Ten games that changed the world
April 11th 2008 11:31
Not all these games are the best in their genre. In fact, in one of their cases, a significant number of people who have played it say that it is the worst game ever. Each one, though, was an important game for one reason or another, a milestone in the development of its genre and its medium, whether or not we realized it at the time.
Without further ado, here they are in chronological order.
Super Mario Brothers (1985)
It wasn't much to look at. It had almost no storyline. There were only two action buttons. Somehow, in spite of those facts, Mario could do an astonishing number of things, especially by the standards of the time. Old people like me will remember the “impossible” triple jump you needed to perform to get to the end of stage 8-3, and the infinite points trick that involved bouncing the turtle shell off the stairs. It also offered a rudimentary sort of branching path structure: the warp zones allowed you to drastically shorten your completion time (a welcome feature in the days before the battery backup save function). I find it telling that the basic formula has been revisited countless times over the years, in everything from Sonic to Kirby to New Super Mario Brothers. The graphics improve, the actions become more complicated and more numerous, but the essence of the game remains the same, and it is as much fun to play now as it was then.
For creating the standard form of platform games, Super Mario Brothers is one of the ten games that changed the world.
Street Fighter (1987)
It’s hard to believe that the original Street Fighter only had two playable characters, both of whom had the same special moves, when you think about what fighting games have become since then – with their chain combos, realistic sound effects and facial expressions, and casts of thousands. It’s become so ingrained in gaming culture that you forget there was a time when the idea was novel, and before which video game characters just ran around and jumped on platforms. You also forget that like Mario, Street Fighter is solely responsible for most of the tropes, fan favorites, and stereotypes of an entire section of the gaming universe. Karate expert with a tortured past? Street Fighter did it first. Silly giggling Japanese schoolgirl? Street Fighter did it first. Black dude with an aversion to shirts? Cocky American surfer? Hard-as-nails Special Forces woman with a heart of gold? Hulking Russian wrestler who is basically a bye matchup for anybody with a projectile attack? Street Fighter did all of those first. Whenever I fire up Matrix: Path of Neo and instruct the handsome hero in the sunglasses to open a can of Code Breaker on the Merovingian’s exile minions, I still have to suppress the urge to shout “Sho-Ryu-Ken!”
For teaching us how much fun it is to watch cartoon characters flip off walls and kick each other in the head, Street Fighter is one of the ten games that changed the world.
Final Fantasy IV (1991)
There are many legitimate complaints about the early Final Fantasy games. The only way to get the required stats and items to finish the game is by tedious level grinding, or wandering around in caves waiting for enough monsters to attack you so you can advance another level. The main quest is more linear than a yardstick. If you talk to the wrong person at the wrong time, you can get insta-killed. The beauty of Final Fantasy IV is that even you know all this and you notice it, you simply don’t care. Yes, Virginia, the storyline is just that good. You don’t feel like you’re being led around by the nose when the Earth Crystal is at stake – even though you are. You don’t feel like you’re level grinding when you’re trying to sneak into the prison in the Tower of Babel – even though you are. You care about the characters and what happens to them. You genuinely fear for Rosa’s life, even though you know that the game can’t conclude until you rescue her. You genuinely feel sorry for Kain and his unrequited love, you’re genuinely glad to see Rydia and Yang again in the underworld, and you genuinely cry when Palom and Porom die (even though they come back to life a couple of quests later).
Was it overly simple and corny by today’s standards? Perhaps, for some at least. And yet, the recent Final Fantasy titles have been moving back towards the classic formula, as exemplified by numbers one through four. That doesn’t even count the straight remakes of this game for the Nintendo DS and Xbox. Which part of Final Fantasy IV has such timeless appeal? Hint: It’s not the attractive Phoenix Down spell animation.
For showing us that RPG characters could play a role just as well as players could, Final Fantasy IV is one of the ten games that changed the world.
Mortal Kombat )(1992)
Mortal Kombat is in an odd situation, as it is both the descendant of and a protest against Street Fighter. Descendant of, because it is part of the same genre and shares certain stylistic and conceptual similarities (martial arts tournament involving implausible acrobatics and powers). Protest against, because it embraced motion capture technology to make its characters look and move like real people where Street Fighter’s graphics were taken straight from the pages of manga comics. I know that being on the internet, it’s hard to believe that anybody doesn’t like Japanimation, but it’s true. It also had a much darker and more violent tone, introducing the concept of the “Fatality”: a fancy term for a keypad sequence that results in your character killing the other guy in the most extreme and bloody way imaginable. It was followed by a seemingly endless procession of sequels, which brought more characters, more special moves, and, yes, even more extreme and bloody fatalities.
