What games popularized certain mechanics?
I was trying to think of which games created certain mechanics that became popular and copied by future games in the industry.
The most famous one that comes to my mind is Assassin’s Creed, with the tower climbing for map information.
Slay the Spire spawned a ton of deck builder roguelites.
Without which we wouldn't have the only true deck builder roguelite, Rogue Light Deck Builder.
First thing that came in to my mind was Gears of War with its specific third person view and hiding behind covers. I don't think it was the first game with that mechanic but the most influential one
The term I refer to is “hiding behind cover” singular - so when I hear “hiding behind covers” I think of the COG seeing locusts, getting scared, and wrapping themselves up in blankets. Lol
when I hear “hiding behind covers”
Operation Blanket Fort
Third person view in an FPS (first person shooter) type of game was first seen in the first Lara Croft game, I think?
I think you need to be more specific than just "third person". Third person view was in Pong, Pac-Man, Asteroids, Centipede, etc. It's the default for most games.
First person was probably introduced with Battle Zone.
Which, I don't mean to sound pedantic, I just literally don't really know what you mean here.
If you are attempting to ask which game popularized 3d, third person shooters, then yes, the original Tomb Raider is probably the most early, widely popular game that popularized this.
Donkey Kong (1981) popularized having different levels in a game to progress a storyline. Until then, you would have the same level over and over with increasing difficulty
Battlefield 1942 always stands out to me as the one that popularized large scale online battles on big maps with vehicles. At the time it was revolutionary in online gaming.
Command & Conquer: Renegade came out around the same time as well, with similar features. I kinda wish that game had a sequel as well.
Another gameplay feature that comes to mind is the exclamation/question mark above NPC characters for quests. I remember it first from WarCraft 3, but I think it really kicked off with World of WarCraft to get adopted by many more games.
Was it the first to allow you to look on the map to choose where you respawn, specifically on teammates?
I'm not sure I've ever had more fun with any game than I did with BF1942. It was just so much fun. There were games with smoother play and deeper mechanics and better graphics, but none were as fun. The dumb mechanics made it amazing, like being able to lie down on the wing of a plane and snipe people while your buddy flew, or dive bombing and parachuting out at 10ft above the ground to capture a point, or shooting the main cannon from a tank into a barracks that has 15 people spawned inside it, or piloting a goddamn aircraft carrier and running it aground to get to a spawn point safely. It was so stupid but so fun.
Renegade was some of the most fun I ever had in a shooter. Truly a unique experience
Ocarina of time, 3d, lock on, one enemy attacks at a time. So much of modern gaming pulled from ocarina of time
The fact they used Navi to do the targeting really demonstrates how the devs felt they needed to explain the new mechanic and not just use it 'because game.'
I know the "hold a button to lock-on to an enemy" was in Mega Man Legends, but in the first game you had to stand still for the lock to work. On MML2, you could lock and run around freely, but that game came after OoT
Oh wow, did Zelda really make this popular? I wouldn’t have guessed. I’ve play it a ton.
Love oot, but the only thing it brought 3d too was the Zelda series. Didn't realize about the lock-on mechanic, would've sworn it was in earlier stuff, but I guess not.
Though it was used in a few games before, a Quake tournament and Half Life 1 cemented the use of WASD controls.
ESDF is the superior keybinding
Esdf requires more dexterity and is generally less accessible.
I'm an idiot and misunderstood which key bind was being talked about
Been RDFG since about 2002. One of my roommates in college was in the top thousand on Unreal Tournament. He talked me into it. God, I get good at that game playing against him.
I remember using wsad on an ascii graphics game I played back in 85 or so. I think it was called dungeons and dragons, but was not made by tsr. Larn, hack, and Moria were all similar games but I did not play those until later.
yeah HL definitely was the one popularized it as default. quake players changed the bindings for it; i know because i played that game with old-school doom/duke controls
Bullet time was popularized in max payne.
And perfected in The Specialists!
Maybe cheating a bit but there are several genres of games that are named after the games that popularized their mechanics such as roguelike/roguelite, souls-like, metroidvania
Minecraft for the fully breakable/buildable procedural open world.
Minecraft is far more responsible for the survival crafting genre that followed in its wake.
The original XCOM is the source of grid based inventories.
Star Control 2 is the first RPG that did the standard dialogue interface where you talk to someone and choose from multiple replies.
Idk, I think this game already had a grid base inventory: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Schwarze_Auge:_Die_Nordland-Trilogie
April 1992.
Man, that's some good memories.
Yazinda, Durin, Arva von Harben, Tjalf, Melina and Caldrin, I miss you guys.
SC2 did (or did the first mainstream) implementation of a bunch of things, but I'm surprised it was the first for this.
Mario 64 definitely paved the way for most of the 3D platformers of the 21st century
I'd give that to Tomb Raider but both are exceptional.
I don’t think it’s just “being 3D”. Mario 64 put a lot of R&D into particulars of how jumping should work, the camera should work, and what the player’s goals should be. Quite a few games unintentionally copied them, while you could see some games not following their lead early in the 3D days that felt very janky to play. Tomb Raider could arguably be among them with the tank controls, though of course it has its own more niche appeal.
Mario 64 figured out applying analog control to 3d platformers which changed the whole genre, though.
I think Spyro was the first mainstream game to standardise achievements, you could do random stuff in-game and it gave you a little pop up, carried over to Ratchet and Clank and now every game has official achievements
I think Spyro was the first mainstream game to standardise achievements, you could do random stuff in-game and it gave you a little pop up
Which one did that?
Batman: Arkham Asylum's free-flowing combo system was copied by many future games.
I always feel like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time got there first.
Kinda wild to see nobody mention System Shock, the game that invented audio logs. It may seem quaint in retrospect, but at the time all shooters were in the vein of Doom, and story in a shooter was considered "like story in porn." System Shock was not only the first to communicate the plot and next steps to the player through found audio logs, but it also filled the player in on side stories and provided characterization to the survivors on Citadel station.
The game recently got a remaster, and despite very few gameplay changes, still holds up really well in 2024. You can really see the bones of later games in it, such as story focused shooters like Bioshock or F.E.A.R. and I'd really recommend it to anyone interested in playing a great retro game.
They also said popularized, though. System Shock never really got beyond cult classic status, so while it invented them, I'd say BioShock popularized them.
CoD and Assassin's Creed popularised selling the same fucking game 20 times
FIFA and other sports games as well
Sports games have been doing it faaaar longer. Madden started in 1988, released a sequel in 1990, then hasn't missed a year ever since. The baseball and basketball counterparts existed just as long.
Quake revolutionized fps games
Ape Escape was the first PS1 game to require the dual shock controller
I'd argue that quake did far more for 3D graphics then it did for FPS. Like Doom is what got FPS into the spotlight even though Wolfenstein 3d came first. Like quake is pretty much what made real 3D possible and doable on the hardware of the time thanks to everything going on under the hood
That may be what I was thinking of. I actually never played Quake, I just knew it was groundbreaking
Which game popularised the now household mechanic of being shut down after a couple of years?
Iirc (edit - apparently incorrect) Halo was the first to use left joystick as forward/backward and left/right strafe; and right joystick as look up/down and pivot left/right.
I even recall articles counting it as a point against the game due to its 'awkward controls' ...but apparently after a tiny learning curve, the entire community/industry got on board.
https://www.escapistmagazine.com/alien-resurrection-playstation-1-argonaut-games/
Alien resurrection was the first and got panned by critics for it
I thought goldeneye had that basic controls concept a few years before. and Turok was pretty close before that.
edit: ah forgot n64 only had one joystick. but basically the same with the left d-pad and middle joystick.
Goldeneye scheme was forward and back on the joystick moved forward and back but left and right on the stick turned the camera in that direction. The opposite movements were on the c buttons (strafe left and right and look up and down).
It was incredibly disorientating going from that to Turok which used the strafe on the c buttons and looking on the stick. It's the same feeling I now get when I try to go back to Goldeneye now that the other orientation has been made universal.
On a side note, the goldeneye controls allowed for a unique way of moving around the map with circle strafing that you can't really replicate in other games.
Goldeneye got it functional, but it was janky. Try playing 4p with the old N64 controllers and you’d sorta struggle to move and aim.
Halo updated the standard with something usable in modern games. I think a few games in that genre also set the expectation that weapons should have no aim penalty while strafing, since console players would use small strafing motions to do light aim correction.
The original Medal of Honor for the Playstation 1 had an alternate control scheme that let you move in the modern dual stick manner.
The first RTS is an obscure Japanese game called Herzog Zwei,
Westwood studios then made Dune 2 and Command & Conquer which basically polished and popularised the genre for the rest of the world.
Pretty much every RTS that followed took at least some inspiration from how those games worked
Warcraft came a year before Command & Conquer and improved on many concepts that Dune II introduced.
Yeah, you're right to highlight warcraft although I don't think it's a clean line with Warcraft between dune 2 and c&c. C&C was probably around 2 years into development by the time Warcraft came out, and my assumption is most of the actual game design was pretty finalised by that point. Though I'm sure some minor influences made their way in, I don't think Warcraft massively affected the kind of game we got in the end.
But yeah that's not to diminish the contribution of warcraft to the genre, there's loads of games that followed copying the Warcraft style of RTS, even as part of the c&c series in the end with Generals.
gonna be real, WC1 was not a huge title at the time. I think a lot of people look back, rightly, at WC3 being one of the greatest RTS of all time and then think the whole series was lauded at release, but Warcraft: Orcs and Humans was just okay.
Rogue for the rogue mechanic. Progressing in a game as far as you can until you die, then using some form of enhancement mechanic be harder faster better or stronger to go again.
Funny enough, Rogue doesn't have a set of permanent enhancement for a wider meta game. In Rogue you start over from scratch always and every time. That's the difference between a roguelike and a rogue liTe game. Binding of Isaac and Spelunky are roguelike. You die, you start over from scratch. Hades and Slay the spyre are rogue lite. Every run gives permanent enhancements that change the next runs, so each time you start slightly different or progressively better.
Hades, yes. That's a premier Roguelite with meaningful meta progression.
Slay the Spire is fuzzy on that point. I would not recommend it to someone looking for a Roguelite. It straddles the line in that it has very limited meta progression which is quickly exhausted and basically works as a tutorial. Once you've maxed out the card unlocks for each character it plays with the same feel as a Roguelike game. It's still not a pure a Roguelike since the starting boon choice and the card swap event allow some minor meta-influence between runs, but there's no more meta-progression.
A roguelite is ostensibly something that has enough features of a roguelike to be noted, but not enough to be considered one. And I'd argue there is way more to what makes a roguelike than permadeath with no meta progression.
Also Slay the Spire has less meta progression than Issac. Hades is in a whole nother ball park.
Isn't it called "rogue-like" because that last part of metaprogress was not in rogue? Maybe I'm confusing it with roguelite.
Be careful; you're stepping into a holy war. There are some who stick to "the Berlin Interpretation", where there are far more criteria to what makes a roguelike, and from my perspective, it makes those games so close to Rogue that it's not worth giving it its own genre, plus this classification came out just before Spelunky ruined it. Colloquially, you're typically right though. Most will call a game roguelite if your progress gives you upgrades that make the next runs easier, whereas a roguelike may still have unlocks that add more variety or "sidegrades" that are neither better nor worse.
Inter-run progression was not in Rogue and is a modern concept. And arguably anti-roguelike
I’m curious if it’s actually a different one. That’s the biblical “source” but I feel like there was a long gap before the indie scene picked up that theme in droves. I’m now unsure what it was that started that more modern trend.
Rogue was the originator, but NetHack and ADOM did more to popularize Roguelikes than Rogue itself ever managed. NetHack was the first one I ever heard of, and it's the only reason I know Rogue existed in the first place.
