15 Most Influential Games of All Time

The following games were rated by Gamesspots as the 15 most influential games of all time with there corresponding links. I have also added my experience with those games

Space Invaders--Arcade (1978)
First encountered space invader in a pub in hopetoun a small mallee town in Victoria Australia. As we were in primary schoold we had to sneak in to play on the table tops. The first table top I played though was pong. We were the first family in the town to purchase a video game which was a hanimax (Should have bought an atari). I spent so many hour playing space invaders on that hanimex.

To understand my gaming influences an example is when we moved from a country town to a small city called geelong. On the first day of moving into our new house my mother took us to a local video arcade called space invaders. The video arcades of Geelong would be a place a regurlarly frequented for the rest of my high school days.


Pac-Man--Arcade (1980)
My expericence with pacman was on tabletop machines, I was never into this game but liked the film concerning a pac man tournament


Pole Position--Arcade (1982)
I remember fondly getting into the specialised arcade machine that was setup with a steering wheel and thinking that you were a driver. At the time I thought the graphics were amazing.


Gauntlet--Arcade (1985)
Awesome game but found it was to expensive to play for some reason. Ahead of its time and if you were playing Dungeoun & Dragons, like I was at the time it was really good escapism


Super Mario Bros.--Nintendo Entertainment System (1985)
I never ever got into mario brothers game only mario game I played was donkey kong which would be in my top ten games.



Commando--Arcade (1985)

I had this game on my commodore 64 and remember teaching ex soldiers the game in which they were amazed.

Double Dragon--Arcade (1987)
Played this game in video arcades of Geelong not one of my favourites I rather played the karate game at that time

The Legend of Zelda--Nintendo Entertainment System (1987)

I never had a nintendo so missed out on the nintendo games.

Tetris--Commodore 64 (1987)

I was first introduced to tetris at university and use to spend some of my break spending money to play tetris. Looking back I must have been a real geek.


Dragon Warrior-- Nintendo Entertainment System (1989)

Another nintendo game I know nothing about

Street Fighter II--Arcade (1991

First introduced to this game when I was living in wellington. Did not play much as I didnt like the prospects of being beaten by juniors. Spawned Mortal Combat which was the fighting game that I have played the most

Reminds me that some of the best video arcades were in Wellington

Virtua Racing--Arcade (1992)

Cant remember this game. My favourite racing game is need for speed but the most anticipated game was a one screen rally arcade game which you could do upgrades based on how you would go in the previous race.

Resident Evil--PlayStation (1996)

I did not own a playstation so I have no experience with playstation games

Super Mario 64--Nintendo 64 (1996)

Another Mario game, I was going to buy the nintendo 64 to see what the fuss was with Zelda but it ran out of stock in Fiji so I missed that opportunity.

Final Fantasy VII--PlayStation (1997)

I havent even watched the movie so cant comment. Read that the grapics in the moview was pretty good for it times


Main games missing from that list I personally thing were influential


Wolfenstein 3D
I would consider this the most influential game. It was the precursor to the popularity of the shareware games, First Person Shooter and Doom. Some of my best experience were playing doom at night and doom/quake multiplayer bloodfests

My first experience with wolfenstien was when I was working in Wellington and a tech support guy said that he had a free copy of a game. I istalled wolfenstein in my computer at home. At the time I was amazed that that you could get quality games for free. Probably inluenced my opinion on the quality of open source products later on

Once my two nieces from my village in another island visited me for a holiday . They had never seen pizza or a computer before. I introduced them to multiplayer doom using serial cables. It was amazing to see how they responded to being able to pretend that you were a person shooting other things or persons.


Age of Empires
The game I have easily played the most is Age of Empires and if I want to kill some time I play age of empires two. Other types in this genre was starcraft


GTA Vice City
I played GTA and thought it was boring, GTA Vice City was the game that changed the gaming experience for me. This was furthe changed by San Andreas which is the only game that I can tell that has physicall effected the way I behave. I think there is a problem when a game starts to get two realistic ie the disconnect that you have with the older games like doom is no longer there


Hyper Olympics

I spent countless hours playing this game and busting my knuckles trying to run as fast as possible. Still was not able to master the ice cream stick technique. This was a precourser to 1 and 10 then Madden Football which I think is currently the number one gaming franchise.

I remember playing one and ten in a video arcade disguised as a garage and thinking of how the graphics was so real life. To play madden now and to see the differences is unexplainable.

But again playing games now is all relative on your previous experience.

If I get another one of my nephews/neices that have never seen a video game. I would guess they would enjoy space invaders. The only variable to this is how much influence of T.V and DVD's would have on there experience