The Most Important Video Games in History

I'm going to say it: Spacewar is the Citizen Kane of video games. I know it's nauseating to read that, but it's important to recognize just how early this medium revealed the aspects that make it special. Spacewar was the first video game with a display, but it also had detailed physics (that would model the arc of your path around a black hole) and random-number generation (for calculating where your ship would end up after you pressed the warp button). Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney (who would together found Atari) built 1971's Computer Space for the arcade after playing Spacewar at Stanford.

Star Trek is an early turn & text-based game that became ubiquitous on college campuses. There have been many versions of it, with the most well known version likely being Bob Leedom's "Super Star Trek."Aaron A. Reed, "Code Archaeology with Super Star Trek," Medium Source ↗ Hewlett Packard shipped Mayfield's 2nd version with their "Contributed Program" library in 1973. There were actually quite a few Star Trek inspired fan games released in the 70's, but this seems to be the earliest.

The game was created in 1971 by Don Rawitsch (a Carleton College history major/student teacher) with math-student programmers Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger, built in about two weeks. Rawitsch debuted it on December 3, 1971 to his 8th grade history class at Jordan Junior High in Minneapolis, and it ran on the HP 2100 minicomputer via HP time-shared BASIC, accessed via teleprinter terminals.

Over the 1974 Thanksgiving weekend, Rawitsch (then at MECCMinnesota Educational Computing Consortium) rebuilt the game for MECC's CDC Cyber time-sharing system, and it became the most-used program on the Minnesota school network.

An Apple II version was created in 1985, and the game became a huge edutainment hit.Robert Whitaker, "He Created The Oregon Trail," Slate Source ↗Greg Toppo, "Oregon Trail at 50," The 74 Source ↗

Nolan Bushnell, co-founder of Atari, had seen a version of Magnavox's tennis game that would eventually make it to the Magnavox Odyssey. When he and Ted Dabney hired Allan Alcorn as their first employee, Bushnell had him make a table tennis game as a test of his abilities, and told him it was for General Electric (this was a lie).Computer History Museum, "Pong" Source ↗ Alcorn's version ended up being so good, they decided to manufacture it - they were later sued by Magnavox for patent infringement.MIT Press, "Atari, Magnavox, and a Tale of Two Patents" Source ↗

Hamurabi is likely the oldest playable city management simulator, and a great example of early game development for education purposes. You can find a nice, slightly modernized port of Hamurabi here. The original game is fairly brutal, with no explanation of the math behind resource management - it's all trial and error.

Rusty Rutherford developed pedit5 (internally "The Dungeon") over roughly four to six weeks in late 1975 on the University of Illinois's PLATO network. Another game, simply titled "dnd," also emerged on PLATO around 1975, but most experts favor pedit5 as the earliest. It is widely regarded as the first dungeon-crawl game and one of the earliest CRPGs, and its random generation makes it an early predecessor of the roguelike genre. You can play pedit5 or dnd over at cyber1.org - you'll need to sign up for access as it's a PLATO mainframe emulator. Aaron A. Reed, "On the Dating of Two Early CRPGs: pedit5 and dnd," Medium Source ↗

When I think of the beginning of adventure games, I think of "Adventure" and specifically Colossal Cave Adventure. Will Crowther was a caver but also enjoyed Dungeons & Dragons, and the influence of both are very clear. Stanford grad student Don Woods discovered the game in early 1976, obtained Crowther's source, and released his expanded version in 1977, growing it to ~3,000 lines and adding high-fantasy elements including a dragon, a scoring system, and more treasures.Dennis G. Jerz, "Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave," Digital Humanities Quarterly Source ↗

You can play a version ported to MS-DOS on archive.org.

A 1976 Associated Press story ignited a national moral-panic controversy (New York Times, 60 Minutes) that is often cited as the first major video-game violence controversy - and the coverage boosted sales.Video Game History Foundation, "The Media vs. Death Race" Source ↗

The game was conceived by Nolan Bushnell and Steve Bristow as a single-player evolution of Pong. The prototype hardware was designed by Steve Wozniak, with Steve Jobs assisting as breadboarder/tester; Jobs took the assignment and recruited Wozniak, whose tight design used far fewer TTL chips than typical.Atari, "New Insight into Breakout's Origins" Source ↗

Night Driver's first person driving perspective was preceded by Nürburgring 1, but to my knowledge there's no playable version of that available. The anecdote about Night Driver's development is that programmer Dave Shepperd was shown a flyer with a game cabinet on it with a portion of the screen visible, and that this served as the basis for Night Driver's first person perspective.

While Zork! was originally created and available on mainframe computers like the PDP-10, the developers went on to form Infocom and published it as three separate games from 1980-1982. Zork! was very popular and made its way onto many personal computers in the 80s.Elizabeth Woyke, "The Enduring Legacy of Zork," MIT Technology Review Source ↗

MUDs were a pre-internet multiplayer experience inspired by text-based adventures (like Colossal Cave Adventure) and dungeon crawlers (Zork!) of the time. While they started on college campuses, they soon spread and became popular even into the 90s. Many MUDs are still playable today, with a version of MUD1 available at british-legends.com.

It's no exaggeration to say that Space Invaders changed everything. It's widely considered to be one of the highest grossing video games of all time when accounting for inflation, and pierced the public consciousness. There's a funny myth about how Japan ran out of coins at one point because of the game, but there's nothing really substantive to back that up.Charles Paradis, "Insert Coin to Play: Space Invaders and the 100 Yen Myth," Academia.edu Source ↗

The concept originates from a 1969 text-based game ("Lunar") written by high-schooler Jim Storer in FOCAL on a DEC PDP-8, inspired by the Apollo 11 landing; players managed vertical thrust from velocity/fuel readouts in timed turns.Jim Storer, "Lunar Landing Game Related Documents," Brandeis University Source ↗

A landmark Golden age arcade release and one of the most influential vector titles.The Strong National Museum of Play, "Asteroids" Source ↗ It is Atari's best-selling arcade game of all time (~70,000 arcade units), and the Atari 2600 port sold over 3 million copies. You can find an amazing design doc for the game here.

