Written by Citizen Alpha Saturday, 20 March 2010 01:52

Every once in a while a game comes out and completely flies under the radar. You spend dozens of hours playing it then when you go to ask your friends about it or look up more information on it you find that it’s no where near as popular as you suspected while playing it. Here’s a list of four ground breaking games that not just flew under the radar because of greatness, but they even went as far as to inventing genres.

Zork

What is it?

Zork is the granddaddy of my list here and is the brain child of those geniuses over at MIT. Zork was nerd slang for an unfinished program and when the game was completed it was renamed to Dungeons however the name Zork stuck. The original Zork was a text based adventure/RPG game where the user would type in specific commands to a text parser, or command line, to control the "player character". The series went on to produce many sequels and even a series of books.

Why have you never heard of it?

The first iterations of the text based game where created in 1977 and if you were old enough to play and remember this game people probably shout "OMG Zombie!" when you walk around in public. I don’t think anyone would want to go back to playing a text based game in this manner unless it was some sort of cruel joke. Zork changed with the times and eventually came out on CD-ROM with some hammy live action actors pushing plot into your brains while you solved puzzles.

Why is it important?

Zork’s gameplay spawned the adventure games, hokey live action puzzle games, and took fantasy off the tabletops and put it on a computer screen keeping anti-social nerds out of the sun and in their basements for decades to come. Since Zork spawned so many genres and pretty much floated between them, it quickly got lost in the shuffle of games that were specializing.

Castle Wolfenstein

What is it?

It’s a side scrolling stealth game where the player attempted to steal Nazi plans and escape alive under a certain time limit. Anyone with a gaming background probably had to read that last sentence twice because your images of Wolfenstein are all based on the first person shooter series that practically invented the genre. You’re partially correct. If Wolfenstein 3D is the grandfather of first person shooters then this is that guys funny uncle. The series featured another side scrolling game with the purpose of assassinating Hitler then evolved into the first person shooter and its subsequent sequels you now know today.

Why have you never heard of it?

The series took a complete U-turn at the second game. It would be like if you played football then changed all the rules, equipment, and field into tennis but still called it football. This U-Turn in development somehow managed to erase any previous knowledge of its 2D predecessors.

Why is it important?

While the gameplay and graphics aspects of this game are rather unremarkable it did have two key factors making it important. It popularized the use of digitized voices in games and poured the foundation for Wolfenstein 3D, the original first person shooter. Some may argue that this game isn’t very important at all in the scheme of things, that first person shooters would have cropped up without this game, but this was the game that caused that butterfly affect.

Dune II

What is it?

Dune is a real time strategy game with a top down isometric view based in the popular science fiction universe of the same name. Players would take command of one of three "houses" to battle other armies for the planets natural resource, spice. The player would harvest this spice for money and then build military units to eradicate other armies. If you think this game concept has been done to death, well um, guess who made it popular? The game did have a few unsuccessful sequels however the tiny gaming outfit Westwood Studios had more success with its other series Command and Conquer which pilfered the best concepts of Dune II but with a different and original setting.

Why have you never heard of it?

The Command and Conquer series greatly out shined its spiritual predecessor Dune II and Dune II never quite made it out of that shadow. Then to further bury it in obscurity the development giant Electronic Arts ate up Westwood and its associated franchises. It’s also, technically not the very first real time strategy game, not by a long shot.

Why is it important?

Dune II introduced a lot of features that everyone now associates with real time strategy games. A campaign map, winning conditions, unique races, resource gathering, etc was all introduced in this game. Real time strategy before Dune II was primarily a rock paper scissors style game based in real time.

Meridian 59

What is it?

Way back in 1996 the now dead 3DO studios launched the world’s first massive multiplayer online roleplaying game. The game lacked a lot of common features of its successors but it was quite ahead of its time, especially being a 3D game at the time when those types of games were complicated without being multiplayer. Meridian 59 is primarily player driven with a heavy focus on Player versus Player combat. The game still exists today under a new owner and has a cult following of players that still dish out $10 a month to play on its official servers.

Why have you never heard of it?

A lot boils down to marketing, technology, and was quickly out shined by Ultima Online. While Meridian 59 did boast 3D graphics, 3D games were advancing by leaps and bounds. The inability to jump to do things in the 3D environment that Meridian 59 offered, players found themselves quite limited. Coding up a massive project utilizing an emerging technology has its complications and development time hurt this one pretty bad because its game engine was obsolete three months after it was put out. Ultima Online did a lot better utilizing an older gaming platform and focusing on depth.

---

Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites