

3. The use of Cinepak compression and other resource-conserving techniques resulted in a game that had outstanding still graphics and video for the time.

4. With the success of the independently developed Myst (by Rand and Robyn Miller) and, incidentally, the low-budget sleeper hit "The Usual Suspects", one could argue that the plot twist became a staple in entertainment culture... Games and movies developed suspenseful storylines often predicated upon a last-minute twist.

5. Myst was one of the few games where the objective wasn't merely to survive (you technically cannot die in the game).

6. The actual objective of the game, the concept, and anything beyond basic navigation is not even hinted at in the documentation. In fact, figuring out the objective of the game IS part of the objective of the game.

7. Myst was one of the first successful wholly-immersive experiences whereby visual and auditory cues were not merely window dressing but an integral part of understanding how your actions affect your immediate surroundings (e.g. listening to water flow in the Channelwood age to verify whether valves are set properly to power the machinery of that age).

Re:Where's Myst?

[nuzak]

> Games and movies developed suspenseful storylines often predicated upon a last-minute twist.

Um, Billy Shakespeare did a few plots like that too, and I suspect he didn't invent the technique either.

Re:Where's Myst?

[SnowDog74]

Of course I wasn't implying that no one had done a plot twist before... I was simply speaking of on a local timeline. Not every narrative has to have a twist, but between 1993 and 1996 there was a significant resurgence of popularity in the twist ending. While seemingly unrelated to gaming, I think that films like "The Usual Suspects" and "The Sixth Sense" raised expectations of viewers that there ought to be a twist ending... an expectation which had both good and bad effects on popular cinema.

Re:Where's Myst?

[dim5]

With the success of the independently developed Myst ... one could argue that the plot twist became a staple in entertainment culture

Obviously you never played Pitfall or Night Driver. These ushered in the "surprise ending" for me. I'm running, running, running, running, running, running, EATEN BY AN ALLIGATOR! Oh man! Who saw that coming? Or I'm driving, driving, driving, driving, driving, driving, CRASHING INTO SOME KIND OF TREE OR CAR OR CAT OR SOMETHING! Man... that was suspenseful gaming.

But what about MULE?

[jmp_nyc]

Simcity and Civ are both fantasic games, to which I've lost many months of my life, but both owe a great deal to MULE. MULE was the first economic simulation that depended on resource management, and Will Wright acknowledged that SimCity was at least in part inspired by the game. It was also one of the first, if not the first game to allow head to head multiplayer.
-JMP

Re:But what about MULE?

[OnTheWay]

Yes I would have had a tough time choosing between M.U.L.E. and Star Raiders - both were landmark achievements, IMHO. Being able to play 4 people on the same screen in MULE was fantastic. When we played 3 people and one AI, we would use the collusion feature against the AI - man that was fun!

warcraft series does belong on the list

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen a number of people question the prescense of warcraft on the list. Frankly, I dont think they know what they are talking about. They clearly aren't familiar with the RTS genre. The Warcraft was not first, but it revolutionarized the genre. What was so important was the multiplayer strategic potential of these games. (Personally i feel War2 was the most important game in the series, War1 was slightly before my generation) The games were balanced. no single strategy was dominant, and so people developed a truly wide range of different strategies.

Most of these strategies weren't even discovered by the games creators, and only came about because of the existence of a large competitve online community. For starters, Rush or Build up, Micromanage or Macromanage, rock paper scissors unit strengths and weaknesses. when to take an expansion, when to upgrade to better units. These are elements that have been present in every (good) RTS game that came afterwards. And they were done first in an Effective manner for online play with Warcraft 2.

I call bull. Selection committee oxy impaired!

[Anonymous Coward]

List of games that are National Treasures

Centipede
Pong
Lode Runner
Wolfenstein
Space Raiders
Harpoon
The Shogun series on the Amiga precurser to Total War series
Zork
Microsoft Flight Simulator
Sim City
Ballz or Mortal Combat

and, of course, WWIIonline

Umm Street Fighter 2?

