The game that started it and the game that made it...

Inspired by the Zelda clone thread... what are the major games when it comes to the birth of a genre? For me, it goes in three stages... the game that first does it at all, the game that comes up with the more defined formula that actually works, and finally the game that makes it go mainstream. Two more well-known examples would be FPS & RTS.

First-Person Shooter
The First: Maze War (according to Wikipedia, anyway!)
The Formula: Wolfenstein 3D
The Definer: Doom

Real-Time Strategy
The First: Stonkers/Cytron Masters (according to Wikipedia, anyway!)
The Formula: Dune II
The Definer: Command & Conquer

So... thoughts on these or other genres? Fight it out, you know the debate is out there!

I'm a fan of strategy RPGs. But I'm sure there are varying stories. Especially for the formula and defining games. But I think in a lot of cases its probably something like Fire Emblem as the first, probably Tactics Ogre for the formula and Final Fantasy Tactics to define the genre, which went on to even more popularity when Disgaea got ahold of it

But for me, since I never played Fire Emblem, or any early strategy games, as I'm pretty sure none of them were released in America (pretty sure Warsong was like the third game in the Langrisser series or something like that. Its been a while since I read a history on it) if I recall correctly, Shining Force was actually the first strategy RPG in America. Or at least close to it. But regardless, it was my first foray into the experience. So at the very least, that's the formula layer for me. I'm still looking for my definer in the genre, as FFT didn't appeal to me. Too convoluted. I'd love to say Disgaea, 'cause that had a great story and characters, and the combat wasn't so complex. But it did add needlessly more complex formulas with the stupid colored tile crap. I hate when SRPGs do that kinda stuff. And of the simpler tactical games, none of them have the fun and charm of the ol' Force games. Though this may not even be meant to be personal opinion anyway :}

Point and click adventure games would be another interesting category to look at. Though unfortunately I'm only on my break at work, and quickly skimming Wikipedia for the first graphical point-and-click adventure game is a little hard to discern. As they started out text based, then slowly evolved graphics. Phooey. Good topic though

Dune 2 and C&C are not turn-based dude

Oops. I have no idea why I typed in Turn-Based. Adjusted!

DooM defined FPS games for some time, but I'd say that Goldeneye defined them for consoles for awhile, and Halo was another genre-definer.

RTS is one of the hardest genres to identify its origin; some people point to a German Genesis game called... ok I forget what it's called. Personally I would say:

The First: Dune II (as far as point-and-click RTS goes, with the trinity of base building, resource gathering, and combat control)
The Formula: Command & Conquer
The Definer: Starcraft

C&C has a big place in my heart, but even I have to admit people associate the genre with Starcraft.

Unfortunately you all took the genres I could think of... what about Turn Based JRPG's?

The First: Dragon Quest
The Formula: Final Fantasy
The Definer: FFVII (going with my define definition from RTS)

Dune 2 definitely came up with the formula before C&C. Not sure if you've played it?

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Originally Posted by I'm my own MILF

DooM defined FPS games for some time, but I'd say that Goldeneye defined them for consoles for awhile, and Halo was another genre-definer.

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I wouldn't agree with that. They may have set the benchmark at the time, but Doom still defined how those games played out when it comes to the basics of the gameplay. You move around and shoot things. I'd say Wolfenstein 3D defined it but you couldn't move up and down throughout floors.

However it's possible that one could point out the first game that allowed you to move in one direction while looking in a different direction (eg. mouse + keypad)... but then, even in W3D you could strafe.

It should be noted that by 'define' I don't mean 'is the most famous'...

C&C pretty much started the whole multiplayer thing but it didn't do anything new, gameplay-wise as far as I know. The Warcraft series (and eventually Starcraft) turned out to be far more influential for RTS as a genre.

Coincidentally, 1up posted an article about the real origins of game mechanics.

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Originally Posted by 1up

First Person Shooters and Multiplayer Deathmatch - Credited to Doom (1993) - Beaten by 19 years


If you're the kind of person who likes reading about the history of video games (and if you're reading this, I assume you are) you've probably noticed that no one can pin down what the original first person shooter was. Lots of articles reference Wolfenstein 3D (1992) or Catacomb 3-D (1991), still others mention Battlezone in the arcades (1980). When you read about early multiplayer FPS games, you inevitably read about John Carmack implementing deathmatch into Doom over the course of an afternoon. Doom may have made deathmatch mainstream, but it was preceded by twenty years by a game called Maze.

