Unbuilt Trope / Video Games

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• .flow started the trend among Yume Nikki fangames of using objects other than a bed to enter the Dream Land, namely Sabitsuki's computer. However, due to the Dream Within a Dream nature of the Golden Ending, Sabitsuki was sleeping in her bed all along, making it actually a subversion.
• Angelique is the primary inspiration for the otome isekai genre, much like how Dragon Quest is the primary inspiration for the RPG isekai genre, with the game's rival character Rosalia as the primary inspiration for the stock otome villainess archetype. In many of these stories, the villainess is humiliated and/or executed, and a common plot point in a "Reborn as Villainess" Story is the protagonist trying to avoid the villainess's bad endings or becoming friends with the heroine. Angelique already does both of these story elements- nothing bad actually happens to Rosalia in any of the game's endings, the worst being she loses the competition to Angelique but still ends up being Angelique's best friend. Likewise, the otome villainess genre presents a Perspective Flip with the villainess becoming the protagonist, but Angelique Duet, a remake of the first game, already allowed the player to choose Rosalia as the player character with Angelique becoming the rival.
• Call of Duty.
  • The Modern Warfare sub-series has a reputation for being the trilogy that started the wave of obviously-derivative Modern Military Shooters that acted as little more than jingoistic terrorist murder simulators, with heavy America Saves the Day overtones. It's often forgotten that the first game in the trilogy was actually a subversion of these sorts of games. The American hero does not, in fact, kill the main terrorist, and all of his actions in the Middle Eastern area of the campaign end in complete nuclear destruction that ultimately accomplishes nothing other than getting thirty-thousand American soldiers killed, himself included. The game heavily implies that the Middle Eastern nation was an oil-rich U.S. puppet state, there are several things in their missions named after lines from anti-war movies (with a tank being called "War Pig" after a Black Sabbath anti-war song, and the first level being named "Charlie Don't Surf"), and in the end, it's not the U.S., but the British SAS that manage to defeat the main bad guys. In addition, the game has the player complicit in many morally questionable actions (such as murdering enemies in their sleep and picking them off from an AC-130), and overall paints them in a rather dubious light. To the opposing side, the West seems like little more than imperialistic bullies who can only be brought down by nuclear weapons.
  • One huge critique of the Modern Military Shooter genre is that it acts as little more than a power fantasy for Western gamers to enact vengeance on caricatures of Middle-Eastern terrorists, when The War on Terror is far more complicated than a black and white situation, and portrays the player character as always being in the right, despite the many questionable actions they could be partaking in. Imagine, then, a game meant to deconstruct the genre. This game would have the player character complicit in the murder of innocent civilians, with said action not only being condemned by the game itself, but also end up as the catalyst for even worse situations in the story. America would find itself having its famous monuments and areas desecrated; being the ones who must suffer under an invasion being portrayed by the opposing force as "righteous vengeance". Better still, the main villain would be an American general who allowed all this to happen to drum up patriotism, with the theme being that Patriotic Fervor is ultimately a tool used to manipulate the masses, and killing in the name of it leads to countless suffering that may not have been justified. Indeed, the game would be filled with many quotes speaking out against such ultra-nationalist viewpoints. Such a game exists, even being made before Spec Ops: The Line was released, and it's none other than Modern Warfare 2, the very game that popularized the genre even moreso than its predecessor.
• The first Clock Tower on the SNES.
  • It is credited as being the first Survival Horror game that made a lot of tropes for the genre, but it also gave the player even less to work with than most games under that label do. Jennifer is an ordinary girl who is in way over her head, and has no way to fight back against the horrors she encounters, a style that wouldn't become popular in the genre until the 2010s. The controls are also intentionally awkward and clunky to emphasize how little experience Jennifer has with combat, and the most you can do to escape a threat is to run and hide. The few times Jennifer actually does neutralize a threat, it's either due to sheer dumb luck, or because someone else already figured out how to do it. Finally, no matter what you do, it's impossible to save everyone. Almost all the characters are Doomed by Canon within the game's Multiple Endings, with the canon ending being the ending in which everyone except Jennifer ends up dead at the game's conclusion.
  • It also codified the Press X to Not Die trope into mainstream video game media. However, what people didn't realize that the whole point of it being included in the first place was to keep the player on edge; to have it so even in the cutscenes, the player remained tense from the constant threat of death instead of the cutscenes providing a moment for the player to breathe and set down their controller. The trope played into the game's Survival Horror nature, instead of being included just for the heck of it.
• Cow Clicker was already intended as a deconstruction of social games like FarmVille, the goal being simply to click on a cow every six hours to earn points, share with friends so that you could earn their clicks too, and spend money on microtransactions that added aesthetic touches and let you skip the clicks. No point to it all except racking up meaningless points. Then it actually became not only so popular that its creator ended it after a year due to how disturbed he was by its success, but influential on what became known as the "idle game" genre, where gameplay was built entirely around clicking and cooldown timers. The game that helped popularize the idle game genre was meant from the start as a gigantic piss-take, using the very idea of it as the Logical Extreme of how shallow social and later mobile gaming could get.
• Demonophobia was one of the very first ero-guro games whose main claim to infamy are the numerous ways the player character could be killed to come to public attention, being released around 2008. Unlike many of its imitators though, it actually went out of its way to explain and make plot-relevant why Sakuri could respawn just to die over and over again: namely, that she has Resurrective Immortality and is being mind-wiped regularly to avoid breaking under the strain of her repeated deaths, and when she does remember, she rather quickly flies over the Despair Event Horizon. Compare that to most modern ero-guro games, which treat death as a game mechanic for the sake of the player's gratification instead of delving into its deeper ramifications as Demonophobia did.
• Desert Bus viciously picks apart and deconstructs both the idea trying to make video games realistic and of taking video games so seriously long before either became trends, predating games like Spec Ops: The Line; it points out how ignoring Acceptable Breaks from Reality just makes a boring and miserable game that the player probably won't waste their time on.
  • The idea of making video games realistic and taking video games so seriously actually had a reconstruction that is even older than the aforementioned Desert Bus in the form of the flight simulator genre (which includes games such as Microsoft Flight Simulator), which shows that acceptable breaks from reality and necessary weasels can be ignored easily if one manages to replicate a real-life process that is in itself engaging. In this case, it is the fact that there are plenty of factors that you have to take into account when flying a plane (weather conditions, altitude, etc.) in order to use several buttons that all result in different effects, as well as the fact that there needs to be near-perfect control of the plane during the different phases that the plane goes through (landing being a prime example of that), that make for an engaging experience.
• Double Dragon I was the first Beat 'em Up to include Co-Op Multiplayer. It was also a legendary subversion of the trope. Two brothers are fighting to save the Damsel in Distress... but only one can get her, so after they bring down the bad guys, they fight to be the one who gets to claim her.
• Fatal Fury: The first game, Fatal Fury: King of Fighters, was released in the same year with Street Fighter II and thus would be one of the earliest modern fighting games inspired by it, but there are also plenty of differences from it unlike most other straight Street Fighter II clones. There're only three playable characters (even less than eight characters in Street Fighter II: The World Warrior), a temporary Co-Op Multiplayer is supported against computer opponents, and the gameplay forces you to use its "plane system" where characters switch their position into (and out of) the background to approach and attack each other. It comes off strange and ridiculous, but this is because Fatal Fury was in development before Street Fighter II and was allowed to explore the genre more freely than the others. Whereas Street Fighter II became a genre touchstone, Fatal Fury was not as successful, so many of its innovations only stayed in the Fatal Fury series.
