The Ten Most Important Games

Taking a page from the National Film Preservation Board, the History of Science and Technology Collections at Stanford University and a group of five prestigious games industry figures have inducted ten games into a sort of 'canon'. The New York Times reports that some of these titles represent the start of weighty gaming genres, while all are laudable for their place in gaming history. "[Henry] Lowood and the four members of his committee -- the game designers Warren Spector and Steve Meretzky; Matteo Bittanti, an academic researcher; and Christopher Grant, a game journalist -- announced their list of the 10 most important video games of all time: Spacewar! (1962), Star Raiders (1979), Zork (1980), Tetris (1985), SimCity (1989), Super Mario Bros. 3 (1990), Civilization I/II (1991), Doom (1993), Warcraft series (beginning 1994) and Sensible World of Soccer (1994)." Most likely, future years will see additional titles inducted into this game canon.

pong

What no PONG?

Re:pong

Pong is significant for bringing video gaming to the masses, and being the first large commercial success. This list is more for games of great cultural significance, artistic works deserving of praise. I wouldn't really include Pong, fun though it may be.

Re:pong

> What is Zork

There's information about it in the internet. Use a "search engine" such as Google (www.google.com) and find out.

> TYPE ZORK INTO WWW.GOOGLE.COM

Google suggests that the original poster try the Zork Wikipedia Entry [wikipedia.org].

It is almost 5:00 pm in your office. You are feeling a mite peckish.

> TRY THE NEXT LINK

Google's second link points to the Infocom-IF [infocom-if.org] page on the history of Interactive Fiction.

It is almost 5:30 pm in your office. You are hungry. Because Congress fucked up Daylight Saving Time, it is not yet dark.

> TRY THE THIRD LINK.

Google's third link points to a live PHP-based implementation Zork [thcnet.net], cleverly disguised as a 404 page.

By the time you're done with that, you will have either starved to death, or despite Congress' fucking up Daylight Saving Time, it will be sufficiently dark that you will have been eaten by a grue.

*** You have died ***
Your score is 2 out of a possible (+5, Funny)

Re:pong

*** You have died ***

Cancel or Allow?

Re:pong

> My point being that you shouldn't need to google for one of the 10 most important games

Depends on how much you know about the history of computer games, I guess. Zork is a classic - probably the most important game on the list.

Re:pong

"you shouldn't need to google for one of the 10 most important games"

And if you've been gaming for more than 20 years, you don't need Google to know about Zork.

Re:pong

What is Zork...

I think you need to look around and ask yourself "Do I really belong here?"

Re:pong

It seems to be something of an underground indie hit.

Heh, no, that's not quite it. It's just really old. There was no game industry at the time to have an "underground" or "indie" from.

Re:pong

It seems to be something of an underground indie hit.

Yes, a it's bit like Citizen Kane that way :P

Re:pong

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

Three revolutionary things about Zork

1. Zork understood english sentences. All other text-based games used 2-word commands, like "take beer" and then "drink beer". Zork would understand things like "pick up the beer and drink it".
2. Zork used an interpreter (Z-code), so the game content was separate from the code. This allowed them to port to far more platforms than their competitors (and back then, there were a lot more platforms!)
3. Zork was marketed more like a book. When new games came out, the old games remained on the shelves because they still had value. This was a revolution in marketing game software.

Also, read this. It's a fascinating story about the company behind zork. [mit.edu]

Re:pong

I don't object to your being a newbie. What I object to is your insistence on talking about something about which you obviously know nothing. Zork was a major game at the time of release. Lots of people had it. I remember reading a review of it in Creative Computing (written by Isaac Asimov iirc) before I bought it. A glowing review. Just because you weren't alive at the time of a game's release doesn't mean it wasn't significant.

Re:pong

but my point is that it is not such a important game, it is almost unimportant at all.

And everyone is rightfully pointing out to you how you are very very wrong on that point. It's funny that you're sitting there saying that Zork was unimportant, yet you want to put Prince of Fucking Persia on the list? Warning: Bad Car Analogy Ahead - That's like saying that Henry Ford is insignificant in the world of cars, but that John DeLorean should be on the list because he made a car out of stainless steel (not that you'd know who John DeLorean is)...

