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The Most Influential Games In History?
Kotaku reports on a list published recently by Guinness World Records which credits Super Mario Kart as the most influential console game in history. "Tetris ranks in at number two, according to the list, and the original Grand Theft Auto is in the number three spot. Where does Super Mario Bros. turn up? Way down at number 17, beneath Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas." Several other franchises have multiple entries on the list, such as Final Fantasy and Resident Evil. What console games have influenced you the most?
Yes, it's fun, people love to play it with friends, it's a very casual game. But number one? No, sorry, not even close. The rest of the list looks very accurate, if not a little debatable, but Mario Kart is in no way the most influential console game ever.
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
No doubt about it, one of the first games and also quite enjoyable
Laughter is the best medicine, except if you have a broken rib.
No Pong.
No Space Invaders.
No Elite.
No Dune 2 (first RTW)
No Flashback (first motion capture)
No Doom.
All of those are top-30 for their initial and lasting impact, especially Doom. There are loads more too, you could argue that Jet Set Willy, Manic Miner and Zork all had an massive impact upon gaming.
This isn't the most influential games list, it's a favs list from someone born in 1990.
if they actually did a proper list no one would be talking about it.
Did everyone miss the word "console" in the summary?
Rapelay is the right answer. Rapelay
1Âmetal gear solid,
2Â mario bros
Mario Kart??
Next year's list will definitely have to include Peggle Extreme.
The linked article uses the word "influential", while the Guiness Records list does not. Guiness uses this criteria: "a top 50 list of games ranked both on their importance and on how fun they are to play." In this case, importance doesn't mean influential. Reading the linked article, it seems that by "importance", they mean which games sold the most and for the longest time.
A list of influential games would be entirely different, with games like Wolfenstein 3D, Dune II and Ultima III at the top.
Minesweeper Consultant, Solitaire Expert
On the console, I choose Tetris.
But if the word "game" is broadened to include all kinds of games not necessarily video games, I say it's chess. Chess has become part of history in both the West and the East (China, Korea and Japan all have traditional board games originated from the same root with chess and they remain very similar to each other to this day). In China it's even part of the language -- there are many idiomatic phrases that originated as game terms. And after all these years it's still fun to play.
</off-topic>
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
Desperately trying to stay relevant. When was the last time anyone cared about them?
As for the the liquid (just) form of Guinness.. now we're talking.
GameRanger - multiplayer gaming service for PC and Mac games
I agree with all the assumptions that the authors of the list have little awareness of console gaming history. Influential? And there's no Tony Hawk Pro Skater? Prior to Grand Theft Auto III, I believe that THPS sold more units than any other console game in history.
Oddly, Grand Theft Auto (1) is listed, but that only came out for the PC and Playstation 1, and never really created any excitement until the GTA3 was released on the PS2. Oh, well.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
'Super mario kart' most influential game? with that game at the top you can't take the guinessbook of record serious anymore.. there was nothing new about that game.. I guess Doom or wolfenstein3d should be on position 1 as that one was the most influential game ever (I'm not a Doom fan, but that one really changed the face of computergaming as we know it)..
BioShock without System Shock series? (And since BioShock is such a recent game, exactly what has it had the chance to influence yet?)
Advance Wars, which is just a glorified Empire?
Grand Theft Auto series picked because it's the "most controversial series"? Ever heard of this little game series called Doom?
No mention whatsoever of the Ultima and Wizardry series, which laid the foundation for pretty much all of the CRPGs ever?
*sigh*
Doom and Wolfenstein were the ones that I remember most. Oh, and the Microsoft BSOD - that game could just jump up by surprise at any time.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
There are a lot up there that certainly deserve to be there, but there is near equal number that aren't really 'influential' games, but rather games that people simply liked. Bioshock for instance, while a great game, I can't think of much in the way of influence it has had. As others have mentioned, there is some seriously huge omissions of games that certainly had huge impacts like Dune 2.
Assuming it was Influencing Education then i got to vote for:
1) Democracy 1 & 2 (Positech games: taught in many schools in UK).
2) Political machine 2004 & 2008: (teaches about the power of money in today's politics, something Democracy 2 leaves out)
Influencing Sports:
1) Wii Sports: Seriously. 30 mins of playing tennis with your spouse will leave you wheezing and gasping for breadth, and makes you tear off your head bands and just lie down.
