Throughout the history of gaming, there have been numerous titles that have been lauded for their impact on the development of the medium. Games like Super Mario Bros, Pac-Man, Doom, and Space Invaders regularly receive recognition for their lasting legacy which can still be felt even today. Yet not all such influential titles are well known, despite having caused monumental shifts in the landscape of video games and inspiring legions of imitators many such games continue to be unknown to most gamers. Sometimes it is because these games did not become immediately popular and it would take some time before their impact was felt, other times it was because they appealed to a somewhat niche portion of the video game market, or because they were unknown outside of their country of origin. Today, I would like to pay homage to these unsung heroes of the video game industry, the games that don’t get the credit that they deserve for helping to shape the art form into what we have today.
Influential video games you might not have heard about
The Black Bass

Have you played literally any fishing game ever? Have you ever even played a fishing mini-game within a larger title? Then you have almost certainly played a game that has been influenced either directly or indirectly by The Black Bass. First released for the NEC PC-88 in 1984, while it was far from the first fishing game ever made, it would ultimately end up as the one that nearly all others after would copy. Many elements that are now ubiquitous in fishing games were first introduced in this title such as the use of a line tension meter. The impact of this title can be seen in games as diverse as Sonic Adventure, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Stardew Valley, and Red Dead Redemption II, not to mention the seemingly endless procession of the Rapala and Bass Pro Shops games. However, due to the fact that the MSX wasn’t very popular in the West, most of the world wouldn’t be introduced to the series until The Black Bass II (simply called The Black Bass in the US) was brought over to the NES in 1989 by which time it was only one of many fishing games on the market, many of which had further iterated on the formula of the original. The result was that the game ended up feeling somewhat antiquated and was largely overshadowed by its copycats, becoming a small footnote in gaming history here in the West despite its massive influence.
Colossal Cave Adventure

One question often asked by those not well versed in the minutia of gaming history is why are games like The Legend of Zelda classified as action-adventure titles despite the fact that the majority of games in existence contain action and could be said to be adventures of some sort. That is because, unlike most genres, the name Adventure is less of a descriptor of the type of gameplay that sets it apart from other games and more so an indication of lineage. Much like how Souls-Like indicates games that are descendants from and influenced by the design of Dark Souls, Adventure games are descendants of and were heavily influenced by a game called Adventure or to give it its full name; Colossal Cave Adventure.
Created for mainframe computers in 1976, Colossal Cave Adventure was a text-based game that had players exploring a cave system filled with treasures. It set itself apart through its emphasis on exploration and inventory-based puzzles, elements that have remained hallmarks of Adventure titles to this day. The game would directly inspire the creation of text-based Adventure games like Zork which later led to the creation of graphic adventure games like King’s Quest and then later beget point and click adventure games like The Secret of Monkey Island.
At the same time, the Adventure game would branch off in another direction thanks to an Atari 2600 game also called Adventure which took heavy inspiration from its text-based counterpart. Adventure faithfully adapted the core gameplay of CCA into a graphical form that better suited the Atari 2600 and also added in arcade-style action, thus creating an “Action-Adventure.” This game would then end up inspiring numerous other titles, creating a chain of influences that would carry on to the modern day, occasionally splitting off and creating even more genres along the way such as sandbox and survival horror. It is truly astounding just how many of the games that we play today can have their lineage traced back to this one groundbreaking title.
Deer Hunter

Many who have pursued the bargain section of a used game store will likely be amazed by the sheer number of hunting games released. The most prolific of these is no doubt Cabela’s which has produced dozens of hunting games in the last two decades for almost every platform under the sun. While game hunting as a concept has existed in video games almost since its inception, the title that created the modern hunting game was Deer Hunter (not to be confused with the classic anti-war movie of the same name) for PC in 1997.
Though somewhat derided by the gaming press at the time the game would end up being a massive success largely due to how it was able to appeal to a previously untapped market of working-class rural Americans. It achieved this through a combination of very low system requirements which ensured that even the cheapest computers at the time were capable of playing the game well as well as presenting itself as a much more serious and realistic take on game hunting, as opposed to previous efforts which tended to be much more cartoony. This runaway success would lead to countless sequels and imitators that continue to this day, most of which have largely been ignored by the mainstream gaming audience due to the fact that such games don’t appeal much to the traditional hardcore gamer. Nonetheless, when considering the evolution of video games as an art form it is important to appreciate and study important titles in the medium’s history even when they lay outside of the general interests of the average gamer.
Elite