"Rogue was originally developed as a way to combine the asynchronous nature of chess with the dungeon crawling of Dungeons & Dragons. Like any good dungeon master, the devs quickly realized that they needed a way to keep adventures fresh for each session, and implemented random level and enemy generation. Today the majority of gamers can tell you (or argue with you about) what a “rogue-like” is, but probably haven’t played the progenitor of the genre. And while there’s not much to the game visually, or mechanically compared to modern rogue-likes, the original is still as engaging and infuriating today as it was in the ‘80s." - Ben Pack

Designed and programmed by Atari engineer Doug Neubauer (who also worked on the POKEY sound chip). It combined a first-person 3D cockpit view with a strategic 2D galactic map, establishing conventions of the space-combat sim genre. It would influence later space-combat games like Elite (1984) and Wing Commander (1990).Bill Loguidice, "The History of Star Raiders: Taking Command," Game Developer Source ↗

Bruce Artwick developed FS1 as a realization of his 1976 master's thesis, A Versatile Computer-Generated Dynamic Flight Display. It would go on to be licensed by Microsoft, and would become their longest-running software line, outlasting MS-DOS and predating Windows.

Often credited as the first console action-adventure game, and also the origin of the video game "easter egg" - when a developer hides a secret in the game for players to find. In this case, Warren Robinett programmed a hidden room displaying "Created by Warren Robinett" because Atari did not credit its programmers.Atari, "So Let's Talk About That Easter Egg" Source ↗The Atari Compendium, "Warren Robinett interview" Source ↗

Roberta and Ken Williams are nothing short of legendary game developers. They'd go on to found On-Line Systems (reincorporated as Sierra On-Line), which would develop games such as King's Quest, Gabriel Knight, Space Quest... and Leisure Suit Larry. They set a template for how adventure games would be made going forward.

Pac-Man was one of the first games with a true mascot, released in the midst of Japan's "kawaii" craze (consider that Hello Kitty launched in the 70s in Japan).Corinne Segal, PBS - "8 things you didn't know about Pac-Man" Source ↗Alistair Wong, "Pac-Man Creator Toru Iwatani On Namco’s Atari Influences And Overseas Popularity," Siliconera Source ↗ Atari licensed the game from Namco and held exclusive rights to develop and distribute it for the VCS 2600, which sold 7-8 million cartridges worldwide. Atari did overproduce Pac-Man, by some estimates by about 4 million cartridges.The Atari Compendium, "License to Ill: How Atari's Biggest Arcade Licensing Coup Became Its Worst Adaptation" Source ↗

Battlezone featured a custom "Math Box" coprocessor (a specialized ALU by Jed Margolin and Mike Albaugh) to handle its 3D vector math.Paul Wallich, "The Invention of Battlezone," IEEE Spectrum Source ↗ A modified military variant, the "Bradley Trainer" (Army Battlezone), was built for the U.S. Army for Bradley Fighting Vehicle gunnery training; only two units were produced.

Defender was famously, brutally hard - a game that respected exactly nobody's quarters - and it broke new ground by scrolling its action sideways across a world bigger than the screen, complete with a radar so you could find the trouble you couldn't see.The Strong National Museum of Play, "Defender" Source ↗ It made Eugene Jarvis a legend and helped kick the side-scrolling shooter into being.

Garriott didn't just make a game, he set standards - the sprawling tile-based world, the mix of overworld and first-person dungeons, the whole "build your character and go" ethos that the genre still runs onJimmy Maher, "A Word on Akalabeth and Chronology," The Digital Antiquarian Source ↗. Ultima became one of the pillars the entire CRPG world was built on, and Lord British one of its founding figures.

Co-designed by Dona Bailey and Ed Logg, Bailey had come to Atari from writing assembly for microprocessors in Cadillac engines, and she is generally credited as the first woman to program a coin-operated arcade game. Logg has described the split as his design, her programming, roughly.Centipede - The Strong National Museum of Play Source ↗

Nintendo at the time of Donkey Kong's development was a toy company, attempting to crack the arcade market. Their first release, Radar Scope, was a hit in Japan but failed to entice U.S. consumers. The arcade version of Donkey Kong was a huge success in the U.S. market, and Coleco secured the exclusive rights to produce Donkey Kong for their console, the ColecoVision. It helped Coleco compete directly with Atari for consumers' attention at home. Shigeru Miyamoto, the game's designer, has gone on to the become one of the greatest and most influential video game designers of all time.Travis Fahs, "The Secret History of Donkey Kong," Game Developer Source ↗

Wizardry took the tabletop dungeon crawl and made it a party-based computer institution, selling over 500,000 copies and, crucially, jumping the Pacific - it directly influenced Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, effectively helping seed the entire Japanese RPG tradition.Time Extension, "The Making Of: Wizardry, The Landmark RPG That Inspired Dragon Quest & Final Fantasy" Source ↗

Utopia was an early arrival of real time strategy games on consoles when the genre was primarily dominated by turn based ones, and even more interesting was that it shipped as a two player multiplayer only game, though many gamers played solo with the other island sitting idle.

