The 10 most influential video games as of 1985

I've been reworking my DDG grapher program - the one responsible for that chart in the Data Driven Gamer banner and others which I used to use more frequently in retrospectives. On the surface, it doesn't appear any different, but the data sources are normalized. On the downside, this means I had to discard about a hundred corrections that don't fit the format, but on the upside, I can run queries on it now! And I thought it might be interesting to query this - what games, measured by both breadth and depth of influence, have been the most influential?

I won't go into the exact formula, but it is points-based, and the main factors considered are - what games did it influence, how strong or direct are the lines of influence, and how important are they? Magnavox's Table Tennis, though it directly influenced Pong, didn't really impact anything else of importance, and it itself is therefore not ranked as highly as Pong. Pong, conversely, directly spawned hundreds of clones, but the vast majority are irrelevant today and do nothing for Pong's score.

You'll need to click on the charts in order to read them legibly, and then probably only if you have a pretty big monitor! You might even want to open them in a new tab.

 

10: Asteroids

 

 

Atari's most successful video game of all time plays like an update of their own Computer Space, which in turn drew heavily from SpaceWar, which I consider the first important video game, and in turn is the MRCA of that genre, and nearly anything that features 2D space physics.

Apart from the success of Asteroids steering Atari's own direction, and very likely giving vector games a lease on life, there have been dozens of Asteroids clones, and some of them by pretty notable developers. The Stamper Brothers debuted with Vortex in 1980 and led to Ultimate Play the Game, and Rare. Jordan Mechner's first game Deathbounce copied Asteroids, and if nothing else, Broderbund's rejection encouraged him to be more original. Sega's early output included an Asteroidslike Space Fury. And Defender, one of the best and most original arcade games of its era, undoubtedly carries Asteroids in its DNA with its controls, its focus on inertia and wrap-around geometry.

 

9: Pong

By some criteria, Pong is arguably the most influential video game of all time. It's not the first by any reasonable definition, but it proved the industry was commercially viable, and in the earliest years of it, one could say the industry was Pong.

Other games had longer-lasting influence in terms of gameplay mechanics; we don't see all that many Ponglikes past 1980, but before that, Pong launched Atari, where its rebound mechanics would be seen again in games like Breakout and Combat, and hundreds of adaptations and clones, including Sega's Pongtron and Nintendo's Color TV-Game series.

 

8: Space Panic

Described by Chris Crawford as the first ever platform game, Space Panic isn't anywhere near as famous as Asteroids or Pong, and in my estimation, it isn't very good, but pioneering gameplay elements still in use today makes it more influential than either by my metrics.

The ladder-based platform traversal and trap'em up mechanics launched Broderbund into the Apple II era with its weirdly successful Apple Panic and came full circle with the smash hit Lode Runner. Universal themselves would also come full circle, releasing the far superior Mr. Do's Castle in Space Panic's image after years of uninspired shooters. Other notable games made in its image include BurgerTime, Floppy Frenzy, and very possibly another.

 

7. Scramble

Here, we're starting to enter the realm of concrete genre forerunners. Space Panic is a bit, well, alien to the modern concept of a 2D platformer, lacking even a jump mechanic. Konami's Scramble has some quirks that are foreign to the scrolling shmup formula, an arcade mainstay, but it is unmistakably part of that clade. It's these quirks, like bombs, emphasis on terrain, and fuel pickups which help us identify its direct descendants, and few are more direct than Konami's own Gradius, which had to be removed from the graph to keep it readable. Universal's Cosmic Avenger, SNK's Vanguard, and Anco's Cavern Fighter & Skramble copy it unapologetically.

Others take it in some interesting directions; Irem's Moon Patrol is, in my mind, very clearly a Scramble inversion that places the ship on the ground and swaps your bombs for SAM rockets. Alpha Denshi's surreal Jump Bug, also removed from the graph, is said to be the first sidescrolling platformer, but being a multistage autoscroller that runs on Galaxian hardware, I'm pretty sure it owes something to Scramble. Namco's Xevious undoubtedly took direction from it, featuring the same forward-firing guns and surface-targeting bombs but translated to a now-ubiquitous vertically scrolling format. Sega's Zaxxon goes in an even more daring direction, albeit a dead-end one, with a 3D axonometric perspective, which funnily enough winds up feeling more Scramble-like than some of its 2D descendants.

