Top 5 Underappreciated Innovators

Street Fighter II breathed new life into the mano-a-mano fighting game, but Mortal Kombat gave us the ability to rub some salt in the wounds of the defeated with its hilariously gory fatalities. It wasn’t the first one-on-one fighting game to dance in a puddle of blood and organs, however — that title goes to Time Killers, which was full of splatter, limb severing, and decapitation just before MK started freaking out parents. It failed to catch on, mostly on account of it looking and playing pretty much like crap.

When we think “open world” or “sandbox” game, our minds usually turn to GTA III. Hell, to a certain extent, those phrases have been narrowed from their original meaning to something more like “a game where you run around in a city, steal cars, and mess up pedestrians.” The first game with sandboxy stuff was maybe Elite, but the originator of the “city you can wander around in and do a bunch of stuff” genre was probably Shenmue. On the downside, a lot of what you could do was pretty mundane: I remember walking to my job running a forklift, moving boxes around all day, playing a bit of Space Harrier in the arcade on the way home, feeding my cat, and finally having a tearful cut-scene with the girlfriend before finally getting home. Then I played Shenmue to unwind.

You’ve got a little imaginary dollhouse with a tiny person living inside, eating, sleeping, and watching TV while you watch his exploits and keep track of his needs. Sound familiar? One of the ideas for a sequel to Little Computer People was to have a whole apartment complex full of LCPs that would interact with each other and form relationships, though the idea never saw development. At the time, Activision was discouraging the sequel-ing of its products, and the idea was eventually discarded. It wasn’t until years later that Wil Wright would come upon almost the exact same concept and run with it all the way to the bank. While The Sims almost certainly wasn’t inspired by Little Computer People or its imagined sequel, it’s an interesting case of convergent evolution.

Wolfenstein 3D and Doom were the first FPS games most of us played. It’s easy to forget, but there was a time when those games were impressive as hell in their realism. The weird thing is that first-person shooters were among the first videogames ever made. Maze War was a popular game among people with access to powerful computers way back in 1973, and it had already laid down the basics of running around a maze and shooting other people for points. Later incarnations included MIDI Maze and Faceball, but the style never caught on until there were semi-realistic Nazis and demons involved.

Wolfenstein does have a claim on originating at least one genre, though it was way back in 1981. The original Castle Wolfenstein featured such things as avoiding the line-of-sight of your enemies, taking care not to alert other guards with noises, and pilfering a uniform to blend in. It was pretty much the prototype for gameplay that would later appear in Metal Gear and finally reach great popularity with Metal Gear Solid and Thief.