Al and Tipper Gore hated this game and wanted to ban it, but Mortal Kombat rode out the inventor of the internet’s challenge and eventually won the battle with its ancestor: today’s fighting games are much more in the style of Mortal Kombat than of Street Fighter when it comes to their look and feel, even when they are also Japanimation (*cough* Tekken *cough*). Every new one-on-one fighter has fatalities now – and its fans refer to them as “fatalities,” no matter what name the manual uses for them. For showing us the way to the blood-soaked future of the fighting genre (and inciting the vitriolic 1990s congressional hearings on video game violence), Mortal Kombat is one of the ten games that changed the world.
Doom (1993)
If you want to get really technical about it, Doom was not quite the original first-person shooter; that honor belonged to Wolfenstein 3D, a World War II-themed affair set in a mysterious German castle. Wolfenstein, though, never really made it big outside of the PC format. The Super Nintendo version had lackluster sales, which at first glance makes it a little odd that Doom did so well – the gameplay is essentially the same, after all. I blame the lazy story writers. After all, why would you voluntarily revisit World War II yet again, and learn “facts” which would only confuse you when they weren’t mentioned on the History Channel later because they are fictional, when you could blast your way across a post-apocalyptic Martian landscape inhabited by demons from the ninth circle of Hell?
Doom introduced the genre to gaming’s common man, serving up the excessive gore and at times sophomoric humor that was highly in demand before games went mainstream. Look up what BFG 9000 actually stands for, and you’ll see what I mean. The genre would reach its peak around the year 2000, with the inimitable classics GoldenEye, Perfect Dark, and TimeSplitters leading the charge, and would owe it all to a linear-path pixellated dungeon and its cacofiends. For that, Doom is one of the ten games that changed the world.
Donkey Kong Country (1994)
In 1994, graphics were like a form of magic. We weren’t savvy with digital video, TiVo was the fevered dream of a madman, and even the best desktop computers had less memory available for image processing than my financial calculator. In spite of being released in, as it were, the middle of the Stone Age, Donkey Kong Country looked amazing. Not only did it really look like you were in the jungle, it felt like you were in the jungle – Diddy and Donkey ran, swam, and climbed just like real monkeys do. And the game was hard – fourteen years later, I’ve uncovered barely more than 80% of the secret rooms.
Mario opened a new area of game design. Donkey Kong moved in, bought the lease, added three new rooms, another floor, and a two-car garage, and repainted the whole thing. For that, Donkey Kong Country is one of the ten games that changed the world.
The Longest Journey (1999)
I’ve waxed lyrical about this game in a previous post, and I stand by it. I doubt you will ever see a game like this again – and it’s not for lack of trying, as the string of blatant knockoffs from Keepsake to Two Worlds will testify. What I haven’t told that many people before, and what’s gotten me the weirdest stares from the people I have, is that the game it’s most similar to is Final Fantasy IV – its structure and gameplay are actually very simple (well, except for the fiendish lateral thinking puzzles), but you don’t notice because of the immersive writing and positively enthralling storyline. You learn more than you ever could have imagined about April Ryan and her world, and from there you learn about yourself and your world. It could as easily be called an interactive graphic novel as a game, and it was the first game that received serious coverage and praise from the mainstream media (for what that's worth). For taking games to places we didn’t know existed and where, for all our sakes, designers should find their way back to, The Longest Journey is one of the ten games that changed the world.
Baldur’s Gate II (2000)
Baldur’s Gate II was far from the first game based on Dungeons and Dragons, but it was the closest, as of its release, to feeling like actually playing Dungeons and Dragons, with a really clever and immersive dungeon master for a change. Not only did you get to create your own character – and give him or her your own name if you felt like – but the storyline focused on and revolved around that character, even to the point of having non-player characters falling in love with you.
Much of the game was highly modular, with most quests being able to be completed in any order or combination. The setting was also deep, with even scenery characters getting a degree of development that has rarely been equaled since (though Icewind Dale II would have made an unputdownable novel, despite its lack of joinable NPCs, and Planescape: Torment remains the preferred game for fans of the Outer Planes manuals). Baldur’s Gate II’s tropes have become standard expectations for new RPGs – the first two questions out of anyone’s mouth whenever such a game is announced are “Will there be romances?” and “Do the quests have a prescribed order?”