 

6. Donkey Kong

 

A game both massively successful and massively influential, Donkey Kong established Nintendo's dominance and defined platforming for years to come, especially on personal computers where smooth sidescrolling capabilities just weren't ready yet. Atari games Miner 2049er, Jumpman, and Bruce Lee are obvious descendants, as is Electronic Arts' Hard Hat Mack, and a whole bunch of ZX Spectrum platformers, starting with Chuckie Egg.

 

5. Colossal Cave Adventure

Not many games have an entire genre named after them, let alone a mainstream one, but this is the game that adventures get their namesake from. No text adventure but the earliest and/or most obscure have not been influenced by Don Woods' Adventure. Adventureland, a 16KB BASIC reduction was the first, we see multiple points of entry into the catalogs of Infocom and especially Sierra On-Line, and we're by no means done seeing its influence in this blog, even as graphic adventures start becoming viable enough to make text adventures commercially obsolete. Rogue, another, nicher game lending its namesake to a genre is known to have been influenced too, as is Atari's Adventure.

 

4. Breakout

We're reaching the point where I need to really start pruning back items from the graph to keep it from being unreadably cluttered. Several branches are omitted entirely.

Breakout was the first DDG whale, and even more so than Pong, it seems like every Japanese developer of the era, big or small, got their start with a Breakout clone. Sunsoft, Namco, Konami, SNK, Sega, Nintendo, Universal, Irem, you name it. Atari themselves would expand on the formula with Avalanche and Super Breakout, which influenced other games in turn, notably Activision's Kaboom, and we're not done with Breakout clones yet.

Breakout also steered the direction of the Apple ]['s hardware and firmware capabilities to some extent, as designer Steve Wozniak wished to recreate it. It also is known to have been a direct influence on one of the most significant video games of all time.

 

3. Pac-Man

Everyone knows Pac-Man, right? It's only the most profitable arcade game franchise of all time. Like Breakout, Pac-Man has an obscene number of imitators, but if Breakout clones were almost universally unimaginatively derivative, Pac-Man had a refreshingly diverse spawn of games that were clearly following in its footsteps, but also distinguished themselves in a variety of interesting ways. Oil's Well had its break-neck pace and pipeline-laying gimmick. Lock 'n Chase had its maze-reconfiguring barriers and a layer of strategy that came with them. Lady Bug had revolving doors and a pinball-inspired scoring element. Blueprint (again with the Stampers!) had its machine assembling and that bizarre, googly-eye-filled aesthetic that Rare would be known for. Bomb Jack took Pac-Man's scoring system and developed it into an intricate and complex system that challenged you to navigate its bomb-filled stages with precision and grace. And, of course, Midway's Ms. Pac-Man and Pac-Man Junior took the formula in their own distinct directions without overcomplicating its purity.

Namco's own Tower of Druaga would also springboard off Pac-Man's mazes and powerups to inspire a whole new aspect of gaming, but we won't be seeing that come into its own for quite some time.

 

2. Galaxian

 

With its colorful graphics and its comparatively elaborate attack formations, Galaxian might be an iterative improvement on Space Invaders, but enough of one that it quickly became the new go-to title to clone, both for the arcade industry and for bedroom micro programmers. Which leads right into our #1,

 

1. Space Invaders

 

Come on, you had to know this would be #1. Even in the brief few years it took for Galaxian to replace Space Invaders as the new standard, Space Invaders had spread its influence far and wide and at a pace faster than Breakout before it could dream of. Companies that copied Breakout now copied Space Invaders. Companies that didn't exist before copied Space Invaders. And in the years following Galaxian, the industry had gotten mature and diverse enough that blatant copying was beginning to get slightly blasé.

Space Invaders permanently affected the direction of video gaming, perfected the mechanic of "shoot things with your laser," introduced round-based difficulty curves, and to this day there is virtually no action game which can't be traced back to Space Invaders in some manner.

I expect that as my master graph continues to grow into 1986 and beyond, many of the games on this top ten will lose rank, especially Galaxian. But not Space Invaders. I've argued that Space Invaders' importance is often exaggerated, but never that it isn't the most influential game of all time.