Influential Games

I just read IGN's article on what they believe are the top ten games that influenced where the industry is today (http://au.games.ign.com/articles/840/840621p1.html). A good read and it got me thinking, not so much about what games influence the industry, but about what games influenced me specifically.

I've been playing games since we got our first PC (I remember being the envy of my class when I was the first person to get a computer at home). Then it started with the demos and text based games. There were a couple that I don't remember the names of that was simply white text on a black screen, story based things. I didn't get very far then as my seven year old vocabulary wasn't wide enough to come up with enough synonyms to say what I wanted to even if my imagination was vivid enough to picture the whole world as described in surprising clarity. One I do remember the name of that had some visual elements to it was Hugo's Haunted House. I loved that game and even though I don't think I ever finished it (or the two that followed) the challenge of figuring out first what needed to be done and then articulate it in a way that the game understood was fun, even if the stories were a little shallow most of the time.

I also enjoyed playing platform games like Jazz Jack Rabbit, Jill of the Jungle, Wacky Wheels, and Commander Keen. All of these were demos, installed by floppy disk and run either with MS DOS or Windows 3.1. I believe I finished all the levels for each of those games several times over, but was never really aware that by buying the full version I could play more, a fact I am sure my parents were glad I never realized.

Then we come to the first series of games that had the biggest impact on what I now enjoy playing. The Quest for Glory series. Created by Sierra and so full of bugs they were rendered near impossible to complete (at least until the rise of walkthroughs on the internet with bug work-arounds). In these games the player navigated a fantasy world through a nameless hero (or hero-wanna-be in the first one), saving before doing anything or going anywhere and dying in the most ridiculous ways (my favourite will always be when using a lockpick on yourself when attempting to make the 'thief sign' you end up sticking the lockpick up your nose and you have a chance of either cleaning out your nasal passages, or dying by sticking the pick too high and into your brain). It started (at least in my books) the whole fighter/mage/thief class choice in adventure/role playing games and even now the games I most enjoy follow these three class specs at least to some extent. Through the help of walkthroughs and bug work-arounds I managed to finish games 1-3 when I was older, but I have never yet completed the fourth or fifth games because of the bugs.

I can't mention personal influential games without mentioning Age of Empires (number two mostly). I remember spending many hours with my brother and father trying to set up a local LAN to play a game for half an hour before giving up (I tended to lose a lot against those two). Always interested in history, the ability to play history was fantastic to me and more than defeating my enemy I loved just creating sprawling civilizations.

That kind of leads on to the Stronghold series for the same reasons. Only this time it was harder to create a thriving economy and city without fighting as it was a lot more involved. I was, however, disappointed when my name was not on the list of those the narrator greets by name when opening the game (as opposed to my father and brother, with very medieval-esque names of Peter and William).

Finally comes 2002. Year of Morrowind and full game immersion. To date I have never come across another game where I could start playing first thing in the morning and the next thing I realize it's dark outside (World of Warcraft addiction doesn't count, that was addicting for a whole other reason, which I'll no doubt cover in this blog at some point since game addiction is particularly fascinating to me). True, I restarted it several times over till I found the kind of character class that was just right, but once I got into it I could not seem to get it out of my mind. For a while the guy I was dating at the time and I would copy our save games on to a floppy disk and go around each other's houses and continue playing, watching each other play (yeah we both enjoyed watching game play as much as playing it). Until the save games became too large for floppy disks. Then we went back to normal boyfriend x girlfriend stuff ;) Even now I have not finished all the side quests available, though I have recently reinstalled it and all the expansions, as well as upgrading the game with the Morrowind Overhurl mod and a few others to add to the gameplay experience. Let's see if I can finish those quests this time :)

Now, I'm looking forward to Skyrim (as if that wasn't obvious by now) with high expectations of it having the same immersiveness that Morrowind had but Oblivion lacked (even if Oblivion was very pretty).