When Zaxxon first appeared, that angled pseudo-3D look was genuinely jaw-dropping - you really felt like you were flying into the screen, banking over walls and judging your altitude against a shadow. It's also one of the first arcade games Sega bothered to advertise on television, dropping something like $150,000 on a commercial.Aljean Harmetz, "Movie Themes Come To Video Games," N.Y. Times News Service Source ↗

Pinball Construction Set shipped with the promise of allowing players to create their own games - the tool was the product. First developed and released by Bill Budge in 1982, Electronic Arts picked it up and released it in 1983 for the Atari 8-bit and Commodore 64. Will Wright has cited it as an influence on SimCity, and it would be followed by games like RPG Maker, LittleBigPlanet, and Mario Maker, and more.

Two joysticks, no buttons: one hand moves you, the other aims your fire in any direction. That control scheme was the whole innovation, and it launched the twin-stick shooter as we know it.Bill Loguidice, "The History of Robotron: 2084," Game Developer Source ↗

Activision was formed by programmers that left Atari after they failed to negotiate better pay for their efforts. They'd realized that some of their individual works were responsible for large percentages of the company's profits, but felt they were never credited for their work appropriately.The Atari Compendium, "David Crane interview" Source ↗ Pitfall! is proof they were right - it was a best seller on the console, and its gameplay also paved the way for future titles like Prince of Persia and Super Mario Bros.

Atari lost exclusive control over who could create games for its system when their lawsuit against Activision ended in a 1982 settlement that let third parties in, and this would greatly contribute to the video game crash of 1983.Julien Mailland, "How Nintendo Bled Atari Games to Death," The MIT Press Reader Source ↗

Q*bert is an early example of creating the illusion of a 3D scene using 2D images. Jeff Lee was inspired by M.C. Escher's art and its illusions of perspective.The Register, "Antique Code Show: Q*bert" Source ↗

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is sort of a mascot for the 1983 Video Game Crash - but the factors playing into the crash were truly a perfect storm. Atari had lost a court case pertaining to outside developers of Atari games, and the market was flooded by cheap cartridges. This combined with the arrival of the VCR and price wars in the PC market devastated video game sales.Smithsonian National Museum of American History, "From Landfill to Smithsonian Collections: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial Atari 2600 Game" Source ↗

Nobunaga's Ambition is regarded as one of the originators of the grand-strategy genre: turn-based rule of a domain through economy, military, and diplomacy with the goal of conquest. Its success established Koei as a strategy publisher and began the company's long-running historical-simulation output, which grew to more than fifteen Nobunaga's Ambition titles alongside the parallel Romance of the Three Kingdoms series.Automaton, "Koei's Founder on How His Solo Passion Project Sold 10,000 Copies at the Dawn of PC Gaming in Japan" Source ↗

While the 1983 Video Game Crash was crushing American games developers, a burgeoning PC video game market in the United Kingdom was starting to spin up. The UK home micro game scene was rife with weird and surreal titles, many inspired by Monty Python. Jeff Minter's games are an iconic example of this style, and Attack of the Mutant Camels is probably the most well known example of the era.Jack Yarwood, "Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story." - Time Extension Source ↗

The title helped establish the template for the Japanese adventure genre, which many other titles would imitate and build upon. When asked "Can you remember one of the first times a story in a game really struck you?" Hideo Kojima cited Portopia Renzoku Satsujin Jiken. "Along with my encountering Super Mario Bros., experiencing this game led to my working in this industry. The player is a detective and tries to solve this murder case with his colleague called Yasu. There’s mystery, a 3D dungeon, humor, and a proper background and explanation of why the murderer committed the crime. That is why there was drama in this game. My encountering this game expanded the potential of video games in my mind." Greg Kasavin, "Everything is Possible”: Inside the Minds of Gaming’s Master Storytellers" - GameSpot Source ↗

Dragon's Lair was first released as a Laserdisc arcade game in 1983 by Cinematronics, featuring artwork created by former Disney animator Don Bluth. In an arcade full of blocky sprites, Dragon's Lair looked like a movie - because it basically was one. The LaserDisc's storage let it deliver fidelity years ahead of anything running on contemporary hardware, and players lined up (and paid a premium quarter) just to watch Don Bluth's animation play out.William Hunter, "Dragon's Lair and the Laser Game Craze," The Dot Eaters. Source ↗

"Dragon's Lair is the intersection between classic arcade games and the hand-drawn animated movies I love. I'd always spend a few quarters on a cabinet if I saw one in the wild, even if I usually failed a QTE and died. But, hey, those death animations were worth the price of admission." - Mike Minotti

Not the first sports game by a long shot, but the button-mashing translation of athletics would go on to become a full genre. Hyper Sports, Daley Thompson's Decathalon, Epyx Summer Games, and even Mario & Sonic at the Olympics Games would follow in its footsteps.

M.U.L.E. was doing four-player, simultaneously competitive-and-cooperative multiplayer economics in 1983, and designers have been quietly cribbing from it ever since. It was lead designer Danielle Bunten Berry's early work, and its fingerprints run deep: Will Wright dedicated The Sims to Bunten's memory, and Shigeru Miyamoto has named it as an influence on Pikmin.AtariWomen, "Danielle Bunten Berry" Source ↗

King's Quest gave you an animated character you steered through a pseudo-3D world you could move around and behind, not just a static illustration with a text parser bolted on. Roberta Williams had already helped invent the graphic adventure with Mystery House; here she set the template Sierra would follow for a decade and a half of King's Quests.Jimmy Maher, "The Unmaking and Remaking of Sierra On-Line," The Digital Antiquarian Source ↗

Rogers spotted the gap in a single glance: "there were no computer role-playing games in Japan. The US had Ultima and Wizardry" - so the same man that flew to Moscow to negotiate the rights to Tetris also worked to popularize role playing games in Japan.

