The Ten Most Important Games 577
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.
Simcity (Score:4, Interesting)
WarCraft (Score:2, Interesting)
Not a bad list but. (Score:4, Interesting)
What about
Summer Games?
Combat?
Pong?
But two big thumbs up for Star Raiders!
Re:pong (Score:1, Interesting)
- HC
Pong Parody (Score:3, Interesting)
Or scroll to the bottom of this page [cornponeflicks.org] for better resolutions:
Re:pong (Score:2, Interesting)
What is Zork and what is so special about Mario 3?
Holy crap these people are clueless (Score:2, Interesting)
Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
And most egregiously, where is Crowther and Woods' Colossal Cave Adventure, to which Zork owes everything?
Re:Not a bad list but. (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Series... but no series (Score:2, Interesting)
This isn't really about firsts so much as it is about first big commercial hits - Doom was by no means the first FPS.
If I were to credit Nintendo for platformers, I'd go all the way back to the original Donkey Kong - which broke a lot of new ground. It had different levels, with different objectives on each - in an era where a video game was by and large "same level over and over, but harder and faster"
It, following Pac Man's lead, also had characters - ones you could market over and over.
It was also the first time I know of that the movie and game industries clashed in a big way, Universal suing over the name Kong, then losing a huge countersuit to Nintendo in the end.
Also, DK was supposed to be Popeye, but the licensing fell through, so they changed Brutus into an ape, and replaced Popeye with a charicature based on one of their US warehouse managers and named him Jump Man (so the legend goes). After a new license was cooked up, they made a whole new Popeye game (another one of my favorites).
The criteria for greatness shifts (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:pong (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What are they smoking? (Score:1, Interesting)
This isn't supposed to be a list of games that were the first implementations of their genre. These are games that introduced something that seemed to go beyond the gameplay mechanics that were present in earlier titles. SMB3 was chosen because it was one of the first games to be non-linear and allow the player to decide how they were going to progress through the game. It also allowed you to go backwards through a level to find secrets and other bonuses. The first Mario game may have made platform games popular (and no, it wasn't the first platform game), but it didn't offer anything as fundamental as the features mentioned above.
Re:pong (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Three revolutionary things about Zork (Score:4, Interesting)
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:Strange criteria (Score:2, Interesting)
Probably because Super Mario Bros took a big leap forward from the first two. And I think the list creators would suggest that there is a bigger, more important leap to Super Mario Bros 3. I may not agree, but that's at least up to qualitative evidence.
If you look at all the posts in this thread you will notice a lot more than ten games that people will swear need to go on the list. That should proove that there are a whole lot of influential games. Sitting in my chair, I say the soccer thing is a little weird, but I don't have the scope of an average person. I have the scope of a technical engineer with a wealthy North American video gaming experience. I'm guessing some other demographic really thought that game was important.
Re:Not a bad list but. (Score:4, Interesting)
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:WarCraft vs StarCraft (Score:2, Interesting)
I think some people get WC and WCII mixed up.
Marathon? (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Re:What are they smoking? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:pong (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Best game (Score:2, Interesting)
I love deus Ex 1 and i re-play it every few months
I love the atmosphere, i love the story, i love the writing, i love the way the free gameplay.
I love how you can try any mix of skills and still have fun. I love finding new areas or texts even after probably close to 20 full re-plays of that game.
The game is full of little secrets, small references, books, emails. And i am not talking about dumb trash like in Oblivion where they just copied and pasted some background lore into a few books. I am talking about finding an npc in the back alley restaurant of Hong Kong who gets into a full on philosophical debate with you or hacking a pc of an arms dealer to find he has been exchanging emails with an experimental AI that wants to know his thoughts about color orange.
Stuff you can miss the first time, second time, third time, without noticing it. There are TONS of obscure stuff in DX1
Some examples:
In the first level, it is possible to finish it without killing anyone, in any way: your brother who normaly tells you "you killed a lot of people today, pace yourself" at the end of that level tells you something different if you don't kill anyone.
In the UNATCO hq, if you walk into the female toilets while Sharon(i think) is in there, she lodges a complaint with Manderley who gives you a talk about it.
Your brother can survive! You have to be caught at just the right moment though, when the agents are outside of his house, you need to be caught before he dies. If you run away from his appartment and get caught later on, he is dead.
Another thing i love about the game is how you can approach every situation from a variety of ways: You can sneak past, you can just run in with a pistol or shotgun, you can set mine-traps, you can lure enemies into turrets or robots, you can use any combination of these! This goes for almost every situation in DeusEx - it is one of very few games that really give you freedom.
I would easily say Deus Ex, with it's smallish levels, set storyline, inability to get back to all levels, gives players more freedom to play how they want to than games that have been heavily marketed as being trully free, eg GTA SA and Oblivion.
Plus it ran great on the hardware it was released for! And nowdays, when you play it on hardware that was only dreamt about when the game was released, DX1 plays fantastic - the graphics scale up to use the new hardware!
Sadly, DX2 was a piece of trash