It was also one of the first games to inspire a significant community of modders, hackers, and unauthorized bugfixers, complete with internet domains (The Gibberlings Three is my favorite), an OCAML product designed specifically to install fan-made content, differing philosophies, forums, brutal flame wars, and content boycotts. In other words, everything we love and hate about the internet.
And all of the above makes Baldur's Gate II one of the ten games that changed the world.
Enter the Matrix (2003)
Some of its players called it the worst game ever. I didn’t think it was quite so dire, but Path of Neo did have cooler special moves, plus the small matter of oh, I don’t know, getting to play as Neo. (Anthony Wong and Jada Pinkett Smith have about one line each in The Matrix Reloaded, and I had to look at both IMDB and WhatIsTheMatrix.com to figure out who the hell they were.) Also, the car’s wheels in Enter the Matrix’s driving level were square. Hadn’t the designers ever seen a car before?
You’re not playing it to see the car, though. You’re not even playing it because of its compelling protagonists. You’re playing it because it continues the story of the movies – not anything terribly essential, but plenty of interesting stuff, including more screen time for the Merovingian and Persephone, and what Smith got up to between the “Swarm” scene and the beginning of Revolutions. For being part of the first story to span movies, games, television, and comic books, Enter the Matrix is one of the ten games that changed the world.
World of Warcraft (2004)
Many of the names on this list moved gaming into a new conceptual world – for example, by initiating the platform, fighting, or shooter genre, introducing storyline-based gaming, deepening and broadening their respective niche. World of Warcraft went one step further and brought gamers into an actual, literal new world. Players spend hours choosing their character’s clothes and hair color to perfectly represent their inner self. The game has clans, guilds, and towns where people have built virtual farms with virtual livestock and virtual furniture. People have had weddings and funerals for their characters, attended by hundreds of fellow players. They’ve had weddings and funerals for themselves, attended by even more of their fellow players. For being the first brave foray into a cybernetic realm of modem-neuron interface, a place where self-image is reality and your abilities are limited only by your mind, World of Warcraft is one of the ten games that changed the world.
Without further ado, here they are in chronological order.
Super Mario Brothers (1985)
It wasn't much to look at. It had almost no storyline. There were only two action buttons. Somehow, in spite of those facts, Mario could do an astonishing number of things, especially by the standards of the time. Old people like me will remember the “impossible” triple jump you needed to perform to get to the end of stage 8-3, and the infinite points trick that involved bouncing the turtle shell off the stairs. It also offered a rudimentary sort of branching path structure: the warp zones allowed you to drastically shorten your completion time (a welcome feature in the days before the battery backup save function). I find it telling that the basic formula has been revisited countless times over the years, in everything from Sonic to Kirby to New Super Mario Brothers. The graphics improve, the actions become more complicated and more numerous, but the essence of the game remains the same, and it is as much fun to play now as it was then.
For creating the standard form of platform games, Super Mario Brothers is one of the ten games that changed the world.
Street Fighter (1987)
It’s hard to believe that the original Street Fighter only had two playable characters, both of whom had the same special moves, when you think about what fighting games have become since then – with their chain combos, realistic sound effects and facial expressions, and casts of thousands. It’s become so ingrained in gaming culture that you forget there was a time when the idea was novel, and before which video game characters just ran around and jumped on platforms. You also forget that like Mario, Street Fighter is solely responsible for most of the tropes, fan favorites, and stereotypes of an entire section of the gaming universe. Karate expert with a tortured past? Street Fighter did it first. Silly giggling Japanese schoolgirl? Street Fighter did it first. Black dude with an aversion to shirts? Cocky American surfer? Hard-as-nails Special Forces woman with a heart of gold? Hulking Russian wrestler who is basically a bye matchup for anybody with a projectile attack? Street Fighter did all of those first. Whenever I fire up Matrix: Path of Neo and instruct the handsome hero in the sunglasses to open a can of Code Breaker on the Merovingian’s exile minions, I still have to suppress the urge to shout “Sho-Ryu-Ken!”
The Wachowski brothers have seen all the same things you have
For teaching us how much fun it is to watch cartoon characters flip off walls and kick each other in the head, Street Fighter is one of the ten games that changed the world.
