The videogames that made the history of game design

Besides being one of the most impossible challenges and having been at the centre of a potential world conflict, Tetris is one of the most enduring puzzle games in history, to the point of having created its own eponymous sub-genre. Many of the scrolling puzzles produced after 1984 must thank Aleksej Leonidovič Pažitnov’s creation, including the famous Puzzle Bobble (created ten years later), which brings the dragons of the iconic Bubble Bobble into an arcade puzzle game that owes it a lot to the most famous coloured bricks of all times, (literally) overturning the level structure and interaction with the stacking bricks.

What do the two games have in common and what makes them iconic? The game mechanics, the soundtrack and the colourful levels offer two ways of representing a puzzle game with almost opposite, yet very similar moods, basing the entire experience on the ability to make objects disappear and react very quickly when faced with the unpredictability of the colours and shapes of the pieces that appear.

Legend has it that the design of one of Namco’s biggest hits, created by Tōru Iwatani in 1980, came from a pizza missing a single slice, resulting in the iconic yellow ball-eating character. In addition to the graphic revolution of the highly recognisable pastel yellow on a black background (equally influential as the four red, blue, orange and pink ghosts), Pac-Man was the forerunner of a whole series of more or less recognised and in turn influential clones.

Among them, we remember the (perhaps) less famous – but still highly successful – Bomberman (Hudson Soft, 1983), another iconic title of the puzzle game inside a seemingly dead-end maze. Both products not only boast a thirty-year (and more) series of spin-offs, but they’re also identified among the progenitors of the entire genre, offering rather similar gaming experiences, but with major differences, with the player always acting as the protagonist in choosing the right path and interacting with the surrounding environment.

The light gun was one of the biggest revolutions in the video game world, regardless of whether it was a peripheral device at the arcade or its domestic version, and it took the shooter genre to a whole new level. It was a new and captivating physical interface that allowed players to identify with the protagonists of the game. On the one hand, we have Duck Hunt, which since 1984 has been making siblings fight in front of the very successful NES console using the less successful NES Zapper, both made by Nintendo, while the iconic dog laughs at their missed shots.

On the other hand, twelve years later SEGA improved the light gun concept with The House of the Dead, bringing the same fights into the chaotic atmosphere of the arcade, and adding a horror twist to the experience. In their own way, both games took the light gun to memorable heights - on the one hand, the incredible inaccuracy (mainly due to the technological limitations of the time, which some people would describe as “intentional”), and on the other hand a much more precise accuracy, remarkable for the historical period and the lively circumstances in which the games took place.

Another important breakthrough in terms of hardware in the gaming sector was the peripheral device representing the reproduction of a real steering wheel, first without and later with force feedback, that is, the counter-steering response to the rotation imposed by the player. In 1986, SEGA launched Out Run on the arcade market, an arcade cabinet as peculiar as it was fascinating. It was a complete, “vertical” driving station (later with one seat, or rather two, and two steering wheels with pedals) for a new, colourful and frenetic racing game. 

Thirteen years later, Crazy Taxi, a very similar-looking but yellow-coloured cabinet, invaded the arcades, leading thousands of teenagers to drive poor digital customers around the city, unaware of the danger they would be in. Both games have, in different ways, defined the racing genre, focusing on the score attack category with, on the one hand, checkpoints to be reached aboard the Ferrari Testarossa Spider, and, on the other hand, customers to be driven to their destination in the fastest time possible. For years, both products saw their sequels land on many home consoles, losing some of their original essence but, at the same time, adapting to new currents.

The plumber (formerly a carpenter, to be more precise) with a thick moustache is one of the most famous and recognisable characters in the history of video games, yet not many people know that, before he starred in a game bearing his name, he was one of the characters of Donkey Kong, the 1981 arcade platformer, and Mario Bros, where he takes action with his brother Luigi in levels that strongly remind us of the aforementioned game. It was not until 1985, however, that he was consecrated as an entertainment icon with Super Mario Bros, whose distinctive level design and theme probably enjoy a fame that is still unmatched today.

