The BAFTAs dares to ask the internet: 'What is the most influential videogame of all time?'
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There's a lot of good arguments out there. Pong for being the "first", Pac-Man for making arcades insane and bringing in big money, Tetris for its wide appeal, Mario 64 for convincing everyone 3d games work, Doom for popularizing the fps, Wii Sports for its ubiquity, Farmville for starting what would become mobile games (which as much as gamers hate to admit, they make more money than every other platform combined). It'd take a pretty convincing argument for me to fully believe any of them but of mine I'd make an argument for Pac-Man, but my heart wants it to be Tetris
The beautiful tapestry of video game history is not woven from a single thread alone. Each person will have their favorites, naturally, but every delightful (and sometimes not delightful) digital block has contributed to where we are today.
That is, to say, I agree with you. They should break it down into categories tbcf
personally I think its Doom
Correct - it’s Doom and it’s not even close. They’re still making Doom levels and doom clones.
and i dont even say doom because of doom the game itself. theres one factor that doom has that almost all the others dont, which is how relevant doom was for creating a game engine, which would evolve into other game engines.
doom engine is basically responsible for quake, goldsrc, id tech, IW, source,, all of which had many defining games.
the fact that games still being released till this day, has roots on an engine developed over 30 years ago
100%.
Hexen, Heretic, Strife, list goes on. All great games too.
And running doom on all kinds of things, like a microwave
Rogue. You've heard of Roguelikes? It influenced more than just them. Probably every action RPG owes it something.
Oblivion: introduced predatory micro transactions
gacha mechanics have existed before oblivion in many asian mmos
unironically i think this might be it. That horse armor was an ill omen of things to come.
Sierra was making ganes like kings quest v extremely difficult so you would call their hotline and pay some crazy amount to figure out what to do next.
Doom.
People are still making Doom WADs. And have you ever heard of the FPS genre?
Half-life. Maybe it didn't innovate specifically anything, but it's the first real maturely designed game, with incredible attention to detail and focused on conveying a cinematic story in fully interactive environments.
And don't get me started on HL2.
Don't we have enough wars already?
Tetris
I think naming a single game is hard, but most influencial franchise in gaming would have to be Mario. Between the platformers, smash, kart and the music it is just so widely recognizable.
Eh, Super Mario Bros was super influential, and kicked off the Mario franchise. So I'd probably pick that.
Or maybe Pong, which normalized digital gaming. Or maybe Space Invaders.
I think those are both valid picks. If you can only pick one game it's going to have to be one that changed how the world looked at video games.
Ultima. Easy.
Did you play any games past ultima? It pioneered a laundry list of features that game are still using.
Well, pretty much everything in Ultima was either innovated or popularized there. It came out in 1980, there really wasn't a lot before it with any kind of complexity.
Mostly the open world.
III was a bit more influential with:
But each game from the Ultima series was additive, and Ultima also pulled from Akalabeth, so it's hard to pick a specific game to be "most influential." Is it Ultima I because it started the series that largely standardized CRPGs? Or is it Akalabeth because its success led to Ultima?
Many other games have "defined" their genres, but few have done so quite as completely as Doom (1993). And on top of birthing the entire FPS genre, the practice of making Doom run on any electronic device with a screen and a CPU has long been a fantastic exercise in programming and hacking. The possibility of implementing Doom in everything from calculators to pregnancy tests to Captcha in a browser window has kept the game in the public consciousness for decades, and will continue to do so for decades to come.
Of course the real answer is Clash of Clans, because it popularized mobile gaming and skyrocketed that platform's revenue to the point that it outpaces every other gaming platform combined, but I'll boycott BAFTA if something riddled with microtransactions gets any recognition
It didn't catch on the way Doom did. Maybe it had something to do with the ceiling of having a texture in Wolf3D. 🤷🏻♂️
If we want to talk about first, then Maze War takes the trophy. Wolfenstein 3D may have come before Doom, but it lacked the influence and staying power. Wolf may have been earlier, but Doom birthed the genre as we know it
Minecraft might be a good contender in terms of spawning the survival genre and also having so many mods used to pioneer entirely new game modes and even having a major part in machinima and Let's Plays and such things on Youtube.