Going by the names, The Maze Game, Maze, and Maze War, Maze (as we'll call it for the sake of brevity) was created by two NASA programmers, Steve Colley and Howard Palmer, in 1973 for the Imlac PDS-1. As a sidenote, the PDS-1 was the first machine to have a graphical user interface similar to what Xerox, Apple, and Microsoft would eventually adopt and turn into the Macintosh and Windows UIs. Though the most advanced machine available at the time, it was incredibly primitive. Colley described the difficulty of rendering even a simple cube, let alone an entire maze, on the glorified adding machine in his retrospective on Maze: "In 1973, I was trying to do simple 3D displays on the Imlac PDS-1. The first one I did was a simple rotating cube, in which the hidden lines of the wireframe cube were removed. The complexity was in doing the sines and cosines on a slow machine with no multiply or divide."



Still, Maze in its original form wasn't an FPS. The game was a first-person game, but not a shooter. The goal was simply to escape the labyrinth. At some point either Thompson or Palmer took the work that NASA had been doing on ad-hoc LANs, and paired it up with Maze to make it a multiplayer game. Each player was represented by an eyeball, and the goal switched from escaping the maze to killing the other player. In one single game, Palmer, Thompson, and Colley invented not just the FPS, but deathmatch as well.

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Game Mechanics That Are Older Than You Think from 1UP.com

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Originally Posted by kotora

C&C pretty much started the whole multiplayer thing but it didn't do anything new, gameplay-wise as far as I know. The Warcraft series (and eventually Starcraft) turned out to be far more influential for RTS as a genre.

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It took the genre to the mainstream and was the game everyone talked about when talking about RTS. "It's a real-time strategy game. You know, like Command & Conquer". I didn't like it, personally, but I still concede that it was the one that started the masses of clones. Although one could point at Warcraft, I'm not sure which of them came out first. But annoyingly (again, since I preferred Warcraft to C&C on every level) C&C was definitely the one that took the genre to the mainstream and was the game used to define the genre for years to come. Even if it should have been Dune II, because I found Dune II way more enjoyable for some reason. Which is strange considering the lack of user-friendly features. It just played so well!

Survival Horror

The First: ??
The Formula: Alone in the Dark
The Definer: Resident Evil

Something like that, maybe?

Oh crap, well there was a Clock Tower game on SNES that was only released in Japan, so that was pretty early survival horror. And there was like a game or two that Capcom dabbled with back in NES/SNES days that set the groundwork for Resident Evil, but I can't remember the details. I think it might be in GameTrailers.com's retrospective videos though

I never played Dune II, I've only seen some footage in it in videos about C&C and RTS, I guess I just assumed that C&C shaved off the fat and worked on the general interface that all RTS used today. I don't know if I'd say Warcraft/Starcraft were more influential, I really can't think of anything they innovated or standardized, except maybe a map editor and the unique characters of Warcraft III, but even then the only thing I think they started with that was the level progression they could undergo.

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Originally Posted by Bolivar

I never played Dune II, I've only seen some footage in it in videos about C&C and RTS, I guess I just assumed that C&C shaved off the fat and worked on the general interface that all RTS used today.

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except most RTS games follow the warcraft style of UI and gameplay

if you don't see how Warcraft and Starcraft influenced the genre aside from some :bou::bou::bou::bou:ty heroes then you just don't know that much about RTS games

Um, there are quite a lot of RTS games you're all overlooking here. The genre is bigger than C&C, War/StarCraft, and their franchises and clones. No mention of Total Annihilation? Age of Empires? Warzone 2100? The RTS games Relic have made haven't really fit the C&C or WC formula, especially DoW2. What about Sins of a Solar Empire, which could be called either RTS or RT4X? Homeworld is something all of its own again. What about Populous? What about Act of War or World in Conflict?

Properly speaking, games like Evil Genius, Dungeon Keeper, and Tropico can be called RTS games as well, though they have a different slant. So are games like Hearts of Iron or Europa Universalis.

The foremost names might be Westwood and Blizzard, but the genre is much much bigger and more diverse, and much less unified around particular ideas, than y'all seem to believe.

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Originally Posted by Vyk

Oh crap, well there was a Clock Tower game on SNES that was only released in Japan, so that was pretty early survival horror. And there was like a game or two that Capcom dabbled with back in NES/SNES days that set the groundwork for Resident Evil, but I can't remember the details. I think it might be in GameTrailers.com's retrospective videos though

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It's called Sweet Home. It's based on the movie of the same name. It's kind of an RPG, really.

Marathon ushered in mouse look for the FPS

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Originally Posted by I'm my own MILF

Um, there are quite a lot of RTS games you're all overlooking here. The genre is bigger than C&C, War/StarCraft, and their franchises and clones. No mention of Total Annihilation? Age of Empires? Warzone 2100? The RTS games Relic have made haven't really fit the C&C or WC formula, especially DoW2. What about Sins of a Solar Empire, which could be called either RTS or RT4X? Homeworld is something all of its own again. What about Populous? What about Act of War or World in Conflict?

Properly speaking, games like Evil Genius, Dungeon Keeper, and Tropico can be called RTS games as well, though they have a different slant. So are games like Hearts of Iron or Europa Universalis.

The foremost names might be Westwood and Blizzard, but the genre is much much bigger and more diverse, and much less unified around particular ideas, than y'all seem to believe.

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none of these games influenced or popularized the RTS genre as much as the westwood and blizzard games did. Every genre has some diverse games but this thread is not about naming all of them.

Agree on that count! As much as I would love to say the likes of Warzone 2100 are what people think of when they hear the acronym "RTS", I know it's not the case. I also know that, while I felt the game was a breakthrough, it actually used a bunch of the best ideas from other games and put them together rather than innovating outright. Or so I'm lead to believe, anyway. It still was the first truly 3D RTS I played!

Both Warcraft and Command & Conquer were pretty equal in their influence. I only chose C&C ahead of (my preference) Warcraft because if I talked to people at the time, they knew more about C&C than Warcraft. Sadly. Perhaps it's just the people I knew, though. I can't say the internet was at the level it's at now, and I certainly wasn't active on it at that point.

Real-Time Strategy
The First: Stonkers/Cytron Masters
The Formula: Age Of Empires
The Definer: Age Of Empires II

Much better

I guess that makes sense if AoE1 and 2 were the only rts games you've ever played

Yes but when a large segment, indeed the majority, of a genre diverges from the genre-definers, you've not found very good genre-definers. During the 90s C&C and WC were absolutely central, but that has changed, and I don't think you can proclaim them to be quite so central anymore; their time of influence has passed and new ideas have begun to emerge, and to simply hold those two up as the be-all and end-all of innovation in the genre is a pretty big shortfall.

Maybe I should clarify by what I meant with defining the genre. I mean the first game that took the genre mainstream to the point that a lot of people knew what it was all about. Generally this means playable via Windows, very high sales, and in general if you ask someone who has played video games from time to time what a [genre] game is and to give the first big example, they'll more often than not say "oh, the first big one was _____."

As for it being in the 90's - well, yes, most genres did become mainstream during the 90's because gaming in general became mainstream in the 90's.

I'm not talking about the most recently innovative, I'm not talking about the most famous current game, I'm talking about the very first games (The First) which are handily pretty easy enough to come up with in most cases, the first to get the basic formula that is used in a stereotypical version of such a game - in Dune II's case, we had the grid map, the minimap, the building of structures, the gathering of resources, etc. (The Formula) and the first 'big famous one' that made the genre well-known in the first place (The Definer). Perhaps 'Definer' was a bad choice of word, I must admit!

I definitely agree that RTS can be pointed into all sorts of types of games from Sins to Warcraft to whatever else, but we're talking the type of game you think of initially when you hear the words. I think most people will think of a similar thing. However if you want to talk 4XRTS or something like that, go for it! I wonder if Sins is the first of it's kind? Surely there was something else beforehand, I seem to recall mention of a previous game from the developer that was very similar to Sins but I think it was turn-based.

In that case I think the word you wanted was "Popularized" :p In which case Command and Conquer is the clear winner. Hardly anyone played Warcraft: Orcs and Humans. Everyone played C&C.

I'd say WC2 and SC (especially SC) made a much bigger impact than WC1 did

What would be the story for JRPGs? I imagine FFVII would be the one that got it to mainstream, but am not sure at all on the first or the one that came up with the formula for things to come.