Super Mario Bros. defined what would in time come to be known as the side-scrolling platformer genre, in which the protagonist moves within a huge, continuous painting that slides from right to left while they go in the opposite direction, with no possibility of turning back. Each game element has achieved a reputation in its own right: Mario, Luigi, the bricks, the gold tokens, the mushrooms and even all of his enemies have inspired (and continue to inspire) in their very essentiality the design of many Nintendo characters today and beyond. The series has been so successful that it has been declined in countless different game modes and consoles over the decades, and has even generated an endless multitude of more or less famous clones.

Crash Bandicoot is the successful Naughty Dog (later developer of Uncharted and The Last of Us) video game that kick-started the even more successful and long-running series for Playstation (and PC) consoles, bringing the basic concepts of Super Mario Bros. into the 3D world, moving a humanoid marsupial in levels halfway between the more roguelike scenes of Indiana Jones and, indeed, the boxes (that is, the bricks) of the Nintendo plumber. Obviously, the differences between the two series of games are many, including Crash Bandicoot’s ability to turn back within a single level – unless prevented from doing so (unlike the various Super Mario games, where the screen is locked), but the spirit behind the game is the same – to complete a course fraught with obstacles and dangers, possibly without ever losing a life, but the gist is very similar indeed.

Those who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s must remember the two words that were shouted during fights between peers: “Kamehameha” and “Shoryuken”. Leaving aside the famous “Energy Wave” featured in many episodes of the Dragon Ball anime, the other exclamation originated in (and helped make famous) the fighting game Street Fighter, released in 1987 by Capcom. In hardware terms, Street Fighter is one of the games that made iconic the joystick-and-button control panel typical of arcade cabinets (today known as the arcade stick), with four possible axes of movement, from six to countless buttons, movement combinations and actions leading to spectacular moves, including the Shoryuken.

Speed, coordination and quick reflexes were the necessary skills to be able to compete against other players and the CPU (i.e., the computer-controlled opponent), and, together with the learning curve linked to the individual characters, they represent the key factor in the success of the entire series – different approaches for different types of fights. The customisation of individual characters, albeit in repeated patterns, has been explored over the years by many other titles of the same genre, but in the home console sphere, it is Tekken (Namco, 1994 – arcade version, 1995 home version) that has refined these features.

The successful series, which is mainly played on the Playstation system, not only diversifies the possible characters in terms of types of approach but also introduces significant differences gameplay-wise, making punches, kicks and the height at which the different strikes are inflicted on the opponent profoundly peculiar, making the players’ reflexes and hand-eye coordination fundamental. Even today, amid so many other fighting games more or less borrowed from these series, Street Fighter and Tekken represent two complementary philosophies of interpreting fights.

Football is the most famous sport in the world, so it was only natural that, sooner or later, it would become a video game genre. Before the FIFA / Pro Evolution Soccer dualism that has monopolised the last few decades, football was reinterpreted in digital form according to two major schools of thought, identifiable through the game view perspective – top-down view or side view. Sensible Soccer debuted in 1992 on the Amiga platform, and in addition to the managerial component (yes, there is a very interesting story behind Football Manager, which would require a separate in-depth study), it is the successful arcade gameplay that has enshrined the success of the game by Sensible Software, which is great with both joystick and gamepad.

Over time, Sensible Soccer inspired a plethora of clones and sequels, with a still very active fanbase. To revolutionise that style of play, the only alternative was to offer a different experience, still very much tied to tactics, but literally changing the perspective of the game. In 1994, seizing the enthusiasm caused by the World Cup, SEGA produced the gem that is Virtua Striker, whose strength lay in its strong arcade component, in the speed of the exchanges and in the great immersiveness in the action, given by being able to run next to the footballers. Even today, these two approaches have a following in the different ways of approaching modern football video games, leading to parallel experiences and visions of play that cannot be compared.

