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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?
What is this list, world history excluding everything the innovate programmers from the UK came up with in the early to mid 1980's? Ever heard of Rare, formerly Ultimate Play the Game, who dropped a little title called Knight Lore on the world and changed the industry overnight? Okay, so it led to a load of derivative rubbish, but I'd rather vote for a technically groundbreaking game packed into 48kb than a three-CD monster with pretty cutscenes.
And where is Lords of Midnight? And leaving Elite out of that list is like leaving Ms Hilton off a paparazzi's to-do list.
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
Super Mario Kart, the original for the SNES, is definitively not your average casual game, quite the opposite. Some characters such as Bowser or DonkeyKongJr are pretty much completly undriveable unless you have some real skill and tracks like Rainbow Road were the tiniest mistakes is punished by a huge time penalty isn't exactly what you expect from a casual game either. Now the Mario Karts that followed after it were very much tuned for casual gameplay, the insanely difficult Rainbow Road got a balustrade, making it completly harmless and boring and the hard to play characters got a lot easier and the overall singleplayer difficulty went down an order of magnitude.
Anyway, calling it the most influential game in history might be bullshit, but so would be calling any game, different games had influence in very different areas. However that doesn't mean that it influence wasn't huge. You just have to look at some pre-Super Mario Kart racing games to see that there was quite a bit of difference between what came before and what came after it. Super Mario Kart pretty much nailed all those elements that you consider given these days, replay, ghost driver, weapons, 3D track and plenty more.