Ancient Game History: The Most Influential Video Games Ever
Video games have been around for longer than many of you might think. The first video game remembered as such was Tennis for Two, a piece of software written by American physicist William Higinbotham in 1958. When it comes to commercial video gaming, history is far shorter – it is counted since the early 1970s release of Atari’s Pong. In the four decades that have passed ever since, both the gaming hardware and the software have evolved at a fast pace from the pixelated ball-and-paddle games like Pong to the realistic and lifelike games we play today. The history of video games, in general, had a few titles that bent the direction of its course. Let’s take a look at some of the most influential of them all.
Snake – the first successful mobile game
People have used many devices as portable gaming rigs over the years, including programmable calculators that were used to run various type-in games like Tetris, Darth Vader’s Force Battle, Lemmings, and even a rudimentary form of Doom. But then mobile phones have proven to be an even better device for playing games, starting a veritable revolution. The first known mobile game was a version of Tetris built into a Hagenuk MT-2000 mobile phone in 1994, and the first truly successful such title was Snake, built into the software of many generations of Nokia’s phones.
Two decades have passed from Snake to the best Microgaming-powered games of 2017 at your fingertips but descendants of Nokia software designer Taneli Armanto’s original still show up in a variety of places. Slither.io, for example, is the massively multiplayer variant of Snake, released in 2016.
Meridian 59 – the first MMORPG as we know it
Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) had many early ancestors, including the text-based MUDs and other fantasy games that initially ran on university mainframes, later making it to personal computers. But the first game to be considered a true MMORPG, with 3D graphics and parallel game worlds was Meridian 59, built by developer Archetype and publisher 3DO in 1996. Upon its initial beta release, the game gathered 17,000 players and was highly successful for years after its commercial release. The game was built on a Doom-based 3D engine at first, which was replaced by a new rendering engine in 2004.
3DO shut down the game in 2000, but Near Death Studios re-released it in 2002, and the game kept running in its commercial form until 2010. The game survived the company and was ultimately released as freeware in 2012.
Dune II – the RTS archetype
Dune, the adventure-strategy video game released in 1992, was a blend of interactive storytelling and economic and military strategy but with little to no real-time elements added to the mix. Dune II, in turn, which was surprisingly developed in parallel with the original game, focused far more on the strategy part in detriment of the story. While it certainly wasn’t the first real-time strategy game ever released, it was the one to establish the format that the greatest names in the coming years – Command & Conquer, Warcraft, and their likes – used.
Wolfenstein 3D – the game that made FPS popular
While it was clearly not the first game to be played from a first-person perspective, Wolfenstein 3D is considered by most to be the archetype of the modern FPS genre. ID Software, the company behind it, did many great things for the genre, giving us Doom, Quake, and many other games that all contributed to the state in which it is today. But Wolfenstein 3D was the first game to show what the PC was capable of with its full-color graphics, smooth scrolling, and exciting premise of a parallel World War II.
Pong – the game that made the video game industry into a “thing”
Consider this: would all of the above have been possible without this simple, blocky, abstract tennis simulator released in 1972? From a business perspective, Pong might be the most influential video game ever created: it made it clear that there’s money to be made off video games, and helped bring them from arcades to our homes.
