I’m saying pokemon. It’s still a dominant franchise today. It’s inspired countless spin offs and copy cats. It made gaming social and the connector for Gameboys a required accessory. Pokemon Go was a covid time revolution. The series is likely responsible for a sizable growth in the gaming market in the late 90s and early 2000s. People who never played a video game can identify Pikachu, and might even have a plushie. We are closing in on 30 years of pokemon being a dominant franchise.
I see a lot of downvotes from people. Listen, it’s okay to disagree and we can have discussions about it. None of the comments so far are offensive or anything. Tell these people why you disagree.
Doom. Was on more PCs than Windows, defined a genre and is still referenced today.
Continues to have a large following, ported to everything thats powered. This is the answer for me!
I have been gaming since 1980. I have never had a more visceral blown away reaction to a game than the first time I played Doom. We even setup a LAN in our dorm so that we could play it multi-player. The only other computer experience with a similar impact was seeing web pages for the first time and realizing that my parents would be able to use the internet with them (no need to learn usenet, ftp, archie, gopher, and all of the command line utilities that I used). Doom felt so revolutionary.
Oh, it’s a “type your pick”, not a list of choice. Interesting
Gamey McGameyface it is then
I would have said Doom, but I think in the long run it’s Minecraft or Skyrim.
I don’t think either of those two are in the top 10
Pong
Minesweeper.
Minecraft
BattleBorn, Lawbreakers, Skull&Bones and Concord; the biggest f* to AAA (and “AAAA”) industry. You crash, so the Indie rise.
Most of all time. GTFO.
Doom.
I can’t think of anything that really competes overall. It could be argued games like Pong, Pac-Man, Quake, Half-Life, WoW, ect. all were pivotal points in gaming, but I don’t think anything has had as direct and widespread influence as Doom.
I’d say Wolfenstein 3D is right there. Without Wolfenstein there wouldn’t be Doom.
Wolfenstein 3D was an evolutionary stepping stone to Doom sure, but you can say that about any game which came before.
Doom really was a huge step up over and above Wolfenstein. Game play, visuals, realism, mood. I remember as a kid playing doom late at night in the dark and actually feeling a bit scared. Nothing before could ever do that.
Yep doom and pong
I was there way back in the 8-bit times, and yet I still agree. There is only pre-Doom and post-Doom.
One of the proof points would be how the existence of Doom on x86 was the perhaps single most influential factor in the demise of non-x86 home computers (Atari ST, Amiga). We (myself included) just sold off what we had to get PCs.
Concord!
Probably Minecraft.
As much as I would like it to be Outer Wilds, Minecraft is the correct pick. The sheer influence the game has and had cannot be beaten
I bet noone’s gonna mention the great grandfathers of modern RPGs. Bard’s Tale, Ultima, Dungeon Master… all modern games are standing on the shoulders of giants.
While they’re important, I think they’ve also aged poorly in many ways something like Doom has not. I’d compare their importance more to something like Pong or Galiga. Good games, that pushed the limits of the medium for their time, and are foundational, but more acted as a steping stone rather than something other games were widely inpired by or modeled after.
I wouldn’t disagree that Doom is a very good choice here too. The fact that it has become a tradition and challenge to try to run Doom on all kinds of hardware alone proves how influential Doom is. However, I wouldn’t say Dungeon Master has aged more poorly than Doom. Both games are really fun today I think. Dungeon Master is just way more niche, it’s older, it had fewer players and the franchise has died a long time ago, while Doom is going strong. It’s a tough choice and I admit I’m a bit biased here anyway - Dungeon Master was my first true love when it comes to video games.
“Aged poorly” was a bad choice of words. My point was more that the industry has moved on from them, and while some of the conventions are the same, its largely stuff that predates them. If you go back to retro RPGs when you’re used to Skyrim, Dark Souls, Final Fantasy, ect. you’ll be unfamiliar with much of how the game plays. Not much was carried over from these games specifically. I’d argue that the influential RPG, that would be the genre’s equivalent to Doom, would be D&D. While not a video game, thats the model everything referenced, and still references, moreso than even Doom. It’s what codified core mechanics like HP, classes, character stats, and more, in the same way Doom codified modern first-person mechanics, ammo management, and exploding barrels.
… and why it’s World of Warcraft.
Do I want that to be the answer? No.
Sadly, that’s actually a decent choice, as much as I hate to admit it.
That question is so broad it cannot be answered.
There’s a myriad of games which are or have been wildly popular (e.g. Mario, CS, GTA, WoW, Minecraft, Fortnite)
There’s games which pushed the borders to new limits (e.g. Tetris, Doom, WoW, VR Chat)
And there’s games which warped the industry or their players (e.g. mobile games, micro transactions, loot boxes)
Agreed. Up next: what’s the best song ever?
Darude - Sandstorm
