- cross-posted to:
- gaming@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- gaming@beehaw.org
Video games’ influence on popular culture has never been more prevalent. Their effect is visible and audible in today’s music, across the world of TV and cinema, and on the catwalk. Even your favourite language-learning and fitness apps feature progression systems and rewards popularised by games. To reflect the medium’s universal impact, ahead of the 21st BAFTA Games Awards, we asked the public a provocative question : what is the most influential video game of all time?
As more than one responder said, it’s unfair to have to choose just one. Do you pick the pioneers that shaped the early days of the medium, the innovators that were ahead of their time, the ones that proved formative to your own creative journey, or simply the ones that made you most emotional? As might be expected, among the extraordinary number of responses we received was a staggering variety of games — ranging from titles that launched the industry to contemporary giants released mere months ago. The top ten alone spans multiple genres, from platformers to shooters, sandbox adventures to simulations.
So, without further ado, here are the public’s top 21: each of which, it’s fair to say, has had a seismic impact on games and those who play them…
the list, from most influential to least
- Shenmue
- DOOM
- Super Mario Bros
- Half Life
- Ocarina of Time
- Minecraft
- Kingdom Come Deliverance 2
- Super Mario 64
- Half Life 2
- The Sims
- Tetris
- Tomb Raider
- Pong
- Metal Gear Solid
- World of Warcraft
- Baldur’s Gate 3
- Final Fantasy VII
- Dark Souls
- GTA 3
- Skyrim
- GTA
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Is this an April fools joke? I’ve never even heard of Shenmue.
Kingdom come deliverance 2 is not even a bad game but how can it be number 7? It’s been out for two months… it’s hardly influenced anything. The first one would make more sense but only because of the dedication the team put into making it. Bizarre entry, and while I don’t agree with shenmue being more influential than doom, super Mario bros or even sonic for that matter, I guess I never played it that much when it came out.
Because this is an ad.
It must be.
What a terrible list.
It’s actually really surprising that Pokemon isn’t on this list. I guess people forget that the gameboy games started it all.
While they are very good, and I don’t doubt they’ll be influential, Baldur’s Gate 3 and Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 are way too young to be influential yet.
Yeah, the rest are like “ok sure, but maybe not in that order”. But BG3 and KCD2 are like 90% recency bias. Great games, but probably on par with Witcher 3 or the RDR games.
But they didn’t do any research here, they didn’t have a panel of judges, they just put it up to a vote of the internet. By “influential” they really meant a popularity contest.
Kinda surprised to see Shenmue at #1 It did incorporate multiple gameplay loops and detail that wasn’t usually seen at the time (or even today for that matter). It also introduced quick time events.
I guess I’m just surprised people care about it or know about it. Whenever I talk about that series people don’t seem to know what I’m talking about lol
I get its a recency and public vote thing but KCD2 being on here is … A choice. Not saying it’s bad but most influencial? Over GTA? Mario 64? Half life 2? Lol
I think that one baffles me the most. They make an argument for Shenmue and even if I don’t agree with it being on one, I can somewhat see why it’s on the list. But KCD2 has no right to be on the list at all. As they state themselves, the game is not even two months old. We can’t even remotely say what its long-term influence on the gaming industry will be. Though my money is on “none at all.”
Exactly. How can a brand-new game be influential? What has it had time to influence?
Yep this is extremely weird. Public voting is reaaaally bad at this. I’m sorry, but Minecraft has sold over 300 million times. That’s literally 3.75% of the whole world’s population. It’s what a whole generation of kids grew up with, what shaped their minds massively.
Shenmue has sold 1.2 million, I had never even heard of it (which admittedly is not a measure of influence, but it does mean something), and while it apparently was one of the first games with such an extensive open world, open worlds in general were already very desired, Shenmue didn’t influence anything really, it just tried to do it on a more massive scale, and even failed spectacularly economically.
Probably not a person on the world (that does computer games at all) exists who hasn’t heard of Minecraft.
It’s quite obvious that Minecraft should be ranked higher than Shenmue, but this questionnaire quite obviously only reached a very old demographic.
Zero Punctuation as usual gets to the heart of the matter very effectively: https://youtu.be/g4Dw0Z2Dsts
That’s for Shenmue 3. He actually made a separate video reviewing the original, but that one covers more of the history and context. TL;DR It has a devoted cult following of people who basically want a very specific type of gaming experience, but the specific game that was the first to give it to them just objectively is not very good at all as an interactive video game, which is why it has never been all that popular outside that little following. Some people trace to Shenmue the lineage of huge cinematic games that emphasize narrative, which I guess could be valid, but even a super-charitable reading shouldn’t put it anywhere near the coveted number 1 spot.
