Elite for me, I still have my Elite pinbadge that you got if you sent your cassette back to the publishers once you got to elite status on the game.
MrSynthpop
Braben's pet 😉
To my mind (as someone who isn't really a gamer) an important game is Turbo Esprit. Sort of by accident. Up til then games played like arcade games and had the same time pressure / stay alive or go back to the beginning (put another 10p in) format. In other words you had to be winning to continue playing. In Turbo Esprit if it was all going wrong, even if you ignored the goal of the game the game carried on running and you could just play - explore the game world, dick about, slalom between the lampposts, mow down pedestrians, cause pile ups. Before then hitting a ped would be game over, go back to the start, but with that game you had the first element of go anywhere, do anything that you now have in games like GTA
Not quake, but quakeworld, the addon that made it multiplayer.
There were a few lan games before that but QW changed everything and put games on the internet.
Battle cars
Jet Pac
Elite
Gunship 2000
F19/F117
Loved Gaunlet
First online multiplayer game I played Delta Force, spent way to many hours playing that all on 56k 🙂
I couldn't see what the fuss was about with Kick Off/KO2.
I did once play a full length 90 minute game though just for a laugh. My god, that was awful. Ended up losing something like 89-3, I wasn't very good at it.
Carmaggedon
Have to be another vote for Doom and Quake here, or rather Quakeworld. I spent waaay too much time playing Quakeworld, competitively, in the late 90s 😳
I still play Quake Live now and have a bash on Doom 2 now and again.
Mario 64.
Proof that free-roaming 3D could actually work properly and provide wonderful gameplay.
Everything since owes a huge debt to this.
Crysis series, and the one where you kept hearing the little girls voice whispering "help me" used to put the fear of god into me when playing in the dark!
ATM and for a no of decades, Max Payne and the Punisher.
Descent.
manic miner
the one where you kept hearing the little girls voice whispering "help me"
Silent Hill?
not SH1, is it F.E.A.R.? Never played it but seem to recall something about a girl and it being scarySilent Hill?
RE scared me but SH freaked me out big time, never played that in the dark.
[quote=cynic-al ]Descent.
Proper 3D freedom of movement and the possibility(likelihood) of completely losing yourself. Descent was also the first computer game I played against a mate over a modem connection 🙂
RE scared me but SH freaked me out big time, never played that in the dark.
IMO RE got you all kind of jumpy whereas SH messed with your head and made you want to finish that last can (of Stella) and go to bed with the lights on.
Half Life might not have been a technical move forward but it had more atmosphere than anything I'd played previously. The section where Freeman is climbing the outside of the Mesa was realistic enough that I had nightmares about slipping off to my death!
Half-life. I love that game, everything was just right for its time, the graphics and animation were spot on, the character design was different Freeman being a scientist not a macho hero, multiplayer was great I loved the 'crossfire' map and the sounds were good, even on the menu the sound effects were good clicking from menu to menu. Superb game I spent hours enjoying. I used to lead scientists to their deaths, that was funny edging someone down a lift shaft. Really great for its time and hugely influential in the 'playable tutorial' aspect. It had time scale too the story went from morning to night then day again.
But as said before no doom/quake no half life, so its gotta be one of those two. Half-Life was the perfect evolution of what they started.
Great thread again race face
As lots of others have said, Doom. although I have a soft spot for Conflict: Desert Strom, the first game I ever bothered to finish.
HL just didn't do it for me despite all the hype etc. HL 2 on the other hand was proper bo; the expansive (albeit linear) world, the moody Combine, the awesome next-gen physics, the myriad ways in which you could confront/escape situations ... friggin' awesome.
In the F1 genre, for me it has to be GP2 by Geoff Crammond.
Back in the day...
DOOM - a leap forward and a bridge to the modern equivalents
Gauntlet - I still quote "Warrior needs food badly" when hungry
In the F1 genre, for me it has to be Pitstop 2 on the C64 (as a successor to Atari's early 80's classic Pitstop).
Frogger
I'll raise you with Scramble.
King-ocelot - Memberthe character design was different Freeman being a scientist not a macho hero
A scientist engine-of-death, though, which didn't really make any sense. Oh a helicopter gunship? Luckily my PhD thesis in Wibbly Wobbly Science included a section on firing rocket launchers. Yes I did pass my viva despite never speaking.
Shenmue 1 & 2 on the dreamcast.
The Hobbit on sinclair spectrum which lifted role playing games from the mire and into true interactive intelligence on small computers
Horris Goes Skiing, ZX48k
DooM
I think I first got it on 3.5 Floppy on a magazine as shareware. Still got the disks somewhere. Cakewalk was on the same disks 0_o.