2) Can't think of anything close enough.
Influencing Fun:
1) Mario bros under any Platform
2) Age of Empires: Rise of Rome
3) Civilization III
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
They've ignored many great series, entire genres, and all of the earlier games.
I don't see any turn-based strategy titles on the list like Langrisser, Fire Emblem, or Super Robot Taisen.
I don't see any shmups such as Gradius, or the newer danmaku style like Dodonpachi. Or perhaps the Hudson Soft shmups/shooting caravan/PC-Engine Teikoku? nah, that wasn't influential at all...
none of the classics like Centipede or Pac Man?
no Megaman? no Phantasy Star? none of the early Falcom series like Ys or Dragon Slayer? no DOOM? no Ultima? no Infocom? no Warcraft!?
lol Super Mario Kart.
does this guy know WHAT a videogame IS?
Additionally, fun for who? It's a thoroughly subjective thing.
As a good example, take The Sims. It sold more copies than the top two FPS _combined_, and got more women into gaming than any game before it. Some people obviously loved it. But put some l33t FPS'ers in front of it, and most of them will find it a pointles waste of time: where's the score? Where's the competition with other players? Where are the bragging rights? Etc. And make no mistake, viceversa too. A lot of the people who loved The Sims, thought that Quake 3 or CounterStrike sucked.
E.g., if we're talking about consoles, take _the_ number one flame-war from the N64 era: platformers vs RPGs. At a time when there were more Final Fantasy games sold than all N64 Nintendo games combined, the his-own-fanboy Hiroshi Yamauchi shot his mouth all over the place with such pearls as "[People who play RPGs are] depressed gamers who like to sit alone in their dark rooms and play slow games" and (about RPGs again) "Stop playing boring games." Never mind that he was proud to never having played either kind of game (or any game at all, for that matter,) so he was basically just telling us "buy my game and not the competitors" in the most obnoxious asshat way. But lots of actual gamers did fall squarely into one of the categories:
A) "if I wanted to read, I'd get a book" vs
B) "what's the point if there's no story?"
And the flamewar between the two laid waste to many a board.
Which of them was right? Neither, actually. In a subjective matter of taste there is no "right" or "wrong".
But what I'm trying to say is: who decides which game is more fun? A lot of the guys from category A would have ranked FF7 as the biggest pile of crap, while a lot of those from category B thought that Mario 64 was a simplistic kiddie game. And both were right... for their own subjective tastes.
So basically it seems strange to me see such a list which combines something which can be measured objectively (sales, sequels, whatever you measure success and influence in) with something purely subjective (fun.) It's like claiming to make a top of cars based on horsepower _and_ how nice their colour is.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The original Metal Gear was one of the first game to emphasize stealth elements and practically birthed an entire genre. A majority of action games on the market have at least some stealth elements that originated from Metal Gear. At the very least they put Metal Gear Solid, but the original is more deserving. Additionally, why the hell is Guitar Hero on there? It's exactly the same as Guitar Freaks, which came out 10 years ago. And Halo is revolutionary how? This list is totally ridiculous.
Nothing from Id? Carmack pretty much invented the FPS! Every FPS owes something to Wolf3D! No Elite; possibly the first simulator. Where's Adventure in that list?
Okay - perhaps we're only looking at console games (Which makes Tetris a bit of an oddity). Grand Theft Auto gets three mentions, but GTA 3 isn't one of them. VC and SA may have been improvements but they weren't more influential. Outrun 2 but no outrun? Why is Pokemon all the way down at 26 and Guitar Hero at 27? Where's Singstar, and anything for Sony's EyeToy? Can you really say these haven't influenced gaming?
Are they using a meaning of "influential" that I've not heard before, or are these "industry experts" all 14 year olds?
It's really terrible. Not even one shooter!
Circumcision is child abuse.
The list is totally fubar, but remember one thing: it's a console list.
This sort of discussion is meaningless without a decent definition of "influential". I suggest "introduced central ideas to gaming that are well known", which can then be quantified based on e.g. number of players. Games that introduce important ideas can be said to create their own genres.
