What have been the most important/influential games of all time?

[UnitedWarrior93]

Halo really took FPS to a whole new level, and for me personally, the first 3 halo games is where my online gaming started.

 

[00Stinger]

Halo really took FPS to a whole new level, and for me personally, the first 3 halo games is where my online gaming started.

I could never get into Halo as much as I tried to

 

[The Big Sauce]

Halo for limiting inventory and most notably the shield recovery system which over time made 'med pack' based recovery seem like a relic of the past.

Call of Duty 4 really influenced how a lot of multiplayer games have XP bars to give your multiplayer games real sense of progression.

Killswitch for the PS2/Xbox was the pioneer of the modern third person cover based shooter, this usually gets attributed to Gears of War in the following generation. Which to be fair GOW was probably the main reason that cover based shooters dominated that generation.

Resident Evil 4 for the over the shoulder third person look as well.

 

[The Big Sauce]

Breath of the Wild..

One of the few games that just never ends and you really enjoy existing in that world.

It has come out too soon for its influence to be seen. It probably will be influential in terms of some open world design choices but there hasn't been a single release post BOTW that you could say has been influenced by that game. Purely because there hasn't been enough time to see the effects.

It wasn't until last year that we saw the effects that The Witcher 3 was having on game design with an increased focus in the quality of side quests in the likes of Assassin's Creed Origins.

 

[Long Live HFC]

i disagree that consoles killed the RTS market; i think DOTA2 and LoL played a much bigger role. on that basis i'd add the original warcrat mod to this list. pretty influential if it managed to destroy an entire genre.

 

[dave123]

Doom by far on pc

After that I think command and conquer

Then metal gear solid
Gran turisimo

 

[Cruyff14]

yeah Metal Gear in general is amazing, you go back to the NES game, so many NES games had no story element at all, they were treated purely as games in the toy sense of the word. Konami were doing things ahead of the time back on the NES with the first Metal Gear to the point where people were confused by the complicated controls, story, difficulty.

i remember well what it was like when MGS2 came out in 2001/2002, i was 11/12 year old, i could tell it was one of the best games ever but i recall at the time the doubt people had when cinematic stuff was crossing over into video games, people were skeptical and thought it would cheapen gaming, take it away from the purity of skill based gaming and turn it into some kind of interactive movie - hey, that actually happened. but Konami/Kojima was a visionary, he didn't have cinematic stuff tossed in there as a gimmick, it helped him tell his grand story that he didn't want to tell through Hollywood, told through a game in a groundbreaking way. i remember how people complained about the weapon selection system and the controls and such but it was all kind of revolutionary, looking back at the generation compared to now.

Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time were totally influential because they set the stage for the genre, they laid the foundation for third person 3D games, and it's impressive because it came from the visions of a few men.

i guess Street Fighter has to be up there too for creating a genre as we know it, there's a cool documentary about the history of the games and the scene, obviously the competitive community is huge for SF

I think if you mention Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat absolutely has to be mentioned too.

 

[woota]

Halo for limiting inventory and most notably the shield recovery system which over time made 'med pack' based recovery seem like a relic of the past.

Call of Duty 4 really influenced how a lot of multiplayer games have XP bars to give your multiplayer games real sense of progression.

Killswitch for the PS2/Xbox was the pioneer of the modern third person cover based shooter, this usually gets attributed to Gears of War in the following generation.. Which to be fair GOW was probably the main reason that cover based shooters dominated that generation.

Resident Evil 4 for the over the shoulder third person look as well.

Nope. There were other games like that before GOW. The first game I ever played with those gameplay mechanics was Winback on the N64, back in about 99.

 

[NetworkNerd]

Agree with most of the mentioned. Some others:

Driving Simulators - Daytona USA (at the arcade - 24 years and still at most arcades)
Pokemon Red
Early Civilization games are underrated but were also iconic

One that might cause a bit of a debate is wii sports. Nothing like it had been seen before and I for one had to get it once the uni year finished.

 

[mike123]

It has come out too soon for its influence to be seen. It probably will be influential in terms of some open world design choices but there hasn't been a single release post BOTW that you could say has been influenced by that game. Purely because there hasn't been enough time to see the effects.

It wasn't until last year that we saw the effects that The Witcher 3 was having on game design with an increased focus in the quality of side quests in the likes of Assassin's Creed Origins.

Even then I'd argue Breath of the wild has been influenced by open world games likes Skyrim so I don't think Breath of the Wild will be influential in its own right.

 

[simba_]

I think if you mention Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat absolutely has to be mentioned too.

yea i think you could roughly say SF pioneered the genre and MK popularised it. and Tekken too in the PSX era

 

[Donakebab]

Just a few before I head off to work.

Wolfenstein might have come first, but Doom polished it up and delivered it to a global audience. People all across the planet were sharing a fist full of floppy disks to install the newest craze.

There were a few before these two, but Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat were the first big fighting games and brought it to the masses across arcades, PC's and home consoles.

The Legend of Zelda changed gaming in many ways. It expanded the concept of player health by allowing players to gather more hearts to make them stronger. It broke out of the linear mould most games followed by creating an open world and letting the player explore and even complete dungeons out of order (to an extent anyway), plus the existence of dungeons themselves separate to the open world. Shit they even understood the game was massive (for it's time) and that people would need a break, so they installed a ****ing battery in the cartridge allowing consoles to save progress for the first time ever. Not only did it revolutionise gaming in many ways itself, it spawned a series that would continue to do so.

 

[Gethelred]

Pretty much anything made by Square Enix on the NES and the SNES.

Final fantasy, Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Evermore. Basically, when western fantasy games were struggling along with the lone holdouts being the Fallout/Wasteland series and Bioware's KOTOR and Balder's Gates 1 and 2 - and most of those late in the decade - Square Enix created and cultivated the entire Eastern RPG genre, creating the concepts of turn based combat, classes, leveling up and, most importantly, class changes as characters developed.

My favorite ever game - Seiken Densetsu 3 - wasn't even released outside Japan due to poor relationships between American and Japanese Square Enix, and it's only due to a translator and emulation that the game is starting to get any credit for being among the greatest real time action/rpg's ever created.

 

[Dancing Potato]

Nope. There were other games like that before GOW. The first game I ever played with those gameplay mechanics was Winback on the N64, back in about 99.

Wow, now that's a throwback. I both loved and hated that game as a kid. It was so much fun but bloody hell it was difficult. I never did manage to finish it.

 

[Footy_Fan2007]

all this talk about the first MGS makes me wish I played it

Sent from my SM-G930F using Tapatalk

Incredible game. Had everything.

 

[BEaston]

Half Life for me.

 

[Financialpanther]

• Wolfenstein in a big way (big ups for Doom which really brought home the FPS).
• Resident Evil blazed the way for the pure story driven game for me.
• Sim City was a pioneer
• Test Drive - really brought the driving sims and arcade to the forefront.
• Prince of Persia - enjoyable as a kid
• Battlefield 1942 - multiplayer war, this game was a cracker.

 

[Dancing Potato]

• Wolfenstein in a big way (big ups for Doom which really brought home the FPS).
• Resident Evil blazed the way for the pure story driven game for me.
• Sim City was a pioneer
• Test Drive - really brought the driving sims and arcade to the forefront.
• Prince of Persia - enjoyable as a kid
• Battlefield 1942 - multiplayer war, this game was a cracker.

I'd say Resident Evil is to survival horror what Doom is to FPS. It really popularised it.

Alone in the Dark is then probably the equivalent of Wolfenstein in that it created the genre. Unless I'm forgetting any earlier examples?

 

[woota]

I think No Man's Sky deserves to be on this list. I have never played anything like it. Most unique thing I've ever played.

 

[Long Live HFC]

I think No Man's Sky deserves to be on this list. I have never played anything like it. Most unique thing I've ever played.

it can't really be considered "most influential" yet, though. what has it influenced?

 

[Howard Littlejohn]

I find it hard to go past Space Invaders. While there were a few games around before then, that was the one that started having people go to the shop to play rather than just playing while waiting for the fish&chips. An arcade couldn't be built around one game, but probably provided the impetus to prove that a place to play games could be a business in its own right. Pacman and Donkey Kong would then help cement that business model as a successful one until the rise of the modern home console (there were consoles reasonably early, but the Atari was not really as a threat to arcade) and online play.

 

[Cleavy]

Zork

 

[calyam]

I think No Man's Sky deserves to be on this list. I have never played anything like it. Most unique thing I've ever played.

If it is unique and nothing is like it then it is by definition: not influential.

 

[Red_White_Blue]

obviously wolfenstein 3D and Doom for the FPS genre...but does anybody know what was the first FPS game with a vertical axis of movement? (meaning, the ability to aim up and down). I could be totally wrong but I'm thinking it may have actually been Duke Nukem 3D.
.

I think it was actually a star wars game called dark forces. Might have beaten duke nukem by 12 months or so. Could be wrong though sorry mate

 

[Long Live HFC]

while duke 3D and dark forces came first, i think quake's mouse-look was the cornerstone of vertical aiming for the FPS genre.