Assassin’s Creed and the Open World Gameplay design. It definitely existed before then, but after AC came out, it felt like every RPG switched to the open world map.
I feel like GTA planted that seed waaayy before that. I remember open world games being followed by "like GTA". Assassin's Creed was no exception.
Valid point. I forgot about GTA since that was one of the few banned games in my household.
I feel like Elder Scrolls was the model being followed for open world RPGs. Assassin's Creed didn't even have RPG mechanics until the later games.
Spacewar! was a F2P PvP game with no microtransactions and no battle pass. Although it's hard to quantify exact player numbers (it precedes Steam charts), for a while it was the most played videogame in the world.
Its real-time graphics and multiplayer combat were very influential, and widely copied by many other games.
It also popularized the "mechanic" of online matchmaking through steam for pirated and abandoned games. Thank you Spacewar, very cool.
Edit: the Steam one is a test game for their steamworks system with source code from the original game. The more you know.
Wow this brought it full circle, the name looked familiar but then it clicked, back in my pirating days lol
for a while it was the most played videogame in the world.
I see what you did there!
Jurassic Park: Trespasser invented physics engines in fps games as we know it. The game itself was a buggy mess and a financial disaster. The player's health was shown on the main character's boob for some damn reason. However, they did have the basics of a very good physics engine, and Valve took a lot of their ideas and incorporated it into Half Life 2.
Man, Trespasser is an example of a game with some pretty wild ideas about immersion and puzzle solving in a first person shooter game that the tech just wasn't quite able to pull off. If anyone is curious there is a positively antique Let's Play on YouTube that discusses the game's development, its relation to the wider Jurassic Park franchise, cut content, and, of course, the game in context. I think it may have come from the old Something Awful forums, and it remains, to my mind, the gold standard for what I'd like Let's Plays to be. Worth checking out if you've the time.
I don’t know what game first came up with it, but Super Mario RPG was the first time I saw timed hits for attack and defense in a JRPG. While the mechanic isn’t exactly ubiquitous it has popped up in a handful of other games over the years and it always reminds me of that game.
This was definitely the first time I also remember this appearing, and it made it more engaging for me as a child.
Gears: cover shooter
Prince of Persia: realistic animations with weight. also popularized a platformer subgenre, which was called cinematic platformer but unfortunately the life of the subgenre was cut short due to the advent of 3d.
Diablo: ARPG genre, and even more so loot rarity system (especially the four tiers common/rare/epic/legendary) and affixes in loot as well.
Half-Life: a lot of good things, sure, as pointed out by other comments, but I will also never forgive valve for popularizing the game not fucking starting for ages.
Rogue and maybe more so Nethack: roguelike mechanics.
some really obvious ones are Tetris: falling block puzzles and Sokoban: pushing block puzzles.
also now pretty much obsolete but Overwatch: loot boxes. they existed before, but Overwatch made them an industry standard.
Wasn't CS/TF2 far more influential in the lootbox department?
i don't think they were as influential no. overwatch loot boxes were not only a monetization venue but also the main leveling system. whether you paid or not you always played toward a loot box. and couple with the game's massive success and popularity it opened the floodgates to this form of monetization to be a standard.
Pacman was the first to simulate a real life mechanic, of munching pills, listening to repetitive music, and running from multicoloured ghosts.
Crush the Castle inspired Angry Birds and several other games with the same catapult mechanic. Loved that flash game way before Angry Birds was put on the App Store.
Street Fighter 2 popularized and pretty much set to stone what a tournament fighter game should be. Mortal Kombat came first, but its single-player progression was this weird "tower" with some gimmick fights thrown in, like you vs 2.
Thinking about it, I'd say Mortal Kombat popularized the "REALLY fucking cheap sub boss/final boss" that many other fighting games have (looking at you, SNK) - I mean, good luck getting close to Goro in the first place.
