It's always a Japanese PC game from the early 80s (unless it's a Euro game called like Florkus the Drongo which has language modelling and weather patterns running on 2kb of memory for some reason).
I was figuring deliberate Max Payne-style bullet time was something UPL's Omega Fighter (1989) did first, but nope, the current most likely origin was actually SEGA's Astro Blaster (1981).
More specifically, a point came up recently where part of being a fan of Final Fantasy in particular is being confidently wrong while saying "[The game I started with/my favorite] was the first game in the series to do..." (not even getting into games outside of FF that did it earlier).
I'm giving the person the benefit of the doubt because outside of a certain age range, folks treat public internet spaces as search engines and it could be a honest question by a teenager who wasn't even born in 2005
I don't want to dunk on post too much but it's really funny to see "Is X the only game exaimine the disconnect between player and player character?' and every lists so many examples it's crazy. It's a pretty common thing in indie games!
exploring the 16 bit era is MIND BLOWING. shadowrun on snes is a blast, feels really unique and its awesome. but its still a kinda standard rpg, youre guided along, a dog goes "hey jake you got johnny mnemoniced. or johnny mnemonic is gonna get youd in 2 years" and you know what to do
but after bouncing off genesis shadowrun a few times and finally GETTING it, its bonkers. free roam with clues pointing to the story, but you can spend time heisting corps, taking contracts, hacking files to sell off to fund more training and weapons, and the story BECOMES something as time goes on!
all this to say games have been goin WILD for forever, people were always trying to stretch whatever tech was available to its absolute limits to pull some impossible shit off that wouldnt become a normal thing for another decade
I was gonna jokingly ask "oh yeah when was the first game with a robot with a fat ass asking existential questions?" before realizing how extremely PC-98 coded that is
y'know i think about Infocom's Suspended and how it's probably one of the few parser-driven text games that would genuinely benefit from a graphical interface for no better reason than the game is about keeping track of a LOT of moving pieces at once
everybody knows the spooky cryogenic death mask the game came packaged with but what people don't know is that it also shipped with a map and tokens so you could keep track of all your Little Guys
it could also probably get turned into one of those grandiose Kickstarter tabletop games that combines narrative with tactical coordination and still be more innovative than any of them
That's the fun part about game mechanics. They get iterated on and combined to make "new" fun gameplay. I would be angry about all the souls-like but they start spinning off in different directions.
to be fair they are making 2 games at the same time with the main focus on squadron 42 not star citizen. SC also does have gameplay loops and stuff to do in game so i wouldn’t call it just a tech demo. rockstar also spent ~400mil on RDR2 and ~8years. CIG has also been developing a game engine too
CIG has 1/3 dev team of rockstar currently. Rockstar didnt need to spend time to make a game engine during the development of RD2. and the scope for the games is massively different between them
Once watched a really bad video essay about videogame storytelling. It said that "cinematic" games began with 7th generation consoles, while ignoring the elephant in the room that is Metal Gear Solid. You can even go back further to Ninja Gaiden with its use of cinematic techniques for cutscenes.
If going purely with "cinematic with no gameplay meant to present story" I go with Donkey Kong as the first, unless there is a fucking laserdisc game or something that beat it.
To be fair, this might be more of a semantic problem. He could've meant cinematic games became standardized during that period, but given that the rest of the video has a sleuth of other problems — I'm not willing going to give him the benefit of the doubt.
"Dark Souls is the first game to create an overhyped genre" meanwhile Roguelikes staring in the shadows with glowing (perma)death eyes.
(Although we all know Dark Souls invented everything future in past like a singularity of over-accreditation)
the last game to be the first game to do x was floigan bros episode 1, first game to let you train your brother like a dog and then show him off to your friends. we dont innovate anymore we just iterate, very sad!
Occasionally mildly curious if the original Unreal Tournament was the first multiplayer combat game with automatic audio taunts (the character-to-character ones, I mean. I seriously doubt it was the first with Announcer taunts).
Probably the only time I think I have seen an exception to this is whether any game used a Priority Queues for the majority of its dialogue systems as opposed to a Tree based system before Hades. I am still searching for any concrete examples, mostly cause I want to implement a similar system.
Kichikuou Rance (1996) and most of the company's other territorial conquest games use priority queues to determine start of turn events (some of which are required for progression). I'm guessing they aren't the first but I really don't have much experience with games older than that
The goal is not to find which game is the first to combine some number of gameplay elements (it's still possible to innovate in that regard), but which is the first to have element X. Like the first where you extract resources, or the first to allow to combine resources, but maybe not both.
Games have definitely innovated in new ways and done things not done before since 2005. Helldivers 2 was the first third person shooter to disconnect the gun from the camera, giving it a seperate traverse speed, allowing it to lag behind when wielding unwieldy weapons!
Comments
No. It was Civilization (1991).
good(???) game
That's it. That's my question.
the joke is that it's more like 40
perhaps with a suitable epigraph from Penn and Teller's Smoke and Mirrors
is i wanna be the guy the first game to be hard
Also fun fact:
but seriously though, even listing Mother or Moon as "the first game like this" even feels just like,,, short sighted ???
i don't think ppl realize how long video games have *really* been around
Because as far as I care, the first fighting game dropped in 1928. Your great-grandpa labbed this game during the Great Depression
(Although we all know Dark Souls invented everything future in past like a singularity of over-accreditation)
Isn't that just the Orgazmo-ray though?
1999 is in the window!