Generally?
MS Solitaire
Second place WOW
Moving the industry forward?
Pong, Doom, HL are good choices
Pong
Missile command and asteroids and space invaders were a generation soon after pong. But they were much better games that made for addictive repeated play, and dream infections. Pong was a technology breaktrhough, but not that good of a game.
I was thinking Warcraft 3 instead of WoW, since a WC3 mod spawned the entire genre (MOBA) and that genre brought esports from backwater to front and center. & Of course WoW came from WC3.
I mean it did for esports, but be honest that’s a gamer thing. Wow changed the face of mmorg gaming. It hit 12 million? 65 year old grandmas were playing, it completely broke the gamer/normie barrier.
WC3 also spawned the tower defense genre. But WOW just has a much wider and deeper influence, both in- and outside of video games.
Really, anything from the Game Canon is a good choice: Mario, Doom, Tetris, SimCity, Civ I, Warcraft, SpaceWar, Zork, that soccer game I don’t remember, StarRaiders.
I haven’t seen anyone mention Zork yet, and it really ought to be in contention here. Pretty much all video games can trace how their narrative is structured through gameplay back to the foundations laid by Zork, even doom. It drew on Colossus, sure, but it built on it so much that it became revolutionary to both games as a storytelling medium and to natural language processing. Really cool stuff.
I’m going to be a little left-field with this one. Yes you could pick some boring obvious answer like Pong, Doom or Minecraft and that’s perfectly valid. I’m not saying those are incorrect.
I’m going to go with FarmVille though. It’s really hard to overstate the impact it has had on the gaming landscape (for the worst, if it needed spelling out). It popularised an all new approach to monetisation and retention systems in games, it heralded the proliferation of microtransactions, Games-As-A-Service models and manipulative skinner boxes designed to extract the most money and attention out of you. It opened the door - by being a “social game not just for gamers” - to an entirely new market whose wallets were previously unavailable. It created this malicious new insight that the best way to make money is not to just make a good game and sell it - it is to create an addiction through psychologically manipulative means, then slowly leech their users’ wallets over time.
FarmVille really fucked us over.
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.
Since it is BAFTA I will limit myself to a UK game. Tomb Raider with special mention for Elite. My main memories of my 3dfx card was low poly Lara, not Quake. The mix of story, setting, problem, solving and combat lives on in a lot of popular titles. And I can’t look at space sims like NMS today without thinking of Elite miraculously shoe horned into an 8bit micro.
Pong
Minecraft
