50 Landmark Game Design Innovations

Next Generation has put together a lengthy list of landmark game design innovations that many of your favorite games probably wouldn't exist without. They break them out into self-contained units, though it's sometimes ambiguous how they're demarcating game design elements. Just the same, it's an interesting look at where game industry trends have led us: "23. Gestural interfaces. Many cultures imbue gestures with supernatural or symbolic power, from Catholics crossing themselves to the mudras of Hindu and Buddhist iconography. Magic is often invoked with gestures, too--that's part of what magic wands are for. The problem with a lot of videogame magic is that clicking icons and pushing buttons feels more technical than magical. The gestural interface is a comparatively recent invention that gives us a non-verbal, non-technical way to express ourselves. Best-known example: Wii controller. Probable first use: Black & White, 2001."

Comments

some that come to mind

[joeflies]

Role Playing
------------
whether it's obvious or not, the whole computer gaming model for player vs enemy combat is still largely the same as the dungeons & dragons model. The controls may vary from game to game, but it's largely choose the weapon, roll the dice, and survive the encounter by having more hit points left than your enemy does. Before this was implemented in videogames, you had the one-shot kill gameplay of space invaders or the hunt the wumpus "you're dead" text adventures.

Side Scrolling Screens

I'm not enough of a historian to say what game came up with it first, but the exploration possibilities of side-scrolling created really big worlds to explore.

Re:some that come to mind

[JoeCommodore]

Quality Sound - One of the reason some of the crappy games get good scores is due to the judicious use of sounds, a crappy silent game just sucks, a crappy game with killer sound becomes much more enjoyable.

Theme music - As with sounds a good theme can make or break an otherwise average game.

Moving Character Animation - I recall reading in Donald Duck's Playground this was a big innovation.

Join at any time - I recall in Gauntlet players could join in at any time they didn't have to wait for the strongest player to die to rejoin the game, made it possible to get more quarters in a machine as well as allow weaker players to ride on the coattails of better ones (at least as long as they had quarters).

Wallpapers - I remember the controversy about Zaxxon "i's a mediocre game, it is just visual wallpaper", that visual wallpaper is just about mandatory on all games nowadays.

Save State - Before disk drives many games had no save character option.

Level Designer - A great feature that made game like Lode Runner runaway hits.

Copy Protection - May not be a matter of celebration for the user, but it was a game design innovation, and for some a new challenge of successfully copying the game besides shooting the bad guys. Also some of the things those crackers did to the games made some unplayable games playable (trained cracks).

Re:Eve

[QuantumG]

Eve Online is one of the few games where I didn't even finish the free trial.

I felt the game was playing me more than I was playing it. "Hey buddy, I need you to press a few buttons here. No, not that one. Ok, now that one. Great, now fuck off for 45 minutes, I've got some flying to do."

It's a fish tank.

Complaining about choices

[EvanED]

Let's face it, most action games are about force. Even when confronted with overwhelmingly powerful enemies, your only option is to avoid their killing shots while grinding away at them or searching for their vulnerable spots. In stealth play the idea is to never even let the enemies know you're there, and it requires a completely different approach from the usual Rambo-style mayhem. Best-known early example: Thief: The Dark Project, 1998. First use: unknown.

Really? Not Metal Gear? 1987 for the original, or also 1998 (according to Wikipedia, two months before Thief: The Dark Project) for Metal Gear Solid?

Re:Complaining about choices

[CaptainCarrot]

Well, "best known" is something of a judgment call. As someone who enjoys the Thief series but has never played any of the Metal Gear games, Thief is certainly better-known to me

In an unintentional irony, the screenshot for that one shows what happens when you fail at stealth. Swordfights aren't good things to get into in Thief. I found them practically unwinnable until I switched to a 3-button mouse and mapped the parry maneuver to the middle button.

WASD (#20)

[Radres]

In the article, it says that it is unknown where this innovation came from, but I would hazard a guess that it was players of Duke Nukem 3D and Quake 1 who customized their control setup to this way. It makes sense because before these games, there wasn't the concept of a computer game with full 3D where you look up and down and can have your character move forwards, backwards, left, and right at equal speeds.

Re:WASD (#20)

[Chris Pimlott]

Using the mouse with Wolf3D and DOOM was rather uncommon, though. Since neither game was 3D there wasn't much need for looking up and down. Keyboard was sufficient for the vast majority of players who kept on using the same old arrow keys they were used. Some elite Doom players began using the mouse but they were a small minority.

It wasn't until the true 3D Quake, which required vertical aiming, that mouse use became the norm. Since the right hand, previously seated comfortably on the arrow keys, was now occupied with the mouse, it was only natural that the left hand took over movement duty, using keys closer to where the left hand normally resides on the keyboard.

Re:WASD (#20)

[SpectreHiro]

If memory serves, the WASD+mouselook interface was really pioneered by SkyNET, a Bethesda Terminator game that came out a short while before Quake. It's the first game that used mouselook as the default AFAIR -- the original Quake still required the player to enable mouselook manually, I believe (+mouselook).

Some info at der Wiki. ...and MobyGames

ESDF WASD

[Chris Pimlott]

I always preferred to use ESDF for movement keys instead of WASD, for two main reasons. First, since F is one of the home keys, it makes it easy to be sure your fingers are in the right position without looking down at the keyboard, since the F normally has a raised nub on it. Second, shifting the movement keys over to the right one from WASD adds 3 more keys that are easy to hit with your pinky for binding to useful game actions.

Re:banjo kazooie == donkey kong country

[ben0207]

And Sonic 2 even earlier.

Re:banjo kazooie == donkey kong country

[MBCook]

Right. That's the point they made. In the DK series there were some minor differences in the later games (like Dixie being able to float), but the other character was essentially an "extra life", so you could take a hit and not lose instantly.