• Final Fantasy:
  • The very first Final Fantasy features a super advanced scientific civilization that created airships, floating castles and robots years before VI and VII made the franchise more science fiction focused, along with a mind bending twist where the whole game is a Time Loop created by the main villain — who was also the first boss you fight — to live forever, which was the inspiration for similar Plot Points in the future. The next two games comparatively seem more tame and traditional ironically enough — which is probably partly why people often forget that Final Fantasy's modern "weirdness", usually attributed to VI and VII, has its roots in its original outing.
  • Final Fantasy II:
    • Between its unreasonable difficulty level and brutal death count, Final Fantasy II takes the usually cheerful standard '90s JRPG story of La Résistance out to fight The Empire and makes it as gritty as the NES can. Your plucky orphans are depressed youths who have nowhere else to go and confess to having no idea what they're doing, while the other resistance members insult your characters for it. The heroes win many important victories against the Empire, but once The Emperor gets his hands on the Cyclone, he devastates much of the world before the heroes can stop him—unlike other main antagonists, who might be thwarted before they do any significant damage. Part of your quest involves arming the kingdom with a spell so powerful that it's a clear analogy for a nuclear weapon. Even at the end of the game, Maria fails to reunite with her brother, and Firion, rather than trying to stop Leon from leaving, says the war has changed them, although he holds out hope for Leon's return. This was the first Final Fantasy game that had a proper plot and defined characters.
    • This is the first game to have a Luke, I Am Your Father twist. Unlike future games, this is focused on the female lead—the Dark Knight who harrasses the party throughout the game turns out to be Leon, Maria's brother, who vanishes mysteriously after the Hopeless Boss Fight at the beginning of the game. While this seems subversive, it falls flat due to Maria and Leon being underdeveloped. This is probably why lead character Cecil was given this plot in Final Fantasy IV so they could "correct" this mistake by giving appropriate Character Development to it rather than a supporting character and risk it not landing again. Even so, it is notable for giving a sister such tension with her brother before Cecil and Basch.
    • Mechanically, this is one of the first games with an "improve by doing" system. So how do you improve your HP? By hitting each other. In context, the actual way is by taking damage, under the theory that enduring pain makes you stronger. It just so happens that the most efficient way to do so is by having your party members attack each other.
    • Everyone knows you're supposed to Talk to Everyone in a JRPG. Not so much in FFII, where some early areas, which are occupied by The Empire, are populated by genuinely dangerous guard enemies who will slaughter you for talking to them.
    • Minwu gives his life to obtain the Ultima spell (a shout out to one of FF's influences). Ultima is traditionally the strongest spell in Final Fantasy... but in its first appearance it is almost useless. Amusingly, this is because a programmer felt an ancient legendary spell would be weak compared to modern "proper techniques" and that the struggle to obtain it for no gain reflected real life. He refused to fix the spell and coded the game so no one else could do so. In the Remakes that followed, Ultima works as intended.
  • Final Fantasy IV: Rosa codifies the Staff Chick role in Final Fantasy, yet she was the first main character that was a mage and female and the first canonical female White Mage. Prior to FFIV, almost all the prominent mages were men, with the exceptions of Unei and Aria. As such, while harder to appreciate today, Rosa - and by extension Rydia - can be read as a response to Final Fantasy limiting powerful magic to men. Nowadays, this is lost because FF tends to go the other way and associate women with magic.
  • Cloud Strife from Final Fantasy VII and Squall Leonhart from VIII were two of the first 'cool'-type JRPG protagonists, abandoning more idealistic, fantastical character flaws in favour of dressing in punkish modern outfits and acting like modern edgy teens - something shocking and innovative at the time and done to death ever since. However, both Cloud and Squall use their cool mannerisms as an affectation (Cloud is presenting a false image; Squall is desperately insecure and afraid of loss and spends most of the game teetering on the verge of stress-induced meltdown), and are presented as troubled, flawed individuals in need of therapy rather than as cool 'tough guys' to be admired and emulated. The romantic, aspirational "chuuniyoubu character" approach associated with this character type was always a feature of Misaimed Fandom, but only began to appear in actual works in The Noughties (with an early example being both Cloud and Squall's cameos in Kingdom Hearts). To put this into perspective, Cloud and Squall have less in common with their Kingdom Hearts incarnations that exemplify the exaggerations in question, and more in common with Fei Fong Wong from Xenogears, who is much more straight to the point in being a Deconstruction of JRPG protagonists by lacking all the romantic elements of the archetype and instead having all of the focus be on his ridiculously dark past, the metric shitload of trauma he endures, and the extremely bad effects it has on his mental well-being.
  • Final Fantasy VII:
    • Cloud wasn't the first stereotypical spiky-haired angsty JRPG hero, but he is most certainly the first one people think of. However, viewed backwards, Cloud is a deconstruction of that exact stereotype. While his serious issues are treated sympathetically, Cloud's attitude is supposed to come off as adolescent and irritating, and the other characters view it as an annoyance or a big joke if they buy into it at all. The sheer absurdity of his BFS and Anime Hair comes across as parody, especially in his Character Tics using them. While his Angst Coma is dramatic, it's played for slight Black Comedy, and results in him spasming in a wheelchair rather than any sort of prettier or more romantic visual. Then there's the main twist: Cloud's not even supposed to be The Hero; that guy (Zack) got killed, and now Cloud is trying to take his place. He's role-playing a hero to escape from his own self-loathing.
    • Cloud is credited with kicking off the tendency for JRPG leads to be amnesiac heroes and/or phlebotinum rebels, but he actually reads like a deconstruction of how those tropes usually go down. His memories are screwed up, but when the truth comes out, rather than turning out to be some sort of plot-relevant badass, he was a mook before the plot went down. He got experimented on which gave him the Super-Soldier augmentations that allow him to wield his preferred weapon type properly, but also fed into his delusion that he was the experienced badass he presented himself as instead of the common nobody grunt he actually was. Cloud also isn't some sort of Chosen One or a unique subject for experimentation - it's shown that hundreds of other people got the same experimentation that Cloud did, some of them far more effective and/or more intense. The cost of the augmentations is deteriorating mental health that later becomes outright insanity because of the psycho-emotional trauma he endured, and the ability to be mind controlled by Sephiroth. Contrast with Tifa, Cid, or Yuffie - none of them were augmented at all, and can more than match the augmented SOLDIER members, and it just seems that the cost for the abilities Cloud wanted for years simply wasn't worth the suffering he had to go through in the first place. And his amnesia? His memories weren't rewritten by the Big Bad at all. He did it to himself as a coping mechanism for all the trauma he had to endure for four years, capped with the death of his best friend before either could reach Midgar. To say that Cloud is a mess is an understatement.
