# Modern video games with lasting impact **URL:** \ **Category:** The Game Room\ **Created:** [February 23, 2016, 4:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/modern-video-games-with-lasting-impact/746890 "2016-02-23T16:52:30Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Simplicio](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c37758/32.png) [@Simplicio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Simplicio)\ **Post date:** [February 23, 2016, 11:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/modern-video-games-with-lasting-impact/746890/21 "2016-02-23T23:50:46Z")
> [@HookerChemical](#): > > On preview, I considered Braid, Simplicio. It combines the meta and puzzle arguments into one game. The only reason I left it off was that I see less direct influence. I think it was more important as inspiring (or at least, proving) a new business model and market for games than for its actual influence on content. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2016, 12:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/modern-video-games-with-lasting-impact/746890/22 "2016-02-24T00:08:11Z")
I don’t think genre-creating games belong on this list, or rather, it depends on what you mean by genre-creating. Did Dune (the first RTS) create the genre, or was it Command and Conquer? What do we count as the first FPS, and does it matter compared to Doom? OK, yes, those are old games, but I figured they’d be less controversial for making the point. ---
**Author:** ![Knorf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/58956e/32.png) [@Knorf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Knorf)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2016, 1:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/modern-video-games-with-lasting-impact/746890/23 "2016-02-24T01:52:28Z")
> [@Quartz](#): > > It’s a modern reboot, but how about Elite? It’s rejuvenated the space sim sector. It’s also the game that has included the entire Milky Way Galaxy as its playable “map.” For all its flaws, that is still a stupendous achievement. I’m a fan. ---
**Author:** ![Jophiel](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jophiel/32/66_2.png) [@Jophiel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jophiel)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2016, 3:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/modern-video-games-with-lasting-impact/746890/24 "2016-02-24T03:23:54Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > I don’t think genre-creating games belong on this list, or rather, it depends on what you mean by genre-creating. I think “genre creating” is less important than games that made the genre explode. Either in number of “copy games” or just in number of people playing the one game. [Little Computer People](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Computer_People) had less impact than The Sims. [Project Firestart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Firestart) had less impact than Resident Evil, etc. That said, I don’t understand what sort of “impact” we’re looking for any more so I dunno. ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_Angel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/d26b3c/32.png) [@Johnny\_Angel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_Angel)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2016, 4:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/modern-video-games-with-lasting-impact/746890/25 "2016-02-24T04:17:06Z")
I kind of felt like Back to the Future was where Telltale first began to make games that were more interactive storytelling than puzzle-solving. Jurassic Park introduced quick-time events, which were apparently already common in other games that I don’t play, so it’s hard to say how big that was as an addition. But I think Walking Dead hit the gaming world hard mostly because it was a compelling story set in the popular Walking Dead world. In the meantime, though, I have long felt that they were innovating a sort of mostly-cinema form of adventure gaming, and that’s now their bread-and-butter. Furthermore, the ye olde schoole franchise Dreamfall has taken a lot of notes from Telltale games. They release the story an episode at a time, with a handful per ‘season’ by analogy I assume with British television shows, which Telltale started doing with Bone, if I’m not mistaken. I first jumped on board with Sam & Max. They still use puzzles, but now when you make decisions they flash a brief message suggesting how the other characters feel about what you’ve said or done. As far as I know, these elements are definitively traceable to Telltale Games. ---
**Author:** ![Jragon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e19b73/32.png) [@Jragon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jragon)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2016, 5:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/modern-video-games-with-lasting-impact/746890/26 "2016-02-24T05:00:54Z")
> [@Johnny\_Angel](#): > > I kind of felt like Back to the Future was where Telltale first began to make games that were more interactive storytelling than puzzle-solving. Began, maybe, but while it was easier than their past games, it was definitely very much in the Sam & Max/Monkey Island way of doing these. Lots of time spent running around trying to solve puzzles. ---