Final Fantasy IV (1991)
There are many legitimate complaints about the early Final Fantasy games. The only way to get the required stats and items to finish the game is by tedious level grinding, or wandering around in caves waiting for enough monsters to attack you so you can advance another level. The main quest is more linear than a yardstick. If you talk to the wrong person at the wrong time, you can get insta-killed. The beauty of Final Fantasy IV is that even you know all this and you notice it, you simply don’t care. Yes, Virginia, the storyline is just that good. You don’t feel like you’re being led around by the nose when the Earth Crystal is at stake – even though you are. You don’t feel like you’re level grinding when you’re trying to sneak into the prison in the Tower of Babel – even though you are. You care about the characters and what happens to them. You genuinely fear for Rosa’s life, even though you know that the game can’t conclude until you rescue her. You genuinely feel sorry for Kain and his unrequited love, you’re genuinely glad to see Rydia and Yang again in the underworld, and you genuinely cry when Palom and Porom die (even though they come back to life a couple of quests later).
Was it overly simple and corny by today’s standards? Perhaps, for some at least. And yet, the recent Final Fantasy titles have been moving back towards the classic formula, as exemplified by numbers one through four. That doesn’t even count the straight remakes of this game for the Nintendo DS and Xbox. Which part of Final Fantasy IV has such timeless appeal? Hint: It’s not the attractive Phoenix Down spell animation.
For showing us that RPG characters could play a role just as well as players could, Final Fantasy IV is one of the ten games that changed the world.
Mortal Kombat )(1992)
Mortal Kombat is in an odd situation, as it is both the descendant of and a protest against Street Fighter. Descendant of, because it is part of the same genre and shares certain stylistic and conceptual similarities (martial arts tournament involving implausible acrobatics and powers). Protest against, because it embraced motion capture technology to make its characters look and move like real people where Street Fighter’s graphics were taken straight from the pages of manga comics. I know that being on the internet, it’s hard to believe that anybody doesn’t like Japanimation, but it’s true. It also had a much darker and more violent tone, introducing the concept of the “Fatality”: a fancy term for a keypad sequence that results in your character killing the other guy in the most extreme and bloody way imaginable. It was followed by a seemingly endless procession of sequels, which brought more characters, more special moves, and, yes, even more extreme and bloody fatalities.
Al and Tipper Gore hated this game and wanted to ban it, but Mortal Kombat rode out the inventor of the internet’s challenge and eventually won the battle with its ancestor: today’s fighting games are much more in the style of Mortal Kombat than of Street Fighter when it comes to their look and feel, even when they are also Japanimation (*cough* Tekken *cough*). Every new one-on-one fighter has fatalities now – and its fans refer to them as “fatalities,” no matter what name the manual uses for them. For showing us the way to the blood-soaked future of the fighting genre (and inciting the vitriolic 1990s congressional hearings on video game violence), Mortal Kombat is one of the ten games that changed the world.
Doom (1993)
If you want to get really technical about it, Doom was not quite the original first-person shooter; that honor belonged to Wolfenstein 3D, a World War II-themed affair set in a mysterious German castle. Wolfenstein, though, never really made it big outside of the PC format. The Super Nintendo version had lackluster sales, which at first glance makes it a little odd that Doom did so well – the gameplay is essentially the same, after all. I blame the lazy story writers. After all, why would you voluntarily revisit World War II yet again, and learn “facts” which would only confuse you when they weren’t mentioned on the History Channel later because they are fictional, when you could blast your way across a post-apocalyptic Martian landscape inhabited by demons from the ninth circle of Hell?
Doom introduced the genre to gaming’s common man, serving up the excessive gore and at times sophomoric humor that was highly in demand before games went mainstream. Look up what BFG 9000 actually stands for, and you’ll see what I mean. The genre would reach its peak around the year 2000, with the inimitable classics GoldenEye, Perfect Dark, and TimeSplitters leading the charge, and would owe it all to a linear-path pixellated dungeon and its cacofiends. For that, Doom is one of the ten games that changed the world.