    • FFVII was not the first game in the series where Failure Is the Only Option and the Hero is an Unwitting Pawn to the Big Bad for a portion of the game, but was one of the first games where almost the whole game's plot and the hero's actions are orchestrated by the villain. The game treats this with weight and the revelation is traumatic for Cloud and Tifa in particular. It can also be seen as a precursor to Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty and its analysis of video game narratives and exploring free will.
    • Aerith's death is often seen as the archetypal Heroic Sacrifice in Final Fantasy: a pure-hearted maiden whom gives her life to save the world. Except in FFVII proper, Aerith is not exactly "pure" in the traditional sense — Aerith is very flirtatious and "worldly", in stark contrast to the traditional White Mage. By the time Sephiroth kills Aerith, she's already summoned Holy, meaning her death isn't the trigger to save the world. Even then, Aerith barely understands Holy, she did not need to die to make it work, and in the end, Holy doesn't even stop Meteor like it was supposed to. Compared to previous deaths in FF, her death is not "heroic" or "epic". She was chosen to die by the developers because people would not expect her to die, especially since deaths in previous games tended to be middle-aged or elderly men like Tellah and Galuf. A love interest for the protagonist had never died in Final Fantasy before — the closest precedents being Aria from III or Rachel from VI, the latter of whom is already dead by the time of the game's plot. The most you can say Aerith's death "accomplishes" is that it's implied Aerith summons the Lifestream to destroy Meteor, and is all but stated to have cured Geostigma in Advent Children. But there's little to suggest she wouldn't have been able to do all of that if she were still alive when those things happened. Part of the reason for this is that Tetsuya Nomura hated the cliché of the hero giving his life for his love interest, and also wanted to try and convey a more "realistic" and "pointless" death.
  • Lightning in Final Fantasy XIII was designed to resemble Cloud and her game contains multiple lines and details pointing this out ("You were a soldier, weren't you?"), but she's presented seriously as the kind of cold-hearted badass Cloud wishes he was rather than The Mentally Disturbed dork that he actually is. The result is that Cloud comes off as a Deconstruction of her, even though he's the character she's based on. Pointed out in Dissidia Final Fantasy where Cloud tells her he sees her as 'the real warrior' when compared to himself.
• Fire Emblem:
  • A major tradition in the classic titles is the Fountain of Expies, known in the fandom as "archetypes". These include the Jagen, the Est and the Navarre. All three of these archetypes are deconstructed in Mystery of the Emblem, the third game in the series:
    • The first Expy of Navarre in the series is Mystery of the Emblem's Samuel, an in-universe Costume Copycat who is terrible at impersonating the real one, is a sleazy, unlikable wimp and intentionally pathetic in battle.
    • The crutch character, Arran, has terrible growth rates because he has a terminal disease.
    • The Trope Namer for the Est archetype is captured twice over the course of Fire Emblem Gaiden and Mystery. In spite of her potential as a fighter, at the time of capture she's unable to free herself and relies on the heroes to rescue her. She loses her self-esteem from these incidents, and later abandons Abel in the belief that she's a burden to him. This becomes all the more tragic for players that have made the effort to level her up: while they see the potential in her, she can't.
    • The series' most recurring villainous archetypes are Gharnef, the Evil Sorcerer, and Medeus, the dark dragon/god/demon he serves. But the very first game is far from their later conventional relationship: Gharnef is only feigning loyalty to Medeus so he can seize power for himself, and Medeus himself isn't a demon or divine figure, he's just a mundane military dictator who happens to be a dragon. The archetypes spawned from their depictions in Mystery of the Emblem, where both underwent Motive Decay that is implied to be the result of Came Back Wrong.
    • Fire Emblem: New Mystery of the Emblem is the first game to introduce the concept of the Avatar (default name Kris). Unlike the other games in the series that have playable Avatars, Kris is not some sort of divine being or even a main protagonist — they are a Decoy Protagonist that, while leader of the 7th Platoon in the early chapters, play The Lancer to The Hero Marth. Also, in the end, Kris ends up a "Hero of Shadow" that is all but forgotten by history.
  • Throughout the series, there usually are female characters that are killed off for drama (e.g. Emmeryn in Awakening). Mystery of the Emblem is one of the first to do so and has four such characters in the end: Maria, Elice, Lena, and Nyna. The difference here, though, is that if they are killed off, you are the one responsible for their deaths via Mercy Kill, as they are possessed by the Big Bad; and second, it is actually possible to save some or even all of them from their grisly fate if proper conditions are met.
  • Genealogy of the Holy War features the first (or second, if Gaiden's Alm is counted) battle-hungry Lord, in the vein of the popular Hector, Ephraim, Ike and Chrom. He is introduced livid that the neighbouring Verdane has invaded his territory, intending to fight them off alone. Without taking any regard for strategy beyond "Save Edain", the momentum of his charge leads to him taking over Verdane and later Augustria by accident, causing massive political backlash that kills his friend Eldigan, brands him a traitor—setting him and his army up to be killed in the Battle of Belhalla—and helps Arvis and the Loptous Sect establish the Empire of Grannvale by subduing those territories, letting Arvis claim them when he kills him. Ephraim is the only such Lord since whose brashness is deconstructed, and not nearly to this extent.
  • Genealogy of the Holy War also features Arvis, who in light of Fire Emblem: Three Houses would read as a deconstruction of the Flame Emperor if he didn't predate them by over two decades. Like the Flame Emperor, he has an association with fire and seeks to create a perfect Utopian society at any cost, and allies with a clearly villainous cult to do so. When Arvis succeeds at establishing his empire halfway through the game, a 15-year Time Skip shows that it came at a great cost: instability reigns over the continent due to most nations not wanting to submit to the Empire's rule, and allying with the evil cult has backfired on Arvis horribly, with most of the power now in their hands and him being reduced to a puppet ruler. By the time the party faces him, Arvis has already lost everything and is reduced to a broken man. By contrast, on one path of Three Houses the Flame Emperor gets a happy ending, and they're able to hunt down and destroy the evil cult they allied with in the epilogue. Granted, this only happens on the route where you choose to side with the Flame Emperor and help them shake off the cult's influence while also keeping them from falling too deeply into Knight Templar territory (an option Arvis never had).
  • The original Camus actually survives the first title in the series, and goes on to have character development in the sequels, undergoing a redemption arc and becoming a real hero. In Genealogy of the Holy War, Eldigan perishes at the hands of the Obviously Evil master he is obedient to, destroyed and slain by his determination to be loyal to the throne no matter what tyrant sits on it. And Reinhardt is a flat-out deconstruction of the whole archetype; his dogged determination to be "knightly" is eventually framed as moral cowardice, doing the honorable thing rather than the right thing, and his Courtly Love towards a woman who does not love him back screws over his allies many times, ultimately resulting in his own sister turning against what he has become. However, as series creator Shouzou Kaga left the franchise, these elements faded, and in modern times most Camus archetype characters are just presented as good people on the other side of the war, disapproving of but rarely stopping their evil comrades from doing evil things, whether because their bosses are threatening their loved ones or simply out of misguided loyalty, and almost never actually examine at what point their unwillingness to confront their nation's corruption becomes complicity in its crimes. Three Houses was praised for a return to treating many such characters with a much more deconstructionist lens, though exactly which ones depend heavily on Story Branching.
• Five Nights at Freddy's popularized the genre of Mascot Horror, but did quite a few things differently from how later entries in the genre would do so.
  • It is common for Mascot Horror games to have some sort of hidden lore put into it, leaving the player to put the pieces together, so it can be a shock for people to discover that the first game was very light on plot. While there is a hidden backstory, it's presented via an Easter Egg, and it does nothing more than strongly suggest why the animatronics were trying to kill you. Compare that to the later entries, which often heavily delve deeper into the plot.
  • The idea in a lot of Mascot Horror that the titular Mascot should be scary, but appealing enough for children (often colorful with a toy-like appearance). The animatronics of the first game are too uncanny to fit the description while the ones from the third game are too rotten and decayed. On the other hand, true ones from the fourth game are too nightmarish even by the standards of the genre. Only the second game, Sister Location, Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator, and Security Breach fit the description, the last one being released after the trend became established.
• F-Zero: The first game, F-Zero (1990), has been credited for popularizing the futuristic racing subgenre on home consoles. However, futuristic racing games like WipEout and Rollcage usually emphasize the Vehicular Combat component, something the first F-Zero lacks. The game is all about going fast and there's little you can do to affect rival cars physically, as it was inspired by the real-life F-1 races. While the sequels would introduce Spin Attack, the simplistic design was still respected in the series — the combat is limited to melee (refraining as much as possible from Mario Kart item battles that many imitators feature) and didn't take priority over the series' main feature, the speed.
• God of War
  • This is the franchise perhaps most associated with the idea of god-killing, which was at the forefront of the third installment. But in the first two games, whilst the end goal was to kill a god, the bulk of the quests in either instalment was finding the power to do so, since whilst Kratos is an incredibly powerful demigod, he was still a mortal. In the first game, he needed to find Pandora's Box to slay Ares and when Zeus betrays him and tricks him into giving up his godly power, has to use the threads of the Sisters of Fate to travel back in time just to get it back. This trend actually exists in the spin-offs; Chains of Olympus had Kratos use the Gauntlet of Zeus to kill Persephone, Ghost of Sparta was during the time Kratos was still a god, and Ascension saw him attain the Eyes of Truth to counter the Fury's illusions, even though they aren't technically even gods. Even God of War 3 had a more subtle version; Kratos could kill any god by himself except for Zeus, who's pretty much a god among gods, requiring him to target the Flame of Olympus and attain the power within to ultimately finish him off. In shorthand, if Kratos wants a god dead, it may not be a question of "if?" but it will still be one of "how?".
  • Similarly, Roaring Rampage of Revenge is practically codified by this series but this wasn't actually Kratos' main goal in the first game; whilst he did want Ares dead, what he was promised for killing him was not vengeance alone, but also forgiveness for his sins, as the gods promised to remove his nightmares and shame for the murder of his family as his own hand. However, the gods go back on their promise, revealing it was nothing but a fool's hope, and what this does is extend Kratos' hatred from Ares to all of them, but even then he didn't aim to cast them down directly, just use his godly authority to conquer other lands - which isn't too far from what the original Olympian line-up tended to do. After Zeus steps in out of paranoia than Kratos will aim to dethrone him, this leads straight into what is viewed as the franchise's main deconstruction of RRoR, as the slaughter of the gods causes the destruction of Greece, which Kratos completely ignores as he aims to slay Zeus.
  • There's some misconception about the character of Kratos himself, which was brought to light with the Nordic reboot of the series as people claimed that only now had he become a complex character and was only defined by being nothing but a raging destroyer. On his character page, Kratos qualifies for the tropes of Guilt Complex, Maddened Into Misanthropy, Even Evil Has Standards and Emotional Bruiser, most of which outline the more nuanced traits he had in the Greek saga, where he was basically at his most villainous.
• Gumshoe is the Ur-Example of the Endless Running Game, having Stevenson run across the level without stopping until he reaches his goal. In most modern running games on phones, you tap the screen to interact with the character or environment, such as jumping or destroying objects. But on the NES, you have the Zapper and thus a more justified take on this. For example, how do you make Stevenson jump? By shooting him, making him leap almost cartoon-style. And why is Stevenson constantly running? Because he has 24 hours (and each level is timed) or his daughter will (presumably) be killed.
• Half-Life is the Trope Codifier for the First-Person Shooter genre moving away from being fast, action-y Doom clones to being slower, setpiece-driven Pipe Shooters. But unlike the games that followed Half Life, the tropes it uses are there for to integrate into the story:
  • The game is slower because Gordon Freeman isn't an Action Hero like Doomguy, Duke Nukem, or any variety of soldier-type protagonists that would come in the following Tactical Shooter genre. He's is just a scientist wearing Powered Armor, and as such rushing forward recklessly will get you killed; think of the numerous traps scattered throughout the game, like laser mines, turrets, and HECU ambushes. Instead, the game rewards being a Badass Bookworm and using weapons in creative ways, like throwing Snarks to force enemies out of hiding, setting up your own traps with laser mines and satchel charges, or disarming minefields from a distance using your guns.
  • The game is very strictly linear, with the path forwards never being all that unclear and backtracking rarely being necessary. But it does this not to control pacing (at least, not primarily), but to reinforce a theme in the story that becomes starkly apparent by the end of the game, and especially throughout all of the sequel: for as smart and strong Gordon Freeman might be, he's ultimately just a pawn in the machinations of the G-Man, with minimal volition of his own to do anything but further his plans.
• Halo:
  • It is one of the first shooters on the Xbox console, and the Trope Maker for several first-person shooter cliches. However, both the games and their expanded universe are far more serious than you'd expect from a Sci-Fi FPS. Many of the aliens you fight are not actually malicious, but rather simply trying to not get in trouble with their Prophets. Nearly every game has a Bittersweet Ending, with Master Chief losing his friends and allies. Similarly, in-game it is very common to play Big Damn Hero and return to the marines you saved only to find them all completely killed, bringing home the brutality of war. Halo: Reach even ends with almost the entire team dead, including you — the only one who survives (Jun) doing so by leaving the planet entirely near the end of the game. The "good" guys are willing to kidnap children and forcefully make them Super Soldiers (and this was originally planned as their response to insurrections and civil wars, not an Alien Invasion), and the psychological effects of warfare are addressed. Most victories come from lucky flukes like the Elites starting a rebellion against the Covenant, and the Expanded Universe also shows that having a One-Man Army on your side is little consolation when your enemy can glass planets.
  • The original Halo was also one of the first shooters to do away with health bars and health packs, popularizing Regenerating Health as a staple of first person shooters. Unlike its imitators, though, it actually had an in-story justification for this: the player character (the Master Chief) is explicitly written as an enhanced Super-Soldier with a suit of Powered Armor, and his armor is equipped with an energy shield. When the player heals from damage while taking cover, it's actually the Master Chief's shield recharging, and his own, actual health is wholly separate from the shield's integrity, still requiring medkits to heal up. Even when Halo 2 shifted to full-on regenerating health, it gave an explanation for it, that being the Applied Phlebotinum of automated systems that treat wounds with the same contents as the first game's medkits once you've avoided damage long enough for your actual shield to recharge again. Most later FPS games didn't bother with explaining the regeneration mechanic, but just picked up on it because it made for faster gameplay and a more forgiving difficulty level.