So, for example, taking modern genres to start off with, for the real-time strategy genre, the most influential game could be Dune II, from which the Command & Conquer, WarCraft and StarCraft series derive. For first-person shooters, most of the ideas were introduced in either Wolfenstein 3D (basic FPS concept) or Doom (up/down movement, many interactions with the environment such as triggering doors and lifts). The platform game gets much of its ideas from Space Panic (platforms) and Donkey Kong (jumping).
Starfox on the SNES. Didn't that have the first in-cartridge hardware for improving performance? What about Micro Machines on the Mega Drive. Didn't that have the first in-cartridge slots to let 4 players race simultaneously?
And as for Oblivion being on there, and Morrowind not being there.....well....I'm lost for words.
That's the trouble with lists based on subjective criteria.
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I would put Pong ahead of Super Mario Brothers. Before Pong, there was no video game industry. It didn't exist. Not just consoles, but outside a few projects by various companies and people, there weren't any games at all. Super Mario comes in second, then Space Invaders I think.
But GTA was inspired first by Siren City on the C64 - this is something that the developers alluded to in GTA Vice City - where the bootup screen was a mockup of a C64 loading screen - so to me that honour should goto Siren City - and its developer Ian Gray.
I agree with Dune / Dune 2 being on the list - as it was the forerunner of the modern RTS.
Then before Doom there was Wolfenstein...
thats with 2 seconds of thought - clearly less has gone into this list...
Wolfeinstein3D, Doom, Quake, Elit, Dune, StarCraft, Flashback, Half-Life etc.
Most of the published Top 50 would not be even in my top 100.
Basically they picked the best selling console games from the last 5 year, added some they could not leave out (like Tetris)
If these are the most influential console games then thank god for PC games, otherwise we'd never have ANYTHING new.
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
Halo above MGS, FFVII, Resi Evil 4, Sonic, Street Fighter etc.
'nough said.
The team said they picked Super Mario Kart for the top spot because it is the best-selling racer on the SNES, the GameCube and the DS. Tetris, a good choice for number two, was selected because it is available on at least 50 different gaming platforms. And Grand Theft Auto holds the record for the most controversial series of games.
So basically they chose three completely different criteria for the top 3.
Just another watered down list with no care for cohesive conclusion.
I record my sleeptalking
Yes, seriously, why is HALO of all games the most influential FPS of all time? Doom, quake, wolfenstein, Half-life, Counter-strike, Unreal Tournament are all more important in terms of how they affected the industry than that, quite frankly, bland game. This article HAS to be a troll to get more pageviews.
These games are just ones that are popular now. A proper list would have to include the following at minimum:
1. Elite - Procedural generation, 3D graphics, open ended game play - in 1984 on a computer with only a few kilobytes of memory. Genius.
2. Starcraft - The game that became a sport. Still being played to this day by masses of people despite its ludicrously dated graphics
3. Doom - Wolfenstein came first, but it was Doom that made Id into software Gods and replaced the term 'first person shooter' with 'doom clone' for about 5 years
4. Counterstrike - A turning point for fps, made the 'tactical shooter' popular in addition to multi-player teamwork
5. Everquest - World of Warcraft is more popular now, but Everquest set the standard for 3D online fantasy worlds that are as immersive and addictive as being dunked in liquid heroin.
But of course, nobody cares about history, because people have the attention span of goldfish.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
I see hardly anything older than about 15 years. Where are the console games that shaped console gaming? Where are the 2600 and ColecoVision games and make console gaming relevant in the first place?
And why limit it to consoles? PC games like Doom, Command & Conquer, and X-COM defined whole genres fifteen years ago.
Instead we have button mashers like Guitar Hero. Yeah, that's influential. Not trendy look-we-have-a-new-controller at all.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
..should of made the list.
Guinness World Records Editor-in-Chief, Craig Glenday, said of the selection process: "We knew this would be a complex task so we invited a crack team of industry experts to form a judging panel - and the result is a 'top 50' list of games ranked both on their importance and on how fun they are to play."
Okay, so now we're rating games by how 'fun' they are to play? I'm sorry but you cannot use 'fun' as an effective way of rating something. Fun is completely subjective and there is not a solid benchmark for something like this.
Now what they should've done, is taken all the reviews for all the different titles, as well as news articles and other things documenting public reaction and hype, as well as looking into how each game actually influenced the industry, such as developing cutting edge technology, or setting a standard that redefined how games were developed. Then you would have an accurate way of rating the games.
