Most of all time. GTFO.
Doom.
this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
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I was there way back in the 8-bit times, and yet I still agree. There is only pre-Doom and post-Doom.
One of the proof points would be how the existence of Doom on x86 was the perhaps single most influential factor in the demise of non-x86 home computers (Atari ST, Amiga). We (myself included) just sold off what we had to get PCs.
I can't think of anything that really competes overall. It could be argued games like Pong, Pac-Man, Quake, Half-Life, WoW, ect. all were pivotal points in gaming, but I don't think anything has had as direct and widespread influence as Doom.
I'd say Wolfenstein 3D is right there. Without Wolfenstein there wouldn't be Doom.
Wolfenstein 3D was an evolutionary stepping stone to Doom sure, but you can say that about any game which came before.
Doom really was a huge step up over and above Wolfenstein. Game play, visuals, realism, mood. I remember as a kid playing doom late at night in the dark and actually feeling a bit scared. Nothing before could ever do that.
Yep doom and pong
Doom. Was on more PCs than Windows, defined a genre and is still referenced today.
Continues to have a large following, ported to everything thats powered. This is the answer for me!
I have been gaming since 1980. I have never had a more visceral blown away reaction to a game than the first time I played Doom. We even setup a LAN in our dorm so that we could play it multi-player. The only other computer experience with a similar impact was seeing web pages for the first time and realizing that my parents would be able to use the internet with them (no need to learn usenet, ftp, archie, gopher, and all of the command line utilities that I used). Doom felt so revolutionary.
I'm going to be a little left-field with this one. Yes you could pick some boring obvious answer like Pong, Doom or Minecraft and that's perfectly valid. I'm not saying those are incorrect.
I'm going to go with FarmVille though. It's really hard to overstate the impact it has had on the gaming landscape (for the worst, if it needed spelling out). It popularised an all new approach to monetisation and retention systems in games, it heralded the proliferation of microtransactions, Games-As-A-Service models and manipulative skinner boxes designed to extract the most money and attention out of you. It opened the door - by being a "social game not just for gamers" - to an entirely new market whose wallets were previously unavailable. It created this malicious new insight that the best way to make money is not to just make a good game and sell it - it is to create an addiction through psychologically manipulative means, then slowly leech their users' wallets over time.
FarmVille really fucked us over.
Farmville also got a ton of middle-aged women into games at a time when gaming was primary seen as an industry for teenage boys
With the same reasoning, Candy Crush. The single game that killed the entire genre of mobile gaming. It validated the idea that mobile games should be casual and it proved there's way more money in addictive mechanics than there ever will be in quality games.
Which was first farmville, clash of clans or candy crush?
I agree with you that one of those manipulative mobile games deserves to be on the list.
Candy Crush and Clash of Clans were both released in 2012. FarmVille was 2009, years earlier. You could call those two the first wave maybe after the genie was out of the bottle, but FarmVille was the great progenitor.
Super Mario Brothers is what brought video games into the household.
This one game is why every game system was called "a Nintendo" for decades. Yes, other games came along and changed the landscape dramatically, but SMB1 created that foothold into the home.
Exactly my thinking as well. Super Mario Brothers was the game that made "couch gaming" popular for more than just kids. Adults were getting into it as well. I still have fond memories of my dad trying his best at it and thinking sticking his tongue out in the right direction would somehow help his jumping ability.
Without the NES, the couch-gaming scene as we know it wouldn't exist. And Super Mario Brothers was the game that brought it to the masses.
None of the others come close to this. This game rescued the industry and set it's new trajectory
That question is so broad it cannot be answered.
There's a myriad of games which are or have been wildly popular (e.g. Mario, CS, GTA, WoW, Minecraft, Fortnite)
There's games which pushed the borders to new limits (e.g. Tetris, Doom, WoW, VR Chat)
And there's games which warped the industry or their players (e.g. mobile games, micro transactions, loot boxes)
Half-Life for me. The moment games really became an interactive storytelling medium.
And it's not just that. Half-Life also spawned Counter-Strike, one of the foundational pieces of e-sports (if not also the modding scene in general today). Not to mention being a precursor to today's digital distribution model in the industry.
I also said half life. Doom was a leap forward, but Half life actually set a technological and story telling bar, on a budget, in 1998. Many videogames drew inspiration from its innovations, storytelling or themes.
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Tetris brought in the normies.
I'd say everyone knows what Tetris is, so that's a good argument for it.
