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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.
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.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
Matt
You have 1 Moderator Point! Use it or lose it! Is that a threat? -vapid
Limiting to just 10 is silly.
What about
Summer Games?
Combat?
Pong?
But two big thumbs up for Star Raiders!
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I'm kind of disappointed to note that Street Fighter II didn't make the list either.
- HC
Cheesy Blaxploitation + the grandaddy videogame = great parody.
Or scroll to the bottom of this page for better resolutions:
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?
Ave Maria
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?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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).
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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.
Funny that Zork somehow trumps Adventure on this list. But what do I know.
cat
"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.
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.
Hopelessly pedantic since 1963.
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.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
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.
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.
Michael Reed, freelance tech writer.
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
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
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.
"One of these days... milkshake... BOOM!!!!" - emb
I couldn't agree less.
:)
:)
:( 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.
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