GTA3 – rekindled my love of gaming, the ability to cause utter carnage was outstanding.

Halo2 – my first online gaming experience.

COD:MW (the first modern warfare) – stunning, stunning game.

Other notable mentions:

Micro-Machines on the SNES – 4 of us playing it sharing a controller between 2.

Elite, obviously.

Harrier Attack on the Speccy – we used to have lunch in a mates house who lived near school and play it non-stop.

Syndicate on the Amiga.

Good question.

Undoubtedly, I’d have to say “Elite” for proving what was possible to achieve with the very meagre hardware of the day. I love the open-ended gameplay and the ability to approach the game in a number of different ways. The 24k of code managed to squeeze in a dozen different ships, 1800 worlds, numerous missions and ship enhancements.

What about others? Well, it depends on how you judge importance. A lot of games that were great from a technical point of view didn’t have the marketing clout behind them to make them more memorable – games like Ant Attack, Starstrike II (and Elite) and others were amazing achievements for the time, but lose out to Mario in terms of being cultural landmarks and $$$s earned.

I’d dearly love to be able to include Turrican II too, for the almost obsessive attention to detail in the game. It’s still something I have the occasional go on, twenty one years after I first completed it. But ultimately it’s derivative despite the memorable soundtrack and visuals.

What’s wrong with Half-Life then?

It was just another FPS, nothing particularly innovative about it.

Doom and Counter Strike on the PC

What about Final Fantasy 7 on the Playstation?
Resident Evil was awesome
GTA
Goldeneye for sure
Super Mario 64

These were all important to me, but to the computer gaming world, I dont know?

for me it was 3D ant attack, then jet set willy and the game I just couldnt leave alone was zelda

Most important – Angry Birds
Best – Fallout 3

(Oh and Far Cry 3 ain’t that great BTW)

Best – Fallout 3

Try either of the first two, they’re far better in terms of story and choice as well.

If you’re talking about “important” then Wolfenstein ranks up near the top due to the fact it introduced a novel 3D engine (actually really 2D) that allowed games like Doom to be possible on those early computers.

Although after some wikipediaing it seems Hovertank 3d was the first to use the idea…

Not read the whole thread, so apologies if it’s already been said

You could argue that games are an art form. So the OP question is a bit like asking

What’s the most important film, music or piece literature?

What’s the most important piece of photography, architecture or oil on canvas?

IMPOSSIBLE is answer.

A man in the street/on STW you give his favorite, a expert would point you in the direction of a number of very important examples within each genre/ sub genre.

But a good OP question none the less… and as a bloke on STW I’d say Jet Set Willy or Manic Miner

“How do you pick up that pipe?”
“Press this button”
“How do I swing it?”
“Use that button”
“What can I hit with it?”
“Dunno, try it out on anything”

30 minutes later

“Sbob, the old lady was dead half an hour ago. Stop beating her corpse and pass the controller”

Grand Theft Auto 3. 8)
Good times.

Surprised to hear so many people mention Mario Kart 64, I thought it was awful compared to the SNES version.
Bowser/Kong, rainbow road, I will beat you. 😈

“most” important is impossible to answer, agreed. I think landmark titles plural make for an interesting discussion though.

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.

3D Monster Maze, that would be.

Goldeneye for me. 4 player split screen offered the first decent social gaming experience with your mates at the time. We wasted hours laying proximity mines and shooting each other through walls. As great as internet gaming is I still think is was brilliant to be able to get 4 people in the same room playing off of one console and TV.

I actually still do meet up with mates for gaming sessions, but now it’s much more of a hassle and expense as you have to organise 4 TVs and 4 copies of whatever game you want to play(unless you play a sports game like FIFA)

Another World.

Don’t think it really works to treat computer games as all the same- Ultima was maybe most important for RPGs, Doom or Wolfenstein for FPSs, Command and Conquer for large scale strategy (maybe Lords of Chaos or Rebelstar or something for older versions?), Elite for space games… But was Dizzy very relevant to Half Life?