[Paxtez]

Street Fighter 2 created the fighting game genre (yeah yeah, SF1 and that kung fu game whose name escapes me, they sucked). Also created the competitive arcade scene.

I would also put Final Fantasy 7 on the list. RPGs up to that point were much different. FF7 brought about modern cinematic RPGs.

Re:Umm Street Fighter 2?

[Aokubidaikon]

I agree with you but for different reasons. Street Fighter II was the first game of its kind with a large (at the time) roster of characters with different moves and fighting styles.

M.U.L.E.

[ryl000]

I still remember the music to this one. And it somehow managed to sneak in some economics lessons, too!

What about Oregon Trail?

[Roam_2062]

What about Oregon Trail?

Mutiplayer games on dial up...

[Posting=!Working]

The first multiplayer game I remember playing was calling my friends and asking them if they knew how to get the Babel Fish.

Oh sure, take your new fancy games with their "online multiplayer battles" and your high-falootin "graphics" and "user interfaces." You just can't beat the fast paced, rapid fire action of the old text adventure:

You are in a small room. There is a table with a PF25L7 Mark-2 Raygun right in front of you on a table. Far away, at the end of the hall, out the door, and across the field is an Ogre, minding his own business.

>GET GUN
I don't understand "GET"

The far-distant ogre notices your scent, and turns towards you.

>PICK UP GUN
There isn't a Pick here.

The ogre begins to lumber across the field towards you.

>TAKE GUN
You don't see a gun.

The ogre is nearly across the field now. You should probably think about defending yourself.

>TAKE RAYGUN
You are now holding the Raygun.

The ogre is at the door. You probably should have closed it.

>KILL OGRE
I don't understand "KILL"

The ogre trundles slowly down the hall.

>USE RAYGUN
Use Raygun with what?

>OGRE
You aren't holding any Ogre.

The ogre has nearly made it across the hall.

>FIRE RAYGUN
You cannot make a fire here.

The ogre has made it across the hall and is looking through the doorway.

>SHOOT RAYGUN
What do you want to shoot the Raygun with?

>SHOOT OGRE WITH RAYGUN
I cannot shoot the raygun with a "Shoot"

The ogre has entered the doorway and is crossing the room towards you. You'd better defend yourself now!

>SHOOT ORGE WITH RAYGUN
I don't understand "ORGE"

The ogre smashes you to bits with his club, then cooks and eats you. You should have shot him with the raygun.

GAME OVER

Re:Mutiplayer games on dial up...

[Bambi Dee]

*looks at transcript*

Oh my. You need to play some new text adventures. :P

Chrono Trigger.

[ZombieRoboNinja]

Any list of anything that doesn't include Chrono Trigger is incomplete.

Metroid

[irritating environme]

By their standards Metroid is the originator of nonlinear back and forward movement.

You are in a maze of twisty little passages...

[shmlco]

Sorry, but any list the mentions Zork and not the Colossal Cave (Adventure) just isn't going to cut it in my book.

Re:Wolfenstein was what attracted many people to i

[znaps]

As far as 3D games go, I think I'd have Driller in there. To my knowledge, it was the first 3D game with a proper functioning 3D environment that one could explore freely.

Re:Wolfenstein was what attracted many people to i

[Das Modell]

Graphics update? You must be joking. Have you ever actually considered the technical gap between Wolf3D and Doom? It's enormous.

Re:pacman

[Anonymous Coward]

forget pong, pacman is why more important

Re:Subjective lists are good for arguments--that's

[saunderscc]

Atari Adventure is clearly different than the coin-ops with a more limited consumer awareness. However, this is a game that was a predecessor to the likes of Zelda--another game that is on many people's short list. Adventure is also the first to exhibit the Easter Egg phenomenon amongst other firsts in the gameplay concept. I can't believe it's been more than 25 years since I played it. Anyone know if there's an emulator that will run it on a mac?

Zaxxon Anyone?