Towards the end of the 1980s, fantasy experienced a new renaissance, particularly in the field of video games, with two series that revolutionised the action-adventure (with a distinct turn towards role-playing) and JRPG (Japanese role-playing game) genres: The Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy. The first is one of the symbols of Nintendo and, together with Super Mario, established its worldwide success and still represents a trendsetter every time a new chapter of the saga is produced. The second is the brainchild of Hironobu Sakaguchi, whose success literally saved a company – Square – on the brink of bankruptcy.

Both games have rewritten the rules of their field: on the one hand, a classic heroic tale, the rescue of a princess, which goes hand in hand with the exploration of Hyrule, a high fantasy world that title after title has been refined into a complex mythology, through a painstaking process of world-building; on the other, the scheme that has defined the stereotype of the role-playing game on a digital platform, with the system of turn-based battles, with specific classes, levels and abilities for each character. After more than thirty years, both successful series keep their primal idea intact, adapting to new generations of gamers.

“My name is Guybrush Threepwood and I’m a mighty pirate!”. The Secret of Monkey Island, a flagship product of Lucasfilm Games by the trio Ron Gilbert, Michael Land and Steve Purcell, is still the most famous graphic adventure. The story’s protagonist is Guybrush, who on the island of Mêlée wants to become a pirate with commitment and (often for him unintentional) irony, accompanied by improbable objects and characters, puzzles to solve and... duels of insults. The story, the setting, the music and the many pop culture references have made this title rightfully enter the Olympus of video games, generating in the following years a large number of sequels and an even larger series of (official and less official) clones.

In this second category also falls another title, produced by Lucasfilm Games itself, which left its mark on the genre a few years later – The Day of the Tentacle, the sequel to the progenitor of both titles, Maniac Mansion. Compared to the company’s other games, this one has a totally humorous background, with a cartoony style and a surreal narrative intertwined with US history and a dystopian future. With The Day of the Tentacle, not only are mechanisms that had already become modern classics revisited, but the SCUMM game interface imposed itself on the market as the new visual standard for the genre, leading to a standardisation of the UI that would lay down the law for many years to come.

In video gamers’ collective imagination, Solid Snake is a perfect example of the protagonist character. He is a highly skilled secret agent with unquestionable charm, whose name and manners were inspired by another famous “Snake” - Snake Plissken from Escape from New York. The strong point of the entire Konami-branded series (at least until the revolution brought by the modern chapters), however, despite the decidedly successful protagonist, is the affirmation of stealth mechanics, which represent a constant challenge for the player and become more and more complex level after level. This paradigm was resumed years later by another long-running series produced by IO Interactive: Hitman.

In this case, the player plays the part of an assassin - the famous, silent and lethal Agent 47. In the first chapter of the series, the stealth gameplay experience is complemented in terms of product design by the use of ragdoll physics, which for the first time reproduces the movement of human beings more faithfully and realistically, which is fundamental to successfully achieve kills within the various levels. In both series, the goal is always the same - to succeed in the task while drawing as little attention as possible to yourself. The fixed camera and the alert mode established by Metal Gear Solid are reinterpreted and updated to the new language in Hitman, spectacularising stealth kills, always observed from behind the protagonist.

What do the Doomguy and the Master Chief have in common? Much more than one might imagine. Apart from their relatively similar physical appearance, the idea behind the Doom and Halo series is very similar: to play an Übermensch protagonist capable of coping with hordes of enemies in alien and hostile worlds, where survival must be earned one kill at a time. We have talked about Doom and its mods at length here.

In 2001, Bungie Studios launched Halo: Combat Evolved on Xbox, the new console just launched by Microsoft, and after the first few hours of play it was immediately clear that this was a new milestone in the genre. The real revolution, however, lies not only in the fascinating setting but also in the gameplay: the use of two simultaneously equipped weapons and the possibility of getting around the map with different vehicles. It is precisely these two factors that add important variables, capable of revolutionising the dynamics that, in the meantime (with the various Quake and Wolfenstein) had reached a stalemate that seemed to be unbreakable.