The Black Onyx was built from the ground up to be approachable for players who'd bounced clean off the imports. It cracked open a market that Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy detonated two years later; Rogers cheerfully admits those Japanese-made games "struck a more effective cultural chord" and blew right past him.Simon Parkin, "The Making Of The Black Onyx," Time Extension Source ↗VICE, "The Dutch Godfather of Japanese RPGs" Source ↗

I, Robot holds a Guinness World Record as the first arcade game to render filled 3D polygons - not wireframe outlines like Battlezone, but actual solid, shaded surfaces computed in real time.Michael Plasket, "I, Robot," Hardcore Gaming 101 Source ↗

The story of how Tetris escaped the USSR is genuinely wild. Pajitnov, as a Soviet state employee, couldn't sell his own game for a profit and saw no royalties for years, while the international rights got juggled, misassigned, and fought over between publishers.CNN, "Tetris: The Soviet 'Mind Game' That Took Over the World" Source ↗

Karate Champ is the game that laid down the modern one-on-one martial-arts fighter - the round structure, the judged scoring, the whole two-guys-facing-off template that Street Fighter and everything after would inherit.Post-Game Content, "Karate Champ - Player vs Player: Games of the Retro-Bit Super Retro-Cade" Source ↗ It didn't invent the very idea of a fighting game - Sega's Heavyweight Champ got there back in 1976 - but this is the one whose DNA you can still feel every time two characters square up on a health-bar screen.

Dragon Slayer is one of the earliest action RPGs, pairing real-time combat with character growth at a point when most games kept the two apart. It also started a long-running Falcom line - the Dragon Slayer name carried on through Xanadu, Sorcerian, and Legend of Heroes - and the design it worked out runs forward into Ys and much of the action-RPG genre that came after.shmuplations, "Yoshio Kiya – 1987 Developer Interview" Source ↗Kurt Kalata, "Dragon Slayer," Hardcore Gaming 101 Source ↗

How do you fit an entire galaxy into 32K of memory? You don't store it - you generate it. Elite used procedural generation to conjure eight galaxies of 256 planets each on the fly, a trick that let two guys on a BBC Micro build a universe bigger than any hard drive of the era could have held.Jimmy Maher, "Elite," The Digital Antiquarian Source ↗ Just as important, it handed you no goals: dock, upgrade, trade, hunt, explore, become whatever kind of spacer you wanted.

Knight Lore ran on Ultimate's "Filmation" engine, which used masked sprites to render a convincing isometric 3D room you could move freely around inside, which made a splash among the British computer scene. It wasn't the literal first isometric game, but it was the one that spawned an entire sub-genre of imitators on home computers seemingly overnight.Internet Archive, "Knight Lore (1984)" Source ↗ And the Stamper brothers weren't done: they'd go on to found Rare, famous for Donkey Kong Country, Banjo-Kazooie, GoldenEye 007, and more.

Widely considered one of the best video games ever made, and deeply influential for every 2D platformer that would follow. While Donkey Kong introduced the world to Mario and its particular brand of platforming, Super Mario Bros. and the Nintendo Entertainment System could be credited as foundational elements of the revival of the video game business in the United States after the crash of 1983. Koji Kondo's phenomenal soundtrack paired with the feel-good precision of its controls have made it a true classic - the kind of thing people who've never held a controller can still hum.Nintendo Life, "Mario History: Super Mario Bros. - 1985" Source ↗shmuplations, "Super Mario Bros. – 2015 Developer Interview" Source ↗

Richard Garriott's long-running Ultima series changed drastically with Quest of the Avatar. Bothered by his players' amoral approach to his previous games - and, by his own account, partly motivated by angry letters from parents - he built what may be one of the first real morality systems in a video game.Peter Tieryas, "The Story Behind Ultima’s Morality," Kotaku Source ↗

Gauntlet made a splash in the arcades with its four player dungeon crawler gameplay as game developers were looking for ways to innovate and create experiences in the arcade that players couldn't get at home. John Howard Palevich's Dandy (1983), an MIT thesis project published through the Atari Program Exchange, shares Gauntlet's core so closely that designer Ed Logg openly acknowledged it as inspiration - and Palevich threatened legal action, and settled out of court (reportedly for a Gauntlet machine of his own).Jason M. Gallagher, "Gauntlet: A History of the Classic Dungeon Crawler," Den of Geek Source ↗

Fifteen years before Will Wright let you micromanage a household, Activision shipped a game with no score, no win state, and no enemies - just a tiny person to care for. Crane himself framed it as an early step toward the simulation genre, and it's now widely regarded as a direct ancestor of The Sims.

Space Harrier was one of the first games built on Sega's "Super Scaler" hardware, which threw enormous sprites at the screen and scaled them in and out to fake a sense of speed and depth that wowed at the arcades. That pseudo-3D horsepower - and the deluxe hydraulic cabinet that rolled with your movements - set the template for Sega's arcade dominance and for Suzuki's own follow-ups like OutRun.Kurt Kalata, "Space Harrier," Hardcore Gaming 101 Source ↗

The Legend of Zelda asks players to poke at every rock and search every corner of its map, and the battery-backed save system meant that the adventure could persist between gaming sessions, a genuinely new idea on consoles.Video Games Chronicle, "Zelda at 40: How Shigeru Miyamoto's childhood explorations inspired Nintendo's legendary classic" Source ↗ The Legend of Zelda has gone on to become one of gaming's most beloved franchises with its curiosity-first design philosophy.

While turn-based RPG's are deeply associated with Japanese game developers now, role playing games in general were not popular with Japanese consumers before 1984 - imports like Wizardry and Ultima (Horii's own cited influences) introduced the concepts to a wary audience.Game Informer, "Yuji Horii’s Journey To Making Dragon Quest, As Told By The Man Himself" Source ↗ In 1986 the seminal Japanese turn-based RPG arrived: Dragon Quest, streamlined for newcomers and dressed up with a killer pop-culture team - character art by Akira Toriyama (of Dragon Ball fame) and music by Koichi Sugiyama. It resonated with Japanese audiences, launched a national institution, and has since become a worldwide mainstay of the genre.

Metroid, co-developed by Nintendo R&D1 and Intelligent Systems, fused shooting and platforming with a maze you had to map in your head and re-open with power-ups, so backtracking became discovery rather than a chore. That structure was influential enough to eventually get named after the game itself (half of the "Metroidvania" label).

OutRun took the Super Scaler pseudo-3D tech from Space Harrier and leveraged it for a perfect Miami-sunset driving experience, complete with a radio to swap between tracks by Hiroshi Kawaguchi. The hydraulic sit-down cabinet made it an arcade event.Brian Gazza, "OutRun," Hardcore Gaming 101 Source ↗

This is the game credited, in part, with the popularity of the brawler in the arcade craze of the 1980s and '90s. It kicked off a genuine golden age of beat 'em ups, and you can draw a straight line from the Lee brothers to Final Fight, Streets of Rage, and the whole flood of side-scrolling brawlers that followed.Sam Derboo, "Double Dragon," Hardcore Gaming 101 Source ↗

Metal Gear flipped the era's shoot-everything logic on its head: here, getting into a firefight usually meant you'd already screwed up. It's the game that made stealth a mainstream, marketable idea and launched one of gaming's most beloved (and most talkative) franchises, with Kojima steering it for decades.Ryan Lambie, "Why 1987's Metal Gear Is Still Important," Den of Geek Source ↗

NetHack has a design premise that every object should interact or behave as expected with everything else in the game - the interaction matrix is dense, and combined with its procedurally generated dungeons and D&D style mechanics (NetHack is a fork of Hack, which was heavily inspired by Rogue), has made for an experience that left a lasting impression on many game developers.

That verb-menu interface was powered by SCUMM (the Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion), an engine Gilbert built for this game - and it went on to run the entire golden age of LucasArts adventures, from Monkey Island to Day of the Tentacle. Maniac Mansion also had a cast of swappable kids, multiple endings, and a sense of humor that made point-and-click feel playful instead of punishing. It was Lucasfilm Games' first self-published product, and it set the template for a studio that would define the genre.Lucasfilm, "Lucasfilm Originals: SCUMM" Source ↗

Méwilo designer Muriel Tramis is widely credited as the first Black woman video game designer, and she drew on her own Martinican heritage for a game set on the eve of a real catastrophe most players had never even heard of. French developers like Tramis were treating games as a consciously artistic medium - with actual literary collaborators - years before anyone was giving the format that kind of credit.Video Game History Foundation, "Ep. 4 Elijah Lee Finds the First Black Female Game Designer" Source ↗

Dungeon Master took the first-person party RPG concept from turn-based to real time, and became the Atari ST's best-selling game - moving around 40,000 copies in its first year. Its influence is easy to trace: Eye of the Beholder, Ultima Underworld, and most grid-crawlers that followed borrowed from it in some way.Damien McFerran, "The Making Of Dungeon Master, A Truly Trailblazing First-Person RPG," Time Extension Source ↗

Alongside Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy helped establish the console JRPG, and it set several of the genre's lasting conventions: side-view turn-based battles showing the player's whole party facing the enemy - a break from Dragon Quest's lone first-person view - and a high-fantasy story told on an epic scale at a time when most console games carried little narrative.

It saved progress on a battery-backed cartridge, still a novelty in 1987, and it launched Square's flagship franchise, selling roughly 700,000 copies in North America and building an early Western audience for the genre.Sam Stone, "How Final Fantasy Changed RPGs Forever," Den of Geek Source ↗

Interplay used Wasteland's setting and concept as the basis for Fallout (1997) after it was unable to reclaim the Wasteland license, and co-founder Brian Fargo has described Fallout as effectively a Wasteland sequel. Its consequence-driven, character-based approach to a nuclear-ruined world supplied much of the template later carried forward by the modern computer RPG.Jimmy Maher, "Wasteland," The Digital Antiquarian Source ↗

SimCity has no win condition, no opponents, and no score, and publishers considered it unsellable before it went on to define its genre.Jimmy Maher, "The Life and Times of Maxis, Part 1: SimEverything," The Digital Antiquarian Source ↗ It demonstrated that open-ended software toys could sell, started the "Sim" line, and influenced later management and city-building games.Alex Wawro, "How Will Wright and SimCity shaped the course of game dev history," Game Developer Source ↗

Populous is widely recognized as the first god game and established the genre. It was the breakthrough title for Bullfrog and Peter Molyneux, whose studio went on to make Theme Park and Dungeon Keeper.Alex Cachinero-Gorman, "Populous," Hardcore Gaming 101 Source ↗

The rotoscoped animation gave the running and jumping character a weight and momentum uncommon on home computers in 1989.Jordan Mechner, "Prince of Persia" Source ↗ The game launched a franchise that sold around 2 million units across ports and later produced the Sands of Time series.Ubisoft, "Prince of Persia 35th Anniversary - A Look Back at the Original Game" Source ↗

Herzog Zwei ran real-time strategy on console hardware years before the genre became established on PC. It is widely regarded as an early proto-real-time-strategy game that predates Dune II, and the creators of Warcraft, StarCraft, and Command & Conquer have cited it as an influence.Robin Bea, "Herzog Zwei Still Stands Out In The Genre It Created 35 Years Ago," Inverse Source ↗

Capcom later set out to remake Sweet Home, and that project became Resident Evil (1996), produced by Fujiwara and directed by Shinji Mikami.Ryan Lambie, "Resident Evil: How Sweet Home Inspired the Series," Den of Geek Source ↗ Its use of limited resources, environmental storytelling, and permanent character death laid groundwork that survival horror was later built on.James Balmont, "Sweet Home: The forgotten 1989 game that inspired the survival horror subgenre," Inverse Source ↗

Railroad Tycoon was where Sid Meier developed the management-simulation design he carried into later games, and where he began working with Bruce Shelley, the collaboration that produced Civilization the following year.CivFanatics, "Civilization Chronicles: Interview with Bruce Shelley" Source ↗ Its name marked the start of the "Tycoon" economic-simulation label later reused by many builders.

