Everyone Has Their Own Greatest-Games List — However You Rank Them, It's All One History of Video Games (Part 2)

This art form has existed for only about 50 years, but it has moved at extraordinary speed, and it has all but redefined entertainment.

At the end of the previous piece, we said that Nintendo and its Famicom marked the beginning of the modern video game industry.

From then on, video games stopped advancing as slowly as they had in their first two decades. Separating hardware from software brought specialization, computing technology raced ahead, and systems of commercial cooperation matured. In the era that followed, it became hard to let one or two games stand in for the history of a whole period.

To put it in a cliché: what came next was an age when a hundred flowers bloomed.

The Last Fifteen Years of the Last Century: A Home Console Market Ruled by Japan

Those flowers bloomed first in Japan.

Pick up almost any list of the greatest games in history and you can guess the result without reading it: Japanese titles take more than half the top ten, and by company, Nintendo holds the most spots.

Because the North American console market had collapsed, Japanese games filled the world's view for a long stretch, from 1985 to 2000. Nintendo, Sega, Enix, Namco, Konami, Capcom, Square, Koei — in that era, Japan was home to the world's most famous group of game developers. Using Nintendo's consoles as their platform, they made one classic after another.

That monopoly could not last, of course. Sega and Sony each became Nintendo's rival in turn. Sega had begun releasing consoles even before the Famicom came out, and Sony launched its first console in 1994: the PlayStation.

Competition brought prosperity. In the 1990s, Japanese games held roughly 70% of the global games market; for that whole stretch, anyone who bought or played a console inevitably became a consumer of Japanese-style games.

It was also an era when classic games burst out, and the titles that hold a place in gaming history all came from that small island nation:

In action-adventure games, Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda arrived in 1986. It gathered puzzle-solving, role-playing and action elements together, and later became one of Nintendo's three signature franchises. It is regarded as a landmark action role-playing game: it has no numerical leveling system, yet players can solve all kinds of problems through their own skill and by swapping the character's equipment.

In fighting games, Capcom's 1991 arcade release Street Fighter II redefined the genre. It was neither the first fighting game nor the first one-on-one fighting game, but every fighting game today follows the pattern it set: sharper graphics and more precise controls, the system of moves, charge attacks and combos, and player-versus-player matches all come from this one title. It even revived the sagging arcade market for a time — after arcade gaming's golden age passed in 1982, it became the best-selling arcade game ever, at 2 million units.

In music games, the PlayStation got the first rhythm game in the modern sense in 1996: PaRappa the Rapper. Its hero — a dog in hip-hop pants — plus a cast of odd characters and a rap-style soundtrack made it wildly addictive. Two years later, Dance Dance Revolution, the dance-mat game you have probably seen, swept through Japanese arcades. Plenty of players are still waiting for a remaster of PaRappa the Rapper 2, and you can of course still find dance machines in arcades.

The Final Fantasy series became the most influential Japanese role-playing franchise. Launched in 1987, it did not stay penned inside Japan the way Dragon Quest, the series that founded the Japanese RPG, did.

Final Fantasy VII in particular, released in 1997 when 3D graphics had only just reached games, looked astonishing to players of that era — modern and steampunk at once. Add the character work, the voice acting, the cutscenes, and the way in-game graphics and cinematics interwove to carry the story, and the game came closer, in a sense, to a film. Edge, the West's most famous games magazine, praised it this way: "'Interactive movie' has long been an insult to anyone who cares about gameplay; but Final Fantasy VII did more to be like a movie than any other game, and succeeded in the end."

At Sony's PlayStation press conference during last year's E3, the moment a high-definition remake of Final Fantasy VII was announced, the whole world erupted. You can watch here how players reacted to the news, and see how much this game matters.

Once you talk about 3D, you cannot leave out Nintendo's Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. As Nintendo's first step into the 3D era, 1996's Super Mario 64 was groundbreaking in every respect — its open 3D world, its handling of a non-fixed camera, and the feel of its controls.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, from 1998, carried over the design standards of its predecessor and added finely rendered facial expressions, along with a targeting feature that let players lock the camera onto an object — a solution many later 3D games would adopt. On the value of these two games, Grand Theft Auto producer Dan Houser put it this way: "Anyone who makes a 3D game and claims not to have drawn on Super Mario 64 or The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is lying."

Beyond those: the founder of the stealth genre, the Metal Gear series (1987); the Pokémon series on the Game Boy handheld (1996); and Shenmue (1999), the first game to carry the concept of an open world and a sandbox — all were born in that same fifteen-year span.

