Unfortunately, the Nintendo seal of quality is now hilariously ironic.

Anyone up for a game of Homie Rollerz?

I like the duality that plays out when you think why the Seal was important back then for it prevented and what it could be ushering in now.
But anyway I think most recently one the greatest innovations in games has been online play. I think online play has set the stage for the next decade of gaming.

IMB or IBM computer?

What is the IMB Home Computer? I heard of the IBM, but not the IMB.

but TI beat IBM to the punch in the gaming dept. you would think Sid Meier would know that.

My list:

1. Laserdisc gaming
2. D-Pads
3. GPU

How about 3D acceleration?

I'm sure it's simply a typo ... and, yes, the IBM computer was a huge deal. I remember playing King's Quest on the IBM PCjr when I was a kid and being blown away.

He should hang his head in shame for saying he'd welcome being absorbed into the EA Collective.

Corner of shame Meier! Get thee haste!

@rainofwalrus [XBL]: IBM made computer gaming mainstream ... of course there were other computers with games, but IBM got it into the mass market.

EA should be subject to a seal of quality and maybe then, people wouldn't hate them as much, I mean they release a great game or two a year but that doesn't outweigh the crap they make a year

@Dragonzigg:
How so?

I understand what your going at, but thats two completely different kinds of "crap", which you should be aware of if youve been around longer than since the 360 was released.

Meant as a joke? Not very funny im afraid. 5/10 Showelware

Man, I miss the Nintendo Seal of Quality.

My Apple IIc was what changed my view of gaming. My dad had the IBM for work. Back then I never really thought of the IBM as a gaming machine.

@Nintenboy01: IBM

Wth is going in with the EA hate these days?
Around year 2002 you could pretty much ignore EA games by default. You knew theyd be shit anyway.

But 2008? Not anymore. EA is a _good_ company today. They make and publish great games (well, good AND bad games, like just about any company besides Valve). Anyone with a bit of a clue would see this.

Hating on EA is very old, kids. Try something else.

IBM? Sweet, Will Wright Sweet,

Nintendo Seal of Quality a great innovation? Uhh I don't think so. Stickers saying AWTHOME PRODUCT INSIDE were invented along time ago.

Sid ... sit down. That's like saying the Ferrari logo is the greatest invention in the auto industry?

@Krellie: EA is a good company, lmao. I pity you.

@Krellie: They're not hated on simply because of their games, it's because we find their business practices distasteful. I, and many on here, believe that EA's incessant consumption of smaller publishers harms creativity. A large company is required to show a profit to shareholders so they are less likely to take chances ... the company will produce safe products that sell.

I honestly can't name one extraordinarily creative product to come out of EA in years.

I will always maintain that the Commodore 64 was more important to computer gaming than the IBM and its clones. The reason is that the Commodore (the clearly best gaming machine of the 1980's) was relatively inexpensive, and was the first computer of many Atari gamers, and transitioned them into computers. Later, when Commodore died out and IBM clones dominated the market, they moved over to it.

Greatest Innovation: Color Monitor (Oh how long we dealt with b/w or even...green or amber)

Seal of approval? Forshame as this allows for abuse of the said seal. And the clubbing commences...(btw, this is like the Microsoft approval...just means you paid into the club.

Would the game, Life, be foremost, at creating? I would think Adventure was a foremost "thinking" game. Forget about graphics and go North and look.

Yeah i remember when Nintendo's Seal of Quality actually ment something but not anymore now it's on every Wii shovelware game out there ..............DAMN YOU CARNIVAL GAMES AND HANNAH MONTANA DAMN YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

@ErskinPig: Please evaluate.

@jayntampa: While I agree to some extent, they (EA) has lately shown that they atleast let their bought up companies keep their creativity, and dont push their release schedules etc.

Dont get me wrong. Im not saying EA is the BEST company out there, but I dont think they are any worse than SquareE or Nintendo either. (And I say that being a big fan of named companies.)
I buy very few games from EA, but still..at least I dont judge them on past merits.

(Okay, they are somewhat worse than Ninty and Squeeny.)

I'd say the Commodore 64 and the Amiga did more for PC Gaming. As the Commodore line made PC Gaming a mass market phenomenon at a time of 2 to 3 grand PC's that really didn't offer much performance for the money, and you still had to buy a 200 dollar sound card (Ad-Lib or Sound Blaster), or a new video card (not GPU) and some ultra expensive ram at that time.

1. Video games.
2. Directional pads.
3. Game saves.

@Krellie: They don't push the release schedules on games where the developers have such a following that the developers can push back ;)

If I was judging EA on past merits, I'd be in love with them -- they've made some of my favorite games ever (Archon and Mail Order Monsters come to mind) ... but, in the long run, they're doing the entire industry a disservice by removing diversity.

@Dragonzigg: Last I checked, they were not using the Seal of Approval anymore... so I'm not quite sure what you mean.

God. Sid's list of top innovations makes me feel like I'm too young to play videogames. And I'm 26.

@Krellie: I think a lot of people fail to realize that the large software companies have to play it safe because those numbers drive their business. A lot of these large companies make money in gaming ONLY. It's the same reason people constantly nag on Nintendo for using a lot of of their franchise mascots, or Square for re-releasing/remaking so many of their old games. You people forget that they don't just magically generate money from the core of the Earth. Since development prices continue to climb upward, so does the price of entry to make new games, or new franchises.

Not that EA is some perfect angel of gaming or anything, they've certainly done their best to stifle things down to 'This is as good as you're gonna get!' levels, but I think that's mainly because of the previous direction of the company. They over-inflated themselves well before the market was so booming with cash, and had to make everything brainlessly safe just to keep themselves from toppling into failure.

