personally I think its Doom
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
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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.
Doom was also born out of D&D sessions. And the What genre is Doom? video argues pretty well for RPG.
Almost every game nowadays has some kind of story. Pure abstract games like Tetris, however long lasting and multigenerational they are, are the vast minority. Even in something like Pong you play the role of a tennis player.
So, yeah, almost every game is an RPG.
If Pong is an RPG, then tennis is an RPG. When I use reflexes to move the paddles, I’m not playing the role of a tennis player, I am playing tennis (some form of it at least).
Doom.
People are still making Doom WADs. And have you ever heard of the FPS genre?
Don’t we have enough wars already?
Many other games have “defined” their genres, but few have done so quite as completely as Doom (1993). And on top of birthing the entire FPS genre, the practice of making Doom run on any electronic device with a screen and a CPU has long been a fantastic exercise in programming and hacking. The possibility of implementing Doom in everything from calculators to pregnancy tests to Captcha in a browser window has kept the game in the public consciousness for decades, and will continue to do so for decades to come.
Of course the real answer is Clash of Clans, because it popularized mobile gaming and skyrocketed that platform’s revenue to the point that it outpaces every other gaming platform combined, but I’ll boycott BAFTA if something riddled with microtransactions gets any recognition
Castle Wolfenstein came out the year before how is that not the first?
It didn’t catch on the way Doom did. Maybe it had something to do with the ceiling not having a texture in Wolf3D. 🤷🏻♂️
If we want to talk about first, then Maze War takes the trophy. Wolfenstein 3D may have come before Doom, but it lacked the influence and staying power. Wolf may have been earlier, but Doom birthed the genre as we know it
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.
Tetris
Mario Bros.
Literally every gamer has played it or a game like it. Even non gamers recognise it. It’s copied and iterated on to this day.
It certainly wasn’t the first 2D platformer, but it’s success made everyone else go “that’s what we’re making now”
Seriously. For a lot of people, SMB single-handedly answered the question of whether home consoles or arcades were the future.
Probably Mario
Especially if we consider “influence” beyond influencing other games.
I can’t see Space Invaders so I’ll say that. It was a tour de force when it first came out, raking 13 billion dollars in today’s money (citation needed).
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.
Pokemon is The Bard’s Tale meets Tamagotchi.
Pacman’s audience was colossal as was Tetris
FIFA, for pioneering the idea you can release the same game every year with minor cosmetic tweaks.
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.
Not one mention of WoW anywhere in this article or this thread, I find that at least somewhat surprising!