… and why it’s World of Warcraft.
Do I want that to be the answer? No.
Sadly, that's actually a decent choice, as much as I hate to admit it.
DOOM 1993
I see a lot of downvotes from people. Listen, it's okay to disagree and we can have discussions about it. None of the comments so far are offensive or anything. Tell these people why you disagree.
Oh, it's a "type your pick", not a list of choice. Interesting
Gamey McGameyface it is then
Bad rats.
The intersectional apex of interactivity and storytelling
I bet noone's gonna mention the great grandfathers of modern RPGs. Bard's Tale, Ultima, Dungeon Master... all modern games are standing on the shoulders of giants.
While they're important, I think they've also aged poorly in many ways something like Doom has not. I'd compare their importance more to something like Pong or Galiga. Good games, that pushed the limits of the medium for their time, and are foundational, but more acted as a steping stone rather than something other games were widely inpired by or modeled after.
I wouldn't disagree that Doom is a very good choice here too. The fact that it has become a tradition and challenge to try to run Doom on all kinds of hardware alone proves how influential Doom is. However, I wouldn't say Dungeon Master has aged more poorly than Doom. Both games are really fun today I think. Dungeon Master is just way more niche, it's older, it had fewer players and the franchise has died a long time ago, while Doom is going strong. It's a tough choice and I admit I'm a bit biased here anyway - Dungeon Master was my first true love when it comes to video games.
"Aged poorly" was a bad choice of words. My point was more that the industry has moved on from them, and while some of the conventions are the same, its largely stuff that predates them. If you go back to retro RPGs when you're used to Skyrim, Dark Souls, Final Fantasy, ect. you'll be unfamiliar with much of how the game plays. Not much was carried over from these games specifically. I'd argue that the influential RPG, that would be the genre's equivalent to Doom, would be D&D. While not a video game, thats the model everything referenced, and still references, moreso than even Doom. It's what codified core mechanics like HP, classes, character stats, and more, in the same way Doom codified modern first-person mechanics, ammo management, and exploding barrels.
My vote goes to Dragon Quest. Early gaming was dominated by JRPGs like DQ, Final Fantasy or Chrono Trigger. Pretty much every modern game has RPG elements. While there are earlier RPGs, DQ popularized them and invented the JRPG.
Of course, literally speaking, the first game ever is the most influential - therefore Tennis for Two.
I’d argue Rogue at this point.
Probably the first game to spawn a genre of its own, which still exists to this day and is still referenced with the original moniker, in a world where most gamers don't even know what was "Rogue", but they certainly know what a Roguelike or Roguelite is. Very feel games in history have been so massively impactful to give birth to new genres. Doom also did it for some time, there were doomlikes going around, until the lingo shifted to just calling them FPS.
can someone help me describe 'most influential' for me here?
pardon my english
I suppose it means the game that had the largest impact on the gaming industry and/or society in general. For example, almost all games have red represent health and blue represent mana/magic because diablo was super popular and everyone copied it.
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Mario? Tetris?
Generally?
MS Solitaire
Second place WOW
Moving the industry forward?
Pong, Doom, HL are good choices
Pong
Missile command and asteroids and space invaders were a generation soon after pong. But they were much better games that made for addictive repeated play, and dream infections. Pong was a technology breaktrhough, but not that good of a game.
I was thinking Warcraft 3 instead of WoW, since a WC3 mod spawned the entire genre (MOBA) and that genre brought esports from backwater to front and center. & Of course WoW came from WC3.
I mean it did for esports, but be honest that's a gamer thing. Wow changed the face of mmorg gaming. It hit 12 million? 65 year old grandmas were playing, it completely broke the gamer/normie barrier.
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Really, anything from the Game Canon is a good choice: Mario, Doom, Tetris, SimCity, Civ I, Warcraft, SpaceWar, Zork, that soccer game I don't remember, StarRaiders.
I haven't seen anyone mention Zork yet, and it really ought to be in contention here. Pretty much all video games can trace how their narrative is structured through gameplay back to the foundations laid by Zork, even doom. It drew on Colossus, sure, but it built on it so much that it became revolutionary to both games as a storytelling medium and to natural language processing. Really cool stuff.
Might be biased but not only does the FF7 story hold up close to three decades later but it was also the catalyst for introducing Japanese RPGs into a western market.
Chrono Trigger predates FF7 by two whole years, and is, objectively, one of the best Video Game RPGs of all times, while also being a JRPG in itself.
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