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Video games’ influence on popular culture has never been more prevalent. Their effect is visible and audible in today’s music, across the world of TV and cinema, and on the catwalk. Even your favourite language-learning and fitness apps feature progression systems and rewards popularised by games. To reflect the medium’s universal impact, ahead of the 21st BAFTA Games Awards, we asked the public a provocative question : what is the most influential video game of all time?
As more than one responder said, it’s unfair to have to choose just one. Do you pick the pioneers that shaped the early days of the medium, the innovators that were ahead of their time, the ones that proved formative to your own creative journey, or simply the ones that made you most emotional? As might be expected, among the extraordinary number of responses we received was a staggering variety of games — ranging from titles that launched the industry to contemporary giants released mere months ago. The top ten alone spans multiple genres, from platformers to shooters, sandbox adventures to simulations.
So, without further ado, here are the public’s top 21: each of which, it’s fair to say, has had a seismic impact on games and those who play them…
the list, from most influential to least
- Shenmue
- DOOM
- Super Mario Bros
- Half Life
- Ocarina of Time
- Minecraft
- Kingdom Come Deliverance 2
- Super Mario 64
- Half Life 2
- The Sims
- Tetris
- Tomb Raider
- Pong
- Metal Gear Solid
- World of Warcraft
- Baldur’s Gate 3
- Final Fantasy VII
- Dark Souls
- GTA 3
- Skyrim
- GTA
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What a terrible list.
Kinda surprised to see Shenmue at #1 It did incorporate multiple gameplay loops and detail that wasn’t usually seen at the time (or even today for that matter). It also introduced quick time events.
I guess I’m just surprised people care about it or know about it. Whenever I talk about that series people don’t seem to know what I’m talking about lol
It’s actually really surprising that Pokemon isn’t on this list. I guess people forget that the gameboy games started it all.
While they are very good, and I don’t doubt they’ll be influential, Baldur’s Gate 3 and Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 are way too young to be influential yet.
Yeah, the rest are like “ok sure, but maybe not in that order”. But BG3 and KCD2 are like 90% recency bias. Great games, but probably on par with Witcher 3 or the RDR games.
But they didn’t do any research here, they didn’t have a panel of judges, they just put it up to a vote of the internet. By “influential” they really meant a popularity contest.
You can tell this survey was filled out almost entirely by millennials by this collection. Almost all games that came out during their childhood or their young adult years, except those 2 they’re playing right now. And pong.
To be fair, the video game industry is relatively young, and the games that built it to what it is today did come out during the years that correspond with millennial youthhood. If we made a list of most influential films today, a lot of them would be from the 40s and 50s, but that wouldn’t be because a bunch of Silent Gens showed up to vote.
Lol, what? Are you pretending like the late 90s was the infancy of gaming? The industry had already collapsed and rebounded like twice by then
Half Life
I don’t think that Half Life was all that influential. It was a successful game, had a story at a time when FPSes tended to barely bother. But I think that it was less that it was very innovative and more that it competently executed on mechanics and technology that already existed.
Minecraft
I don’t know if I can agree. Yes, it was successful and a sandbox game, but (a) Terraria, for example, came out earlier, and I don’t feel like it was that transformative. It certainly inspired some sandbox games, but I don’t think that this was really an incredibly broad shift.
The Sims
This one brought a lot of new mechanics, but I don’t know about influential. There wasn’t really a large Sims-like genre that it inspired.
Baldur’s Gate 3
It a 2023 release. How can it be influential? Hasn’t even been time for a generation of games influenced by it to come out.
Minecraft alpha was released in 2009 and Terreria development started in 2011.
Half life was pretty big. It not only influenced gaming but it was also HUGE on modding and popularized seamless levels, smart ai, physics and movie-like visual storytelling in shooters. It did a lot and definitely deserves a place on a list of influential games. Competetive esports as seen today exists thanks to a half life mod. It also popularized the realistic shooter genre as cs was really realistic back in its day.
I get its a recency and public vote thing but KCD2 being on here is … A choice. Not saying it’s bad but most influencial? Over GTA? Mario 64? Half life 2? Lol
I think that one baffles me the most. They make an argument for Shenmue and even if I don’t agree with it being on one, I can somewhat see why it’s on the list. But KCD2 has no right to be on the list at all. As they state themselves, the game is not even two months old. We can’t even remotely say what its long-term influence on the gaming industry will be. Though my money is on “none at all.”