 Wing Commander framed its dogfighting with mission briefings, a named squadron, and pilots who could be killed permanently, presenting space combat as a narrative war. It produced a franchise of direct sequels - II, III, IV, and Prophecy - plus spin-offs including Privateer and Armada, and set Chris Roberts on the path that led to Star Citizen.Alex Wawro, "Before Star Citizen, there was Wing Commander: How Chris Roberts got his start," Game Developer Source ↗

John Madden had required an authentic 11-on-11 simulation with full playbooks, a demand that made the earlier computer versions difficult to build, and the Genesis hardware was the first to render that design for a mass audience. The game sold roughly 400,000 copies against an EA projection of 75,000 and won best 16-bit console game at the 1990 Golden Joystick Awards, becoming a Genesis killer app and launching one of the longest-running annual sports franchises.Jason M. Gallagher, "How Madden Became King of the Gaming Gridiron," Den of Geek Source ↗Ernst Krogtoft, "John Madden Football, the beginning of a billion-dollar legacy," Retro365 Source ↗

Solo developer Eric Chahi created his own game engine, leveraging vector graphics to reduce memory requirements on the Amiga and Atari ST. It was lauded for its use of cutscenes and real time cinematics, inspiring developers like Keiichiro Toyama, creator of Silent Hill.

Drawing from SimCity, Railroad Tycoon, and Empire, Sid Meier worked late nights on Civilization with Bruce Shelley serving as his play tester. It started as a real time strategy game before becoming the iconic turn based 4X game we know today. A real advancement in strategy games comes from Meier's Advances Chart, a timeline of research achievements in science, technology, and culture, which progresses the player empire through historical advancements. Shelley (who was by this time becoming more and more a game designer) and Meier pored over books and papers learning about which advancements should be included, and this ended up inspiring non-violent means of winning the game - a spaceflight trip to Alpha Centauri. Civilization also introduced "Wonders," special structures that could only be built once and would provide a bonus of some kind. Civilization is full of design elements like this that would be endlessly copied by future franchises.

It shipped six weeks late. Meier and Shelley had their bonuses cut for missing the Christmas season, then watched the game keep selling month after month when every other title's sales fell off: 850,000 copies in four and a half years.Jimmy Maher, "The Game of Everything, Part 1: Making Civilization" - The Digital Antiquarian Source ↗

What started as an animation of little guys getting killed to make some coworkers laugh became a real-time puzzle game about herding them. The player never controls a lemming directly, instead assigning roles to individual lemmings as they march. Each level demands a percentage saved rather than everyone, and the intended solution often means spending a few on purpose. The game rewards quick decisions, because the stream doesn't stop while you think.Joe Donnelly, "The making of: Lemmings," PCGamesN Source ↗

DMA Design would later develop Grand Theft Auto, and eventually be rebranded as Rockstar North.

Two major competitive fighting game mainstays were popularized in the competitive fighting game scene in Street Fighter II and mostly accidental - combos, and distance normals. Skilled players found that correctly timed sequences left no room to recover between hits - Capcom's team found it during development but thought the timing would be too strict for players (it wasn't). They'd later embrace it with an on-screen combo meter in Super Street Fighter II. Normals were the result of an attempt at Final Fight-style chained hits, reworked after pushback kept breaking it.shmuplations, "Street Fighter II – 1991 Developer Interview" Source ↗Capcom, "Street Fighter II Developer's Interview" Source ↗

Sega launched an all out assault on Nintendo's vice grip on the international console market, and it decided to pack in its answer to Mario with Sonic the Hedgehog. Sega wasn't shy about it, either - its marketing line "Genesis does what Nintendon't" is some iconic console wars mudslinging. shmuplations, "The Story of Sonic Team – 1997 Developer Interview" Source ↗

The first role-playing action game in 3D, and is considered an early predecessor to the immersive sim genre. It directly inspired titles like Deus Ex, The Elder Scrolls, Half-Life, Tomb Raider, and more. Paul Neurath's original concept for The Stygian Abyss was borne out of wanting more immersive visual elements after working on Space Rogue, which was 2D tile based with 3D space flight.

The story behind id Software and its hacker ethos development practices made the team the 90s rock stars of gaming. They moved fast, innovated on PC, and pushed what games on the platform could do. John Carmack's engine development skills introduced early 2D smooth side scrolling in Commander Keen, and he followed that up with the engine that could run a first-person shooter with smooth controls. Combined with the talented level designers he worked with at Softdisk, Wolfenstein: 3D became a hit and shifted the direction of games for the decade.

Originally developed for a never-released VHS based console, Night Trap is a full motion video game that features a sleepover beset by vampires. The player is tasked with protecting the girls at the sleepover and help them survive the night. Fairly tame by today's standards, its release in close proximity to the bloody Mortal Kombat led Senator Joseph Liebermann to decry violence in games & push for a proper rating system, which would eventually result in the ESRB.