[dhj]

What about Zaxxon? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaxxon Sure Wolfenstein/Doom was impressive with the 3D graphics and all. But considering the state of home computing when Zaxxon came out over 10 years prior... I think it deserves mention. It was a very impressive game. I suppose it didn't spawn a whole new genre, although the graphics were by far the closest thing to 3D until FPS and Flight Simulators. Am I reaching with this one?

Where is maniac mansion?

[korogorov]

I mean, seriously... "Sensible world of soccer", "super mario 3" and no maniac mansion? You must be kidding.

The store's run dry!

[donut1005]

M.U.L.E.

Most Important != First

[RingDev]

Sure, everyone will chime in with "obscure reference" games claiming that each was the "first" in a genre, but it doesn't matter. We are talking about IMPORTANCE. No body gives a crap about some text based mud that started in the 70's (except for those of us who were playing it in the 80's). Start Craft set the standard for multiplayer RTS games for years. Yes, there were others before it, and many clones of it, but it was the flag ship. Much like Counter Strike is the flag ship of team based FPSs. Quake was the most important standard set in the FPS arena though because of what it did to the industry. Quake was the software that was needed to sell the hardware, which spawned a whole industry of PC Gaming, not just a little fan base.

WoW is the standard setter not for its timing, but for its total package. Technically, the game is very impressive, marketing, customer service, balance, web experience... it's not perfect, but it is the closest anything has come on a large scale. 8+ million players can't be wrong. ;)

Anyways, it's after 1:00am, I'm half passed out writing this, so I'll retain the right to rebut any and everything I may have said come morning.

-Rick

But, but....

[had3z]

what about Diablo?

Re:Wolfenstein was what attracted many people to i

[fferreres]

The differences being:

- Doom had realtime multiplayer capabilities (maybe the first realtime game with 3D surroundings), and could be played over a modem
- Doom had "pseudo realist" visuals and textures (Wolftein looked like a Cartoon). The visual experience was truly different

But it doesn't matter, it was "Id" that did this...so we are talking about what was more merritable.

Championship Manager

[Anonymous Coward]

Choosing Sensible World of Soccer was dumb - especially when it was just a cutesy attempt to compete with the dominant Kick Off 2 title at the time. The real missing title if we're looking at (non-US) Football games is Championship Manager 2. Its release began the domination of a significant genre for the last 13 years. After a publishing company breakup, its taken on the name of Football Manager, which would be the alternative title to choose as that was originally used in 1982 for Kevin Toms genre-creating title.

Don't be sexist and forget the teenage girls!

[BitwizeGHC]

"Sephiroth is my BISHIEEEEE!!!"

Re:[visting] Marathon?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://source.bungie.org/ for those of you interested in revisiting that classic along with its conversions and variants on modern hardware. Improvements in gameplay are OpenGL, optional hir-res textures, scripting, support for true 3D elements (working bridges and models) and both Windows and Linux support.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

You forgot EVE Online

[kinsoa]

the Best Game Ever.

Re:You forgot EVE Online

[yellowalienbaby]

You mean they forgot ELITE, which defined Eve's genre, was technically way ahead of its time, and should be on the list damnit

my $0.019999

[mattsucks]

bz? (pvp "deathmatch", complete with wireframe graphics. mmmmm, loved those guided missles)

conquer? (CivWho? plus you got the source code, and could tweak to your hearts' content)

Hello Kitty's Island Adventure? Butters is da man!

Space invaders? Pacman? Elite? Prince of Persia?

[Anonymous Coward]

Space invaders must have been one of the first graphical games out there. Pacman was a craze phenomenon. Elite was one of the best space-flying games for its time, with a HUGE database of planets for its miniscule size. Finally, the first Prince of Persia was notable for the realism of the characters' movements.

Mod Article -1 Oxymoron

[blank_vlad]

Games aren't important. Get some perspective people.

Other missing games

[LKM]

Pong was definitely important. And what, no Zelda? Also, while Super Mario Bros. 3 was an important game, I'd say that Super Mario Bros. was more important, even though Mario 3 was the better game, and is still a strong game today. What about Space Invaders? Marathon? Wolfenstein? Why Doom?

