This is interesting but the site is missing many important game technologies and incorrectly attributing some.
The site lists Descent 3 as being the first to have procedural texturing and yet Unreal had it in 1998.
Doom is only listed as "first game to present panoramic skies". Doom may have been the first to have ambient lighting and built to be moddable. Probably also the first LAN-based multiplayer 3D first-person shooter.
Quake is only listed as "advanced 3D first person shooter" and yet Quake had many technologies that were probably firsts as well. First ip-ip client-server 3d first person shooter, first true 3D environments in first-person shooter, first to use pre-generated lighting in combination with dynamic lighting using a surface cache, and probably more.
I may have some of these wrong, but you get the idea. The site is missing a lot.
>The site lists Descent 3 as being the first to have procedural texturing and yet Unreal had it in 1998.
I couldn't find a reference for this, and my recollection is that Unreal had amazing (for the time) detail textures when you got close to an object, but they were very repetitive.
Back in 2000 I had a subscription to the UK PC Gamer magazine and they did a huge "Complete History Of Games" poster, with connections between everything that influenced everything else.
Imgur won't let me upload my scan of it in full resolution, but here's a lower res and still readable version of my scan: https://i.imgur.com/eZPLvMR.jpg
Fellow PC Gamer UK reader from the early 2000s. Funnily enough the first magazine issue I bought contained the Duke Nukem Forever announcement, which became a running gag for delayed releases for over 10 years.
The Space Wars (1977) gameplay video is me playing my old arcade game with my son. The video is copied from my YouTube channel -- maybe this guy should attribute the source of his gameplay clips...
I sold the game years ago as it is rather large. I also worked with a few ex-Cinematronics engineers back in the day. They claimed it was a "hack shop" but a lot of fun at times.
Not sure why it says that Mystery House is the "first game with an ending". Hunt the Wumpus from 6+ years earlier certainly has an ending (you catch the Wumpus). Colossal Cave Adventure and mainframe Zork certainly do too. Adventure for the Atari 2600 and Star Raiders for the Atari 800 both predate it by a couple months. It's not even the first commercial home computer adventure game to have an ending, since quite a few of the Scott Adams adventures predate it. At a guess, I'd say it could be the first "graphical adventure game with a text parser interface", but I wouldn't swear to it.
It's weird that Zork doesn't feature on such a list, though I'm not sure what category it might hold, as it was a re-imagining of the Colossal Cave Adventure (also missing from the list).
I have two relevant memories from the 1970's - first, my friend's dad brought home a stonkingly large desktop machine. My first experience with an actual, albeit doubtlessly feeble and tedious computer by contemporary standards.
I am pretty sure Wumpus (or a clone) was what kept us amused for hours there.
Second, a few years later another neighbour - Greg Dubois - employed me to sit and make copies, on a high-speed tape duplicator, of games he'd written for the TRS-80, that he was selling direct to Dick Smith (one of the few retailers of such wares in Australia at the time).
I’m sure Cunningham’s Law will deliver some improvements to this list as people trawl their youth for innovations. But one thing I think is equally interesting is the list of _lasts_ in video games. For example I’m pretty sure Frontier: Elite II was the last commercial game written by a single person, in assembly language, released on a single floppy disk. And it’s been nearly 15 years now since a single game was released without a crafting system, nobody remembers what the last one was.
Usually Firsts lists contain influential things (although this list shows that a lot of the time it's the Second that becomes influential), while a list of Lasts will probably be full of irrelevant things. I suspect the last game that came out on most consoles or formats will be some movie tie-in or low-budget children's title.
I used to play Hunter on Amiga for hours (first open world 3D game). I never understood why it took so long after Hunter for the concept of open world to really stick.
I would argue that the credit of first 3D open-world game belongs firmly to Mercenary from 1985, and not to Hunter with it's 1991 release date.
Mercenary is a 3D vector environment where one can navigate the environment freely, on foot or by using different vehicles and aircraft, enter buildings and explore their interior.
The graphics is much more limited than Hunter with the first Mercenary game from 1985 only using simple wire-frame graphics, you can most of the time just walk through.
