The results of our public vote for the most influential video game are in. Find out where big names like Baldur's Gate 3, Super Mario Bros, Tetris and Shenmue came on the list.

Video games’ influence on popular culture has never been more prevalent. Their effect is visible and audible in today’s music, across the world of TV and cinema, and on the catwalk. Even your favourite language-learning and fitness apps feature progression systems and rewards popularised by games. To reflect the medium’s universal impact, ahead of the 21st BAFTA Games Awards, we asked the public a provocative question : what is the most influential video game of all time?

As more than one responder said, it’s unfair to have to choose just one. Do you pick the pioneers that shaped the early days of the medium, the innovators that were ahead of their time, the ones that proved formative to your own creative journey, or simply the ones that made you most emotional? As might be expected, among the extraordinary number of responses we received was a staggering variety of games — ranging from titles that launched the industry to contemporary giants released mere months ago. The top ten alone spans multiple genres, from platformers to shooters, sandbox adventures to simulations.

So, without further ado, here are the public’s top 21: each of which, it’s fair to say, has had a seismic impact on games and those who play them…

the list, from most influential to least
  1. Shenmue
  2. DOOM
  3. Super Mario Bros
  4. Half Life
  5. Ocarina of Time
  6. Minecraft
  7. Kingdom Come Deliverance 2
  8. Super Mario 64
  9. Half Life 2
  10. The Sims
  11. Tetris
  12. Tomb Raider
  13. Pong
  14. Metal Gear Solid
  15. World of Warcraft
  16. Baldur’s Gate 3
  17. Final Fantasy VII
  18. Dark Souls
  19. GTA 3
  20. Skyrim
  21. GTA
  • dfyxAEnglish
    8·
    2 days ago

    HALF-LIFE 2

    Okay that’s a little weird. We’re getting up into the real high-water heights here and I mean HL2 is good but…

    This list is not about good, it’s about influential. HL2 was the first major game that based its core gameplay to its physics engine, the first to have HDR rendering and the game that Source engine was developed for. Without HL2, a lot of video games in the decade that followed it, would have looked a lot different.

    SHENMUE

    THE FUCK WHY WHAT

    The article claims that Shenmue was the first to have a “living world” where characters follow their daily routines and so on. But yeah, I have my doubts if all the other games that do that were influenced by it.

    • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
      3·
      2 days ago

      HL2 was the first major game that based its core gameplay to its physics engine, the first to have HDR rendering and the game that Source engine was developed for. Without HL2, a lot of video games in the decade that followed it, would have looked a lot different.

      Yeah, maybe so. Source is just Valve’s internal engine, it was continuously developed and used during pretty much all of their FPS-type game development which includes HL2 along with everything else. It was forked from the not-“Source” source tree at the time of release of the original Half-Life and moved forward continuously from there. But yeah HL2 did do a bunch of ground-breaking stuff, I do see your point and I think it belongs on the list.

      The article claims that Shenmue was the first to have a “living world” where characters follow their daily routines and so on.

      It’s not. Ultima 6 was doing that.

      Actually, The Last Express had already done whatever Shenmue was attempting to do with its “living world” absolutely ten times better. But the same tragic story that led The Last Express to be a commercial flop also means that all the wonderful stuff it did didn’t really make any impact. 😢 TL;DR it was an actual successful implementation of powerful narrative inside of a world that the player could meaningfully impact, in a perfectly meshed and groundbreaking form. But for some reason the studio either refused to or couldn’t do basically any promotion for it, and so after being completed it sold barely any copies and simply fell into the abyss, unknown. It was a masterpiece. Shenmue probably had more lasting impact on gaming.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Express

      • jansk@beehaw.org
        5·
        1 day ago

        Source was not an internal engine, it was an openly available engine used by numerous non-Valve games (The Ship, Garrys Mod, Titanfall, Dear Esther, etc etc).