Oh, you know what happened? I just realized, I hadn’t even read the introductory material and realized it was from a public survey. It’s a “first past the post” problem. Plenty of people had various lists of games they felt passionate about (and you can tell where the boundary is where “I played this game recently and I love it now so it is my favorite” started to distort the placement of some recent games), but anyone who had Shenmue anywhere on their list put it as the number 1 spot. And so, it won by bad voting algorithm. I can almost guarantee that each respondent was only allowed a single choice for most influential game.
I actually think the list, with some exceptions, is remarkably accurate. It definitely isn’t perfect. There are also some big omissions, notably in old PC games that had a big influence or fleshed out new genres that have mutated since then, or gone extinct or something. I think they’re just outside of too many people’s memory at this point.
Off the top of my head:
- Ultima or Dungeon Master
- King’s Quest or Monkey Island
- Civilization
- Battlefield 1942
- Halo or Goldeneye
- Counterstrike
- Warcraft 2
- Zelda 1
Thank you. My big question from this list was “WTF is a Shenmue?”
Half Life
I don’t think that Half Life was all that influential. It was a successful game, had a story at a time when FPSes tended to barely bother. But I think that it was less that it was very innovative and more that it competently executed on mechanics and technology that already existed.
Minecraft
I don’t know if I can agree. Yes, it was successful and a sandbox game, but (a) Terraria, for example, came out earlier, and I don’t feel like it was that transformative. It certainly inspired some sandbox games, but I don’t think that this was really an incredibly broad shift.
The Sims
This one brought a lot of new mechanics, but I don’t know about influential. There wasn’t really a large Sims-like genre that it inspired.
Baldur’s Gate 3
It a 2023 release. How can it be influential? Hasn’t even been time for a generation of games influenced by it to come out.
Minecraft alpha was released in 2009 and Terreria development started in 2011.
Half life was pretty big. It not only influenced gaming but it was also HUGE on modding and popularized seamless levels, smart ai, physics and movie-like visual storytelling in shooters. It did a lot and definitely deserves a place on a list of influential games. Competetive esports as seen today exists thanks to a half life mod. It also popularized the realistic shooter genre as cs was really realistic back in its day.
You can tell this survey was filled out almost entirely by millennials by this collection. Almost all games that came out during their childhood or their young adult years, except those 2 they’re playing right now. And pong.
To be fair, the video game industry is relatively young, and the games that built it to what it is today did come out during the years that correspond with millennial youthhood. If we made a list of most influential films today, a lot of them would be from the 40s and 50s, but that wouldn’t be because a bunch of Silent Gens showed up to vote.
Lol, what? Are you pretending like the late 90s was the infancy of gaming? The industry had already collapsed and rebounded like twice by then
Do you believe that the film industry didn’t start until the 40s and 50s? Of course not. The first “films” came out around 1900, but the technology was still improving, and the industry was still figuring itself out. It wasn’t until the 20s that both had progressed enough for real “traditional” films could be made.
Similarly, the gaming industry collapsed and rebounded twice before the 90s because it wasn’t getting off the ground. The tech wasn’t there yet. So yes, if you look at a timeline of the gaming industry, it was objectively in its infancy until “like the late 90s”. The same way the dotcom bubble came and went a decade before the vast majority of people even realized the internet had anything to offer them. I get that maybe you were in a nerdy little bubble of early adopters, but I’m talking about the world outside that bubble.
- Note that revenue in ~1975 and ~1990 are basically the same. Industry revenue was mostly sideways for 20 years.
- Then the 90s came. People shifted from arcades to handhelds, mobile, PC, the internet.
- The number of games published per year increased significantly.
- And an explosion of objectively “influential titles” were published in this era. Many of which are featured in Bafta’s list. (Though obviously Rogue should be on there).
Portal though?
Also: mobile games? Flash games? FarmVille left a helluva mark.
I think FarmVille might genuinely be the “correct” answer for this question, but it was never going to win a popular vote contest like this.
Picking farmville as the most influential video game of all time like picking pewdiepie as the most influential director of all time.
I mean, it’s not like that at all though? Even setting aside the popularisation of the free-to-play model and its monetisation - which has defined mobile games (an industry dwarfing all other types of games in revenue by the way), FarmVille was the first innovator in terms of really invasive big data analysis of customer behaviour to maximise profit and retention. The way Zynga did player data analysis (back in 2009 I might add) literally set the tone for all modern internet. There are plenty of articles about the influence of FarmVille, here’s one.. There is another one here.
