Genre Turning Point / Video Games

1970s and earlier

• 1972's Pong was not the first video game, the first commercially sold video game, or even Nolan Bushnell's first video game; he had produced Computer Space (based on 1962's Spacewar!) the prior year, and Pong was inspired by one of the games included with the Magnavox Odyssey, to the point where Magnavox sued Bushnell's company Atari over it. It was, however, the first successful video game, breaking electronic games out of an experimental computer-nerd niche and demonstrating to the average person what they were capable of.
• IGN, when listing the Atari 2600 as the second-greatest video game console of all time (behind only the Nintendo Entertainment System), referred to it as "the console that our entire industry is built upon." While the Fairchild Channel F was the first video game console to use removable cartridges for games (before, home consoles like the Magnavox Odyssey had only a few built-in games), the 2600, released the following year in 1977, was far more successful, defining what a video game console would be to this day. Many of America's biggest video game companies, most notably Electronic Arts and Activision, got their start making games for the 2600. Atari and the 2600 were also directly connected to The Great Video Game Crash of 1983, when Atari's port of Pac-Man and their E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial tie-in, which they hoped would be killer apps, instead served as the last straws in an American gaming market bloated with subpar products and cash-ins — all of them trying to grab a piece of the pie that Atari had baked — and leaving the field wide open for Japanese companies led by Nintendo to rebuild the American video game industry in the latter half of The '80s.
• Space Invaders in 1978 was the first Arcade Game to truly take off as a pop culture phenomenon, and together with the Atari 2600, it started what has been called The Golden Age of Video Games. Extra lives, high scores, progressive difficulty, the Endless Game, rail shooters — all of these and more can be traced back to this game. Other companies both Japanese and Western, including American pinball manufacturers like Bally/Midway, Gottlieb, and Williams Electronics (who had just witnessed Space Invaders become the first electronic game to out-gross any of their pinball machines), saw Taito's success and jumped into the arena with electronic games of their own, while game machines spread like wildfire across arcades (where they got their name), boardwalks, restaurants, theaters, bars, and grocery stores.

1980s

• In 1980, Zork set a new standard for the Interactive Fiction genre, using humor, cunning puzzles, and good writing in place of previous efforts which were often more barebones. Many following companies would try and fail to surpass Infocom's work.
• In 1984, King's Quest put the Adventure Game genre and Sierra On-Line, one of its most iconic developers, on the map. As one of the first adventure games with animated graphics, it codified many of the tropes of the genre, tropes that Sierra would continue to build upon throughout the '80s and '90s with games like Phantasmagoria, Police Quest, and Space Quest. Somebody going back to play their games now, even after the likes of Life Is Strange, Until Dawn, and the output of Telltale Games, would find most of the experience quite familiar (if exceedingly difficult).
• Elite has been cited as the first true open-world game for the unprecedented level of freedom it offered to players in 1984, a time when many of its contemporaries were simple 2-D platformers and narrowly scripted adventure games. It was also one of the first games to use 3-D graphics, albeit largely in wireframe, to represent its vast world where players could visit any one of hundreds of unique planets. It proved especially influential on space simulators due to the amount of realism and detail with which it presented space travel, such that, even decades after its release, the developers of games like EVE Online explicitly cited it as an inspiration.
• In 1985, Sega established its famed AM2 development team led by Yu Suzuki, which proceeded to lead a second wave for arcade gaming in the late '80s. With games like Hang-On, OutRun, Space Harrier, and After Burner, they gave arcade gaming killer apps in a time when it was first seriously threatened by home consoles, which by the latter half of The '80s were making a quick recovery after the Crash of '83. They emphasized taikan cabinets (Japanese for "body sensation"), whose controls were far more complex than a mere joystick and buttons and couldn't be replicated on a controller, such as Hang-On and OutRun's respective cabinets designed to simulate riding a real motorcycle or driving a real car, or After Burner simulating a fighter plane's joystick. As many game genres migrated to home consoles during The '90s, arcades hung on through these types of cabinets designed to go above and beyond what consoles were capable of, such that nowadays they make up the majority of arcade games (especially outside the fighting game genre) that get made.
• When Nintendo exported the Family Computer (or Famicom) console to the US as the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985, they reshaped the industry after it had seemingly imploded two years prior.
  • In the '70s and early '80s, home console gaming would be a medium dominated by American companies like Atari, Coleco, and Mattel, but the crash caused Western game development to shift to personal computers for many years afterward, leaving Japanese companies, largely unaffected by what they called the "Atari shock", alone to dominate the home console industry going forward. Nintendo famously put an Official Seal of Quality on every game released on the NES to denote that it would actually run properly on the machine without regularly crashing, helping to restore American consumer confidence in home console games after experiencing the glut of broken shovelware that killed the industry last time. Until Microsoft entered the fray in the early '00s, the Console Wars were an almost exclusively Japanese affair, with Nintendo, Sega, and later Sony as the dominant players while American companies were also-rans at best.
  • Nintendo also heralded a shift in the marketing of video games as toys rather than computer software. The Robotic Operating Buddy, a peripheral that was included with the NES at launch, was only ever used with two games, but that was enough to get toy stores to see the console as an electronic toy and carry it on their shelves, and so video games became staples of children's entertainment from the late '80s onward. On a less positive note, not only did this bring the Animation Age Ghetto into home console gaming by causing the entire medium to be seen as being strictly for kids (an image that Nintendo especially struggled for decades to shake off), but also, as this article by Tracey Lien for Polygon notes, it marked the beginning of gaming in general becoming a gendered activity. When Nintendo's market research found more boys than girls playing their games, the NES was stocked in the boys' section of toy stores, a move that led to the Most Gamers Are Male trope becoming the increasingly dominant assumption of video game publishers.
• Mario, a figure who even many non-gamers are on a first-name basis with, is considered the icon of gaming, as much as Mickey Mouse is the icon of Western Animation, for a reason. For over thirty years and counting, Nintendo's flagship franchise was at or near the forefront of most of the medium's greatest innovations.
  • In 1985, Super Mario Bros. defined the 2D platformer, and ensured the resurrection of the video game home console in the United States after The Great Video Game Crash of 1983 by serving as a Killer App for the NES upon its introduction to the US market. Previous entries, such as Pitfall! and Nintendo's own Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong, took place on a single screen or series of screens. Super Mario Bros' innovative scrolling screen was so influential that even the name of the genre changed, being popularly known as "sidescrollers" until the leap to 3D — a name that is still widely used for 2D platformers to distinguish them from their 3D brethren. More broadly speaking, the first Super Mario Bros marked the beginning of video games' shift away from arcade design sensibilities and into what we see them as today. Earlier video games were not designed with endings in mind, but to go on infinitely so as to encourage people to put more quarters in. If the games had an ending, it was usually due to glitches and not intended or designed by the programmers, and reaching that point was rare due to the extreme difficulty of these games. Super Mario Bros., on the other hand, was innovative in that it was designed to be finished. This then-novel concept of games having distinct beginnings, middles, and endings paved way for future developments such as difficulty curves, and, despite the original Super Mario Bros. having a simple Excuse Plot, more complicated narratives that turned video games into an effective story-telling medium.
  • And speaking of which, another Mario game, Super Mario 64 in 1996, set the standard for 3D platformers for years to come, and was the first 3D platformer to successfully use a joystick. It was one of the first 3D platformers that truly felt open and explorable, with its at-the-time unique camera system and massive, sprawling open environments. Its success and influence led to an explosion of similar collect-a-thon 3D platformers in the short-term, and in the long-term paved the way for the modern world of 3D gaming through its innovations.
  • Yet another Mario game, New Super Mario Bros. in 2006, proved with its high and unexpected popularity that looking to gaming's past was not a sign of creative stagnation. This led to a massive influx of retro-flavored games afterward, from Nintendo's own Donkey Kong Country Returns to any number of indie titles lacking AAA budgets.
• 1986's The Legend of Zelda was the first console game to use a battery-backup save feature, codified or outright named a huge number of tropes used in Action-Adventure games since, and pioneered non-linear game design that served as an important progenitor to later open worlds. The complexity of games after this point would never be the same, as it was now possible to make a game that couldn't be beaten in a few hours. While Super Mario Bros. had taken a huge stride towards moving past arcade-based design with its definite structure and ending, Zelda took things even further by ditching many of the vestigial "arcadeisms" that Mario had retained, such as the high score, taking video games a step further into becoming not just games, but immersive interactive experiences.
• 1986's Dragon Quest took RPGs down a completely different path. Its emphasis on story and simplistic combat was a major culture shock for American gamers when they got their hands on it (Western RPGs at the time consisting mainly of shallow stories and cripplingly complex gameplay), but it definitely had a following, and it spawned the subgenre we now refer to as the JRPG.
• James Cameron's 1986 action/horror film Aliens was impactful enough in the world of cinema, but it arguably left an even greater mark on gaming, as this article by Alexander Chatziioannou for The AV Club lays out. To start, H. R. Giger's visceral, barely humanoid monster designs set the template for what evil alien baddies in gaming looked like. Shortly after the film's release, a slew of license-skirting takes on the xenomorph showed up in titles like Contra, R-Type, and Alien Storm, and Giger's work continues to influence the likes of StarCraft's Zerg, Dead Space's necromorphs, and Prey (2017)'s Typhon. Meanwhile, its claustrophobic industrial corridors, often overgrown with alien Meat Moss, were just as influential on level design, becoming a common environment in which to battle those monsters, especially in more horror-leaning titles. Finally, while it was hardly the first sci-fi story to feature them (it was, in fact, heavily inspired by Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers), Aliens codified the Space Marine character type that would become the default protagonist for generations' worth of sci-fi shooters, from Doom to Gears of War.
• 1987's Maniac Mansion wasn't the first point-and-click adventure, but it was considered the first one to do it right. The game's success would prove how much more viable and more intuitive it was to point at things on the screen rather than telling the game what you wanted to do, and the text adventure died almost overnight due to it.
• 1988's Ninja Gaiden on the NES was one of the earliest games to utilize cutscenes in video games, thus allowing for it to tell a story that was more complex than the simplistic Save the Princess stories told by other games of its era, and avoiding the need to relegate all of its backstory and lore to the game's manual. Additionally, while taking most of its cues from Castlevania in terms of level design and gameplay, Ninja Gaiden set a new standard for difficulty in video games, and to this day is regarded as one of the forefront examples of Nintendo Hard video games.
• The North American launch of the Sega Genesis in 1989 birthed the Console Wars. While the makers of video games and consoles had long seen each other as competitors, Sega of America's marketing made Nintendo into their rival in a way that none of the companies before them had been. "Genesis Does What Nintendon't" was a direct shot across the bow that forced Nintendo to respond, the beginning of a fierce competition from The '90s onward that other companies (most notably Sony and Microsoft) and PC gamers would later join and which gave console manufacturers brand identities akin to sports teams, complete with the same kind of Fandom Rivalries. To this day, console gamers will still sometimes describe themselves as loyalists to one system or another, and fiercely debate which system has the best games.

