FIFA, for pioneering the idea you can release the same game every year with minor cosmetic tweaks.
this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
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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.
Slight correction; you’re referring to Super Mario Bros. (1985).
The plain ol’ Mario Bros. (1983) was the arcade platformer about bunking mobs coming out of pipes:
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?
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
It didn't catch on the way Doom did. Maybe it had something to do with the ceiling not having a texture in Wolf3D. 🤷🏻♂️
Half-life. Maybe it didn't innovate specifically anything, but it's the first real maturely designed game, with incredible attention to detail and focused on conveying a cinematic story in fully interactive environments.
And don't get me started on HL2.
Not one mention of WoW anywhere in this article or this thread, I find that at least somewhat surprising!
Oblivion: introduced predatory micro transactions
Sierra was making ganes like kings quest v extremely difficult so you would call their hotline and pay some crazy amount to figure out what to do next.
gacha mechanics have existed before oblivion in many asian mmos
unironically i think this might be it. That horse armor was an ill omen of things to come.
I think naming a single game is hard, but most influencial franchise in gaming would have to be Mario. Between the platformers, smash, kart and the music it is just so widely recognizable.
Eh, Super Mario Bros was super influential, and kicked off the Mario franchise. So I'd probably pick that.
Or maybe Pong, which normalized digital gaming. Or maybe Space Invaders.
I think those are both valid picks. If you can only pick one game it's going to have to be one that changed how the world looked at video games.
Minecraft might be a good contender in terms of spawning the survival genre and also having so many mods used to pioneer entirely new game modes and even having a major part in machinima and Let's Plays and such things on Youtube.
Machinima pre-exists Minecraft by a significant stretch though? Red vs Blue was ongoing when Notch thought of Minecraft.
Tetris
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.
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Doom.
People are still making Doom WADs. And have you ever heard of the FPS genre?
All y'all acting as if the answer isn't Candy Crush or some other mobile bullcrap.
Mobile is the biggest platform by far. Mobile games make more money than console and PC combined.
Can't wait for some console/PC gamer to tell me that playing Bloons TD doesn't make you a gamer, but playing Fortnite somehow does
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).
There's a lot of good arguments out there. Pong for being the "first", Pac-Man for making arcades insane and bringing in big money, Tetris for its wide appeal, Mario 64 for convincing everyone 3d games work, Doom for popularizing the fps, Wii Sports for its ubiquity, Farmville for starting what would become mobile games (which as much as gamers hate to admit, they make more money than every other platform combined). It'd take a pretty convincing argument for me to fully believe any of them but of mine I'd make an argument for Pac-Man, but my heart wants it to be Tetris
The beautiful tapestry of video game history is not woven from a single thread alone. Each person will have their favorites, naturally, but every delightful (and sometimes not delightful) digital block has contributed to where we are today.
That is, to say, I agree with you. They should break it down into categories tbcf
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Probably Mario
Especially if we consider "influence" beyond influencing other games.
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Don't we have enough wars already?
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.
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
But it barely influenced any other games. The genre of creature collector games in this style is quite small.
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