50 Landmark Game Design Innovations

Next Generation has put together a lengthy list of landmark game design innovations that many of your favorite games probably wouldn't exist without. They break them out into self-contained units, though it's sometimes ambiguous how they're demarcating game design elements. Just the same, it's an interesting look at where game industry trends have led us: "23. Gestural interfaces. Many cultures imbue gestures with supernatural or symbolic power, from Catholics crossing themselves to the mudras of Hindu and Buddhist iconography. Magic is often invoked with gestures, too--that's part of what magic wands are for. The problem with a lot of videogame magic is that clicking icons and pushing buttons feels more technical than magical. The gestural interface is a comparatively recent invention that gives us a non-verbal, non-technical way to express ourselves. Best-known example: Wii controller. Probable first use: Black & White, 2001."

Re:banjo kazooie == donkey kong country

[ben0207]

And Sonic 2 even earlier.

Re:some that come to mind

[JoeCommodore]

Quality Sound - One of the reason some of the crappy games get good scores is due to the judicious use of sounds, a crappy silent game just sucks, a crappy game with killer sound becomes much more enjoyable.

Theme music - As with sounds a good theme can make or break an otherwise average game.

Moving Character Animation - I recall reading in Donald Duck's Playground this was a big innovation.

Join at any time - I recall in Gauntlet players could join in at any time they didn't have to wait for the strongest player to die to rejoin the game, made it possible to get more quarters in a machine as well as allow weaker players to ride on the coattails of better ones (at least as long as they had quarters).

Wallpapers - I remember the controversy about Zaxxon "i's a mediocre game, it is just visual wallpaper", that visual wallpaper is just about mandatory on all games nowadays.

Save State - Before disk drives many games had no save character option.

Level Designer - A great feature that made game like Lode Runner runaway hits.

Copy Protection - May not be a matter of celebration for the user, but it was a game design innovation, and for some a new challenge of successfully copying the game besides shooting the bad guys. Also some of the things those crackers did to the games made some unplayable games playable (trained cracks).

Fact checking

[4D6963]

#1 : The earliest computer games didn't offer exploration.

Yeah, except Ken Thompson's 1967 Space Travel game which involved exploring a vector-graphics solar system.

#11, #16, #44, #46

[CaptainCarrot]

The first minigame I ever saw was in Major Havoc [wikipedia.org], which came out in 1983. As you approached the space station for the next battle, you had a little Breakout game to play in the lower right corner of the screen. When you cleared it, you got an extra guy. I don't know how popular it ever was or how well known, but there you are, and at least moderately early.

Physics puzzles? 1992? Since the article doesn't confine itself to graphic games, that's not even close. Try KINEMA [atariarchives.org]. The book the listing on that page was taken from was published in 1978, but I saw it a year earlier on a timesharing system my high school was connected to. Yeah, it looks like a quiz, but there are quiz games too, and everyone called this a game.

I wonder if this guy ever even played Dragon's Lair [wikipedia.org]. It didn't use a CD-ROM because it predated them, and the animated scenes wouldn't have fit on one anyway; it used a laserdisc. The picture wasn't "tiny, grainy", it was very high-quality hand-drawn animation -- by Don Bluth, for God's sake.

The article makes it sound as if the "brag board" was something the game industry invented. Actually, it had been around for decades -- albeit informally, and probably illegally. When you scored amazingly well on a pinball machine, you recorded it by carving the score and your initials into the frame around the backglass. Preferably while the manager of the establishment hosting the game wasn't looking. The tradition carried on into coin-op video games. Building it into the machine did two things. It prevented lying about your score, and it saved wear on the game cabinets.

Re:WASD (#20)

[SpectreHiro]

If memory serves, the WASD+mouselook interface was really pioneered by SkyNET, a Bethesda Terminator game that came out a short while before Quake. It's the first game that used mouselook as the default AFAIR -- the original Quake still required the player to enable mouselook manually, I believe (+mouselook).

Some info at der Wiki. [wikipedia.org] ...and MobyGames [mobygames.com]

Re:Eve

[Silverlancer]

Its a sandbox. It provides you with pretty pathetic NPC-related gameplay, and asks you to make your own, whether it be building a corporation, taking part in the stock market, competing in the cutthroat economy, or conquering space and maintaining an empire.

While it certainly has its flaws, the most important thing one has to remember when trying EVE is that if you are uncreative enough that you want your game spoonfed to you, a'la World of Warcraft, EVE Online is not the game for you.

Re:Eve

[wampus]

Tell my PS2 that.

The first party game != Mario Party

[Stormwatch]

The first party game was probably Party Mix [slashdot.org] for the Atari 2600 + the Starpath Supercharger add-on. That was 16 years before the original Mario Party.