what is the most important/influential game of the 90's?

Tiktaalik said:
Around the time of Mario64's release there were a ton of companies attempting 3d platformers. That Nintendo made a particularily great one with Mario64 is not as significant as the genre creating accomplishments of DOOM. Draft's post about Quake goes even further and is an even more compelling argument when you factor in some of the ideas created there with regard to game development, such as 3D accelerators and modding.
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Modding was done in Doom.
 
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SlipperySlope said:
Modding was done in Doom.
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It wasn't nearly as extensive or versatile as it was in Quake. Quake is very likely both the most customizable and the most customized game ever. You could do ridiculous things through the console and configs alone, without anything extra, such as creating your own custom hud.

Quake had every mod imaginable created for it. If you can think of it, someone probably did it. Quake Rally (racing)? Check. Ghostbusters? Yep. Air Quake (you fly planes and shit)? Ninja Quake? Chess? Basketball? Aliens? Dinosaurs? A platformer? An RPG? 3rd-person hack-n-slasher? Machinima? Everything.

And this isn't even counting the hugely impactful ones like Team Fortress and Capture the Flag, both of which got their start in Quake 1 simply as mods.
 
Doom was definitely my first thought when I read the thread title. I know that there were FPSes before it, I thought Wolfenstein was amazing at the time too... but Doom really was a giant leap in a huge number of ways.

Mario 64 does have to be its primary competition, though, as the thread quickly pointed out. It was a groundbreaking game that redefined gaming in so many ways...

Is anything else close to those two? No, not really. I mean, OoT for instance was one of the best games ever, but I don't think there's much question that Mario 64 was the more influential one on the industry as a whole. But Doom vs. Mario 64, in terms of which one was more influential in the industry... wow, that's a hard one. I'm not really sure, you can make strong cases for both... maybe Doom, but I'm not sure.

Zeliard said:
It wasn't nearly as extensive or versatile as it was in Quake. Quake is very likely both the most customizable and the most customized game ever. You could do ridiculous things through the console and configs alone, without anything extra, such as creating your own custom hud.
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Doom had lots of mods, huge numbers of them. Sure, Quake had even more that were even more ambitious because of all the things the engine could do that Doom couldn't, but don't understate how many big mods were out there for Doom, for everything from Barney Doom to Chex Quest to that Aliens mod or whatever to just maps and such... Doom was the game that brought modding into the FPS genre, not Quake.
 
Daytona USA. It set the standards by which all arcade racers are judged.

Then Daytona USA 2 came out, and refined those standards to insane levels. :D
 
bon said:
Pokemon single-handedly changed the face of handheld gaming. It was suddenly like, "woah, check it out, the Game Boy can do so much more than Tetris and watered down NES games."

Not to mention it pretty much created its own genre, which it rules to this day. There are plenty of other monster training games, but there is nothing on the same level of detail and scope as Pokemon.
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This is the first and most accurate post in this thread, Pokemon not only inreased a dead systems life 5 fold, but it single handedly changed the way handheld games are thought of. Playing cards, animation, and console games all owe the fact that pokemon was a runaway success, so much so that there isn't a single game today that doesn't feature some element that was in pokemon. No matter that pokemon owe's lots to dragon quest, but allmost all games owe to pokemon.
 
my reflex thought was sonic. just cause, idunno, i think it was the beginning of the "maturation" of the industry: brash, nasty, fast...well, the marketing was in the least. with sonic and genesis, sega began to take gaming into adulthood.

but i must concede with OP: doom created a genre which is arguably STILL the best selling genre. so, yea. i concur.
 
KeioSquad2 said:
there isn't a single game today that doesn't feature some element that was in pokemon
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Eh, I think that's stretching it a little. Pokémon did a whole lot for the genre and the industry, but it didn't do that much.
 
Michan said:
Eh, I think that's stretching it a little. Pokémon did a whole lot for the genre and the industry, but it didn't do that much.
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Sorry, I get emotional. But it has rubbed of on most genre's in lots of ways, even sadly in character design(I mean Lots of knock offs).
 
Zhuk said:
Two posts about two different issues, comparing them is stupid.

Go play Snatcher and Policenauts before saying that MGS was revolutionary.
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My post was concerning that you said: "MGS didn't do anything revolutionary". Granted, when you compare it to PC games. But a few post later, you bring Halo to the table saying that it was revolutionary, when Halo didn't do anything that wasn't done in PC.
 
Yeah. Doom.


I remember a time when saying "I hate FPS" was met with nods of agreement. That, or "What's an FPS? Oh, Doom-type games, yeahhhh."

