Older Than They Think / Video Games

Arcades

• Arcade gaming as a whole is much Older Than They Think. A common mistake made by many gamers is to believe "arcade games" started with Space Invaders. A less common mistake made by veteran gamers is to believe "arcade games" started with Pinball and/or Baffle Ball. In reality, Arcade Games started around the second half of the 19th Century, when the first amusement parlors and midways were built on boardwalks, tempting tourists to spend their coins watching moving pictures on the kinetoscopes and listening to phonographs. Later arcades broadened their appeal with more affordable lowbrow attractions, such as shooting galleries, strength testers, fortune tellers, peep shows, and vending machines.
• Cards for saving data are commonly associated with Initial D Arcade Stage. However, SNK started doing it in the early 90s with the Neo Geo MVS arcade hardware; some MVS cabinets have card slots which allows players to use special proprietary cards to save data for a variety of games.

Consoles and Peripherals

• Many people think that consoles using the razor and blades model^note Selling the consoles at a loss and making up for by collecting licensing fees on games or through Revenue-Enhancing Devices like mandatory online subscriptions or microtransactions are a relatively recent phenomenon, starting in the sixth or seventh generation, and cite it as a sign that the industry is focusing on graphics and hardware above all else. In reality, this has been going on in the console market since at least the Atari 2600. Atari sold it at a loss, anticipating to make a lot of money off of game sales since they thought they'd be the only one making games for it. This bit them in the ass when third-party publishers inevitably entered the market due to Atari's poor treatment of its developers and the 2600 lacking any sort of lockout mechanism to prevent unlicensed games from running, something that every console since has had. Similarly, Sega sold the Sega Genesis at a loss for a time in order to undercut the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. And then the model is declared illegal for video games by the FTC in the Sega vs Accolade case because it decided that the lock-in is anticompetitive.
• Think Pong is the first video game ever? Well, our friends at The Other Wiki think otherwise. Depending on how you define "video game", the answer is different; the first on a digital computer was Spacewar! in 1961, but a missile simulator using analog circuitry and a cathode ray tube existed in 1947. (Yes, even the practice of using electronic games as military simulators is not only Older Than They Think, it was how they got started in the first place!)
  • Speaking of which, Pong was not the first home game system, that goes to the Magnavox Odyssey. Nor was the Atari VCS (a.k.a. Atari 2600) the first console to use ROM cartridges — that honor belongs to the Fairchild Channel F. (The "cartridges" used in the original Magnavox Odyssey were just a block of jumpers that connected various pins together inside the Odyssey to select a particular game; all the games the Odyssey could ever play were already contained in the main unit. The Odyssey², which did use ROM-containing game carts, didn't come out until a couple of years after the VCS.)
  • The first ever coin-op video game wasn't Pong either, but Computer Space (an adaptation of the early computer game Spacewar!) which was released a year earlier (by the same company, before they changed their name to Atari). However, Pong was the first successful coin-op. Atari later revamped Computer Space and re-released it as Asteroids.
  • The EDSAC — and for that matter, the Ferranti NIMROD — both fall under the classification of digital computers, and both precede the PDP-1 in being the hosts of computer games. The first digital computer game was made a full ten years before Spacewar!.
• Believe it or not, there were Sega titles for Famicom/NES, before Sonic came to being, and long before the company left the hardware business. These were licensed ports made by other companies and included (but are not limited to) Fantasy Zone, Altered Beast (1988), Space Harrier, Shinobi and After Burner. These were also released for the PC Engine. None of those ports were released outside of Japan, however.
  • Similarly, there was a port of Video Game/Columns for the Super Famicom, released only in Japan in 1999.
  • In 1998, Sega obtained the rights to the Puyo Puyo series from Compile, who was facing financial troubles. However, Compile was apparently allowed to continue to do whatever they wanted with the series, resulting in a Sega property receiving entries on the Nintendo 64, PlayStation, and Game Boy Color.
  • Like their former rival Nintendo, Sega had been around for years before they started making video games, at least as early as 1960. Sega began as Service Games, which made pachinko machines aimed at military servicemen (hence the name). They then branched out into pinball before going into video games.
• The PlayStation wasn't the first 32 bit console. Neither was the Sega Saturn, or the 3DO, or even the Amiga CD32, despite their own claims. That honor actually goes to the FM Towns Marty, which never left Japan and didn't sell that well even there. ^note With that said, the Marty had a 16-bit data bus.
  • In fact, a case could be made for the Sega Genesis being the first 32-bit console, as it used simultaneously two 16-bit buses, making it functionally 32-bit. Old Apple computers marketed as 32-bit did the same.
• Ghen War, a 1995 First-Person Shooter for the Saturn is a tragically unknown innovator in the genre. The game featured fully 3D environements and enemies a full year before Quake came out, extensive terrain deformation before Red Faction made it cool and an ambient soundtrack that changed depending on what was happening on the screen.
  • Ghen War wasn't the first to use a variable mix, however. LucasArts developed the iMuse system in 1991 and featured it in Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge; as far as just FPSes go, Dark Forces also used the system and came out a few months before Ghen War.
  • If Ghen War counts, then surely Geograph Seal that came out in 1994 counts as well.
  • The first fully-3D game was Driller by Incentive Software (now Superscape) — in 1987, eight and a half years before Quake. OK, the frame rate on the 8-bit machines of the time was about 1 every 2 seconds, but it was still impressive.
  • FPSes in general are far older than most people realize. The oldest one that most people are familiar with is Wolfenstein 3-D, but in reality the earliest examples of the genre were Maze War and Spasim (owing to incomplete documentation, it's uncertain exactly which of the two was finished first) which both came out circa 1974, fully 18 years before Wolfenstein 3D.
• It's a trend for people to give Nintendo consoles credit for innovating and coming up with new ideas. In reality, most of these "innovations" and technologies are the result of their "Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology" approach to hardware; that is, making use of things that had already been done or used before by other game systems in new ways (or just plain reintroducing the concepts once they become cheaper to implement):
  • The Nintendo 64's gamepad wasn't the first game controller to use an analog stick; that was the Atari 5200's.
  • It wasn't a game console, but the original IBM PC had an analog joystick port in 1981.
  • The Virtual Boy wasn't the first portable console with 3D effects; the Tomytronic 3D was a extremely similar console that came out in 1983 and actually featured color graphics (in contrast the VB's monochromatic graphics).
  • The Game Boy Advance having cross-platform functionality with the Nintendo GameCube was a big deal, but it was preceded some years prior by the Sega Dreamcast and Neo Geo Pocket Color having cross-platform functionality.
  • The Vectrex used a light pen that allowed for touch-sensitive gaming decades before the Nintendo DS came out. The Game.com also featured a touch screen, though in a rather crude fashion. Even before the Game.com, Sega was in development of a handheld with a touch screen, but had to cancel it due to it becoming too expensive.
  • The Wii wasn't the first game system to incorporate motion controls, as there had been game accessories released in the 1990s and the 2000s that featured this technology. Before the '90s, there were the Pantomation and the Smartland SL 6401.
  • The Wii U's controller with the built-in screen and its ability to play the console's games without a television wasn't exactly new. The Sega Nomad could play Sega Genesis/Mega Drive games and output to a TV at the same time. The Sega Dreamcast also had a Visual Memory Unit (VMU) which functioned as a second screen and could also act as a handheld game system with additional software.
  • The technology for the Nintendo 3DS's glasses-free 3D screen was around since at least 2004. A notebook, the Sharp Actius RD3D used a glasses-free parallax barrier 3D screen, using the same exact technology the 3DS uses to achieve 3D. There was also a TV around the time too by the same company.
    • And guess who makes the screens in the 3DS? That's right - it's Sharp. They've had a close working relationship with Nintendo since the 1980s (as proven by the C1 NES TV, Twin Famicom, and Famicom Titler), and their portables, dating back to at least the Game Boy Advance, use Sharp LCD screens^note However, there are records that Sharp produced the EL screens for the Game Boy Light and is a secondary supplier of LCD panels for the OG Game Boy.
  • As far as wireless controllers, they've existed since the Atari 2600.
  • The Rumble Pack for the Nintendo 64 wasn't the first console gaming peripheral to enable force feedback. An unknown strap-on device called The Aura did the same thing two years earlier. It also wasn't the first gaming hardware to have force feedback—the pinball machine Earthshaker!, released in 1989, had built-in rumbling motors timed with the gameplay.
  • The Nintendo Switch is the same case as the Wii U, but even moreso: a handheld system that can be plugged to a TV and used like a home console, while also supporting multiplayer using a single system and screen even on the go, with each player using a separate controller? The Sega Nomad did it.
    • The basic design of a tablet with detachable controllers on the sides was beat to market by the Aikun Morphus X300 about a year prior.
    • The Switch is far from the first Nintendo console to not be region locked. While all of Nintendo's prior home consoles have been region locked (initially by having physical region locking for their cartridge-based consoles from the NES to the Nintendo 64, before switching to software-based region locking from the disc-based GameCube to the Wii U), all of Nintendo's handhelds, from the Game Boy to the Nintendo DS, wereregion-free with the exception of the Nintendo 3DS, which employed software region locking for its game cards.
  • The Nintendo DS was praised for its unique gimmick of having two display screens, which many games took advantage of by using one of the screens as a map display for example. The DS wasn't Nintendo's first foray into dual screen gaming. Their first iteration of dual screens was done in the arcade version of Punch-Out!!, which predates the DS by a good 20 years. The "Vertical Multi Screen" Game & Watch series were also foldable handhelds with two screens, very similar to the DS.
  • Nintendo themselves are a much older company than most people realize, and aren't even technically a video game company: they're a toy company whose most profitable division for the past few decades has been video games. The company was actually founded in 1889 as a maker of playing cards (which they still produce to this day).
• On the topic of motion gaming, the Kinect for the Xbox 360 wasn't the first accessory to offer controller-free camera-based motion gaming. Sony had beat Microsoft to the punch with the PlayStation 2's EyeToy in 2003.
• The Sega Genesis and Super NES had online multiplayer, through a commercially failed device known as the XBAND. It was mostly Executive Meddling that killed it since nobody wanted to host the service. Not to mention that practically no developer took an interest in adding XBAND support for their games, save for Weaponlord, which necessitated reverse-engineering the games to add multiplayer support. For portables, Nintendo had a cellphone-based service that remained in Japan, predating anything practical by two generations.
  • Before that, there was the XBAND's predecessor for the NES, the TelePlay Modem, made by Keith Rupp and Nolan Bushnell of Atari fame. Executive Meddling prevented it from ever getting released.
  • Even before that, the Genesis had online multiplayer in Japan as early as 1990 via the the Sega Meganet service, though very few games supported it. Sadly, with the exception of Brazil, it was never released outside of Japan.
• Downloadable games are older than most people think. In 1983, a service called GameLine allowed you to download full games via dialup modem to a special cartridge for the Atari 2600. The service didn't last long, but its parent company (Control Video Corporation) became Quantum Computer Services, which eventually became America Online. In The '90s, Sega had the Sega Channel for the Genesis, which was preceded in Japan by the above Sega Meganet (the latter being the first service to feature download-only games). Nintendo followed with the BS Satellaview for the Super Famicom in Japan. Sega also had an online store just for the Dreamcast, too, called Dreamcast Direct (later Sega Direct). Segagaga was in fact released initially as an exclusive to that store.
  • Though the Satellaview service may not be the first game download service, it was the first to offer DLC addons for retail games.
  • PlayCable came out in 1981, 14 years before Satellaview's launch, and allowed local cable television providers to send games to Intellivision units as subscribers downloaded them through an adapter, but none of the games' data survived for that as there was no storage device for the console. It flopped because of the high costs and the adapter's limitations.
• Unlimited Detail, it sounds great on paper. All you have to do is create objects out of "atoms" which are essentially points (from a point cloud). Except... this is not a new thing. The technology can be done either with voxels or perhaps more true to the point cloud, point sprites. Voxels have been around for decades. Point sprites have been around for at least 10 years, as a gaming benchmark tool had used it in one of their tests.
  • In fact, point sprites are used in fluid simulations, where the point sprites interact with each other like little balls. This can be done in real-time for games.
    • The deal with Unlimited Detail is not the use of point cloud data but the algorithm that makes it so only one of them is calculated per pixel to allow for as much detail as the ram and resolution of the screen would allow. They also had crude skeletal animation in a very early version (8:50 in this video) however it is unknown how efficiently it would work in the current iteration.
• Remember Humongous Entertainment's first batch of games? You know, Putt-Putt Joins the Parade, Fatty Bear's Birthday Surprise and Putt-Putt Goes to the Moon? Almost everyone played those off a CD-ROM under their Windows ports. Almost no one is familiar with their original DOS versions, let alone their first release on floppy disks.
• When YouTube videos of the Dolphin emulator showing that it could render Wii games in 720p, it received a lot of praise with some even proclaiming it a fine example of the emulator surpassing what the console can do. Except many emulators of 3D consoles (namely of the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation) can already do this very same thing. One could argue that some 2D console emulators can do this, but since the source material is fixed it doesn't look as pretty without filters.
• You know thumbsticks on game pads that curve inward? It was what gave the Xbox 360's controller an edge over the PlayStation 3's SIXAXIS and DualShock 3... but it actually appeared on the Dual Analog Controller for the first PlayStation. ^note It was released in the US, but without rumble for whatever reason. Since Sony quickly released DualShock afterwards (making the Dual Analog an Obvious Beta as DualShock is "standardized"), it was replaced right away.
• The PS4 Pro and Xbox One X (although it was sold as a new model) weren't the first times a console has had a hardware expansion akin to a PC. Predating these are the Expansion Pak for the Nintendo 64 (which was mandatory for some games, including high profile ones like Majora's Mask and Donkey Kong 64), as well as the 64DD (and its small library of titles) that never made it out of Japan. And even before that, there was the overbudgeted and flopped Sega CD and Sega 32X add-ons for the Sega Genesis.
• A lot of people think that the famous "SE~GA!" jingle debuted in Sonic the Hedgehog, but it was first heard in Japanese Sega commercials from the 1980s. Even an instrumental version of the jingle played during the Sega Master System bootup screen.
• The Oculus Rift wasn't the first consumer-level virtual reality headset. There were a few predecessors in the mid 90s, the most notable one being the Forte VFX1 Headgear. And even before that, Sega developed the Sega VR in the early 90s for its Sega Genesis, but sadly ended up cancelling it at the last second after finding out that it tended to give children motion sickness or headaches. Despite this, it was fully developed and finished, and a number of games were made for it.^note Nintendo's Virtual Boy came out the same year as the VFX1, but despite its name and marketing it wasn't a true VR device, as it lacked headtracking and wasn't typically attached to the player's head. The reason old headsets weren't more successful was due their high price, limited number of supported video cards, and the fact the primitive 90s consumer-level technology held back the experience.
• The XE-1 AP controller for Sega Genesis introduced many innovations that would become attributed to later game controllers, like thumb stick^note it wasn't the first controller with an analog stick, but it was the first one to use one to use the modern implementation of a small analog stick in place of the D-pad to be controlled with the thumb, an analog/digital toggle button, grips on its back and shoulder buttons. A couple of games made use of its features, but the fact it never left Japan limited its game support and ensured it would fall into obscurity.

