[Closed] what would you vote most important computer game in the history of gaming?

Manic Miner for me.

Possibly 'Fifa' as a genre rather than any particular version. It wouldn't be too hard to put things like CoD and HALO in there too.

I'd guess it would depend a lot when you were born and got into gaming.

Some may argue Donkey Kong... some Pac Man... some would be later and go for CoD.

Doom as stated above changed the world of gaming... epic huge game beyond comprehension.

Pro Evo Soccer for me was an epic adventure as it got me more into on-line gaming..

Championship manager, UFO enemy unknown both caused me many sleepless nights.

Predictable... but Elite trumps it on all counts.

Yeah, you'd have to go Elite.

Have to agree that the 3d engine in doom was a real leap forward.

I spent far too much time becoming an Ace at Harrier Attack though.

Too young to play Doom but i would have to say Quake

Impossible question to answer, to many land marks. Doom created the genre, counter strike created/cemented the multiplayer aspect of it or maybe golden eye did? Who knows and who cares. Mario kart 64 is still the best game ever.

I mentioned Elite in a thread last week, but it was Elite II for me... that was simply epic, getting my status, missions and ship up. I always ended up with the Imperial cruiser, it was fast, could jump well, carry big weapons and cargo... just brilliant. jumping for hours until one day you get a bad jump and end up 4,000,000,0000,000 light years from anywhere and out of fuel.

space invaders - pacman

but as above I recon Doom was revolutionary and a massive leap forward.

I hope in future it will be remembered as such... and it was free too !!!

as above really, Doom/Quake and maybe Elite.

quake

For me it was Half-life, but no Half-Life with Doom, so yep, Doom.

Space Invaders or Asteroids.

Thread finished.

Wolfenstein.

Agree with doom and manic miner etc.

Duke nukem is on the list for me as it was the first game I multiplayed on. Took my pc to my mates house and connect the com ports to death match.
First online game would be star siege tribes, then unreal the battlefield etc

BF3 etc now due to the advances in gameplay and graphics etc.

Gauntlet (the arcade version) in terms of introducing hardcore multi-play. I don't think any other game attracted so many people around it when it first launched, basically because it let players come and go so long as they had another 20p or whatever.

Other than that ...

- Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy
- Elite
- Knightlore (for the esoteric fans)
- Doom and Quake
- Half Life 1 (and 2)

Wolfenstein.

yes that. forgot that came before doom.

The thing is, there were 3D games before Doom. There were multiplayer games before Gauntlet. There were space/adventure games before Elite.

There were [b]no[/b] games (really) before Space Invaders and Asteroids.

In fact, actually, I'm wrong and I'm changing my mind.

Pong.

ah Gauntlet! 🙂

Streetfighter 2

My most recent favourite is Half-Life 2 and the episodes.

Unreal Tournament - I still play this on my work pc, brilliant game, and yet it's 13+ years old now.

Gauntlet... awsome

"Wizard is about to die..."...

Ignoring pioneering games such as Pong, from the late 80s when games developed charisma and universal appeal there was Dizzy, Manic Miner, Chuckie Egg, Prince of Persia, Lemmings, R-Type, Tetris, Double Dragon; so many to choose from.

Sonic the Hedgehog

Half Life

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People are always going to be biased towards the ones that influenced them. Having grown up with and Amstrad-megadrive-playstation still the two games that had the biggest effect on me were Gran Tursimo (first game on my playstation and a giant leap from anything I'd had before) then GTA3 for the fact you could wander around the city and explore while doing missions as opposed to following a very linear game path. That and Goldeneye cause I liked that but didn't have a copy myself.

What's that one on the internet - the massive multiplayer fantasy thing?

Unreal Tournament? Blimey! I remember, years ago, 5 of us in the studio used to spend our lunchtimes blowing each other to pieces on that!

