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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?
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.
Emphasis mine.
Including fun totally skews the results, since it knocks off games like ET for the Atari 2600, while adding on games that aren't that influential, but the judges just liked.
No matter what the guy said, it's odd that "fun" would factor into "influential." Two totally seperate things as GP pointed out so well with ET. It's especially ridiculous when you consider the aspect of history: pong isn't on there? The original super mario bros is at 17?
It seems that the people who made this list for guiness were 15 year olds who were drunk off of guiness at the time.
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.
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If that's true about their definition of importance then the list is even more incorrect. Have a look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games
If the 8 million units figure for Super Mario Kart is true then there are tens of games that outsold it and possibly for a longer period. Halo 2 is oddly a possibility but more importantly, GTA: San Andreas, Gran Turismo, FFVII.
About the only way Mario Kart could be top is if you bundled all Mario Kart versions together, but then if you apply the same method to say, Grand Theft Auto or the Halo franchise then it starts to slip right back down again.
So in other words, I don't think that list is even correct by any reasonable metric at all.
I don't really know how they compiled the list, it's certainly not on lasting legacy - I can barely even remember the original super mario kart, but everyone remembers space invaders for example. It's not on sales figures because super mario kart comes way, way down the list again, possibly as far down as past number 50. It can't be influence because really, how many SMK clones are there vs. say, Doom clones?
As stated earlier in the thread it seems like it's basically just one persons list of their top 50 favourite games. It certainly doesn't seem to be based on any objective measure that's for sure as I can't find any objective measure that fits their results, on the contrary, all objective measures seem to contradict their results completely even when combined in different combinations.
Doom, C&C, Total Annhialation were all big ones for me. UT was pretty huge. Oh and Starcraft should be pretty close to the top. C&C I think was one of the big games that brought the RTS to the world. And TA is an RTS which I still don't think is matched to this day.
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
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.
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The list is totally fubar, but remember one thing: it's a console list.
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.
For this list not to put DOOM on the #1 most influential spot - insane. Maybe the editors at Guinness are a little too young to remember life before first person shooters, but such a life existed (and you were likely to be eaten by a Grue!) Doom was the shot that started a revolution in gaming - in other words, the grandfather of most of the games we play today.
Mario Kart. It's too early in the morning to come up with a response to that. Bah.
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No, Wolfenstein 3D would be the revolution maker. It was the proof of concept that John Carmack and his team of misfits at Id needed to even go to the next level with DOOM. It proved that you could do a first person shooter in a realtime 3D-like (because it wasn't really 3D, just looked like it) space.
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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.
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DOOM wasn't a console game. I'm aware that it was eventually ported to a number of consoles, but I would say the grandpappy of console shooters was probably Goldeneye 64.
Looking at the release dates of the port, the first systems DOOM was ported to, in '93 and '94, were the Sega 32X, the Jaguar, and the 3D0.
It didn't hit a system owned by more than six people until the SNES the following year---after the release of the PlayStation. Apparently the PlayStation version sold a fair number of copies worldwide, I can't for the life of me remember anyone owning it.
Wiki gives sales figures for the PlayStation version at ~600,000.
Goldeneye, on the other hand, was ubiquitous in its day. It was like the Halo of 1997, the only reason to own the hardware platform. Wiki gives sales of the cart at ~8,000,000. On a console which only sold 33 million worldwide.
So while I agree with your sentiment that DOOM ought never be slighted, I don't think it has business being on a list of influential console games any more than the Mona Lisa deserves a place on a list of influential novels.
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.
For once, even the summary got it right: these are the 50 most influential CONSOLE games. PC games and arcade games were not in the list.
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WoW also isn't particularly fun, which would also seem to take it out of the running.
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