Game Elements

• Most people seem to think that Nintendo pioneered the idea of using RFID cards in games to get additional characters and power-ups, unaware that Mattel had actually tried the same mechanic a whole decade earlier with the HyperScan. The idea itself went back several more years to 1999, with a PC edutainment game called Redbeard's Pirate Quest: Interactive Toy by a startup known as Zowie.
• Animal Crossing:
  • The series, itself, was introduced to western audiences with the Nintendo Gamecube iteration, which, itself, is actually an Updated Re Release of the original game released on the Nintendo 64 in Japan. The game had originally been conceived for a console add-on, the 64DD, with the hopes of taking advantage of the 64DD's internal clock and expanded memory. With the 64DD's commercial failure and discontinuation, however, development for the game shifted to the original N64.
  • Several "new" features in Wild World, such as the ability to pick up flowers and join in villagers' conversations, were introduced in Doubutsu no Mori e+ before making their international debut there.
  • A lot of mechanics from New Horizons actually originated in Happy Home Designer, such as the ability to decorate the outside (which New Horizons expanded upon with landscape editing), the ability to interact with objects like music players (you do a little dance and shake a tambourine to the beat of the song), as well as clothes and face customisation being easily accessible (via the machine and booth on the first floor of Happy Home Academy).
  • Many veteran players have complained that the villagers in New Horizons are nice to the point of coming off as sappy, but also make them fall flat as characters, and thus yearn for their villagers to be rude again like they were in past games. New Horizons is not the first Animal Crossing game with villagers that are "too nice", and the only game in which the villagers' rudeness was cranked up to eleven was in the original GameCube game, and that only applies to the English localization, as the localizers seemingly felt like the game needed to have its script spiced up. The villagers Took a Level in Kindness come Wild World and City Folk, and in New Leaf they acted pretty much the same way as they do in New Horizons. Ironically enough, the Snowboys are not too different from the rude villagers of the GameCube game, and are not very well-liked by players for this reason.
• The Sensory Abuse audio in CrazyBus, has been around forever. A random audio tone generator was often taught as part of the syllabus in BASIC programming courses in the 80s and a pack-in demo program that came with earlier versions of Microsoft BASIC also produced random tones. Going back even further, sound chips that produce such tones can be found in some toy robots.
• Video Game Setpiece was, and still is, one of the major tropes of First-Person Shooter games from Half-Life to Call of Duty and so on. However, a side scrolling shooter called Elevator Action Returns, released in The '90s by Taito might be the first game which uses extensive set pieces.
• The gaming press likes to credit Half-Life with being the first FPS with a strong story that drives the gameplay, which is somewhat misleading. Both Marathon and System Shock placed a strong emphasis on storytelling in addition to combat years earlier, but they used a text-message-finding system to advance and expand their plots (there's an entry about it below). Meanwhile, Strife, a 1996 release built on a modified Doom engine, has a story that unfolds in-game and even branches off in different directions depending on the player's actions and choices.
• In a strange version (both examples are made by the same by the company) the Jjaro and maybe the W'rkncacnter first appeared in Pathways into Darkness, not Marathon. That said, it's implied they're in the same 'verse.
• One of the most (in)famous examples comes in Metroid vs Halo, in that during the early 2000s, it was believed that the former was a case of Follow the Leader for the latter. In actuality, the franchise began in 1986 and already had two other entries during the 90s, long before Halo: Combat Evolved (2001) was released. The confusion stems from the first-person Metroid Prime (2002), and while both games were in development at the same time, Prime was an FPS from the start, whereas Halo's switched to the style partway through development. The fact that Metroid Prime 2 and Halo 2 were released the same year (2004) and, likewise, Metroid Prime 3 and Halo 3 (2007), certainly didn't help things.
  • Too many people seem to think that Halo first came up with ring shaped worlds, even though Ringworld used it at least 30 years before.
  • Speaking of Metroid Prime, it is often lauded for being the first Metroidvania FPS ever, but the truth is that aforementioned System Shock did it almost a decade earlier.
  • There's a camp going around that think a lot of what Halo had done was new to the FPS genre in general. Two weapon limit? Counter-Strike. Regenerating Health? The ill-fated Jurassic Park: Trespasser. Quick Melee button? Duke Nukem 3D. Grenade hotkey? Terminator: Future Shock. Group AI? Half-Life. Vehicle physics? Codename Eagle. Vast outdoor environments? Unreal. Space marine in green armor? Doom. It's not even the first successful console-focused FPS, with both Turok and Goldeneye predating it by over four years. What Halo was actually first at was combining many of these elements into one game - each game above only had, at most, one or two of the listed mechanics.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Enemies are camping in a fortress made of solid blocks. You fling projectiles at said fortress, Wreaking Havok and trying to kill all the enemies inside with as few shots as possible. Sounds like Angry Birds, doesn't it? A Flash game called Crush the Castle did it earlier, and there, they got the idea from another game called Castle Clout.
  • Significantly pre-dating either game is the 3D equivalent called Castle Battles from Neopets.
  • And all of these are Spiritual Successors to artillery-style games, which began no later than the mid-70s. Which themselves are successors to ENIAC's original purpose of plotting artillery tables.
• Rune Factory was not the first game to combine life skills, monster taming, and elements of the Farm Life Sim with an Action RPG, that honor goes to Legend of Mana.
• Quick! Who was Nintendo's first female protagonist? Samus? ...Not quite. That honor goes to Bubbles from Clu Clu Land, predating Metroid by about two years.
• Some people have speculated that Calling Your Attacks comes from the Street Fighter series, the first Fighting Game to give names to the character's special attacks so players talking about the game could refer to them. However, this trope originates from other media: anime has been doing this since at least the early '70s (at least from Mazinger Z, if not earlier), and it has antecedents in Chinese wuxia novels throughout the twentieth century; Street Fighter came out in 1987.
  • Calling out the name of the attacks was a habit of Wong Fei-hung, a real martial artist who lived in the late 19th and early 20th century (making it Older Than Television).
    • Calling your attacks has been a standard of Kendo (Men! Do! and Te!) since the training method's creation.
• Warcraft III was not the first strategy game to use RPG elements, as many of its fans believe. The concept first appeared in New World Computing's King's Bounty in 1990 and featured more prominently in the same company's Heroes of Might and Magic series, starting in 1995. That's also the source for the concept of W3's heroes. Nor was Warcraft 3 the first Real Time Strategy game with RPG elements. Warlords Battlecry got there before it ^note Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun also preceded both, but its RPG elements were far more minimal.
  • The first Fire Emblem game, another strategy game with RPG elements, was also released in 1990.
• Many people think that the fighting game genre started with Street Fighter, though games like Yie Ar Kung-Fu, Karate Champ, Karateka and Way of the Exploding Fist predate it by years, going back to Bug Byte Kung Fu on the ZX Spectrum. There are some people who think that the genre was started by Street Fighter II (apparently it never occurs to them to wonder why there's a "II" in the name).
• Resident Evil:
  • Resident Evil is often credited for inventing Survival Horror, when all it did was coin the name for it and bring the genre into the mainstream. The Alone in the Dark series invented the actual gameplay model years earlier. Capcom's own Sweet Home (1989) — despite being a turn-based RPG — also has elements of the genre, predates Alone in the Dark (1992) by three years, and is the inspiration for Resident Evil. The lineage of the genre can be traced to Haunted House for the Atari 2600.
  • Sherry Birkin has a Healing Factor in Resident Evil 6 due to having her body adapt to the G-virus embryo that is within her. However, Sherry isn't the first protagonist in the series to have the ability to heal quickly. Another young girl has similar abilities to Sherry in Resident Evil Gaiden, a Game Boy Color game that predates RE6 by 10 years.
  • Resident Evil 5 introduces Uroboros, a parasite that infects the host. If the host's DNA is compatiable with the parasite, the victim gains superhuman strength and speed. If the host's DNA isn't a good match, Uroboros mutates from within and bursts out of the victim as a writhing mass of tentacles. While many think the concept was a first for the series, Resident Evil 2 did it first with the G-Virus, albeit in a slightly different way.
  • People were blown away by the shotgun in Resident Evil 2 (Remake) not always constantly blowing off a zombie's head. This has actually been an element of the games since the original Resident Evil, although it first had a reliable chance of failing in the 2002 RE1make, which debuted 17 years earlier. Similarly, the ability to cause a head-exploding critical hit with a pistol? Again, it goes all the way back to the original Resident Evil, although its chances of happening were typically very rare unless using special variant handguns or handgun upgrades.
  • Many players feel the shift from Survival Horror to Action Horror was a Franchise Original Sin that began with Resident Evil 4. In fact, it began as early as Resident Evil 2; outside of the initial minutes on the streets, ammunition is so plentiful in the game that a player can literally mow down every single enemy in the game from the police station on and still have plenty of ammo to burn on the final boss. The trend only continued into Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, which added a new ammo generating system, encouraged players to fight the Nemesis in order to acquire cool special gear from it, and debuted the Mercenaries Mode; a Bonus Mode in which the player tries to rank up the highest score possible by killing as many enemies as they can in the time limit.
    • One could make the argument that the Action Horror goes all the way back to the original Resident Evil; "fight" was always a viable option, the player gained access to increasingly powerful weapons such as shotguns and grenade launchers as the game progressed, and there were even distinct "boss battles" that could only be resolved by blowing the boss away with concentrated firepower, as opposed to solving a puzzle or running away. To say nothing of how the game ended with the player blowing up a monstrous Super-Soldier with a convenient rocket launcher and then flying away in a helicopter before the infested mansion was blown up by a self-destruct sequence.
  • Two common complaints about the Resident Evil 3 (Remake) are actually examples of this trope:
    • Firstly, the complaint about the game length. None of the original Resident Evil games were that long, and completing them in 4 or fewer hours was quite normal. It wasn't until Resident Evil 4 at the earliest when game length began approaching double-digit hours for a single playthrough.
    • Secondly, the complaint about Nemesis not pursuing Jill frequently throughout the game like the Xenomorph from Alien: Isolation and instead being restricted to set pieces. This is how Nemesis actually worked in the original Resident Evil 3: Nemesis; outside of a brief stretch of time when Jill was exploring the streets of Raccoon City in between leaving the police station and getting on the tram, Nemesis only appeared in scripted cutscenes and encounters. And even during that time, most of Nemesis' appearances were still scripted. That said, it is a legitimate criticism that the "free-roaming Nemesis" period is much shorter in the 2020 version, due to cutting out the extensive Fetch Quest to repair the tram that the original game had.
  • Many fans complain about the final portion of Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, which sees the player move from the sprawling, gothic mansion to a relatively linear and comparatively sterile sunken ship/mine tunnels/lab setup. But this is actually a case of RE7 staying true to the series formula; since the very first game, Resident Evil games have tended to have a clear shift from a relatively open-ended and labyrinthine starting zone to a more linear and shorter closing area, typically with some kind of lab theme.
  • Many people cite the zombies ambushing the player through a door/loading screen in Resident Evil 2 as one of the game's most memorable moments, but Resident Evil had done it before (albeit from the zombie's view and was more tense than scary) by two years before the sequel came out.
• Saints Row 2 and 4 got a lot of praise for putting gender on a slider in the Character Customization, allowing players to create characters with a gender identity outside the male/female binary. Ultima III, which predate them by decades, gave gender options "Male", "Female" and "Other". It didn't affect the story or even character appearance (everyone is just a few pixels), but it's still an early RPG that allowed you to play as a non-binary character before the term "non-binary" had even entered common parlance.
  • Similarly, the later Mass Effect, Dragon Age and Fallout games trumpeted their wide range of romance options, allowing you to roleplay a character with any sexual orientation. Again, some of the Ultima games, although they did not have Love Interests or plots devoted to relationships, allowed the Avatar to be played as gay or bisexual by giving players the option to visit male and female prostitutes.
• Alone in the Dark: The criticism that "You're not alone and it's not dark" isn't new to Illumination. The reboot and The New Nightmare drew identical snarky comments over the presence of a partner character and light-based puzzles.
• Many people think Wolfenstein 3-D or Doom was the first First-Person Shooter. These weren't even id Software's first FPS games (that would be Hovertank 3D).
  • "Halo was the FIRST EVER FPS GAME! if I'm mistaken I know it's at least one of the first made."
  • There are even earlier contenders for first FPS: MIDI Maze in 1987, and Maze War and Spasim in 1974 (whichever one of these two counts as the first depends on whether you think the release date or the start date of development counts more.)
  • Within the fandoms for Wolfenstein 3-D and Doom, a good number of purist fans insist that the old games were never intended to be played with a mouse, and therefore versions that do feature the ability to look around with a mouse rather than needing to use the keyboard are, essentially, cheating. Though Wolfenstein and Doom were indeed designed around the assumption that a player might not have a mouse (many consumers didn't own one in the mid-90s), both games always supported mouselook as a control method and this was designer John Romero's preferred control method during deathmatch tournaments. Part of this comes from confusion with the concept of vertical mouselook (that is to say, being able to look up or down as well as left or right), which wouldn't become standard-issue in shooters for another few years, but tends to show up in modern ports of those games despite them not being designed for it (for instance, it completely trivializes the Final Boss of Doom II).
• Since Doom³, any game that lets you find various logs to help figure out the story is inevitably compared to it — although BioShock has somehow dodged this. Doom 3 is by far the most popular game to include this, but it's far from the first. In First Person Shooters alone, the device goes as far back as 1988's The Colony, and if you include games outside that genre, the list becomes truly unwieldly, although Myst is likely the most prominent.
  • BioShock's use of logs can most likely be attributed to its status as a Spiritual Successor to the System Shock games. System Shock was released in 1994 — not the first to use the trope, but one of the earlier examples. The developers thought that the current technology was incapable of simulating interactions with enough fidelity not to murder any immersion. Similar reasoning probably applied to most of the early examples.
  • Also, Marathon uses this. The PC has to go through the game and get the story and missions from Terminals. That doesn't help clear up the story much, though...
  • The Thief series make extensive use of books, scrolls, and notes to provide clues and flesh out the back story.
  • The 1995 sci-fi adventure Bio Forge also uses a great number of logs and computer consoles to help move the story along.
• Many players think that Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is the first Metroidvania Castlevania game; non-linear gameplay dates as far back as Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, although Symphony went a long ways toward polishing it (read: making it playable without a strategy guide).
  • Before that, Vampire Killer for the MSX was broken up into multiple small metroidvania-style levels. It was also released (on October 30, 1986 in Japan) only a few short months after Metroid itself (released on August 6, 1986 in Japan), meaning that Castlevania almost did "Metroid-style gameplay" even before Metroid did it.
• Many people who started playing World of Warcraft without playing the games before it have no idea that the franchise existed before the MMORPG. This has prompted situations like people who hear of Warcraft III mentioned saying, "There's a World of Warcraft III? I didn't even know about II!" A large section of the player base wasn't even aware of the MMORPG genre before it came out, leading them to believe it pioneered far more than it did; overall, the game is a refinement of what had been done before. On top of that, the game features piles of pop culture references, many of which the fan base mistakenly believes Blizzard invented.
  • This has gone far enough that, nowadays, WoW fans will often accuse other MMOs of ripping off their favourite game for using gameplay mechanics and concepts that WoW ripped off from someone else. On the other hand, those who loathe World of Warcraft and all it stands for will make the same complaint of any other MMO with no regard to such things as "release dates."
  • Or accuse Warhammer of being a WoW rip-off, which is funny because the reverse is almost certainly true. Tycho of Penny Arcade says it best.◊
  • In fact, Blizzard once "announced" a new game as an April Fools joke: Warcraft: Heroes of Azeroth, a strategy game and prequel to World of Warcraft. The game in question was Warcraft III.
  • The World of Warcraft expansion Mists of Panderia is accused of knocking off Kung Fu Panda by having a race of Pandas with a new Monk class. However, the Pandaren have been around since before Warcraft III was released. It started as one of Blizzard's April Fool's jokes announcing a fifth playable race.
  • Was Blizzard being original with their Paris Hilton parody named Haris Pilton? Probably not, considering that Westward did the same thing 2 years prior to the Blizzard joke.
• In the MMORPG Runescape, when the Tower of Life quest was released, involving a homunculus, many Fullmetal Alchemist fans assumed it was a ripoff. The Runescape homunculus bears little resemblance to the ones from FMA, and both are named for an old term for "artificial human."
  • Funny that Runescape should wind up next to World of Warcraft on the list, since there's a dedicated number of people convinced that Runescape is a watered-down version of it. It was released several months before World of Warcraft was even announced. Wrap your heads around that for a minute.
• Valkyrie Sky is the first MMO Shoot 'Em Up? Not true. That title belongs to the now defunct Bugs Rider published by Game & Game nearly two years prior to Valkyrie Sky Beta. Though you may argue that Valkyrie Sky is the first MMO Vertical Shooter, since Bugs Rider is a horizontal one.
  • But even "the first MMO Vertical Shooter" may not even true if you count Lazeska: Sky Fantasy. A game that never had a chance to see the light, but it was first introduced back in 2006 while Valkyrie Sky started Beta in late 2009.
• Believe it or not, Zoo Tycoon was not the first zoo simulation game. The Japan-only Sega Saturn game Simulation Zoo predates it by four years.
• Several people have talked about how innovative the adjustable camera of Super Mario 64 on the N64 (1996) was. How using polygons instead of pixels in the arcade Hard Drivin' (1988) created a new look for games that had never been seen before. And how Metal Gear for the MSX2 (1987) was the first game that had you sneaking around. However, there was a game which had all these elements and came out before all of them, but for some reason nobody gives the 1983 arcade game I, Robot credit for them.
  • Castle Wolfenstein (1981) was the first true stealth game, incorporating many of the elements that are still being used today. Yet it still remains in the shadow of both Metal Gear and the totally-unrelated but much better-known Wolfenstein 3-D.
    • And of course, whenever Wolfenstein is rebooted nowadays, people always compare it to "the original" Wolfenstein 3D, never wondering why it had "3D" in the name as a differentiating factor.
• Pokémon did not debut in 1998 or 1999, as many American fans assumed, but in 1996 in Japan. Pokémon Red and Blue were released as Pokémon Red and Green in 1996. There is even some that assume that the games first released in 1995 because the year is listed in some of the games as a reference to the original planned release date.
  • Contrary to popular belief, Pokémon Diamond and Pearl weren't the first official Pokémon games with online. The Japanese version of Pokémon Crystal could connect to mobile phones for online play through an official peripheral, allowing players to trade and battle, among other things. It even had its own version of the GTS.
• For all its popularity, many people assume that Pokémon is the first Mon collection/raising game; those people forget that Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei was released in the '80s. It also wasn't the first Mons anime; Megami Tensei had an OVA in 1987.
  • To give an idea of just how prolific the Megami Tensei series was before Pokémon's debut, by the time the original Pokémon trilogy came out in Japan, Megami Tensei had under its belt the original two games, the first two Shin Megami Tensei games, Super Famicom remakes of both Megami Tensei games, the entire Last Bible spinoff series (5 games long,) 2 games in the Strategy RPG spinoff series Majin Tensei, the first Devil Summoner game, and Shin Megami Tensei if..., which serves as a prototype for Atlus' Cash-Cow Franchise, Persona.
  • Likewise, Dragon Quest V featured monster collecting 4 years before Pokémon debuted, making the Dragon Quest Monsters series more of a natural extension than a clone. It wouldn't reach the states for over a decade and a half.
  • Megami Tensei also involved computers that can access the world of monsters. In a way, Megami Tensei predated both Pokémon and Digimon.
  • The idea of tiny capsules able to fit in a pocket and used to store monsters originates from Poké Balls, correct? Nope! The 1967 Japanese sci-fi superhero series Ultraseven used the idea nearly 30 years earlier and was confirmed by Word of God to be the inspiration.
  • What was the first Augmented Reality game? No, it is not Pokémon GO — Ingress predated it by at least four years (in fact, Pokémon GO even used Ingress's architecture; it helps that the same people made both). Invizimals predates them both, and it even was reviewed unfavourably because it lacked the things that made Pokémon fun. Nintendo also had AR minigames in the 3DS long before GO. Predating even Invizimals is the PC game Cyber Figure Aris which allowed you to interact with an anime maid character using your webcam and AR cards.
• Critics and fans are quick to label any sandbox that features driving and shooting a Grand Theft Auto clone. But the original GTA games were top-down, and GTA 3 closely resembled, and has a continuing rivalry with, a game called Driver released two years prior. And then there's Hunter, which was released on the Amiga by Activision in 1991.
  
  Similarly, some people believe that the series started with Grand Theft Auto III, conveniently forgetting the number three in the title. Infact, GTA III isn't even the first 3D sandbox game by Rockstar. The honor goes to Body Harvest. Driving freely around cities, picking up missions at will, shooting and blowing up everything. Quarantine did all that first. You didn't get out of your car and steal others, but the rest is there.
  
  The ability to move around at your own pace with no need to do missions in a certain order goes back to RPGs such as the first Final Fantasy (though there may be more obscure earlier examples). The ability to not die (or at least, instantly respawn without dealing with a game over screen) was made famous by The Secret of Monkey Island, whose sequel Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge has a proto-sandbox mechanic in that it allows you to go back and forth between three different islands and complete a large proportion of the game in any order you like, without dying or having to fight anyone. There are some opportunities to affect the final ending in both games, which predates games like Soul Edge/Soul Blade where you can do a similar thing.
• Combined with Adaptation Displacement, The Witcher in certain parts of the world. In the Western Hemisphere (And to a lesser extent, Oceania, New Zealand, and Australia) a lot of people learned of The Witcher from the games by CD Projekt Red. This happened again in Latin America in which people thought the video games were based off of the Netflix series, as they first learned of The Witcher through that. (The games didn't experience a legit release until after the books in a lot of Latin American countries)
• Every third-person shooter with a cover system is doomed to be compared to Gears of War. Gears' developers openly admitting on several occasions that they got the mechanic from an obscure PlayStation 2 game called Kill Switch, and that was preceded by WinBack, a Nintendo 64 game with a similar cover system.
  