It's very clear that you were born in the early nineties and that anything that happened before that is "unimportant" in your world...

Re:pong

So it might have been the first command line adventure game, but being the first doesn't make it important if it didn't included some technical breakthrough: AI, intuitive gameplay, impressive artwork that was not supposed to be posible for that system, original story or something like that. i.e. PoP introduced a new kind of animation fo the movements of the character looked realistic.

You are so wrong.

Zork was not the first text adventure, but the technical breakthough there was that it was able to pack lots verbose descriptions of places and events in a very small space (less than 48KB mem, 130KB floppy disks)). You forget the (lack of) power that home computers had in 1980.

AI: Zork's parser an incredible leap at the time. Previous adventures used commands like "USE SCREWDRIVER" unscrew a screw.

Zork did stuff like:

>> UNSCREW THE SCREW

Which screw, the Phillips screw or the standard screw?

>> STANDARD

>> You unscrew the standard screw. The control panel falls on your foot. Your scream of pain wakes up a grue, who decides to eat you.

ANd remember, artwork is more than graphics. Since the graphics on the computers of the time was either poor or non-existent, Zork made up for it with the verbosity of the descriptions.

In summary, here's a (likely incomplete) list of the technical breakthroughs of Zork:
1) A parser that could understand more that just two-word "Verb Direct-Object" commands (e.g. "GO HOUSE". Look at the old Scott Adams Adventures for more examples).
2) Paragraph-length (or more) descriptions of places and events, that allowed the player to become more immersed into the game. This all packed into the tiny computers of the late 70's.
3) Multi-platform. Zork ran on virtually every home computer from the Osborne to the Apple II.
4) Z-Interpreter. Zork was done as Z-code, ran though an interpreter. The same interpreter was used for several games.
5) Fun packaging. The manuals and other sundries that came with the game were interesting, and prized by collectors today.

I think you need a little more appreciation for the state of home computing in 1980.

Simcity

Simcity, and moreso, Simcity 2000 was awesome. I never really got into Simcity 3000, because I found that you had a little too much to manage, there was too much to control, and you couldn't keep it all in your head. I wasted many days on my simcity (2000). I never got to the point where the Arcologies would launch into space, although that may have been a myth, like the ability to pick up and throw the puck in fight mode in blades of steel.

Re:Simcity

Someone needs to fix the Wikipedia bit.

Does anyone know the editor over there?

Re:Simcity

"Does anyone know the editor over there?"

I "wiki-know" him.
He says he's a tenured professor of religion at a private university somewhere.

WarCraft vs StarCraft

I am happy to see that they recognize WarCraft as the basis for which the success of StarCraft was built upon.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

And I am not happy to see Dune II by Westwood Studios not beeing recognized as the basis for which the success of WarCraft was build on.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

No mod points, but hear hear.

Dune II was the first PC game (that I'm aware of) that had all the elements of today's strategy genre.

Warcraft was Dune II with orcs.

Command&Conquer was... the next version of Dune II. :p

Everything since has simply been a refinement of the same formula.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

Dune 2 was primitive because it was the first "real-time strategy" game. And they had to put that in quotes on the box too, since no one really knew what it meant.

The only thing Warcraft had different was the humor and a fantasy instead of sci-fi storyline.

Re:WarCraft vs StarCraft

It's not clear that Warcraft was influenced by Dune 2 at all;

This has got the be the single most stupid thing I've ever read on slashdot.

Re:WarCraft

Dune 2 had at least as much of a plot as Warcraft. At any rate, I remember it better than I remember the plot from Warcraft. You play the Noble Atreides, the Evil Harkkonnen, or the Insidious Ordos, and try to take over the world. You pick which territory to invade (not that it actually mattered), and towards the later levels the emperor or whatever starts helping out your opponents (IIRC). Not great, but then I don't even remember anything about the plot in Warcraft.

Yeah, I played a hell of a lot more Dune 2 than I did Warcraft - who doesn't love running over Fremen with a harvester, or building rocket towers in the middle of the enemy base and watching the fun (yeah, the game had some issues)?

