I was trying to think of which games created certain mechanics that became popular and copied by future games in the industry.
The most famous one that comes to my mind is Assassin’s Creed, with the tower climbing for map information.
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Donkey Kong (1981) popularized having different levels in a game to progress a storyline. Until then, you would have the same level over and over with increasing difficulty
Dune II - basically the grandfather of every RTS game out there (and incidentally very, very different from Dune I): opposing forces, resource collection, tech tree, fog of war, et cetera. Or perhaps it was (not World of) Warcraft, it’s been too long and memory gets fuzzy.
Dune I and II were in development in parallel. One of them was cancelled (don’t remember which one), but they forgot to tell the company, IIRC.
preussiske
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Warcraft 1 came after Dune (and Blizzard were big fans, IIRC), either way. It enabled multi-selection (based on spreadsheet programs, IIRC).
Sorry about the surprise prussians. I was never any good at typing on glass, I much prefer an actual keyboard.
Pacman was the first to simulate a real life mechanic, of munching pills, listening to repetitive music, and running from multicoloured ghosts.
CoD and Assassin’s Creed popularised selling the same fucking game 20 times
Sports games have been doing it faaaar longer. Madden started in 1988, released a sequel in 1990, then hasn’t missed a year ever since. The baseball and basketball counterparts existed just as long.
FIFA and other sports games as well
Iirc (edit - apparently incorrect) Halo was the first to use left joystick as forward/backward and left/right strafe; and right joystick as look up/down and pivot left/right.
I even recall articles counting it as a point against the game due to its ‘awkward controls’ …but apparently after a tiny learning curve, the entire community/industry got on board.
I thought goldeneye had that basic controls concept a few years before. and Turok was pretty close before that.
edit: ah forgot n64 only had one joystick. but basically the same with the left d-pad and middle joystick.
I think you are right, but the N64 controls used the C buttons as analog inputs for camera movement.
If we’re talking Goldeneye, I believe the C-button aiming was an alternate control scheme. IIRC, the default controls had the stick control both your forward/backward motion, but also your left/right turning, instead of left/right strafing, so your aim was controlled horizontally by the stick, but vertically was pretty much locked on the horizon at all times. To do fine-tuned aiming, or to aim vertically at all, required holding R to bring up the crosshairs which you could then move with the stick, while standing still.
In hindsight, it’s amazing that we ever tolerated that.
One of my friends still owns an N64 and wants to play Goldeneye and Perfect Dark sometimes. This control scheme raises my blood pressure so much lol.
Doom or Wolfenstein birthed 3d fps I’m p sure 😁
I’d put it at Quake.
Wolf3d is an evolution of Hovertank 3D, which had flat shading for walls, floors, and ceilings. Wolf3d then has textured walls but still flat shading on the floors and ceilings. Some other games came out after Wolf3d that had textures floors and ceilings while id worked on Doom.
Doom not only had textured everything, but also stairs. Trick was, you couldn’t develop a level that had a hallway going over another hallway. Not enough computer horsepower yet to pull that off. This is sometimes called “2.5D”.
Quake brings everything together. Everything’s texture mapped, your levels have true height with things built over other things, and the character models are even fully 3d rendered.
Oblivion popularized fucking DLC, holy fucking shit I hate DLC so fucking much I pirated any games that has DLC, I don’t mind expansion but DLC can crash and burn in a pile of dogshit
Expansions are DLC.
Assuming you mean micro transactions rather than dlc like we saw in Halo 2
Spacewar! was a F2P PvP game with no microtransactions and no battle pass. Although it’s hard to quantify exact player numbers (it precedes Steam charts), for a while it was the most played videogame in the world.
Its real-time graphics and multiplayer combat were very influential, and widely copied by many other games.
for a while it was the most played videogame in the world.
I see what you did there!
Space War history
SpaceWar is the first game to be frequently ported to different computers, back when computers took up a big portion of the room they sat it, and when “porting” was practically re-coding, from scratch, in Assembler.
Street Fighter 2 popularized and pretty much set to stone what a tournament fighter game should be. Mortal Kombat came first, but its single-player progression was this weird “tower” with some gimmick fights thrown in, like you vs 2.
Thinking about it, I’d say Mortal Kombat popularized the “REALLY fucking cheap sub boss/final boss” that many other fighting games have (looking at you, SNK) - I mean, good luck getting close to Goro in the first place.
I wonder which korean mmo could be considered as the one that de facto popularized pay-to-win as an integral mechanic.
Diablo hands down popularized not only the action RPG genre, but also having enemies as loot mystery boxes. One lucky kill and you could get your hands on a really great piece of equipment. The amount of clones speaks for itself.
I think Gran Turismo popularized the “carreer mode” of racing games.
M Bison cheated a lot in sf2
Though it was used in a few games before, a Quake tournament and Half Life 1 cemented the use of WASD controls.
ESDF is the superior keybinding
It’s such a pain remapping controls on every. single. new. install.
But it’s worth it. Fuck wasd
it’s one key over, is it really swear-word level different?
If naughty words cause you a level of righteous indignance, my recommendation is to abstain from online activities until one reaches the age of majority
Ocarina of time, 3d, lock on, one enemy attacks at a time. So much of modern gaming pulled from ocarina of time
Oh wow, did Zelda really make this popular? I wouldn’t have guessed. I’ve play it a ton.
People always forget that resident evil 4(? There is a million of them) made third person shooters mainstream.
What are you smoking? That’s like a 2005 game.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-person_shooter
Jonathan S. Harbour of the University of Advancing Technology argues that Tomb Raider (1996) by Eidos Interactive (now Square Enix Europe) is “largely responsible for the popularity of this genre”.
Hell, Max Payne was definitely more popular, and it came out in 2001.
Well you are right but I’m talking about the style and feel that one of those earlier pivot resident evils created. It plays the same as gears of war and all other cover shooters that followed. Sure third person existed but everything today plays in a way that series established.