  All of this ignores that many such games featured "leaning" mechanics, allowing players to effectively utilize cover by only exposing a minimal portion of their avatar when returning fire. One early example was the first System Shock.
• Any first-person shooter is doomed to be compared to Doom, GoldenEye (1997), Counter-Strike, Halo or Call of Duty, depending on when it was made. In fact, before the term "first person shooter" was coined, every FPS games were called a "Doom clone"
• A number of people accuse Rock Band of being a rip-off of Guitar Hero, unaware that:
  • A) Rock Band developer, Harmonix, were the original developers of Guitar Hero, and
  • B) The concept predates Guitar Hero by at least 8 years: Konami's Guitar Freaks was first released in 1998.
  • In fact it was the publisher, RedOctane, that first approached Harmonix with the idea, having previously been involved in developing the instrument controllers for Guitar Freaks. Even the concept of a 5-button guitar game predates Guitar Hero; RedOctane's third-party Guitar Freaks controllers have five buttons (despite GF being only a 3-button game), and these controllers were around as early as maybe 2001 or 2002.
  • In the X-Play review for the North American release of beatmania, after giving it a poor score, co-host Morgan Webb accused it of being one of many Guitar Hero rip-offs (despite the original beatmania coming out in 1997). This is a bit odd, given that the show's second-degree predecessor GameSpot TV, which also featured Adam Sessler (one of the co-hosts of X-Play), occasionally did features of Japanese rhythm games such as GuitarFreaks and DanceDanceRevolution.
• Some people feel that SimCity is a more boring clone or spinoff of The Sims. Funny thing is, SimCity released in 1989, and invented the sandbox-simulation genre.
  • According to the Washington Post, The Sims was originally intended to be a house architecture game, with the eponymous characters intended only to evaluate the functionality and aesthetic of the house. In other words, where SimCity was about the macro level of city planning, The Sims (probably not its working title) was about the micro level of home design, and both were intended more as entertaining simulators than as straight games. Of course, playing the characters turned out to be a lot more fun than expected.
• The trailers for Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (2010) placed great emphasis on the moving wings and spoilers... something the series has had since Need for Speed II (1997).
• Think mature-themed and mature games were introduced with the PlayStation? Actually, they already had soft-porn games in the early '80s, done up by none other than Sierra. There might have been even more made earlier too...
  • Speaking of Sierra, it was established in 1979.
  • The earliest (if not first) adult computer game in Japan was 1981's Yakyuken, published by Hudson Soft. The next two years brought the first obscene visual novels, including Enix's Joshi Ryou Panic and Falcom's Oooku Maruhi Monogatari.
  • There were also pornographic games on the Atari 2600 (if you can call them that), courtesy of developer Mystique. Beat 'Em and Eat 'Em, Philly Flasher/Cathouse Blues, Gigolo/Bachelor Party, Custer's Revenge/General Re-Treat/Westward Ho... and that's not even scratching the surface.
  • Bubble Bath Babes features nudity. Monster Party features no end of gore, and Bionic Commando has Hitler Master-D's head explode in gory detail.
  • The subject of drugs has been tackled since the arcade game NARC game out in 1988.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Mario's 180 sideways somersault move in Super Mario 64 came first in the Game Boy version of Donkey Kong. In fact, the opening and the whole slew of in-game moves in DK'94 clearly showed off Mario's excellent acrobatic skills (other than his high jumps) for the first time.
  • Charles Martinet's first game as Mario was not Super Mario 64. It was Mario's FUNdamentals, released a year earlier.
  • The North American name "Toadstool" was changed to "Peach" not in Super Mario 64, but in Yoshi's Safari, though it was reverted back to "Princess Toadstool" for Super Mario RPG.
  • Super Mario 3D World's gameplay mechanic of holding potted Piranha Plants was first used in Mario Party 3 for the minigame "Storm Chasers".
  • Daisy is often mistaken for a Satellite Character added to pad out the spinoff roster like Waluigi, but she first appeared in Super Mario Land. Many people either didn't realize that wasn't Peach or don't know of the game.
  • A lot of people think Luigi as being a Cowardly Lion first appeared in The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! (when they don't think it was originated by Luigi's Mansion). Actually, there was an Atari 2600 commercial for the original Mario Bros. game that depicts him as frightened of the monsters and crying for Mario to help him. ^note The anonymous actor in this commercial was the first person ever to portray Luigi — the first to portray Mario was veteran voice actor Peter Cullen in Saturday Supercade that same year (1983).
  • While Luigi's modern voice is often cited to have originated from Luigi's Mansion, his modern voice was actually first heard in Super Mario Advance, five months before Luigi's Mansion.
  • While Toad's current raspy voice is said among Mario fans to be in response to him being mistaken for a girl in games like Mario Kart 64, The Super Mario Bros. Super Show already had Toad sounding like that several years prior.
  • Luigi's iconic high jump and low traction are often assumed to have first appeared in Super Mario Bros. 2. It debuted a bit earlier in that in Japan's version of SMB2 that Americans know as Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels.
  • A large number of elements, such as Mario being merely Italian as opposed to Italian-American or Peach being blonde (or just being named Peach, period), get accused by fans of very old media as being retcons introduced in 64. In reality, most of the time, those elements had been around for some time—it's just that they were also frequently obscured by localization or the very minimalist storytelling of the older games.
  • Bowser using power-ups against the players in his final battle in Super Mario 3D World, while unexpected, wasn't the first game to do so. Wario used a similar concept in Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins, predating 3D World by 21 years.
• The beat 'em up Renegade (1986) is often called a "Double Dragon ripoff" by less informed people, even though it was made by the same developer (Technos Japan Corp.) and predated Double Dragon (which came out in 1987) by a year.
• Customizing Counter-Strike servers to add the Unreal Tournament "Headshot!" "Multi kill!" "Killing spree!" etc. sound effects has become such a wide-spread practice that many CS players, unaware of the now-less-popular game, conclude that they are "CS sounds." (While Counter-Strike, in its original form, is in fact slightly older than Unreal Tournament, the use of the sound bytes in the former is the result of server mods, is not part of the game itself, and were obviously added after the release of UT.)
  • This carries over to another Valve franchise, too; in this case, Team Fortress 2. This time around, the writer of the mod was smart enough to realize that the Unreal Tournament sounds, in fact, did not originate from Counter-Strike, and attributed it to the game they came from... Quake.
• The Create-A-Class system in Modern Warfare. While it was one of the most popular games to have such a system, it wasn't the first (Battlefield 2 and First Encounter Assault Recon, for example, both had similar class-based multiplayer components and predated CoD4 by two years).
  • And FEAR itself wasn't the first to effectively combine shooting and melee fighting (possibly among others, Oni came four years earlier), but again it was one of the most popular ones to do so.
  • Within the series, one of the things Call of Duty: Black Ops became notable for was actually giving the player character(s) a face and voice. Finest Hour on PlayStation 2 did so first, though the player characters never spoke when actually under player control. Call of Duty 2 also at least gave all of its player characters faces, and Modern Warfare had two of its protagonists speaking during specific cutscene.
  • And for the recent hubbub around female protagonists in historical World War II games like Call of Duty: World War II and Battlefield V, it ignores much older games with Nazi-killing heroines like Manon Batiste and Violette Summer. For bonus points, both heroines were based on real women who took part in the war in real life^note Manon taking inspiration from Helene Deschamps Adams, a French woman who was an agent in the French Resistance and the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of the CIA); and Violette based on the rather tragic Violette Szabo, who was in the British Secret Operations Executive and was captured in the line of duty and later murdered in a concentration camp..
  • The developers of Call of Duty: Ghosts had been hyping certain new features as "innovative", ignoring that other engines did them long before they did. For instance, "dual-render" scopes (only the scope's view is zoomed in, while your peripheral vision stays the same — Unreal Engine 2 and Source can do it) and "advanced fish AI" that moves out of the way when you swim towards them (Super Mario 64, and for that matter every other 3D game ever with fish that don't actively try to kill you, has this).
• Hey, Drawn to Life is so innovative, never mind that Magic Pengel and Graffiti Kingdom did that concept 5-7 years before it. In 3D!
• Kingdom Hearts has this theme about memories, huh? Well, a similar theme was prominent in Persona 2 a couple years prior... and that's not even counting the amounts of short stories about similar themes that have probably existed long before Nyarlathotep tried to manipulate Jun's memories....
• Speaking of Nyarlathotep, the first appearance of the Crawling Chaos certainly wasn't in the Persona or Shin Megami Tensei games, despite what some people seem to believe.
• Speed modifiers in DanceDanceRevolution, often thought to have debuted in DDRMAX: Dance Dance Revolution 6th Mix, appear as far back as the Dance Dance Revolution Solo sub-series and the two licensed Dancing Stage games. The "boost" modifier (which causes notes to increase speed as they scroll up) is also a feature taken from Solo.
  • Similarly, the difficulty rating of 9 (on the pre-DDR X scale) is slightly Older Than They Think. Thought to have appeared first in DDR 3rd Mix, it first appeared in DDR 2nd Mix Club Version, a version of DDR with songs from the beatmania series.
  • The first DDR game to run at 60 frames per second is Dancing Stage feat. True Kiss Destination, which was released sometime between 2nd and 3rd Mixes. The first well-known DDR game to do so is 5th Mix.
• Jake Hunter Detective Story was criticized for being a cheap cash-in on Capcom's Ace Attorney series by many professional critics, even though it's actually a localization of the latest installment of an older detective game series known as Detective Saburo Jinguji, which began on the Famicom Disk System all the way back in 1987. Part of the blame can be placed on Aksys themselves for cutting half of the game's content and their arguably unnecessary decision to Americanize the game's storyline (whereas Ace Attorney is filled with numerous pun-based names that wouldn't had translated well if they were kept in Japanese, the Jinguji series on the other hand has a decidedly more serious tone, as well as settings that are obviously based on real Japanese locations such as Shinjuku). They later re-released the game with a newer (but still Americanized) translation and all of the missing content restored, but the damage had already been done.
• The difficulty name "Lunatic" appeared in the 1992 Shoot 'Em Up Super Aleste, four years before the Touhou Project series began.
  • There are Touhou fans who dismiss other Bullet Hell shooters as ripoffs. Never mind that danmaku shooters have been around at least since Recca (1992); depending on how one defines the genre, possibly as early as Gradius (1985). This could be part of the reason for the series' Fandom Rivalry with prolific Bullet Hell developer CAVE, as its first foray into Bullet Hell began in 1997 with DoDonPachi (not to mention that CAVE was founded by former developers from Toaplan, who developed another Bullet Hell shooter even earlier called Batsugun,) while the Touhou series began in 1997 as well, but as a completely different genre altogether.
• The cutscene goes at least as far back as Pac-Man (1980).
• Story of Seasons is a FarmVille rip-off. Yes, there are people who believe so. FarmVille is not even the first farming-based Flash game for Facebook; that was Farm Town.
• Tactics Ogre was at one point referred to as a rip-off of Final Fantasy Tactics, a game with very similar key features. This was because Tactics Ogre was released in North America on PS1 after FFT. The game is actually a PS1 remake of an SNES game, pre-dating FFT two years. Also, the similarities are due to some of the same designers working on both, so really, neither one is a "rip-off" per se.
  • Tactics Ogre wasn't the first with those features... Fire Emblem predated it by a few years, and Nobunaga's Ambition and Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Koei) have been around since the mid-'80s.
• Capcom vs.:
  • While the Vs. series widely popularized the concept of 2-on-2 (and later, 3-on-3) Team Battles, The King of Fighters laid the groundwork for such an idea back in its 1994 inception. Admittedly, there it was more of a battle royale, "last man standing" survival affair, and it wasn't until KOF 2003 that the series included tag-ins (called "shifts"). While many, fans and detractors alike, are quick to note that SNK blatantly copied Capcom (which is mostly true, although both companies cribbed off of each other on numerous occasions), fighting game enthusiasts tend to overlook this detail.
    • ... although even tag battles were modeled long ago, thanks to Kizuna Tag Encounter, which was also the brainchild of SNK.
  • The Vs. series, particularly the Marvel vs. Capcom titles, is also known for the implementation of Aerial Raves, air combos that involve launching the opponent into the air and juggling them while midair. However, 1995's Suiko Enbu (also known as Outlaws of the Lost Dynasty or Dark Legend) predates them with a similar juggling system that additionally involves spinning knockdowns, groundbounces, and wallbounces, all over a decade before these became commonplace in the Vs. series. Ironically, Suiko Enbu was developed by Data East, the company infamous for being sued by Capcom over the blatant parallelism between Fighter's History and Street Fighter II.
  • Also, while the Assist Character feature has long been a hallmark of the Marvel vs. Capcom games, it actually originated in a completely different Marvel fighting game. The obscure Data East title Avengers in Galactic Storm (which was ironically released the same year as Marvel Super Heroes) was the first fighting game to use such a mechanic, with players able to summon characters like Iron Man, Thor, Giant-Man or The Vision to assist their fighter.
• Dragon Ball FighterZ was hailed as the first "serious" Dragon Ball game, and the first one aimed at the Fighting Game Community instead of a more casual audience. In reality, a serious DBZ game aimed at fighting game fans was attempted over a decade earlier with Super Dragon Ball Z. It was even headed by Noritaka Funamizu, a former Capcom employee who'd worked on numerous fighting games like the Street Fighter and Capcom vs. series.
• The Game Boy Advance game Dragon Ball Z: Taiketsu used Broly as a major marketing ploy by advertising the game as the fan favorite character's first appearance in a DBZ game. This, however, is only true for the west, as Broly made an appearance many years earlier in the SNES game Dragon Ball Z: Super Butouden 2
• Dimension-shifting in side-scrolling shooters: Salamander (1986) comes to mind for many gamers, but it's far from the first side-scrolling shooter that has dimension-shifting. The idea goes back as far as the arcade game Vanguard (1981).
• Wikipedia proves that the Quick Time Event didn't originate with Shenmue like many gamers think — its director merely coined that term for it. The first game to actually make use of it was Dragon's Lair.
  • One could argue that anything with some cue to Press X to Not Die can count as a QTE. As an example, That One Level from Mega Man 8 that tells you to "Jump Jump!" or "Slide Slide!"
  • The first non-laserdisc game to use QTEs is Die Hard Arcade in 1996, though instead of the Press X to Not Die variant it's "Press X to not get stuck in a room full of enemies."
• Young'uns these days credit Blizzard with creating the first MMORPG; others just as misguided will correct them and refer to EverQuest. Ultima Online was the first game specifically referred to as an MMORPG; prior to the naming, they were called graphical Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs), the earliest examples of which date back to the 80s! The first fully graphical multiplayer RPG was AOL's Neverwinter Nights (not that one) back in 1991, compare to Ultima Online's 1997 release. Oh, it's great fun to tell stories of games prior to World of Warcraft, where players could kill other, unconsenting players and take their possessions as loot, then be hunted as criminals and banned from towns as murderers! Imagine losing stats permanently when dying, rushing back to your corpse (after someone resurrected you) before someone looted it, compared to zipping right back and popping back up, fully equipped and at half health and mana.
  • Furthermore, Ultima online is not even the oldest MMORPG still in service. Korean MMORPG Nexus: The Kingdom Of The Winds takes the credit, coming out in 1996.
  • And as time passes, it turns From Bad to Worse. Many games coming out after World of Warcraft were derided as "WoW-clones" for directly copying the systems and sometimes look of World of Warcraft. There were some real problems with other companies trying to capitalize on the success but failing because they didn't actually understand what made the game great. However, it's now changed that the response to calling something a "WoW-clone" is "Well, it's an MMO! What else do you expect?" Which ignores the significant variety in games and playstyles that existed before or alongside World of Warcraft that were also MMORPGs. Raids, quests, progressively more ridiculous equipment, linear storylines, etc. are now seen as the definition of MMOs, even though some of those were in completely unrecognizable forms or nonexistent altogether before World of Warcraft. World of Warcraft may have refined a lot of things that needed refining, and ultimately made the genre accessible to a wide audience, but it also left out features that were extremely popular in games before it came out that in their own time were thought of as the definition of MMOs. The MMO genre is less of a genre than a wide variety of ideas that simply require many players connected together online.
  • Actually the first networked-based multiplayer RPGs (with graphics or otherwise) where those on the PLATO Network during the mid-seventies, long before either the MUDs or Neverwinter Nights. If these games can be considered MMORPGs it would mean that the fourth RPG video game ever created, Moria, was an MMORPG. Furthermore this would make MMORPGs the 2nd oldest sub-genere of video RPGs ever (only being beaten by the single-player dungeon crawls.) Truly Older Than They Think.
• Tell me if you recognize this setting: Colonists on an alien world must fight among each other for limited resources while constantly under seige by parasitic mind worms controlled by an emerging consciousness produced by the neural interconnections of the native flora. That's right, it's Frank Herbert's Pandora book series which inspired Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.
• There's the belief that Quake is the first fully 3D (as in, drawing all aspects of 3D) FPS and Super Mario 64 being the first full 3D platformer, when in fact a PlayStation launch title, Jumping Flash!, came before either of them, and it was a hybrid of sorts.
• The Boss Rush phenomenon dates back to 1985, with Space Harrier. The last level was nothing but previous bosses.
• The developers of The Force Unleashed spent a lot of time in pre-release interviews for the first game talking about how they'd incorporated a materials-system into their engine like it had never been done before and would revolutionize how objects in the environment react to physical force; Half-Life 2 did it four years earlier and to a much greater extent. The material system used in The Force Unleashed was a refinement of existing material systems, though - when materials break apart in that game, they are procedurally generated and more or less realistically break, whereas in games like Half-Life 2, wooden boards, no matter where or with what you hit it, they always break into two nearly-symmetrical halves in the center.
  • In a meta example, Jurassic Park: Trespasser featured realistic environment physics six years before Half-Life 2. That said, Trespasser's physics engine was explicitly an inspiration for the one used in Half-Life 2, and like the above Half-Life 2's was much more refined than its existing inspiration, primarily with the inclusion of friction allowing for items to stack properly (whereas Trespasser had to resort to freezing physics objects in place on loading the level to keep them from sliding off of each other - several puzzles and even one full level had to be scrapped because of it).
• Remember when the NPC Scheduling was touted as innovative in Oblivion? Sure, it was new for The Elder Scrolls... but Ultima V already did it in 1988.
• Back on the subject of Street Fighter (see above), it's not quite as innovative with its game mechanics as people may think, even with Street Fighter II being the fighting game Trope Codifier.
  • Multiple-level super meters, air blocking, chain combos, EX moves ^note no, you're reading that correctly; the console version of The Movie predates Second Impact in regards to the use of EX Moves in SF, air dashing? Darkstalkers had all of that and more back in '94. 2.5D gameplay and Ultra Combos? Street Fighter EX (co-developed by Arika) first came up with that (although the Meteor Combos—EX's analogue to Ultras—were Limit Breaks as opposed to Desperation Attacks). The Guard Break in EX even opens up the opponent for a free attack like a charged Focus Attack in IV and can be similarly used to cancel normals and specials. Some of the moves in IV were even carried over from EX; Death Tower (Bison/Dictator's back throw) was introduced in EX, while Blanka's Shout of Earth Ultra in SSFIV was originally his Meteor Combo in EX2. Also, while Street Fighter III is famous for introducing a parry mechanic, SNK's Samurai Shodown II did it first three years earlier.
  • Super Street Fighter II Turbo definitely popularized the concept of super meters and powered-up special moves in fighting games, but Capcom actually got the idea from SNK's Art of Fighting. Yes, that's right, the game widely known to be a Street Fighter knockoff actually originated those specific mechanics with its Spirit Gauge and Super Death Blows.
  • A fighting game threequel that ditched most of the previous fan favorite combatants in favor of a largely new cast, and also implemented a new art style with much smoother character animations? Most fans would think this refers to Street Fighter III, but SNK actually did it first with Art of Fighting 3.
  • And speaking of Darkstalkers, it may come as a shock to some fans that Morrigan's Darkness Illusion was the first move to use the button press sequence (LP, LP, F, LK, HP) that is now commonly associated with Akuma's Shun Goku Satsu. Allegedly, a handful of Japanese players back in the day even nicknamed the SGS "Goukiness Illusion" because of this.
• Some people consider Final Fantasy Adventure a Link's Awakening ripoff. Final Fantasy Adventure came out in June/November 1991, Link's Awakening was released in mid-1993.
• Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was not the first FPS to introduce a bullet penetration system. The first one (or earliest ones) to do so (albeit, improperly) was GoldenEye 007, where anything that wasn't level geometry sans windows and doors, could be shot through with the right weapon. This ranged from a low penetration of shooting through boxes and enemies, all the way up to shooting through steel doors and "bulletproof glass."
  • Another jab at Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, it's certainly not the first game of its genre (being a modern warfare FPS). Nor the first popular one (arguably). Battlefield 2 was a "modern warfare" game released two years earlier, which was arguably based on the Battlefield 1942 mod, Desert Combat, released somewhere in 2003. And then we could claim the obsession with "terrorists versus counter terrorist" games spanning years earlier were in the same boat.
  • Many people mistakenly think that Ghost's skull balaclava started a military fashion trend, when in fact soldiers have been wearing skull balaclavas years before the game was even developed.
• The Dragon Quest series may have the Slime as its Mascot Mook, but Dragon Quest wasn't the first game to have a slime be the first and weakest enemy in the game; The Tower of Druaga and Hydlide did so before.
• The first video game to have an Easter Egg is routinely credited to Atari 2600's Adventure (1979), but in fact Easter Eggs have been found in two earlier Atari arcade games (Owen Rubin's initials in Orbit and Skydiver, both from 1978), and no fewer than three games for the obscure Fairchild Channel F console (Brad Reid-Seith hid his name in 1978's Video Whisball and Alien Invasion, while Michael Glass's name can be found in the 1976 Demo Cart).
• On This Very Wiki, the page for Anomaly: Warzone Earth cites the game as the first "Reverse Tower Defense" (aka Tower Offense) game. However, the first game of this type was actually Bokosuka Wars (1983), with a less obscure example being Sega's Gain Ground (1988). Both of these long predate not only Anomaly: Warzone Earth but every "standard" Tower Defense game.
• The X-Universe series is often though of as a singleplayer clone of EVE Online by the uninformed, but the first X game came out four years before EVE. EVE's story also borrows heavily from Escape Velocity: Nova.