But, I'm sorry but rating them by how 'fun' they are is just stupid. There are some games that my girlfriend thinks are the most amazing things ever, yet I can't play for more than 5 minutes without getting bored.
video games just a teeny bit, for the same reason that comic books are now called graphic novels - you're a bunch of losers with bad personal hygiene and bad social skills all clustering around a niche hobby. Within a generation you'll all be extinct like HAM radio operators.
I know the series got some good mentions, especially Ocarina of Time that brought the series 3D but about the original, first game with a save cartridge, over the top perspective, huge world, second quests! Seriously, a big miss for this list.
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
If it were truly the list of the "most influential" games, we should see the earliest most unknown games ever that inspired the would-be programmers who made the slightly less unknown games which inspired the would-be programmers who made the slightly known games which inspired the would-be programmers to make great, fun games.
I mean, let's just be honest - what was the most influential part of the barn burning I held last night?
one match and a piece of straw
what influences the avalanch? what influences the tsunamis and hurricanes?
glad as heck to see chrono trigger on there, but what about FFIII? and what the hell is FFXII doing up there? where is dragon warrior I-V?
but, actually, now that I think about it - they never mentioned what the object being influenced was? we all assume it is the game industry, but they could mean "what influenced us as players".
she was the daughter of a wealthy florentine pogen read em and weep was her adjustable slogan
I've read past versions of the Guiness World Records Gamers Edition. They essentially random select. The Gamers Editions are often filled with, not only incredibly subjective claims, but often flatout lies.
I believe the last one I looked at was from 2007 and I encourage anyone to flip through it if they happen to be at a book store with an old copy. They list games as First of a genre that clearly aren't. They list games as introducing new features that had been around for a long time.
Its just a book full of lies some random people that don't know anything about video games (or video gamers for that matter) through together. Nothing more.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
written by someone who was looking more at sales numbers than actual influence.
I'm sorry, but adventure was far more influential than mario kart
But the list isn't about influence, it's a list of the "top 50 console games of all time".
in that case, they forgot one: Madden football.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Cmon, to the O.P. , edit the damn title to include the word "Console" because when I first glanced at the list , coffee came out of my nose. Like some of the comments.. no doom? no ms. pacman?
granted, even for a Console list.. how the f*ck did FFXII rank above FFIII ? Guiness Should hold themselves to a higher standard, and I would LOVE to see who the judges were.. fricken morons.
It's not illegal if you don't get caught.
"Journey: Escape" (Atari 2600) didn't make the cut!
When politicians are involved, everyone loses.
Influential games... 1. Pong, Space Invaders, Missile Command->Nintendo 2. Zork 3. PLATO dungeon games -> Wizardry -> Everquest -> WoW 4. Wolfenstein->Doom 5. Artwick's Flight Simulator became Microsoft's Flight Simulator 6. Sim City 7. Age of Empires 8. Call of Duty (1st popularized the gaming dream of jumping into a tank or plane)
Why ain't it on the list?????
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
Isn't this all dependant on your personal tastes? If you liek FPS games, doom and quake will undoubtly rank at the top... if you like RPG games, final fantasy will be on top. This all is quite ridicilous, as there is no huge-scale survey.
The top games on my list are the Lucasarts adventures with Monkey Island on top. Id Software games made me spend a lot of time playing too, Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, but playing Quake online was just sick. Unfortunately one day I had to start working and since then I hasn't played any games to the point of dreaming about it.
Super Mario Bros
SpaceQuest (All Sierra games)
Dune1 and Dune2
Doom/Quake/Duke Nukem
Carmageddon
Tetris
StreetFighter2
With thoses games, you can resume ALL the new games out there
I can't call that English
Half-Life and Unreal DEMAND their precense there simply because of the ENGINES THEY'RE BUILT ON! How many games right now run on the Source Engine? The Unreal Engine?! GTA IV has the Euphoria Engine so that deserves to be up there, but come on!
I can't believe they don't have Starcontrol 2 in their coolness list. The best game ever made
It has taught me the value of patience.
I can't believe how many people are saying DOOM, Unreal, EQ, WoW, etc... this is a list of CONSOLE games. Apparently noone read the article before posting. And yes I must be new here.
