Which video games introduced, popularized and mastered their respective genres?

If some of you are able to state facts, then its fine with me, but I mainly want to hear your opinions about this subject. To you, which are THE three games that innovated their genre? Here’s an example about the survival-horror genre, it is known by fact that the three games were:

Introduced – Haunted House (Atari 2600, 1982)
Popularized – Resident Evil (PlayStation, 1996)
Mastered – Silent Hill (PlayStation, 1999)

However, I really don’t think this is the case. To me and in my opinion, it was like this:

Introduced – Alone in the Dark (DOS, 1992), because it was the first to use 3D graphics.
Popularized – Silent Hill (PlayStation, 1999), because it inspired developers to make horror games this way.
Mastered – Amnesia: The Dark Descent (Windows, 2010), no explanation needed.

Mention any genre people, let’s discuss this!

I really didn't think Amnesia was very good, and I definitely wouldn't say it's a better horror game than the old silent hill games. What's your reasoning behind Amnesia being the best? I know you said no explanation needed, it barely cost anything to make and they've made a ton of sale thanks to all the popular YouTubers making videos where they scream constantly at nothing and it's low price, as well as good marketing from Steam. So it did very well profit wise, but I wouldn't say it mastered the horror genre.

If you're talking about the actual game Amnesia is just walking through a generic castle with an uninteresting story. There's hardly any danger, and when monsters do occasionally pop up you just have to look away for a bit, you don't have to run or hide, you can just stare at a wall for a couple of seconds and they go away. So it basically turns into a dark hallway simulator with some point and click puzzles required now and then to progress. There was the whole insanity thing for if you spent to long in the dark, but it never seemed to matter. The only good part of the game was that water room with the invisible shark thing, which they of course used for the demo for that very reason.

There's nothing wrong with liking Amnesia or one of those crappy slender man games, just saying they aren't very good. I wouldn't even rank Amnesia third, there are better horror games out there, although there aren't that many horror games in general. Although I would say Amnesia sort of revitalized some interest from the corporate side by making so much money with such a small budget, which might make a few company's try to get in on some of the action.

I may be wrong in saying this, but as a gamer, this is just my opinion. And it's nothing against the game itself. But I don't think Amnesia popularized anything. I'm sure it's a great game, and I certainly will probably never play it simply because I'm the biggest baby, and games that aren't supposed to be scary, scare me. But I've never seen Amnesia headline much of anything other than being a good horror game.

Silent Hill was just a weirder/scarier version of Resident Evil, no? Perhaps I'm wrong but I didn't play much SH.

I don't know enough about the histories of genres, but I want to say for FPS:

Doom started and popularised it
Quake mastered it
CoD milked the most money from it and showed us yet again that the majority are morons.

painter said:

CoD milked the most money from it and showed us yet again that the majority are morons.

Click to expand...

I feel I owe you a cookie for this

*sigh* OK, I’ll be honest with you DeadSun.

Before making my decision, I was actually choosing between Amnesia and Slender: The Eight Pages and truth be told, I was originally going to put in Slender. The only reason I didn’t put it was because Slender isn’t a full game, unlike Amnesia which is. I said “no explanation needed” because it is a very scary game, it might not be for you, but it was for many people who played it. Also, I might be wrong about this, but I think Amnesia did something different that previous survival horror games had not done before, which was to add Nyctophobia, something that was lacking in all previous protagonists in survival-horror games.

I’ll change my choice then, I think Slender: The Eight Pages was the game that mastered the genre because, unlike other horror games, not a single event in the game was predetermined. In any other horror game, if you play it twice, you’ll know exactly where the scary things are, but in Slender, every session is different and the events happen at complete random, which I think it’s brilliant to keep the player scared ALL the time and I wish more games would follow its steps.

painter’s radio

DOOM wasn’t really the game that introduced the FPS genre, but it sure was the one that popularized it. The actual game that started the genre was one that predated Wolfenstein 3D, it was called “Catacombs 3D.” Although, in my opinion at least, I believe Wolfenstein 3D was the game that introduced the FPS games, simply because you had firearms, instead of magic.

The game that mastered it however is always going to be debatable, but we can sure agree that it’s definitely not COD.

Adventure Gaming

Introduced – Colossal Cave Adventure (PDP-10, 1976)
Popularized – Adventure (Atari 2600, 1979)
Mastered - A Bard's Tale (Apple II, 1985)

painter said:

Silent Hill was just a weirder/scarier version of Resident Evil, no? Perhaps I'm wrong but I didn't play much SH.

I don't know enough about the histories of genres, but I want to say for FPS:

Doom started and popularised it
Quake mastered it
CoD milked the most money from it and showed us yet again that the majority are morons.

Click to expand...

I'd say counter-strike mastered it.
Quake maybe for 1v1.

International karate: introduced us to 2D fighting

Street fighters: popularity

Mortal kombat or super smash bros

Dagger said:

Mortal kombat or super smash bros

Click to expand...