• I Wanna Be the Guy: A primal inspiration for tons of Platform Hell video games, the game is, however, different in design from most games that followed. The game itself is quite easier than its imitators; the real challenge comes from its Troll design, which intentionally baits the players who are used to ordinary video game languages. As the creator talked in the official FAQ, it's "a game about subversion" and "humor driven game", while avoiding unnecessarily brutal game design to keep the player invested. By comparison, a lot of fangames try to squeezed random and incredibly hard traps as many as possible, thereby missing the point of this game somewhat. A number of such fangames, such as "I Wanna Kill the Kamillia" have long boss sections with multiple phases, sometimes against completely invincible enemies that do nothing but attack to the beat of a song in ways that will require rote memorization for long stretches with zero checkpoints. In addition, many games like Meat Boy, 1001 Spikes, and Celeste enjoyed even bigger critical success than this game, but while they're also occasionally light-hearted and funny, they play the platforming straight, lacking the ironic humor in I Wanna Be the Guy that criticized the unfair Trial-and-Error Gameplay in retro games.
• Kanon: This 1999 visual novel started Utsuge. However, though the game puts you in a standard plotline of an All-Loving Hero trying to fix a group of troubled girls, nearly every route reveals that you were the cause of the girl in question's problems.
• kill.switch was the first modern cover shooter, codifying many of the gameplay mechanics found in games such as Gears of War as well as the visual language of modern millitary shooters. Its plot, however, is distinctively unlike most of the military third-person shooters that followed. Rather than a standard action here or a straightforward military man, your player character is an empty shell for most of the story, puppeteered by a bloodthirsty Psychopathic Manchild under the orders of a war profiteer, who has you murder innocent people just doing their job to precipitate tensions between the West and the old Soviet bloc so that he can sell his mind control technology to both sides of the conflict. Its themes of agency and You Bastard! undertones (said psychopath sees his actions as a big dumb video game in-universe, even referring to his killing spree as a "high score") brings to mind self-styled deconstructive fare like Spec Ops: The Line and reads like a reaction to games like Army of Two despite being released in 2003, before this style of shooter became common.
• The King of Fighters '94: This is the first arcade fighting game to feature 3-on-3 team matches, followed by games like Marvel vs. Capcom 2, Guilty Gear XX, and Skullgirls. However, KOF '94 is very different from the games that followed it in terms of how it's designed around it. You don't customize the player characters for yourself, but pick one of the preset teams, forcing the player to learn their entire dynamics to get good at it. Non-gameplay aspects are also designed around this, as each team gets unique cutscenes in the Story Mode and its members have a unique Victory Quote for every team against them. You'd be hard pressed to find a modern fighting game that intentionally takes away the player's choice like this.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time brought Camera Lock-On to the mainstream. In-Universe, this is accomplished through Navi. She is unable to help you when the Final Boss is actively repelling her, and despite her annoyance for several players, her departure at game's end was portrayed as an unambiguous tragedy that leads directly to the sequel, where Link is trying to find and reunite with her. Navi and her successor Tatl are their games' main character after Link, being talkative Foils to his Silent Protagonist. Good luck finding a game since where the control scheme doubles as a Deuteragonist whose loss emotionally effects the protagonist.
  • Americans Hate Tingle because he's a selfish, greedy Manchild. This hatred stems primarily from his role in The Wind Waker; he is hated a lot less in his debut game Majora's Mask because A) his weird behavior fits with the game's running theme of Surreal Horror, and B) Tingle's own father criticizes him for it.
  • Agahnim from A Link to the Past is commonly regarded as the first example of the series' characteristic Hijacked by Ganon trope, in which the new villain is really just a pawn for the series' overarching Big Bad Ganon. But although the maidens make it clear that Agahnim is working to free Ganon from the Dark World, the game subverts it by revealing that Agahnim is actually an alter ego of Ganon himself. Even the second time Hijacked by Ganon comes into play in the Oracle of Ages and Seasons linked game, Ganon's adoptive mothers turn out to be the Big Bad Duumvirate, not Ganon himself, who is deceased and who Twinrova is trying to revive.
• Leisure Suit Larry, created years before H Games became popular, seems to mock the very idea of how they work. Instead of a late teen or twentysomething, you play an unattractive forty-year-old loser who is always rejected by the ladies. Sex is very rare, and at the beginning of the first game, Larry can only get it from a rather hideous prostitute who will give him a nasty venereal disease if he doesn't "protect" himself beforehand. Other potential lovers exploit and steal from Larry, giving him major setbacks in his quest for sex. And a very attractive woman looks like she's about to have sex with him... only to run off to her boyfriend instead. Even after accomplishing his goal of losing his virginity, Larry is unsatisfied, realizing how meaningless intercourse is on its own. And the woman who genuinely does fall in love with Larry at the end of the first game dumps him at the beginning of the second.
• MDK featured an early example of a Sniper Rifle mode as one of its most important mechanics. But, instead of being a badass weapon in a realistic military shooter, the Sniper mode is bizarre-looking and ridiculous (the player character attatches his main weapon to his face to use it). Furthermore, instead of being used to dispatch enemies without being caught, the rifle has to be used to solve puzzles, and the player's expected to be able to use it in full combat scenarios with no regard to stealth. It sounds like a Take That!, but it's just because the programmers wanted to show off the feature - after all the trouble they went through to figure out how to put it in the game, they wanted players to use it as much as they could.
• Metal Gear Solid was the first video game with a modern "cinematic" aesthetic (rather than use of pre-rendered or live-action cutscenes, which was reasonably common before) to really be a hit. It also has a somewhat fraught relationship with cinema, incorporating Homage Shot after Whole-Plot Reference, while at the same time driving home a theme that the fantasies of action cinema are horrible things to want, and engaging in constant fourth-wall-breaking references and incorporating weird, funny mechanics that are intended to remind you that you are playing a video game rather than watching a movie. Most of the games it influenced missed the irony and just thought it was cool to run around in a Bruckheimer kitchen-sink.
• PaRappa the Rapper serves as the Trope Codifier for Rhythm Games, but one feature you can find in PaRappa that you'd be hard-pressed to see elsewhere are the freestyle mechanics. In short, you can heavily deviate from the game's expected inputs during normal gameplay, but as long as they generally follow the rhythm the game will still give points — and possibly give more points than for following the exact instructions the game gave. This is in opposition to most rhythm games since, which expect players to follow the exact instructions much more rigorously as part of their core challenge to master the songs; even when the game does allow you to approach the song in multiple ways, it's typically in specified sections (such as specifically-placed omnidirectional dot blocks in Beat Saber or freestyle guitar solos being an optional feature and only available for specific segments in Rock Band 4).
• Phantasy Star II is one of the earlier Eastern RPGs, and one of the first to include a Duel Boss fight against a hero's Evil Counterpart, as Nei faces down her Psycho Prototype sister Neifirst in a climactic duel. It's a Hopeless Boss Fight where Nei gets Killed Off for Real, because Neifirst is far stronger than she is, forcing the rest of the party to step in and take Neifirst down.
