![]() The mix of puzzles, exploration and action, and its hugely varied settings have thrilled children for nearly thirty years. Zelda is a princess normally in need of rescue by a young hero, Link, who must acquire a range of objects to save her and often the world. Nintendo’s second huge series, the 17 games have so far sold over 67 million copies. The franchise is valued at over $10 billion. It has over 200 sequels including the racing game Super Mario Kart, Dr Mario, the RPG Paper Mario, the intergalactic Super Mario Galaxy, Mario Golf, and many more. The series was almost singlehandedly responsible for Nintendo’s survival and the resurrection of the American video game market after the E.T.-led crash of 1983. Players play as a mustachioed plumber who avoids obstacles, jumps on monsters, and grows larger by eating mushrooms, in a race to save Princess Peach from the evil Bowser. The defining game of the 1980s, Mario started in the 1981 game Donkey Kong, but it was 1985’s eponymous game that launched the scrolling platformer series. As Alexey Pajitnov developed it in the USSR, the original Western versions were, strictly speaking, all pirated. The Russian game’s haunting music and perfect endless puzzles meant it was the game chosen to ship with the first Game Boys. A sequel, Elite: Dangerous, will release in 2014 for PC and Oculus Rift. Elite, (1984)ĭavid Braben and Ian Bell’s space game was notable in several ways, though it followed a path trod by 1974’s Star Trader open-ended gameplay the possibility of success through trading, piracy or bounty-hunting procedurally-generated galaxies to explore and even an included novella. It was released on home computers, consoles and in the arcades, making it hugely popular and establishing the tropes of the modern racing game, which has changed little since. Pole Position, (1982)ĭesigned by Pac-Man’s creator Tōru Iwatani, Pole Position focused on a realistic F1 driving experience. Despite its simplicity, Pac-Man made more than $2.5bn in quarters alone and is today the most recognised video game character in America. Players control the titular character as he flees ghosts and eats pac-dots, sometimes turning the tables on his pursuers. Tōru Iwatani’s iconic crescent broke the growing arcade monopoly of the space shooters and tennis games. It was programmed on UNIX systems, meaning it was only played by academics and computer scientists. Simple enough, but Rogue was the first game to use procedural generation heavily, meaning the game had infinite replay value, inspiring games like Nethack, Below and Diablo. In Rogue you play an adventurer attempting to make your way to the bottom of a dungeon. The difference was that it was a ‘Multi-User Dungeon’, making it the first massively-multiplayer game, albeit as a text adventure, allowing users to fight and co-operate online. MUD was developed by Roy Trubshaw, a student at Essex University, based on the adventure game Zork. Players control a mobile gun fighting off a descending invasion of aliens, with designs drawn from The War of the Worlds. Space Invaders, (1978)Įveryone knows the iconic imagery of Space Invaders, created by Tomohiro Nishikado and inspired by the arcade game Breakout. Despite that name, Zork was smart and sophisticated, with a rich, funny story, presaging modern adventure games and RPGs, about exploring an underground world. The word ‘zork’ was MIT hacker slang for an unfinished program. Zork, (1977)Īnother game from the super-brains at MIT, Zork draws on the first interactive fiction game, Colossal Cave Adventure. It was almost certainly copied from a game included in the first home console, the Magnavox Odyssey. The first standalone arcade machine, Atari’s tennis sim PONG was also the first video game to reach mainstream popularity. Two players each take control of a starship in the gravity well of a star, and must attempt to destroy each other. Steve Russell’s PDP-1 game was certainly the first shoot-’em-up. A simple tennis sim, it took Higinbotham four hours to design and a technician two weeks to build. Having helped develop the first nuclear bomb, Physicist William Higinbotham went onto develop the first interactive computer game, Tennis for Two, played on a Donner analog computer and an oscilloscope. Intriguingly, the final edition probably has a different list, as the US publisher pushed back on me to add Duck Hunt, Paperboy, Street Fighter 1, Double Dragon, Sonic The Hedgehog, Mortal Kombat, Clash of Clans, and Candy Crush Saga… and we compromised on some of them, but I can’t remember which. The games are listed chronologically, with a second list after them clarifying where they sat in my putative top 100, back in 2014. The book seems to have sold very poorly, so I’ve reproduced the list here. Back in 2014, I contributed a list of the 100 most influential or important video games for a book called 100 x 100 in the USA or 10,000 Things You Need to Know: The Big Book of Lists in the UK.
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