Dune 2 was a whole lot more significant than Warcraft, as it really broke open the genre (I'm sure it wasn't the first). Warcraft had a sense of humor, but other than that it had all been done before.

Not a bad list but.

Limiting to just 10 is silly.
What about
Summer Games?
Combat?
Pong?
But two big thumbs up for Star Raiders!

Re:Not a bad list but.

Aw, hell, this is as good a post to reply to as any.

Myst. It was artistically gorgeous, and it was rather unique in that it just tossed you in with no fancy instruction manual or tutorial. Hell, you didn't even know what the objective of the game. It was just kind of like, "Here, play this. Don't know what to do? Well, you're smart, figure it out."

Very cool game.

Re:Not a bad list but.

Agreed!

The puzzles in the game were fun, all if the "levels" were intricately designed and the atmosphere was other-wordly without being alien.

Shoot-'em-ups are OK for the kiddies, this was a game for adults. Perhaps that's why it wasn't on the list.

Re:Not a bad list but.

That's what you get when artists make a game on their own.

dang, kinda makes you wish more artists made games.

Missing option

Life

What are they smoking?

And where can I buy some?

How can Mario Bros 3 be considered one of the 10 most important games of all time when the original Super Mario Bros is the foundation is was built on in the first place? It wasn't even all that innovative if we're talking "grand scales" such as this (it was innovative, but not nearly the leap that the original was).

Then there's Donkey Kong Country, which to my knowledge popularized actually using 3d models for characters in a game.

The Legend of Zelda, anyone? Action/adventure one of those genres that never really took off or spawned a descendant that is considered widely to be the greatest game of all time? Ocarina is yet to be dethroned according to most critics (and gamers I know).

How about Doom? Or is FPS a fad? :-P

I just find it hard to justify putting in WarCraft when it didn't even spawn the genre it "represents" in the first place, and on top of that not putting in the games that spawned much more prominent genres.

Re:What are they smoking?

I just find it hard to justify putting in WarCraft when it didn't even spawn the genre it "represents" in the first place

While this is technically true, it is also true to say that very few people either played or remember the prototypes of the modern real-time strategy genre during the 1980s. Indeed, even the first game which mostly resembled the genre in its modern form (i.e. using the mouse to move units, gathering resources, etc...), Dune II from Westwood Studios in 1992, was not widely played and would not be immediately recognized by the average gamer. It was really the WarCraft series, beginning in 1994, from Blizzard that exploded the genre into the mainstream and cemented its long-term popularity. The Wikipedia article on real-time strategy [wikipedia.org] games really sums up the history quite nicely (including some obscure early games that I was previously unfamiliar with).

Huh?

Where's Hunt the Wumpus? Where's Lunar Lander? Where's Star Trek? Pong?

And most egregiously, where is Crowther and Woods' Colossal Cave Adventure, to which Zork owes everything?

Re:Huh?

"Where's Hunt the Wumpus? "

My girlfriend and I play that all the time, and just after I hide the wumpus, she finds it. After she finds it, I always acknowledge with a "Nice Hunt" kind of thing.

Re:Huh?

This is the worst euphemism for sex I've ever read.

Re:Huh?

This is the worst euphemism for sex I've ever read.

Thanks to the nested comment structure, I thought you were talking about "Crowther and Woods' Colossal Cave Adventure"...

Which works just as well.

One of these is not like the others

"Sensible World of Soccer"?

Re:One of these is not like the others

While I was reading this, I imagined that Americans would probably have that reaction, but I can assure you that SWS (the original) and SWOS (the early ones) are without doubt the best football games ever made, and probably the best sports game ever made, in terms of game controls and pure fun.

Oh man, the hours I lost on those games on my 286(SWS) and Pentium(SWOS).

Zork?

What about the original "Adventure" (aka "Colossal Cave") by, if memory serves, Crowther and Woods? Nothing wrong with "Zork" but it wasn't the first of its genre.