(actually, hey, it was- they both had really irritating jump sections)

Wasn’t Half Life the first FPS to have a big long proper story based plot rather than just shoot the monsters?

Wasn’t Half Life the first FPS to have a big long proper story based plot rather than just shoot the monsters?

Harumph.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Shock

Quite. Having slightly more story than Doom is hardly innovative!

these three were classics on the amiga aswell, first two pretty groundbreaking as sort of open world …

and the ulitmate coin-op conversion for addictivness..

Back this on kickstarter if you want new ELITE

Also, if you’re on android, get “BEEBDROID
” from the play store. And you get get Elite on that, as well as other classic BBC B games!!

Prince of Persia

Battlezone for me

It took the vector based Asteroids-like graphics and created a 3D world – in 1980. I wasn’t this excited about another game until the first incarnation of Wolfenstein a few years later (which used to give me motion sickess!). I then quickly moved through Duke Nukem, Doom, Half-Life, Unreal, Quake and all versions thereof.

I dread to think how much time I wasted or how much money I spent on the latest graphics cards!

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.

I thought Impossible Mission on the Commodore 64 was the first that had that truly lifelike animation of a human form. Dunno if it used motion capture or not. Also the first game I can recall to feature digitised speech.

As for the most important game ever, can’t argue with Elite or Doom. Or maybe MUD, or whatever the first text-based adventure games were, for introducing the concepts that predate all the sword n sorcery type games.

It all began for me with Finders keepers on the spectrum back in 84′

It set my imagination blazing and left me craving more gameplay and better graphics.

Seminal gaming moments: Resident evil 2, GTA 3, Gran turismo – all!

Best so far – Dead space 2!

Thing about halflife is that the story’s just window dressing- it’s still a totally linear tunnel shooter, you never make a single decision til the end, the game just tells you “Go there, do something, go somewhere else”, and always by the one permitted route. In some ways it’s more linear than Quake, and Freeman has no more character. (and what he does makes no sense- you are a taciturn scientist. Now shoot all the things.)

I thought it was a bit crap tbh.

I thought Impossible Mission on the Commodore 64 was the first that had that truly lifelike animation of a human form. Dunno if it used motion capture or not. Also the first game I can recall to feature digitised speech.

STAY A WHILE… STAY FOREVER!! I’d struggle to say what the first home computer speech was; I had a Speccy, the C64 almost certainly had the drop on it there. I remember Robin of the Wood had intro speech, “can you help Robin in his quest for the silver arrow” is what it was supposed to say IIRC, but mostly it sounded like you’d left the tape running. Ghostbusters was an early one for speech too, on both platforms.

I don’t think Impossible Mission was mocap, just well animated; happy to be proved wrong though.

Mission Impossible was amazing for speach.
Paradroid on the C64 was a mold breaker too for shear game play and depth.
On the Amiga Syndicate changed my view of RTS/career type games.
Colin Mcrae rally and Doom for the first time were the jaw dropping PC moments for me!

As for my youth, in the arcades games such as:
Starwars with its skonky vector graphics (before elite).
Space Harrier for shear playability
Gauntlet was amazing for multiplayer.
Paperboy for graphics in its day was jaw droppingly good.
Double Dragon was also a fave and was the best of that type of game.

As for consoles?
I suppose it depends on what you play.
Games such as Sonic, Road Rash and COD etc were platform defining.

Can’t wait for PS4!

Good call on Paradroid. As a Speccy owner, that was always my favourite C64 game.

The original X-Com has to be on the list. Pretty clever design and structure, very open and non-linear (to a point). Also it was damn hard. No easy breaks or rewinds or extra lives. Dead meant dead. One or two shots could end hours of gaming. No respawns like CoD and co.

Just picked up the new version for the Xbox and impressed at how well they have kept the original recipe intact. Clearly the graphics are better and gameplay is smoother etc but the basic premise exists. Lots of balls to keep in the air, and eventually you are forced to drop some to keep the rest going.