Donkey Kong Country (1994)
In 1994, graphics were like a form of magic. We weren’t savvy with digital video, TiVo was the fevered dream of a madman, and even the best desktop computers had less memory available for image processing than my financial calculator. In spite of being released in, as it were, the middle of the Stone Age, Donkey Kong Country looked amazing. Not only did it really look like you were in the jungle, it felt like you were in the jungle – Diddy and Donkey ran, swam, and climbed just like real monkeys do. And the game was hard – fourteen years later, I’ve uncovered barely more than 80% of the secret rooms.
Mario opened a new area of game design. Donkey Kong moved in, bought the lease, added three new rooms, another floor, and a two-car garage, and repainted the whole thing. For that, Donkey Kong Country is one of the ten games that changed the world.
The Longest Journey (1999)
I’ve waxed lyrical about this game in a previous post, and I stand by it. I doubt you will ever see a game like this again – and it’s not for lack of trying, as the string of blatant knockoffs from Keepsake to Two Worlds will testify. What I haven’t told that many people before, and what’s gotten me the weirdest stares from the people I have, is that the game it’s most similar to is Final Fantasy IV – its structure and gameplay are actually very simple (well, except for the fiendish lateral thinking puzzles), but you don’t notice because of the immersive writing and positively enthralling storyline. You learn more than you ever could have imagined about April Ryan and her world, and from there you learn about yourself and your world. It could as easily be called an interactive graphic novel as a game, and it was the first game that received serious coverage and praise from the mainstream media (for what that's worth). For taking games to places we didn’t know existed and where, for all our sakes, designers should find their way back to, The Longest Journey is one of the ten games that changed the world.
Baldur’s Gate II (2000)
Baldur’s Gate II was far from the first game based on Dungeons and Dragons, but it was the closest, as of its release, to feeling like actually playing Dungeons and Dragons, with a really clever and immersive dungeon master for a change. Not only did you get to create your own character – and give him or her your own name if you felt like – but the storyline focused on and revolved around that character, even to the point of having non-player characters falling in love with you.
Much of the game was highly modular, with most quests being able to be completed in any order or combination. The setting was also deep, with even scenery characters getting a degree of development that has rarely been equaled since (though Icewind Dale II would have made an unputdownable novel, despite its lack of joinable NPCs, and Planescape: Torment remains the preferred game for fans of the Outer Planes manuals). Baldur’s Gate II’s tropes have become standard expectations for new RPGs – the first two questions out of anyone’s mouth whenever such a game is announced are “Will there be romances?” and “Do the quests have a prescribed order?”
It was also one of the first games to inspire a significant community of modders, hackers, and unauthorized bugfixers, complete with internet domains (The Gibberlings Three is my favorite), an OCAML product designed specifically to install fan-made content, differing philosophies, forums, brutal flame wars, and content boycotts. In other words, everything we love and hate about the internet.
And all of the above makes Baldur's Gate II one of the ten games that changed the world.
Enter the Matrix (2003)
Some of its players called it the worst game ever. I didn’t think it was quite so dire, but Path of Neo did have cooler special moves, plus the small matter of oh, I don’t know, getting to play as Neo. (Anthony Wong and Jada Pinkett Smith have about one line each in The Matrix Reloaded, and I had to look at both IMDB and WhatIsTheMatrix.com to figure out who the hell they were.) Also, the car’s wheels in Enter the Matrix’s driving level were square. Hadn’t the designers ever seen a car before?
You’re not playing it to see the car, though. You’re not even playing it because of its compelling protagonists. You’re playing it because it continues the story of the movies – not anything terribly essential, but plenty of interesting stuff, including more screen time for the Merovingian and Persephone, and what Smith got up to between the “Swarm” scene and the beginning of Revolutions. For being part of the first story to span movies, games, television, and comic books, Enter the Matrix is one of the ten games that changed the world.
World of Warcraft (2004)
Many of the names on this list moved gaming into a new conceptual world – for example, by initiating the platform, fighting, or shooter genre, introducing storyline-based gaming, deepening and broadening their respective niche. World of Warcraft went one step further and brought gamers into an actual, literal new world. Players spend hours choosing their character’s clothes and hair color to perfectly represent their inner self. The game has clans, guilds, and towns where people have built virtual farms with virtual livestock and virtual furniture. People have had weddings and funerals for their characters, attended by hundreds of fellow players. They’ve had weddings and funerals for themselves, attended by even more of their fellow players. For being the first brave foray into a cybernetic realm of modem-neuron interface, a place where self-image is reality and your abilities are limited only by your mind, World of Warcraft is one of the ten games that changed the world.
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