Exactly. How can a brand-new game be influential? What has it had time to influence?
Yep this is extremely weird. Public voting is reaaaally bad at this. I’m sorry, but Minecraft has sold over 300 million times. That’s literally 3.75% of the whole world’s population. It’s what a whole generation of kids grew up with, what shaped their minds massively.
Shenmue has sold 1.2 million, I had never even heard of it (which admittedly is not a measure of influence, but it does mean something), and while it apparently was one of the first games with such an extensive open world, open worlds in general were already very desired, Shenmue didn’t influence anything really, it just tried to do it on a more massive scale, and even failed spectacularly economically.
Probably not a person on the world (that does computer games at all) exists who hasn’t heard of Minecraft.
It’s quite obvious that Minecraft should be ranked higher than Shenmue, but this questionnaire quite obviously only reached a very old demographic.
Zero Punctuation as usual gets to the heart of the matter very effectively: https://youtu.be/g4Dw0Z2Dsts
That’s for Shenmue 3. He actually made a separate video reviewing the original, but that one covers more of the history and context. TL;DR It has a devoted cult following of people who basically want a very specific type of gaming experience, but the specific game that was the first to give it to them just objectively is not very good at all as an interactive video game, which is why it has never been all that popular outside that little following. Some people trace to Shenmue the lineage of huge cinematic games that emphasize narrative, which I guess could be valid, but even a super-charitable reading shouldn’t put it anywhere near the coveted number 1 spot.
Oh, you know what happened? I just realized, I hadn’t even read the introductory material and realized it was from a public survey. It’s a “first past the post” problem. Plenty of people had various lists of games they felt passionate about (and you can tell where the boundary is where “I played this game recently and I love it now so it is my favorite” started to distort the placement of some recent games), but anyone who had Shenmue anywhere on their list put it as the number 1 spot. And so, it won by bad voting algorithm. I can almost guarantee that each respondent was only allowed a single choice for most influential game.
I actually think the list, with some exceptions, is remarkably accurate. It definitely isn’t perfect. There are also some big omissions, notably in old PC games that had a big influence or fleshed out new genres that have mutated since then, or gone extinct or something. I think they’re just outside of too many people’s memory at this point.
Off the top of my head:
- Ultima or Dungeon Master
- King’s Quest or Monkey Island
- Civilization
- Battlefield 1942
- Halo or Goldeneye
- Counterstrike
- Warcraft 2
- Zelda 1
It was just a two question + your name form: type-in your #1 pick but also why. Full-on first past the post, single vote only, no option to name other games. Pretty flawed methodology overall.
That said, I will admit that I did put in Shenmue and while I didn’t expect it to get #1, I hoped it’d be top 3 at the very least. I really do trace more or less every successful strongly story based open world game of the 2000s back to a combination of Shenmue and Half-Life. Shenmue’s story didn’t have a super wide appeal and would be completely uninteresting to most teenagers at the time (which was still the main gaming audience), but the method of storytelling is top-notch, and its open world just felt far more genuine than anything predating it. Meanwhile, Half-Life did an excellent job at telling a story that looks boring but is actually very interesting, and did so in an engaging, if not particularly open world way.
Thank you. My big question from this list was “WTF is a Shenmue?”
Oh, you know what happened? I just realized, I hadn’t even read the introductory material and realized it was from a public survey. It’s a “first past the post” problem.
First past the post is remarkably shit isn’t it. I think your analysis is completely right.
Portal though?
Also: mobile games? Flash games? FarmVille left a helluva mark.
I think FarmVille might genuinely be the “correct” answer for this question, but it was never going to win a popular vote contest like this.
Picking farmville as the most influential video game of all time like picking pewdiepie as the most influential director of all time.
I mean, it’s not like that at all though? Even setting aside the popularisation of the free-to-play model and its monetisation - which has defined mobile games (an industry dwarfing all other types of games in revenue by the way), FarmVille was the first innovator in terms of really invasive big data analysis of customer behaviour to maximise profit and retention. The way Zynga did player data analysis (back in 2009 I might add) literally set the tone for all modern internet. There are plenty of articles about the influence of FarmVille, here’s one.. There is another one here.