Only after the turn of the century did that change, as Microsoft's Xbox forced its way into the market and large numbers of technical staff moved toward the West, where budgets were bigger and operations more commercial. The Japanese game industry, which had never held a technological advantage and had grown complacent and rigid on the strength of its past success, gradually lost its old standing.

Doom and Red Alert: Innovation That Belonged to the West

The personal-computer wave that IBM set off began in 1987, but PC gaming had a hard time in that era because Nintendo's NES dominated so completely. A 1993 data report showed the console games market was 12 times the size of the PC games market.

But PC gaming did not disappear. Many important PC games were born in the 1990s too. The era opened with 1989's SimCity and 1991's Civilization, which founded the simulation genre and the 4X (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) turn-based strategy genre respectively.

That is because a PC could do many things a console could not — the mouse, for one.

The commercial mouse, popularized by the Mac in 1981, could do what a console controller could not: position precisely, select quickly, and switch more easily to a top-down, god's-eye view. After Logitech set the standard for the first mechanical mouse in 1983, the gap between console and PC controls in this respect kept widening.

Even today, even though Xbox — backed by Microsoft's formidable engineering — has produced a controller with an outstanding feel, a keyboard and mouse remain far handier than a console controller for shooters and strategy games. Few shooters today dare let console and PC players compete online, because it would be too unfair to the former. And you have never heard of anyone playing Warcraft or StarCraft with a controller, have you?

So it is not hard to see why the founders of the modern first-person shooter (FPS) and the real-time strategy game (RTS) both emerged in the West, and both on the PC.

In 1992, id Software built the first FPS in the modern sense: Wolfenstein 3D. Using perspective effects and changes in the size of on-screen objects, it achieved the look of a 3D first-person view with two-dimensional graphics, and with its fast action and its open-source philosophy it became "the godfather of 3D shooters."

Also in 1992, another DOS game, Dune II, laid down the concept of the real-time strategy game. Developed by the studio Westwood, it introduced the most basic elements of every later RTS: moving objects on screen with the mouse, gathering resources, and a fog-of-war system that players had to explore to lift.

After the pioneers came the heirs. For the first-person shooter, id Software went on to make Doom, which truly set off the FPS craze. Violence, gore and zombie-killing: this game laid humanity's destructive urges bare, and countless players were captivated.

Worse still, it offered networked multiplayer. Given how popular the game became, the network failures it caused are still told as legend. Hours after Doom was released, computing administrators at Carnegie Mellon University announced that the university's network was overloaded because of the game, ordered students to stop using its multiplayer feature, and cut off by force anyone caught doing so. Intel banned employees from playing Doom for the same reason. A computer-lab administrator at the University of Louisville simply wrote a program that deleted Doom from every machine in the lab.

After that, id Software made Quake, the first game with 3D models; Half-Life was then built on that game's engine; and Counter-Strike grew out of part of Half-Life's functionality. Generation after generation kept the FPS burning. Today, the "guns" in "cars, guns and balls" — the shorthand so often used for the Western gaming world — all trace back to Wolfenstein 3D.

The RTS baton passed to Westwood's Command & Conquer series. For players in China, its Red Alert games are nothing short of childhood tears, even though they were only a small branch of Command & Conquer. Entertainment Weekly wrote of the game at the time: "If you liked playing with toy soldiers as a kid, playing Command & Conquer is like stepping on a landmine and going straight to heaven." Units answered your orders with voice lines, and command flowed across the battlefield without a snag; the game felt exhilarating, and it sold 3 million copies.

More important still, Windows 95 was born in exactly that era. Its simpler interface let people work their PCs directly instead of typing DOS commands; with internet access built straight into the PC and automatic hardware detection and software installation, it lowered the barrier to using a computer — especially for games — by a wide margin.

Besides Command & Conquer, released mainly for Windows 95, a wave of PC games you will recognize all came out within a few short years: Blizzard's Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness and Diablo; Bullfrog's Theme Hospital; Ensemble Studios' Age of Empires; even the most classic entry in the Richman series, Richman 4, and the homegrown Chinese single-player game The Legend of Sword and Fairy 95.

That era was the golden age of PC gaming, with studios of every size testing what each genre could do on the computer. Since Japanese makers still held the console market, Western developers had little choice but to put more of their new work on the PC — and that, in the end, produced the great divide between Eastern and Western games.

