Muchos seran los llamados…

By On 29/11/2004 ·

As a counterpoint to lists warning against Top 1o Most Evil Games, many feel called to make a canon of the very finest specimens ever.
Here’s Kjetil Sandvik‘s recent attempt:

Spacewar (first real computer game)
Pong (first commercial game)
Colossal Cave Adventure (first text adventure)
Asteroids (first commercial and succesful vectorbased game)
MUD1 (First multi-user dungeon/dimension)
Mario Bros (first character-based platform game)
Madden NFL (first good licensed sport game)
Pole Position (first good driving game)
Pac Man (the ultimate arcade game)
The Ultima-series (long, commercial and artistic succesful RPG-series)
Microsoft Flight Simulator (first, pure and best simulator)
Civilization (Ground-breaking God perspective/building game, marvelous gameplay)
Tetris (A class of its own)
Myst (first visually narrative CD-ROM)
Doom (historically epoch-making technology/content)
Tekken (most succesful martial arts games)
Final Fantasy-series (Ground-braking adventure/RPG)
The Sims (Again a class of its own)
Grand Theft Auto (first and biggest in 3D freedom-of-movement, ironically, theme-based, show-off sound track)

Basically: I like it. But… Including Asteroids because of its vector graphics seems arbitrary. Asteroids was wonderful but not because of its graphics technology. I don’t see any real reason for including it.
Mario Bros… Not really the first character based platform game. Donkey Kong came before Mario and features said plumber even if he had yet to be named.
Madden NFL… first good licensed sport game seems a less-than-worthy criterion.
Myst (first visually narrative CD-ROM)… not sure what that means exactly. Myst may have been some sort of “Birth of a Nation” of adventure games (even if don’t think that’s true) combining all sorts of known tricks in brilliant ways. But I really don’t think Myst deserves so much honour.

At least I think we need to add an example of processual, sandbox-style game style emerging in the 1980s. Probably Elite, since it was such a ground-breaking design for its time.
Other candidates in this category: SimCity (which probably deserves a place for other reasons also) and Sid Meier’s Pirates.
More problematic, of course, are the games that did nothing original in a way that just made them so much better than anything that had come before. In this category I would place Baldur’s Gate which made a linear story seem open through sheer size (and some clever design choices).
Also, it’s shocking (the outrage!) that no RTS games make the list. Dune II, Kjetil. Not the first of the best, but surely the best of the first.

Dette indlæg ligner…
Talk on games+film at ITU (07/03/2006)

Advanced Game Theory guest lecture slides (25/09/2007)

Don’t make me think (about THAT) (31/10/2004)

Book contract (27/04/2005)

Methodological commandments (03/08/2006)

Del: