The evolution of gaming has been a rather interesting topic for me as I have always been a huge fan of nostalgia and while we can all agree that gaming has come a long way today, it is indeed imperative to acknowledge the days of little beginnings of a platform that gives us so much joy today. A lot has happened to mould the community to what it is today but there are a few things that stand out and points us to why we started doing certain things the way we do them today. Things like the way battle royale games are structured and the way open-world games are made haven’t always been a video games staple as they are today and in this list, I try to point out some of the games that popularized certain concepts that are now wildly used in games today.
1. GTA 3(2001) -THE GRANDPA OF THE OPEN-WORLD GENRE
Very few games can boast of the level of influence and popularity that the Grand Theft Auto franchise has garnered over the years. Rockstar’s flagship IP, GTA has so much reputation that is always expected to outdo it’s predecessors and other similar games with every new installment to the franchise and it is amazing how Rockstar never fail to meet all the unrealistic expectations. It’s a wonder how they consistently come up with even better content just when it feels like they have nothing new to offer.The success of the franchise is largely attributed to GTA3, the franchise’s first appearance in the 3D scene in 2001. At the time of release, GTA3 literally took a lot of other games out of business and popularized the open world genre that now saturates the market today. GTA 3 ushered in a huge open world that was very convincing, lived in and immersive. At the time, it was ground breaking as the idea of progressing through a game at your own pace just as you would in real life turned out to be pretty immersive and a formula a lot of other games have now transitioned into. GTA 3 gave players the freedom to do whatever they liked in the fully rendered world ranging from side quests to missions and even causing mayhem in the city and having the police chase after you. It might seem pretty normal for games today but without the advent of GTA 3, Open world games as we know them today would probably not be in existence.
2. 007 GOLDEN EYE(1997) - FPS AND MULTIPLAYER AT ITS BEST ON A CONSOLE
Golden Eye was indeed a phenomenon back when it first released for the Nintendo 64 in 1997. so outstanding that it still has a resonating effect even after multiple console generations. RARE really outdid themselves with this one offering an excellent adaptation to an already excellent 1995 James Bond movie making it one of the very best movie adaptations. However, it was the multiplayer suite that really sets this one aside.The multiplayer suite offered a variety of modes that remained key to golden eye’s longevity and charm .Often sited as one of the best video games ever made, golden eye ushered in a lot of new innovations and was a more realistic and huge step up from the doom style FPS that was popular at the time. Golden eye raised the bar for other FPS games and further demonstrated the viability of FPS games on consoles.However, Golden Eye has not really aged that well and a better way to revisit this masterpiece is through the 2010 reimagining, Golden Eye: Source, which is literally the entire golden eye game remade with valve’s source engine but with far better graphics and controls all done while staying true to the identity of the original game.
3. CALL OF DUTY 4: MODERN WARFARE(2007) - INNOVATED ONLINE FPS SHOOTERS AS WE KNOW THEM TODAY
Online shooters are indeed a huge aspect of gaming with various companies releasing their take on the genre, trying to cash in on the cash grab. Much of what we know as online shooters of today was popularized in the 2007 masterpiece FPS shooter: Call of duty 4: Modern Warfare. Though not the first game in the series, its arrival forever changed the series and caused a knock on effect on other competing games as well.It is the first call of duty to deviate from the world war plot to a more modern setting and It featured a highly engrossing campaign and a robust multiplayer mode with a lot of excellent features such as skill based match-making and shooting mechanics and giving rise to the perfect control scheme that are still in use till today.The campaign did not lag behind either as modern warfare gave players a solid and highly immersive story to enjoy howbeit with a lot of back-stabs and betrayals to endure and bombs to detonate. Since the arrival of COD4:MW, we have seen the market saturated with similar games that have used features from this game because of the way it was implemented and how good it was. It is safe to say online shooter games would be far different from what they are today without the arrival of call of duty 4: Modern Warfare.
4. CRYSIS(2007) - USHERED IN A GRAPHICAL LEAP LIKE NO OTHER
The original Crysis game was a really big deal back when it launched in 2007 and still holds up pretty well even till this day.Being one of the very first games to ever support direct x10, it was indeed iconic in what it was able to achieve at the time. Part of what made Crysis really big was it’s graphics that were really mind-blowing at the time and the way it implemented some pretty mind-blowing physics that was just fantasy meant only for dreams at the time.The level of detail was way ahead of it’s time and took it far ahead of it’s peers and it’ll take years before other games and even it’s sequel even began to catch up. It literally turned the dial way up on what good PC graphics should be like making it the golden standard to test if your PC can hold it’s own on gaming and in turn popularizing the ‘but can it run Crysis meme’. Though, it is 13 years at this point, It’s still interesting to see it bring even modern PCs to their collective knees. Though much of that could be attributed to the fact that it is poorly optimized. with the release of Crysis Remastered in 2020, we hope to see Crysis in even much more glorious graphics and hopefully better optimized this time.
5. HALF-LIFE 2(2004) - SINGLE-PLAYER FIRST PERSON SHOOTER PERFECTED
We can all agree that a lot has changed in the last sixteen years but valve’s Half-Life 2 remains an all time blast and is still as shiny as the first minute it hit the shelves in 2004. It literally wrote the blueprint which all modern FPS shooter draw their inspiration and creativity from. Combining excellent ideas like a robust physics system,unscripted cut-scenes that added even more immersion and an excellent gun play, Half-Life 2 managed to carve it’s own niche in the gaming scene and all other FPS shooter since then have followed suit. In a world where most FPS games are gradually ditching single-player campaign to cash in on the online multiplayer scene, Half-life 2 serves as a reminder of how much a solid campaign mode can achieve. Though it’s quite a shame the game ended on a cliffhanger, fans have been religiously waiting for years for a sequel to this ground breaking title and while valve clearly has other priorities to tend to, the sheer reputation of Half Life is enough to steer such priorities and we have seen that in the wake of Half-Life Alyx. It’s so exciting that the one true king of the FPS genre is finally back, howbeit in glorious VR.
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