Role-Playing Games: Japan and the West Diverge, Then Converge

Genres were not the only thing that diverged. The West's PC path and Japan's console path meant that even within a single genre their games looked very different — role-playing games (RPGs), for instance.

Even today, players still argue regularly over whether Japanese RPGs or Western RPGs are better.

Now that the line between the two has blurred, the question may no longer be worth asking. But trace the history and you can still see how role-playing games, one of the most important genres in gaming, went through many interesting changes because East and West had different cultures and different histories.

Role-playing is one of the most important and most classic genres, and its core idea is to let players inhabit a character and experience the game through them. Every game has some version of this element — in Super Mario you play as Mario — yet we never call such games role-playing games, because the core of their play is not the growth of the character you play.

Any player with a little knowledge of gaming history knows that the role-playing video game descends from a tabletop game, Dungeons & Dragons. If you have seen The Big Bang Theory, you may already have a sense of it: each person plays a character with particular strengths and particular weaknesses; under a fixed set of rules, the group cooperates and talks its way through a session, while dice simulate the probability and randomness of the real world. One player takes the role of Dungeon Master, who interprets the rules, describes what the players encounter, announces the results of their actions, and acts for all the non-player characters (NPCs).

First published in 1974, this tabletop game was every bit as complex as a computer game; in fact, you can think of the computer as taking over the job of that Dungeon Master. Many classic RPGs were built on its rules, such as BioWare's Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights.

Ultima — 《创世纪》 in Chinese, or "Genesis" — is the acknowledged ancestor of the modern RPG video game, and one of its developers, Richard Garriott, was one of the countless fans of the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop game. Wanting to play something similar on a computer, he released Akalabeth on the Apple II in 1979, then reworked it in 1981 into the Ultima series.

Before Ultima, plenty of video games had already been built on Dungeons & Dragons — pedit5, which appeared as early as 1975, among them. None of them influenced later games the way Ultima did.

First, Ultima introduced the visual idea of the "tile": compared with earlier games made purely of text and symbols, it used individual blocks of color to produce more complex, more colorful images while keeping file sizes small. It also brought a complete, complicated plot and warring factions — a story that mixed time travel with swords and sorcery — which by Ultima IV had grown to include extensive dialogue between the player and NPCs, and had created the RPG map convention still common today: on a main overworld map you can see icons for towns and dungeons, and walk up to an icon to enter a new map.

Add the elaborate class and ability system designed by another foundational series, Wizardry, and the origin and first golden age of the modern RPG clearly belonged to the West. But when the genre reached Japan, it ran into some trouble.

Games like Wizardry sold reasonably well and shaped later Japanese RPGs such as Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, yet they also drew criticism: "To many Japanese players, these games weren't as exciting as homegrown Japanese titles."

Remember that these Western RPGs all ran on computers, where you interacted by typing commands and dialogue on a keyboard — even to talk to an NPC or fight a battle. To Japanese players steeped in arcades and consoles, that delayed feedback was nowhere near as satisfying as an arcade or console joystick, and combined with a pile of complicated numbers, players did not buy in. Koei's Dragon and Princess, the first homegrown Japanese RPG built to the Western formula, and the games that followed it, made little impact.

So a "new" kind of RPG was born. It no longer asked players to set up an initial character and manage complex numerical progression; it handed you a largely fixed character from the start, whose skills and equipment were about all you could change. Pair that with Japan's bright, clean anime look rather than the West's dark and brooding one, and the Japanese role-playing game — the J-RPG — was born.

Among them, the Dragon Slayer series was the weighty culmination. Released in 1984, it is considered the first action role-playing game: players fought in real time, drawing on elements popular in Japanese arcade and console games at the time, and it introduced puzzle events built around items. That influenced The Legend of Zelda, one of Nintendo's most important games, released two years later.

The success of Dragon Slayer set off a boom in Japanese RPGs. Whether Dragon Quest, The Legend of Zelda or the later Final Fantasy, the Japanese RPG, distinct from the Western style, became one of the most important genres in Japanese gaming. But as the era moved on and consoles became Japan's mainstream platform, games first released on computers, such as Dragon Slayer, faded into obscurity, while The Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy rode the steady advance of console graphics and performance into lasting classics.

