Trendsetters: The 10 Most Significant Games

8/26/2008 6:16 PM | 9 Comments | Page 1 of 10

Significant games -- these are the games that launched or toppled empires, ignited new genres, or changed the way games are played. The terms "significant" and "best-seller" are not synonymous. If they were, Super Mario Bros. 3 and The Sims would top the list as they are the best-selling non-packed-in games in console and PC history. Neither game made the list, though both inspired a host of less-impressive imitators.

Just being first at anything does not cut it on this list, either. A solid case can be made that Night Driver, an arcade game released by Atari in 1976, was the first 3-D game, but did it shape the games that came after it? Gotcha, an Atari arcade game that came out on the heels of Pong, was the first maze chase. Pac-Man re-invented and popularized the maze chase wheel. Gotcha may have come first, but Pac-Man is the more significant game.

It is also worth noting that not all significant games are good. E.T. was a remarkably bad game that is highly significant for the role it played in the Atari collapse.

So what was the most significant game of all time? The number-one slot is up for grabs. Here, in no particular order, are 10 top contenders:

Super Mario Bros.
(Nintendo, Nintendo Entertainment System, 1985)

Super Mario Bros. has no firsts. It was not the first pack-in; Atari packed Combat in with the 2600. It was not the first side-scrolling game; the first scroller was Atari Football. The first side-scrolling action game was Defender -- a pioneering arcade game from Williams in 1980. That same year, Nihon Bussan released Crazy Climber, a vertical-scrolling game in which a man scales skyscrapers.

Super Mario Bros. is important because it powered the resurrection of the home videogame business. The first two generations of home consoles, the Pong generation and the Atari generation, both went down in flames and stayed down. Today's game business is based on lessons learned after the launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES).

"Super Mario Bros., never one of my favorites to be honest, but clearly it ushered in a much more refined gameplay. The visuals were at a new level," says Arnie Katz, a game journalist who covered the collapse of gaming in the early '80s and the return of gaming in the mid-'80s. "Certainly Super Mario Bros. was crucial in bringing games back."

"I loved that game," Minoru Arakawa, former president of Nintendo of America, told Crispy Gamer. Under Arakawa's leadership, Nintendo of America resurrected the home videogame business in the United States with the launch of the Nintendo Entertainment System.

"I think Super Mario Bros. was the key software for the revitalization of videogames in the United States and Japan."

According to Arakawa, having the right game packed in with the system was essential.

"The Master System... I don't know whether it was because of hardware or because of software that it failed," says Arakawa. "But I do think that Super Mario Bros. was what made the NES so successful. Later SEGA came out with Sonic for Genesis. I think Sonic really contributed to the success of Genesis.

As a sidenote, Nintendo went on to sell a reported 40 million copies of the original Super Mario Bros. (a significant portion of which came packed in with hardware), making it the best-selling videogame of all time.