• Valve highlighted the "virtual camera" in their Source Engine tech demo, where a "screen" can show actual real-time 3D footage from some "camera" (as opposed to an animated texture or something). Cool, but Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty did this in 2001 where the radar map can showcase, in real-time 3D, what the enemy is doing when in the Alert or Evasion phases. The original Unreal engine from 1998 was also proven to be able to handle it, as in 2000 a mod for Unreal Tournament came out that, when you equipped the Translocator and sent out its beacon, would place a small screen on your HUD that showed what a "camera" on that beacon could see, even allowing you to rotate it to scout the area out before teleporting yourself to it.
• Time Killers introduced the concept of four punch and kick buttons being those of respective left and right limbs, which has been popularized by Tekken.
• Speaking of Tekken, while Eddy Gordo was a revolutionary character and is definitely the most popular example of a capoeira fighter in video games, he wasn't the first. Elena from Street Fighter III beat him to the punch by a few months, while Richard Meyer and Bob Wilson from Fatal Fury predate them both by several years. And if we're talking more general Dance Battlers, you also had characters like Duck King, also from Fatal Fury, and Dee Jay from Street Fighter II.
• Many people think that the only game older than The Sims to feature "playable pregnancy" is the Story of Seasons series. They're thinking wrong. The "playable pregnancy" feature actually goes back to the 1992 Super Famicom video game Dragon Quest V. After you chose one potential wife out of the two female suitors (or three in the Nintendo DS rerelease), after time passed in-game, you would notice that her belly was swelling, meaning that your wife would soon have twins,one of whom would grow up to be the true "Legendary Hero".
• Chun-Li from Street Fighter II is frequently credited as the first playable female fighting game character. She was beaten to that honor by six years by Yuki in Taito's 1985 fighter Onna Sansirou - Typhoon Gal. There are also at least four other fighting games before Street Fighter II with playable characters: Gaea from Galactic Warriors (1985), Lan-Fang from Yie Ar Kung-Fu II (1985), Linda Lash in the two-player versus mode of the NES port of Double Dragon (1988) and Tyris Flare in the Duel Mode of Golden Axe (1989).
• The control scheme of WASD movement + mouse aiming didn't originate in any First-Person Shooter, but in Dark Castle.
• Time Commando did melee weapons having drastically different damage, reach and speed 13 years before Demon's Souls got praise for this sort of "depth" — and it's deeply unlikely that even that is the first, given that these are the basic mechanics of melee weapons in video games anyway, and changing them up is the obvious thing to do with them.
• When you think of real-time combat in the JRPG genre, the Tales series will get the most credits for introducing it into the genre, particularly the original Tales of Phantasia (SNES, 1995). In reality, Japanese studios have started using real-time combat in their RPGs as early as 1984, such as Dragon Slayer (NEC PC-98, Nihon Falcom), Hydlide (NEC PC-98, T&E Soft) and Dragon Buster (Arcade, Namco).
• R-Type Tactics (2007) is not the only Turn-Based Strategy spin-off of a Shoot 'Em Up series. The first is actually the Gradius spin-off Cosmic Wars, released for the Famicom 18 years earlier.
• A computerized chess (or rather chess-based) game came out in 1912 as a technology demonstration. El Ajedrecista would play a King and Rook against a human opponent (who only had a King). Not only is it the first example of an electronic chess game, it's also the earliest example of Unwinnable by Design (and one of the few cases where that was obvious from the start) and considered the first computer game ever.
• Star Trek Online: The original post of this thread accused Cryptic of ripping off Star-Lord from Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) in their design for the Vaadwaur uniform. It didn't take very long for folks to point out that the "Gas Mask Mooks with Badass Longcoats" motif is one that dates back to World War I, and that given the trench warfare look of the Kobali battlezone and the Space Nazi behavior of the Vaadwaur, Cryptic probably had Nazi Germany in mind.
• Tetris:
  • The first Tetris game to use the now-iconic "Korobeiniki" theme was Nintendo's Game Boy version, right? Nope—it was Bullet-Proof Software's 1988 Famicom port, predating both Tengen's unlicensed and Nintendo's official NES versions. Of course, since this version was only released in Japan and is highly obscure even there, it'd be harder to find someone who does know this.
  • Many features Tetris games known amongst Westerners as recent additions owe themselves to Sega's 1988 arcade version. It's the first game to introduce lock delay^note Once the current piece lands, it has a very brief period delay during which you can move or rotate the piece until it locks into place. In contrast, Nintendo's early Tetris games immediately lock a piece down once it lands., first game to feature fast sideways movement^note 1 cell per frame as shown in Tetris: The Grand Master, and, thanks to the aforementioned innovations, first game to allow fall speeds of 1 cell per frame without becoming a Kill Screen^note NES Tetris notoriously becomes impossible to continue at level 29 because of the lack of these quantities.
  • 20G^note 20 grid cells per frame, where 1 frame = 1/60 second. Since a typical Tetris field is 20 cells tall, this means pieces instantly drop to the bottom, thought to be introduced in Tetris: The Grand Master (1998), was actually first introduced in Tetris Semipro-68k (1989).
• When Crysis came out in 2007, the game was touted on being innovative because you could modify your weapons in real-time. Gunman Chronicles, a game using the original Half-Life engine back in 2000, allowed you to modify the pistol from single shot, three-round burst, to a sniper rifle; the Rocket launcher could also modify payload, detonation style, and launch method (rocket, guided missile, or grenade) in real time.
• Dragon Quest was up to III by the time Final Fantasy was first released. Due to poor planning, it took Dragon Quest years longer to make it overseas, thereby cementing Final Fantasy as the beginning of the JRPG to almost everybody outside of Japan. Dragon Quest often doesn't even get a cursory glance despite codifying and/or making basically every single JRPG trope.
  • And speaking of Dragon Quest: first game to include a Dark World? The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past? Nope, Dragon Quest III.
• The Dragon Quest series is known for its party chat feature, which made its way into remakes of some of the earlier games. The series also introduced in a similar fashion a bag with unlimited capacity separate from the party members' individual inventories. Both of these features appeared in the Doraemon Famicom JRPG Giga Zombie no Gyakushū long before Dragon Quest got around to them.
• As far as fighting games go, while the plot is usually an afterthought to the gameplay, many gaming publications and websites will state that story wasn't given a strong focus until titles like BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger (2009), Mortal Kombat (2011), Skullgirls (2012), and Injustice: Gods Among Us (2013) came along. This is largely untrue. Among others, Tekken, the Soul series, The King of Fighters, and Rival Schools^*all of which date back to the mid-to-late 90s have narratives that are both elaborate and apparent within the confines of the actual game, though some were not like this initially and a few went off the rails with certain installments. It was also extremely common for titles based on licensed properties like the Dragon Ball Z: Budokai series (2002–2008), X-Men: Next Dimension (2002), and Capcom's JoJo's Bizarre Adventure game (1998^*1999 for Heritage for the Future) to have strong story elements in the single player modes. Similarly, Melty Blood (2002) was a story-heavy "anime fighter" that spun off from the equally dense visual novel Tsukihime, itself belonging to a setting known for its sprawling continuity. Weaponlord (1995) also made an attempt at immersive storytelling in spite of mostly catering to hardcore players, and the original Art of Fighting (1992) also had a fairly heavy emphasis on story for the era it was created in. Even the poorly-regarded Justice League Task Force (1995) made an effort, with the Story Mode featuring cutscenes between each battle to explain what was going on and why the characters were actually fighting. In fact, features such as branching story routes and multiple endings that earned BlazBlue laudation were taken from previous Arc System Works title Guilty Gear (particularly the console version of XX, which predates its successor's home release by about six and a half years), and the Tales of Souls in Soulcalibur III (2005) operated similarly. Likewise, the widely praised idea of a single narrative with constantly alternating characters/perspectives seen in the NRS fighters began with the installment before the 2011 reboot of Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe (2008)... and even that concept didn't originate there; Koei's DeStrega had a similar setup with its story and cast ten years earlier. Several of these titles lack the same kind of mainstream appeal that the largely bare-bones Street Fighter series has and many fans of the genre are known to ignore the story elements anyway, which likely accounts for the misconception.
• Party games, as in collections of multiplayer mini-games. The genre did not start with Mario Party as some may think, but Starpath's 1983 Party Mix for the Supercharger (an obscure Atari 2600 add-on).
• Final Fantasy VII was considered groundbreaking for its story, in part due to the permanent Character Death of Aerith. This particular trope, however, predates FFVII twice over in the Phantasy Star series: first with Nei's death in Phantasy Star II, then with Alys's death in Phantasy Star IV.
• Many people think edutainment games began in The '90s. They started in The '80s with series like Number Munchers and The Oregon Trail, though the 90s was when more companies began making them.
• Undertale:
  • Many fans think that "MEGALOVANIA," the music that plays during the battle with Sans at the end of the Genocide route, was composed for the game. It was actually first made by Toby Fox in the Earthbound Halloween Hack (a ROM hack Fan Sequel to EarthBound), then used in Homestuck before finally being used in Undertale. Plus, it was heavily based on "Megalomania," the boss theme from Live A Live. However, the version used in Undertale is an arranged version; wildly different from The Halloween Hack and Homestuck's respective versions.
  • Similarly, a lot of fans refer to Sans's "You're gonna have a bad time" quote as originating from Undertale. It actually comes from a meme known as "Super Cool Ski Instructor," which itself comes from the South Park episode "Asspen."
  • Skeletons named after typefaces first appeared in Helvetica long before Papyrus and Sans appeared in Undertale.
  • An RPG where you befriend monsters instead of killing them? It's unclear who did it first, but it certainly wasn't Undertale. In fact, Toby Fox said he drew inspiration for that very mechanic from the Shin Megami Tensei series, where you could do just that — and the first game in that series came out in 1987.
• The Sims is not the first life sim game. It's not anywhere near it. Little Computer People was released in 1984 and games like Alter Ego (1986) also existed in the 80s.
• Many people would think that Don't Shit Your Pants (and its sequel, Don't Wet Your Pants) is the first Interactive Fiction game to feature a playable Potty Emergency. That accolade had to go to the true first Interactive Fiction game, Infocom's Leather Goddesses of Phobos. At the very beginning, your character's gender is indeterminate for a first few moves before a few mugfuls of beer triggers a sudden urge to go to the bathroom. Fortunately, you start the game in front of two bathroom doors, and you have to make a decision to choose one of either appropriate gender in order to empty your bladder by using the toilet. But you have to be quick, or it will result in a Potty Failure (and a Press Start to Game Over).
• Those who think mobile gaming popularized Microtransactions, or even that they invented them, have overlooked the staple of arcade gaming of "Insert Coins to Continue." Some arcade games were made Unwinnable by Design until the player inserted more money to keep playing, making them functionally identical to those microtransactions that lock the player out of necessary game content unless they pay up. Double Dragon III even allows players to purchase additional power-ups by inserting more coins into the machine.
• Almost everyone thinks that Skylanders started the "toys-to-life" concept of video games. In truth, there was actually an earlier fighting game for the original PlayStation called ZXE-D: Legend of Plasmatlite that did it first. It came with a special memory card that connected to the body of a robot figure the game came with. You could change the parts of the robot and the in-game model would change to reflect what you did! Unfortunately, it only came out in Japan.
• The premise of physical props and items that unlock content in video games hit the mainstream with Skylanders and amiibo. Before amiibo, there was Nintendo's e-Reader, a device for Game Boy Advance that allowed you to scan in cards that unlocked special content. However, even earlier than that was Epoch's Barcode Battler, a device that generated characters from barcode cards that you could play games with. The Barcode Battler was released in several countries, but only Japan got the licensed Nintendo-themed card sets featuring Super Mario and The Legend of Zelda content.
• Mega Man:
  • The lesser-known Game Boy Mega Man (Classic) games introduced a few gameplay elements that would become staples in the console games, such as fighting bosses in sets of 4 instead of getting to choose from all 8 from the get-go, the Energy Balancer, and an in-game store to purchase power-ups and upgrades. Most people are also unaware that the GBA game Mega Man & Bass started out as a Super Famicom game released back in 1998, 5 years before the GBA port.
  • It may seem that Mega Man X4 was the first time the series dropped the bombshell that Dr. Wily is Zero's creator, but in reality this was explicitly revealed a year earlier in Bass's ending in the arcade game Mega Man 2: The Power Fighters (though more people became aware of this with the release of Mega Man Anniversary Collection in 2004) and was vaguely hinted at even further back in the Japanese version of Mega Man X2.
  • Mega Man for DOS had an intro stage three years before Mega Man X, even if it was just a flat plain where Mega Man had to run away from a robotic guard dog. Its sequel Mega Man 3: The Robots are Revolting had underwater swimming stages, which wouldn't return until Mega Man 8.
• The trope "Samus Is a Girl" is named after Samus Aran from Metroid (1986), the most famous example of gender reveal in video games. She removes her space suit in the ending credits of the original game, if you complete the game under a certain time. However, Namco's Baraduke came out one year before and had the exact same twist delivered in the same way, i.e. the player character is someone in a yellow space suit who takes off the helmet at the end of the game to reveal that she's a woman.
• Day of the Tentacle was praised for, among other things, the idea of having three characters each living their own adventures at the same time (but not in the same time...) and coming together at the end. The same system, minus the time travel stuff, appeared in the Italian adventure game Nippon Safes Inc. that was released two years before, and even coined the term "Parallaction" to describe it.
• Final Fantasy VII stood out among other JRPGs when it released with its distinct Urban Fantasy aesthetic, in sharp contrast to the medieval fantasy settings of other games, including previous FF titles. However, the previous game, Final Fantasy VI dabbled in science fantasy: while it had a strong medieval fantasy aesthetic, it also incorporates Steampunk and prominently features Magitek (which the game named). Before even FFVI, though, the very first game has light sci-fi with the Floating Castle dungeon and the Warmech enemy, which also has the honor of being the series's first superboss, predating Shinryu and Omega (the latter being a sci-fi inspired enemy) in Final Fantasy V.
• G-Darius (1997) is well-known for its Beam-O-War mechanic where the player has to mash the fire button to overtake the enemy's beam. However, Taito's own Metal Black (1991) features the same mechanic and predates G-Darius by six years.
• In 2016, Final Fantasy XV reached somewhat memetic status with its blatant Product Placement of Cup Noodles. However, FFXV is nowhere near the first game to do that. Sports games have long placed corporate logos inside them, as did games such as Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. Heck, games such as Maniac Mansion shipped with coupons of Pepsi Cola in the late 80s, while licensed games were used as advertisement as early as the Intellivision and Atari ages. If you think those don't count because they take place in a real-life setting where the brands aren't as out-of-place, there's also Darkened Skye (2002), a fantasy RPG where you must defeat evil using the power of Skittles candy.
• Super Smash Bros. is considered the definitive example of the Platform Fighter subgenre, and the example by which all others are compared against. The concept, however, was first realized in 1994 with The Outfoxies, which Masahiro Sakurai even cited as his inspiration for Smash.
• Knights of the Old Republic has one of the most famous twists in video gaming, so much so that most folks know of it even if they haven't played the game. However, the Japan-only Glory of Heracles III had the same twist of the main character being an amnesiac ex-Big Bad eleven years before KotOR.
• Some Wii and 3DS games would frequently remind the player to take a break if they had been playing too long. Thanks to Nintendo popularizing casual gaming, many people believed that the whole "take a break" suggestion originated from the Wii era. The reminder to take a break actually started with EarthBound (1994) where the main character's father would remind the player to save and take a break if they had been playing a long time without saving. The game predates the Wii by a decade.
• At the time, Hatred was utterly blasted for being a game entirely about the gratuitous slaughter of defenseless people without any hint of comedy or analysis. In reality, the game is effectively a fully 3D version of the original Postal, where Postal Dude also engaged in wholesale slaughter of innocent people for an entire game, played nightmarishly straight, and with only some half-hearted babble about mental illness and stress-related breakdowns slapped onto the very end of the game to justify it all. What's even more impressive is how Postal completely flew under the radar both then, and even after its HD rerelease, while both a copycat of the original game, and the more goofy and irreverent Postal 2 (a game explicitly made so you don't have to kill anyone) caught the ire of Moral Guardians instead.
• You may think that Red Dead Redemption 2 is a western-style Wide-Open Sandbox video game to feature songs as a first musical of some sorts, but the first video game to be a theatrical musical in regard to its presentation style is Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure, a JRPG released in 1998.
  • Also, RDR2's protagonist, Arthur Morgan, isn't the first playable character to have suffered tuberculosis; that honor instead goes to Ukyo Tachibana from Samurai Shodown.
• Widescreen 16:9 gaming, often associated with HDTVs and the first consoles to make use of them, actually predates the HD era, with beatmania IIDX and Pac-Man World using a 16:9 screen in 1999 and Virtua Racing using the same in 1992.
• A train of multi-colored marbles enters the screen and rolls down a winding track. The player controls a cannon that shoots marbles, and matching groups of three marbles causes them to disappear with the rest of the train closing the gap. Zuma? In fact, the concept comes from the arcade game Puzz Loop released in 1998, five years earlier.
• Stardew Valley has been called a Darker and Edgier Farm Life Sim compared to Story of Seasons. Despite this, most of its themes (such as depression and alcoholism) have been touched upon in Story of Seasons games. Primarily older titles such as Harvest Moon 64 and Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life feature mature themes, but even relatively newer ones like Harvest Moon: Tree of Tranquility do.
• Quiz Magic Academy and Quiz RPG: The World of Mystic Wiz aren't the first Pop Quiz RPGs in history. In fact, the NES Home Game adaptation of Japan's real-life Quiz Show Trans-America Ultra Quiz did it first in 1991. Although in the actual show, there are no RPG elements.
• Cross-platform multiplayer between competing game consoles seems like an idea that didn't became a reality until Nintendo and Microsoft started allowing it between Switch and Xbox One owners with Minecraft in 2017, with Sony following suit in 2018 when they allowed PS4 owners to play with other console players in Fortnite. However, Capcom vs. SNK 2 actually allowed crossplay between PS2 and Dreamcast owners all the way back in 2001, via KDDI's Multi-Matching service, but this feature was only available in Japan (mainly due to the fact that the Dreamcast port was unreleased in other regions, but also because online play was cut from the PS2 versions released in the west). Final Fantasy XI also supported crossplay between PS2 and Xbox 360 owners when the latter version was released in 2006.
  • The Teleplay Modem was a peripheral designed to provide online play between the NES, Sega Genesis, and the SNES, and was showcased way back in 1992. It garnered interest from companies such as EA and Sierra and there were three games developed internally for the modem but as Nintendo and Sega refused to license the Teleplay Modem or the games, these ultimately went unreleased. Despite this setback, there was another attempt in 1993 with the Edge 16 modem, the result of a partnership between AT&T, PF Magic and Sega of America, which would have offered crossplay between the Sega Genesis and Panasonic's 3DO console. Like its predecessor though, the modem fizzled out and development was pulled before anything could be released.
• The PS4 was not the first Sony console to have paid online. While the online service for the PS2 was free for most games, a majority of Capcom and SNK Playmore titles in Japan, particularly the Neo-Geo Online Collection series, required an additional paid service offered by KDDI known as Multi-Matching, which had a monthly fee of 945 yen. In fact, Resident Evil: Outbreak, which had free online for the North American version, required this service for the Japanese version.
• Detractors of Donkey Kong 64 often cite the collection obsession being necessary to complete the game as a major downside. Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble! did the same thing three years prior, though not to the same extent as 64 did.
• For many, many years, pretty much everyone believed that the unique tracks in the 1997 PC Collection version of Sonic 3 & Knuckles were hastily thrown in to sidestep the game's infamous legal issues involving Michael Jackson/Brad Buxer's contributions to the soundtrack, not helped by the PC Collection port using MIDI for its tracks; but in 2019, a 1993 prototype for Sonic 3 was leaked which revealed that the PC Collection "replacement" tracks were the originals all along, with the Jackson/Buxer ones being added later. This has caused these tracks to be Vindicated by History by several fans, especially since the prototype gives these tracks the Genesis instrumentation treatment that makes them sound much more in line with the rest of the soundtrack.
• Before its release, Saints Row: The Third's promotional material heavily played up how absurd some of the weapons in the game were. The Penetrator, a gigantic purple dildo on a stick, drew an especially large amount of attention due to how it Crosses the Line Twice. However, it's not the first Wide-Open Sandbox to feature such a weapon: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which came out seven years before Saints Row: The Third and two years before the first Saints Row, also had a huge purple dildo that could be used as a melee weapon (as well as a smaller vibrator which did much more damage), so the concept of bludgeoning foes with sex toys wasn't as novel as some people thought.
• Metroid Prime 2: Echoes had the Ing as Samus's main enemy force and several of them steal her suit's weaponry at the start of the game and use them against her later on. While a novel concept that seemed new at the time, Metroid Fusion used the same concept earlier with the X-Parasites using some of Samus's weapons against her due to them using parts of her suit and DNA.
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was many players' first experience with an open world Zelda title that let them complete major dungeons in any order they wanted and it was also assumed that it was the first game in the franchise to do so. The Legend of Zelda and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link used similar open world experiences by at least thirty years prior to Breath of the Wild; the first game game had an open world where you could could find and complete dungeons in any order you wanted while the second game had a more natural open world filled with wildernesses, caves, and towns filled with people that gave Link hints to aid him in his quest.
• Vampire Survivors is the Trope Codifier, Genre Popularizer, and most prominent example of the Horde Survival Roguelike genre (aka Bullet Heaven) where the player faces endless hordes of enemies and selects randomized upgrades on level-up. However, Vampire Survivors isn't the first of its kind — Crimsonland has a Survival mode that predates it by almost two decades, with the randomized perks on level-up being the roguelike elements.

