Gaming

I think System Shock belongs here too. It was an immersive sim in 1994, was one of the first games to make use of audio logs, and had 3D models and environments before Quake. It initially released on floppys without voice acting so it didn't sell too well, and it wasn't until later that it started getting more widely appreciated as the groundbreaking title it is. Another thing is that the controls and graphics can make it a bit of a pain to play today - this was before WASD and mouselook were standardized.

A quote from a review of the game Alien: Resurrection written in 2000:

The game's control setup is its most terrifying element. The left analog stick moves you forward, back, and strafes right and left, while the right analog stick turns you and can be used to look up and down.

You may recognize this as how every console FPS works now, but it earned the game a 4.7/10 at the time.

Another World had the whole cinematic gaming figured out back in times the floppy disk, lengthy intro included. Took about 15 years for the rest of the industry to catch up.

Elite procedural open world universe in 3D all the way back in 1984. The sequel in 1993, Frontier: Elite II even let you land on planets.

Magic Carpet, fully destructible terrain in 1994 along with an interesting mix of (very light) RTS and FPS. Later on Red Faction and Red Faction: Guerrila offered even more destructibility. While we have some modern games like Teardown that focus on destruction, it's still not a commonly seen feature in games. Magic Carpet is also still the most "3D" game I am aware of, supported almost everything, VR headsets, red&green glasses, even MagicEye-style auto stereograms.

EF2000, flight simulation with a full dynamic war simulated in the background. Falcon 4.0 improved on it. Carrier Command might be an even earlier example of similar mechanics. Mainstream gaming still hasn't really had anything similar as far as I can tell and relies on scripted events instead of a simulated world.

Boulder Dash Construction Kit (1986), might not have been the first, but one of the early games including a fully featured and easy to use level editor.

Not a game, but the Dreamcast as a system. Supported online play that was not/under utilized. Had a mini screen in the save game cartridge. I miss that system.

In a way, Crysis. There's a reason the "But does it run Crysis?" meme exists. Because most computers could barely run it on release. It was way ahead of its time technologically.

Farcry 2, IMO, was pretty far ahead of its time.

Being able to shoot individual limbs and twigs from trees.

Fire, that would intelligently spread.

Weapon durability which was visually impacting, as well as alerted the firearm's performance.

It had some really cool features for its time.

Severance: Blade of Darkness. This game from the Spanish dev Rebel Act Studios is absolutely insane.

First of all, in gameplay terms, it's basically Dark Souls ten years before Dark Souls. All the basic elements are there - very difficult lock-on based combat with heavy emphasis on distance, timing attacks/blocks/dodges, and stamina management, several equipment slots for your left and right hand that you cycle through individually (and the same for consumables), non-linear level design with shortcuts to earlier areas, weapons that you might hang onto for their moveset even though they're not statistically the best... To be fair, there are some differences. The game is divided up into discrete levels rather than having an interconnected world, there's no magic, RPG elements are pared down to the absolute minimum, and the controls are atrocious even by the standards of the day. But looking back on it, I find it extremely hard to believe that From Soft didn't take some inspiration from this little-known title.

Secondly, there's the technical aspect of the game. Remember Doom 3? Remember those pre-release videos in which id Soft bragged about their new engine having 100% dynamic lighting with every single polygon casting an accurate real-time shadow? Yeah, guess what, Blade of Darkness had the exact same lighting system three years earlier. Ridiculous!

Daggerfall. Ah yes, the infamously undercooked open-world RPG from Bethesda. In some ways it was actually the last of its kind; nobody really makes old-school dungeon crawlers like this anymore. But it was also one of the first games that pioneered a procedurally generated world deliberately made too large for a single human to explore. With a world containing 320,000 square kilometers of wilderness and almost fifteen thousand locations of various types, it would take a lifetime to see everything. It's quite literally not built for human consumption, since you can never fully consume it. The best you can do is sample it. This achievement went thoroughly unappreciated at the time due to technical limitations making the vast world invisible and therefore pointless. The very faithful Daggerfall Unity remake can be modded with a draw distance of some 150 kilometers, however, and the sheer size of Daggerfall's world thereby revealed is extremely impressive to see. Despite its primitive graphics, it feels far more real than the compressed geography of Skyrim and Fallout. Ridiculously huge worlds that the player can never hope to fully explore would go on to be used in games such as Minecraft and No Man's Sky.

Turbo Esprit. I mean, just watch this video. Yes, that is a third-person open-world city driving game with realistic traffic and pedestrians, i.e. an early predecessor of GTA. It came out in 1986 and runs on a ZX Spectrum, a machine with 48 KB of memory.

Driller. The first game on the Freescape engine, a first-person shooter (of sorts) featuring fully 3D environments and enemies. In 1987. Running on the same machine as the previous game.

Jurassic Park Trespasser: the YouTube channel ResearchIndicates and one of the most informative Let’s Play videos of all time best explains this game.