1990 to 1994

• The Super NES did this with its controller. Refining and expanding upon the NES' simple yet effective controller design, its layout of a directional pad underneath the player's left thumb, four face buttons in a diamond arrangement underneath their right thumb, Start and Select buttons in the middle, a pair of trigger buttons on the "shoulders" where the player's index fingers lay, and rounded grips for comfort is still, more than thirty years later, the archetypal image of a video game controller. This combination of functionality and ergonomics massively expanded the kind of games that one could play on a console by removing the limitation of having just two buttons and a D-pad or joystick to control everything (which often necessitated convoluted button combos for even mildly complex actions), and it has informed the design of every controller since. To this day, the controllers for the home consoles of all of the "Big Three" console manufacturers (Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft) use the same basic layout with only minor modifications, most notably the addition of two extra shoulder buttons and dual analog sticks, both of which were influenced by another controller further down this page. Vladimir Olivares, writing for Comic Book Review, called it "what all modern controllers would model themselves after."
• 1991's Street Fighter II altered the face of the Fighting Game, shifting focus from side-scrolling brawlers to one-on-one fights, varied character rosters, and competitive two-player modes. It didn't invent competitive multiplayer, but after its release, the main metric for comparing two gamers' skill went from which of them got the high score to having them face off in a head-to-head contest where only one could win. The spectacle of this kind of multiplayer gave arcades a second wind in The '90s, as people flocked to Street Fighter II cabinets to watch players duke it out, bringing the arcade back to the forefront of gaming in a manner not seen since the days of Space Invaders. Even after consoles and PCs took over for good in the 2000s, the competitive scenes around Street Fighter II and other arcade fighting games that followed laid the groundwork for e-sports. A key part of this appeal was that it boasted a "bug" that let you chain moves together, which soon became one of the cornerstones of the fighting game genre, helped along by an accurate joystick that made it much easier for a skilled player to pull off these complex moves without relying on dumb luck and Button Mashing like in older games.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • In 1991, Sonic the Hedgehog helped define part of the culture of The '90s by creating the Mascot with Attitude, the titular character having a distinctly overt and expressive personality while remaining family-friendly enough to pass the muster of parents. Whereas Mario was a frumpy Italian plumber, Sonic was a blue bullet of a creature whose design, from his spiky hair to his bright red sneakers to his Finger Wag, evoked both speed and a sense of late '80s/early '90s "cool". The game itself backed up Sonic's attitude by showing just how dynamic gameplay in a platformer could be through the use of momentum-based physics, branching pathways, and lively level geometry.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was a turning point in how video games were released, marketed, and perceived in the entertainment industry at large. Up until the early '90s, most video games didn't have strict release dates, but instead followed the model used by the toy industry where they would trickle out to retailers over the course of a month or two, which reflected how games were viewed as toys at the time rather than media. With Sonic 2, Sega instead created a huge marketing push around a definite release date of November 24, 1992, which they dubbed "Sonic 2sday", generating enormous amounts of hype from people who couldn't wait to purchase the game on that day. While this huge launch presented logistical challenges to Sega and retailers, it paid off when Sonic 2 became one of the fastest selling video games up to that point, with many comparing the launch to that of a new album from a major artist or a blockbuster film. It set a standard for definitive release dates for video games going forward (especially after Acclaim used Sega's blueprint the following year to hype up the release of the home version of Mortal Kombat on "Mortal Monday"), and helped propel video games into becoming an important branch of the entertainment industry.
• The Final Fantasy franchise has, for decades, defined the Role-Playing Game, and while Western examples of the genre would go off in their own direction, it remains a seminal influence on JRPGs.
  • 1991's Final Fantasy IV (or Final Fantasy II as it was known in North America) seemed like this to Western gamers, since it was one of the first plot- and character-heavy console RPGs to get a Western release. In reality, the genre had been going strong for a long time in Japan, but it was the first to get widespread Western release and therefore represented a turning point in terms of getting them worldwide.
  • 1997's Final Fantasy VII rewrote the rulebook for the JRPG genre, popularizing highly cinematic presentation enabled by CG rendering and the newly increased storage space of CDs, and dynamic camera angles and movement in battles presented in 3D. It sparked a JRPG boom in the West as other Japanese developers brought their games across the Pacific and boosted their production values to match up with what Squaresoft had accomplished, and more broadly, it's been regarded in hindsight as the first "AAA" game, gaming's equivalent of the Summer Blockbuster.
• For quite a while, there were Multi-User Dungeons, or MUDs, the precursors of modern-day MMORPGs. They codified many of the popular gameplay features that we see today, but it wasn't until 1991's Neverwinter Nights (AOL)^note Not to be confused with the later remake by BioWare in 1997, which was a story-driven single-player game that graphics were used. Similar genre busters later seen, which further canonized what's sometimes called the 'Diku' (after Diku MUD, itself very definitely a trope codifier), were 1997's Ultima Online and 1999's EverQuest.
• Warren Spector considers 1992's Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss to have pioneered the Immersive Sim, a type of game that emphasizes player choice and freedom over guided set pieces. Its development team, Looking Glass Studios, would write the book for the genre in The '90s through this and other games like System Shock and Thief: The Dark Project.
• The release of the Lost Treasures of Infocom collection in 1992 sparked a renewed fan interest in the Interactive Fiction genre which had fallen out of the mainstream. This was soon followed by the release of the TADS 2.0 and Inform 1 programming languages, triggering a new wave of fan-created games and the formation of an online community dedicated to the genre.
• The first three Mortal Kombat games (respectively released in 1992, '93, and '95) introduced some major changes to the fighting game genre.
  • The most immediate impact was to raise the stakes in terms of the violence that video games could get away with. The Ultra Super Death Gore Fest Chainsawer 3000 trope was born here, as blood went flying with each punch and kick and players could end each match with "fatalities", brutal finishing moves in which the loser was violently murdered and often dismembered in a mess of gorn. As this article by Travis Fahs for IGN notes, after Mortal Kombat came out "waves of imitators began to flood the market, filling arcades with a sea of blood". In fact, Mortal Kombat was, together with Night Trap, one of the games responsible for the creation of the Entertainment Software Rating Board (or ESRB), North America's main Media Watchdog for video games, as parental outrage over the game's graphic violence led to Congressional hearings in 1993.
  • The series introduced juggling to fighting games, a game mechanic later improved by other franchises such as Tekken. If a player knocks their opponent into the air, they can keep attacking them, continually lifting them back into the air. It had Game-Breaker potential, so combo-breaking measures were put in place in later games not only of the series, but also of other franchises.
  • The game also popularized simplified move commands, such as buttonless motions (such as ← ← →) and simplified motion+buttons (← → 👊 ). These commands would later become standard for specialized command moves.
  • It was one of the first fighting games to put an emphasis on lore beyond "these people are in a fighting tournament competing to win the prize", which would reach full flower with Mortal Kombat 9. It featured a universe of various realms that the fighters all hailed from, with recurring characters between games with their own developing stories, and its aesthetic lifted heavily from '70s martial arts movies and exploitation films.
  • Mortal Kombat 9, as noted above, elevated the importance of storytelling in fighting games. Before then, story was often considered a complete afterthought that casual players can look up in the manual, and was often only vaguely referenced as each character only had an arcade ending and nothing else. It was generally agreed that story didn't matter in fighting games, the reasoning being that they were meant for competitive play and one didn't need a story for why two people are fighting each other. However, once MK9 came out, it completely flipped the script. It proved that you can have a fully cinematic story in a fighting game, and have it be compelling for gamers. MK9 made it perfectly reasonable, if not expected, for a fighting game to have a full-fledged story mode, and the term "fighting games don't need a story" has slowly waned from being "universally accepted" to "a lazy excuse not to have content". Since then, nearly all big-name fighting games have included one, with other developers likely taking cues from the success MK9 had.
• In 1993 and '94, Sega AM2 (in their second appearance on this list) made three games that demonstrated what gaming in the third dimension was capable of.
  • First, 1993's Daytona USA revolutionized the Racing Game with its emphasis on speed and fluidity. It was the first commercially-released game ever to use texture filtering to produce polygonal graphics that didn't look jagged, and more importantly (as noted in this video by Digital Foundry), its 60-frames-per-second graphics demonstrated the importance of a high framerate in producing a top-quality 3D racing experience, elevating it above previous experiments like Virtua Racing. (Its home version for the Sega Saturn lacked these graphical features, and suffered for it.)
  • A few months later, Virtua Fighter not only brought fighting games through that transition, it also showcased more natural forms of combat as opposed to the fireballs and wuxia of its 2D brethren.
  • Finally, 1994's Virtua Cop revived the Light Gun Game as an arcade staple, combining the trends towards both taikan games and 3D graphics to produce the sort of game that home consoles had an especially difficult time replicating without expensive peripherals.
• There had been games like Wolfenstein 3-D before it, but none had the immediate impact of 1993's Doom, the Trope Maker that popularized the First-Person Shooter genre in the mainstream consciousness.
  • It was the first FPS to offer multiplayer (via LAN or dial-up modem), it codified many of the Standard FPS Guns, it popularized a heightened "extreme" aesthetic inspired by Heavy Metal music and horror movies in the FPS genre that would endure for much of the decade, and its modding community demonstrated the strength of user-generated content in extending a game's longevity. So many copycats and ripoffs came out in The '90s that, for a long time (until 1998),◊ most FPS games were referred to as "Doom clones".
  • Beyond just the FPS genre, it also served as a Killer App for the PC and elevated the prestige of PC gaming compared to home consoles, which were seen as superior until the advent of Doom. id Software joked in a 1993 press release that Doom would be "the number one cause of decreased productivity in businesses around the world," and indeed, many offices and universities banned the game, not for its violence but for how it distracted workers and students and for how its online multiplayer hogged the limited bandwidth available at many such places in The '90s. Combine that with its aforementioned violence and heavy metal aesthetics, and it specifically gave PC gaming an image as the more "badass" and "hardcore" alternative to a console gaming landscape that was dominated at the time by the self-consciously family-friendly Nintendo.
  • It was also one of the games that popularized shareware, a model under which developers gave away part of their program for free, and the user would pay them money for the full thing if they liked it. This was seen as a really stupid idea that could never possibly make money, until id Software, Apogee Software (later known as 3D Realms), and Epic MegaGames came along and proved that the model could be profitable, at least with games, even before the days of the internet when distributing shareware was made easy. Apogee/3D Realms made a lot of money selling Kingdom of Kroz and Duke Nukem as shareware, and Epic with ZZT and Jill of the Jungle, while "demo discs" that offered limited slices of gameplay from multiple upcoming and newly-released games as a free preview became a hallmark of the PlayStation brand in the late '90s and early '00s. Even the free-to-play model that took off in the 2010s, where free content is used to entice players to pay for premium content, can trace its roots back to shareware.
• 1993's Myst pioneered the Art Game with its focus on Scenery Porn and exploring lush, detailed worlds at one's leisure, a style that would later influence the Environmental Narrative Game in the 2010s. Between its gorgeous pre-rendered graphics and its fairly modest system requirements, it was also a Killer App for PC gaming and video games in general for adult gamers turned off by either "kiddie" Nintendo or the grim, violent PC shooters of the time, and was one of the first games to be discussed as not just light entertainment but outright art. On the other hand, many old-school Adventure Game fans blame Myst for popularizing a simplified style that emphasized graphics over puzzles and storytelling, and thus see it as a negative turning point for the genre that saw it fade from mainstream relevance and the attention of hardcore gamers in the late '90s.
• What the Atari 2600 did for gaming in The '70s and the Nintendo Entertainment System did for it in The '80s, the Sony PlayStation did for it in The '90s upon its release in Japan in December 1994, becoming the decade's defining home console and the one whose hardware enabled numerous changes to gaming as a whole.
  • It was not the first console to use CDs as opposed to cartridges for its games. Both the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer and the Philips CD-i predate it^note So did the FM Towns Marty and the Amiga CD32, but neither one was released in the U.S., the Sega Genesis, TurboGrafx-16, and Atari Jaguar had CD drive peripherals released during their lifetimes, and the Sega Saturn beat Sony to the punch by one month. It was the PlayStation, however, whose combination of a CD drive and advanced graphical hardware showed just how much optical media could expand what gaming was capable of. Its audio capabilities especially caused the PlayStation to lead a revolution in sound design in gaming in the late '90s, particularly with the rise of voice acting and music, as it became possible to fit voice lines for every character and music that wasn't compressed into a MIDI format onto a single disc. The smaller size and lower cost of discs compared to large, proprietary cartridges, when combined with the PlayStation's pioneering use of a memory card to store saved game data separately from the game itself, also allowed developers to make games that spanned multiple discs. The epic Japanese RPGs that the PlayStation became famous for couldn't have been made on the hardware from just one generation prior, a fact that Squaresoft realized when they ditched Nintendo (which still used cartridges for the Nintendo 64) and made their games exclusive to Sony's console.
  • It also did this with its controller. While the Super NES controller set the standard for video game controllers in 1990, in 1997 the new Dual Analog controller for the PlayStation, and especially its more famous successor the DualShock, perfected it. It wasn't the first default gamepad (as in, the one packed in with the console itself, not an add-on) to have full analog control, nor was it the first controller built with ergonomics in mind rather than being shaped like a rectangular brick — the Nintendo 64 beat it to the punch in both regards. However, by having two analog sticks, character and camera control in a 3D environment were greatly simplified. Not only has it remained in basic service through five generations of PlayStations and counting with only minor changes to its basic design^note The DualShock 2 added pressure-sensitive buttons. The PlayStation 3 initially shipped with a controller called the Sixaxis, which was a DualShock in all but name that added motion controls, wireless functionality, and a rechargeable battery but took out the rumble feature (the DualShock's namesake) due to a legal battle with the Immersion Corporation; once that was settled, Sony came out with a proper DualShock 3 that was functionally a Sixaxis with rumble. The DualShock 4 made the L2 and R2 buttons into concave triggers to match those of the Xbox controller, added a light bar to the top and a speaker to the front, and turned the Select button into a touch pad. The PlayStation 5's controller, the DualSense, is rounder and more ergonomic and adds haptic feedback, but is otherwise a DualShock in its button layout and functionality., but every controller since from Microsoft and Nintendo (save for the Wiimote, which when used as a regular controller is a throwback to the original NES controller with a D-pad and two face buttons) has been heavily influenced by its layout of "two analog sticks for each thumb, a D-pad on the left, four face buttons on the right, and two trigger buttons for each index finger".