Along with Sweet Home, Alone in the Dark is an early landmark survival horror title and helped spawn an entire genre. Its game engine is the first known use of interpolation, computer rendered animation between key frames for smoother flow. The franchise has gone on to sell millions of copies across 8 games, with none received as well as the 1992 classic.

Acid spit melting the flesh off an opponent. Ripping a head complete with spine out of the enemy. The secret button combinations that would reveal FATALITIES in Mortal Kombat became chlidhood arcade legend, and home releases on Sega and Nintendo consoles cemented it as a fighting game classic that riffed on the genre with violent flair. Mortal Kombat and Night Trap are commonly held as the origin of the ESRB.

It's hard to imagine Nintendo without kart racers - and it makes sense: they invented the genre. The split screen car racer featured Mario and friends hucking shells at and lapping one another in this multiplayer classic, and would be followed by many best seller entries on every Nintendo console since, as well as competitor copy cats like Wacky Wheels, Atari Karts, and Sonic Drift.

The original Dune game was a more straightforward adventure, while Dune II would establish the blueprint for successful RTS games for decades. Real time management of units, resource gathering, exploring the fog of war, and base-building are hallmarks of the genre that came together in this influential title. Blizzard Entertainment's first game, Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, was a direct flip of Dune II, and Westwood would later release Command & Conquer.

Over-the-top gonzo basketball that's less simulation and more arcade cotton candy. It emphasized fast-paced competitive action over strategy and accuracy: players' dunks ignore gravity, there are no fouls or violations, and gamers were encouraged to play dirty. It was a commercial and critical success, with over $2 billion in lifetime revenue.

With Star Fox on the SNES, Nintendo brought real-time polygon 3D to the console using the Super FX co-processor - a chip designed by Argonaut Software. It was the same trick as Battlezone's Math-Box thirteen years earlier: the main CPU couldn't do the 3D math on its own, so a dedicated chip handled it. Damien McFerran, "The Making of Star Fox," Time Extension Source ↗

What started as "Clue meets Twin Peaks" became something else entirely when Graeme Devine and Rob Landeros noticed the capabilities of CD-ROM when seeing the tech demo'd at a conference. They used full-motion video (FMV) of live actors in their horror puzzle game, and The 7th Guest became a massive hit. It sold over two million copies on release and became one of the first CD-ROM "killer apps."Ben Reeves, "Horror Story: An Oral History of The 7th Guest," Game Informer Source ↗

Myst was accessible to an audience that hadn't been introduced to video games. It leveraged a non-existent UI with the ability to tap and touch anything on screen while exploring the main island and various ages. Rand and Robyn Miller spent time reading about consumer design for things like doors, switches, and teapots in order to understand how to make their game appeal to a wider audience.

"We imagined a computer illiterate user – and we often thought of our grandmother – or we imagined the type of user that doesn't have the time to learn how to play a game; these were the users that would have to be immediately drawn into a game. We wanted to create an interface that would appeal to this type of user." - Robyn MillerBernard Boo, "Myst: Creators Rand and Robyn Miller Unlock the Secrets of the PC Classic," Den of Geek Source ↗Nintendo Life, "The Making of Myst" Source ↗

Games released in 1996 were chasing Doom. Games releasing in 2026 still are. The game had (has!) rabid fans, and its fast paced action and gameplay elements all serve the core focus of "ripping and tearing" - and has made Doom one of the most influential shooters of all time. id Software released their engine in 1997 on Linux, and thirty years later games are still being made on forks like GZDoom.

Shown as a prototype at the Amusement Machine Show in Tokyo to warm reception in 1993, Daytona USA quickly populated Japanese arcades and it later landed on the Sega Saturn in April 1995. It was the first game to run on the Sega Model 2 board, which was built in collaboration with GE Aerospace. Cabinets for the game are still running at arcades 30 years later, and it's considered one of the highest-grossing coin-op titles of all time.Time Extension, "Daytona USA Is 30 Years Old This Month" Source ↗

Julian Gollop cut his teeth on board games and tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons, and its influence on X-COM and future computer strategy titles are obvious. He pitched MicroProse a sequel to his squad tactics game Laser Squad; they liked it, but wanted something with the scope to stand next to Civilization, so he tacked on a global campaign onto the unit tactics he already excelled at. At one point the game was actually cancelled - MicroProse's new owners reviewed the UK lineup and killed it, and the UK office just kept quietly developing it anyway. The fusion of the global campaign layer with the tactical one made for a remarkably deep player experience in 1994, and it's still the template that everyone borrows.Joe Donnelly, "The making of: X-Com," PCGamesN Source ↗David L. Craddock, "X-COM’s Beloved Tactical Gameplay Took Months To Get Just Right," Kotaku Source ↗

"Donkey Kong Country reinvented Nintendo’s ornery ape into a flourishing franchise in its own right, full of iconic new heroes and villains. Its take on 2D sidescrolling was more moody and naturalistic than the Mario alternative, with lush landscapes and ambient audio. This more realistic aesthetic, groundbreaking at the time, was the result of cleverly used pre-rendered visuals that translated technologically advanced 3D graphics back into humble 2D sprites. With your mind filling in the details, Donkey Kong Country on the beloved yet aging Super Nintendo looked just as futuristic as anything on the truly next-gen Sony PlayStation just starting to hit store shelves. The trick worked. Along with extending the life of the SNES, DKC’s success also further solidified the partnership between Nintendo and Rare. The British studio would be a vital workhorse during the inconsistent N64 era." - Jordan Minor

The label "Metroidvania" would be used to describe the non-linear exploration and "search action" gameplay of Symphony of the Night and Metroid. Journalist Jeremy Parish did not coin the term (he learned it from Scott Sharkey at 1Up) but he maintains a site cataloguing all games that fit the genre, metroidvania.com.Jeremy Parish, "Design in Action | Symphony of the Night and the Metroidvania Lie" Source ↗