I think Killer Instinct is the one that mastered the 2D fighting genre, because before it, I don't remember any other game that had combos.
I know combos could be done in Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat, but they were not as the same level as the ones seen in Killer Instinct.

VanillaCreme said:

I may be wrong in saying this, but as a gamer, this is just my opinion. And it's nothing against the game itself. But I don't think Amnesia popularized anything. I'm sure it's a great game, and I certainly will probably never play it simply because I'm the biggest baby, and games that aren't supposed to be scary, scare me. But I've never seen Amnesia headline much of anything other than being a good horror game.

Click to expand...

I don't scare easily, to be honest, and yet Amnesia did get my blood pumping, in the best of ways. I believe the OP is right, to some extent. Amnesia definitely does show mastery of the horror genre. Much is implied, much is accomplished by the atmosphere and mood, relatively little is shown. It doesn't get much better than this, IMO.

I really think you should try it, play it with the lights on and/or with someone else in the room with you. It's an experience, alright, one worth having. I don't think it could have a negative effect on your health, IMO anyway.

My personal introduction into the horror or survival-horror genre was actually Silent Hill 2 which managed to create an intensely unsettling atmosphere - with a surprisingly low amount of blood on top and no cheap jump scares (I really despise those). Later I got to play Silent Hill 1 as well - it was a very good game, but not quite as captivating as SH2.
And I'm not much of a retro gamer so I don't know anything before the late 90s...

I never got all the hype about Amnesia either. Probably because I played the Penumbra series before which is its predecessor. A lot of its ideas were adopted by Amnesia, so there was hardly anything revolutionary in it for me. The physics, the lack of weaponry, not looking directly at enemies to alarm them, no overwhelming amount of threats etc.
Scary to some degree, but I think Outlast managed to scare me much more.

Woah, holy crap, Case,
I investigated a bit about the three adventure games you mentioned and I could not help but notice that “Adventure” is considered “Open-World.”
For an Atari 2600 game, that sound very ambitious, but I think it’s an exaggeration.
However, do you think it was the first game to introduce, non-linear game-play? Or am I getting something wrong here?

Rodent,
Yeah, the same thing happened to me with Silent Hill 2. It was the first game of the franchise I played and I nearly sh*t my pants.
The morgue, in particular, scared me so much that I had to turn on the lights and mute the TV, but after that brief part, I turned the lights off and raised back the volume and continued like if nothing happened. XD
A couple of years later, I played the 1st Silent Hill, but I felt that it wasn't as scary as the second, although it did gave a few jump-scares.

AnonymousMe said:

Woah, holy crap, Case,
I investigated a bit about the three adventure games you mentioned and I could not help but notice that “Adventure” is considered “Open-World.”
For an Atari 2600 game, that sound very ambitious, but I think it’s an exaggeration.
However, do you think it was the first game to introduce, non-linear game-play? Or am I getting something wrong here?

Click to expand...

I'm not sure who claims that "Adventure" is "open-world," but there's no free-roaming, so I wouldn't put it in that classification. I could waste hours exploring the vastness of GTAV's map and never do a single mission, but in "Adventure," there's not much to do besides finish the puzzle. It's also very linear in that the items are required to be found and used in a certain order.

AnonymousMe said:

Yeah, the same thing happened to me with Silent Hill 2. It was the first game of the franchise I played and I nearly sh*t my pants.
The morgue, in particular, scared me so much that I had to turn on the lights and mute the TV, but after that brief part, I turned the lights off and raised back the volume and continued like if nothing happened. XD
A couple of years later, I played the 1st Silent Hill, but I felt that it wasn't as scary as the second, although it did gave a few jump-scares.

Click to expand...

Yeah, the prison and the labyrinth as a whole made me feel really uncomfortable during the first time playthrough. Silent Hill 3 was almost as good though it put a bit more emphasis on visual horror. The atmosphere was still top-notch of course, just with a different theme. A matter of personal taste.

Do sports games count?

If yes, I dont know about who introduced basketball games, but NBA live series popularized it, and studio 2K mastered it.

Mr.YellowCat,
I'm going to guess it was "Basketball" (Atari 2600, 1978) the game that introduced basketball games. It's a very primitive game, but we had to start with something. XD

I have a couple different ones here:
Baseball Manager Games:
Introduced – Earl Weaver Baseball (EA Amiga & DOS 1987)
Popularized – Front Page Sports Baseball Pro 98 (Sierra PC, 1998)
Mastered – Out of the Park 13 (OOTP Developments PC & iOS 2012)

Football/Soccer Manager Games:
Introduced – Football Manager (Addictive Games 1982)
Popularized – Championship Manager 3 series (Sports Interactive PC, 1998)
Mastered – Top Eleven Football Manager (Nordeus Flash & iOS 2010)

FPS genre (single player campaign):

Introduced: Wolfenstein 3d (although a couple games before this used the layout, I still think you have to start with this)

Popularized: Doom

Mastered: Half-Life 2

Really? That’s it guys?

Come on, there’s still a plethora of genres we can discuss about. Take a look at Wikipedia’s article to get an idea if you have to.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_genres