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It's not really a matter of a game's quality, it's a matter of how everything spawns off of it.
For example, video game RPGs spawned off of Akalabeth. That doesn't make it *better* than, say, Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest, but it does make it influential.
Let's stop dilly-dallying and just change "-1: Overrated" to "-1: Disagree" or "-1: Doesn't Subscribe to Groupthink".
1) First fps you could play online
2) First fps that used mouse and keyboard (no more pgup pgdown keyboard looking)
3) First online squad based shooter (team fortress addon)
4) Quakespy anyone? (Where Gamespy came from)
5) GLQuake, one of the first fully 3d rendered fps
6) There are a lot more reasons associated with the design of a full 3d fps
FPS = Most popular game type ever
Quake = Most innovative FPS ever
Quake isn't on the list, therefore the list is an epic fail.
Logic ftw.
Legend of Zelda, why is this not mentioned. Common now.
No single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood.
That's odd.. I can't recall another game that had "wow'd" me as much as the original Starfox did in its day. 64 was absolute crap in comparison.
After reading this (horrible) list, I think Madden belongs on there ahead of some of these items. There are enough people arguing about top 5 or so that I won't get involved in that one, but Madden should be in the top 30.
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I think for once, every console gamer in the world can agree that this list is insanely incorrect. Maybe that's the record:
"First Time All Console Gamers Agree On A Game List In History".
Stargate (Williams Defender II) was the first game to have processed game play outside the visible screen. It had a sensor/map that showed you what was happening outside of the visible gamespace.
Nearly every single game since then has this. Mario Bros obviously didn't, but it influenced gaming forever to expand the gameplay to a fuzzy "third dimension" of off screen play.
All these were on console. Per scale, Blake Stone was more popular than Wolfenstein 3D and Doom combined. Commander Keen was the kindergartner game made by the Johns of ID Software. What topped all of these was moreso Halloween Harry than all of the others; it rocked more than Duke Nukem 3D, and without the gore.
I've seen all these on sonsole, customized through Apogee software and they all rocked.
I know folks will argue with my choice based on tech advances, etc. But by far the game that blew the console market up again (after Atari, Intellivision & Colecovision folded) was John Madden Football for the Sega Genesis. This game not only revolutionized gaming but also blasted the door open on the lucrative sports gaming, sub-market. But innovations, you ask? How about utilizing celebrity to be a part of the game & in its marketing/naming
. Besides, its the only game to date to have a full season worth of shows, for several season now, dedicated to it: ESPNs Madden Nation.
Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. -Mahatma Ghandi
Four Intellivision games should be on top of the list.
Intellivision NBL Baseball and NFL Football.
Even now, people look at a system and ask, "what's the football look like", and the framing of that question was done none other by Mattel, who hired George Plimpton to essentially go on TV and say "Look at what the football looks like."
In doing so, Intellivision demonstrated that better graphics linked to sport games could move consoles, and secondly, opened the doors for major sports leagues to actually endorse games and created the major league licensed games that quite frankly still drive many console sales today.
Intellivision Sea Battle and Intellivision Utopia
Intellivision Sea Battle was arguably one of the first "add a unit to the board" war games. You could use the button controller to add several kinds of ships to a fleet in secret, adding an element of surprise that lacks in gaming today - due to the way controllers are. Once units moved close to each other, you flipped to a zoom in battle view.
Intellivision Utopia - is arguably the grandfather of all civ type games. You built up a little island economically, laying down food, housing and factories.
This is my sig.
seriously...
BaseBall Stars NES
Where the hell is Mortal Kombat? This panel of experts sucks. I agree Street Fighter II was good and influential but I seem to remember A LOT more noise made about every one MK game then the entire Street Fighter franchise.
How can Super Mario World be more influential than Super Mario Bros., when the latter was explicitly the influence for the former?
http://xkcd.com/290/
This sig is false.
In my opinion it's a way of diverting mind of gamers. I couldn't believe that wow isn't included with the least. From what I've witnessed, people even spend money to buy the cheapest wow gold just to sustain competitiveness on the game and even influenced friends and family. Why?
Whoa.... did Nintendo pay to make that list? What about Myst? Or Hexen? Or Early Duke Nukem? These were the games that we all grew up on... these are the games that inspired our "Halos" and our other FPS... Yeah... better check that list again...