1995 to 1999

• 1996's Duke Nukem 3D not only took the "extreme" aesthetic of Doom to the next level, it marked a shift to more realistic and grounded environments and level design in FPS games, set as it was in city streets, apartments, movie theaters, prisons, subways, and other places that were meant to look and feel like real-world locales rather than the abstract and maze-like maps seen in older games. It made waves by electing to not make its player character a Heroic Mime, instead giving him a well-defined personality through numerous lines of dialogue during gameplay.
• To this day, Resident Evil enjoys a reputation as the last word in Survival Horror, and it is because of how fundamentally it shaped the genre's conventions.
  • The original game from 1996, of course, was the big one. There had been antecedents like Maniac Mansion, Alone in the Dark, and Phantasmagoria, but Resident Evil made the genre into a showcase of what the new PlayStation console could do. It embedded a heavy Adventure Game influence in the genre with its key hunts, puzzles, and inventory management, established zombies as the mook of choice for many games, and spawned a wave of imitators and a long-running franchise. It even gave the genre its name, through the loading screen that came up when a player reloaded a save file.
  • Moreover, the RE games as a whole also impacted the broader zombie genre, beyond just video games. The series, together with House of the Dead, is credited as having revived the zombie film following its dormancy from the mid-'80s onward, first in East Asia with films like Bio Zombie, Wild Zero, Junk, and Versus, and then in the West in the early '00s with 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead, the Dawn of the Dead remake, and — appropriately enough — RE's film adaptation. It also popularized Elite Zombies that are stronger, faster, and deadlier than the standard undead shambler, largely to add some variety and challenge to the gameplay. Furthermore, it also popularized the idea of zombies as having biological origins. The original idea of the cinematic zombie was derived from Haitian Vodou, and so before RE, the source of the zombie plague was as likely to be supernatural as it was to be scientific.^note George A. Romero's Living Dead Series, the Trope Codifier for the genre, never definitively explained where its zombies came from, with characters offering explanations ranging from a radioactive space probe to The Scourge of God. RE, however, explicitly had its zombies and other monsters be products of The Virus and made the MegaCorp that created the virus into the Greater-Scope Villain of its early Myth Arc. Since then, "science gone wrong" has become the default explanation used in zombie media to explain the origins of zombies, to the point that supernatural origins are either conscious throwbacks to older zombie fiction or are presented as twists.
  • Resident Evil 4, released in 2005, is particularly notable here, as it managed to be a turning point for two genres, with the reasons for both being intimately related. Whereas survival horror before then (including prior games in the series) was known for starving the player of resources in order to increase tension, RE4 gave the player an NRA convention's worth of guns and ammo and proceeded to throw everything and the kitchen sink at them, producing a high-octane, adrenaline-filled thrill ride. In switching from Survival Horror to Action Horror, RE4's brand of frights was no longer about the fear that you don't even have the resources to overcome this one zombie, but rather, from fear that the angry mob of parasite-brainwashed villagers or Big Creepy-Crawlies in front of you would overwhelm you no matter how many bullets you could fire at them.
    
