Midseason Replacement

Some of the most popular trends in contemporary gaming can have their roots traced back to earlier games that were definitely popular but whose impact on gaming rarely get the recognition they deserve. Here are just five games I think deserve more recognition for their impact on gaming.

Snake

The first time I played this game, it wasn’t yet Morning in America and the cast of Diff’rent Strokes all had bright futures ahead of them. It came on a cassette tape for the tape drive on my Commodore Vic-20 computer. Some of you may be thinking “tape drive?” Others of you may be thinking “cassette tape?” Yes, in the early days of personal computing, you were as likely to find games on cassette tapes and cartridges as you were to find them on floppy disks. (I’m pretty sure someone just said “floppy disk?”)

This game is probably the simplest computer game employing graphics you’ve ever come across. You are in control of a line that gets longer and longer as you play. You are competing against another ever-lengthening line, and if you touch yourself or the other line, you die. If this game had died out with the first generation of home computers, it wouldn’t be on this list. The game, however, got another lease on life as cell phones became advanced enough to show simple graphics.

There was a time—roughly 2000-2001–when it seemed like every cell phone had this game packed into it. The inclusion of that game primed us for the inevitability of mobile gaming on cell phones. Before long, snake would be replaced with solitaire, bowling, java games, and eventually downloadable apps, but there was a brief moment when Snake defined cell phone gaming and heralded the arrival of the cell phone as a mobile gaming device.

Excitebike

For people who grew up with the NES, this game likely brings back fond memories. Excitebike was a simple motocross racing game that was recently revived for the Wii. The games simple mechanics made it easy to play but difficult to master. If it were just gameplay we were talking about, there’d be little to set Excitebike apart from its contemporaries.

Excitebike included something, though, that allowed it to stand out from other games of its era. It included a track editor. You could create your own tracks and race on them. Unfortunately, only Japanese gamers could save their tracks to disc to share with their friends; the rest of us created tracks, raced them, then created more. I reached a point where I was spending as much time creating tracks as racing on them. It wasn’t the first game to feature a level editor, but it was the first popular, mainstream game that I can recall featuring one. 

This wasn’t a feature that other games rushed to copy. I think, though, that we have finally reached a point with the release of Modnation Racers and Little Big Planet where level creation has come into its own and made the leap from the DIY modding community into the mainstream. It’s taken 25 years, but this concept has finally reached fruition.

GAUNTLET

Gauntlet was a dungeon crawler that holds the distinction of holding a number of firsts. It was the first arcade game that allowed for different classes of characters. It was also the first four-player co-op arcade game. Level after level, you and three teammates rushed to kill hordes of enemies in order to make it to the level’s exit.

Gauntlet is an old arcade classic whose brilliance was never really realized on home consoles. Part of the reason for that is that the game was designed for an arcade experience. Specifically, the game was designed to eat quarters which created a sense of urgency in gamers that the home experience just could not duplicate.

Anyone who was around during the original arcade game’s heyday will probably have fond memories of this game, but the game’s luster has been dusted over as time has gone by. What this game did though can not be dismissed. This game was the first four-player co-op game, so every time you fire up a co-op game over Xbox Live or PSN, you are playing on the legacy of Gauntlet, which first taught gamers to look out for their teammates, communicate, and plan ahead as a group.

Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!

The easiest thing you can do to create a high profile for a video game is attach a popular brand name to it. Sometimes, this works, and sometimes it doesn’t. A variation on that theme is the celebrity endorsement. By 1987, celebrities came no larger than the former unified champion of the world, Mike Tyson. Nintendo attached Mike Tyson to the NES port of its arcade series Punch-Out! and a star was born (not Mike Tyson, but contender Little Mac).

What makes this game unique among games with celebrity licenses is that game systems finally had reached a point of ubiquity that a meaningful celebrity endorsement could help create a blockbuster. No matter how popular Larry Bird and Dr. J were, their game was never going to have the same kind of recognition as Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!

Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out! is by no means an obscure game, but I think that its legacy is that it was the first game to demonstrate the strength of the celebrity endorsement. There were other boxing games that provided a more satisfying boxing experience, but, like Mike Tyson’s prodigious punches, his name on the game was something that could not be countered. It would be a full decade before another celebrity endorsement would prove as formidable. Tony Hawk took what Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out! promised and delivered millions of sale over tons of sequels.

PaRappa The Rapper

As much as I loved the idea of Parappa The Rapper, the game infuriated me. PaRappa the Rapper was arguably the first rhythm game to be developed for home video gaming. The gameplay was simple, you simply tapped your keys in sync with an on-screen display, as the characters rapped on-screen. What was infuriating about this game, for me, was that I felt like the rhythm aspect was unforgiving. Despite that, I still loved the game for having rapping characters and innovative gameplay.

Other rhythm games soon followed, most famously Dance Dance Revolution. From Dance Dance Revolution, it’s just a hop, skip, and jump to Guitar Hero and Rock Band, all of which utilize essentially the same gameplay.

You might suggest that the timing element introduced by PaRappa The Rapper had existed before. For instance, in many basketball games, your free throw accuracy was determined by timing your shot so that you pressed the button when an on-screen indicator was in a sweet spot. It was PaRappa The Rapper, however, that made that rhythm element the central focus of the game and added the music element. Without that I might never have spent hours trying to pass “Institutionalized” by Suicidal Tendencies in Guitar Hero 2. The irony is that there hasn’t yet been a great rap game to emerge from the rhythm game genre (in which I include karaoke games).

The Sierra Network

If you played computer games in the late eighties/early nineties, the name Sierra On-Line is probably very meaningful to you. Sierra On-Line created some of that era’s most popular computer games, including Leisure Suit Larry, Space Quest, and King’s Quest. The irony is that the company was never actually “online,” in the modern sense of the word, until it created The Sierra Network, released in 1991. The Sierra Network was an online community that allowed its users to create their own avatars and play a number of games, from casual games to arcade flight sims and RPGs together.

1991, wow. That was a time before the World Wide Web and Mosaic browser. To connect to The Sierra Network, you used a 2400 baud modem. That’s like a fifth the speed of current dial-up modems, and it was a time before unlimited access to the internet. That’s right, you paid by the hour to connect to The Sierra Network.

It was essentially a two-dimensional version of the same kind of online community for gamers provided by Second Life or Playstation @Home. It was just so ahead of its time with so few people who could actually use it that there was no way for Sierra On-Line to operate the service and keep it profitable.  The idea behind The Sierra Network was sound, and people never gave up on the idea of creating online communities for people to gather and play games. Probably the most important lesson to come out of this was that there would be an audience for the online gaming communities the Internet made possible and that the key would be learning how to properly monetize them.

So there you have it: Six video games whose effect on modern gaming are indisputable and yet rarely get the recognition they deserve.