Now when you say it, you just get angry looks and "WTF"'s.


It's still the dominant genre of games today.

Sorry, Mario 64.
 
So many good choices, it's hard to pick just one. I'll just list a few off the top of my head.

Super Mario 64: This really brought the point home that 3D platforming was doable, and doable well!

Half-Life: Set the bar for FPS games back then to not be split into individual levels, but one seamless experience (minus a few short load times now and then). The mechanics were top-notch and the storytelling method was interesting just because they didn't have the camera break away from Gordon's eyes, so you see and hear what Gordon sees and hears.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: This was really the first time that there was really a sense of a living, breathing, 3D world. Day would change to night and back again and Hyrule Field was huge! The storytelling via cut-scenes looked amazing! One I was particularly fond of was right off the bat when it showed Link's dream involving Ganondorf and the drawbridge under a stormy Hyrule Field.
 
Anything but Super Mario 64 is incorrect. Every single 3D game released after it was somehow influenced by it. The fanboys might not want to admit to that, but I guarantee you any developer with half a brain would be more than willing to admit that.
 
DungeonO said:
Anything but Super Mario 64 is incorrect. Every single 3D game released after it was somehow influenced by it. The fanboys might not want to admit to that, but I guarantee you any developer with half a brain would be more than willing to admit that.
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I'd argue there definitely is not a right answer. The 90s was an amazing time with far too much influential software to even conceive of narrowing it down to one title.
 
Doom, without a doubt.

Quake and Half-Life were important to the growth of the FPS genre, but Doom almost single-handedly popularized it. That's what makes it so influential.

Super Mario 64 is a close second.
 
I would say the most influential game of the 90s was Street Fighter II The World Warrior. Its success changed the focus of several different companies to try to imitate it: from SNK, Atari Games, Midway Games, Sunsoft, Data East, and the list goes on. Many different fighting games during the 90s.
 
The most important game is one that changed the way the market went. To that end, I would say one of the PS1 launch era games is deserving of the title 'most important'. Possibly Wipeout or Ridge Racer then.

Most influential in terms of how games are like now? Tie between Mario 64 and Doom easily.

Best game of the 90s? Wouldnt fucking dare try and pick just one.
 
S1lent said:
People seem to be confusing influential with revolutionary in this thread. Just because some game that hardly anybody heard of or played did something first doesn't mean that it was in any way influential. That there were other games before Mario 64 that used the analog stick, for example, is irrelevant to this argument.
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Revolutionary and influential go hand in hand. You can't claim a game influences anything if everyone was already doing it anyway
 
KeioSquad2 said:
This is the first and most accurate post in this thread, Pokemon not only inreased a dead systems life 5 fold, but it single handedly changed the way handheld games are thought of. Playing cards, animation, and console games all owe the fact that pokemon was a runaway success, so much so that there isn't a single game today that doesn't feature some element that was in pokemon. No matter that pokemon owe's lots to dragon quest, but allmost all games owe to pokemon.
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Man I said Pokemon a page before that copy cat. :lol

Great minds think alike though.

DOOM is probably over all number one. FPS, Video game violence, basic deathmatch and co-op, map design, custom .wads, engine proliferation between different developers, the "mature" feel, the buzz, using the power of modern computing to its fullest.

Sure, it's built on the smaller success of Wolf 3D, and Quake did introduce quite a few things, but there sure as shit wouldn't even have been a Quake if not for Doom. Quake was basically DOOM III. I'm pretty sure it even was named such at one point in development.

Another interesting choice for an influential 90's PC game has to be Diablo I and its Battle.Net implementation. Not on the level of DOOM, Quake, Mario 64, Pokemon, but deserves recognition none the less.
 
so, I'm assuming by Doom you guys mean Wolfenstein. I mean...I can see how 20 or so people meant to type in 11 letters and it just happened to come out 4. Coincidences like that are slim but possible.

Wolfenstein -
1. First FPS shooter
2. WWII themed...cough cough
3. First Over the top FPS themed game with Hitler MachineGun Boss, but not too over the top either. It draws that line that games now a days like to do.
4. Isn't as twitchy and fast as DOOM. If this was 1999, I would say DOOM has influenced the big hits of that era, but fps games have slowed down since the days of quake arena and unreal. The pace of gaming has actually hit around the Wolfenstein speed. Fast, but not ultra fast. Methodical but arcadey.
5. Fps's have also changed in the theme department. No longer are people shooting aliens and monsters ala duke nukem and doom. they're killing nazis (cough cough), and terrorists in the year 2009.