Stop me if you have heard this one before, a space game where the player can freely fly their starship to thousands of procedurally generated alien worlds, occasionally getting into dog fights with space pirates. This seemingly describes numerous modern-day titles such as Starfield and No Man’s Sky, and one might assume that games of such immense scope have only been possible fairly recently, but you would be wrong as a group of British developers were able to achieve this style of game all the way back in the early 80s. Released in 1984 for the BBC Micro computer and later ported to other machines, Elite was a game that combined free space flight across a vast open universe with thousands of worlds to visit, trading, business management, and 3D dogfighting utilizing wireframe graphics. The game offered the player complete freedom, allowing the choice between being a law-abiding space trader, or a ruthless pirate. While many of these elements had been done individually before such as space combat in Atari’s Star Raiders, and interplanetary trading in the 1974 mainframe title Star Trader, no game had ever before combined all of them and applied them on such a massive scale. To say that Elite was ridiculously impressive for 1984 is an immense understatement, and game developers took notice. The game would end up influencing numerous games that came after; Wing Commander Privateer, the X series, Eve Online, Freelancer, No Man’s Sky, and Star Citizen all built upon Elite’s foundation.
Gendai Daisenryaku

Released for the NEC PC-98 in 1985, Gendai Daisenryaku would end up being the inception point for nearly all Japanese turn-based strategy games that would come after. The game took heavy influence from tabletop war games and while far from the first attempt to convert this style of game into electronic form, Daisenryaku would end up being extremely popular, spawning a long-running franchise with dozens of entries across many different systems. The series continues to this day with the most recent entry coming out as recently as 2021. In spite of this proliferation to this day only two entries from this series have ever been released outside of Japan. The game would end up being highly influential, leading to the creation of games like Military Madness on the TurboGrafx-16 and Famicom Wars for the Famicom. Famicom Wars would eventually beget the larger Nintendo Wars series which includes the Advance Wars games. Sega and Nintendo would then experiment with changing the setting to medieval fantasy and adding RPG elements which would lead to the creation of the Shining Force and Fire Emblem series respectively which would then form the basis for the strategy RPG, influencing games like Final Fantasy Tactics and Triangle Strategy.
The Portopia Serial Murder Case

Sometimes greatness can come from unexpected places, when a young Yuji Hori set out to create a text adventure murder mystery for the Japanese home computers he could not have anticipated the impact that his game would have on the industry. Released in 1983, The Portopia Serial Murder Case was in many ways an evolution of the Graphical Text adventures that had become popular in the West, though with several key innovations. Unlike the often extremely punishing games that inspired it, Portopia had no true loss state and utilized a somewhat more open-ended structure that enabled a branching narrative. The game would prove extremely popular, enough that it would receive a port to the Famicom. While the Famicom did possess an optional keyboard accessory, this was inaccessible to the vast majority of users who were largely accustomed to playing with the system’s default controllers, making it difficult to adapt the original text parser interface to this version of the game. Yuji Hori then decided to remove it entirely and replace it with a menu interface wherein players could select what they wanted to do from a list of prearranged options.
Between these two versions of the game, The Portopia Serial Murder Case more or less single-handedly invented the visual novel. As a genre, the visual novel would grow to become massively successful and influential in Japan, though it is only in recent years that it has started to gain popularity in the West largely due to the popularity of games like Phoenix Wright, Danganronpa, and various indie titles. Beyond just visual novels, many of the conventions established in The Portopia Serial Murder Case would go on to influence other genres as well, in particular the JRPG. In 1986 Yuji Hori applied the menu-based interface he had created for Portopia to the original Dragon Quest, greatly streamlining how RPGs could be controlled and increasing their accessibility which would in turn lead to the genre’s mass popularity. In the following decades, Dragon Quest and other JRPGs would borrow numerous elements from visual novels, many of which originated from The Portopia Serial Murder Case.
Sokoban

One common trope in many action-adventure and RPG games is the block-pushing puzzle; wherein the player is tasked with moving one or more blocks, crates, or other large objects onto designated places (often to activate a switch). This type of puzzle has appeared in countless titles ranging from the Zelda series, Golden Sun, Pokemon, Sea of Stars, Ico, and much more. All of this can be traced back to a puzzle game by the name of Sokoban released in Japan for the NEC PC-8801 in 1982.
Sokoban, whose name roughly translates to warehouse manager, had players solving increasingly intricate puzzles that had them pushing crates around oddly shaped warehouses. The game was very popular and thus ended up inspiring numerous sequels and copycats. Several of these would end up being moderate successes in the West such as Boxxle on the GameBoy, and Shove-It on the Sega Genesis. Nonetheless, the Sokoban sub-genre of puzzle games largely died out by the mid-90s, but not before it entrenched itself as a type of puzzle seen in other genres, largely due to its appearances in the Legend of Zelda series. There it remains to this day, though Sokoban clones still occasionally pop up in the indie scene such as in the 2019 game, Babba is You.
Tokimeki Memorial