That is also why another genre descended from the RPG — the MMORPG, the massively multiplayer online role-playing game — was born on Western computers, which networked far better, rather than on consoles, which stayed cut off from the internet for so long. Sega did release the Mega Modem, a device for putting a console online, as early as 1990, but console networking never truly worked, right up until Sega's last console, the Dreamcast, arrived in 2000 and the company went bankrupt.

In the West, meanwhile, Diablo, which launched on the very last day of 1996, won considerable acclaim thanks to the multiplayer mode and Battle.net that Blizzard later built for it. That same year, Ultima Online, born out of the Ultima series, became the founding ancestor of the modern MMORPG. Whether you play World of Warcraft, Fantasy Westward Journey or Moonlight Blade today, all of them owe it their existence.

These days the line between the two genres keeps blurring. Japanese RPGs, for instance, used to be mostly turn-based, until Final Fantasy XII broke the rule; and Mass Effect inherited the distinctive cinematic storytelling that Final Fantasy VII pioneered.

StarCraft and MOBA: The Age of Esports

Just as role-playing games found new life in the twenty-first century through the MMORPG, the rise and fall of the real-time strategy game produced a concept that became the buzzword of the new century.

That concept was esports.

Esports traces back to Space Invaders and Pac-Man, an era when players competed by chasing high scores; later, fighting games like Street Fighter gave players a place to duel one another directly.

In the last decade of the twentieth century, a series of mature esports competitions was founded, such as the Cyberathlete Professional League, where players of that era tested themselves against each other in Quake, Counter-Strike and Warcraft II.

But the esports we know best has to start with StarCraft.

Released in 1998 by Blizzard Entertainment, StarCraft pushed esports to a height it had never reached. Players control one of three races with completely different economies, unit types and tactics, which made strategy rich and varied and made the game a pleasure to watch.

Most important of all was what the game did in South Korea. After the 1997 Asian financial crisis, South Korea, stuck with stubbornly high unemployment, badly needed a new industry to drive growth. The telecommunications and internet infrastructure the Korean government built at scale to fight the crisis, plus StarCraft's popularity among players, finally formed an esports industry with a broadcast system as developed as that of traditional sports. South Korea's two big television networks, OGN and MBC, each built their own tiered, bottom-up StarCraft competitions, which promoted the game and its matches better than anything else could. Korea's Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism set up the Korea e-Sports Association, the now-famous KeSPA, which built a complete system much like the NBA's, running from advertising investment through event organization to team operations.

That became the best early prototype of how esports could work.

To this day, professional StarCraft players in South Korea are treated like sports and entertainment stars: steady endorsement deals, documentaries and event interviews, crowds of fans, sky-high salaries. The competition system built around it — the World Cyber Games, arguably the highest-level gaming tournament in the world — also started in South Korea, and went on to influence the rest of the world.

But after real-time strategy peaked and declined during the new century's first decade, a completely new genre picked up the RTS banner: MOBA, the Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. In a sense it is a simplified RTS. Players no longer deploy an army; they control far fewer units, usually a single hero, in contests against other players. The concept traces back to Aeon of Strife, a custom map players made with StarCraft's map editor, which is also where the three-lane battlefield now standard in these games comes from.

What follows is the story most players know well: Dota and League of Legends. Dota, a map that came out of Warcraft III's map editor, made the genre widely known. With no commercial operation behind it at all, running purely on updates from the map's own author, its official English-language forum had more than 1 million registered users by 2008.

Then came League of Legends, currently the hottest title in gaming. Once Dota's success drew commercial attention, Riot Games launched League of Legends in 2009 and began formally calling its game a MOBA. That same year Valve brought on Dota's map developer, IceFrog, and released Dota 2 the following year.

Everyone can see how far these two games have pushed esports: the 2015 League of Legends World Championship final drew 36 million unique viewers, breaking every previous esports viewership record.

The prize pool at Dota 2's The International (TI) keeps setting records too — and what matters most is not the more than $20 million total in 2016, but the $1 million first prize at the very first TI. In 2011, nobody imagined that winning a video game tournament could be worth $1 million. That not only widened Dota 2's reach but also won the idea of esports unprecedented attention, from players, game makers and investors alike.

Now every developer has started mining its own games for esports potential — Nintendo has reached for Mario, EA for its FIFA series. Perhaps ten years from now esports will be as ordinary a part of a game as DLC and patches are today, and by then, when people talk about Dota and League of Legends, they may find better things to say than how big the prize money is and how many people play.

A History Still Being Written

Look around at the people near you. What is everyone playing right now?