**Author:** ![Willcross](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/b2d939/32.png) [@Willcross](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Willcross)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2016, 5:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/modern-video-games-with-lasting-impact/746890/27 "2016-02-24T05:13:44Z")
I feel like the rise of lower budget indie games should be represented, but not sure which game would be best. Something like super meat boy or binding of Issac maybe. ---
**Author:** ![Deeg](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/deeg/32/2955_2.png) [@Deeg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Deeg)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2016, 5:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/modern-video-games-with-lasting-impact/746890/28 "2016-02-24T05:19:27Z")
> [@Airk](#): > > I just can’t give it to Everquest. If you want to go “MMO Progenitor” you have to go with Ultima Online, and if you want “MMO that changed the world” you’re really looking at World of Warcraft. > > Everquest was influencial in its day, but I don’t think it really had long term impact. I’d give it to EQ. It was the first major game were grouping was an integral part of the game. WoW came along at just the right time and with some upgrades to EQ and it really took off. ---
**Author:** ![Jragon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e19b73/32.png) [@Jragon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jragon)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2016, 5:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/modern-video-games-with-lasting-impact/746890/29 "2016-02-24T05:20:03Z")
E: nm weird glitch ---
**Author:** ![straight\_man](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/straight_man/32/3027_2.png) [@straight\_man](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/straight_man)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2016, 7:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/modern-video-games-with-lasting-impact/746890/30 "2016-02-24T07:06:57Z")
I think the two most influential video games of the last decade are casual games: _Angry Birds_ and _FarmVille_. _Angry Birds_ was the first ultra-successful game to be built on a single, very simple core mechanic designed around the smartphone screen. (I mean, the entire game uses a single press-and-drag motion that always does the exact same thing.) _Farmville_ was the first ultra-successful “game” to reduce gameplay to a Skinner box, where “winning” takes literally no skill whatsoever, and you pay to “win” sooner. These two games define almost every casual game you can play today. If it’s on the App Store/Google Play and it costs less than $5, a game is almost always going to consist of: 1) a core mechanic that you could describe in five words or less; and 2) a way to pay money or watch ads to win or upgrade your stuff faster. The only really popular smartphone game I can think of that doesn’t hit at least one of those criteria is _Minecraft_ — and as this thread shows, _Minecraft_ is another of the most influential games of the last decade. _Farmville_ also changed the serious games. IIRC, it was right after Zynga made a mint on _FarmVille_ that the AAA games really started looking for money from pay-to-win and pay-to-make-your-stuff-pretty mechanics. That switch might seem like an inevitable response to technology changes and market changes, but I’m not so sure. It is taken for granted now that even quasi-serious gamers will actually pay money to _skip_ part of a game, even an expensive game. And neither of these games are still influential in the “people-talk-about-them” sense. _Angry Birds_ is currently #18 on the “Paid” section of the App Store, so it’s around but no longer the juggernaut it once was. FarmVille is basically gone and (mercifully) forgotten. So: _Angry Birds_ and _FarmVille_. ---
**Author:** ![Jragon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e19b73/32.png) [@Jragon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jragon)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2016, 7:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/modern-video-games-with-lasting-impact/746890/31 "2016-02-24T07:27:45Z")
Speaking of Minecraft, even if it doesn’t get credit for the genre stuff, it still codified the indie Early Access process, which has made a huge mark on gaming for better or worse. ---
