Generally?
MS Solitaire
Second place WOW
Moving the industry forward?
Pong, Doom, HL are good choices
I was thinking Warcraft 3 instead of WoW, since a WC3 mod spawned the entire genre (MOBA) and that genre brought esports from backwater to front and center. & Of course WoW came from WC3.
I mean it did for esports, but be honest that’s a gamer thing. Wow changed the face of mmorg gaming. It hit 12 million? 65 year old grandmas were playing, it completely broke the gamer/normie barrier.
Pong
Missile command and asteroids and space invaders were a generation soon after pong. But they were much better games that made for addictive repeated play, and dream infections. Pong was a technology breaktrhough, but not that good of a game.
Pong
I’m saying pokemon. It’s still a dominant franchise today. It’s inspired countless spin offs and copy cats. It made gaming social and the connector for Gameboys a required accessory. Pokemon Go was a covid time revolution. The series is likely responsible for a sizable growth in the gaming market in the late 90s and early 2000s. People who never played a video game can identify Pikachu, and might even have a plushie. We are closing in on 30 years of pokemon being a dominant franchise.
Minecraft
Really, anything from the Game Canon is a good choice: Mario, Doom, Tetris, SimCity, Civ I, Warcraft, SpaceWar, Zork, that soccer game I don’t remember, StarRaiders.
I haven’t seen anyone mention Zork yet, and it really ought to be in contention here. Pretty much all video games can trace how their narrative is structured through gameplay back to the foundations laid by Zork, even doom. It drew on Colossus, sure, but it built on it so much that it became revolutionary to both games as a storytelling medium and to natural language processing. Really cool stuff.
BattleBorn, Lawbreakers, Skull&Bones and Concord; the biggest f* to AAA (and “AAAA”) industry. You crash, so the Indie rise.
I see a lot of downvotes from people. Listen, it’s okay to disagree and we can have discussions about it. None of the comments so far are offensive or anything. Tell these people why you disagree.
Minesweeper.
Doom. Was on more PCs than Windows, defined a genre and is still referenced today.
I have been gaming since 1980. I have never had a more visceral blown away reaction to a game than the first time I played Doom. We even setup a LAN in our dorm so that we could play it multi-player. The only other computer experience with a similar impact was seeing web pages for the first time and realizing that my parents would be able to use the internet with them (no need to learn usenet, ftp, archie, gopher, and all of the command line utilities that I used). Doom felt so revolutionary.
Continues to have a large following, ported to everything thats powered. This is the answer for me!
can someone help me describe ‘most influential’ for me here?
pardon my english
I suppose it means the game that had the largest impact on the gaming industry and/or society in general. For example, almost all games have red represent health and blue represent mana/magic because diablo was super popular and everyone copied it.
Might be biased but not only does the FF7 story hold up close to three decades later but it was also the catalyst for introducing Japanese RPGs into a western market.
Chrono Trigger predates FF7 by two whole years, and is, objectively, one of the best Video Game RPGs of all times, while also being a JRPG in itself.
Bad rats.
The intersectional apex of interactivity and storytelling
I would have said Doom, but I think in the long run it’s Minecraft or Skyrim.
I don’t think either of those two are in the top 10
Concord!
Tetris brought in the normies.
I’d say everyone knows what Tetris is, so that’s a good argument for it.
