8 More Games That Were Ahead of Their Time

GTA 3
GTA 3

Games can be put into one of perhaps three categories: games that lead, games that follow and games that get stuck in development hell, take years to come out and then get reviled on release. Today we’re only interested in the games that lead, and did their damnedest to be original whether people remembered them or not. We’ve already covered 9 of these, but here’s 8 more.

1. Elite (1984)

Image Source: Huffington Post
Image Source: Huffington Post

Elite arrived in 1984 created by Ian Bell and David Braben and was ported to practically every system going. Its popularity has piqued in recent years with the release of the fourth game in the series, Elite: Dangerous. Elite revolutionised the space trading game genre and really caught the imagination of gamers with its wonderful 3D wireframe graphics and, yes okay they look dated now, but just compare them to other game graphics back in ’84.

Elite also had an open universe with 256 planets to explore, it was amazing that they managed to cram such a large universe into into such a small amount of memory. The game has gone on to inspire the likes of Wing Commander: Privateer, the X series and Freelancer, amongst others.

2. Rollercoaster Tycoon (1999)

Image Source: YouTube
Image Source: YouTube

I know what you’re thinking, why is Rollercoaster Tycoon on here and not the classic Bullfrog title Theme Park? Well there’s a good reason for this, Theme Park may have been the first game to allow you to build a theme park in detail, but Rollercoaster Tycoon evolved the genre. Rollercoaster Tycoon had more realistic rides and parks to build in and provided more of a challenge to the gamer, but most importantly they actually looked like theme parks!

One of the most significant parts of the game, and why it has the name it has, is the physics behind the roller-coasters themselves. They each have physics and rely on momentum to work properly, in other theme park building games the roller-coasters would run no matter the way they were built, but in Tycoon, they had to be build correctly. Also you could make them crash and it looked epic!

3. SimCity (1989)

Image Source: GameHackStudios
Image Source: GameHackStudios

When looking for games that were ahead of their time its hard not to mention Will Wright’s SimCity. Not only did the game spawn many other city builders, especially the fantastic Cities: Skylines in 2015, it also launched the Sim brand, sparking everything from SimAnt, SimTower and of course The Sims.

SimCity gave you a plot of land and are told to build a city. That’s it. No other goals or scenarios or levels, just build a city and enjoy yourself. I lost hours to this game, building my perfect metropolis (until I lent my SNES copy to Ricky and he overwrote my save, despite asking him to use the empty slot). SimCity inspired a number of developers over the years and encouraged gamers not to create, who knew city management could be so fun?

4. Shenmue (2000)

Image Source: Forbes
Image Source: Forbes

Over the years people have begun to think that Shenmue was all a bit overrated. Players new to the game might find the game slow to get going, the quick time events crude and the storytelling kinda cheesy. Also, it hasn’t helped that the ending of Shenmue 2 promised “The Story Will Go On…”, giving Shenmue 3 a comical Half Life 3-like mystique. However I am here to inform anyone who dislikes Shenmue that they are wrong. I don’t care how valid a point it is, I will blindly tell them that they are wrong.

Here’s why: Shenmue was the original ‘open city’ game, it went into such detail and created a vivid, colourful world filled with people seemingly going about their daily lives. It also popularised the ‘quick time event’ will would be a feature in several different games in the first decade of the 21st century. The Shenmue games are charming and fun, which other games do you get to chase people down in a fork life truck? Ryo is also a lead character that despite some iffy writing, you really want to get behind.

5. Super Mario 64 (1996)

Image Source: Inverse.com
Image Source: Inverse.com

Super Mario 64 is easily the most important 3D platformer to be release post 16-bit era. Platformers were the staple diet of gamers of games in the 8-bit and 16-bit years, with just about every character you can name getting their own game. From Mario and Sonic to Bubsy and Boogerman, there was no end to platform mascots back in those days, much like first person shooters today, platformers were the go to design to make a good game.. Then a problem occurred. With the release of the Playstation 2-D graphics became old hat and simply didn’t sell as well as their three dimensional graphics brethren. So most games developers attempted to release their platformers in 3D and it just didn’t work.