    At the same time, by jettisoning past RE games' cinematic camera angles and clumsy controls in favor of an over-the-shoulder POV and a more fine-tuned aiming system, RE4 inadvertently wrote the book for the modern Third-Person Shooter formula as people realized that there was a really good shooter in there. Starting with Gears of War, which refined the system for a more conventional action shooter experience, nearly every third-person shooter since the mid-'00s bears some influence from RE4 — ironic, given that RE4 wasn't even part of that genre to begin with. In a case where these changes were received more negatively, none of this was lost on longtime RE fans, and as both later games in the series and other survival horror franchises went in a more action-heavy direction, a not-uncommon opinion emerged in the late '00s and early '10s that RE4, as good as it was on its own merits, wasn't just a Franchise Original Sin for the RE series, but a Genre Original Sin for survival horror as a whole.
• Quake, id Software's 1996 follow-up to Doom, was not the first FPS game with built-in Internet multiplayer^note Bungie's Marathon shipped with AppleTalk network multiplayer, complete with voice chat, two years prior. AppleTalk could be routed over the Internet, but it wasn't common at that time., but it played a large role in turning it into one of the staples of the genre. Virtually every FPS released since Quake includes a multiplayer mode, with many FPS fans buying games solely for the multiplayer and never touching the single-player.
• Tomb Raider.
  • Lara Croft, making her debut with the first game in 1996, was far from the first female protagonist in gaming, or even the first Third-Person Seductress. However, she set the template that most of her successors followed: a beautiful, busty, athletic young woman with tomboyish sensibilities, sharp wit, and skimpy (or at least form-fitting) clothes. The success of Tomb Raider led to a slew of sexy female leads in gaming, including Jill Valentine in Resident Evil 3: Nemesis (whose tube-top-and-miniskirt combo was a drastic shift from her police uniform in the first game), Joanna Dark in Perfect Dark, Cate Archer in No One Lives Forever, and Rayne in BloodRayne, demonstrating that male gamers would happily play as a woman if she happened to look like a supermodel and carry herself as One of the Boys. To this day, Lara is recognized as gaming's most iconic and influential female protagonist, the image that most people think of when they picture such (as evidenced by Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, an Affectionate Parody of video game tropes made twenty years later in which the token female character is based on Lara). It wasn't until the 2010s that the paradigm for female protagonists in gaming began to shift away from this archetype...
  • ...in no small part because of Tomb Raider's 2013 reboot, which reimagined Lara with a more realistic (albeit still idealized) physique and clothes that were more practical for a young woman spending a lot of time in the great outdoors. The "new" Lara Croft has in turn been cited as a major influence on a new generation of video game heroines, such as Aloy in Horizon Zero Dawn, Kait Diaz in Gears 5, and Ellie in The Last of Us.
• Pokémon Red and Blue (released in Japan in 1996 and internationally in 1998-9) were a major turning point for handheld games. Prior to Pokémon, most handheld games were the Poor Man's Substitute of console games. Pokémon, on the other hand, was an original idea conceived around handheld play, and its game design benefitted from its portability; suddenly, Level Grinding and Gotta Catch 'Em All become less tedious when you can do them anytime, anywhere, when you might otherwise have nothing to do, and Socialization Bonus encourages you to sync your game with others when you're out and about, all elements that would inspire future handheld games. It proved that handheld games could stand on their own and be just as popular and influential as console games if they made up for their inferior graphics with compelling gameplay. The following decade saw the gaming industry take handhelds much more seriously, choosing to produce bespoke handheld games from the ground up instead of watered down versions of console games. This was especially true in Japan, where handheld overtook consoles as the dominant method of playing games around the mid Turn of the Millennium. However, this clashed with the tastes of Western gamers, many of whom remained enamored with the ever-increasing graphical capabilities of consoles. One particular beneficiary of this was Nintendo, whose handhelds kept them afloat when their home consoles flopped, culminating in them deciding to join their home console and handheld lines into the hybrid Nintendo Switch, an entire system that has sold incredibly well on model of fun gameplay on-the-go compensating for weaker graphics that Pokémon had pioneered two decades prior.
• 1996's Barbie Fashion Designer was the first commercially successful video game that was marketed primarily to girls, popularizing a field of "girls' games" that would later be built upon by companies like Her Interactive (makers of the Nancy Drew point-and-click adventure games) and Purple Moon. This had a mixed impact. On one hand, its success, outselling even Doom and Quake and selling almost as much as Doom II, demonstrated that girls were a vast, untapped market for video games in a time when the Most Gamers Are Male stereotype was rapidly becoming the default mindset among developers and publishers. On the other hand, it's also been blamed for entrenching that stereotype and bringing the Girl-Show Ghetto to gaming. Purple Moon founder Brenda Laurel (who was herself not immune from such accusations) envisioned her company as the Spiritual Antithesis to what she felt that Barbie Fashion Designer represented, saying that it "perpetuated a version of femininity that was fundamentally lame".
• 1997's Diablo wrote the book for the modern Western action role-playing game, combining Hack and Slash gameplay, an RPG-style leveling system, and an innovative loot mechanic in a formulation that games ever since, in all genres, have drawn inspiration from. As Matt Gerardi of The AV Club put it, "twenty years after Diablo, every game is Diablo."
• The Windows-era Touhou Project games, first released in 1997.
  • They were far from the first Bullet Hell games, but with their intricate bullet patterns and use of humanoid characters rather than mechs and fighter ships, they revolutionized the Shoot 'Em Up genre, especially within the doujin shooter scene. Since 2002, it's hard to find a doujin shmup or even a commercial one that doesn't fill the screen with intricate bullet patterns. That said, some feel that the saturation of bullet hell games makes it difficult to find more "classical" shmups ever since Touhou popularized bullet hell, or shmups that don't use what detractors refer to as a "loli" or "jailbait" aesthetic.
  • Touhou's impact on the doujin game scene also cannot be understated. The series has come to define Japanese indie games in ways few works, even big-budget ones, can only dream of. Like Star Wars and Star Trek are to Western science fiction and Neon Genesis Evangelion is to anime, Touhou has become the defining face for doujin games, with its own huge events and whole fan cultures of various kinds circling around it and influencing other works that follow.
• 1997's Castlevania: Symphony of the Night completely changed not just its own series but the entire platforming genre. Before it, Metroidvania games were rare and generally based more heavily on Metroid than on older Castlevania games; the majority of platformers were linear. (The "vania" half of the name Metroidvania itself referred more to this game specifically than the series as a whole.) Afterwards, open-world Metroidvania titles became increasingly common to the point of being the norm, linear platformers became increasingly uncommon, and many Metroidvanias included some form of RPG Elements.
• Rarely does a licensed game redefine conventions. Yet this is exactly what GoldenEye did in 1997. Not only did it set the standards for every shooter of its generation, but more importantly, it showed that FPS games on consoles didn't have to be watered down compared to their PC counterparts, and could be legitimately great games in their own right. It would also bring multiplayer FPSes to a wide audience, allowing up to four players to shoot each other up on one screen and one console; before then, the only way to enjoy multiplayer FPSes with that many players was to do it on a PC with each player having their own machine. Finally, it's credited, together with Team Fortress Classic and MDK that same year, with having popularized the headshot by introducing location-based damage.
• 1997's beatmania is not the first Rhythm Game, but it introduced the idea of scrolling notes, something that has become the standard for the genre, and has been reflected through other Konami rhythm games like DanceDanceRevolution, non-Konami Asian-developed rhythm games such as Pump It Up and Love Live! School idol festival, and finally, Western rhythm games such as Frequency, Guitar Hero, and Rock Band.
• The critical and commercial success of Gran Turismo in 1997 brought a sea change to racing games, as this video by Luke Reilly for IGN lays out in detail.
  • It proved that simulation racing could be made just as accessible, fun, and mass-market as the likes of Mario Kart and Daytona USA without sacrificing depth and realism, opening the doors for the subgenre to coexist and succeed next to its arcade racing brethren. Its massive roster of over 150 cars to choose from, ranging from humble compact cars and station wagons to the full roster of the All Japan Touring Car Championship, was unheard of in a time when most racing games were lucky to have ten, but that vast selection not only became the standard for racing games, it also made it more acceptable for racing games to feature more affordable vehicles that players might normally see on the road in real life or even use as daily drivers themselves as opposed to focusing purely on race cars or expensive supercars. It also demonstrated that collecting and tuning cars and having players unlock better ones as they progressed, as opposed to simply giving them access to every car right off the bat, could be made fun and engaging by turning it into an RPG-like system of competing in races to earn money to buy new cars and better parts (the term "CarPG" was often used to describe it), a system that spread so far that it's now simpler to list the racing games that don't allow players to upgrade and customize their vehicles.
  • Moreover, its influence crept beyond gaming and into real-life car culture. Through Gran Turismo, many Westerners were exposed for the first time to the greatest Japanese sports cars of The '80s and '90s, allowing the Japanese auto industry to shake off the boring "econobox" image that had plagued it outside Asia for decades and paving the way for The Fast and the Furious and the ascent of tuner culture in the West. While automakers were historically leery about their vehicles being featured in video games, they became a lot more willing to license out the rights to their cars once they saw the demand that Gran Turismo created for vehicles like the Subaru Impreza WRX STi, Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution, and Nissan Skyline GT-R.
• 1998's StarCraft was a turning point for the Real-Time Strategy genre, from a largely single-player-focused genre to one where multiplayer and even professional play were considered central to the game design. While StarCraft itself still largely focused on its single-player campaign, the immense popularity of multiplayer matches, especially in South Korea, and Battle.net enabling more online play meant that all later games in the genre saw a greater focus on balancing their factions based on an equal starting point. On a less important note, the vast aesthetic differences between the utilitarian Terrans, visceral Zerg, and high-tech Protoss marked a turning point in faction design, where even functionally identical structures and worker units were made entirely distinct for each faction, as well as different factions increasingly having their own methods of advancing up the tech tree.
• Castle Wolfenstein was one of the first games in the Stealth-Based Game genre, but it wasn't until the success of a trio of games released in 1998, Metal Gear Solid, Thief: The Dark Project, and Tenchu: Stealth Assassins, that the genre began to attract attention. Other stealth game series, like Splinter Cell and Hitman, have continued this with quirks of their own.
• Metal Gear Solid also went a long way towards moving action games away from having nothing more than an Excuse Plot, instead making the story an integral part of the gaming experience. The story, voice acting (particularly in a time when almost every game's voice acting ranged from mediocre to awful), and Character Development were singled out for praise, and those three things noticeably made the gameplay and action sequences, particularly the Boss Battles, more intense than any other action games on the market at the time. It also explored some surprisingly adult subjects like PTSD and nuclear proliferation, which would have been unheard of just a few years before it came out.
• 1998's DanceDanceRevolution set the standard for dancing rhythm games. Rather than have the player push buttons to play, the player has to move their body, resulting in something more dance-like than previous dance games as well as a classic form of Exergaming.
• The Half-Life series.
  • In 1998, Half-Life introduced in-game scripted setpieces, intelligent AI, diegetic environments, the Unbroken First-Person Perspective, and story-driven progression to the FPS genre, beyond just a simple sequence of key and switch hunts and Excuse Plots on maps that were designed as combat arenas and only later themed to whatever the game was supposed to be about. Through these innovations, it marked a shift in the FPS genre to a more thoughtful style of shooter, one which would be later refined with later titles made by its developer Valve Corporation.
  • Its 2004 sequel Half-Life 2, meanwhile, popularized advanced physics engines (and integrating physics into gameplay), intelligent emergent AI (especially for allied NPCs which had beforehand been universally useless), several graphical staples (such as auto-generated realistic lip sync, dynamic NPC choreography, and HDR lighting), and the narrative of the alien enemy as an unstoppable, nigh-untouchable eldritch force that you could only fight indirectly.
• 1998's Baldur's Gate is widely regarded as having saved the Western RPG genre from slow extinction, setting up a Real-Time with Pause engine to replace the then-standard turn-based mechanics and putting a strong emphasis on story and Character Development. Since then, strong writing has been expected of WRPGs, and purely turn-based games are almost never released anymore. Those in the know also credit Baldur's Gate for saving its parent franchise, Dungeons & Dragons, from the tar pit that it had been driven into in the 1990s.
• For the Interactive Fiction genre, there is the 1998 game Photopia. Before Photopia, games often used Mind Screw surrealism or High Fantasy loosely bound by a huge Story Arc. After Photopia, plot and puzzles became more important to the feel of a game, and Slice of Life realism overtook surrealism as the most popular environment in Interactive Fiction. Furthermore, the Inform engine that it ran on made it possible for non-programmers to write Interactive Fiction software, especially with the release of Inform 7 in 2006.
• 1999's Silent Hill, one of the more famous Resident Evil imitators, introduced a more psychological take on the genre inspired by Stephen King and H. P. Lovecraft, with evil cults, demonic forces, and the town being an Eldritch Location. It and its series influenced a lot of the more explicitly supernatural takes on the genre.
• Tony Hawk's Pro Skater in 1999 revolutionized not only extreme sports games, but extreme sports themselves. While a number of attempts had been made in the past at bringing such sports to gaming (such as 720°, California Games, Cool Boarders, 2Xtreme, and 1080° Snowboarding), Tony Hawk nailed the sweet spot between fun and accessibility on one hand and realism and authenticity on the other. Games like SSX, Aggressive Inline, and Skate all built on the foundation that Tony Hawk had laid down. Moreover, it also gave a huge boost to the popularity of skateboarding in real life; between 1999 and 2002, the number of skateboarders worldwide skyrocketed by sixty percent.
• Unreal.
  • 1999's Unreal Tournament popularized announcements for every action in the game (such as headshots, combo kills, and kill streaks) as well as Instagib (all players spawning with a One-Hit Kill weapon).
  • For better or worse, 2002's Unreal Championship had quite the hand in the proliferation of Downloadable Content and patches/updates for console games, by being the first console game ever to receive a downloadable patch and a content pack. This caused a lot of controversy over the viability of post-release game patches for console games, and considering all the controversy of developers delivering unfinished games for various reasons with the expectation that they be patched later, it didn't go well. At all.
• Medal of Honor and Counter-Strike, released in 1999 and 2000 respectively, popularized the military shooter, with a much greater focus on realism and authenticity as opposed to over-the-top action and sci-fi storylines. Medal of Honor specifically popularized World War II as a popular setting for shooters in the first half of the 2000s, while Counter-Strike pioneered the modern military shooter, with a focus on equipment and tactics in use by contemporary armed forces and response teams, an idea that would reach full flower later on (as noted below).