In BK, the two characters were linked all the time. They did have different abilities and helped each other. You could jump off a platform as Banjo (who you controlled) but press a button to use Kazooie to glide. You could press a button to have Kazooie's legs pop out and use them to run fast. It was a well done mechanic that used both characters. It was different, and necessary. You didn't need to use the one little team ability in the Sonic games. I don't even remember any in Donkey Kong Country.

Fact checking

[4D6963]

#1 : The earliest computer games didn't offer exploration.

Yeah, except Ken Thompson's 1967 Space Travel game which involved exploring a vector-graphics solar system.

#11, #16, #44, #46

[CaptainCarrot]

The first minigame I ever saw was in Major Havoc, which came out in 1983. As you approached the space station for the next battle, you had a little Breakout game to play in the lower right corner of the screen. When you cleared it, you got an extra guy. I don't know how popular it ever was or how well known, but there you are, and at least moderately early.

Physics puzzles? 1992? Since the article doesn't confine itself to graphic games, that's not even close. Try KINEMA. The book the listing on that page was taken from was published in 1978, but I saw it a year earlier on a timesharing system my high school was connected to. Yeah, it looks like a quiz, but there are quiz games too, and everyone called this a game.

I wonder if this guy ever even played Dragon's Lair. It didn't use a CD-ROM because it predated them, and the animated scenes wouldn't have fit on one anyway; it used a laserdisc. The picture wasn't "tiny, grainy", it was very high-quality hand-drawn animation -- by Don Bluth, for God's sake.

The article makes it sound as if the "brag board" was something the game industry invented. Actually, it had been around for decades -- albeit informally, and probably illegally. When you scored amazingly well on a pinball machine, you recorded it by carving the score and your initials into the frame around the backglass. Preferably while the manager of the establishment hosting the game wasn't looking. The tradition carried on into coin-op video games. Building it into the machine did two things. It prevented lying about your score, and it saved wear on the game cabinets.

Re:Eve

[Blakey Rat]

Games used to be written for 5+ platforms. How many platforms did Lemmings come out on? Or the original Prince of Persia? Apple ][, Commodore 64, DOS, Macintosh, Amiga, Atari possibly.

A game supporting 3 platforms is nothing, relatively speaking. (Since this topic is about the history of games spanning all the way to the beginning.)

Re:Eve

[Silverlancer]

Its a sandbox. It provides you with pretty pathetic NPC-related gameplay, and asks you to make your own, whether it be building a corporation, taking part in the stock market, competing in the cutthroat economy, or conquering space and maintaining an empire.

While it certainly has its flaws, the most important thing one has to remember when trying EVE is that if you are uncreative enough that you want your game spoonfed to you, a'la World of Warcraft, EVE Online is not the game for you.

Re:Eve

[QuantumG]

If I have to make my own fun, I can do that without paying a subscription fee.

Re:Eve

[Ginger Unicorn]

because of the inertia/convenience of directX. as i understand it, it's so well polished/entrenched that developing a game on SDL/OpenGL is a significant enough amount of extra effort than just doing direct x and sacrificing the tiny mac/linux markets.

of course this is something that could change as linux becomes more prevalent and SDL matures.

Re:Eve

[wampus]

Tell my PS2 that.

My Top 20 Innovations by Game

[jlf278]

1. Open Adventure - Legend of Zelda
2. Getting an Airship - Final Fantasy
3. 3rd person 3D - Mario 64
4. Best non-joystick - DDR
5. Captivating Story - Final Fantasy 2
6. 100+ hours to Complete - Final Fantasy 3
7. Online RTS - Command and Conquer
8. Online RPG - CircleMud
9. Online FPS - Halo 2
10. Multiplayer Coop - Secret of Mana
11. 2-player Game - Super Mario Kart
12. 4-player Game - Super Bomberman 2
13. 4-player Hardcore - Smash Bros.Melee
14. Career Mode - Rock 'N Roll Racing
15. Depth of Strategy - Starcraft
16. Depth of Gameplay. - Soul Calibur
17. Depth of Environment - Grand Theft Auto 3
18. True to life - Gran Turismo
19. Powerups - Mega Man
20. Making Sports Fun - Tie: Base Wars / Wii Sports

The first party game != Mario Party

[Stormwatch]

The first party game was probably Party Mix for the Atari 2600 + the Starpath Supercharger add-on. That was 16 years before the original Mario Party.

Re:Eve

[brkello]

I don't understand why you need to make some dumb sandbox analogy for this. Eve is a boring game unless you are a hardcore PvPer. It doesn't matter how hard you rant about it being a sandbox and that if you don't enjoy it you must lack imagination....the meat of the game is boring. I applaud them for removing the skill grind and making it something where you are always training (though, they should allow you to queue two skills if they haven't already), but they just replaced it with the grind to make ISK. Missions are repetitive and boring since you have to run the same one over and over, mining is boring, trade is boring, etc.

In game you do and can meet nice people. But the "community" on the Eve forums are a bunch of people who like to insult others and ask for your stuff if you decide to leave (and insult you on the way out for not liking the game...what a sin!). They all bash WoW because their game is vastly less popular and they feel threatened (just like you did with your spoon fed fun comment).

But now that I think about it, the sand box analogy is perfect. Eve is a sandbox...it is just full of potential. Unfortunately, every toy in the sandbox is broken and is more work than it is fun to play with. And certain kids in the sandbox have been treated better by the teachers than the other kids and thus own most of the sandbox.

Don't get me wrong, Eve is not terrible...but after playing it for awhile you can't help but become bitter from its jerk community, its constant scandals, and how you can just feel there is a good game buried somewhere in there but that it has been taken in the wrong direction.