How does a first person shooter work on a gamepad in a living room? Goldeneye on the Nintendo 64 brought the answer, with split-screen deathmatches and a N64 controller compromise on aiming that would be perfected by later controllers. Danielle Riendeau, "The making of GoldenEye 007, a wildly ambitious classic," Game Developer Source ↗Kate Cox, "The Team That Made GoldenEye Was All For Adding That Famous Multiplayer Last Minute—They Just Didn’t Tell Their Bosses," Kotaku Source ↗

StarCraft enjoyed explosive success in South Korea, setting the stage for institutional, professional eSports on an unheard of scale. Professional gamers playing video game matches aired on local TV stations in the 90s - StarCraft cemented an industry.Jimmy Maher, "Starcraft (A History in Two Acts)," The Digital Antiquarian Source ↗Ben Lindbergh, "Good Game Well Played: The Story of the Staying Power of 'StarCraft'," The Ringer Source ↗

The first game to cross 100,000 concurrent players. Lineage's engine is a fork of Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds (1996) by the same developer, Jake Song, and Nexus holds the Guinness record for longest-running MMORPG. South Korea's gamers flocked to gaming cafes, and games like Lineage and StarCraft were immensely popular. John Henderson, "Beyond Lineage: Jake Song Goes XL," Game Developer Source ↗Felipe Pepe, "RPGs in South Korea: A Brief History of Package, Online, and Mobile Games," Medium Source ↗

Grim Fandango is a game about the afterlife, and you could say it also helped usher the point and click adventure game into its twilight years. Critically acclaimed and considered a point and click adventure game all-timer, but simply didn't sell. It was directed by Tim Schafer, who would go on to found DoubleFine Productions after LucasArts began to exit the adventure game business. Jimmy Maher, "Grim Fandango," The Digital Antiquarian Source ↗Double Fine, "Tim Schafer" Source ↗

"After System Shock I had it in my mind to do a world where anything was possible and the universe of mechanical solutions was available to the player. But this necessitated making the player and the Dinos also physical, so I had to jump in and make compound joint models work, which are now called ragdolls. This was a first and it was hard as fuck." - Seamus Blackley, Executive Producer & Programmer on Trespasser

The story of Gordon Freeman dealing with an inter-dimensional invasion is told in Half-Life entirely without cut-scenes and in first person, resetting expectations for how stories are told in video games. Valve's game engine also lent itself to a lively mod scene, which produced extremely prolific series in Counter-Strike and Team Fortress. Marc Laidlaw, "Writing For Half-Life" Source ↗Valve, "Half-Life 25th Anniversary Documentary" Source ↗

Ocarina of Time's Z-targeting became a template for 3D melee combat everywhere. Nintendo, "Iwata Asks: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D" Source ↗

Thief: The Dark Project wields an extraordinary soundscape as players navigate its complex, interweaving levels. Stereo sound cues are essential tools in avoiding detection in this deeply influential stealth title, and lighting also factors in a major way. Garrett's "light gem" informs the player if they're visible to enemies, and by stepping into the shadows, Garrett the Thief can effectively disappear. On top of that, the player can create their own shadows by dousing torches with water arrows.

Ken Levine did the initial design work for Thief: The Dark Project, and would go on to be the lead designer of System Shock 2 and the creator of the BioShock series.

Argonaut, also the developers of the Super FX chip in use on SNES games like Star Fox, shipped twin-stick controls for Alien: Resurrection as the default scheme a full year before the arrival of Halo: Combat Evolved.John Rairdin, "Fact Check: Did Alien Resurrection invent Dual Analogue First-Person-Shooters?" - Video Game History Foundation Source ↗

Alien Resurrection was panned by critics, who found the new control scheme confusing to use:

"The game’s control setup is its most terrifying element. The left analog stick moves you forward, back, and strafes right and left, while the right analog stick turns you and can be used to look up and down. Too often, you’ll turn to face a foe and find that your weapon is aimed at the floor or ceiling while the alien gleefully hacks away at your midsection." Steven Garrett, "Alien Resurrection Review," GameSpot Source ↗

Hitman: Codename 47 founded the assassination-sandbox and social stealth - hiding in plain sight via disguises, rather than hiding in shadows as in a Metal Gear or Thief. Hitman would become a massive franchise, complete with a movie tie-in. Codename 47 is far from IO's best Hitman game, but it was a flawed and foundational first draft.Edward Love, "The making of Hitman Codename 47," GamesRadar Source ↗

Bohemia Interactive's engine would go on to be used by BISim (Bohemia Interactive Simulations) to create Virtual Battlespace, which became an official "Games for Training" program for the U.S. Marine Corps. The modding community for Bohemia's games would further incubate two landmark entries in the genre: DayZ, and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. Bohemia Interactive, "Bohemia Interactive History #3" Source ↗

It defined the combined-arms multiplayer FPS, featuring 64 players with seamless infantry that could hop into land, air, and sea vehicles on one continuous map. DICE ended up acquiring the mod team that built the Desert Combat mod and they went on to create Battlefield 2.PC Gamer, "Battlefield 1942 review" Source ↗Tor Thorsen, "DICE Acquires Trauma Studios," GameSpot Source ↗

But can it run Crysis? Far Cry proved a PC could render a huge, seamless open world. It debuted the CryEngine and created the PC hardware benchmark era. CryTek's Yerli brothers built Crytek out of their X-Isle tech demo, which Nvidia had bundled as GPU benchmarking software. Lan Pitts, "Crytek's Early Days," GameSpot Source ↗