Mario Bros.
Literally every gamer has played it or a game like it. Even non gamers recognise it. It's copied and iterated on to this day.
It certainly wasn't the first 2D platformer, but it's success made everyone else go "that's what we're making now"
Slight correction; you’re referring to Super Mario Bros. (1985).
The plain ol’ Mario Bros. (1983) was the arcade platformer about bunking mobs coming out of pipes:
Seriously. For a lot of people, SMB single-handedly answered the question of whether home consoles or arcades were the future.
I genuinely think FarmVille is a contender, as I said in the other thread, but realistically gaming has existed long enough that picking just one is kind of impossible. There have been several shifts and revolutions. With how much of the revenue in gaming currently flows through mobile games, gacha games and live service games etc I really do believe FarmVille might be the strongest influence on the current landscape of gaming. But historically, it's possible Doom was more important for its development. Or even Super Mario Bros for putting home consoles on the map. I could even see an argument for Minecraft - it's completely ubiquitous and an absolutely global phenomenon.
Gaming is already big enough and has existed long enough that the question is fairly unanswerable. It's like picking the most influential movie. Is it Birth of a Nation for inventing cinematic language? The Jazz Singer for popularising "talkies"? Is it Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon for being the "first"? Is it The Wizard of Oz? Is it just Citizen Kane? The truth is, it's none of them. It's all of them.
Probably Mario
Especially if we consider "influence" beyond influencing other games.
Apart from a few rather mediocre movies and a few orchestras playing the theme tune what did you have in mind there?
Not OP, but Mario is one of the most recognizable characters in the world. He's had comics, 4 cartoon series, countless toys and merchandise, theme park attractions, etc. The original Super Mario was the undeniable standard bearer for the platforming genre and would spawn the largest game franchise in world history, responsible for over 800 million games sold. I'd call it a pretty influential property, staying as strong as ever 40 years after Mario's big starring debut.
Agreed. Super Mario Bros on NES is universally recognizable, kicked off the Mario franchise, and really brought gaming into relative mainstream success.
It's not the best game ever, but that wasn't the question.
And if it was about being the most recognizable I might agree but the influence on other games or even media in general was relatively limited.
Like I said in the other thread, I vote pokemon. I don't think you can go too much older, because the audience was just so small relative to more modern games. Scale is a major factor to influence.
But it barely influenced any other games. The genre of creature collector games in this style is quite small.
Pokemon has influence far beyond a genre. Palworld being called pokemon with guns is a good example.
But Palworld is still literally one of maybe half a dozen other games remotely like Pokemon.
All y'all acting as if the answer isn't Candy Crush or some other mobile bullcrap.
Mobile is the biggest platform by far. Mobile games make more money than console and PC combined.
Can't wait for some console/PC gamer to tell me that playing Bloons TD doesn't make you a gamer, but playing Fortnite somehow does
I can't see Space Invaders so I'll say that. It was a tour de force when it first came out, raking 13 billion dollars in today's money (citation needed).
FIFA, for pioneering the idea you can release the same game every year with minor cosmetic tweaks.
Robot Odyssey.
Not one mention of WoW anywhere in this article or this thread, I find that at least somewhat surprising!
What did you put in? I wrote an essay on how inevitable praise of Dark Souls also applies to Metroid but then deleted it as too pretentious even for BAFTA.
Metroid is too new, Contra was much more of a "git gud" game. They were released around the same time, but I think Contra is more iconic.
I think the notion of a "git gud" game largely came from Contra. Yes, the genre didn't last, but people crowding around the arcade machine translated to people making videos of themselves beating a hard game.
It's a different kind of connection.