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Originally Posted by kotora

I guess that makes sense if AoE1 and 2 were the only rts games you've ever played

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Starcraft & Command & Conquer are not even half the games AoE1 & 2 are! The only people I know who prefer any of the earlier PC RTS game over the AoE series are just people who suck at AoE games because you have to collect more than just "ore" lol Empire Earth & Rise of Nations series of games are also pretty damn good!

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Originally Posted by Loony BoB

What would be the story for JRPGs? I imagine FFVII would be the one that got it to mainstream, but am not sure at all on the first or the one that came up with the formula for things to come.

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naming "JRPG" as a genre is pretty silly in itself anyway

Very true, but you know what I mean.

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Originally Posted by Vyk

Oh crap, well there was a Clock Tower game on SNES that was only released in Japan, so that was pretty early survival horror.

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Alone in the Dark actually predates Clock Tower by 3 years.

According to wikipedia, some consider Haunted House to be the first real survivor horror game. Haven't played it myself but reading the description of the gameplay it not only sounds really cool, but I think I might have to agree unless I can find anything earlier which could be difficult even if such a game exists.

Let's see hrm you already have RTS and FPS how about....

MMORPG
The First: Neverwinter Nights
The Formula: Everquest
The Definer: World of Warcraft

You can't deny that WoW has made a massive impact on the MMO market. It use to be for nerds in their basements now it's nerds who secretly hide in their basements while during the day they play at real life.

NWN was an MMO? Shows how much I know!

Wiki said it was!

I never played NWN and only know the general idea of it, as it sorta grew out of the Baldur's Gate games. But I think the thing was it was playable online, completely customizable, and extremely popular, so it grew to the point that it probably could be considered an MMO, just not in the typical sense. I don't think it was intended to be an MMO, it was just set up so it could easily become one. But like I said, I don't know for sure, as I never got involved in it :(

Defining the first MMO is pretty tricky. It was an evolutionary progress, limited by the hardware of the time. There are games which back in the 80s counted as the MMOs of their day when you can have more players in a FPS game today. Probably some MUD at some point crossed a rather arbitrary line that makes it the first MMORPG but pinning that line and that point down is going to be subjective.

Oh, and the Neverwinter Nights that is cited as the first MMORPG is not the same game as the one BioWare made.

Ahhh, that makes more sense.

Hm, I didn't realize there was two of them

Don't know what to call this genre. Non-linear side-scrolling adventure?

The first: Metroid
The formula: Super Metroid
The definer: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

2D fighters:
The first: No idea. Street Fighter 1?
The formula: Street Fighter II
The definer: Probably up for debate but for me it's Marvel vs. Capcom 2. I feel it's the standard.

2D platformer:
The first: Pitfall?
The formula: Super Mario Bros.
The definer: Super Mario Bros. 3

Point and click adventure
First: Enhanced Scepter
Formula: Maniac Mansion
Definer: Sam and Max Hit the Road

excluding the Myst series here because it's a different subgenre

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Originally Posted by Del Murder

Don't know what to call this genre. Non-linear side-scrolling adventure?

The first: Metroid
The formula: Super Metroid
The definer: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

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The genre is usually referred to as Metroidvania :p

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2D fighters:
The first: No idea. Street Fighter 1?
The formula: Street Fighter II
The definer: Probably up for debate but for me it's Marvel vs. Capcom 2. I feel it's the standard.

2D platformer:
The first: Pitfall?
The formula: Super Mario Bros.
The definer: Super Mario Bros. 3

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AFAIK the first 2D fighter is generally taken to be Karate Champ, whilst the first 2D platformer is Donkey Kong (A few other games had experimented with various elements of it earlier, but DK was the first to put them into the pot that we can now recognize as "2D Platformer").

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Originally Posted by kotora

Point and click adventure
First: Enhanced Scepter
Formula: Maniac Mansion
Definer: [strike]Sam and Max Hit the Road[/strike] Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis

excluding the Myst series here because it's a different subgenre

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Real life simulation

The First: Little Computer People
The Formula: The Sims
The Definer: The Sims 2

no you're wrong Shiny

Sam and Max had voice acting and dropped that stupid verb system, and therefore defining the genre more than Indiana Jones did

Indiana Jones Fate of Atlantis had voice acting too. So what?