**Author:** ![Garula](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/ea666f/32.png) [@Garula](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Garula)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2016, 10:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/modern-video-games-with-lasting-impact/746890/32 "2016-02-24T10:32:59Z")
Everquest demonstrated that the MMO model works. You could get a significant population of dedicated players playing an online game for hours and hours week after week willing to pay for a subscription service. World of Warcraft demonstrated that that sort of content/payment model could, with a few refinements, draw in a vastly larger crowd than was thought possible. Both were very important. Dark Souls is probably going to go down as one of the most influential games of the era. There have always been games that require a ton of practice to get good at, but for some reason Dark Souls struck a nerve. Now, pretty much any game that aspires to be “punishing but fair” will get compared to it. The Mass Effect series has undoubtedly had a huge impact. Its style of “guns and conversation” has had a pretty huge impact on storytelling in games. Much to the chagrin of classic CRPG fans, Mass Effect demonstrated that having a streamlined conversation and choice system could achieve mainstream appeal. Nowadays it seems like every game is trying to chase that streamlined Good-Neutral-Ruthless decision making design. On the business model front, Braid is pretty fairly credited with kicking off the indie game scene we have today. But some combination of Pillars of Eternity/Torment/Wasteland 2/Divinity: Original Sin deserves credit for kicking off the current Kickstarter based development model. Those games demonstrated that directly appealing to an under served niche (in this case classic CRPG fans) can actually work. It’s created a new model where if someone wants to revive an old property, they have a chance to do so as long as the fans are willing to shoulder some of the risk. ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_Bravo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnny_bravo/32/493_2.png) [@Johnny\_Bravo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_Bravo)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2016, 1:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/modern-video-games-with-lasting-impact/746890/33 "2016-02-24T13:10:26Z")
How about Audiosurf? It wasn’t the first rhythm game by a longshot and music visualizers had been around for years and years, but I think it was the first game that let you use your own music library and dynamically created levels based on the song you chose. ---
**Author:** ![Sir\_T-Cups](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ed655f/32.png) [@Sir\_T-Cups](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sir_T-Cups)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2016, 1:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/modern-video-games-with-lasting-impact/746890/34 "2016-02-24T13:18:51Z")
> [@Johnny\_Bravo](#): > > How about Audiosurf? It wasn’t the first rhythm game by a longshot and music visualizers had been around for years and years, but I think it was the first game that let you use your own music library and dynamically created levels based on the song you chose. In the same vein, Guitar Hero presented a brand-new way of playing games that eventually spawned a few knockoffs and upgrades. The bubble eventually burst on it, but the way it presented music in a game is definitely revolutionary ---
**Author:** ![Zabali\_Clawbane](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/ecd19e/32.png) [@Zabali\_Clawbane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zabali_Clawbane)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2016, 1:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/modern-video-games-with-lasting-impact/746890/35 "2016-02-24T13:49:08Z")
Everquest came out in [1999](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EverQuest)! The three [Lifeline](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.threeminutegames.lifeline.google&hl=en&referrer=utm_source%3Dgoogle%26utm_medium%3Dorganic%26utm_term%3Dgoogle+play+lifeline) apps are interesting in that they are text based “choose the hero’s path” adventures. ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2016, 1:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/modern-video-games-with-lasting-impact/746890/36 "2016-02-24T13:58:12Z")
> [@Lochdale](#): > > Bioshock. As a casual gamer that game surprised me. I was going to come in here to say **Bioshock**. Who would have thought making an open world first person shooter based off of Ayn Rand’s philosophy would be so successful? **Grand Theft Auto** (Vice City onward) - The grand-daddy of hyperviolent open world shooter games. **Call of Duty** ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2016, 2:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/modern-video-games-with-lasting-impact/746890/37 "2016-02-24T14:56:48Z")