As I write this, I am currently playing Persona 5 Royal, one of many games to draw heavy influence from this next game. Tokimeki Memorial was first released for the PC Engine-CD (Japanese Turbografx-CD) in 1994 and while hardly the first game to focus on romance it almost single-handedly established the conventions of the modern dating sim genre. The game had players take control of a high school student as he manages his time through school, partaking in various activities to raise stats and manage relationships between many of the various girls that the player interacts with by taking them on dates and completing specific tasks with the goal of eventually romancing one of them. The game combined aspects of a visual novel with time management and raising gameplay inspired by the earlier Princess Maker series. This game was a massive success, leading to numerous sequels and imitators. As a result of this game’s success the dating sim soon became one of the most popular gaming genres in Japan. The genre has taken much longer to make its way to the West in any significant way and even today remains fairly niche in this part of the world. Tokimeki Memorial would also influence games from other genres, most noticeably the JRPG. Numerous games in the decades that followed have implemented dating sim elements in ways both large and small, most notably Sakura Wars, Fire Emblem: Three Houses, and the Persona series. Coming back to my first statement, I have Tokimeki Memorial to thank for being able to romance the best girl, Makoto, in Persona 5.
The Tower of Druaga

In 1984 while much of the world was still reeling from the video game crash that had occurred the previous year, Namco would release one of the most influential arcade games of all time; The Tower of Druaga. Conceived as an attempt to convert the gameplay of Dungeons & Dragons and early computer RPGs like Wizardry into a fast-paced arcade game, Druaga had players taking control of the Knight Gilgamesh as he explored the different maze-like floors of the eponymous tower on a quest to rescue the princess Ki. What made this game special was its use of communal problem-solving. Each floor of the tower contained a hidden item for players to find, some of which could help make the game easier, while others were required to beat the game. Each item could be obtained through a different secret means and while some were relatively straightforward others required highly counterintuitive actions to be performed. All of this meant that it was effectively impossible for any single person to complete the game by themselves, instead, players who stumbled across a secret would write it down in a notebook that came attached to the cabinet so that others could benefit from this shared knowledge and together players could collectively unravel the tower’s mysteries. The game was a smash hit, especially when it was later ported to the Famicom, becoming a pillar of Japanese game design throughout the mid to late 80s. The Tower of Druaga is cited as a major influence on a number of games from this period, most notably the original Legend of Zelda, as well as lesser-known titles such as Milon’s Secret Castle and The Goonies II. In fact, if you have ever wondered why many 8-bit action-adventure games of this period included secrets that seemed impossible to figure out without a strategy guide, influence from The Tower of Druaga is more than likely to blame. The impact of the Tower of Druaga can still be felt in games today, and the idea of communal problem-solving can still be seen in the messaging system in Dark Souls and Eldin Ring.
Trespasser

This one is kind of cheating considering how it is fairly well known but not for being influential. Released in 1998 for PC, Trespasser was an immensely ambitious title that sought to create a fully immersive experience set within the Jurassic Park universe. The game promised sophisticated dinosaur AI, expansive outdoor environments, and plenty of physics objects that could all interact with one another. Unfortunately, all of this proved to be a bit too much for the then-inexperienced developers at Dreamworks Interactive, and the final game that was released ended up being one of the most infamous disasters in the medium’s history. A buggy mess that could barely run on even the best machines of the time, featuring brain-dead dinosaurs, broken physics, and absolutely horrendous gameplay. However, despite this failure, Trespasser inspired numerous titles in the years to come. The large outdoor environments would influence the design of Halo: Combat Evolved and Far Cry, its utilization of audio logs for storytelling would inspire a similar system in Doom 3, and Tresspasser’s physics system would lead to the focus on physics in Half-Life 2. The game’s janky controls would even inspire the creation of indie comedy games like Surgeon Simulator and Octodad: The Dadliest Catch. In many ways, the game was far ahead of its time, with pioneering mechanics such as a purely diegetic user interface and sandbox mechanics that wouldn’t become commonplace for many years to come. If Trespasser can teach us anything it is that a failure can have just as much impact on a medium’s development as a success.