Portal was less shooty half life. But mobile and flashgames are huge and despite not (rightfully) considered real games, they are the most popular games.
- GRAND THEFT AUTO
- THE ELDER SCROLLS V: SKYRIM
- GRAND THEFT AUTO III
Wow… okay, this is good. It is really rare to see one of these lists that is actually populated with extremely influential games. That’s a good choice of metric, too. Not which ones are “great” but which ones had a lasting impact on the landscape.
- WORLD OF WARCRAFT
- PONG
I wonder if it might be good to separate by decades or generations or something. These are both obviously ground-breakingly influential and belong on the list but it seems kind of senseless to try to “compare” them.
- HALF-LIFE 2
Okay that’s a little weird. We’re getting up into the real high-water heights here and I mean HL2 is good but…
- KINGDOM COME: DELIVERANCE 2
Guys? You okay? I haven’t played it but it seems unlikely that it needs to be above WoW and Dark Souls.
- MINECRAFT
- THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: OCARINA OF TIME
- HALF-LIFE
Okay, here we go. You guys found your stride again. These are legit choices yes.
- SHENMUE
THE FUCK WHY WHAT
You really think Skyrim belongs there? I’d agree that Elder Scrolls deserves a place, but what did Skyrim do that wasn’t done by Oblivion or even Morrowind?
Be worse and sell more. It started a huge trend where every new iteration of the series was worse and yet most sold. It was influential.
Sold copies, that’s what.
Skyrim has just invaded gaming culture more than those other two. You can like them more and point out that they had the features that made skyrim what it is but when modern RPGs are borrowing features those are not the games that they will be looking to emulate.
I can’t really think of any games other than other bethesda ones that took features from skyrim.
Shenmue
My thoughts exactly. Sure it was good; but influencial? I am trying to remember what, if anything, it even did that was novel for the time, let alone what’s been replicated from it that would show some influence it had.
Also: Baldur’s Gate 3 is so new, it’s hard to say it’s had any influence at all yet. I’m not even sure Larian has influenced much in the industry, and they have made a lot of public statements about the state of the industry since BG3 blew up.
HALF-LIFE 2
Okay that’s a little weird. We’re getting up into the real high-water heights here and I mean HL2 is good but…
This list is not about good, it’s about influential. HL2 was the first major game that based its core gameplay to its physics engine, the first to have HDR rendering and the game that Source engine was developed for. Without HL2, a lot of video games in the decade that followed it, would have looked a lot different.
SHENMUE
THE FUCK WHY WHAT
The article claims that Shenmue was the first to have a “living world” where characters follow their daily routines and so on. But yeah, I have my doubts if all the other games that do that were influenced by it.
HL2 was the first major game that based its core gameplay to its physics engine, the first to have HDR rendering and the game that Source engine was developed for. Without HL2, a lot of video games in the decade that followed it, would have looked a lot different.
Yeah, maybe so. Source is just Valve’s internal engine, it was continuously developed and used during pretty much all of their FPS-type game development which includes HL2 along with everything else. It was forked from the not-“Source” source tree at the time of release of the original Half-Life and moved forward continuously from there. But yeah HL2 did do a bunch of ground-breaking stuff, I do see your point and I think it belongs on the list.
The article claims that Shenmue was the first to have a “living world” where characters follow their daily routines and so on.
It’s not. Ultima 6 was doing that.
Actually, The Last Express had already done whatever Shenmue was attempting to do with its “living world” absolutely ten times better. But the same tragic story that led The Last Express to be a commercial flop also means that all the wonderful stuff it did didn’t really make any impact. 😢 TL;DR it was an actual successful implementation of powerful narrative inside of a world that the player could meaningfully impact, in a perfectly meshed and groundbreaking form. But for some reason the studio either refused to or couldn’t do basically any promotion for it, and so after being completed it sold barely any copies and simply fell into the abyss, unknown. It was a masterpiece. Shenmue probably had more lasting impact on gaming.
Source was not an internal engine, it was an openly available engine used by numerous non-Valve games (The Ship, Garrys Mod, Titanfall, Dear Esther, etc etc).
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