Kotaku 
Enter your username and password.
Denver, 9:45 AM
Sat Nov 21
44 posts in the last 24 hours
Tip us: tips@kotaku.com
Editor-In-Chief:
Brian Crecente
Email | AIM | Twitter
Deputy Editor:
Stephen Totilo
Email | AIM | Twitter
Senior Editor:
Michael McWhertor
Email | AIM | Twitter
Senior Contributing Editor, Japan:
Brian Ashcraft
Email | AIM | Twitter
Contributing Editor, East Coast:
Michael Fahey
Email | AIM | Twitter
Contributing Editor, Oceania:
Luke Plunkett
Email | AIM | Twitter
Contributing Editor, Weekends:
Owen Good
Email | AIM | Twitter
Correspondent, San Francisco:
AJ Glasser
Email | AIM | Twitter
Columnist:
Leigh Alexander
Columnist:
Tim Rogers
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
10/23/09
10/23/09
10/23/09
10/23/09
super Metroid fits. #lionheadstudios
10/23/09
10/29/09
notoriousEIC and Dark_Mirage all explain my viewpoint better than me anyway. :D
10/23/09
Halo, did not, bring FPS games, to consoles, you dumb bastard. Also being limited to a few weapons and being able to regenerate has been around for SO long.
I've never even heard of RTS dune 2 thinking about it. And besides that, Lemmings came first. More of a puzzle RTS, but there you go. (I'm being really nitpicky I know, I do not like the dude.)
Super Mario 64? Well its hard to argue with him... but what the hell. Super mario RPG was basically an open world too if you want to take it from that point of view.
World of warcraft did not. NOT. use carrot dangling first. For christs sake, what about every other MMO that came first? Even the pseudo ones, like Diablo 2. Ragnarok online, FF13, and other MMORPG's where the fun is at the end of the game all come to mind anyway.
Christ.
If I had to make my own list to counteract this stupidity, I'd put Metroid, THE REAL FIRST GAME TO HAVE AN ICONIC FEMALE CHARACTER AS THE MAIN PERSON. Also, Metroid prime, as a nice example of an FPS that came before halo.
Donkey Kong Country, for dropping jaws with graphics, and absolutely kicking ass in the music department.
Sonic the Hedgehog, for proving SPEED is the way to go.
Kid Icarus, for setting an epic standard in platforming (and fucking difficult too).
And lets go with earthbound, for its messed up humor, amusing story, and well once again music that I could listen to forever. And plan to actually.
Wall of text, sorry guys but godamn. The idiocy.
10/23/09
10/23/09
10/23/09
10/23/09
Also, those things were around before Halo, but once again they weren't common until Halo popularized it. Someone doesn't need to do something first to be revolutionary, they just need to do it well enough that it catches on. #lionheadstudios
10/23/09
Halo 1 actually came out a year before it. So how about you think before you call someone an idiot, because you are doing the exact same thing. #lionheadstudios
10/24/09
10/24/09
10/25/09
10/23/09
(Edit: Okay, I only feel *kinda* bad for him.)
10/23/09
Mario 64 was awesome, but I'm not sure I'd credit it for having 3d platforming, but maybe for the open world aspect of it.
Halo, again, good game but one of the top 5 revolutionary games in the last 20 years? No, it was incredibly popular and is likely a cause of the console FPS overload, but it was about as creative and revolutionary as a Blizzard game.
Similar problem with his reasoning for WoW. Was an awesome game in vanilla & TBC, most popular MMO ever, but there's no way you can credit WoW with the carrot on a stick thing. Other MMOs existed before WoW, namely Everquest..
I don't hate any of the games he chose, but they don't all fit on this list. In some cases, the real revolutionary games are the less successful ones, and then someone takes those ideas and puts it together in a better way. #lionheadstudios
10/23/09
Revolution brings change, not originality. You've mixed up revolutionary with originality. Halo did that.
Granted, I would have listed Doom, seeing as it really established the shooter genre, but he made a valid point. #lionheadstudios
10/23/09
@DocSeuss: Agree to disagree I suppose. Halo did almost every aspect of a fun, easy fps very well, probably better than any predecessor. Just not all that revolutionary for me. Btw, that word can also be used to mean radically new or innovative. #lionheadstudios
10/23/09
Tomb Raider? Revolutionary by having a disproportionate woman as the star? Samus is classy and somebody people can respect. #lionheadstudios
10/23/09
Metroid the entire game. It might as well be a robot or anyone in that armor. Not until the end, do you find out it's a woman. Wow 3 second shot of a woman. Revolutionary, lol. #lionheadstudios
10/23/09
Mario 64 is the only thing on that list I absolutely wouldn't question. #lionheadstudios
10/23/09
10/23/09
Well, I guess that *would* fit this list. #lionheadstudios
10/23/09
10/23/09
Yes, but Goldeneye's controls weren't fully realized. If the game had come in the Dual Analog era then I would agree as well. Like it or hate it, Halo itself is a extremely strong brand in gaming more so than Bond. (You can thank EA for destroying what RARE built up for gaming) #lionheadstudios
10/23/09
Seriously, get your evil Empire right, EA is now the Rebellion and Activision is the Empire. #lionheadstudios
10/23/09
10/23/09
"Beginning in 1999, Electronic Arts held the exclusive rights to develop games based on the official James Bond films."
They were the first to ruin it actually after Goldeneye. That is what I was talking about.
[en.wikipedia.org] #lionheadstudios
10/23/09
10/23/09
10/23/09
Personally, I believe Doom Custom Edition (1996) on PlayStation was revolutionary. :) (Man, I enjoyed that.)