Game Engines

• The very first game engine that could program different games for different genres is usually thought to be the Unreal Engine launched in 1998, but Terminal Reality's PHOTEX engine, used in their multiple racing games, first-person-shooters, and flight simulators, predated it by a couple of years in 1996.

Other Media References

• So many people seem to be under the impression that Bahamut being portrayed as a dragon was from Final Fantasy, but it was done in Dungeons & Dragons long before Final Fantasy did it.
  • Many people complain about D&D incorporating elements from MMORPGs into 4th edition. So many people don't realize that MMORPGs and MUDs have in fact incorporated elements from D&D into THEIR genre first, making it an odd case of a copier is being copied by the source material in order to seem more like it use to be, but game systems tend to copy each other a lot so this trope goes back a ways.
• When you hear the name "Morrigan," what do you think of? A fighting succubus or a disapproving sorceress? But what about the ancient Celtic triune goddess both characters were named after?
• Many people who get a first glance at Iori Yagami from The King of Fighters automatically assume he's an Emo Kid due to his clothes and hairstyle. In fact, Iori debuted in 1995, years before the Internet popularized emo music and fashion. Iori's theme music isn't even rock: it's funk and jazz, primarily.
  • Needless to say, Emos existed (both as a musical genre and as a visual style) since the 1980s.
• While one of the most recognizable quotes from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night may be "What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets!", the (mis)quote is actually an old psychological aphorism, enough so to be refuted by French author and statesmen Andre Malraux in 1955.
  • Another popular quote from the same game is "The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." This quote is generally attributed to either Leo Tolstoy or Edmund Burke, and is probably older than either.
• Lampshaded in Max Payne 2. A character Vinnie Gognitti wasn't aware that Maxwell's Demon, villain of the in-game comics Captain Baseballbatboy, had been invented quite before the comics. The ignorance had dire consequences for him, though to be fair, there was no way his answer was going to be satisfactory, considering the situation. The Maxwell's Demon referred to by Vlad is actually a thought experiment intended to demonstrate something about the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
• The iconic theme music from Tetris, "Korobeiniki," was first published in 1861.
  • Granted, it's not exactly uncommmon knowledge that the standard soundtrack consists of Russian folk music. It's not the first time a video game has used public domain tunes either.
• The Japanese term "Ansatsuken" (assassination fist) is commonly misinterpreted as the name of Ryu and Ken's fighting style and is often thought to be just a name made up by one Capcom's writers. In truth, the term was coined in the manga Fist of the North Star to describe the titular fighting style practiced by Kenshiro. Moreover, "Ansatsuken" in the Street Fighter series does not refer to particular fighting style, but it's simply a category for any style with a killing potential, as it's also been used to describe Gen's otherwise unrelated fighting style.^note Ryu and Ken don't practice a particular style, but rather they developed their own unique style mixing techniques from various styles such as Karate, Judo, Tae-Kwon-Do according to books such as All About Street Fighter III: New Generation and All About Street Fighter ZERO 3, with their three signature special moves (the Hadoken, Shoryuken and Tatsumaki Senpukyaku) being learned from an ancient assassination style that their sensei Gouken trained in. However, early localizations of Street Fighter II (particularly the manuals for the console versions), would claim that Ryu and Ken's style is "Shotokan Karate", which is where the term "Shotoclone" originated from.
• Gaz sure was witty with that "Don't call me Shirley" line in Call of Duty 4. It was funnier when Airplane! did it 25 years earlier.
  • There are also people who think Wallcroft's "Nothing takes five minutes!" line in Modern Warfare 3 came directly from the game, rather than being one of the series' many references to Black Hawk Down.
• Many believe that the battle cry of "CHESTO!" was popularized by Rishu Togo (from 2002's Super Robot Wars: Original Generation fame) and his students (the prime example being Sanger Zonvolt, who debuted in 2003's Super Robot Wars Alpha 2). This particular warcry was a stock phrase used by Japanese martial artists and samurai in general. Media-wise, one of the first uses of "CHESTO!" was back in 1989, where it was frequently shouted by Kousoku Sentai Turboranger's Youhei Hama/Blue Turbo.
• At least some people think that the "Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again" joke originated from one of the Grand Theft Auto games. Apparently this is as old as the immigration rush in the US... back in the 1800s.
• This forum post suggests that Geralt of Rivia, a character who first appeared in a short story published in 1986, is a Sephiroth clone. The thread-starter is a known troll so this may have been deliberate.
• Despite what the Internet seems to think, the line "Hey you, get off of my cloud!" did not originate from Hotel Mario. It is the title of a Rolling Stones song from 1965, before video games as we know them even existed.
  • Also in Hotel Mario, its theme tune is actually a 1933 composition by Max Steiner for a film adaptation of Little Women.
  • The line was also delivered by Verminous Skumm, in the 1980s. Hades also says it in Hercules, calling Zeus "Mr. High and Mighty, Mr. Hey-You-Get-Offa-My-Cloud."
• One of the most quoted lines in Meet the Heavy:
  Heavy Weapons Guy: Some people think they can outsmart me. Maybe. (Beat) Maybe. I've yet to meet one that can outsmart bullet.
  • ... is in fact a variant of this line, in RoboCop (1987):
    Emil: I bet you think you're pretty smart, huh? Think you can outsmart a bullet?
• Samus Aran is often cited by many people as "the first playable female character in Video Game History", unaware that Ms. Pac-Man already existed 5 years before the first Metroid game.
  • As stated above, she's not even the first game character who revealed herself as female at the end of her game: That honor goes to Kissy AKA Toby Masuyo from Baraduke, which was released in arcades one year before Metroid.
• People critical of Final Fantasy XIII tend to list the game's extreme linearity and lack of freedom as one of the shortcomings, stating how the whole game is nothing but a large hallway. Final Fantasy X did the same thing several years prior.
• Five Nights at Freddy's is so associated with the Hostile Animatronics that many people think it started there, and that any appearance of one is a Shout-Out. Despite this, the concept of Hostile Animatronics is much older showing up in ghost stories and other media. At the very least, it can be traced back to the original West World in 1973.
• The old quote "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results" can be dated back to at least 1981, but it's sometimes mistaken as coming from Far Cry 3, in which Vaas says: "Did I ever tell you what the definition of insanity is? Insanity is doing the exact same fucking thing over and over again expecting shit to change."
• Virtually every dance found in Fortnite was created long before the video game made them well-known among the modern youth, with many of them originating from TV shows, movies and music videos from the '80s and '90s.

