Games That Invented Genres?

[Bofferbrauer2]

The_Liquid_Laser said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

Sorry, what?

Wolfenstein had countless imitators. Here's a small, non-exhaustive list of Wolfenstein clones that came out before Doom:

• Corridor 7
• Blake Stone
• Ken's Labyrinth
• Super 3D Noah's Ark
• Nitemare 3D
• Catacomb Abyss
• Operation: Body Count
• Shadow Caster
• Rise of the Triad
• Spear of Destiny (Basically Wolfenstein 3D 2)

And it's no wonder it had so many imitators considering it's sales and reach. Wolfenstein sold about 150.000 registered copies plus over 1M shareware versions. Anything that sold into the 6 digits on PC was a smash hit at the time. The secret of Monkey Island, one of the best-selling PC games of the time, barely sold twice as much as Wolfenstein - and unlike Wolfenstein, had retail copies outside the US where the shareware model was very difficult.

I mean, there's a reason why Wolfenstein clone was a common term before DOOM came out, at which point it became a DOOM-like (or Doom clone. Depending on the region and country, some used clone while others used -like), and then after Duke Nukem 3D a Duke-like, and than came the Quake-like until it got settled into the term FPS (yes, it took that long for the term FPS to take off and onlyr eally settled in around the time of release of Half-Life!).

One reason why there were quite a few; but not "tons" of imitators: DOOM came out just 18 months later, by the time many of the games that got influenced by Wolfenstein actually came out, the genre was already called DOOM-like

And even before Wolfenstein, there had been some games that would be considered FPS nowadays. Catacomb 3D or Hovertank 3D, anyone? But those didn't make nearly the push for the genre that Wolfenstein did

Bolded: By that assessment, we would only have FPS, RPG, Action-adventure, beat'em up and Jump'n run (plus maybe the loosely-defined arcade genre), because everything else wouldn't have reached the threshold to become a genre by your metric. RTS? Action-RPG? Racing? Simulations? Sandbox? Fighting games? None of those had enough releases in a year or two to beat even Wolfenstein and it's clones, which by your own account wasn't enough to become a genre. So why ever would those ever have become a genre but Wolfenstein 3D is denied that honor despite inspiring more clones on it's own?

Bofferbrauer2 said:

Such a narrow-minded phrase. And historically, factually wrong.

Videogames existed before Pong, be it on Mainframes like Tennis For Two (which predates Pong by 14 years!) or the Arcade cabinet Computer Space (which came out a year before Pong and was a derivative of Spacewar!, which came out 10 years earlier), Videogaming was well on it's way, if if Pong never had existed.

By the way: Spacewar! => First Shooter.

I'm going to ignore all of the factual errors in your first post to point out that your arguments in these two posts contradict themselves.  The first post argues how popular Wolfenstein 3D is, and the second post argues that popularity doesn't matter.  Were you actually trying to make a point and if so what is it?

Don't ignore the factual errors if you find any, please post them, as I'm curious myself what I got wrong.

I wasn't contradicting myself, both were about 2 different things altogether - hence why they were in 2 different posts.

In the first post, I was just pointing out that Wolfenstein would even by your theory that popularity matters more to start a genre than defining it in the first place that Wolfenstein even then would have been the one to "invent" the FPS genre, as it was really popular when it released. The popularity didn't come with Doom, it was already there with Wolfenstein, Doom "merely" brought it to the next level.

In the second one, you're saying that we wouldn't be playing any video games today if it weren't for Pong. I just pointed out that Video Games existed before Pong, that Arcade machines existed before Pong and that it was inevitable that we would be playing videogames today, Pong or no Pong. It may have taken longer to take off, but at worst in the late 70's it would have taken off with hits like Asteroids! and Space Invaders.

Also, Personal Computers, and uses of recreation would have developed either way. So while the arcade games (and by extension videogame consoles) may have developed differently, computer gaming wouldn't have been much influenced by this change, as the games played on those were mostly different. With the Apple ][, TRS-80 (both 1977), TI-99 and Atari 400/800 (both 1979), computer gaming started in the 70's, too. Personal Computers started as business machines but quickly gaming became a thing on those machines despite not designed for this - and this design difference also forced a bit the fact that games on computers were very different to those on early consoles with almost no overlap. But while different, it's still video gaming, so your assertion that without Pong we wouldn't be playing videogames today is simply wrong.