2000 to 2004

• The Sims, whose first game was released in February 2000.
  • Upon its release, it massively expanded the definition of what a video game could be. Here was a game with no combat, no puzzles, and not even a clear way to "win" — you played as an ordinary person living in the suburbs whose goal was to make money, build friendships, fall in love, raise a family, buy a nicer house, and otherwise engage in all the mundanities of American life. While The Sims was merely the culmination of what Maxis had been doing since SimCity, none of its preceding games left as great an impact or became pop culture touchstones the way that this one did. It pioneered not only the Life Simulation Game but also, more importantly, the Casual Video Game, opening up the medium to people who had never considered themselves gamers before. Everything from the Nintendo Wii to the boom in mobile gaming to the rise of the Environmental Narrative Game owes something to the path that Will Wright and his team blazed with The Sims.
  • Moreover, it was also a landmark for LGBTQ+ representation in gaming. The developers agonized over whether to program same-sex romantic relationships into the game, wanting to represent real life on one hand but also fearful of backlash from both Moral Guardians and their publisher Electronic Arts on the other, and ultimately, they decided to leave them out of the game... or would have, if not for Patrick J. Barrett III, a gay programmer on the team who had been hired after that decision had been made, didn't know about it, and decided to include them after being given an old design document to work from. When the game was shown at E3 in 1999, two female Sims acting autonomously shared a spontaneous kiss, and suddenly, the game became the talk of the event and was well on its way to becoming a pop culture touchstone. Since then, the Gay Option for romance and LGBTQ+ characters in general have become far more normal in games, and gaming became a new way for queer gamers to express themselves in ways that they couldn't in real life (especially in the early '00s).
• The Team ICO Series were hugely influential on The Sixth Generation of Console Video Games, with their impact stretching to the present day:
  • 2001's ICO is credited with ushering in the arthouse game, and for its mammoth influence on visual and environmental storytelling over cutscenes and dialogues. The mix of puzzles, platforming, and combat in both games was a huge influence on the revived Sands of Time trilogy of Prince of Persia and the Uncharted games, as well as codifying the importance of a supporting NPC companion, inspiring the likes of Alyx Vance (Half-Life 2), Elizabeth (Bioshock Infinite), and Ellie (The Last of Us). Its cinematic presentation, heavy emphasis on art direction and visuals for atmosphere and setting has likewise been cited as a major influence on FromSoftware's Dark Souls and Bloodborne.
  • The boss fights in 2006's Shadow of the Colossus were immensely influential on many developers and subsequent games, for their presentation, their distinct designs and looks, and the manner in which the fighting style and environment of the boss arena communicated and indicated personality, theme, and story. The game especially invented the Colossus Climb, which has been mimicked, homaged, and parodied numerous times.
  • The prestige and critical acclaim of these games also played a major part in inspiring Sony to focus on console exclusives, attracting several developers and development teams with the promise of creative freedom and generous budgets in exchange for planting their flag with Sony and making games that would make people want to buy PlayStations. Sony's focus on console exclusives in the sixth, seventh, and eighth generations ultimately led it to build a library that has come to rival Nintendo's, and one which the Xbox often Can't Catch Up with. Indeed, Sony even announced their cloud service on PC (PlayStation Now) with the promise of access to console exclusives that PC gamers otherwise would not have been able to play legally. Included among the stable at launch were ICO and Shadow of the Colossus, both of which have been remastered and kept in print in both the PS3 and PS4 era.
• Grand Theft Auto:
  • 2001's Grand Theft Auto III completely revolutionized the Wide-Open Sandbox, the content that was considered acceptable for video games to show, and voice acting in video games.
    • It wasn't the first 3D open-world game, predated as it was by titles like Driver, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and DMA Design's^*The studio would change its name to Rockstar North in 2002 after it was fully integrated into Rockstar Games own Body Harvest. However, its success helped it stand head and shoulders above its progenitors, providing players with a massive world that was packed to the rafters with things to do without any restrictions or menu screens interrupting gameplay, the world itself serving as that menu by having every gameplay feature accessible directly from it. To this day, the template for most open-world games is a refinement of what GTA III accomplished.
    • It also wasn't the first graphically violent game, or even the first to start a moral panic over video game violence. Long before the original GTA began development, Mortal Kombat and Night Trap more or less directly led to the creation of the ESRB. It was the scope of its graphic content, however, that changed the game, paired as it was with the aforementioned open world that let players get into any sort of vice and debauchery they could imagine, from picking up streetwalkers (and then killing them to get their money back) to beating old ladies with a baseball bat to getting into running battles with the police that inevitably saw players killing cops. Unfortunately, it also helped sell the idea of video games as Murder Simulators, and a lot of the anti-video-game movement of the 2000s was fueled directly by backlash against GTA and the many games that imitated it.
    • Voice acting in games had become common in the '90s thanks to the PlayStation and advances in the PC, and it wasn't entirely unheard of for studios to get Hollywood actors for it.^note Lots of FMV games, especially those adapted from movies and TV shows, shelled out to have their characters played by recognizable faces, and the 1998 shooter Apocalypse was marketed on Bruce Willis voicing the protagonist. But much as Aladdin popularized the Celebrity Voice Actor in Western Animation, so too did this game popularize it in gaming. DMA Design not only had every character (barring its silent protagonist) given voice lines, they hired several famous character actors (especially those from Mafia movies like Robert Loggia, Michael Madsen, Debi Mazar, and Joe Pantoliano) to voice them, and had real-life radio DJ Lazlow Jones host his own in-game radio Talk Show and write most of his own material for it. Having actors from movies and TV shows voice characters in games would become increasingly normal as time went on, especially in bigger-budgeted releases, and working in games was no longer seen as a huge step down in respectability.
  • Its 2002 sequel Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, meanwhile, revolutionized video game soundtracks. Before, music in video games was usually either specifically composed for the game, made up of a handful of more-or-less obscure/underground musicians, or composed of no more than about a dozen licensed tracks, usually from a single genre (such as Tony Hawk's Pro Skater's Punk Rock soundtrack).^note GTA III used a mix of all three. The reggae/dub station K-JAH had its playlist consist entirely of songs by the Jamaican musician Scientist, the '80s pop station Flashback FM had all its (five) songs taken from the soundtrack to Scarface (1983), the Classical Music station Double Clef FM used music that had been in the Public Domain for decades, the modern pop stations Head Radio and Lips 106 saw Rockstar North (then DMA Design) hire in-house musicians to write and compose their own music, and Rise FM, Game Radio, and MSX FM respectively featured underground electronic, Hip-Hop, and Drum and Bass musicians. The Houser brothers, however, used their connections in the music industry to secure the rights to a soundtrack composed of over a hundred songs from some of the biggest pop and rock icons of The '80s, contributing to the game's Miami Vice/Scarface atmosphere like nothing else. Vice City's soundtrack is still held up as one of the greatest ever seen in a video game, to the point that this very wiki's page for Song Association was once known as the "Grand Theft Auto Effect", and it's been the norm for games to use licensed tracks from big-name artists ever since.
  • Grand Theft Auto Online, the online multiplayer mode of 2013's Grand Theft Auto V, popularized the "live service" or "games as a service" model in full-priced games. While microtransactions had already started expanding beyond free-to-play mobile and browser games, GTA Online stood out in that it was a AAA, full-priced, $60 retail game whose online economy was nonetheless powered by microtransactions in a similar manner, beyond just cosmetic items and into encouraging players to break out their credit cards to more easily access the best weapons and vehicles without grinding for in-game currency. Other developers, taking note of how lucrative the live service model became for Rockstar and its parent company Take-Two Interactive, adapted it for their own online games... for better or for worse. This would prove extremely controversial in the years to come, with many gamers and even government regulators coming to see the live service model as exploitative, leading many to regard GTA Online in hindsight as the game that gave the green light to developers and publishers to get increasingly greedy.
• Initial D Arcade Stage in 2001 redefined arcade racing games, especially in Japan. It introduced a number of competitive elements, such as an emphasis on one-on-one "battles" rather than "grids" of racers, the option to challenge players to a race mid-game, a card system for saving player data, and tuning options to upgrade and fine-tune one's vehicle. These features helped create a major Fighting Game-style tournament scene, something that had never been seen with previous racing games in arcades.
• In 2001, the Beat 'em Up genre, moribund since the mid-'90s, went 3D with Devil May Cry, the game that popularized the Stylish Action genre of video games, revived the Hack and Slash for a new generation, and served as the inspiration for games like the Ninja Gaiden revival, God of War, and Bayonetta (a Creator-Driven Successor from Hideki Kamiya). Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening is also considered a landmark, due to popularizing within the genre the usages of stance systems and weapon changing during combos, allowing for combat to become even more stylish and opening up the possibilities for what Combos players could execute in combat.
• The Xbox brand, whose first namesake console debuted in 2001, became the face of gaming in the 2000s for the changes it brought to the table right from the start, though it wouldn't be until the release of its more successful successor, the Xbox 360, in 2005 that the effects became truly apparent.
  • It made Microsoft the first American company since Atari to become a major player in the Console Wars, officially breaking the monopoly held by the Japanese since The Great Video Game Crash of 1983. This was a major sign that the Great Crash's lingering aftereffects were gone for good.
  • It wasn't the first home console to boast online gaming as a feature. The Sega Dreamcast and the PlayStation 2 both beat it to the punch, and numerous consoles before then had limited, experimental online capabilities. It was, however, the first to make a major push for it, with its online service Xbox Live (now known as simply the Xbox network) becoming central to the console's brand and identity once it went live in 2002. Xbox Live provided three previously rare functions on consoles — it allowed for easy online multiplayer without having to go through a complicated setup, it allowed for the onset of Downloadable Content expansions and software updates to console games, and it allowed for the download of games directly to a console's hard drive, starting with small titles such as Namco arcade games and later expanding to full games with the 360. At first, there were naysayers to the idea of online gaming and services becoming central to a home console, but once Sony and Nintendo caught on to the success of Xbox Live and created their own online services for the PlayStation 3 and the Wii, it ushered in a new era of independently produced games, which themselves are sometimes deconstructions and reconstructions of classical video-game concepts. Nowadays, every console has some form of online gameplay and services, and online multiplayer is considered as important a part of gaming as single-player titles. Unfortunately, the rise of software updates also made it more acceptable to release a game unfinished and then fix any problems with it through patches afterwards, which has led to a number of debacles with games being released in an outright broken state in the expectation that they'll be patched up later.
  • Finally, as the first home console with a built-in hard drive, it expanded the scope of what was possible with a home console game, much like the PlayStation's use of CDs versus cartridges. Developers could now make games that didn't have to fit onto a single disc, without relying on multiple discs that had to be swapped out during gameplay, enabling far more detailed graphics and bigger worlds than ever before. Ironically, it was the Xbox 360's competitor, the PlayStation 3, that most fully realized the benefits of this arrangement, with every PS3 shipping with a hard drive while the 360 had a budget model without one until 2010 (and afterwards, had a budget model with a paltry 4 GB until the end of its run). By the end of the Seventh Generation, as it became clear that the PS3's standard hard drive was giving it the edge as 360 and multiplatform developers couldn't take storage space for granted, Microsoft learned its lesson and made a 500 GB hard drive standard on the Xbox One.