Johnny Reb II

[dabadab]

I guess the first real-time strategy game was Johnny Reb II written in 1985.

Elite

[wildBoar]

Wicked game for at the time, and sadly missing.

Re:Elite

[comradeeroid]

I concurr, to not include Elite in a list of the ten most imporant games in the history of gaming is a crime against humanity.

My five most influential games

[Dimble ThriceFoon]

1) Operation Flashpoint (First comprehensive tactical sim) 2) Medieval: Total War (Shogun was first, but not accessible enough) 3) Deus Ex (An object lesson in deep story telling) 4) Thief: The Dark Project (An object lesson in environment interaction) 5) TES: Morrowind (The definition of open/freeform gameplay that is fun)

no Fatal?

[red crab]

In my top ten I would have included Fatal Car Racing as well.

RPG's

[cgomezr]

The most obvious flaw in that list is the lac of an RPG, IMHO. I would have added either Ultima IV (an RPG featuring a complex world where all your character's actions had some kind of influence, and monster bashing was not the only goal) or any good representative of the roguelike genre, or maybe both. And I would *definitely* drop Sensible World of Soccer.

Anyway, the list is quite good. When I ask most people what they think are the most important games of all time, they usually come up with things like Tomb Raider, Final Fantasy Whatever, GTA San Andreas and suchlike. Luckily these people don't go around creating canons.

Silly list.

[anduz]

Considering how big a business rpgs are these days and there isn't a single one on the list.

Dungeon Master?

[Flambergius]

Dungeon Master?

Wikepedia:
"Dungeon Master is the first 3D realtime action computer role-playing game"

Re:Dungeon Master?

[Junks Jerzey]

There were lots of games *like* Dungeon Master before it, though. The whole Wizardry series, for example. Dungeon Master made it real-time instead of turn-based, but I don't think that's enough to put it into this exclusive list.

Re:Dungeon Master?

[Dan Hayes]

Yeah, I remember when it came out and being amazed. I remember getting terrified because somewhere in the distance I could hear a portcullis opening and I knew something was coming... :)

What about Hero's quest?

[Adeptus_Luminati]

And leisure suite larry? And Roger Wilco, and all the ones that followed from there?

Thanks Sierra, for making my highschool lunch time hours sitting in front of CGA and EGA monitors (that's 4 and 16 colour for the young ones in the crowd) playing those super fun games... especially Hero's quest!

Adeptus

Re:What about Hero's quest?

[krunoce]

Sorry, but I never played any of those. Different generation?

Actually, there were a few old LucasArts games that used the Scumm engine (The Dig, The Curse of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, Sam and Max) which were very fun. But I'm not sure of their impact.

Sensible Soccer.... WTF?

[Dogtanian]

I'm from the UK (where Sensible Software were based and where football is very popular), and *I* don't think SWOS belongs in the top 10.

Sure; the Sensible Soccer games were popular at the time and well put-together. But the original SS wasn't the first football game. It wasn't even particularly innovative within its own field; its overhead vertical view and graphical style was very similar to Kick Off and Kick Off 2's (which came out 2-3 years earlier, and were already hits).

I'm not claiming the two were identical (one of my friends who enjoyed football games assured me that the playing style in SS was somewhat different to Kick Off's), but it was nevertheless an evolutionary game, and not one that belongs in this top 10.

I also don't see why they chose Sensible World of Soccer (a sequel) instead of the original SS. I don't recall it being particularly innovative or significantly more popular.

Re:Sensible Soccer.... WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you should have played it instead of asking the opinion of your friends?

I'm a casual gamer and have yet to find another game with as much game-play as Sensible Soccer.

Re:Sensible Soccer.... WTF?

[Dogtanian]

Maybe you should have played it instead of asking the opinion of your friends? I have played it- and personally, I didn't think it was radically different from KO2. I was acknowledging that some people think that there are some differences, however.