Strange criteria

There's obviously something going on with the criteria that's not being mentioned in the article. The one that sticks out most to me is Super Mario Bros. 3, when that game is obviously based on Super Mario Bros. (1, of course) Similarly, Zork is based on the earlier Colossal Cave Adventure. Apparently part of the criteria is not just genre-defining but rather some sort of popularization of a genre. So, like any supposedly defining canon, this comes down to a matter of opinion on what is "important".

It's called the tipping point.

Tipping point, dude. Importance is not defined as first, or they would just use the word first. Importance is a different word. Certain games achieved certain statuses by reaching a tipping point where they became "big".

A game that 80% of people played, that was the second game in a genre of which >50% of people ultimately played -- is going to be considered more important than a game that only 2% of people played, that was the first game in a genre that 100% of people play today. Popularity means a lot in importance.

The most important horror movie isn't the first horror movie.

Oh, and it's all based on DONKEY KONG, actually! :)

Wolfenstein was what attracted many people to id

Doom was basically just a graphics upgrade and subsitution of aliens for german soldiers. Doom/2/3, Quake/2/3, Return to Wolfenstein, Quakeworld (arguably the precursor to the Battlefield series), teamfortress, Duke Nuke'em, Unreal et al would never have existed without the popularity of Wolfenstein which resulted in hundreds of thousands of pirated installs globally and raised the perception of FPS as a genre to levels that enabled all of these a viable demographic in the business.

At least that's my opinion, I could be wrong... I'm not though.

Multiplayer

I was a huge fan of both Wolfenstein and Doom (having wasted many hours of my college life on both), but I have to agree with their choice. Doom brought one huge factor into the FPS that Wolfenstein lacked: multiplayer capability. Before Doom, we used to hike up to Macintosh lab so we could play Bolo, a simple player-vs-player real network game where you fought each other in little tanks. It was actually a very fun and addictive game. But it was Doom that brought this concept to the mainstream. In Wolfenstein, once you solved the maps, there was no replay unless you downloaded your own level builder, but with Doom and multiplayer, you could play the same levels again and again. It made Doom highly addictive at the time.

I remember a couple friends of mine created a network of four computers in our dorm(at a time when they still gave out college credit to CS students who fought through the headaches of networking a couple computers), and for the next semester, there was a death match running until about 2 am every night. It was huge. Of course, later came Descent (a revolutionary game in its own right), Hexen, Quake, etc., but it was Doom that truly kicked off the revolution. Without multiplayer, it would have been a pretty substantial upgrade to the graphics, but the player-vs-player death match would change the gaming world forever.

Re:Wolfenstein was what attracted many people to i

Hardly. Doom introduced multi-player death match to the masses and ushered in the era of online multiplayer gaming. That is Doom's real legacy.

Bryan

Series... but no series

Super Mario Bros. 3 (1990), [...] Warcraft series (beginning 1994)

Odd, why only pick Super Mario Bros. 3 and not the entire Super Mario Bros. series like they did with Warcraft? From the article...

Mr. Grant, the editor of the popular Web site joystiq.com, who selected Super Mario Bros. 3, said the game was important for its nonlinear play, a mainstay of contemporary games, and new features like the ability to move both backward and forward.

Super Mario Bros. 3 added some interesting new elements to the side scroller, but I would argue that it didn't define the side scrolling genre. I think Super Mario Bros. 3 improved upon the genre defining Super Mario Bros. game, even if I enjoy Super Mario Bros 3 more. Could 'nonlinear' games be found before Super Mario Bros. 3? What about any RPG game like Dragon Warrior? It would have been better to just include the entire Mario series for their significance on the video game world. I think Mario 64 is far more revolutionary than Mario 3, but the entire franchises importance shouldn't be underestimated.

Cheers,
Fozzy

Space invaders?

No Space Invaders? No PacMan?

Best game

I have yet to have more fun gaming than playing Deus Ex (although a few games have come close).

To me that makes it an important game :)

Rogue

Nuff said.

Why Doom instead of Wolfwenstein?

To me, Doom was just the next iteration of Wolfenstein. Wolfenstein started the whole violent, popular fps id thing.

Duke Nukem Forever?

What about Duke Nukem Forever?

DNF is a very important game.. If it ever gets released, hell will instantly freeze over.