The MD had to get us to reign it in a bit as if any clients came in at lunchtime they'd be met with blood curdling cries of [b]DIE YOU BASTARD!!! DIE!!!![/b] 😆

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It's a tricky one, most of the old classics have already been mentioned. Another you could add in is Populous for kick-starting the god game genre. Personally though I'd vote for Everquest for making MMOs/MMORPG actually massive for the first time. I only got into it myself as I was heavily into Quake 2 and watched Immortal totally bomb out in one of the champs, it turned out he'd being playing Everquest rather than practising so I figured I'd best have a look at what all the fuss was about, I've not put anything close to the amount of hours into another game that I did in the first 3 years playing EQ (I'm over MMOs now thankfully :p ).

My son seems obsessed with this game called minecraft at the moment.. I looked at a couple of screen shots and it looked like a spectrum game from the 80s. Surely it must be better than that ❓

The first Tomb Raider was absolutely epic

Probably my most pivotal gaming moment was when I played golden eye on the N64 for the first time... thats the game that sticks out most prominently even though in the scheme of things its not that old.

before that I liked Virus, fly round killing infected trees? Mario will always be up there for me as will Mario Kart original snes version.

changed my mind about 600 times whilst typing this so I'm pressing post now.

Half Life series.

HL2 was _very_ important from a hardware/graphics technologies point of view.

Some good replies here already.

Doom for essentially creating the FPS genre (I know there were earlier titles, but it exploded with Doom). Elite not for the 3D or open world approach (both of which were revolutionary) but for the absolutely mental way they used memory to fit it into 32Kb. (Read up on it sometime, it's twisted genius).

I was going to say Knight Lore for its use of isometric 3D, but that accolade goes to Sandy White's Ant Attack a year or two earlier.

I adored Manic Miner (and was playing it on a real Speccy a couple of weeks ago) and JSW, but I'm struggling to see how it was a 'landmark' game for any reason other than being really, really good.

Ignoring pioneering games such as Pong, from the late 80s when games developed charisma and universal appeal there was Dizzy, Manic Miner, Chuckie Egg, Prince of Persia, Lemmings, R-Type, Tetris, Double Dragon; so many to choose from.

As an aside; was Prince of Persia the first game to use motion capture for the sprite animation? I'm struggling to think of anything earlier. PoP was a landmark game for that reason alone, I think.

What's that one on the internet - the massive multiplayer fantasy thing?

world of warcraft

before that I liked Virus

As Grum points out, Virus was a conversion / update of Zarch on the Archimedes.

I'm going to go all modern and say Portal.

It proved you can make a brilliant game with a great story without actually needing even one gun! Finally got round to playing Portal 2 at the mo and loving it even more!

Stoner - Member
Have to agree that the 3d engine in doom was a real leap forward.

I spent far too much time becoming an Ace at Harrier Attack though.

Harrier Attack, that bring back some memories! My Grandpa had an old Amstrad computer which took cassette/tape games, and Harrier Attack was one I played as a kid all the time! Although, at the time I thought it was called "Arrier Attack" because of his accent 😆

Another vote for Doom, remember playing that when I was young, can't quite remember when it came out though!

Sonic the Hedgehog? Mario Bros? Tertis? Great games that I wasted alot of time on!

Finally, more recent, GTA3. First 3D GTA was just amazing!

world of warcraft

Yeah, in terms of MMORPGs, Everquest was first (I think) but we've got to count WoW as a landmark title. For sheer volume of players and longevity. It's been running, what, eight years now, and still massively popular.

We can probably add Diablo II to the list for similar reasons as well.

HL2 was _very_ important from a hardware/graphics technologies point of view.

Can I be controversial and suggest System Shock?

the whole sonic v mario battle took gaming into the mainstream in a big way, so I'd say those two games, on the megadrive and snes

Back in the day it was Jet Set Willy then Gorf.

I think the first Tomb Raider (as already mentioned) reignited my interest in gaming.

I reckon

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Because they got it so right first time! I remember playing it on the SNES in 1993, yet nearly 20 years later my kids are loving it on the Wii. The graphics are better but the game is exactly the same as it was. Perfect!