I wonder which korean mmo could be considered as the one that de facto popularized pay-to-win as an integral mechanic.
Diablo hands down popularized not only the action RPG genre, but also having enemies as loot mystery boxes. One lucky kill and you could get your hands on a really great piece of equipment. The amount of clones speaks for itself.
I think Gran Turismo popularized the "carreer mode" of racing games.
Mortal Kombat did not come first. It was quite openly inspired by Street Fighter II.
Dude, I have not played mortal kombat in ages but I still seethe at the mere mention of Goro
Arma 2-3 have been responsible for at least 3 major multiplayer genres.
SovietWomble has a video essay that touches this topic.
WASD + mouse aim in FPS. Wolf3d, Doom1 and Blakestone used the arrow keys, spacebar and Ctrl back in the day. The arrows were turn, not strafe too.
I reckon it was some friends of mine in the 90s in Box Hill, Melbourne, Victoria who were the first to use WASD/mouse aim. Share house above a shop at the end of a tram line.
Quake 1 popularized mouselook
Ocarina of Time is the mother of modern 3D gaming with Z-targeting.
I'm not 100% sure if factorio was the first, but the devs at Wube certainly perfected the idea and now there's a whole market for the "factory game" genre.
Even if it's not the first, I'd say it's the first that figured out that computers were powerful enough that you can have a gobsmackingly huge factory.
Dune II - basically the grandfather of every RTS game out there (and incidentally very, very different from Dune I): opposing forces, resource collection, tech tree, fog of war, et cetera. Or perhaps it was (not World of) Warcraft, it's been too long and memory gets fuzzy.
Dune I and II were in development in parallel. One of them was cancelled (don't remember which one), but they forgot to tell the company, IIRC.
preussiske
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Warcraft 1 came after Dune (and Blizzard were big fans, IIRC), either way. It enabled multi-selection (based on spreadsheet programs, IIRC).
Sorry about the surprise prussians. I was never any good at typing on glass, I much prefer an actual keyboard.
Elite was the first game to utilize procedural generation, which has been extremely popular across multiple genres.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game)
While some might not consider it a game mechanic I certainly do, as gaming the proceduraly created levels is a core part of certain games, see mapping tactics in Diablo 2 for example as you use knowledge of procedural generation to reduce the time to find and kill bosses!
Rogue and Hack both predate elite.
See I thought of Rogue first but trusted the Guiness book of world records! I guess they need to be corrected
Doom or Wolfenstein birthed 3d fps I'm p sure 😁
I'd put it at Quake.
Wolf3d is an evolution of Hovertank 3D, which had flat shading for walls, floors, and ceilings. Wolf3d then has textured walls but still flat shading on the floors and ceilings. Some other games came out after Wolf3d that had textures floors and ceilings while id worked on Doom.
Doom not only had textured everything, but also stairs. Trick was, you couldn't develop a level that had a hallway going over another hallway. Not enough computer horsepower yet to pull that off. This is sometimes called "2.5D".
Quake brings everything together. Everything's texture mapped, your levels have true height with things built over other things, and the character models are even fully 3d rendered.
Oblivion popularized fucking DLC, holy fucking shit I hate DLC so fucking much I pirated any games that has DLC, I don't mind expansion but DLC can crash and burn in a pile of dogshit
Assuming you mean micro transactions rather than dlc like we saw in Halo 2
DLC is literally just DownLoadeable Content
So like... I don't get the hate for a specific method of providing content. Like, there's obviously a difference between Factorio's Space Age, and what The Sims does, even though they are both DLC.
Technically true, but I think everybody knows exactly what kind of dlc is meant, and because they still make up the majority of dlc content and addon-sized dlcs are so rare, it's fair to call them that.
Moneygrab empty dlcs ( shiny horse armor! ) are stupid, and history has shown that people are not fiscally responsible enough to not be lured into spending absurd amounts of money for very shallow or plain empty content. "Vote with your wallet" doesn't really work in the face of more and more insidious marketing efforts.
Expansions are DLC.
