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

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: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

[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

[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: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).

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! :)