Quake...was that the one with the "Shambler"...classic.
I'd have to pick two though, PC & console.
Console would be the GTA series. I was online last night in fact, Niko Belic still running amock.
PC...Unreal Tournament. Still play it now. For those of us that want a quck 20min bit of carnage its spot on. Its just so playable. I couldnt believe how many people still play it online...
They banned it on our work LAN. 🙁

Ooh, I know. What about Chaos? That was one of the first mainstream turn-based strategy titles (if we ignore Gollup's earlier Rebelstar Raiders), you can trace the current XCOM game's pedigree right back to it.

command & conquer.

Yes Dune came before it but C&C was miles better

Knight Lore as mentioned above was a real landmark game of that 80s spectrum generation. Didn't ultimate have to delay its launch because it was so far in advance of their other games that were ready to release?

For the lefties, how about monty mole and technician ted - for introducing the politics of the day into computer games? Can't have been too many games that were doing that in 1994.

[beware the sound on that clip will do your head in]

Tomb Raider took me FOREVER to complete !!! it was truly an Epic !

Didn't ultimate have to delay its launch because it was so far in advance of their other games that were ready to release?

I don't know about "had to" but yes, IIRC it was completed before Sabre Wulf, and they chose to release them out of order so as not to steal SW's thunder.

Operation Flashpoint/Arma/Arma 2/Arma 3.
The game engine is used to train troops.
Footage taken from the game was mistaken for actual world footage of a 1988 IRA attack and used in a documentary.
It's banned in Iran!
This big cross-over between the virtual and the real world makes it a contender in my eyes, sets a tone for the future.

For the lefties, how about monty mole and technician ted - for introducing the politics of the day into computer games? Can't have been too many games that were doing that in [s]1994[/s]1984.

TFTFY 🙂

BTW, I've had a go at Monty Mole in recent years and it's bl00dy hard. Given the fact you only have 3 lives or so and no "save", it's an example of how much patience/perseverance we had as kids back in the day 🙂

For the lefties, how about monty mole and technician ted

Tech Ted was evil, one of the hardest games ever. Not content with making a tricky platformer, they made it so that all the tasks were co-dependent and impossible unless done in a certain order, and then to add insult to injury stuck a time limit on the sod. Oh, and if you're really masochistic, there's the 128K version with more rooms.

It's landmark for another reason, too. It's the first Speccy game with a (truly) animated loading screen. (We can discount Manic Miner here, which cheated)

For me personally, it'd be things that weren't just extensions of previous ones - which would rule out Doom or counter-strike - Doom was very similar in mechanic to Wolfenstein, just had a much much better graphical engine, counter-strike was just another multiplayer fps, that happened to be jolly good.

Spacewar, I played a DOS port of it a lot, but it was one of the original games, and I'm so has to be up there.

GTA 1 - first really large scale explory game with a real narrative that I was aware of, and absolutely brilliant multiplayer to boot - just building such a big game, without railroading you into a particular story at every point was a brilliant thing. (Elite I guess was larger scale, but then the large scaleness of Elite was largely repetition and automatic generation, and the narrative wasn't really there in Elite)

Tetris (Gameboy version obviously - way better than the first PC version). The first computer game I can remember ever being a real sensation outside the world of people who played computer games.

Oh, and not really important, but kind of meaningful for me - that skiing game where you had to stay within the lines (that I typed in from somewhere in Basic on a Casio PB-something pocket computer), and that game at the Science museum's computer gallery where you have to shoot something (or maybe it is golf, can't remember), using an old vector graphics computer system controlled by a jog wheel. Oh, and Donkey Kong handheld (game + watch). And Arcade Volleyball, what a game!

If anyone knows if you can buy Elite these days for XBOX / PC / Mac, then feel free to let me know that I can indeed waste any precious little time I have left.

For me Elite defined gaming, and Doom defined 1st person gaming. This is a personal thing but as much as I love COD/Battlefield/MOH, I can't get enough Far Cry for its multi directional gameplay / ability to be able wander all over the map and act almost as if YOU decided the outcome, rather than being led down a path.

I'm hoping Far Cry 3 is on my XMAS list.