Whether we are in the distant future or in the past of human civilisation, being able to manage entire nations and their armies is always fascinating. In 1997, Ensemble Studios developed the first chapter of Age of Empires, a real-time strategy game that allows you to explore four ancient ages by building empires and dominating the entire world by developing a specific historical civilisation, with its visual styles and peculiarities. Only a year later, Blizzard Entertainment launched StarCraft onto the market, revolutionising the foundations laid by Age of Empires, allowing the player to choose very different civilisations (in terms of appearance and development), conquering the hearts of millions of players worldwide thanks to its multiplayer modes (accessible to several people even with a single copy of the game).

The fundamental aspect of both games is the positional strategy at the start of the game, related to resource gathering and efficient resource management. Along the same lines, the famous MOBAs have been developed in the modern era, leading to the extreme exploitation of multiplayer technology in online arenas, especially in the most successful cases that have become a social phenomenon: League of Legends, DOTA 2 and many others, up to today’s over-saturation of the genre.

In the late 1980s, a simulation game made its debut on the Amiga 500 and laid the foundations for a new genre: Sim City, the city simulator. Despite the shallowness of the “manageable” aspects, due in particular to the technological limitations of the period, it was already possible to speak of a management genre in the modern, complex and multifaceted sense. The gaming experience of the product created by Maxis was revolutionary and satisfying, and when in 1994 it reached its consecration with SimCity 2000, nobody seemed overly surprised by it. At the same time, in 1991 the game designer Sid Meier came up with a new strategy game called Civilization, delving into the new management genre and then declining it in a “futuristic” version with Alpha Centauri and in a fantasy version with Master of Magic, taking a different but very interesting path compared to the other management games.

In Civilization, to build one’s empire countless factors must be taken into account: positional strategy, resources, development and relationship with neighbouring nations, leading each map (thus, each game) to be different from the others. Even with their due differences, the two franchises still seem to move on parallel tracks: research, the use of diversified tools and the management of complex aspects become the main factors of both series, allowing them to remain modern and competitive on the market even in the years to follow, compared to the many clones they have unwittingly inspired. Even today, the longevity and uniqueness of each map make each game unique, while many clones that were created over the years try to apply the same successful system to totally different contexts (one of them being the crazy hospital of Theme Ospital).

The horror genre, irrespective of the media, has some essential fundamental characteristics: atmosphere, involvement and believability. Capcom knows this well (and especially Shinji Mikami and Tokuro Fujiwara – the creators of Resident Evil, or rather, Biohazard), and so does Konami, producer of Silent Hill. Starting in 1996 (Resident Evil), and since 1999 (Silent Hill), the two series have shaped the way horror is experienced by gamers worldwide.

Resident Evil recounts a horror story that draws from the atmospheres created by George Romero and relies heavily on the shock factor of the visual component, while Silent Hill scares us because of the atmosphere, rather than because of jumpscares or gore, with a soundtrack that at first feels almost “wrong” because of its incredible compositional complexity. Precisely because of their differences, the two games have generated two different schools of thought in the creation of games that can nevertheless be ascribed to the same genre, still representing excellence in the category, generating a large group of followers and clones such as the masterpiece The Last of Us and many others.

The two video games by Nintendo and Konami represented a turning point not only for their respective franchises, but in the video game design of action-adventure games in general, eventually merging into a single genre, which is now very popular, especially thanks to indie titles that have become cult hits: Hollow Knight, Axiom Verge, Salt & Sanctuary and others. The non-linear structure of both games led the authors to explore science fiction on the one hand and horror on the other, proposing in each case interconnected maps, to be explored several times in order to progress or complete the game, playing a character whose characteristics improve throughout the game.

This structure generated a rather complex learning curve, with challenges often more suited to experienced gamers than to newcomers, giving the entire genre a reputation for a long time as being “hostile” to first-time players. First in 2D, then in 3D, the Metroidvania genre experienced an incredible evolution in the second half of the 1980s.