• Halo.
  • 2001's Halo: Combat Evolved brought Regenerating Health and the Limited Loadout to the shooter genre, in addition to mixing up the gameplay with a mix of on-foot and vehicular action and environments that alternated between open spaces and tight corridors. These elements existed prior to this, but Halo blended them into a kind of alchemic formula that stuck.
  • 2004's Halo 2 popularized online multiplayer, once considered the domain of PC gaming, on home consoles and made it into a mainstream fixture of gaming, serving as a Killer App for Xbox Live. It also codified a new paradigm for online gaming, one that was built on automated matchmaking instead of manually selecting a game to join from a huge list, which helped to ensure that people were matched with players of similar skill levels, and had balanced teams and standardized rulesets.
• 2001's Burnout wasn't the first racing game to have vehicular damage, nor was it the first to feature traffic as a road hazard. Damage had shown up as far back as Daytona USA and was already a fixture of Vehicular Combat and Wide-Open Sandbox games, traffic in racing games goes all the way back to OutRun, and the Need for Speed games by that point featured both. What Burnout did that those games didn't, however, was inject a ton of spectacle into it, drawing inspiration from action movie car chases (the developers cited Ronin (1998) in particular) in having players weave their cars through traffic jams and busy intersections and then watch those cars bend, break, and crumble in vivid detail when they inevitably crashed them. Destroying your car became as much an attraction as racing it, perhaps best demonstrated when later games in the series not only added a "Crash Mode" where the goal is to cause the biggest pileups, but added "takedowns" that made ramming your rivals off the road into a gameplay feature. After Burnout, vehicular damage was far more widely expected in racing games, such that even the makers of simulation racers like Forza Motorsport (where licensing agreements with real-life automakers often restricted how the cars could be depicted) increasingly added it into their games and put their own realistic spin on it.
• In 2002, Metroid Prime successfully fused the FPS with the adventure genre, creating a first-person shooter where the focus was on exploration and puzzle-solving with combat as a secondary focus. Those had long been staples of video games, but Metroid Prime really was the codifier for their inclusion in the FPS genre. To this day, almost every modern FPS can trace its roots back to either Halo, Metroid Prime, or Medal of Honor.
• Ratchet & Clank:
  • The original Ratchet & Clank (2002) was certainly not the first platformer to have ranged weapons or traversal items, but it was one of the earliest to seamlessly integrate them into the gameplay and have ranged combat as developed as any dedicated shooter of its day (sans strafing, which was remedied in the sequel). Because of this, any platformers with weapons that released afterwards, such as Jak II: Renegade, would have much more developed weapon combat that was equally important to the platforming, as opposed to having throwaway weapons that were subservient to it, which is today seen as either rather antiquated or an intentional throwback.
  • On top of that, Ratchet & Clank invented the Weapon Wheel, allowing the player to quickly select one of eight weapons by holding down a button and pushing the right stick, offering player choice without interrupting the gameplay. This was far faster than either tabbing through a list of weapons one-by-one, or pausing the game to pick one from a menu before jumping back into the fray. Weapon Wheels are now standard practice today and used in all sorts of genres and franchises, from Horizon Zero Dawn to Grand Theft Auto V.
  • 2003's Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando was the Trope Codifier for RPG elements being successfully implemented into a genre that wasn't an RPG, most famously by allowing the player's weapons to gain XP and level up. This gave players a sense of reward and ownership for sticking with their favourites, making them even more poweful and fun to use than they were before. Today, practically every video game uses an XP system so the player levels up and can become more powerful in some way, which Going Commando had also introduced with its upgrading health bar.
• By 2002, the PlayStation 2 had a trio of legitimate 3D platformers in Jak and Daxter, Sly Cooper and Ratchet & Clank, marking the first time since Sonic the Hedgehog that Nintendo had serious competition in the platformer market, with all three franchises releasing some of the best trilogies of their day by the end of the generation. Helping greatly is that they all came out in the wake of the first mainline Super Mario game that was truly divisive: Super Mario Sunshine (the next mainline Mario wouldn't come out until 2007). This gave Sony's platforming trio enough wiggle room to establish the PlayStation brand as a legitimate alternative to Nintendo, which PlayStation has since capitalized on with games like LittleBigPlanet and Astro's Playroom. This helped bolster the range of their portfolio alongside tonally opposite titles like The Last of Us, which neither Nintendo nor Xbox have ever matched, and it contributed to the success of the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5.
• Steam, upon its launch in 2003, did a lot to revive PC gaming in the Turn of the Millennium.
  • Before it became popular, PC developers were fleeing to consoles en masse due to both the growing threat of piracy and, later, the backlash that intrusive DRM systems caused within the gaming community. Steam offered not only a relatively consumer-friendly form of DRM, but a whole slew of other features (unified friends lists, an Achievement System, etc.) that had previously been exclusive to consoles. As a result, developers felt more confident releasing their games on PC through Steam, with the knowledge that they were not only tougher to pirate but, even when they were inevitably pirated, the pirate copies would lose their Steam functionality in the process.
  • Steam also helped to greatly expand the market for indie gaming by offering a way for small developers to get their games to consumers without the costs and hurdles associated with brick-and-mortar retail stores. The Xbox Live Arcade and Play Station Network quickly followed its lead, spreading the indie love to console gamers.
  • Much like Napster and iTunes before it and Netflix after, Steam heralded a major shift in distribution. No longer did PC gamers have to go down to the local game store (where the shelf space for PC games was rapidly dwindling in favor of consoles) and shell out $50 on the game they were looking for, if they were lucky enough to find it at all. The digital storefront and frequent sales meant that you had an entire library that you could shop right from your computer in which everything was in stock, and you get big discounts even on AAA titles if you had some patience. Plus, you didn't have to keep track of all those CDs and patches, since Steam handled your own personal library for you. It also made publishers happy, as it diminished both piracy and the secondhand market. In The New '10s, other companies, including the Big Three console makers, started taking notice of Valve's success and began to set up their own digital storefronts, which consequently became a big factor in the decline of physical game stores.
• 2003's Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time made platforming "realistic" with its use of parkour, and set the stage for, among other things, Tomb Raider: Legend, Assassin's Creed (which was, not coincidentally, made by the same studio as Sands of Time, Ubisoft Montreal), and Uncharted. While the idea of realistic platforming and fighting had precedent with the original Prince of Persia back in 1989, it didn't become a staple of gaming until the series made the jump to 3D (well, second jump).
• Starting with Need for Speed: Underground in 2003, the Need for Speed series saw a run of three games that, together, revolutionized the Racing Game genre and the street racing subgenre in particular.
  • Before Underground, arcade-style racers involving licensed vehicles, especially previous NFS games, were mostly games that gave the opportunity for players to enjoy the coolest cars in some fantastic environments, occasionally running from police. Underground, meanwhile, brought illegal street racing straight out of The Fast and the Furious to the gaming world with modified tuners decorated in vinyls and custom body kits, nitrous oxide tanks providing a means to accelerate quicker, storylines to keep things interesting, drifting as a proper gameplay mechanic with special events revolving around it, and some drag racing events, all to enjoy from the safe, legal comfort of players' homes. As a result, street racing became the dominant trend in arcade-style racing games in the 2000s, often to the chagrin of fans of the more exotic-focused older NFS games who disliked what they saw as a Rice Burner aesthetic. To this day, visual customization is as much a feature of many "serious" racing games as performance upgrades were after Gran Turismo, as is the Nitro Boost in the more arcade-leaning examples of the genre, and this game is a big reason why.
  • Its 2004 sequel Need for Speed: Underground 2, meanwhile, popularized the Wide-Open Sandbox in racing games. While games like Midnight Club and Tokyo Xtreme Racer did it first, and games had been experimenting with open-world driving since the late '80s, Underground 2 was the game that really demonstrated how a fully-explorable city could enhance a racing game by both massively expanding the number of potential "courses" and lending authenticity to its "underground street racing" atmosphere by taking it out of what were still effectively closed circuits before.
  • Finally, 2005's Need for Speed: Most Wanted reintroduced police chases to the series after they'd been absent after Hot Pursuit 2, and in doing so, made them a fixture of street racing games by adding another element of chaos to the proceedings in the form of the long arm of the law. Now, just winning the race wasn't enough; you had to get past the cops too if you wanted to make it to the finish line, and then flee them after the race was over.
• Two games by Relic Entertainment, 2004's Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War and 2006's Company of Heroes, shifted the focus of the Real-Time Strategy genre from base-building and resource gathering, as popularized by StarCraft and Command & Conquer, to a more dynamic style with a greater focus on tactics and micromanagement. Nowadays, most RTS games don't feature the old-school "collect resources, build your army, smash your enemies" style of gameplay, and even when they do, those mechanics are often downplayed.
• The Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game genre had been slowly but surely evolving since the days of MUDs, Neverwinter Nights, and EverQuest, but the 2004 release of World of Warcraft was the genre's debutante ball.
  • WoW, as the game was rather appropriately initialized, was the first MMO to become a mainstream hit thanks to Blizzard Entertainment's numerous quality-of-life innovations, and in doing so, it demonstrated how communities could organically form within online worlds, perhaps the first taste that most people had of something that could be called The Metaverse. Online games with persistent worlds flourished in the wake of WoW, from the more immediate MMO boom of the mid-late '00s to the rise of "live service" games in the 2010s.
  • Its influence even stretched beyond gaming, for better or for worse. Psychologists and neuroscientists first started to take video game addiction seriously thanks to WoW, as stories abounded of players who neglected relationships, jobs, school, and the most basic necessities because the game world was so engrossing that they would spend all day within it. The Canadian programmer Vitalik Buterin, meanwhile, was inspired to create the decentralized cryptocurrency Ethereum after his preferred spell in the game was nerfed in a patch, wishing to create a technology where no one singular entity held such an off switch. The right-wing political strategist Steve Bannon was also inspired to begin targeting gamer culture as an audience (as opposed to a punching bag like right-wing pundits before him) after running a gold-farming operation in WoW and noticing the "monster power" of young, aggrieved white male gamers as a potential voting bloc and cultural force.
• The 2004 release of Cave Story is often credited as the first domino that would inevitably lead to the current landscape for independent video game development. The game popularized several basic tenets that would become core to the indie dev scene, like the usage of pixel art, game design philosophy inspired by older console games, and the usage of video games as a form of artistic expression. Most of all, the game's success proved that smaller devs could make a successful and popular product in an industry dominated by big budget studios, and as such countless, countless developers were inspired by this one game to make their own, which in turn led to those games inspiring more people.