Re:Wolfenstein was what attracted many people to i

[Paulrothrock]

Marathon is ten times better than Doom. Same era, same technology, far better implementation. And without Marathon, you wouldn't have Halo.

Genres

[dj_tla]

FTA: Almost all of the games on the Lowood list represent the beginning of a genre still vital in the video game industry.
I fail to see how Civilization I/II is the beginning of a noticable genre in a list with both Warcraft (which should be Dune 2) and SimCity. Axe it and add in Dragon Quest, the beginning of console-style RPG's, which is without a doubt still vital in the video game industry.

Ahem... Populus

[Civil_Disobedient]

And I am not happy to see Dune II by Westwood Studios not beeing recognized as the basis for which the success of WarCraft was build on.

And I am not happy to see that Populus by Peter Molyneux (and Bullfrog) not being recognized as the basis for which the success of Dune II, Warcraft, and all "god-like" games were built on (Sim City and Populus came out in the same year).

Manic Miner?

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely Manic Miner should make the cut - I lost hours of my early youth to that damn Eugene and his nefarious lair....

Re:Wolfenstein was what attracted many people to i

[Anonymous Coward]

With all that said and done, and you all have points, people, Wolf3d was what made me realise that computers were no longer fancy accounting machines.
  There was a lot more to Wolf3d than 2.5d on a 286 in 16 colours.

  It also was instrumental in launching the concept of shareware to the larger public.

  And the killer argument for me is the hacked user-created content - which eventually lead to things like Counterstrike.

  I still love firing Wolf3d up every now and then - so i can compare it to the latest Crysis Dx10 technology video.
  Video games in the 80's sucked.
  Hated them.
    My two euro-cents.

Ultima Underworld

[xouumalperxe]

It may sound like a fanboy's whine, but I really think that Ultima Underworld *really* deserves a place in this sort of top ten. Sure, it wasn't really the most culturally influential game ever, not having had the impact of either Wolfenstein or Doom. But in 1991, the year of Wolf 3D's release, Ultima Underworld achieved technically things that even Doom was far from accomplishing in 1993. Sloping floors? Check. True 3D, with scenery on top of other pieces of scenery? Check. Jumping around? Check. Dynamic Light? Check, to a measure. Stuck on top of this is an interesting plot that's a fair bit more interesting than the "save the damsel in distress" hook you're given, and a pretty high level of interactivity.

Where are the classic RPGs?

[Anonymous Coward]

No Wizardry! No Ultima!

Zork was awesome good fun, but Wiz and Ult was where I burned many a midnight hour. I cast Tiltowait on this whole list. Fie! Fie!

visit KLOV

[gosand]

Kiler List of Video Games
Here you will find games that you forgot about, or that you remember dearly. But only if you are worthy. You can discuss the 10 most significant games, but obviously people will have their own lists. I honestly don't remember Zork and have always hated those adventure games, but I suppose I can appreciate what it did for gaming.

I'll throw out my list of games that were important to me...

Pong. You could play a game on your tv. WOW

Mario Bros and Donkey Kong - I swear I can still smell the pizza

Asteroids - ahh, vector graphics (dun dun dun dun dun dun tweee twee twee)

Gauntlet - multi-player goodness

Track and Field - WHOA, this one has the roller ball instead of buttons!

Bubble Bobble - significant for me because it is the game that got me into arcade cabinet collecting

Duck Hunt - shooting a gun in the house

Wolfenstein - groundbreaking

Links 386 Pro - college drinking golf game on the PC, many hours and brain cells killed

Quake MegaTF - spent many many hours playing w/coworkers, made my own maps!

The fun part is that I could go on with a list for a long long time.