Battlefield 1942 introduced rideable vehicles to the maps.
Halo introduced regenerating health.
If you're counting the shields, Bungie's Oni did it first.
Halo also had vehicles in 2001. Bf1942 came out in 2002. Other FPS games have had vehicles before that, but they were always clunky. Hell, there's a vehicle section in Shadow Warrior(1997).
This is a fantastic timeline if you want to go into details.
I was hoping an article existed!
Serious Sam The First Encounter claims to have invented event cued music. Ie, intense fight music stops once an encounter is over.
Quake is believed by many to have invented Rocket Jumping, but Marathon (1993) had two forms of it first.
Marathon and Rise of the Triad both released with duel welding pistols in the same week.
I dispute the Serious Sam claim. The LucasArts iMUSE system was doing things like that years before. Even among fps games, the first Dark Forces game used it.
And ROTT also had rocket jumps.
Skyrim for the horse armor dlc.
That was Oblivion believe it or not. Ahh, the good ol' days where everyone got up in arms over even cosmetic DLC.
I thought that the uproar about horse armor was that it was the first pay-to-win DLC. The armor was not just cosmetic but actually provided a stat boost to your horse. The accusation was that the developers had made it too easy for enemies to kill your horse and decided to patch the game to fix it but made players pay for the patch.
My mistake you’re totally right there!
I remember them having a sale on Oblivion DLC one time where the rest of the DLC was half-off, but the horse armor was double.
Oblivion was weird on DLC. Knights of the Nine was pretty good, and Shivering Isles was amazing. But they also had bullshit stuff like Horse Armour.
It was the beginning of the end, because they saw how much money they made on the horse armour vs how much effort it took to make it. It was actually generally criticized at the time, but it also sold really well.
DOTA popularized and also invented the battle pass mechanic.
You mean DotA 2, but DotA (warcraft 3 map) also popularized the MOBA genre. It wasn't the first MOBA however, as I believe that title belongs to an earlier StarCraft map called Aeon of Strife. But StarCraft didn't have a robust enough hero system for it to really catch on.
Note: read "first" as "first popular/important", not just for this thread but for most conversations across media like this.
Spelunky was the first "Roguelite" that brought permadeath with meta progression to another genre, starting the modern wave of Roguelites.
Pokemon kicked off "monster collection" as a mechanic
To my knowledge, Halo was the first major game to do regenerating health
Rouge rougelike
*rogue Roguelike
Though rougelike certainly sounds like an interesting genre too 😉
Dune 2 for it popularized RTS genre. C&c to bring it to the masses
The Sims for the scrub-the-toilet mechanic.
Souls games. Popularized invasions.
Perfect example that "popularized" is different from "popular".
And also the concept of your collection of souls being recoverable from your last point of death.
I know the "death bag" mechanic had been done before, but the disappearing cache is a core element of Soulslike gameplay that has been repeated so many times since then. It adds a sense of urgency and FOMO to the recovery of your stuff. If you die again, it's gone for good.
People always forget that resident evil 4(? There is a million of them) made third person shooters mainstream.
What are you smoking? That's like a 2005 game.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-person_shooter
Jonathan S. Harbour of the University of Advancing Technology argues that Tomb Raider (1996) by Eidos Interactive (now Square Enix Europe) is "largely responsible for the popularity of this genre".
Hell, Max Payne was definitely more popular, and it came out in 2001.
I wonder what the source of the RTS conventions was. Ctrl num for making groups. Double press to centre on group. X for scattering units. A to stop them. Pretty sure these predate C&C but the only one before that I can think of is dune.
Dune was the second RTS ever though
Maybe because that one didn't come from videogames. Selection sets or groups have been a thing on UI for a long time, ever since vertex editor on CAD software.
I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone say Pokemon. From a. monster collecting/battle game nothing has really came close.
How about the flowing hair on Lara Croft in Tomb Raider 2 and later?
From my understanding, they wanted to have that working for TR1 but missed the deadline, so Lara got a static hair bun in TR1.