Oh god yes, that's one of my favorite games and let's play series of all time. Hey, remember how Half-Life 2's physics engine blew everyone's minds with those seesaw puzzles where you had to weigh down one end with bricks or other items so that you could walk up the other? Yeah, guess what, Trespasser had that before Half-Life 1 even came out.

I would also add Shenmue on the Dreamcast. It was the first open world sandbox action/adventure game, with an amazing amount of content, and realistic (for the time) character modeling and animation, but sadly, few people played it. Many more people played Grand Theft Auto III, which came out several years after Shenmue.

1 set of games that felt ahead of their time were Pokemon Gold/Silver and Crystal.

They had so many interesting mechanics that (for some reason) were not introduced in the later games that it almost feels like robbery.

• Day/night time switch with corresponding pokemon. I remember you could encounter night specific pokemon and also daytime pokemon in the night who were fast asleep when starting the battle.
• Two regions in 1 game.
• End boss as Red in MT silver
• Rematches with trainers.
• Pokewatch system overall
• Hapiness system for Eevee evolutions
• The encounter system for suicuine, Entei and Raikou
• Pokemon crystal with the Battle tower.
• Moving sprites in pokemon crystal.

Probably even more, but for me it is still the best designed pokemon game to date and really ahead of it's time.

It also felt like one of the last games that was oozing with the passion that the developers put in it.

I'll give a mention to FUEL, an open-world offroad racing game with a map that was over 5,000 square miles. The racing itself was fairly medium, but the absolutely massive open-world is something that I can see in Forza Horizon and some others

some genre pioneers

• M.U.L.E. (Multiplayer Strategy)
• ELITE (3D space sim)
• Populous (Godmode RTS)
• Maniac Mansion (Point & Click)

Big Rigs Over the Road Racing would have blended in inconspicuously on Steam had it released 10-15 years later. At the very least it would no longer be remembered as "the worst game ever", and it may even have gained some "so bad its good" meme fame from streamers and made some sales.

Ultima Underworld

It came out before Doom, had full isometric 3D environments including looking up and down, and contained immersive sim and RPG elements. All the ingredients of a modern first person action RPG... in 1992.

• Alternate Reality: The City -- texture mapped first person RPG from 1985

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• Alternate Reality: The Dungeon -- same but with a virtual machine implementing the behaviour of the in-game objects so that the same VM code could be used on all platforms (with disparate processors). Having done some 6502 coding since then, it's not as impressive as it sounds -- you use VMs for everything, when your actual processor is so primative -- but I can't think of other games doing this sort of thing except for Infocom.

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They both had lyrics for the considerable amount of original music, which were displayed and highlit karaoke style when they played. Coming in out of the freezing rain into a cozy tavern, spending your last couple coins on a hot meal, and listening to the band while your character eats and recovers sounds like a very mundane, prosaic experience, but it had such an emotional reality that it was completely immersive. The feeling of warmth and safety is unforgettable.

I often hear about the original "Elite" in this context. It managed to do real time 3d rendering on home computers (albeit wireframe) in a time when that was usually relegated to pre-renders or supercomputers. Came out a good decade before making 3d games was more generally viable.

Star Raiders (Atari 8-bit) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Raiders

Looks primitive now, but was absolutely next level shit at the time.

Can you add the year for each of these? I'm not familiar with all of them.

Rescue on Fractalus! was a first person 1985 game where you pilot an orbital landing craft from space to the surface of fractal generated mountainous planet. Blew my mind.

Deus Ex (2000)

I feel that given the current trendyness of AI and large language models it seems prudent to mention Façade, an interactive play that used AI and language processing to let the player "speak" to the characters and influence tha narrative. It was very janky and you could break it rather easily, but the concept was solid - the technology was just a decade and a half away.

I have so many fond memories of Jurassic Park Trespasser. I remember my dad picked it up for me right around launch time. I had read the previews in PC Gamer magazine and was fully into the hype.

The game was really attempting VR before we had VR. There was no HUD. Your lifebar was a heart tattoo on your chest that emptied as you took damage. There was no ammo counter for your guns. Your character would say things like, "feels full" or "feels a little light" to give you an estimate of ammo remaining.

The biggest flaw, apart from the broken AI for dinosaurs, was just like VR, you had to aim manually. You could turn and twist your gun freely which meant you had to aim down the sights. In VR, in 2023, with motion controllers, this is amazing. But in 1998, with a mouse and keyboard, it was really awkward. It's a game I never finished.; Probably never even got close to finishing. But I was still in awe of the world they built and freedom offered in 1998.

Silent Hill and Resident Evil 1 for PS1

I'll throw an easy one into the mix:

Street Fighter II: The World Warrior (1991)

It introduced many things we consider normal in fighting games.

Other popular, well-known, options might be Portal, the Super Game Boy (not a game but awesome idea)...

Those all sold well though, so they don't meet the criteria.

I remember discovering the Sid Meier games because I bought a box of them for $1 (because the boxes were only printed in French) and I feel that despite the popularity they certainly could have sold even more had they been released a little later. Pirates, come on... awesome.

My brother and I were also obsessed with Crash and the Boys on Nintendo. Really didn't find many games like that at the time.