This is a hard question to answer; probably the ones with the biggest/longest-lasting impact will be games that did something relatively mundane like rendered a shape in a better way, or had better AI, or whatever, that gets used in a lot of subsequent games. In terms of game design… it’s a lot harder. Most of the console/PC games are pretty much prettied up versions of much earlier gaming concepts- there’s nothing terribly groundbreaking about WoW or GTA or whatever; MMORPGs and sandbox games long preceded those two; they’re just the most successful versions. I tend to think that Minecraft is kind of novel- being a building-oriented game, instead of a story-oriented game, and I think that Angry Birds/Candy Crush will be notable, if only because they pinpointed that sweet spot of casual play vs. skill/engagement that seems to be ideal on mobile devices. Otherwise, most games seem to be improvements of existing games. For example, what’s _really_ novel about the Telltale games? They seem to be a pretty looking dialogue-driven text game. You could do 95% of the gameplay without graphics, if you just described things. Very Zork-like in a lot of ways. ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_Angel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/d26b3c/32.png) [@Johnny\_Angel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_Angel)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2016, 5:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/modern-video-games-with-lasting-impact/746890/38 "2016-02-24T17:49:19Z")
Well, the old Telltale games were derivative of Lucas Arts point-and-click adventures, and they were meant to be. The later cinematic games are a different story. These are by no means like Zork. Zork games were for a time when everybody entrusted with a computer was either a programmer or learning to be one. You had to draw schematic maps of everything you encountered to figure out what was going on. One important object was quite intentionally described so as to preclude you figuring out what an obviously useful thing it was. You don’t get anything like that in the new Telltale cinematic games. Being on your toes and being able to quickly decide which button to press take the place of paying careful attention to details and lateral thinking. The old Infocom games styled themselves as “interactive fiction” but the puzzle element always dominated over the story-telling element. Telltale’s cinematic games give you only enough control to keep you feeling immersed. They don’t even have the kind of variability you could expect from a choose-your-own-adventure story. But they do have rapid button pushing meant to feel like an analog to a struggle to keep a zombie’s jaws off of you, or pull yourself up from a plummet. This element seems to have already been in other games, though the only games I’d played that employed something like them before were Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace. Outside those, it appears that making an adventure game mostly function on Quick Time Events is an innovation, even if these weren’t new to begin with. ---
**Author:** ![typoink](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/ecb155/32.png) [@typoink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/typoink)\ **Post date:** [February 24, 2016, 6:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/modern-video-games-with-lasting-impact/746890/39 "2016-02-24T18:25:36Z")
I would argue that Gears of War belongs on that list. It really created the idea of shooters using cover to offer a slower, more thoughtful, and more “setpiece”-y. Uncharted, the Tomb Raider reboots, and even Mass Effect owe a lot of the pacing and feel of their action sequences to Gears. I definitely, definitely think Braid belongs here. It was the game that proved to a bunch of professionals that “retro”-looking indies could make money, and I’m pretty sure of the bigger hits of that genre like Super Meat Boy and Spelunky were made by folks who took Braid’s success as the inspiration to put their finances on the line to “go indie.” Braid is like the Velvet Underground of indie gaming. ---
**Author:** ![Miltonyz](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Miltonyz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miltonyz)\ **Post date:** [March 1, 2016, 2:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/modern-video-games-with-lasting-impact/746890/40 "2016-03-01T14:54:10Z")
> [@Airk](#): > > I’d pick League of Legends over DOTA2, simply because LOL keeps hitting my ‘news radar’ and DotA2 basically only does it when Valve pulls some sort of stunt. Also, earlier game. DotA2 is basically a League-of-Legends-alike. Maybe it will someday be more successful, but I don’t think think it will have more IMPACT, because there would be no DotA2 with LOL’s success. And we’re not talking about some sort of WoW \> Everquest thing here - League of Legends connects with an ENORMOUS number of people. Yes, so does DotA2, but my point is that the games are basically comparable in that regard, so DotA2 doesn’t have a significant advantage there to make it more “impactful” than its predecessor. > . Dota is much older than LOL. It started as a Watercraft 3 mod. Dota2 is essentially a graphical and engine update to Dota with official support. Its a fairly complex story but I believe that the creators of LOL started as Dota modders. What League did to change the game was to monetize it and create a sport out of a genre that up until that point was fairly obscure. Without League I am sure that Valve would have never became invested in Dota and it would still simply be a niche game. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/modern-video-games-with-lasting-impact/746890.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/modern-video-games-with-lasting-impact/746890.md?page=3)