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

[Anonymous Coward]

What is Zork...

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

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

[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...

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

[slashbob22]

*** You have died ***

Cancel or Allow?

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?

[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.

One of these is not like the others

[ucblockhead]

"Sensible World of Soccer"?

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

[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.

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:Simcity

[Wah]

Someone needs to fix the Wikipedia bit.

Does anyone know the editor over there?

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.

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! :)