The criteria for greatness shifts

For most games I assume it's because it's some game that first came up with the idea of whatever. But Warcraft does not have anything innovative in the first 2 games unless you count a quasi-story as innovative. It may have been popular but from the innovation point of view, it contributed roughly nothing to the RTS genre. If you're to pick a RTS game that really revolutionized the genre it has to be Starcraft, which is not Warcraft in space. So here Warcraft seems to get a pass due to its massive sales and popularity. That's fine but then where's the Pokemons and Final Fantasies? It seems to me Warcraft is only on there probably because whoever made this list actually plays Warcraft but not Pokemon, even though the two games are very similar: massive sales and popularity and not much contribution in terms of innovation to the genre. Which is fine. No one says a great game has to come up with something no one else thought of before. But don't bend the rules just to get your favorite game inducted.

My top 15 most important games...

In no particular order:

1) Pac Man
2) Sim City
3) Wolfenstein 3D
4) The Legend of Zelda
5) Super Mario Bros
6) Mortal Kombat
7) Grand Theft Auto
8) NBA Jam
9) Tetris
10) Warcraft
11) Myst
12) Pong
13) Space Invaders
14) Tecmo Super Bowl
15) Final Fantasy

List hacked together...

Hack / NetHack
[God I'm old.]

Surely you actually meant...

...rogue [wikipedia.org]?

The precursor to hack, which added at least a year to my sentence^Wstay at the University of Maryland in the 1980's?

The game referenced in the classic AI paper ROG-O-MATIC: A Belligerent Expert System [princeton.edu]?

What is the world coming to?

What about Elite or Frontier?

Mercenary or Damocles?

*sigh*

What we need is a rubric

The original list, like so many other lists I have seen naming the "Top 10" etc, seems to be unbalanced. Some things are put in that shouldn't be (Sensible World of Soccer)?!?!!? and there were many exclusions, (Zelda, Super Mario Brothers, Pac-Man, many Microprose games). And we can all argue over what goes where, but what you really need is some sort of rubric to judge games.

For example, how do you compare Super Mario Brothers and Super Mario Brothers 3? Obviously Super Mario Brothers 3 was much more polished, but it only owes its success to the originality of the first. How do you compare a game with great graphics, sound and story lines, but whose gameplay is selecting from a menu over and over (like Final Fantasy VII) to a game that is almost pure concept (like Tetris)? How would you compare The Legend of Zelda, a great adventure/RPG game that everyone has played, with a game like Terranigma, a fascinating adventure/RPG game that was never released in the United States? Tomb Raider could be translated into a movie, which Civilization couldn't, do does that make it a better game?

For all of these questions and more, you have to have a rubric, a means of grading, that you can explain your choices. A rubric would include graphics, sound, gameplay concept, originality, cultural impact, popularity, immersiveness, technical achievement, amongst other things, so that we could fairly rate games against each other. Without that, its just tossing out suggestions and haggling.

No Populous?

I know the god-game genre isn't exactly huge, but Populous is generally credited with being the first; how can you ignore a game that created an entire genre?

(And no Elite either? For shame)

Empire, the Wargame of the Century

Empire pretty much invented the strategy type computer game back in 1977, and was selected as Computer Gaming World's 1987 game of the year.

http://www.classicempire.com/ [classicempire.com]

Yes, I wrote it :-)

Marathon?

Though I detest Bungee for selling out to microsoft, they had one of the most ground-breaking games of their time. Marathon featured 3D maps (not merely 2D, it had stairs and lifts) as well as real physics models, (your bullets and you were affected by gravity) ammunition limits (what, no 999 bullets in your pistol? really!) and used a physics model that allowed for adjustment of things like gravity and weight. I beleve it was also the first game to allow you to be submerged in a "medium" such as water, muck, and lava. (with the physics models adjusting accordingly, try firing an RPG in the water...)

There was nothing even remotely like it until after the realease of the second in the series, Marathon II Durandall. They even published the map editor with M2 and you could make your own levels and even modify the physics of the game. Monsters could be set to trigger on a variety of events, including each other, and it was possible to "pull" several other mobs so if you were spotted, by the time the mob found his way to you (and he WOULD find a way to get to you) he may have pulled several other mobs with him. MMORPG fans will recognize the "train" effect.