Even with the technical limitations of it's time this game proved really captivating, once you made it past the initial hurdle of figuring out what the hell you're supposed to do in this game, after crash-landing on an alien planet in the introduction.
It was one of the few games that really fascinated me back then, and I spent many hours playing it.
>This [Berzerk] is first videogamegame that kiled [sic] a player (at least 3 players)
I thought this meant "killed the avatar on the screen", but no, they are referring to real life deaths. I spent a lot of quarters on Berzerk during my lunch hour at my first white-collar job out of college (alongside Missile Command).
Also glad to see Xevious listed, my grad school buddy and I both got pretty good at that one in the arcade near campus.
There are a few games where I’d really like to know how the graphics or some aspect of them was achieved. These articles always fall short. What was novel and how was it done when (in the cases I’m thinking about) you had nothing more than a Z80 and a few KB of RAM.
On a side note, why do they use nbsp's for columns? Wondered why the right column didn't align perfectly and had to "inspect". As a developer I know not to use tables for layout, but this is a list.
Hmm, I have the feeling this game [0], was a "First real time 3D adventure game", before Blade Runner?
Yeah, seems to be, according to Wikipedia Atlantis was from March 1997, Blade runner from November that year. I played both, liked Atlantis more, sucked me in for a summer, a very new experience at that time (didn't really realize it at that time). I was translated to dutch with some "famous" Dutch voice actors. Really well done.
One first I’ve been curious about is the first game to us a ‘Tetris’ style inventory system where you had to fit different block shaped items in a grid representing your inventory. It is very common, but someone did it first.
What about the first to use a slot inventory at all?
In 1984 "Sundog: Frozen Legacy", first on the Apple ][e then on the Atari ST is the earliest example I remember of a game with a slot inventory.
You couldn't yet put something "twice the size", using two blocks but you could already move inventory from character to your vehicle or to your spaceship's cargo.
The pace of firsts is decreasing over time and 2017 seems to have been the first empty year and since 2020, there has been nothing new? Or is the list not up to date?
[+] [-] Teslazar|3 years ago|reply
The site lists Descent 3 as being the first to have procedural texturing and yet Unreal had it in 1998.
Doom is only listed as "first game to present panoramic skies". Doom may have been the first to have ambient lighting and built to be moddable. Probably also the first LAN-based multiplayer 3D first-person shooter.
Quake is only listed as "advanced 3D first person shooter" and yet Quake had many technologies that were probably firsts as well. First ip-ip client-server 3d first person shooter, first true 3D environments in first-person shooter, first to use pre-generated lighting in combination with dynamic lighting using a surface cache, and probably more.
I may have some of these wrong, but you get the idea. The site is missing a lot.
[+] [-] rasz|3 years ago|reply
that would be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maze_(1973_video_game), its right there on this site https://ultimatehistoryvideogames.jimdofree.com/maze-war
[+] [-] moring|3 years ago|reply
Descent had this before Quake, and I think even Ultima Underworld was "true 3d" (edit: but wasn't a shooter).
[+] [-] johnwalkr|3 years ago|reply
I couldn't find a reference for this, and my recollection is that Unreal had amazing (for the time) detail textures when you got close to an object, but they were very repetitive.
[+] [-] edf13|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nition|3 years ago|reply
Back in 2000 I had a subscription to the UK PC Gamer magazine and they did a huge "Complete History Of Games" poster, with connections between everything that influenced everything else.
Imgur won't let me upload my scan of it in full resolution, but here's a lower res and still readable version of my scan: https://i.imgur.com/eZPLvMR.jpg
[+] [-] ssl232|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] magic_hamster|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] relwin|3 years ago|reply
I sold the game years ago as it is rather large. I also worked with a few ex-Cinematronics engineers back in the day. They claimed it was a "hack shop" but a lot of fun at times.
[+] [-] ardit33|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sparky_z|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jedd|3 years ago|reply
I have two relevant memories from the 1970's - first, my friend's dad brought home a stonkingly large desktop machine. My first experience with an actual, albeit doubtlessly feeble and tedious computer by contemporary standards.
