The games everything else copied
Some games are influential in the way a critic means it. Some are influential in the way that you cannot play anything released since without touching their fingerprints. This list is the second kind.
None of these are here because they are the best games of their decade. They are here because one specific idea in each became the default everywhere, to the point where it now reads as obvious rather than invented.
- 1Quake
The first properly 3D shooter — real geometry and real level design, rather than a flat map drawn to look tall. Its bigger legacy is off the disc: Quake's code was opened up, and the modding scene that followed produced Team Fortress and eventually Counter-Strike. Half the multiplayer shooters of the next twenty years trace back to people messing with this.
- 2Half-Life
Before this, a shooter stopped for its story. Half-Life told the whole thing while you kept walking — scripted events staged in the world, no cutscenes, the camera never taken off you. That single decision is now so standard it has gone invisible, and it is the reason a silent protagonist stopped reading as a limitation.
- 3The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998)
Moving a character in 3D was a solved problem by 1998. Fighting in 3D was not. Ocarina's answer — lock onto a target and orbit it — is what nearly every 3D action game still does, along with context-sensitive buttons and an explorable world on a day-night cycle. It is on this list for the control scheme more than for the adventure.
- 4Diablo
Diablo invented the loop that now underwrites an entire industry: kill things, get slightly better numbers, repeat — and randomise the numbers so the next one might be the good one. It is in loot shooters, in mobile games, in games nothing like it. Worth playing to see the idea in its simplest and most honest form, before it was tuned to be hard to put down.
- 5Grand Theft Auto III
The modern open world starts here. Not the first game with a city in it, but the first where the city was the point — go anywhere, ignore the mission, come back when you feel like it. Every open-world game since has been arguing with the template this set, and most are still using its structure without noticing.
