Have you ever played a game that made you think it could be the next evolution in the genre? Games rely on constant reinvention to keep things fresh, and these nine games did that spectacularly and forged lasting legacies.
1 Populous: The Beginning
While Populous: The Beginning wasn’t the first God game, it was one of the most influential titles in the genre. As someone who loves 4X games, I must pay homage to one of the finest examples. Originally released in 1998, the game delivered something unique with its deformable terrain, where players could raise or lower the ground (flattening the terrain was the recipe for success).
Despite these features, the original release of the game was plagued with problems. Selecting and controlling characters was difficult, and you were more likely to click the ground rather than one of your own peons. It wasn’t a commercial success for Bullfrog Games, but it changed how strategy and 4X games did things going forward. There’s a remastered version of this one on Steam if you want to try it yourself.
2 Black and White
Black and White flipped the script on any other game that came before it. You could, quite literally, be a God, with your digital hand reaching into the world to interact with NPCs via gestures, touches, and even breaking down the houses of those who angered you. Games like these are why so many of us are nostalgic about the God game genre.
Black and White‘s contribution to future games of its type includes things like moral alignment for both you and your in-game creature, an NPC autonomy system, and a reinforcement learning system for your creature where you could teach a digital being how you expected it to behave. Looking back on it now, it might not seem spectacular, but it was at the time. If you’d like to play it, there’s an engine out that makes it possible on new systems.
3 Rollercoaster Tycoon
Rollercoaster Tycoon offered one of the best physics simulations of its era. It was a hallmark of the construction and simulation genre, and park management games today copy a lot of its style and structure.
What was so mindblowing for the time was how effortlessly it handled so many complex physics calculations. It didn’t bog down your PC, no matter how complex it got or how many rides the game was managing. Even more impressive was that a single programmer was responsible for coding the original game. Today, the internet still considers this game a technical marvel of its time.
You can download an open-source version of the sequel, OpenRCT 2.
4 Deus Ex
Before Deus Ex, missions in games were linear with solid win-lose scenarios. In some games (like the Sierra adventure titles), some solutions require you to know instinctively what to do earlier on or you’d be locked out of the game later.
Warren Spector and the rest of the Deus Ex team decided that style of gameplay wouldn’t work for them, and designed a new system where players could experiment with different ways to solve problems and finish missions. There’s even a way to finish the game without killing anyone. It was the first game to do so, and now it’s an expected part of any complex RPG.
Moreover, your earlier decisions affected the game later on: a concept almost every story-based RPG from that time to now has adapted in some form. You can still buy Deus Ex on Steam.
5 Shenmue
When writing this article, I realized I might need a write a whole new one just for the innovations that Shenmue gave us. Black and White gave us autonomous NPCs, but Shenmue raised the bar by giving us NPCs that had their own in-game routines. This concept has been adapted and expanded on by games like the Persona franchise and Bethesda games like Skyrim.
Shenmue‘s open world opened the door to other games to explore and improve on the concept. One of the game’s lasting contributions to gaming (for better or worse) is the Quick Time Event (QTE). Although many games have abused the mechanic to death, Shenmue makes them an impactful part of the story and shows how it should have been done.
Download Shenmue I & II on Steam.
6 Super Mario 64
Nintendo showed how far you could push a 3D platformer with Super Mario 64. Before the world’s most famous plumber made his way into 3D space, players were used to only two dimensions. There wasn’t so much of an open world as different levels you could re-run when you got new abilities to see what secrets were hidden there.
Super Mario 64 changed things by building a 3D platforming legacy that future games like Super Mario Galaxy expanded on. It’s also one of the few platformers to allow for a non-linear exploration of the world, allowing players to take on any of the stages on a particular floor as they please. Later 3D platformer games would borrow heavily from Super Mario 64, but Nintendo did it first.
Play Super Mario 64 on the Switch with a Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack subscription.
7 Elite
With games like No Man’s Sky and Starfield, sci-fi gamers are spoiled for choice when it comes to vast worlds that rely on procedural generation. In the 1980s, when no games used the technology, Elite had the forethought of being the very first. This would be enough to set Elite apart as one of the most innovative titles out of the 80s, but it wasn’t done there.
Not only was procedural generation for entire star systems and their inhabitants done on the fly on early technology, but it ran on those old machines without a hitch. You can download Elite for free from Frontier’s website.
8 Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
When Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was released, the developers went all-out to build a fun game that pushed the series forward in a big way. While most people were caught up in the game’s controversies, its innovations were easily overlooked.
This title was one of the first to use model changes to show progression in-game. So, for example, if you spent a lot of time at the gym, CJ (the protagonist) would start developing muscles. These weren’t just for show but actually affected gameplay. Today, that doesn’t sound like such a big deal but back then it certainly was. The innovation most gamers remember fondly was the seamless world loading. No need to wait five minutes for loading screens between areas like other games of the time.
San Andreas was remastered (and eventually fixed) and now has a definitive edition available on Steam.
9 Duke Nukem 3D
“Boomer Shooter” is the best term to describe Duke 3D, but this one changed the genre of FPS forever. Before the game was released, first-person shooters were limited in their scope. You couldn’t look up or down, only left and right. While that was good enough for most games, 3D Realms made the choice that they wanted to explore the third dimension.
Aside from finally being able to aim up and down, Duke Nukem 3D also introduced something that has shaped first-person shooters (and many other games as well): the explosive barrel. Players realized (some accidentally) that shooting those red barrels caused them to explode. Almost all future games took these concepts and ran with them, and today’s shooters owe a lot of their depth to this game.
Duke Nukem 3D is still playable on modern systems via Steam or using a source port like eDuke32.
Looking at today’s vast array of games and the titles that are released so often, it’s easy to forget that many of the things we take for granted today come from games that most people have forgotten about. The games above are just a few examples of releases that were truly ahead of their time.