I am pretty sure Wumpus (or a clone) was what kept us amused for hours there.
Second, a few years later another neighbour - Greg Dubois - employed me to sit and make copies, on a high-speed tape duplicator, of games he'd written for the TRS-80, that he was selling direct to Dick Smith (one of the few retailers of such wares in Australia at the time).
[+] [-] thom|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flohofwoe|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] YurgenJurgensen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nivenkos|3 years ago|reply
I think only Oblivion caught up with this some 15 years later.
Also Baldur's Gate, Thief, Deus Ex, Jagged Alliance were all genre-defining with their own huge improvements (e.g. 3D sound and lighting in Thief).
[+] [-] rasz|3 years ago|reply
JA came out year after UFO: Enemy Unknown which itself was based on 1988 Laser Squad or maybe even 1984 Rebelstar Raiders
[+] [-] d--b|3 years ago|reply
https://ultimatehistoryvideogames.jimdofree.com/hunter
[+] [-] bdowling|3 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game)
[+] [-] blywi|3 years ago|reply
Mercenary is a 3D vector environment where one can navigate the environment freely, on foot or by using different vehicles and aircraft, enter buildings and explore their interior. The graphics is much more limited than Hunter with the first Mercenary game from 1985 only using simple wire-frame graphics, you can most of the time just walk through.
Even with the technical limitations of it's time this game proved really captivating, once you made it past the initial hurdle of figuring out what the hell you're supposed to do in this game, after crash-landing on an alien planet in the introduction.
It was one of the few games that really fascinated me back then, and I spent many hours playing it.
There's a good introduction and walk-through of the game and it's sequels on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWTAEd0Z9uI
[+] [-] interroboink|3 years ago|reply
Made me chuckle (:
[+] [-] King-Aaron|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AustinDev|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ekaros|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Bondi_Blue|3 years ago|reply
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hTehcvSgyWI
[+] [-] PopAlongKid|3 years ago|reply
I thought this meant "killed the avatar on the screen", but no, they are referring to real life deaths. I spent a lot of quarters on Berzerk during my lunch hour at my first white-collar job out of college (alongside Missile Command).
Also glad to see Xevious listed, my grad school buddy and I both got pretty good at that one in the arcade near campus.
[+] [-] gwbas1c|3 years ago|reply
For more details, there's a scan of the article explaining the death: https://ultimatehistoryvideogames.jimdofree.com/berzerk
Basically, an 18-year-old had a heart attack after playing the game.
[+] [-] toastal|3 years ago|reply
No apostrophes for decades—apostrophes are for contractions and possession. En dash with no spaces for ranges or relationships.
[+] [-] veilrap|3 years ago|reply
- Online multiplayer
- MMO
- VR / AR with headtracking
- Generated Worlds
[+] [-] ianvisits|3 years ago|reply
Such as Ant Attack - may be the first isometric game for personal computers.
Chess in 1K for the ZX81
The Hobbit - first to accept sentences for the game parser.
etc.
[+] [-] nickdothutton|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zobat|3 years ago|reply
On a side note, why do they use nbsp's for columns? Wondered why the right column didn't align perfectly and had to "inspect". As a developer I know not to use tables for layout, but this is a list.
[+] [-] teekert|3 years ago|reply
Yeah, seems to be, according to Wikipedia Atlantis was from March 1997, Blade runner from November that year. I played both, liked Atlantis more, sucked me in for a summer, a very new experience at that time (didn't really realize it at that time). I was translated to dutch with some "famous" Dutch voice actors. Really well done.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantis:_The_Lost_Tales
[+] [-] jibe|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TacticalCoder|3 years ago|reply
In 1984 "Sundog: Frozen Legacy", first on the Apple ][e then on the Atari ST is the earliest example I remember of a game with a slot inventory.
You couldn't yet put something "twice the size", using two blocks but you could already move inventory from character to your vehicle or to your spaceship's cargo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunDog:_Frozen_Legacy
This game was made by FTL. They then later on made "Dungeon Master".
[+] [-] WinstonSmith84|3 years ago|reply