This is no longer an era when a single Famicom can take the whole world. PCs, consoles, handhelds, phones, even VR headsets — every game on every platform has gathered its own crowd of fans, who compare notes, argue, and sometimes look down on one another.

A mass of Western AAA blockbusters surrounds us — Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed, Grand Theft Auto, even The Witcher — and a game industry as Hollywood-like as this one is either forming now or has already formed.

Powerful developers and publishers like Activision Blizzard, EA, Take-Two and Ubisoft are setting or defending their own rules: that a game should sell for $60; that a successful game must have a blockbuster-style trailer, a complicated plot and a realistic, precise physics engine. A game can be guaranteed to launch on multiple platforms worldwide within days of each other; offline, each country has these companies' own distribution systems; online, some build their own platform while others go through third parties.

They can keep a franchise on the scale of Call of Duty shipping a new installment every year, thanks to the huge capital behind them, the many studios they have bought to take turns developing entries, and wave after wave of technical staff.

That may partly explain why Japanese games have been losing their hold.

The decline of Japanese games is now beyond dispute. People point to Xbox's entry into the console market as the starting point. We could list many reasons for the decline: an aging population shrinking the domestic market, conservative cultural attitudes, bureaucratic corporate structures, Western cultural hegemony, and so on.

But Shuhei Yoshida, president of Sony Worldwide Studios, may have cut closer to the bone. He said: "The foundation of technology is shifting from Japan to the West… There are many talented developers and designers in the United States and Europe, so it's easier to put together a large team responsible for developing a current-generation console game there than in Japan. Not many people in Japan work on high-end computer graphics research, which is why many good developers there are making slow progress."

As the industry has matured, inventing new genres has become a harder and harder way to attract players. What they want now is spectacle, high-definition production, speed and satisfaction. On that front, Japan has fallen behind the West.

Elsewhere, though, some things are changing.

Many of the concepts we have already settled on are collapsing. Five years ago, for instance, no one would have called Angry Birds or Candy Crush Saga a great game. Even now, mobile games rarely appear on any list of great games; mainstream gaming media still keep their eyes on consoles and PCs, leaving mobile games to a small number of specialized mobile outlets.

But five years from now, or even two, that attitude may be gone. Mobile gaming's share of the industry is rising: according to Newzoo's latest report, mobile game revenue will pass PC gaming revenue in 2016, accounting for 37% of all gaming revenue, and mobile will hold the largest market share of any category by 2018.

We often see that a change in gaming hardware brings enormous change to the field. Could today's increasingly red-hot mobile games market be the first sign of a new beginning?

If a revolution does arrive one day, will we then remember 2009's Angry Birds, or even Snake on the 1999 Nokia phone? How will we judge Monument Valley, which swept the world in 2014? Should we ignore the value of mobile games in gaming history just because they are simple and young? Years from now, once AR is everywhere, should we remember this past July's Pokémon Go and credit it for spreading a new technology and a new form of entertainment?

The most unfairly treated of all may be Minecraft: in creativity, influence, even its effect on society as a whole, it may beat the number one entry on many a list. Yet game critics are still watching cautiously from a distance. A few years from now, we have every reason to expect a Top 5 list with Minecraft on it.

Independent games are winning more and more respect. Rocket League's 4 million copies sold told everyone that an indie game can also do superbly well commercially; IGN gave its perfect score, without hesitation, to the indie titles The Witness and Inside.

We owe thanks to John D. Carmack II. This brilliant programmer founded id Software and gave us classics like Doom and Quake, and, as an opponent of software copyright, he made Quake's code public. Without that code there would have been no Half-Life; without Half-Life, Valve would never have succeeded on the scale it did, and it would never have launched Steam. And without Steam, thousands upon thousands of independent developers' games would have lost a crucial place to be seen and sold, and today's flourishing indie scene would never have come about. The history of games might have lost some of its chances to change course.

Then there are VR and AR, where technological innovation is once again pressing for change. VR failed years ago on Nintendo's Virtual Boy, but its prospects look decent for now.

What change will these new technologies finally bring? We have already seen Pokémon Go succeed with AR, so what will the first VR game to change the industry look like? Will it be a VR version of an existing blockbuster, or a new game designed for VR from the start — or will no such game appear for a long time yet?

Nobody knows the answer.

In its scant fifty-odd years, the history of video games has had no fixed rules, and has needed none. Just as with a stack of lists that all rank things differently, everyone carries their own Top 10, and everyone carries their own history of gaming.