MCMXC - MCMXCIX
What up, home slices,
Today, a list! Who doesn't love lists? We should beat them up.
10 Most Important/Influential Games Of The 1990's, In Roughly Chronological Order
Street Fighter II
DOOM
Donkey Kong Country
Super Mario 64
Final Fantasy VII
Starcraft/Broodwar
Pokemon Red/Blue
Metal Gear Solid
Half-Life
Zelda: Ocarina of Time
Right, so let me know what you think. Have I forgotten anything that belongs? Put something on that doesn't deserve such accolades? Lists are meant to be argued over, so get cracking. Worth mentioning that the last 5 games all came out in 1998.
Inflaming people everywhere,
Hideo Kojima
7 comments:
Are there other important games?
Sure.
Are they MORE important than the ones you have listed?
Probably not.
I'm trying to think of an argument against DKC and for something else (Super Mario World, Sonic 3 And Knuckles, Yoshi's Island, I don't know...) but I can't. It was goddamn gigantic.
Is CounterStrike a different game than Half-Life? Half-life did a fantastic, ground-breaking job in telling a story through a FPS.
But that had been tried before, if unsuccessfully, and would be accomplished eventually one way or the other.
The popularization of modding can be directly linked to CS, so a list of most influential games should therefore include that.
Also, Chrono Trigger has to be on there, since it influenced me, and in a short while I will be in control of everything, so ya, that's important.
What of UO? Or Everquest? Those games spawned WoW, and if we're talking about influential, we must consider how /today's/ most influential game got its start.
(Single most influential game = WoW? ya, probably. Most influential force in video gaming? Probably not. Most positive influential force? Even less likely. But as of today, it is the 1 most important /title/ in gaming.)
If I wanted to put an MMO on there, I'd take DKC off. Obviously, it was an extremely influential game. But it was /merely/ a high-caliber version of a tried-and-true genre. If you trussed up Castlevania or Mario in well-shaded outfits, you'd have the exact same game. UO and EverQuest had very few real predecessors.
I didn't include CS because of HL, yeah. I counted mods towards their origin. As for UO or Everquest, I decided against them. WoW is certainly an extremely popular and influential game and if I ever draw up a list of 2000-2009, it'll be there along with GTA III. However, its predecessors didn't attain nearly the level of popularity necessary for this list. I mean, DOOM wasn't the first FPS (Ultima Underworld or Wolfenstein 3D, I think) but it was without question the game that made the genre. They didn't call every FPS that came out afterward (till Quake) a "DOOM clone" for nothing.
DKC was the last game I added. Other possibilities included Goldeneye, Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil, but in the end, the fact that a poorly made Mario clone with shiny new 3D graphics was so successful won me over. Not saying its influence was necessarily positive (see Final Fantasy VII), but it made clones viable business in a way that the Great Gianna Sisters never could.
Great answers.
I was trying to make another list to counter yours. "10 LEAST influential of our time's GREAT games". But I was having trouble.
I suppose that might say something meaningful about the ability of gamers as a whole to pick up on excellence. Or maybe it's just that I am a sucker for publicity, and mostly play the games that everyone else says are great.
Uniracers, not /there/ is a great game.
10 best but least influential games would be a really interesting list. I'm going to have to think about that one.
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