BTW, I've had a go at Monty Mole in recent years and it's bl00dy hard. Given the fact you only have 3 lives or so and no "save", it's an example of how much patience/perseverance we had as kids back in the day

It doesn't help that it was deliberately designed to trick you, too. Mole squashers that you've to time your run past, that go tap... tap... tap... tap... taptap *argh*! Curse you, Peter Harrap.

I did have a version of Elite II that worked on a fairly recent laptop run from a boot disk which switched into a more generic mode.

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For £100 you could buy an Amiga and Elite II to play it on.... i wonder if the wife would go with this plan lol.

- Wolfenstein
- Quake
- Goldeneye N64

Kryton57 - you should get Far Cry 3 ASAP, it's a definite contender for Game Of The Year.

Well I'm an old skool gamer from the golden age 😉

as above impossible to answer but genre wise i think the shift from spectrum up to amiga was immense, games like shadow of the beast for graphics and colour were mental.

since then all consoles etc we have been spoilt and in some cases i dont think the gameplay is still there...

agree with many above, Tomb raider on the PS1 WOW!!

but for me it had to be (contradicting myself i know)...

[img] https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRIuszv5RpkCz2iMcKy0UzqAdTZTrzZWdU8f2UDTeZH6k3NiN7M [/img]

the move to 3rd person view and the whole OPEN WORLD gameplay was amazing.

SamB - Member
Kryton57 - you should get Far Cry 3 ASAP, it's a definite contender for Game Of The Year.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwAAshXrIhE

Woahh!!! If it doesn't arrive with Father Christmas, I'll be ordering it on boxing day!

"You move EAST
Thorin Enters"

Can't argue with Doom.
I can't see the Wolfenstein argument. It wasn't visceral, it wasn't multiplayer, it didn't sell PCs, I never even wanted to play it.

Donkey Kong

Space invaders (in the arcade)
Doom (on the 486) although I did prefer Dark Forces
Tomb Raider (on the PS1)

oh...

Gauntlet!

Xenon Megablast

Renegade and Target Renegade

LOL quick google, download of 'dosbox 7.40' and i'm now running a full version of Elite II on my laptop !!!!

Colossal Cave Adventure

i think the shift from spectrum up to amiga was immense

First time I saw a 16-bit machine, it was an ST running Starglider. I -had- to have one.

"You move EAST
Thorin Enters"

Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold.

> KILL THORIN

Settlers on the Amiga

I'd also include early stuff like the ancient Star Trek game (used to load that off paper tape!) and dungeon crawling games like Adventure/Hack/Rogue - games that could be played on the BIG computers of the time.

Pong - the first one for the home.

Or the early Playstation titles. Playstation turned console gaming from a kids' thing to a grownups thing, which obviously had huge implications for the industry.

3 pages in and I'm the first to mention Civilization I spent hours playing it, even used to take a laptop round a mates to compete against each other would start a new map copy it to the others PC and see who could advance furthest fastest.

For me it had to be Arcadia. That was the first game available that made it look like you had an amusement arcade machine in your house.

God, yes. Rogue / Nethack.

what would you vote most important computer game in the history of gaming?

But no idea myself TBH, wasn't in on the early stuff as I wasn't bought a computer/console/whatever as a kid.

Elite and GTA3 (didn't like 1&2) for their enormous game space/sandbox.
resident evil was the first horror game I played, did it start the (small) genre?
quake 3 was first multiplayer I played, loved it but way too down the line of FPS shooters to be "important"
There's other games that 3d-ified existing stuff and generally made them a lot more fun to play, morrowind, FF7 etc but dunno if they count either.

resident evil was the first horror game I played, did it start the (small) genre?

There were earlier survival horror games. Alone In The Dark jumps to mind.

The first time I saw a first person game was on the ZX81 with the T-Rex in the maze. This was a real eye opener for me.

Doom
UT / Quake
Half Life.

I reckon Doom takes the title of most important though.. if only by going off the replies here.

Alone In The Dark jumps to mind.

Anyone suggesting half life needs to give themselves a stern talking to!