• Planescape: Torment, released in 1999, featured an influence mechanic long before more mainstream role-playing games picked up on it. It also portrays such a mechanic as deeply screwed up, the result of a protagonist who bears a cursed seal, the Mark of Torment, which draws other tormented souls to him... and that's when he hasn't spent a lifetime manipulating them into following him.
• Pokémon Red and Blue spawned many concepts and ideas for both the franchise, and the Mons genre, with some reading more like a deconstruction of tropes later games played straight.
  • It's hinted that Pokémon are a relatively new discovery, and that they exist alongside regular animals. Professor Oak's desire to study them via the protagonist isn't just because it's his job as the Pokémon Professor, it's also because no one really knows how they work. Later entries would have Pokémon more or less replace animals entirely. It's even implied that humans eat Pokémon, though this would largely be dropped as the series began portraying Pokémon as fully sapient.
  • Team Rocket is the first of several villainous teams, antagonistic groups that come into conflict with the player over the course of their journeys. Unlike later groups, their ambitions are purely criminal and, while they apparently have some sort of master plan, it never gets a chance to start thanks to the player's interference, unlike later villainous teams who continue relatively unhindered, even as the player character defeats their highest-ranking members multiple times, until the plan's gotten to critical levels. In addition, Pokémon Gold and Silver features their return as a subplot, showing that beating Giovanni wasn't enough to put an end to their operations — on the flip side, it deconstructs the way the leaders are presented as the single most important individual, with the climax of the sub-plot hinging on them hijacking the Goldenrod Radio Tower to bring Giovanni back.
  • The stereotypical rival of the Mons genre is a that of a rude, arrogant bully for the player to root against, though Pokémon itself would largely switch to more friendly rivals from Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire onwards. Blue, the first such rival, is a bit of an outlier, generally portrayed as smug and insulting, but actually offering the player some tips on what to do next when they beat him. In fact, it's even implied that he grows some respect for the player as their rivalry progresses (albeit still insisting he's the better one), and Pokémon Gold and Silver shows that he mellowed out by the time you meet him. Silver was much more abrasive than Blue ever was, though even he gradually starts to mellow out.
  • Pokémon itself would find many parodies mocking the "Ice Cream" Pokémon or the "Garbage Bag" Pokémon, stating that the first generation was significantly more original... except the first generation did a lot of the same. Most of the Pokémon there were just standard animals with slightly varied color, and while individual Pokémon in later generations may be more-or-less "inventive" depending on who you ask, the concept of them just making stuff up out of random objects and animals isn't new. One of the first generation Pokémon was just a Poké Ball with a face on it, and another is a pile of chemical ooze that evolves into a bigger pile of chemical ooze. This is no less unusual or "creative" than the mushroom Pokémon with a Poké Ball pattern on its cap, or the ice cream cone that evolves into a larger ice cream cone. Of course, depending on which part of the fandom you say that to...
• The Portopia Serial Murder Case is rightfully considered the Trope Maker for the Japanese Adventure Game, Visual Novel, and Console RPG genres, not to mention being the Ur-Example for many of the stories and mechanics associated with those genres. And yet, the big plot twist at the heart of the game makes it feel like a subversive twist on the very medium it pioneered: your partner/sidekick is the mastermind behind everything, and the entire game is a Batman Gambit on his part to cover his tracks by putting you on the wrong trail, exploiting his important gameplay role to feed you bad intel and manipulate you into following bogus leads. His victims that you're avenging also really had it coming, to the point that you probably won't feel very happy about solving the case and putting him away at the end.
• Progress Quest is very likely the first Idle Game, predating the Trope Codifier Cookie Clicker by about a decade. However, it instead reads as a vicious satire of the genre — a game where you do absolutely nothing except watch your money tick up, as the game showers you in rewards and accolades that don't actually matter and there is no ending or story aside from "keep your browser open and let the number rise." Normal idle games still have some minimal gameplay consisting of occasionally buying upgrades or clicking a button to manually collect resources, so a game that lacks even that would be seen as a deconstructive exaggeration of the genre if it was made today. It was actually mocking MMORPGs in its time, but the parody has only gotten more dead-on.
• Railroad Tycoon, released in 1990, is the first "tycoon game" by name, and among the first successful business simulation games for the PC platform. While many Tycoon-titled games, as well as the Spiritual Successor Sid Meier's Railroads! are intended for a young audience, with cartoonish graphics, and a simplified economic model, the Railroad Tycoon series has a real-world setting with an elaborate economic system, and gave an early example of a Wide-Open Sandbox.
• The Umbrella Corporation from Resident Evil is one of the most famous and codifying examples of an unstoppable, corrupt, and antagonistic MegaCorp in video games... except, unlike nearly all their Expies, Umbrella actually faces realistic consequences for their behavior. Their hand in the destruction of Raccoon City causes the US government to freeze their assets, them to lose all their major contracts, and their stocks to catastrophically plummet. Within six years of the disaster, Umbrella as a company has been effectively burned to the ground and many of its employees and executives convicted, with the threats in later entries mostly arising from the leftover research, personnel, and experiments that were loosed upon the world as a result of the company's plunge into bankruptcy.
• Preceding Future Diary, School Days popularized the Yandere trope with Kotonoha Katsura but like the aforementioned work, explores just how the person ended up like that in the first place: Kotonoha suffered brutal bullying since junior high and Makoto was one of the few people who bothered to show her anything resembling decency. However, he dumps her for another girl, which causes her to go off the deep end and eventually kill the girl he dumped her for. Also, unlike other cases, she is genuinely mentally ill and isn't just a Clingy Jealous Girl taken up to eleven. Finally, unlike just about every other Yandere, Kotonoha can be convinced to share Makoto with Sekai in the Golden Ending.
• Shadow of the Colossus is largely seen as having started a trend in video games of calling out the player for engaging in violence to accomplish their goal, such as Spec Ops: The Line and Undertale. Unlike other games of its ilk however, Shadow of the Colossus mostly used gameplay mechanics instead of dialogue (which it is rather light on) to communicate to the player that killing the Colossi is a bad idea, and, while most of its followers would openly condemn the player's actions, Shadow of the Colossus doesn't make a final judgement about whether or not Wander's motivations justified his misdeeds; as all major players in the plot are framed in a morally ambiguous light, Lord Emon heroically sealing away the evil god Dormin, released as a result of Wander's foolishness is just as valid of an interpretation of the ending as the fanatical zealot Lord Emon sealing away the misunderstood god Dormin, released as a result of Wander's well-intentioned determination. And as Dan Olson points out, the game is also unique in that it pointedly avoids giving the player any sort of choice in the outcome of its story, making it come across less as a direct condemnation of the player and more as a grimly fatalistic reenactment of a tragedy whose ending was decided long ago.