Meta

• Batman: The Telltale Series gives Thomas Wayne an Adaptational Villainy upgrade, explaining he was connected to Gotham's underworld. This is not the first time Thomas was portrayed as an ally to the crime families of Gotham: his counterpart in Earth 2 was as well, and in fact faked his death in that continuity to protect Bruce and systematically take brutal revenge against the Falcones. The Telltale version of Thomas is definitely more vile than Earth-2 Thomas ever could be, but that didn't stop Earth-2 Bruce from disowning him for being a murderer.
• Haters of Final Fantasy XII will probably tell you that Hitoshi Sakimoto is a new guy, or make the fallacy that XII was his first work on the Final Fantasy series — ignoring Final Fantasy Tactics and the Final Fantasy Tactics Advance games... both of those predate FFXII by 3-9 years. He's also by no means new to game development, as you'll probably see his name (as well as Masharu Iwata) in the credits of any Ogre Battle games, or Revolter, which was released in 1988.
• Related to the above, most people will give you the impression that Tetsuya Nomura first started working with Square around Final Fantasy VII, and some may tell you he was working with them with Final Fantasy VI. Ignoring that he was actually hired long before those games were even in production. Did you know he was actually working with the series as long ago as Final Fantasy IV? Sure he was only a debugger there, but did you also know he was a graphic designer in Final Fantasy V, too? And Chrono Trigger? And Super Mario RPG?
• Final Fantasy X is often credited as Squaresoft's first game on the PlayStation 2 — The Bouncer predates it by a year.
  • A variant in regards to Final Fantasy X-2, where it's credited as the first direct sequel to a prior Final Fantasy title because people are trying to forget the actual first direct sequel to a prior FF, the FFV followup Final Fantasy: Legend of the Crystals.
  • Final Fantasy VII is also recognized as Squaresoft's first game on the PlayStation. A fighting game by the name of Tobal No.1 came out in 1996, complete with a demo of FFVII.
  • Similarly, many people assume that Final Fantasy was Square's first game made. The company produced several games before it, such as King's Knight and Rad Racer. (King's Knight, not the much later Einhänder, was Square's first foray into the Shoot 'Em Up genre.) Final Fantasy came to be after the company was on the verge of bankruptcy; the name itself referred to the fact that, if the game wasn't as successful as it ended up being, it would be their final game.
  • Aerith's death was such a shocking moment. Never before had a game introduced and characterize a party member only for them to be Killed Off for Real. What do you mean have I ever heard of Galuf? Or Tellah, or Josef for that matter?
• Final Fantasy XII introduced the Gambit system that allows the player to program a series of "if X, then Y" commands to their party so that battles were more streamlined for repetitive tasks or specific strategies. In other words, the AI would take control of the party. Many people thought it was the first game in the series that had such a feature, but Final Fantasy Tactics did it first with a similar feature where players can have their party either attack aggressively, cover someone, heal others, or running away.
• Final Fantasy XIV is full of references to past Final Fantasy titles as well as other games made by Square-Enix. Final Fantasy IX did it first, predating XIV by 13 years.
  • Also from Final Fantasy XIV, the "Palace of the Dead" dungeon, Nybeth (its boss) and the quote "Denizens of the Abyss! From ink of blackest night I summon you" actually were shout-outs to Tactics Ogre. Until its 2022 remastering, many people didn't know those were actually shout-outs to Tactics Ogre, causing some people to mistake their presence in Tactics Ogre as a crossover. Tactics Ogre actually debuted in 1995.
• Gungrave was Yasuhiro Nightow's first foray into video games, right? Nope. Way back in the mid-90s he did the character designs for a little known game called Energy Breaker.
• For a company that's known for making video games, many people are surprised when they learn Nintendo has been around since 1889. Naturally they weren't making video games all that time; they were originally a playing card company, and started with the game hanafuda. Nintendo still makes playing cards and card games (including the notable Pokémon Trading Card Game), even continuing to make hanafuda cards. They didn't even get into making toys until Gunpei Yokoi joined the company in the 1960s. Think of it this way - Parker Brothers is only 6 years older than Nintendo.
• Most Japanese electronics giants one would consider Nintendo competitors nowadays were created only after electronics became a viable business. Sony is a relatively venerable example in this group, having been founded in 1946.
• A relative newcomer then, given that Sega was founded in 1940 in Honolulu, Hawaii by three Americans to make coin operated amusements for visiting American GIs. The company didn't move to Japan until over a decade later by another American named David Rosen who was associated with the company from the early '50s to the mid '90s. Even then, it wasn't a fully Japanese company until The Great Video Game Crash of 1983, before which it had the same parent company as Paramount Television. Sega's name isn't of Japanese origin either. It's an abbreviation for Service Games, the original name of the company.
• Another example is Coleco, known for creating one of Atari 2600's competitors: the Colecovision. Coleco's name is an acronym of the company's earlier name: Connecticut Leather Company. The company originally marketed leather goods to shoemakers, and first ventured over into "fun" items by offering leather craft kits featuring popular characters.
• In a related meta-example, many gamers consider Nintendo an oddity in that they actually sell their game systems with a profit margin, instead of selling the hardware for a loss and making revenue from software licenses. In actuality, this was a standard practice for the industry prior to the Sony PlayStation. In fact, it was Atari that switched to the "Sell the console at a loss" model; however, their refusal to grant software licenses contributed greatly to the crash of 1983. They sued to prevent third-party licensing of their hardware and lost.
• Some people refer to Prince of Persia: Warrior Within as Prince of Persia 2. They're apparently too young to have heard of the original 2D game, or its actual numbered sequel Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow And The Flame. (Warrior Within is actually the fifth Prince of Persia game.)
• The highly addictive electronic boardgame Snake did not originate on the Nokia 5110, but rather as a 1976 Arcade Game called Blockade. It does however owe its status as the most played video game in the world to its appearance on Nokia phones.
• The street racing franchise Need for Speed did not actually start at Underground, contrary to what many "tuner" people (and some gaming magazines and websites) believe. Underground was indeed the first ricer game in the franchise, but there were a few NFS games that preceeded Underground: The Need for Speed (and SE), II (and SE), III: Hot Pursuit, High Stakes, Porsche Unleashed, Hot Pursuit 2, an early racing MMO called Motor City Online,^note which is not a Need for Speed game, but originally intended to be and two North American rebrands of the V-Rally franchise. They were all very successful, too, until the success of The Fast and the Furious prompted a franchise reboot. The key difference was that you couldn't tune your car, so they are considered "uncool" today by the fans of the franchise's later games.
  • In some of those you could tune your car. However, you can't do so in some of the newer titles either, as all you can do is cosmetic changes. That people refer to that as "tuning" doesn't make it so.
  • Speaking about "tuning", Underground isn't even the first to have one; that went back to High Stakes and the PC version of Porsche Unleashed.
• Mario is older than some people think. Many people think he debuted in Super Mario Bros. in 1985, though he had been in Mario Bros. before that in 1983, and his true first appearance was in Donkey Kong in 1981, though he was called "Jumpman" in the Japanese arcade version.
• Many people believe that the first version of Hudson Soft's Bomberman was on the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1987. There were actually at least two earlier versions: a version for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum in 1983, released both as Bomber Man (two words) and as Eric and the Floaters (the latter being the more widely known name); and a version for the Amstrad CPC464 which Hudson demonstrated (on a smart-card system which they were also demonstrating) in 1984.
  • Likewise, in 1983 on the Speccy, Hudson also released Cannon Ball aka Bubble Buster. Never heard of it? You more likely know it as Pang, aka Buster Bros.
• You know that Title Scream in the theme for the movie adaptation of Mortal Kombat? It actually debuted in the commercial for the console ports.
• IGN said many times that the Backyard Sports series started around the dawn of the PS2 (after when the editors think games died). The series actually released its first game in 1997, a few years after the release of the PS1 and long before the PS2. (In fact, it was released around the same time as IGN's favorite games.)
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • Many sources cite The Legend of Zelda as the first game (Zelda or otherwise) that had an open world and/or let the player save and resume their game. Which couldn't be further from the truth, as both had been standard features of computer RPGs since the late 70s. In fact they had an arguably more advanced (and definitely more convenient) save system, letting the player manually save at any point and without having to die or quit. It wasn't until 1998 that Zelda adopted this save system.
  • Link's modern, more realistic, slightly Bishōnen design seems to originate in concept art for Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.
  • The The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past comic adaptation had a couple of these:
    • Instead of receiving the expected flippers from Zora, Link ends up with "Zora's Mask", a nondescript monster mask that is useful for a Dressing as the Enemy sequence. This was written more than half a decade before The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, let alone The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask.
    • When Zelda deals the final blow in the comic, she does so by aiming at a glowing wound Link carved across Ganon's chest. Ganondorf possesses a similar scar in Twilight Princess.
    • A moon with a rictus face.
    • A supporting protagonist who is a champion archer and is skilled in flight as a bird, but who is also incredibly arrogant and resents the idea that Link is the chosen hero.
    • Both Link's fairy companion and Zelda wielding a bow were features of the animated series.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time:
    • For many years following the release of the game, many people thought that Zelda was a new series.
    • Many of the features of Ocarina of Time thought to be original were actually carried over from The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, including Kakariko Village, Lake Hylia, the Hookshot, Zelda and Ganon's leitmotifs, the Master Sword, Magic Music and the fact that Ganon was named Ganondorf before he became a monster.
    • The concept of learning different ocarina songs that have different effects actually originated in Link's Awakening, not Ocarina Of Time.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, the Nintendo DS microphone can be used to stun Pols Voice and to haggle with shopkeepers. These two things could be done, respectively, in the Famicom Disk System versions of The Legend of Zelda and Kid Icarus, using the microphone built into the Famicom's second controller.
• It isn't hard to find fans who still think Final Fantasy VII is the first ever game in the series, despite the obvious number in the title. One reason why Final Fantasy VIII sold so well when it came out and quickly developed a Hatedom from the fans, was because they thought it was a sequel. Very ridiculous, since the roman numeral "VII" stands for, well, you know... seven. Little do they know that around FFVII's release, the series has been around for ten years.
• There are people who think Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII is the first "effeminate villain" (and he honestly isn't even that effeminate compared to some of these examples). Obviously, you can tell who has probably never seen the art for the Emperor of Final Fantasy II. Or the troubled and manipulated final boss of Dragon Quest IV who Sephiroth appears to be an expy of, Psaro the Manslayer. Or Ghaleon from Lunar: The Silver Star, who was one of the first of these villains to have their games reach western shores.
  • There are also people who think Sephiroth originated the iconic long white hair and longcoat look. The look was first coined in 1995 by Leone Abbacchio.
  • Similarly, there are people who think that the "angsty prettyboy hero" originated with either Cloud or Squall, when anyone who's played FFIV can tell you that this honor belongs to Cecil Harvey.
• This is a problem in general for Final Fantasy II. Beloved party members dying? FFII did it first and did it the most. Angsty and grim world or plot? FFII's world is hanging out way on the far side of that scale. A villain who aspires to godhood? If Emperor Mateus trying to (and for a a little while, succeeding in) conquer heaven and hell doesn't count, nothing does. A final boss that falls to a stiff breeze? Blood Sword + Emperor = two-turn victory. La Resistance fighting off the evil empire? Look at the Big Bad's title. Dragoons debuted with Ricard/Richard, not Kain. This was the first game in the series with a real plot, bare-boned as it may be.
• Fire Emblem has a lot of examples mostly caused by No Export for You:
  • Many players expressed their bewilderment that Nosferatu was changed from Dark to Light magic in Path of Radiance. What they don't realize is, Nosferatu (called Rezire in the Japanese version) was actually a light magic spell to begin with, first appearing in the third game, Mystery of the Emblem. It was, in fact, the GBA games that changed it from Light to Dark, and PoR restored it. Unfortunately, since the localizers got the GBA games first, they chose a very dark magic sounding name for it, making the transition pretty strange.
  • The Sacred Stones giving Pegasus Knights the option to promote to Wyvern Knights may seem like a bit of Fridge Logic, but that was how the promotion path went for them in the first game. It wasn't until the fourth that Pegasus Knights and Wyvern Riders were made separate class groups.
  • The Sacred Stones' "unique" features (frequently met with They Changed It, Now It Sucks!): Monster enemies, a traversable world map, replayable battles and branching promotions? All of them debuted in Fire Emblem Gaiden, 6 games earlier.
  • The Skill system of the Tellius games originated in the Jugdral games on SNES. Many of the skills found there were taken from those games. There's a case of this even among the skills of Geneology too: the now well-known Sol, Luna and Astra skills actually had their names taken from three very, VERY hard to find Lances from Gaiden, the second game in the series.
  • Similarly, there are some people who think that third-tier classes debuted in Radiant Dawn. Again, it was done fifteen years earlier by Gaiden.
  • Fire Emblem Fates is the first modern Fire Emblem game to abandon the weapon durability system. It is not, however, the very first — that, once again, was Gaiden.
  • Fire Emblem: Awakening was, according to the developers, meant to be a "greatest hits" of game mechanics from the entire series. The one that tends to go over most western fans' heads is the marriage and children system, which originated in the fourth game in the series: Geneology of the Holy War.
  • The Avatar creation system, Casual Mode (which disables permanent death), and Lunatic difficulty of Awakening all debuted in New Mystery of the Emblem: Heroes of Light and Shadow, the sequel to Shadow Dragon that fell victim to No Export for You.
  • Fire Emblem Heroes had lyrics given to the main Fire Emblem theme. While this is the first game in which the lyrics were in English, the Japanese version had lyrics given... in its first commercial. In 1990.
• World in Conflict was widely praised for its brand new original resource and recruitment system, even though the creators had previously used the exact same system for Ground Control 2.
  • Or the free style camera control, which dated back to the original Ground Control.
• Newer gamers, or at least outsiders to the PC gaming market, seem to believe Dragon Age: Origins was BioWare's first foray into the fantasy RPG subgenre, unaware they did it a decade earlier with the Baldur's Gate saga, the Trope Codifier for all of their subsequent games, Dragon Age included, and it was in fact the game's spiritual successor.
• Most people think Fallout: New Vegas was Obsidian Entertainment's first foray into the franchise, even though the previous game was Bethesda's first game in the series, and that Obsidian was partly made up of key team members from the original developers of the Fallout series, Black Isle. New Vegas took place in one of the areas of what would have been the third game in the series before Black Isle closed and Bethesda bought the franchise: Fallout: Van Buren.
• Mario Kart 8 (released in 2014) has several characters that are a crossover from another series (Link, Villager, and Isabelle), which got many people to assume it was the first time in the whole series that there were non-Mario characters appearing. Even if R.O.B.'s appearance in Mario Kart DS doesn't count, Mario Kart Arcade GP, an arcade game released in 2003, already had characters from Pac-Man appear as a crossover due to Namco co-developing the arcade systems, as well as Mametchi from Tamagotchi in the sequel.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • There are people who think that Sonic Adventure renamed Dr. Robotnik to Dr. Eggman, making the former name the "original" one and the later a relatively recent change, which couldn't be further from truth. Not only was he always known as Eggman in Japanese, but this name came before Robotnik. While Sonic 1 was released in North America first, the game and its characters were created and developed entirely in Japan, with the villain being known as "Dr. Eggman" during development. Even early American magazines covering the game when it was still in development used that name. It wasn't until the game was finished that Sega of America decided to make changes to its plot, one of which involved changing the antagonist's name, design and personality. Sonic Adventure merely marked the point the games started using the character's original name overseas, like Yoshi's Safari did with "Peach." Even then, it wasn't the first game to identify him as Eggman internationally. That honor goes to Sonic Drift 2, using the name both in-game and in the English manual. And even before that, the worldwide use of "Eggman" in reference to Robotnik can be seen as early as◊ Sonic the Hedgehog 2's Wing Fortress Zone.
  • Also, many gamers believe Amy debuted in Sonic Adventure or later, while her real first appearance was in Sonic the Hedgehog CD ^note and before that, a prototype Amy appeared in an obscure Sonic manga. One cause of this confusion might have been that Sega of America decided to call her "Princess Sally" (the name of a different character from Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) and Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM), whose actual in-game counterpart is Ricky the squirrel) in the American manual of her debut game as a marketing ploy to promote the American Sonic spinoff media at the time. Likewise, her Piko Piko Hammer, associated with Amy's Adventure redesign, actually dates back to Sonic the Fighters, implemented as a gag to fit in with the slapstick nature of the game.
  • Many people also think that Sonic Adventure was the first Sonic game taking place on Earth, with previous games taking place on Mobius instead. The Japanese manual of Sonic 1 says otherwise, as it specifically calls Sonic's world "Earth," and never mentions Mobius. Like the Robotnik name, Mobius was an American invention by the localization team, and it simply got scrapped when Sega of America switched to keeping the games' original Japanese stories. The 1994 short Sonic the Animation featured Sonic living in a Station Square-like city years before Sonic Adventure began development. Even Sonic the Hedgehog: The Movie had Sonic living amongst Ambiguously Human characters.
  • Speaking of Sonic Adventure again, there was quite the Broken Base over the characters having fully-voiced dialogue. Except for that this wasn't the first game in which Sonic & co. spoke. That honor belongs to the Japanese-only arcade game Waku Waku Sonic Patrol Car, followed by Sonic the Hedgehog CD, SegaSonic the Hedgehog and SegaSonic Cosmo Fighter.
  • More casual Sonic fans might think that Team Chaotix debuted in Sonic Heroes, when in fact they first appeared about 8 years prior in the relatively obscure Knuckles Chaotix. Knuckles' Chaotix also had a sort of prototype to the team up theme of Sonic Heroes, though the true origin of that obviously lies with Sonic the Hedgehog 2. As for specific characters: Mighty the Armadillo made his debut before Chaotix in SegaSonic the Hedgehog, while Vector the Crocodile was conceptualized around the same time as Sonic as part of a band that would appear in the first game's sound test.
  • While the game received better reviews than its predecessors overall, Sonic Colors (2010) got a lot of flak for its space setting being "a rip-off" of Super Mario Galaxy (2007), despite "Sonic going to Eggman's space base" being a recurring trend in Sonic since Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (1992).
  • Likewise, Sonic Lost World (2013) got nearly as much flak for its gravity mechanics also being "a rip-off" of Galaxy — but the Mad Space level from Sonic Adventure 2 (2001) did it years earlier.
  • Sonic's appearance in LEGO Dimensions was not the first time developer Traveller's Tales did Sonic: they had previously developed two Sonic games on the Sega Genesis and Saturn — Sonic 3D Blast and Sonic R.
  • While well-received, Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing and its sequels raised many eyebrows with the decision to have Sonic race in a car, even though he can easily outrun cars. The decision was not without precedence, though: even before the Twinkle Circuit minigame in Sonic Adventure, there was the Sonic Drift duology on the Game Gear, which had Sonic in a racecar (and which also predate Sonic R as the first Sonic racing games).
  • Sonic Adventure 2: Battle and Sonic Advance may be notable as the first Sonic games on consoles from Sega's former archrivals Nintendo, but they are not the first Sonic games to be released on another company's system. They were beaten by the dismal Game.com Porting Disaster of Sonic Jam, released in July 1998, and Sonic Pocket Adventure, which was released only two years before Battle on the Neo Geo Pocket Color, and only a few months after the 9.9.99 launch of the Dreamcast.
  • Around the late 2000s to early 2010s, insurance agency Progressive featured a Fake Crossover with Sonic showing him zipping around the aisles looking for great savings on insurance. As he runs around, the invincibility theme is heard, followed by the 1-UP jingle. Many Sonic fans thought the two themes were made for the commercial, but it was actually lifted from Sonic the Hedgehog 3 standalone version instead of the locked-on Sonic & Knuckles version, which used different themes for the invincibility and 1-UP tunes.
