25
Tetris
Probably Mario
Especially if we consider "influence" beyond influencing other games.
Rogue. You've heard of Roguelikes? It influenced more than just them. Probably every action RPG owes it something.
Hard to argue with this. I'm going to, anyway, and give a doubly contrarian answer - the most influential video game of all time is Dungeons & Dragons.
There is not a single element of CRPGs that wasn't nailed down by 1976, on various mainframes. All those teenage dorks were ripping off the freshly-released tabletop RPG and adding first-person dungeon crawling, random map generation, and everything else that Akalabeth popularized but did not invent. Some of them had real-time multiplayer. Because mainframes.
Rogue was only the best of an entire spate of games just like it - a popular and well-built point of reference more than a surprising innovator. The continuing explosion of CRPGs was surely less about deliberately saying "let's make a game like Rogue" and more about other people seeing your broader-zeitgeist dungeon-crawler and saying "oh, it's like Rogue."
By contrast, Doom is a clear inflection point. "Doom clones" were absolutely trying to clone Doom. id themselves wound up cloning Doom. But I'm not sure Rogue, arriving in 1980, was anything more than an excellent example of the wider genre it came from.
In fact, for direct contrast, damn near every JRPG traces back to Wizardry. That game's creators explicitly namedrop earlier mainframe titles. The Japanese did not have the same tabletop game trend. The PC-8801 port of Wizardry came out of fucking nowhere, for them, and apparently blew their dicks off.
Robot Odyssey.
Doom.
People are still making Doom WADs. And have you ever heard of the FPS genre?
Like I said in the other thread, I vote pokemon. I don't think you can go too much older, because the audience was just so small relative to more modern games. Scale is a major factor to influence.
Don't we have enough wars already?
There's a lot of good arguments out there. Pong for being the "first", Pac-Man for making arcades insane and bringing in big money, Tetris for its wide appeal, Mario 64 for convincing everyone 3d games work, Doom for popularizing the fps, Wii Sports for its ubiquity, Farmville for starting what would become mobile games (which as much as gamers hate to admit, they make more money than every other platform combined). It'd take a pretty convincing argument for me to fully believe any of them but of mine I'd make an argument for Pac-Man, but my heart wants it to be Tetris
The beautiful tapestry of video game history is not woven from a single thread alone. Each person will have their favorites, naturally, but every delightful (and sometimes not delightful) digital block has contributed to where we are today.
That is, to say, I agree with you. They should break it down into categories tbcf
they make more money than every other platform combined
An abuse which demands correction.
personally I think its Doom
Why Doom and not Castle Wolfenstein 3d?
Correct - it’s Doom and it’s not even close. They’re still making Doom levels and doom clones.
and i dont even say doom because of doom the game itself. theres one factor that doom has that almost all the others dont, which is how relevant doom was for creating a game engine, which would evolve into other game engines.
doom engine is basically responsible for quake, goldsrc, id tech, IW, source,, all of which had many defining games.
the fact that games still being released till this day, has roots on an engine developed over 30 years ago
100%.
Hexen, Heretic, Strife, list goes on. All great games too.
And running doom on all kinds of things, like a microwave
I genuinely think FarmVille is a contender, as I said in the other thread, but realistically gaming has existed long enough that picking just one is kind of impossible. There have been several shifts and revolutions. With how much of the revenue in gaming currently flows through mobile games, gacha games and live service games etc I really do believe FarmVille might be the strongest influence on the current landscape of gaming. But historically, it's possible Doom was more important for its development. Or even Super Mario Bros for putting home consoles on the map. I could even see an argument for Minecraft - it's completely ubiquitous and an absolutely global phenomenon.
Gaming is already big enough and has existed long enough that the question is fairly unanswerable. It's like picking the most influential movie. Is it Birth of a Nation for inventing cinematic language? The Jazz Singer for popularising "talkies"? Is it Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon for being the "first"? Is it The Wizard of Oz? Is it just Citizen Kane? The truth is, it's none of them. It's all of them.
Ultima. Easy.
Then why Ultima and not Akalabeth?
While I would love to agree there’s no way that was the most influential game and I played 1-7
Did you play any games past ultima? It pioneered a laundry list of features that game are still using.
Yes I have but I’d be interested to hear what they innovated as Im not sure what exactly Ultima I created for the first time.
What did you put in? I wrote an essay on how inevitable praise of Dark Souls also applies to Metroid but then deleted it as too pretentious even for BAFTA.
this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
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