Not original, just publicity seeking

[TheJasper]

This whole list is a publicity stunt. There is nothing original about what these people are trying to achieve. I would like to point out that the plethora of abandonware sites out there are there for strict purpose of preserving old games for the future. More generally, you can find whole libraries of programs for the TRS-80 and other systems of yesteryear. There are even exemptions in copyright laws specifically to protect electronic archives. The article states that the guy thought it would be profesional oblivion to get into the history of computer games. This shows either total cluelessness, an overdosis of (possibly false) modest or outright lying. 1998 VG's were allready outshadowing the rest of the entertainment industry. I really don't understand the last part of the article: "We have to be really careful here because the technology is just going to make this harder for us," Mr. Spector said. "The game canon is a way of saying, this is the stuff we have to protect first." ?!? protect in what way? preserving the software? there are allready 1000 sites dedicated to doing just that. Making sure people still know about the history of gaming? well, it doesn't really matter to anyone except history buffs, who will want a more detailed picture than this list. It's much more interesting to note the popularity of the roguelike games, possibly leading up to the modern day crpgs, than the rpg they included in the list...namely none. Super Mario 3, no matter the innovations, still rests upon the popularity of Sup Mar 1. Of course, taking a (lightning) quick peak at the Stanford U website dedicated to "The History and Culture of Interactive Simulations and Video Games" one does get the idea that the research is actually narrower than just video games, and that the article may not reflect that. In fact looking a little further, it seems to me that the whole list was less scientific and more a bunch of guys sitting around going "oh yeah that game was cool"

Warcraft? Try Dune 2

[BloodyIron]

I love the Warcraft series, to bits (8 bits in a byte remember), but I am afraid Dune 2 started the whole RTS series, AND YES it did have a narrative.

Their Smoking the Brains of their Enemies

[insignificant_wrangl]

I was in college when Doom emerged--and I must say it took over my life. Doom 2 was even worse (so let's count Doom like War Craft, as a series). Wolfenstein was a cool game, but like many players I discovered it only after Doom (well, actually, in Doom). And Doom did something that no other first-person shooter had ever done: scared the crap out of me. The deep, disturbing breathing of monsters that I could hear but not see was terrifying--and awesome. Nothing against shooting Nazis, that's good clean, fun. But Doom delivered a three-dimensional FPS to the "people." And, for its time, it was a beautiful and compelling game. I completely understand why it made the list.

Umm...What about Commodore?

[Kirgin]

For the c64 - Pirates, Elite (space sim)
For the Amiga - Populus (first real god game), Shadow of the beast, DUNGEON MASTER for Christ sake!! Bards Tale

For PC:
Pool of Radiance

Re:Wolfenstein was what attracted many people to i

[C0rinthian]

And without Marathon, you wouldn't have Halo. Some people around here might consider that a worthy sacrifice. (Personally, I like em both)

Barely scratching the surface...

[interactive_civilian]

The Marathon trilogy's incredibly intricate plot contained so many twists, references, and other hidden little gems, that it was discussed (an perhaps still is a bit) in depth from the release of the first demo of the first Marathon until many years after the game went out of production.

Take a look at the Marathon Story Page, and drink up all of the cool details. However, expect a LOT of spoilers, so if you haven't played through the series, then get on it.

*sniffle*

[Anonymous Coward]

I too am disappointed by the mention of Warcraft over Dune 2.

What really chaps me is that there's no mention of XCOM.

That game sucks!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Big time!

This list is bogus.

[nuclearpenguins]

Why? No Wing Commander.

sensible world of soccer

[Anonymous Coward]

ummm... Sensible world of soccer? what is that?
and mario 1 would be before mario 3 since it spawned it.

yeah pong should be on there instead of some soccer game.

Re:Centipede!

[Xman73x]

Are you serious?.those are then before my time and they sound like the first 2 were lame lol I remember Frogger, Centipede,Milipede,Pacman,Kangroo,PitFall,ChopLift er etc and yes SimCity etc.

Re:Strange criteria indeed.

[trdrstv]

The one that sticks out most to me is Super Mario Bros. 3, when that game is obviously based on Super Mario Bros. (1, of course) Similarly, Zork is based on the earlier Colossal Cave Adventure. Apparently part of the criteria is not just genre-defining but rather some sort of popularization of a genre. So, like any supposedly defining canon, this comes down to a matter of opinion on what is "important".