2005 to 2009

• 2006's Gears of War led third-person shooters as a genre to strategic cover-based gameplay. While third-person cover shooters had some precedents before it (notably WinBack and Kill.Switch), Gears of War is when the concept truly solidified and became a regular feature of the genre.
• 2006's Wii Sports became the Killer App for the Wii by demonstrating how to make motion controls work in a game: namely, tie them directly to actions that people perform when they engage in those activities in real life, thus flattening out the learning curve by having new players simply apply their real-world knowledge of how such things should work to the game instead of having to learn a complicated button scheme. Playing baseball, golf, or tennis meant swinging the Wiimote the way one would a real baseball bat, golf club, or tennis racket, bowling meant engaging in an underhand motion similar to throwing a real bowling ball down a lane, and boxing had players put up actual jabs, hooks, and blocks. Virtually every successful motion control game since took the principles laid out in Wii Sports and applied them to other activities (for instance, driving a car by turning the Wiimote like a steering wheel, or aiming a gun by pointing the Wiimote like a pistol).
• The release of the iPhone in 2007, and with it the attendant "smartphone revolution", changed society in general, but in gaming, one of its biggest impacts was how it remade handheld gaming and the Casual Video Game in its image.
  • It marked the beginning of the end for the days of dedicated, pocket-sized handheld consoles, with the Nintendo 3DS in 2010 being their last hurrah. Instead of having to carry a separate device in one's pocket if one wanted to play games on the go, the iPhone and other smartphones allowed people to do so on a wallet-sized device that most people already carried with them as a matter of course. After the 3DS, the only portable console to find any success has been the Nintendo Switch in 2017, a far larger and more feature-rich handheld the size of a tablet that could be plugged into a television and was nobody's idea of a "pocket console" the way earlier handhelds had been.
  • It also opened up a vast market for low-budget, low-cost games. While handheld games had always been cheaper than comparable home console and PC games, "cheaper" is a relative term, and Nintendo DS and PlayStation Portable games at the time still sold for $30-40 compared to the $60 that full-price console games went for in the Seventh Generation. The Apple App Store that came with the iPhone allowed people to instead download small Mobile Phone Games for as little as one, two, or five dollars — or zero dollars, as some developers eventually took to supporting their games with either ads or microtransactions instead of charging an up-front fee. Couple that with the ease of digital distribution compared to brick-and-mortar retailers (much as Steam had done with PC gaming), and the budget end of gaming quickly moved from handhelds to mobile phones.
• BioShock, upon its release in 2007, brought a sea change to both video game storytelling and video game journalism, with this article at The AV Club outlining the myriad ways it impacted the medium.
  • On the side of gaming itself, BioShock popularized audio diaries as a means of storytelling, such that most games with a narrative story now use them, or something like them, to deliver background details on the world and characters. It also popularized moral choice systems, which would be further refined over the years by games like Mass Effect and inFAMOUS. Furthermore, its deconstructionist twist around the halfway mark, one that went against everything that players are typically told to do in a video game of this sort, was a massive shock to casual gamers expecting just another sci-fi shooter. It was hardly the first game to employ any of these ideas (in fact, it was envisioned as a Spiritual Successor to System Shock 2), but it was one of the first highly-polished, big-budget AAA titles to do so and become a mainstream success. Their spread throughout the game industry since then is such that BioShock's impact can feel muted today.
  • In the realm of gaming journalism, meanwhile, BioShock's exploration of the nature of video game narratives and tropes helped bring a new breed of more intellectual game critics and writers into the mainstream, as people picked apart the game's big twist and its presentation of the morals and political ideas at the center of its story. Those who criticized various aspects of the game and its sequels wound up birthing the term "ludonarrative dissonance" with their complaints about how they felt that the action-packed gameplay didn't match up with the themes running through the story. These criticisms would later give birth to the Environmental Narrative Game genre, which largely eschewed conventional competitive gameplay in favor of storytelling. Notably, Gone Home, one of the more famous games of this type, was developed by a team whose founding members got their start on the Minerva's Den story expansion for BioShock 2.
• Mass Effect in 2007 was ambitious for an RPG across many different levels, but one of the more lasting accomplishments was the presentation of cutscenes and conversations, where every line, choice, and outcome was fully voiced and animated. This set a new standard for RPGs that all after it were judged by, and to this day, a high-budget game not having every line of dialogue voiced is considered very unusual and a sign of corners cut during production.
• The outstanding success of 2007's Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare single-handedly shifted the standard setting of 'realistic' military shooters from World War II to The Present Day or Next Sunday A.D.. Medal of Honor, among others, followed suit. Beyond that, it also popularized progression-based perk systems and player loadouts in multiplayer, as well as the idea of single-player campaigns being highly scripted, cinematic affairs designed akin to rollercoaster rides and presented like summer blockbusters. Its impact was such that, for a long time, it shifted the genre as a whole into being totally dominated by one franchise in a way that it hadn't been even in the days of "Doom clones", as everybody making a first-person shooter in the late '00s and early '10s tried to imitate Modern Warfare in some manner, and even games outside the genre took notice and adapted elements from it.
• If any one game could be said to have kicked off the "modern" era of gaming, it would probably be 2007's Assassin's Creed.
  • While Grand Theft Auto III had popularized the Wide-Open Sandbox, its mission design remained fairly traditional and linear, with the open world primarily serving as a larger-scale take on the Hub Level and a place to do the more freeform side missions. Assassin's Creed not only used modern gaming technology to make its world far more detailed than ever before, it extended its freeform, open-world design to the main, setpiece story missions themselves, giving players an objective and then numerous ways to complete it against the backdrop of a massive, living recreation of a medieval Levantine city with fairly little handholding. Its sequel Assassin's Creed II went a step further and absolutely inundated the player in side content on top of it, creating the feeling of a video game world that functioned as one single level jam-packed with things to do. The "Ubisoft formula" became the dominant paradigm in open-world game design, as the games' publisher Ubisoft replicated it in numerous other genres and other developers making open-world games began to imitate it.
  • It also popularized a simple, fluid, rhythm-based style of melee combat in video games in which, instead of multiple buttons and combinations thereof for different attacks, players had just one or two buttons for attacks (in this case, one for the basic attack and another for a ranged attack) and another button to block, parry, dodge, or grab enemies depending on context. From there, combat turned almost into a Rhythm Game, a control system that was easy to learn and good at making players feel like unstoppable badasses when they timed their moves correctly but also depended on quick reflexes and a keen eye for when enemies were about to attack. It would soon be imitated and refined by other action games, especially open-world games, such as the Batman: Arkham Series (widely seen as having perfected this combat system), Sleeping Dogs, Spider-Man (PS4), and its sequels.
• 2008's Left 4 Dead made online Co-Op Multiplayer mainstream just as Halo did for online competitive multiplayer on consoles, and specifically popularized a Player Versus Environment structure in which a team of four players battles through wave after wave of enemies (often either zombies or conspicuously zombie-like) guided by a reactive AI that adjusts the difficulty and pacing in accordance with how well the players are progressing. Nathan Grayson, writing for Kotaku, stated that "everything is Left 4 Dead now" in terms of how its gameplay loop remained a seminal influence over a decade later. It also brought the fast zombies of 28 Days Later to gaming in order to make The Horde a more pressing threat to players, and popularized Asymmetric Multiplayer with its "versus" mode, which let players on opposing teams take turns playing as both the survivors and the Elite Zombies trying to kill them.
• For better or worse, 2009's FarmVille pioneered the entire business model of casual video games (particularly mobile and browser games) in the 2010s, with its free-to-play format built upon microtransactions and social interactivity.
• 2009's Batman: Arkham Asylum was this for licensed games in general. Before Arkham Asylum, it was common for studios to invest money in AAA licensed titles that were often tie-ins that adapted the movies rather than serve as an adaptation of the license tailored to the video game medium. Although some of these tie-ins were well-received, many were pilloried as cheap cash grabs whose narratives and worlds were too dependent on the movies to stand out. However, the Arkham series became highly praised for creating a unique take on the Batman mythos and charting its own universe and story independent of the then-ongoing The Dark Knight Trilogy. Subsequently, all AAA licensed games are set in alternate universes, with movie tie-ins relegated to mobile games. Some of the most notable examples of this new approach include Insomniac's Spider-Man (PS4) (a franchise that was once the gold standard for the movie tie-in approach, at that), Square Enix's Marvel's Avengers (aesthetically influenced by the Marvel Cinematic Universe but otherwise set in its own universe), and Monolith's Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor (whose developers explicitly cited Rocksteady as their inspiration).
• Mods like Aeon of Strife and Defense of the Ancients pioneered the Multiplayer Online Battle Arena, or MOBA, an evolution of the Real-Time Strategy genre that kept the scale and core gameplay but put each player in command of a single hero unit instead of a whole army. However, it was 2009's League of Legends, developed as a standalone Spiritual Successor to DotA by one of its original creators, that perfected the genre and turned it into a juggernaut. In the 2010s as League grew in popularity, the MOBA quickly displaced the RTS in multiplayer circuits as the many variables and decisions at play, the vast roster of characters who all look and play in a unique manner, and gameplay that was easy to learn but hard to master made it incredibly exciting to not only play but also, more importantly, to watch, fueling the Professional Gaming boom of the 2010s as League became one of the first e-sports to become a mainstream phenomenon (especially outside South Korea).