  • Many fans think that Sonic's Mascot with Attitude status was purely an invention of Sega of America and that Sonic has always been laid-back as in later games. This isn't true. While he didn't have the memetic Totally Radical slang of Western portrayals, his Japanese incarnation was originally going to be the lead member of a punk rock band, with some sources even stating he had fangs. Sega of America asked Sonic Team to tone him down for the final product. Even then, Sonic was given attitude-denoting mannerisms in the games, the fangs and rock band background made it to early Japanese material, and the OVA outright makes him into an Adaptational Jerkass.
  • Tails being a Child Prodigy predates Sonic Adventure. It just wasn't clearly emphasised until the switch to cutscenes, with western media downplaying Tails' smart side for several years. It dates back to Tails' debut game, with Tails building his own airplanes, and also appears in his spin-off games Tails Skypatrol and Tails Adventure.
  • Oddly, Sonic Unleashed wasn't the first video game to include the concept of a were-hedgehog. The video game adaptation of the Wallace & Gromit feature film The Curse of the Were-Rabbit contains were-hedgehogs as enemies in the game.
  • Sonic's Homing Attack, a staple of his moveset since Sonic Adventure, was actually introduced in Sonic 3D Blast. Early-Installment Weirdness applies here, as the technique (referred to as a Blast Atack) requires Sonic to obtain a Gold Shield before he can use it. Adventure would be the first game in which the Homing Attack was a move Sonic could perform by default.
  • The Omochao are most famous for being Annoying Video Game Helpers from Sonic Adventure 2 and later games, but they first appeared in the Chao Race lobby area in Sonic Adventure - as incidental NPCs that never say a word!
• A lot of people seem to think Metal Gear Online is exclusive to Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater: Subsistence had it first, though it was shut down after barely a year. The main PSP installments have multiplayer components, as well.
• Many people think Golden Eye is the game that popularized console FPSs (as well as the first "good" console FPS). In truth, there were several successful console FPSs before it, such as Turok: Dinosaur Hunter (released on the N64 less than six months before Goldeneye), which also garnered a lot of critical acclaim and strong sales upon release. There are also people who deny FPSs were popular on consoles until the Xbox and PlayStation 2.
  • To be fair, PCs were still seen as the gold standard for multiplayer gaming until The Sixth Generation of Console Video Games. This is because, until then, PCs were the only mainstream gaming platforms capable of online play. Console gamers, meanwhile, couldn't play a multiplayer game unless they were able to gather 1-3 friends together in the same room. And even that was nothing compared to the 8-16 player fragfests happening in games like Unreal Tournament and Quake III: Arena. It wasn't until online gaming became a mainstay in consoles during the sixth generation, and particularly the release of Halo 2 in late-2004, that consoles really began to rival PCs in terms of multiplayer FPS goodness.
• The NES action game Street Fighter 2010 is often accused of piggybacking on the popularity of Street Fighter II since it barely had anything to do with the rest of the Street Fighter franchise. In reality 2010 was released on August 1990, at least six months before the arcade release of The World Warrior (which saw worldwide distribution in March 1991).
• Snake's first appearance in a Mascot Fighter wasn't Super Smash Bros. Brawl, but rather the Japan-only DreamMix TV World Fighters, which combined properties from Konami, Hudson, and Takara. This game also featured Simon Belmont, predating his appearance in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (albeit using his contemporary character design by Ayami Kojima of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night fame as opposed to his original NES design).
  • Brawl also isn't Sonic's first appearance in a Fighting Game: that distinction dates back to Sonic Battle, and further back still to Sonic the Fighters.
• The Soul series began with Soul Edge (renamed Soul Blade for home release) and was followed by a sequel called Soulcalibur. Soulcalibur was originally supposed to be Soul Edge II, but the title was changed due to what eventually turned out to be fraudulent trademark dispute with a company called Edge Games (hence why the console port for Soul Edge was retitled). Although Soul Blade was very popular, the demographic had largely moved on by the time of Soulcalibur II, so many fans who started with that thought that Soulcalibur was the first game.
• Elimination Platformers are more often called "Bubble Bobble clones." Bubble Bobble was not even the first one made by Taito, who produced The Fairyland Story the year before. The genre stretches back still further to games like Mario Bros. and Ninja-kun.
• When it was first released, LEGO Battles was advertised as LEGO's first real-time strategy game, apparently forgetting about LEGO Rock Raiders, which came out ten years earlier.
  • Similarly, when LEGO Batman 2: DC Super Heroes was released, it boasted itself as LEGO's first video game to feature voice acting instead of Speaking Simlish and pantomime, and many younger LEGO fans thought this was true. Apparently, the fact that many LEGO games featured voice acting, including the very first LEGO game ever released, never crossed their minds.
  • Even if it was said that this was the first licensed game to feature dialogue, that technically would not be true, since minifigs were able to sing in LEGO Rock Band.
• The Attack Reflector as a Shoot 'Em Up gimmick is often associated with Giga Wing (2000). However, Star Soldier: Vanishing Earth (1998) uses a reflector too, and before that, we have Reflection (1997), a little-known doujin shmup that also uses a reflector. Reflection would later be remade into RefleX.
• The famous TRON "Light Cycles" game, which has been remade too many times to count, predates the movie by a number of years: its basic gameplay can be found in two four-player Arcade Games of 1977, Atari's Dominos and Midway Games' Checkmate (which was also a built-in game on the Astrocade), and these in turn were clones of Gremlin Industries' 1976 game Blockade.
• The concept of building something using the tools that a game give you, especially in a Wide-Open Sandbox setting. Many people love to tout Minecraft as inventing this, rather than the Gmod, Second Life, or Furcadia, all three of which were old news before Minecraft was even in alpha.
  • And speaking of Minecraft, the whole "3D world made up of cubes" thing was done by the freeware title Infiniminer first. Minecraft is largely believed to have copied the world format from that game.
• From the Super Mario games, many people believe that Princess Peach's name debuted in Super Mario 64. It goes farther back than that; similar to the "Eggman in Japanese, Robotnik in English" name swap of the Sonic franchise, Princess Peach was her original name in Japanese since Super Mario Bros., while Toadstool was her English-localized name. Furthermore, Yoshi's Safari (1993) had the princess named Peach for Western audiences 3 years before Super Mario 64 (1996) was released.
• The original Contra is mistakenly thought to be inspired by Predator due to Bob Wakelin's now iconic cover art for the home versions (which was traced over from publicity stills of Arnold Schwarzenegger's character Dutch Schaefer). However, the original arcade version was released worldwide on February 1987, predating the June 12 theatrical premiere of Predator by roughly four months.
  • This also applies to the Konami Code. Although the original Contra had popularized the Konami Code due to its ability to grant you 30 lives when starting the game and is often associated with that game, the code actually made its debut in Gradius, where using the code will automatically power up your ship, the Vic Viper.
• When you ask people what the first game was that Game Freak developed, most immediately would think that it was Pokémon Red and Green, which was published in 1996. More informed audiences would say that it was Pulseman, which was published in 1994. Both, however are wrong answers. The good answer is the NES game Quinty, which was also released in the U.S. as Mendel Palace. That game was published in 1989.
  • This also extends to Pokémon Red and Green themselves. Since the games were published in 1996, many people cite that as "the year Pokémon began"/the "birth year" of Pokémon. However, in terms of development, Pokémon actually began six years earlier, in 1990. Records of the development was so scarce, that the year 1990 was almost never mentioned in any Pokémon talk that brings out the topic of "what started it all."
• Speaking of Pokémon, a lot of people believe Pokémon Mystery Dungeon to be an unique concept rather than one of the several Mystery Dungeon series created by Chunsoft. This is, admittedly, due to a bad case of No Export for You: very few of the previous games made it out of Japan, and those that did didn't even carry the franchise name (Chocobo's Dungeon, for instance). So when these other series do see a western release, they often get described as oddly reminiscent of PMD despite predating the Pokémon subseries by several years. Shiren the Wanderer is a big offender.
• Story of Seasons:
  • Harvest Moon did not start with Harvest Moon 64 and especially not Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life. It was a SNES game first, but the title was released too late in the consoles line to get much notice at the time.
  • The series' first sixth generation game was not A Wonderful Life but Save the Homeland on the PlayStation 2. The game was largely obscure to fans until the PSP remake due to it being a black sheep, what with being a PlayStation title with a mostly Nintendo series and lacking marriage.
  • Similarly Friends of Mineral Town is considered the first handheld game. It's predated by three (technically two, since one is basically a rerelease) Game Boy and Game Boy Color games.
• Punch-Out!!:
  • Punch Out! was an arcade game long before it was a NES classic.
  • The SNES game isn't the first game of the series to be called Super Punch-Out!! either. The sequel to the arcade game has that title.
• Pac-Man:
  • Many Western fans percieve Pac-Man's limbed design as being from the Pac-Man World game, to the point that many have complained that there's not a single bit of Pac-Man World represention in the Super Smash Bros. series, and yet it uses his design from there. It was always been his design since the 1980s, infact, it was his design in the Japanese cabinet art◊, with the more well-known "pie" design being a case of Graphics-Induced Super-Deformed. It's noticeable when you look at old official artwork◊ and the early cartoon adaptation.
  • The blue eyed redesign is usually seen as being from Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures. It first appeared in 2010's Pac-Man Party.
• Lunar: The Silver Star is a popular PlayStation JRPG. It's not known much that the game is a port of a Sega Saturn game. The original Sega CD game is decently well-known, as it's one of the more liked CD games, however due to it being a Sega CD game it's not unknown to see people think Lunar debuted on the PS1.
• Some critics of Bravely Default said the game's autobattle made the game play itself and that the game was "dumbing it down" for casual gamers. Except that RPGs have had Autobattle for literally decades.
• The idea that Microsoft is the first American console manufacturer is so off, it's not even funny. The first American console manufacturer is Magnavox, who you might know for the Magnavox Odyssey — A.K.A., the first console ever made. Even if that's somewhat obscure today, Atari, Inc. most certainly isn't, and the Atari 2600 was the household name for console gaming in the US, long before Nintendo first released the Famicom and NES.
  • Also, the Xbox wasn't even Microsoft's first foray into console gaming. They helped Sega create the Dreamcast.
• The ZX Spectrum game Cop-Out could be seen as an early Cabal clone. In fact, it was released two years before the Arcade Game.
• Console wars did not start with the Super Nintendo Entertainment System versus the Sega Mega Drive like many gamers believe. While it is true Atari and later Nintendo each had a monopoly on consoles during the 80s, ColecoVision and Intellivision had ads poking fun at each other (and the Atari 2600) nearly ten years earlier.
• A lot of common gamer behaviors and discussions have been around since the late 80s, even longer if you count word of mouth and magazines. Early internet and Usenet posts show the same kind of console wars and Misaimed Fandom that still plagues the community. It has been joked Nintendo has been "doomed" for over thirty years, and some internet posts from the late 1980s to mid 1990s do show some PC users complaining about the NES or people in general saying the Ultra 64 will be the end of them.
• Game Theory has popularized many theories however many were in existence prior to the videos. For example the idea Cloud, from Final Fantasy VII, accidentally drowned Aerith has been a theory that's floated around for years.
• While there was a lot of buzz about Indie Games in The New '10s, small independent developers have been around as long as personal computers have been. Many major studios, such as 3D Realms, id Software and Epic Games got their start as indie developers on the '90s shareware scene before hitting the big time. Even before that, there were lots of "bedroom coders" on both sides of the Atlantic who created and sold computer games on their own in the late '70s and early '80s.
• The famous Easter Egg "Totaka's Song" predates Mario Paint. It first appeared in a Japanese only Game Boy game named X. The song also appears in the 2010 DSiware sequel, X-Scape.
• You'd think Konami capitalizing upon their IPs with gambling machines was a new thing, due to the unprecedented backlash surrounding their more recent pachinko and pachislot machines, most infamously a Castlevania title with Fanservice as its focus and a Metal Gear Solid title that uses one of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater's most climactic scenes as part of a Bait-and-Switch promotional video; as a result, any new pachinko project under Konami's name is seen as a pathetic cash-in ploy in the wake of their corporate restructurings. Konami making pachinko is hardly new, as KPE, Konami's pachinko division, has been around since 1992 making pachinko, slot machine, and pachislot spinoffs of Konami IPs like Gradius and Contra.
• CrazyBus' infamous title screen music? A similar sound generator was shipped with one of Microsoft's BASIC demos that shipped with most popular PC clones back in the 80s. Going further back, one can find that these kinds of sound generators are often taught as part of the syllabus for BASIC programming from as far back as the early 80s.
• High Definition video games such GranTurismo 4 did not start in 2004 but in 1993 with Hi-Ten Bomberman.
• While many people do know that Charles Martinet is the long-time voice actor of Nintendo's Mario character, a lot of players that grew up on Super Mario 64 think it was the first game to have Mario voiced. Mario's voice was actually done by Charles one year prior to Super Mario 64 in Mario's Game Gallery (later re-released as Mario's FUNdamentals) where he voiced Mario as the host of several tabletop games as well as being the player's opponent in said games. To go even further back, the first time the general public (outside of Trade Shows) ever heard Martinet's performance as Mario was the Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros. Mushroom World released by Gottlieb in 1992. Five years prior to the release of Super Mario 64.
• The Sega Dreamcast was the first home console to have online gaming capabilities built into it, allowing anyone with a modem and a subscription to play multiplayer and download content before Xbox Live popularized the practice among console developers. Even before the Dreamcast, though, other console developers dabbled in expanding the capabilities of their products with network connectivity, with varying levels of success:
  • The Atari 2600 was one of the first consoles, if not the first, to have a network adapter developed for it: GameLine allowed subscribers to download games. It didn't do very well, though: at $60 per unit and a $15 per month subscription, even the enticing offer of games for only a buck apiece wasn't enticing enough to keep GameLine afloat, particularly after The Great Video Game Crash of 1983 (and you could only keep one game at a time).
  • The Famicom Network System allowed owners to connect to the internet through their Nintendo Famicom. While it had some functionality for games such as cheats and extra content, the bulk of its use was for online banking, weather forecasts, trading stocks, and suchlike.
  • The Sega Meganet was a modem add-on for the Sega Genesis in Japan that allowed subscribers to download small games, such as Sonic Eraser and Phantasy Star II Text Adventures. Its lackluster library resulted in it being a bust, but a successor, the Sega Channel, proved much more successful with an international release and a much broader collection of games, some of which never received a physical release: Golden Axe III wouldn't be available on home consoles in the West until its inclusion in later compilation titles, while Mega Man: The Wily Wars wouldn't receive another Western release until its inclusion on the Genesis Mini microconsole and Nintendo Switch Online.
  • The Satellaview allowed Super Famicom players to play games that were broadcast by satellite connections. While these games had a time limit due to early satellite gaming limitations, a number of games were made for the Satellaview based on popular SNES games, such as Super Mario Bros., F-Zero, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, and Fire Emblem: New Mystery of the Emblem. Many of these games also featured full voice acting, a rarity for cartridge-based games of the era. It was released so late into the Super Famicom's life, however, that it wound up being overshadowed by next-generation consoles, becoming a financial failure. In the years following its discontinuation,a cult following emerged, fascinated over the games that were released on it and, through the tireless effort of a dedicated community of fans, restoring numerous games that would otherwise be lost to the sands of time.
  • The 64DD, developed for the Nintendo 64, is considered a spiritual successor to the Satellaview and gave the N64 online functionality, including support for e-sharing and media sharing. Online multiplayer was also planned for the add-on, but not included. Troubled Production, delays, and a lack of faith in its ability to sold contributed to its commercial failure, leading it to be the single worst selling system Nintendo ever released — worse than the Wii U, even!
  • XBAND allowed Genesis and SNES owners to actually play online with one another as early as 1994, in the days when online multiplayer was the sole domain of computer gamers. Its cheap price ($20 per unit), affordable subscriptions (two plans running for $5 or $10 per month with varying amounts of data caps), and low latency saw it warmly received, in addition to its extra features such as newsletters and email between players, and keeping track of wins and losses. Sadly, it was a little too ahead of its time: due to the ubiquity of arcades, it never caught on and was discontinued after three short years.
• Many people mock the arrant Gameplay and Story Segregation in MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft, Star Wars: The Old Republic, The Elder Scrolls Online or Final Fantasy XIV for having plots that make the player into The Chosen One, yet there are hundreds if not thousands of other chosen ones with the same (in-story) legendary status. Along with supposedly legendary weapons being sold or overshadowed by standard loot for later levels. RuneScape did this back in 2001 with the quest "Demon Slayer", which places the player character as The Chosen One destined to stop Delrith from returning using a legendary sword called Silverlight... and almost all Adamant weapons are stronger than it, meaning Silverlight isn't common to see as many people wield late-game.
• While the fact Steve Blum voiced the Bi-Han Sub-Zero in Mortal Kombat Scorpions Revenge threw some people off, given he mostly voiced Kuai Liang, some of the mirror matches for Sub-Zero in Injustice 2 and Mortal Kombat 11 do see one of the Sub-Zeros be Bi-Han, so technically, Blum as Bi-Han is a case of Role Reprise.
• Most people who grew up in the 1980s or have an interest in the history of video games know of The Great Video Game Crash of 1983 and how Nintendo and Super Mario Bros. helped restore the industry in 1985, but this was not the first or only time the video game market has crashed. There was also a crash in 1977, caused by the market becoming dominated by rip-offs of Atari's 1972 game Pong. Space Invaders, released by Taito in 1978, did for the 1977 crash what Super Mario Bros. did for the 1983 one.
  • It is Common Knowledge that E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600 is such a horrible game that it was single-handedly responsible for the 1983 crash. Besides the E.T. video game having been Vindicated by History since the 2000s with the consensus that it is boring, but not godawful, signs of the eventual crash were already there by the time Atari rushed E.T. out for the 1982 Christmas season. The main factors for the crash were market saturation in that there were too many consoles on the market, lack of quality control on consoles leading to many rushed games, as well as "games" that were pornography in all but name—most infamously, Custer's Revenge for the Atari 2600—and fierce competition from personal computers^note As you can see, the factors primarily affected consoles and their games, and indeed the crash had little impact on games made for personal computers like the Commodore 64. Activision managed to survive the crash by jumping ship to making games for such devices. It is more accurate to say that E.T. was The Last Straw that culminated in the crash, not the cause.
• With the release of the Endwalker expansion for Final Fantasy XIV, the game grew so popular that Square had to halt sales of the game in order to ease the strain on the login servers since there were tens of thousands of players trying to get into the game all at once. As an apology, Square offered players with active subscriptions several days of free game time. While many people believed this was the first time such a thing had occurred, the same exact scenario happened several years earlier when the game was relaunched in 2013 after the disaster that was 1.0.
• Lady Not-Appearing-in-This-Game marketing tactics have mostly been associated with sleazy internet adverts of the 2000's and beyond. Sexy Packaging is a mainstay of advertising in all mediums, but for video games specifically it is amusing to discover that the very first commercial video game ever employed this tactic too: 1971's Computer Space was promoted with a flyer◊ of the arcade cabinet being shown off by a woman in a translucent dress.
• The Dio Field Chronicle was hailed by several videogame critics for creating a new type of stategy combat system that strattles the line between RTS and RPG... except that it's not new, and has been around the CRPG space for decades: Real-Time with Pause. And even within the JRPG space, it's following in the footsteps of Growlanser.
• The "bah" vocal sounds heard in the New Super Mario Bros. games are so ingrained in gamer culture that a lot of fans believed the sound originated from the New series. Super Mario 64 was the first Mario game to use the vocals which play when entering a course. The vocal sound itself comes from a sample pack CD that contained a variety of vocal sounds and the "bah" is actually "pah" when played in its original form.

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