• The original Shenmue bears this relationship to the Wide-Open Sandbox genre, which it helped pioneer. Released in 1999, the game boasts a level of immersive realism that can seem extreme even by modern standards. Among other things: all of the NPCs are individually designed characters with distinct names, home addresses, and consistent daily routines, the in-game weather patterns are based on the actual weather reports from the time and place where the story is set, and there are no waypoints or mini-maps, forcing the player to rely entirely on in-universe printed maps to navigate the game's world. Perhaps most strikingly, the game is surprisingly light on action, and goes out of its way to capture much of the day-to-day drudgery of life in a small Japanese town, even including a section where the player character is forced to get a job as a forklift operator and work daily shifts at the docks. In stark contrast to most modern open-world games, which generally sell themselves as power fantasies that offer players the chance to go anywhere, do anything, and cause as much mayhem as they want, Shenmue effectively does the opposite. The game's open-ended format, where it's easy to get lost in its many side activities, just underscores Ryo Hazuki's sense of despair and helplessness after he is forced to venture out into the world alone after the murder of his father, with no clear sense of purpose or direction as he sets out to find his killer. Compared to later games that built on the concepts that it pioneered (most notably Grand Theft Auto III, released two years later), it can seem like a deconstruction of the open-world genre. In face, it's one of the games that created the genre, and was thus free to explore its implications as deeply as it wanted.
• Mons started with Atlus' apocalyptic Shin Megami Tensei RPG series, ten years before the trope codifier Pokémon even existed. In this case, your character and others recruit the services of demons, angels, and gods. However, cosmic power in the hands of imperfect humans ends up causing social collapse, mass murder, and nuclear war. Furthermore, the battles aren't about a sports league, a criminal syndicate, or even Duels Decide Everything, but a struggle for survival and power in a ruined world, with the explicit goal of most games being obtaining the power to decide the fate of the world. Pokémon would get a "proper" deconstruction by way of the SMT series with Devil Survivor, which was released thirteen years after the release of the original games.
  • Trainer battles in Pokémon are joked to be muggings, because the NPC trainers challenge on sight and the loser has to give the winner their money. In Shin Megami Tensei I, enemy summoners have no compunction against ambushing and murdering another summoner for their computers (demon summoning tools), and give up valuable items as a plea for mercy when they find themselves defenseless.
  • Digital Devil Story, the novel that first entry Megami Tensei was based off of, reads like a deconstruction of demon summoning. Protagonist Nakajima writes the Demon Summoning Program out of academic interest, but uses it to murder his tormentors and lord over his school. Loki, the demon he summons, is only playing along until Nakajima acquires enough Human Resources. The rest of the story is about Nakajima fixing his mistakes. In any other game, Nakajima would be the villain, and merely the Starter Villain; Ozawa, Yasuo, and Tayama are all minor players.
• SimCity is the Trope Codifier for Construction and Management Games. However, much of the lasting appeal of the classic 1989 title, as well as the sequels, comes from the disaster scenarios, and the ability to unleash disasters upon a thriving city. Most later titles in the genre (at least not city-builders) play the concept straight, and neither have disasters, nor the humor of SimCity. SimCity is, literally and figuratively, a Genre Deconstruction made by the first widespread game of the genre. Even the 2015 Spiritual Successor of the series, Cities: Skylines, had no disasters in the core game; players took effort to find methods to destroy cities, until a dedicated Natural Disasters expansion was added. SimCity also averts the Command & Conquer Economy of nearly all management games which come later, and while you do need to designate specific zones for things like residential districts, once you do they'll build up on their own.
• The Sims, which first came out in 2000, almost reads like a satire of the Survival Sandbox set in Stepford Suburbia. It has no storyline other than that which you forge for your Sims, resulting in gameplay and narrative that are completely emergent. You have to carefully observe and manage your Sims' wants, needs, and relationships in order to keep them not only alive, but happy. All deaths are permanent, with resurrection only possible through difficult and convoluted means. Later games even let you fish, grow a garden, and pick wild plants, which you can then sell or use to cook meals and brew herbal recipes. And yet... not only is your Sim not the only non-hostile human in the game world, forging lasting relationships with other Sims is one of the most important gameplay mechanics, not least of all because having kids and establishing a family is how you keep playing after your Sim dies. The game completely lacks a combat mechanic beyond getting into harmless fights with other Sims, the outcomes of which are scripted purely based on one's Fitness stat and end with no more than a bad mood and a ruined relationship. Instead of an exotic and/or bleak locale of a sort that most players would probably never get a chance to visit, The Sims takes place in an ordinary, all-American suburban small town of a sort that most players are familiar with. Your survival and prosperity come not from your ability to rough it in a wilderness or wasteland with Everything Trying to Kill You, but from your ability to hold down and advance in a job in order to build, pay for, and furnish your nice house in the suburbs.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Sonic as a character is often associated with freedom, with this being highlighted by adaptations such as the SatAM cartoon, the Archie comics and the IDW comics, the latter of which even aims to deconstruct it somewhat through showing the negative consequences of Sonic's ideals. That all said, Sonic's original portrayal from the games is less so someone who actively fights for freedom and more in the vein of someone who simply wishes to live his life his way, not caring if his actions involve him going against everyone else's ideas of right-and-wrong. This is outright stated in an intro message from the Japanese manual for the first game, written from Sonic's perspective: in it, Sonic states that he despises people who are all talk and no action, and he affirms that he does what he does because he wants to do it (because he's a Nice Guy who cares about his friends), rather than because he needs to do it out of a defined ideal like justice.
    "Sorry for being brash. People who are all talk are the worst. I don't do what I do out of righteousness. I do what I do because I love to do it. But I'd never betray you."
  • Sonic Adventure was the first 3D game in the series and established both a story and gameplay template for the games that followed, but it should be noted that it did some things a little differently compared to those games:
    • This game was notably the first in the series to introduce a Lovecraft Lite plot where the heroes had to battle an Eldritch Abomination, with Chaos being the main antagonist of the game alongside Eggman himself. Unlike the examples that followed him, however, Chaos' desire to cause massive destruction isn't because of his inherent nature as a monster or even out of a pure sadistic pleasure. Instead, it's revealed that Chaos' wrath is fueled by grief for when the Chao he was protecting were brutally hurt by the invading Echidna tribe, and said grief has festered within him to the present day— where he's first seen being attacked by police officers who shoot him for seemingly no reason other than his monster-like appearance, implicitly confirming to him that people are still horrible to one another even after thousands of years. Likewise, he isn't defeated by being violently attacked to death like the other monsters that followed, but rather through Super Sonic using the Chaos Emeralds' positive energies to neutralize his anger, allowing him to let go of his hate and have an ultimately happy ending like the rest of the cast.
    • Likewise, this game also had the first major instance of Eggman being usurped by a villainous force he intended to control for himself, its specific case of Chaos usurping Eggman is more complex than those of later games. Chaos spends most of the game perfectly content with working alongside Eggman, and his actions at the end of the game— reaching his "Perfect" form and destroying Station Square— were technically what Eggman desired to see happen, albeit only on his terms. As such, rather than Chaos' betrayal coming from Eggman lacking foresight, Chaos' betrayal is heavily implied to be the result of Eggman betraying him first, likely through leaving him to die on the falling Egg Carrier. Additionally, Chaos only usurps Eggman's role as the main villain after all the doctor's other plans have already been foiled by Sonic and Tails, in contrast to how later villains usurped him at the earliest opportunity they could find.