There's no doubt in my mind Wolfenstein is the most influential fps. Things may change back to a doom-like era, but right now as I type this, Wolfenstein is waaay more influential to the fps's that have come recently.
 
CultureClearance said:
so, I'm assuming by Doom you guys mean Wolfenstein. I mean...I can see how 20 or so people meant to type in 11 letters and it just happened to come out 4. Coincidences like that are slim but possible.

Wolfenstein -
1. First FPS shooter
2. WWII themed...cough cough
3. First Over the top FPS themed game with Hitler MachineGun Boss, but not too over the top either. It draws that line that games now a days like to do.
4. Isn't as twitchy and fast as DOOM. If this was 1999, I would say DOOM has influenced the big hits of that era, but fps games have slowed down since the days of quake arena and unreal. The pace of gaming has actually hit around the Wolfenstein speed. Fast, but not ultra fast. Methodical but arcadey.
5. Fps's have also changed in the theme department. No longer are people shooting aliens and monsters ala duke nukem and doom. they're killing nazis (cough cough), and terrorists in the year 2009.

There's no doubt in my mind Wolfenstein is the most influential fps. Things may change back to a doom-like era, but right now as I type this, Wolfenstein is waaay more influential to the fps's that have come recently.
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For how many years were other FPSs simply called "Doom clones"? And plz don't call it FPS shooter. Basically, your whole argument boils down to "Wolf was first." WW2 themed etc don't really compare to what Doom did. I mean, Wolf didn't even have height differences on its maps!
 
STREET FIGHTER II
200full-street-fighter-ii-arcade.jpg

if you attended an arcades during the 90s, there is no denying the influence this game had during that entire decade at the arcades and at home
 
SFII gets my vote followed by FFVII at close second although of course there are superior games in each series.

I'd say Link to the Past but no one has really come close to matching Zelda exactly except OOT.
 
Mario 64 had the most direct influence

Another World had the most indirect

but why do people keep bringing up Halo, that was still in development in the 90's...
 
The thing about Mario64 and DOOM is that there were already a ton of people moving in the direction of Mario64. Lots of people were making 3D platformers, just with bad controls. Keep in mind that Crash Bandicoot came out before Mario64, and many, many 3D platformers already existed. I'm not discounting how incredibly amazing Mario 64 was, its controls and creativity blew everything out of the water, but on the other hand I kind of feel like it was something that was bound to happen, whereas DOOM brought so much to the table that no one was doing. Extreme violence, first person, and most importantly deathmatch.
 
gutter_trash said:
STREET FIGHTER II
200full-street-fighter-ii-arcade.jpg

if you attended an arcades during the 90s, there is no denying the influence this game had during that entire decade at the arcades and at home
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Yeah so true. If you look at the title of this thread and you consider it to be what was the most influential "in the 90s" as in just the 90s I would definitely, definitely say Street Fighter 2. There were so many fighting games that were spawned from Street Fighter 2 in the 90s and it caused a revolution during that decade.

I'm loving that we're seeing a mini resurgence with Street Fighter 4 :)
 
Some of you are fucking pathetic, Im serious. Reading the first 30 posts is just terrible. A game cant be important or influential if its genre isnt the most represented today?

So if gaming goes into a shit storm of Music genre games 5 10 years from now and the day of a FPS release every month is no longer, then it will invalidate what games like Halo and CoD4 are doing today? Absurd.


What influenced the NINETIES fellas, not whats going on today. Besides, your all fucking wrong anyway. Doom was by far the most influential. Wish you guys would stop trying to reignite your 32/64bit gen wars in every thread like this. Its always Zelda vs FF7 with you people. Christ.
 
Tiktaalik said:
The thing about Mario64 and DOOM is that there were already a ton of people moving in the direction of Mario64. Lots of people were making 3D platformers, just with bad controls. Keep in mind that Crash Bandicoot came out before Mario64, and many, many 3D platformers already existed. I'm not discounting how incredibly amazing Mario 64 was, its controls and creativity blew everything out of the water, but on the other hand I kind of feel like it was something that was bound to happen, whereas DOOM brought so much to the table that no one was doing. Extreme violence, first person, and most importantly deathmatch.
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Their weren't that many 3D platformers before Mario 64, I can only think of two: Bug and Jumping Flash. Out of those two Jumping Flash was the only one that I would call a true 3D platformer, Bug was essentially a game on rails, where you could travel to the left and right of the screen only if the game let you, the same is true for Crash Bandicoot. As for Jumping Flash, man playing that thing today is slow and painful...
 
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