2010 to 2013

• In the mid-late '00s, survival horror was thought to be a dying genre, unable to compete in the increasingly big-budget gaming marketplace. And then came 2010's Amnesia: The Dark Descent, which revolutionized indie horror and almost singlehandedly put the genre back on the map. Many of Amnesia's design elements — an unarmed and highly vulnerable protagonist, an Unbroken First-Person Perspective, heavy use of Interface Screw — formed part of the DNA of numerous horror games both indie and big-budget in the 2010s.
• While Loot Boxes were generally confined to free-to-play mobile games, it wasn't until 2010 when Team Fortress 2 introduced them in the form of crates and the keys to open them (which are only purchasable with real money) as part of the Mann-conomy Update that publishers started to consider loot boxes and microtransactions in paid games.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 1 set itself apart from other JRPGs of the seventh generation by putting a large focus on exploration, featuring many open areas that, while not Wide-Open Sandbox-like in design, gave players more freedom to go wherever they wanted, whereas other JRPGs of the day like Final Fantasy XIII were more limited in terms of world and level design by being primarily linear. While JRPGs of the fourth and fifth generations did feature overworlds that players could explore, Xenoblade Chronicles presented a much more seamless experience more akin to Western RPG games, something that JRPGs from the latter half of the 2010s, like Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana, Final Fantasy XV, and Shin Megami Tensei V shifting to more open-ended exploration than previous games in their respective series.
• Dark Souls in 2011.
  • While FromSoftware had originally created a new genre of Action RPG called the "Souls-like" or "Soulsborne" in 2009 with its Sleeper Hit Demon's Souls, it wasn't until its Breakthrough Hit Dark Souls that the genre really broke into the mainstream. That game, its sequels, and its Spiritual Successor Bloodborne pioneered the most influential combat system in 2010s gaming, updating old arcade and 2D-style techniques (hitboxes, a stamina meter, attrition) to modern consoles and showing that a game with "tough, but fair" combat could be commercially successful despite a high barrier of entry for the casual gamer. The games likewise focused heavily on environmental storytelling over cutscenes, with the plot, Worldbuilding, and characterization communicated via Flavor Text, objects, clues, and item descriptions communicated interactively, putting heavy emphasis on telling stories in a way only video games can. Within a few years after it came out, the "Souls-like" style has cropped up in multiple places such as Lords of the Fallen and Nioh, while the highly popular Assassin's Creed series featured a combat system heavily inspired by it for Origins and Odyssey.
  • In 2012, a PC port of Dark Souls was released in response to an online petition. Despite it being a complete and utter mess, it managed to sell over three million copies in its lifetime, which was nearly as many as the prior Xbox and PlayStation versions combined. Later entries in the series would come to PC day one and put extra care to make them far better than the first game's port, and continued to sell like gangbusters. This made it abundantly clear that there was a large, mostly Western audience of PC gamers that were craving Japanese games on the platform, which Japanese developers soon took notice of. In the 2000s, Japanese games on Steam were effectively nonexistent, but in the 2010s, they became increasingly common, with consistent headlines throughout the decade of older console-exclusive games being ported to PC reaching the top of Steam's sales charts, and the list of Japanese developers bringing their games to PC kept growing. As of the 2020s, Japanese games coming to PC has become so common that it's considered odd when they don't, to the point that for even the staunchest developers that have always taken console exclusivity deals, like Square Enix and Atlus, it's not a factor of if their games will come to PC, but when.
• Minecraft, upon its full release in 2011, revolutionized not just the Wide-Open Sandbox but gaming culture as a whole. Charlie Hall, writing for Polygon, called Minecraft the most important game of the decade for how it changed the medium and its culture.
  • In terms of gameplay, it popularized Item Crafting mechanics that, when combined with its vast scope, pioneered the Survival Sandbox genre. By the decade's end, crafting and construction mechanics had become staples of open-world games, to the point that games that lacked such features were often criticized for it. Its blocky voxel graphics, meanwhile, led to a revival of more lo-fi aesthetics in indie gaming in the 2010s, especially (though not exclusively) in children's games, as they could run easily on low-end computers and even tablets and smartphones while their abstraction meant that most content made with them was family-friendly.
  • In gaming culture, meanwhile, its development was also a massive inspiration for smaller indie developers, showing just what a small team (or in this case, just one person) with a small budget could accomplish, especially with crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter. More importantly, it was the first game to seriously take advantage of YouTube for promotion and community engagement, as videos of people playing Minecraft and uncovering its secrets became as popular as the game itself and led many others to start playing it and getting involved with its community, heralding the start of the streaming revolution in game culture in the '10s.
• The 2012 release of the remastered version of Dear Esther (originally a free-to-play 2008 Game Mod for the Source engine) was this for the Environmental Narrative Game, emphasizing narrative and Scenery Porn while de-emphasizing traditional gameplay beyond exploration. In doing so, it demonstrated that interactive fiction didn't necessarily have to involve beating enemies or other assorted challenges, but could be built entirely around exploring a world and uncovering its history and secrets at one's own leisure.
• James Stephanie Sterling has referred to 2012's Clash of Clans as the most influential video game of The New '10s for the impact, both good and ill, that it had on gaming in the decade, especially mobile gaming. It popularized an exaggerated, cartoonish art style for mobile games that could look good even on the smaller screens and slower hardware of cell phones, and more importantly, it mainstreamed microtransactions as a business model for game development, as other companies — including in the console gaming space — looked at just how much money Supercell was raking in daily from Clash of Clans.
• It's rare for a Game Mod to completely upend an entire genre, but that's exactly what DayZ, a zombie-themed mod for the military shooter ARMA II, did upon its release in 2012.
  • It changed the rules of the zombie game, combining Survival Horror with the Survival Sandbox by putting a much greater focus on gritty realism within a vast open world full of dangers. Afterwards, zombie games as a whole moved from the closed, claustrophobic environments and linear progression of Resident Evil to open worlds where the full scale of a Zombie Apocalypse could be shown, as seen with games like State of Decay, Dying Light, Days Gone, and Project Zomboid.
  • Furthermore, its online multiplayer, which allowed players to either work together to survive or try to kill each other with no rules restricting Player Versus Player combat and when or where it could be done, inspired some fans to create mods that removed the zombies and focused purely on competitive deathmatches in open-world sandbox environments. One of those fans, Brendan "PlayerUnknown" Greene, drew additional inspiration from Battle Royale and The Hunger Games to pioneer the Battle Royale Game with his 2013 mod for the game DayZ: Battle Royale, a genre that reached full flower when Greene turned his mod into a pair of pioneering standalone games, 2015's H1Z1 and 2017's PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds.

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