I've said it before & I'll say it again: PLCs and the games industry do not mix. Stay independent or help ruin the industry by selling out. Your call.

@Modus_Operandi: It didn't really change the world of gaming back in the 90s when it was introduced.

The Nintendo Seal of Quality is rather strange. The whole reason it was created was because there were third party products for the NES that operated by sending a current directly into the NES. Pretty much every single game that wasn't directly manufactured by Nintendo had to use this method to get it to boot their code. Naturally this was both a huge blow to Nintendo as they were not reaping in the profits and a potential blow to the consumer as it could potentially destroy their system.

The Nintendo Seal of Quality meant you were getting a product that would boot normally (using the system Nintendo had put in place) and as such wouldn't screw up your system.

Perhaps the first actual "licensing" for a console and it set the stage for most modern consoles where games can only be authorised by the console manufacturers.

It's got a pretty interesting history:

[en.wikipedia.org]

[en.wikipedia.org]

Going strictly by gaming's innovations, I would have thrown the ability to save (battery or memory card, whichever) in there. More recently would be dual analog sticks. So many modern console games just wouldn't be any fun without them. *glares at my PSP*

@Sherlock_the_Barbarian: C64 was definitely the best "gaming system" of the 80s, hands down.

The Nintendo Seal of quality never meant anything. It got so bad that at one point they had to drop the Quality part and it just became the Nintendo seal. It didn't really stand for anything.

1 and 3 are my picks too, but I don't know about 2. I might have picked handheld gaming systems.

My list:

1. Game Saves
2. Laser Disc Games
3. SNES controller - PERFECT design, awesome Dpad, yeah, so maybe it's not an "innovation" but it was definitely 2D perfection.

In an ode to Nintendo's seal of quality, my 3 pics are:

1 - Power Glove (crappy gimmicky peripheral that attempted to blind people's judgement)

2 - Virtual Boy (crappy gimmicky console that just blnded)

3 - Wii (the crappy gimmicky peripheral that blinded people to the fact that they would never make more than 5 good games that actually sold)

Sincerely,
A bored Wii owner

Actually I wouldn't say IBM brought computer games to the masses. I would say Commodore with the VIC-20 and the C64 were THE computer games machines, this is when the jump from consoles to PC happened.

My List would be:
1) Commodore (RIP)
2) Game engines (such as DOS-Doom Operating System)
3) Gamepads (Joysticks were horrible on consoles and PCs, first gamepad btw was the colecovisions controller, it was kind of a cross-over from joystick to gamepad)

the IMB was pretty good but most people had those knockoff IBMs. - but i think arcades brought gaming to the masses or perhaps even home game consoles. how much did an IBM/IMB cost? how many people actually had one relative to, say, an atari or access to an arcade?

How about the modem (and thus remote multiplayer gaming)?

I assume he's talking about VIDEO gaming and not gaming in general though, otherwise the humble dice may make it to the list.

@jayntampa: fair enough. But the same could be said about TI, which did it first and is worth more GEEK POINTS. My points stands stronger than ever.

@jayntampa: Battlefield 1942 was the most inspiring FPS since Quake I. SKATE is the best skateboarding game of all time.

@ErskinPig: LOL, did you stop wearing your Nirvana t-shirt(s) when you saw that jocks were wearing them? Did you cry when Jimmy Eat World* "sold out?"

(* insert your own indie-rawk / pun-crock sellout and run with the joke.)

I think allot of the people don't understand what the seal of approval fundamentally means.

On the Atari, any one could release any piece of crap they so pleased. There was no standards, and it was destroying the industry. People were constantly undercutting each other, in both price and quality, to such an extent that people just weren't paying for the games any more.

Nintendo's seal of approval isn't just saying "good game inside" but much much more. First of all, Nintendo manufactured ALL games for the system (with the exception of some Chinese knock offs, but its not like they were selling those in every k-mart country wide) and to have your game manufactured it had to go through a very strict approval process by the people at Nintendo. So that basically meant that no, you weren't going to have 8 progressively shittier versions of pacman like the Atari did.

The games release today on wii might not be anything special, but their quality is most definetly much higher than the majority of the crap that was released on the Atari during the early 80s.

FTFA:
To get a measure of how much journalism about games has changed, I asked Meier how long it was before he was interviewed by a woman. He laughed and said it was awhile and that it took at least until one of his colleagues became one. Became a woman, he meant? I thought that, but didn't ask, as the inside joke reverberated from Sid to his wife to another member of the Firaxis team. We moved on.

Sounds like somebody's never played Seven Cities of Gold, M.U.L.E., or even keeps current in her own field of journalism.

@tofoomeister: PWNT! I'd killed for M.U.L.E. on the DS!!1!!!1ONE1one!11!

@tofoomeister: His. His field of journalism. Unless Stephen is a she. That's what I get for being such an internet tough guy. =/

Sorry if this is a repeat.

@tofoomeister: His. His field of journalism. Unless "Stephen" is a she. That's what I get for being an internet tough guy.

"

In an ode to Nintendo's seal of quality, my 3 pics are:

1 - Power Glove (crappy gimmicky peripheral that attempted to blind people's judgement)

2 - Virtual Boy (crappy gimmicky console that just blnded)

3 - Wii (the crappy gimmicky peripheral that blinded people to the fact that they would never make more than 5 good games that actually sold)

Sincerely,
A bored Wii owner "

-Quoted for being lame.

Greatest innovation? Sid Meier himself. Let's give it up for his parents!