In this selection, it is impossible not to mention the open-world genre, which has produced a large number of games that must be played for an incalculable number of hours in order to complete them. Although it was marked in part by other games we cited in this article (perhaps not with the first chapters of some series, but certainly with the most recent ones), there were two revolutionary moments for the genre: the transition from 2D to 3D of the Grand Theft Auto series and the development of Morrowind, the third chapter of The Elden Scrolls. In the case of GTA, we cannot speak of an open world when it comes to the first chapters. However, with the third, things started to change. With the advent of 3D, the game world did not only increase in height but also in its proportions, possibilities and complexity in the context of horizontal development.

Open-world games are a resounding leap forward, but they do not cease to be story-driven, allowing the player to choose at any time whether to follow the main plot (usually completed in a few hours, if one only cares about it), or to digress with the innumerable side-quests, improving one’s character’s stats (or financial resources) before moving on to more challenging tasks. The title of a beautiful book by photographer Mimmo Jodice, Lost in Seeing, perfectly sums up the experience of relatively recent open-world games such as Red Dead Redemption II and Horizon: Forbidden West (just to name a couple), where the player would spend entire hours just watching the landscape change over the day, forgetting that they’re inside a video game.

Besides being an integral part of some of the various games mentioned above (especially strategy and open world games), multiplayer/online modes represent a category in their own right. When broadband internet connection entered our homes, it led to a major revolution in the video game world - the gaming experience was again shared, not as in the arcade context, but in a new, unprecedented and undiscovered way. In 1997, Origin System (which later became Microsoft) launched Ultima Online, where players act through their avatars in the fantasy realm of Sosaria. This game is universally recognised as one of the forerunners of the MMORPG genre (perhaps, the most famous and important one), giving players not only the possibility to freely customise their characters, but also to live shared adventures with tens of thousands of other users from all over the world.

The interpretative component, a prerogative of role-playing games, is very important to ensure total immersion in the context. Over the years, many products have tried to establish themselves in this category, going beyond the fantasy genre and trying to capture a more generalist audience. For a while, Second Life (launched in 2003 by Linden Lab) held the stage together with Habbo Hotel, but in the meantime, a new game came out. It was a fantasy game, and for many, it generated what can now be considered a real addiction: World of Warcraft. With this game, Blizzard changed definitively and drastically the world of online gaming, and after almost twenty years, WoW continues to be extremely popular. WoW boasted a whopping – especially for the time – 12 million subscribers in 2010, and still boasts about half that number today.

Even though to analyse a given period it is necessary to wait for the so-called “historical distance” to observe as objectively as possible the events that have taken place, we cannot end this overview without at least mentioning video games for mobile devices (mobile phones and tablets). So, since it is literally impossible to analyse phenomena while living them, we can look back to the (very) recent past to find two examples that have in their own right revolutionised the concept of video games, putting them in everyone’s pockets, much more than the Game Boy did in its time.

There was a time when everyone, everywhere, played Candy Crush. Young and old, casual gamers and professionals alike were captivated by this simple puzzle game in every corner of the globe, to the point that, in 2013, almost fifty million users downloaded it or otherwise played it via browser (Facebook). Undoubtedly, the success of this game can be traced back to three factors – a truly captivating game UI, especially for the time, its ability to monopolise users’ attention for hours on end, and the fact that it was totally free. Needless to say, over the years it has been imitated with more or less success by software houses other than King, but without ever matching that success.

Finally, let us close this selection with a game that condensed in its concept several factors that made it a planetary success: a very strong franchise, the nostalgia effect, augmented reality and the “social” factor – we are talking about Pokémon GO. Widely played upon its release in 2016, in that time this Nintendo-licensed Niantic product monopolised the days of all users between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five, leading them to leave their homes and walk several kilometres to catch their favourite Pokémon. Winning awards and continuing to enrich the gaming experience to this day, six years later, it not only continues to retain new users, but represents an important standard in augmented reality video games taken as a reference by many other licensed products.