Thing about halflife is that the story’s just window dressing- it’s still a totally linear tunnel shooter, you never make a single decision til the end, the game just tells you “Go there, do something, go somewhere else”, and always by the one permitted route

Well yes, but that’s the point. It’s a slightly new genre of game and one which I quite like. I’ve shot a hell of a lot of monsters/aliens/baddies in my time, so putting in a proper story into which you can get is a nice touch. Ok so the HL1 story isn’t exactly amazing, but the atmosphere was imo. GTA4 is an extensio of this. Linear, but atomspheric and cinematic. Good stuffs.

My vote would be Marathon on the classic Mac. Proper 3D levels, decent story line and propelled Bungie to fame, before going on to make Half Life, Portal etc.

That and Duke Nukem 3D – ‘Shake it, baby!’ ‘Don’t have time to play with myself’ 😆

Elite, Doom, Worms+ [Reinforments], Dungeon Master and Sensible Soccer and Kick Off2

Syndicate ! Wow.. what an epic game that was… truely immense.

Although UFO series took that to a whole new level with Enemy unknown and enemy from the deep. They just took months and months.

Sensible soccer !!!! then SWOS… playing that against mates in tournaments for hours and hours…

propelled Bungie to fame, before going on to make Half Life, Portal etc.

I think you might be a bit confused…

Did none of you guys play doom over a LAN?

I had a mate who’s dad is a computer geek and he rigged up 3 pc’s to play it in different rooms around his house. It use to be the first to 100 frags was the winner, I would be drenched in sweat by the end and walk home at about 2 in the morning seeing pixels in the darkness.

Doom was THE turning point in my book.

Dungeon Master! Gods, close the thread.

In half life I liked the clips you got of bad guys chatting, stuff going on elsewhere, not all based on what you did. Of course they were kinda contrived, step over this line, walk through this door and it triggers X event, but hey you can’t have everything. First time I remember seeing this sort of thing, tho I dare say it’s in older games.

I think you might be a bit confused…

Quite.

Marathon = Bungie = Halo. Half Life and Portal were Valve.

God, there’s so many, and there’s a fine line between making a list of “Games that were genuinely innovative” and “Games that I really liked”. Are we including console games as well as computer games?

From a purely personal point of view, the most important games to me were:

The Hobbit & The Lord of the Rings (Spectrum & C64): Because of these games, I’d read both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in their entirety by the age of nine, establishing a fine tradition of nerdery and verbosity from an early age. Despite having read the books, I never managed to get out of the Shire…

Booty, Horace Goes Skiing, The Perils of Bear George and Jet Set Willy (Spectrum): Just because I remember playing them from about the age of three with my dad and brother.

Lemmings (Amiga): Fantastic game, remember staying up until 3am teaching my dad to play it the Christmas we got our Amiga 500+.

Alien Breed & The Chaos Engine (Amiga): Great multiplayer action, even if my brother kind of sucked at it.

Project X (Amiga): For demonstrating that life is hard and ultimately no matter what you do, you’ll never succeed

Street Fighter II Turbo (SNES): HADOUKEN!

Goldeneye (N64): Again, fantastic multiplayer action, and proof that consoles could do shooters

Micro Machines V3 (PS): Four player hilarity, especially when you got the hammer…

Tomb Raider (PS): Crap main character with zero personality, but fantastic environments and music, and paved the way for…

Soul Reaver (PS): The game that made me want to get into the games industry

Final Fantasy VII (PS): Just for the epic production values and fantastic score (I walked down the aisle to Aerith’s theme)

Soul Blade (PS): All the sequels were a disappointment, but I remember watching the intro and thinking, “MY GOD GRAPHICS CAN’T POSSIBLY GET ANY BETTER!!!1111”

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (PS): Proof that just because you can do 3d doesn’t mean that 2d doesn’t have its place.

I’ll stop now. /o\