Right. It should also be noted that Super Mario Bros sold more copies than any other Mario game out there. (the benefit of being a pack in for something like 3-5 years) That game sold more, was more influential to the NES's adoption, and laid the ground work for all platformers to come after it. It did all this despite not having a 90 minute advertisement in the name of "The Wizard" to promote it.

I think the parent article has a very skewed opinion as to what was "important".

RYGAR

[cspariah]

Rygar is, in my opinion, one of the most underrated but important games to hit the original NES. * Side-scrolling platformer with RPG elements, pre-dating games like Metroid and Kid Icarus. * Non-linear gameplay, with the ability to go back, the exact thing that the article says that SMB3 is noteworthy for. Yet Rygar predates SMB2, let alone 3. * Both side-scrolling and top-down gameplay segments, prior to Bionic Commando. * "Teasing" the player with areas that appear unreachable, but which must be returned to later in the game once the player has acquired the appropriate item. This pre-dated the Legend of Zelda by about a month in the US, although Zelda had come out almost a year earlier in Japan. These are just a few of the gameplay elements that Rygar did, and did WELL, long before they were mainstream. If the game had only had some form of password savegame (like in Metroid or Kid Icarus) I think it would be much better remembered. As it is I think many people got an hour or so into it and then were turned off by the difficulty.

Sorry, but no ELITE?

[yellowalienbaby]

ELITE? Did this not define a genre? Was it not groundbreaking? Is it not culturally significant?

I onnly looked at this post to see where ELITE was on the list. Pfft.

Re:Sorry, but no ELITE?

[Plekto]

It should be called "sorry, PC games only"

Alternate Reality: The City, for instane, was the very first 3-D graphical RPG. EVER. The list of innovations was astounding. Basically it was an 8-bit computing equivalent of Eye of the Beholder. Just... back in the early 80s. (yes, not a typo - way way WAY before Windows or Macintosh ever came about.

Elite also is notable as it is the very first 3-d space exploration/trading game. Even today it plays remarkably well.

They also forgot Rogue/Hack/Angband/etc. - the very and I mean the VERY FIRST RPG/Dungeon crawl. Ever.

Lemmings? Larry?

[Dr.Ruud]

Where's Lemmings? Where's Leisure Suit Larry?

Railroad Tycoon?

[Anonymous Coward]

Railroad Tycoon? Talk about fun, it was awesome!

Re:Wolfenstein was what attracted many people to i

[ShadowsHawk]

I completely agree. My oldest brother came back on spring break and had a copy of Wolf3D on his 386. I was a PC gamer after that.

Zork and Warcraft

[The Raven]

There's a long thread about how Zork deserves to be on the list.

There's another long thread about how Warcraft does not, since Dune II preceded it.

One of these threads is wrong, and I believe it to be the latter. The problem is that Zork was NOT the first text adventure... there were several that preceded it. Zork just refined them, and was a better and vastly more successful implementation of the idea. In the same vein, Warcraft is a better and far more successful refinement of the RTS genre that Dune II created.

First movers do not always deserve the prize... sometimes it's the person that first does it RIGHT. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if 20 years from now, World of Warcraft is heralded as the 'originator' of the MMO. Dozens will bring up examples like Ultima Online, or Everquest, or MUDs... but WoW will be the one everyone REMEMBERS. WoW will be the one that pop culture remembers. And thus, despite being late to the party, it will (likely... this IS the future I'm talking about, and nothing is certain) be the one that is recognized as the popularizer of the genre.

Similarly, Doom and Half Life are both seen as the beginning of the FPS genre, in different ways... despite being preceded by games like Wolfenstein and Rise of the Triad. Doom was the technical achievement: the creation of a 3d environment good enough for you to suspend disbelief. And Half Life was the artistic achievement: the creation of a shooter plot and world that was good enough to suspend disbelief. Neither was first, but on most 'best of' lists both are more likely to be listed than Wolfenstein 3D.