• While not the first Wide-Open Sandbox First-Person Shooter by any means, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. trilogy codified a large number of mechanics found in later sandbox shooters such as the Far Cry series and the later Fallout games, from the morally-grey storyline and weapon degradation to the supernatural powers/lore implications found in those games. However, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. trilogy swears off all of the power fantasy elements or quality-of-life features of its successors. The Chernobyl Zone (being based on the real-life Zone of Alienation) is a merciless Death World with Everything Trying to Kill You, and the gunplay is portrayed as realistically as possible, making each firefight a harrowing and Nintendo Hard challenge rather than a thrill ride. Trying anything reckless during gunfights will get you killed in less than a second, you need to eat and drink to survive, and the pseudo-magical artifacts that you find around the Zone are just as likely to kill you slowly from radiation as they are to be helpful.
• Story of Seasons is the Trope Maker for the Farm Life Sim, but the series creator didn't originally intend it to be a farm simulation. The series was about the life of a farmer, with the farm simply acting as a backdrop for the interpersonal relationships. This is why Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life, the creator's favorite game in the series, has barebones farming but a huge emphasis on life in Forget-Me-Not Valley. Later titles and the farm-life sim genre in general are the other way around: farming sims with relationship sidequests.
• Street Fighter: Super Street Fighter II introduced one of gaming's first and most iconic Bruce Lee Clones, Fei Long, complete with his joint occupations of a martial artist and film star. Unlike most other imitators, and even his own later appearances, which didn't delve too deeply into the characters' imitation of Bruce Lee, Fei Long's ending has him acknowledge that for all of his own prowess, he will never be able to live up to Lee himself, and abandons film in favor of martial arts to try and honor his inspiration's legacy.
• Super Mario 64 is the Trope Maker for the Free Rotating Camera, but also has the justification of it being an In-Universe Camera controlled by a Lakitu member of a news crew reporting on Mario's adventure. They're as much a character in the game as anyone else, serving as the narrator proving exposition on your progress through it. Rare now is the game where a third-person perspective is anything more than a gameplay mechanic lacking any sort of explanation.
• In the ending of Takeshi's Challenge, Takeshi Kitano takes a jab at people who dedicate so much of their time just to finish a video game and find all of its secrets no matter how bad the game is, this being before the time of players that play to find every hidden Easter Egg and developers making their games catering to that exact type of behavior.
• Tokimeki Memorial popularized the Dating Sim genre, but unlike most of its successors, it's a bit more involved than just Otaku Wish-Fulfillment. Most dating sims only require you to choose the correct dialogue choices in order to get hitched with the girl of your choosing; in Tokimeki while choosing the correct dialogue choice when dating a girl increases a girl's affection, you also have to do a lot more in order to get a girl to like you. Before you can start meeting girls you can date, you have to increase your social stats to a certain point, and you have to manage your stats in order to get a happy ending with her. Also, girls you've met can "bomb" you, or decrease your reputation if they feel like they've been getting ignored, and getting bombed too many times will make it so that you won't end up with any girls. The fact that Shiori Fujisaki, whose route leads to the game's semi-Golden Ending, doesn't want to be seen with you at the start of the game due to your low reputation, and that her route requires you to have high stats and high reputation while also increasing her affection at the same time, shows that anyone expecting that they can just pick any girl and expect to win her affections simply by choosing the correct dialogue choices will experience a major wake up call.
• Remilia Scarlet, from Touhou Koumakyou ~ the Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, is the character who popularized the Vampire Lolita Archetype. However, where most characters who fit in the trope are elegant, graceful, and played for horror, Remilia is a chuunibyou and Royal Brat whose young appearance is directly tied to her inability to age, physically or mentally, and she's frequently Played for Laughs.
• Ultima IV, one of the first games to use a Karma Meter, is also one of if not the first to punish the player for performing evil actions, something that's rather common now. The game cannot be completed unless you max out all your virtues, and the game's plot revolves around the journey to become a true hero. The whole thing is intended to explore the consequences of the player's actions and the nature of right and wrong, and an experiment to see if a video game can encourage good moral values in players.
• Some of the original cast of Virtua Fighter, the first 3D fighting game, already broke the mold when the game was released. The resident Jeet Kun Do fighter, Jacky, is not a Bruce Lee Clone but a blonde American. The main character, Akira, a Japanese man in a Karate gi, does not practice karate or even another Japanese martial art but a specific style of Chinese kung fu, Baji. On top of that, despite being the main character, he is by far the most difficult to play effectively, and is often a Mid-Boss in the arcade modes.
• Wizardry, one of the first RPGs ever written, contains a flood of unbuilt tropes, before works like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy congealed and built up the tropes to what we know of today.
  • While RPGs Equal Combat (and this is no exception), the game doesn't require you to fight every encounter you run into, as there are actually good monsters that do not mind your company. In fact, if you do fight too many of the "good" monsters, you will be the one turning evil.
  • It is also possible to luck into some of the best equipment early, and some of said equipment (including the Infinity +1 Sword) can break at any time. And this is the only way to get equipment — Boltac's Trading Post has decent starting gear, but due to being the only store in the game, its stock is limited to what adventurers sell to him — your adventurers.
  • Werdna, the Final Boss, is a high-level wizard — and a Squishy Wizard at that. He may have high resistances due to the amulet in his possession, but he does not have Contractual Boss Immunity, and his HP are only as high as a high-level player character wizard, averting Health/Damage Asymmetry. It is possible to kill him with an instant death attack or other abilities that are normally useless in future RPGs.
  • The game allows and encourages class changes and it is possible to gain proficiency in all weapons, armor, and all mage and cleric spells. But each class change takes five years out of your life due to the training required. And yes, there are penalties due to age if your character is old enough, one of which is dying of old age.
  • The story of the first game sounds more like a deconstructive parody. Here, Lord Trebor, who sends you out on the quest to recover the amulet, was also the one to create the dungeon (i.e. the "Proving Grounds") of Big Bad Werdna in the first place. It was said he set it up this way — including allowing monsters to settle there^note Not Werdna, though — he took advantage of this by stealing the amulet and hiding in the deepest depths of the Proving Grounds — because he was mad, and had hoped that many adventurers would risk their lives for the ultimate prize — being a member of Lord Trebor's elite guard! Hence, the subtitle "Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord". (The manual also gives quite a bit of snark — for example, the manual says your starting gold "was probably won in a lottery".) Further games in the series made their lore more straight and more epic.
  • There is an elf of an Always Chaotic Evil faction that is really one of the "good" guys, and unsurprisingly a very powerful ninja (as, well, rangers aren't in the game)^note Ninjas must start out as "evil" with legendary skills and magical weapons galore. He is so much of a Big Good that he becomes the main antagonist of the fourth game, where you play an evil faction bent on taking him out. Sounds like a deconstructive parody of the Overused Copycat Character Drizzt Do'Urden? No, it's Hawkwind, and he (and Wizardry IV, where he was introduced) precedes Drizzt by at least two years.
• Wolfenstein 3-D was released in 1992 and is the Trope Maker for the First-Person Shooter genre—which has plenty of Acceptable Breaks from Reality, such as Bottomless Magazines, Regenerating Health, Respawn on the Spot and an automatic Level-Map Display, regardless of setting. Wolfenstein 3D almost seems like it was made to deconstruct the genre. It has a more realistic, historical setting without superpowers or superweapons. Ammo is limited, and the player character is nearly as easily killed as any Real Life human, with the possibility of Game Over.

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