RE scared me but SH freaked me out big time, never played that in the dark.
I loved the first two Silent Hill games. Seemed to lose it's way a bit after that. Properly creepy.
Proper 3D freedom of movement and the possibility(likelihood) of completely losing yourself. Descent
Back in Doom's heyday, we had half a dozen machines LANned up at work, and used to play in the evenings. Everyone else had played a lot, and I spent the bulk of my gaming time dead. I never really got my head around the map and where all the weapon spawns were.
When Descent came out, we got that running on the LAN. I immediately gelled with it, whereas the others took to it like a duck to petrol. I was hurtling around, barrel-rolling and twisting with abandon whilst everyone else was going "uh, which way is up?" After months of humiliation at Doom's hands, Cougar's Revenge was complete and I battered all comers.
I think it's something to do with the way my brain works. I've got good spacial awareness and can instinctively fly in free-roaming 3D space, whereas the 2D Doom engine just left me bewildered. I appreciate that makes little sense. I can do the Rubik's Cube, but those 4x4 slidey-block puzzles confuse the proverbial out of me.
The Hobbit on sinclair spectrum which lifted role playing games from the mire and into true interactive intelligence on small computers
see my post on page 1 or 2 🙂
" SAY TO BARD "SHOOT THE DRAGON "
F1, lets talk about REVS then on the BBC Micro.
PACMAN has to be the biggest single wide-ranging game that got everyone into thinking about games as a mass market money maker!
A scientist engine-of-death, though, which didn't really make any sense.
Yes it was ridiculous, having a tedious intro sequence that you are forced to play through doesn't make the character a scientist when after that he behaves in exactly the same way as any other generic FPS protagonist. It's not even a slightly original set up either, being largely just a rip off of Another World.
I guess I can only answer this in terms of 'for me'…
Zelda: Ocarina of time. The N64 in general made 3D gaming looking really credible on a console but Ocarina of Time took it to a new level. Final Fantasy might have felt big but it was all a bunch of pre-renders. This felt big, I mean you needed a ****ing horse to get around!
Half Life 2: for me this was the tipping point at which games became more than toys. This was better than any film and people talk about the technological advances it brought, for me it was the cinematic and story telling experience it brought. Maybe the tech allowed that but it was just a means to an end in that respect.
Goldeneye: Took FPS games to the mainstream that no other has done. Even my Dad has stayed up night after night trying to finish it on '007 difficulty'…
X-pilot was a landmark game in the pre-mainstream internet era, a multi-player space shoot-em-up - anyone play this? Ran on unix workstations networked worldwide - computer science students in the early 90s will have logged massive hours playing this. Great game, simple but effective play.
i spent 3 hours playing Elite II last night 🙂
Dunno if it's been mentioned before, but a few folk have wondered about getting Elite/Frontier up and running on a modern PC.
Have a look here: [url= http://www.dosbox.com/download.php?main=1 ]DosBox[/url]
And then here: [url= http://www.frontierastro.co.uk/Files/files.html ]Elite downloads #1[/url] or [url= http://www.sharoma.com/frontierverse/game.htm ]Elite downloads #2[/url]
I still play Frontier now. Totally brilliant.
Ox, my dos window is non-scalable... any way of getting dosbox to run larger than about 500x350 ?
Does Alt-Enter work?
Does anyone remember Lotus Turbo Esprit challenge on the Spectrum??
It was apparently a big influence on the whole GTA series of games.
The graphics were a bit more primitive though.... Its not *quite* 1080p resolution:
[img] 
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Does anyone remember Lotus Turbo Esprit challenge on the Spectrum??
Someone else mentioned it here earlier. But yeah, it's not hard to see elements of Turbo Esprit (Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge was a different game, a 16-bit spilt-screen outing) in things like GTA. Great little game.
But although they share elements, does it really make sense to credit one with influencing the other? Surely the real world is the biggest influence on GTA?
Well, it does if it did. Whether it was [i]actually[/i] an influence or not, I don't know. I'd like to think it was, but you'd have to ask the developers.
Apologies for skimreading the last six pages, but surprised to not find zork mentioned anywhere (although half a point for whoever mentioned colossal cave adventure about five pages ago).
IIRC zork was the first text adventure to go massive so, rather in the same way that Doom may not have been the first FPS but it's success puts it up there, I'd vote for zork in the "influential on the direction of future gaming" stakes.
