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

[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

[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

[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...

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".

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: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.