Mobs could even aggro each other. If a fighter's missile weapon hit a grunt one too many times the fighter would be on the grunt's aggro list and it was quite possible to get them sufficiently pissed off at each other that they would mostly kill each other.

Even with all that it had a flawless network play for up to 16 people. (admittedly poor internet performance, but LAN was smooth) Unfortunately multiplayer was only for the arenas, not for the actual game.

And the game... the depth of the plot and storyline was unheard of at that time. Even moving as fast as you could you might get to the end in a week. Most players took months to beat the game, and spent the next several months discovering the amazing variety of hidden rooms, secret weapons, and amazing powerups hidden on every level, of which there were what, 20? Large and unique, each map with a theme that set it visually apart from the other levels. (how could you not get tired of seeing the same room over and over and over again in Halo??) The different levels used different color pallates for the walls, ceiling, floors, etc, and all of them had a unique background sound.

Although it did not have dynamic lighting, individual map squares (3-8 sided polys actually!) could be lit individually, and even dynamically change by itself or due to player action. Ambient sounds were also present, and were variable by distance and in stereo - you could follow a sound to its source if you were wearing headphones.

It took almost four years for anything like Marathon I to come out on any platform, it was groundbreaking on every front. Doom was the only thing like it at the time and that was sad by comparison.

It occurs to me that in some ways Marathon was more real than even today's games. Think of a FPS game you like. Can you turn while you are falling? How is that possible? You can't turn while falling in Marathon. And ignoring the 999 bullets in your pistol, what happens after you have shot seven of them? You shoot #8 right? In marathon you see his hand come out, drop out the clip, jam in a new clip, and cock the gun. You can't shoot while you're doing that, so emptying a clip in preparation for a tough encounter was one of many strategy decisions you had to make. It was years before any other FPS decided that guns needed to be reloaded. Authentic sound FX too, and bullets that ricocheted off a wall would have one of several random visual effects result on the wall.

Not only did you have to worry about ammo and health, but some levels were hard vacuum and you had to manage your air as well. Certain mobs were resistant to certain weapons also, so you had to be peticular about who you used your limited fusion pistol shots on.

If something exploded on the floor beside you, you didn't just take damage. You were tossed up into the air and over

Where's Myst?

Myst was not only the first million-selling CD-ROM game ever, but it is also the best selling computer game in history until it was overtaken by The Sims.

The ingenuity of Myst was that it ushered in an era of adventure-puzzle games but in my opinion there wasn't even a close second until the sequel, Riven, came along. Some other notes of distinction attributable to Myst:

1. Prior to Myst's release on the Macintosh, CD-ROM drives were optional on computers. The timing of Myst's release with the emergence of Macintoshes that came standard with CD-ROM drives and the explosion in sales of Myst drove consumers to demand CD-ROM drives in their computers which quickly led to CD-ROM drives becoming standard equipment.

2. Myst was not originally ported to Windows and until it was, many consumers bought Macintoshes just so they could play Myst.

3. The use of Cinepak compression and other resource-conserving techniques resulted in a game that had outstanding still graphics and video for the time.

4. With the success of the independently developed Myst (by Rand and Robyn Miller) and, incidentally, the low-budget sleeper hit "The Usual Suspects", one could argue that the plot twist became a staple in entertainment culture... Games and movies developed suspenseful storylines often predicated upon a last-minute twist.

5. Myst was one of the few games where the objective wasn't merely to survive (you technically cannot die in the game).

6. The actual objective of the game, the concept, and anything beyond basic navigation is not even hinted at in the documentation. In fact, figuring out the objective of the game IS part of the objective of the game.

7. Myst was one of the first successful wholly-immersive experiences whereby visual and auditory cues were not merely window dressing but an integral part of understanding how your actions affect your immediate surroundings (e.g. listening to water flow in the Channelwood age to verify whether valves are set properly to power the machinery of that age).

Re:Emphasis?

tags aren't allowed in HTML strict, the DTD used for /. tags are.