6 Titles that Shape the Way we Game

Gaming is almost half a century old and in that time we've seen plenty of games come and go and only some leave a mark. Here are six I'd consider to be pivotal in shaping the way we game

Pac-Man (1980)

Pac-man wasn't the first digital game around - but it was the first one to have a song dedicated to them, and have it hit #8 on Billboard's Top 100. The game reached an unprecedented popularity among arcades - not only people would line up around the buildings to play, it was a true, undeniable pop culture phenomenon.

Pac-man was indeed a massive hit - probably a not bigger than you may realize. In its first year, the game made a billion dollars in quarters, which outpaced even Star Wars - it was the most popular media product at the time, and proved that games were truly capable of generating enormous profits. Why not try it here.

Grand Theft Auto 3 (2001)

Up until GTA III's release in 2001, to call a game "open-world" would be to say that you could go a bit further than usual from wherever the storyline and goals for the player were set. The game introduced players to an experience they had never seen before. Liberty City had an enormous variety of things to do, locations to explore, and innocent civilians to beat up for their cash money. You could either do it all or do none of it, if you preferred - fun would ensue either way.

With a large number of missions and distractions which could keep players busy for hours, simply driving around in Liberty City's streets or creating mass panic (perhaps by using cheat codes which would arm each of the civilians with a rocket launcher) was enough to keep players glued to their PS2s for a long time. Many of its successors tried to imitate GTA's success, but it is still the granddad of open-world games.

Pokemon Red and Blue (1996)

The first game to achieve the sort of child-bating hysteria that big cartoons and toys did in the '80s and '90s, Pokemon had quite a simple concept: It combined cute cartoon creatures with an obsessive-compulsive, competitive collecting mechanic (which was very easy to later transfer into merchandise design), and you get playground gold.

16 years after that, with an entire multimedia empire behind the brand, Pokemon has proven to be even more enduring and popular than Furbies, Pogs and Tamagotchis combined. It has spawned an enormous quantity of imitators, but none of them were capable of coming close to Nintendo's achievement. Despite various commercial failings and missteps in other areas, Pokemon has Nintendo printing out money whenever they want to.

Minecraft (2011)

Minecraft has taken the world by storm since its release in 2011. A flurry of awards initially were backed up with huge commercial success. The game has received numerous awards of note for it being the best downloadable game and over 70m copies of it have been sold, around 20m of which are on Xbox consoles.
The multiplayer game mode has been a large part of the success of Minecraft. Here players acquire resources to create a better world and improve their health. There's also a creative mode with unlimited resources and an adventure mode where custom maps are created by others. The fact the game can be modded has leant to huge communities rising up around the game, some even allowing people to play Minecraft for free.​

Doom (1993)

In the nineties, they didn't call this sort of game a first-person shooter. They called them Doom clones. With a space marine, eight weapons and endless demonic monsters that had to be killed, Doom got the core idea of Wolfestein and ramped them as much as they could. More atmosphere, gore and fun, all merged into an incredibly intense experience which stimulated players in a way no other game was capable of. Spraying rockets, BFG plasma and shotgun shells at bizarre creatures in what at the time was a lifelike environment was a carnal, violent delight.

To say simply that Doom made waves would be the sort of understatement that deserves a revved chainsaw to the chest. Its shareware could be found in every single school computer lab and office cubicle in the country - conservatives were very vocal about their opinions on the Satanic themes and the bountiful carnage that the game represented. More than anything, the game managed to solidify the FPS experience as a prevalent genre, one that still makes the industry millions and millions of dollars yearly. If not for ID Software's bold leap forward, the gaming landscape of today would possibly be unrecognizable.

Pong

For a game that did not involve anything other than two straight lines that represented paddles and a moving pixel that represented a ball, Pong had an enormous impact on the gaming industry at the time. Atari's wildly successful arcade game was what launched it. In the seventies, Nolan Bushnell, Atari's co-founder, hired a new employee. It was Allan Alcorn - a man who did not have much experience in making games. Nolan decided to task him with developing a very simple game inspired on table tennis - nothing more than a warm-up product. This "test" would become Pong, one among the most successful coin-op arcade games in the industry's history.

In fact, Pong was so successful that many companies started to develop their own versions of Pong, which was actually inspired on a ping pong game that was part of the Magnavox Odyssey. Atari tried to circumvent it by developing a version of the game for home consoles, and Home Pong's success was even higher than that of its arcade counterpart, proving that companies could make serious cash through virtual entertainment.