Dodgy handling, iffy collision detection and poor camera angles stopped many platform games in their tracks and it seemed for a while like the platform genre could have died entirely. Super Mario 64 was the first great 3D platform game. Not only was the Nintendo 64’s controller primarily designed with Mario 64 in mind and added a number of revolutionary additions to it such as a primary analogue stick and a trigger underneath, but quite simply Mario 64 was made with love and care. The camera angles were clever and anticipate your next move, levels were large and fun and the graphics were chunky and clear. It still stands up today and set the near unachievable standard for 3D platformers that few have ever gotten close to since.

6 . Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards (1987)

Image Source: YouTube
Image Source: YouTube

Back when I used to be a purveyor of video games myself, I had a woman attempt to return a copy of Call of Duty, I forget which one, COD: Battlefield of Honour 3 or something. She claimed her son had suffered terrible zombie based nightmares after playing it and that the game should have an age rating. I explained that the rating on the box was not a difficulty level, but a content warning to which she was unaware. She then claimed the game should have age verification built in, and I explained about parental controls on her sons Xbox. She seemed pleased, but I’m certain she was cursing me for her lack of a refund. Built in age verification, that was an interesting idea, I thought…

To those who don’t already know, Leisure Suit Larry was a little more on the adult side of gaming. The game follows Larry Laffer has he attempts to ‘get lucky’ with various women throughout the game. The series is largely played for comedy and feels more akin to a Carry On movie, however back in the 80s many of us gamers were mere innocent kids! How could the developers stop young eyes seeing such filth? A multiple answer test that only adults could answer! A genius solution, this should still happen in my opinion, if you can’t answer you can’t play, would make online gaming much more appealing.

7. The Secret of Monkey Island (1990)

Image Source: Myo Market
Image Source: Myo Market

Ah Monkey Island. Designed by Dave Grossman, Ron Gilbert and Tim Schafer, it remains one of the finest and funniest point and click games to date. People would have you believe that game piracy is a scourge of the modern age, something that simply didn’t exist in the good ol’ days of gaming. In truth, it did exist, and was a major problem. Everyone had at least one game their friend had copied for them onto a floppy disk, and the problem was that it didn’t feel like piracy, just friends sharing games.

But how did developers stop piracy back in the olden days then? Well Monkey Island had a novel approach to this problem. The game came with a ‘dial-a-pirate’ wheel (or later a mix ‘n’ mojo wheel) which involved spinning the wheel to match numbers to insert into the game allowing the owner of said wheel to play the game. If you didn’t have a wheel you couldn’t play the game. However if you were particularly sneaky you could just do what my wife did and that was make your own wheel out of a Frosties box. The game is about piracy, after all!

8. Grand Theft Auto 3 (2001)

Image Source: filmlink.com
Image Source: filmlink.com

Where to start with GTA3? I was a huge fan of the original GTA, I didn’t own it myself but I played it a my buddy Matt’s place for hours. It was a game you could lose yourself in, causing chaos and at times not even doing missions, just seeing how much damage you could do. Then I lost interest, I was aware of GTA 2 but just didn’t care enough. For some reason I never saw GTA 3 coming. It appeared to just land out of nowhere, and in my eyes it changed open world games forever. If you really break down what GTA 3 did, it took the gameplay from the original game and placed it within a 3D world. This simple act seemed revolutionary.

The game itself felt like a major evolution in gaming. The game’s story was aimed squarely at adults, okay, looking back it feels more like it was aimed at eighteen year olds, but it was a step towards a more mature type of game, regardless. The seamlessness of moving from on foot to driving was astounding, neither one were a weak point in comparison to the other, unlike Driver 2 for instance, in which the on-foot sections were certainly second fiddle to the driving. Above all else, it popularised the open world game, games like True Crime and Crackdown were direct examples but also games like Shadow of Mordor and Arkham Knight all owe their thanks to Grand Theft Auto 3 for breaking new ground.

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