10/27/09
10/27/09
We can agree to disagree. Goldeneye is long forgotten by me. #lionheadstudios
10/27/09
10/23/09
...Then I realized that he's not Dan Greenawalt from Turn 10. #lionheadstudios
10/23/09
10/23/09
10/23/09
Otherwise i largely agree. Halo is a good choice and not just because i love it. As much as i despise WOW and the general MMO culture i have to agree with that. I think Pokemon is missing, that's an incredibly important game in the way it really pushed handheld gaming into the mainstream. It also bred social gaming. My earliest social gaming moments where when friends would trade and battle pokemon on the Gameboy colour.
10/23/09
10/23/09
10/23/09
• The RTS Dune 2: never played it, so can't comment
• Super Mario 64: DEFINETELY
• Tomb Raider: Has this guy never heard of Metroid?
• Halo: Has this guy never heard of Goldeneye?
• World of Warcraft: This made MMOs uber popular among the masses, so I'll have to agree
But one GLARING ommission: WHERE THE HELL IS SUPER MARIO BROS? That is the most iconic game of all time, and for good reason. #lionheadstudios
10/23/09
10/23/09
Free-roaming kinda like GTA? I also take it he's never played Syndicate or Syndicate Wars...silly man. #lionheadstudios
10/23/09
10/23/09
10/23/09
"Free-roaming kinda like GTA? I also take it he's never played Syndicate or Syndicate Wars...silly man"
I hope you are joking. PM's company Bullfrog made those games. #lionheadstudios
10/23/09
10/23/09
10/23/09
10/23/09
10/23/09
10/23/09
10/23/09
10/23/09
10/23/09
10/23/09
10/23/09
10/23/09
Pokemon. (No, really. Hear me out.)
Pokemon pioneered the concept of meta-interactivity. There was the realm of the game on the cart, and there was the realm of everyone else you knew with that cart; certain resources were available in each. It was like a kind of proto-ARG in that other players in the real world now had an in-game context, and could be dealt with to the mutual benefit of both. Just think of how many games of its era tried to shoehorn in collection mechanics spread out over two titles. (Then think of how many did it well.) Everyone from Megaman to Bomberman tried it, but the only game that came close to Pokemon in its execution of the idea was, of course, Animal Crossing.
You could play Animal Crossing in a bubble, cut off from human contact, and enjoy it. Or you could visit another player's town and drop off some things and steal a plant or townsperson, creating exactly this kind of game-outside-the-game interaction. Even without physical contact, goods could be mailed from one game to another, bringing an element of online communication and resource-sharing to the conspicuously offline GameCube. #lionheadstudios
10/23/09
For example, you can get into IV/EV training, setting up roles based on a Pokemon's nature and building a strategy on almost a move for move basis...
Or you can play with a larger majority of people at a much more shallower level and still likely have just as much success. #lionheadstudios
10/23/09
Example - Look at Mario games. Also, Smash Bros. Punch Out. And Pokemon too. #lionheadstudios
10/23/09
Then again it was a hell of a time sink for all of us in this generation. #lionheadstudios
10/23/09
@Shinkirou: Your comment about Pokemon being "toned down" supports the cases of the above posters. It looks simple, and you can engage the game on that level of simplicity, but if you dig deeper there's a whole new layer of mechanics that the game never really explains, but is a sort of "secret handshake" among those who pay enough attention to it.
Pokemon is, taken on its face, a basic, done-before RPG. Two people playing Pokemon, though, can engage the game in ways that had never been seen before. And that's revolutionary. #lionheadstudios
10/23/09
Halo truly was "combat evolved" on consoles.
/obligatoryfanpost #lionheadstudios
10/23/09
10/23/09
The problem is the N64 didn't have it. That's a pretty big if. #lionheadstudios
10/23/09
IIRC, Goldeneye sold over 5 million copies. It would eventually be outsold by Halo, but not by a lot. Halo was not the revolution. More like a constitutional convention, really. #lionheadstudios
10/23/09
10/23/09
Halo is what really made FPS' viable on consoles, and you'd be hard pressed to argue that.
10/23/09
Halo is what really made FPS' viable on consoles, and you'd be hard pressed to deny that. #lionheadstudios
10/23/09
It's hard to argue with that.
Now, regarding Tomb Raider ... the game completely changed the video game industry. It created a new genre of environmental exploration that just simply had not existed at such a level before. It opened the way for games like the 3D Prince of Persia series, Assassin's Creed, and a lot of 3rd person shooters. It was a game changer. The fact that it was advertised as a strong female lead was a significant change as well.
Sure, Samus was already a classic by then (along with other great female characters on PC, etc), but Nintendo sure as heck never advertised the game with her ... in fact, they led most people to believe it was a man. It was only AFTER Lara Croft, that they were willing to lead with Samus as a woman rather than a suit.
This doesn't degrade Samus' position as a video game heroine, people shouldn't get so angry about that ... Metroid created it's own genre, too. #lionheadstudios
10/23/09
10/23/09
@Paradox Viper: That's the same with male leads, as well ... they're often full of huge muscles, with insane proportions. It's the nature of media, unfortunately. The thing is, though, although the character was clearly exaggerated, they're never pushed jiggle or sexual situations -- she's always been in control of the situation.
However, overall, I can't really disagree that looking back, they were pandering a bit ... but, look at the market. I do know a lot of women from that time that got into games because of that (I was running a video game store at the time).
So, to sum up, I don't disagree with your statement, but I think that it was a step in the right direction. #lionheadstudios