Doom dominated unlike any other PC game before it. Developed by id Software, this seminal first-person shooter defined the genre from that point forward, and any competitors to come in the years after were simply labeled as “Doom clones”. A technical marvel and true...

Before John Carmack, Tom Hall, and John Romero unleashed the blistering corridors of Wolfenstein, they cut their teeth on smaller 3-D experiments: Hovertank 3-D for DOS and the Apple II’s Catacomb 3-D, the latter running on an embryonic version of the engine that...

Beat-em-ups, also known as belt scroll action games in Japan, were all the rage in the 1980s and 1990s in arcades. Players controlled beefy characters who pummeled their way through thugs of a dubious nature with their fists, or a special weapon if they were lucky,...

Those two epic words helped launch the work of Ed Boon, John Tobias, and the rest of the team behind Mortal Kombat in pop culture lore forever. It’s also made it a video game series that essentially always comes back refreshed and inviting, after over 30 years of...

By far the best and most influential of these is Westwood Studios’ Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty from 1992, a landmark Real Time Strategy (RTS) game that not only laid the way for Command & Conquer, but also for the whole genre. Of course, Dune II wasn’t the...

In the 1990's Nintendo had a small part thanks to Super Mario Bros. Sega, who had seen decent success with their own home consoles, decided to challenge Nintendo, hoping to grab their slice of the profit pie. To do so, they created Sonic the Hedgehog, an ambitious...

A proper sequel to their first 1v1 arcade fighting game. Video game designer Yoshiki Okamoto once revealed, “The basic idea at Capcom was to revive Street Fighter (Capcom, 1987), a good game concept, to make it a better-playing arcade game.” And, WOW, did they ever...

In 1984, game design found  Bungeling Bay, he was having more fun making the levels than playing the game. This was the seed that eventually bloomed into the granddaddy of simulation games, SimCity. As the game took shape, one of the key aspects Will brought was the...

Gamers wouldn’t know which sequence they’d play until it began, and the unveiled info was only useful after a lost life returned them to the menu. By comparison, the freedom of choice in Mega Man allowed struggling players the opportunity to gain an advantage by...

This could have safely guessed that Tetris (Alexey Pajitnov, 1988) would appear in our list of The 50 Most Influential Video Games Ever. There’s a simple reason for this… Tetris is the single greatest video game ever created… No caveats. No clarifications. No...

The Legend of Zelda represents, for many gamers, the birth of what is arguably the greatest, and most influential, action-adventure franchise of all time. Released early in the Nintendo Entertainment System’s lifecycle, it arrived during a formative moment when...

Before RPGs,  1986,to strong narrative. Sir-Tech’s Wizardry from 1981 dumped players into a massive 10-floor dungeon with little more than a sentence of congratulatory text for beating the game. The first Ultima came out the same year and switched players from a...

I remember playing a ton of Gauntlet and gathering friends at the Fun Factory arcade in Valley West Mall. This game couldn’t really be played competitively against one another, since you all shared the mission of surviving long enough to make it through the level....