GAME CHANGERS
40 VIDEO GAMES THAT CHANGED THE WORLD 088
JUNE 2014
Words Nick Pope, Mike Rampton Photography Andy Parsons
THEY’VE BRUISED OUR THUMBS, BOLLOCKSED UP OUR EYESIGHT AND STOLEN OUR CHILDHOODS – AND WE LOVE THEM FOR IT. FHM RANKS THE MOST IMPORTANT VIDEO GAMES OF ALL DAMN TIME… 40 CRAZY TAXI
SUPERSTAR SOCCER 38 INTERNATIONAL 35
Producer Kenji Kanno’s original intention for the game was to reflect the daily routine of a cab driver. What we ended up with was the daily routine of a cab driver with a flagrant disregard for company policy and, quite possibly, live breaker-cables hooked up to his nipples. Adrenaline-fuelled lunacy.
Ditching realism in favour of soaring scorelines, buttonmashing mayhem and Alan Partridge-esque commentary (“a decisive kick!”), it may not be as preened and pretty as its more recent rivals, but it still stands up today as an unbeatably fun kick-about.
39 GOLDEN AXE
37 NBA JAM
A game so manly, it’ll make you cry bacon bits. Based on 1982’s machismo-soaked masterpiece Conan The Barbarian, it features a speedoclad sword swinger called Ax Battler and a truly awesome 16-bit soundtrack that Example (among others) has namechecked as a musical influence.
It takes something special to make the British public give a shit about basketball, and this was it. As an arcade game, it was the first to generate $1 billion in quarters and was also notorious for being so beloved by Shaquille O’Neal, he’d have machines shipped to wherever he was in the country.
(DREAMCAST) 1999
(MEGA DRIVE) 1989
SUPER METROID (SNES) 1994
(NINTENDO 64) 1997
A combination of Mario’s platform jumping and the open-world roaming of Zelda, the cold and spooky Metroid games are nevertheless Nintendo’s most un-Nintendo-y franchise. Super Metroid, which was inspired by creator Gunpei Yokoi’s love of the Alien movies, is the best of the bunch.
34 BOMBERMAN (NES) 1985
Blowing shit up is great. Blowing your friends up while dressed as a spaceman is better. On the back of this infallible logic and combining multi-player action and puzzle solving, Bomberman has blasted its way on to almost every single console for nearly three decades.
(SEGA GENESIS) 1994
36 GHOULS’N GHOSTS (MEGA DRIVE) 1989
Not just hard, but throwthe-controller-at-the-wall-thencry-yourself-to-sleep hard. It features you controlling a little cartoon man running desperately through a relentless hailstorm of weird, gothic shit and, 15 years after its release, is still considered the gold standard in difficulty. WHEN THE GAME WAS RELEASED ON MULTIPLE CONSOLES, WE’VE CHOSEN THE ONE (WE RECKON) IT WAS BEST ON
MGS : ESSENTIALLY HIDE AND SEEK WITH GUNS
33
METAL GEAR SOLID (PLAYSTATION) 1998
The brief for the company who made MGS was simple: create the greatest PlayStation game ever. A lot of people think they succeeded. Pioneers of the now-massive stealth-action genre, the developers were also trained to use weapons and explosives by an actual Californian SWAT team, so they’d know how to make the gun play ‘feel’ real.
31
THE DUCK HUNT DOG: THE OSAMA BIN LADEN OF 8-BIT TECHNOLOGY
32
DUCK HUNT (NES) 1987
Video games often divide opinion, but there’s one thing that we can all surely agree on: the Duck Hunt dog is a dickhead. In spite of this, the 8-bit game still managed to become a worldwide success upon its release, and has blazed the trail for every arcade-style shooter ever since.
FARMVILLE
(SMARTPHONE) 2009
(PLAYSTATION) 1997
Fun, time-wasting game or sinister money-draining force for evil? Making a lot of money from people who aren’t typical gamers, publishers Zynga are obsessed with increasing the number of people who spend more than $10,000 on in-game purchases a year – apparently referred to as ‘whales’.
Taking a 15-man team more than five years to create, there were moments when designer Kazunori Yamauchi wondered if they’d ever finish the award-winning racing simulator. “We could not see the end,” he said. “I’d wake up at work, go to sleep at work. I estimate I was home only four days a year.”
30 FINAL FANTASY VII
28 GUITAR HERO
Known in Japan as ‘the game that changed everything’. You can reduce certain grown men to tears just by humming its haunting theme tune.
The music game transformed mild-mannered office workers into snake-hipped rock gods upon its release almost a decade ago.
(PLAYSTATION) 1997
SUPER 19 STREET FIGHTER II TURBO
29 GRAN TURISMO
(DREAMCAST) 1994
Street Fighter II essentially created the one-on-one beat-’em-up genre. By the time Turbo came out (which let you control the four bosses) the original had already dragonpunched its way to £1.5 billion of revenue worldwide. Studies show that to a lot of people, each of the original eight characters is as recognisable as Mickey Mouse.
(XBOX 360) 2005
18 WII SPORTS
16 ANGRY BIRDS
(SMARTPHONE) 2009
(WII) 2006
27
STREETS OF RAGE 2 (MEGA DRIVE) 1992
Its neon-drenched, chip-tuned influence can be seen and heard in everything from Tinie Tempah’s songs to Ryan Gosling film Drive. Its immediate success also forced rival developers Capcom to pour all their resources into making a beat-’em-up. The result was Street Fighter II.
25
SNAKE
(NOKIA 3210) 1999
As addictive now as it ever was, this sparked our love affair with mobile gaming. The first known personal computer version of the game, titled Worm, was programmed in 1978 by Peter Trefonas, but its spiritual home will always sit within the indestructible shell of your trusty, dust-coated Nokia. 090
JUNE 2014
26
(PLAYSTATION) 1996
The racing game that reached out to clubbers and showed the masses that sitting on a sofa and pressing buttons could be (sort of) cool. Developed by a bunch of ravers from Liverpool and Sheffield and featuring a soundtrack that included Daft Punk, The Prodigy, The Chemical Brothers and Underworld, Wipeout 2097 brought the psychedelic essence of a futuristic warehouse party right into your living room.
24
PAUL PHOENIX: HALF-MAN, HALF-BROOM
WIPEOUT 2097
RESIDENT EVIL
(PLAYSTATION) 1996
For six months, horror nut Shinji Mikami worked on Resident Evil totally alone, convinced that no one apart from himself could do justice to the terrifying vision that resided in his head. The unholy result showed for the first time that computer games could be as shit-your-pants scary as any film.
23 TEKKEN 3
22 GRAND THEFT AUTO
The first fighting game that allowed you to step not just back and forth, but also up and down, meaning you were tenderising your mate’s virtual face in three dimensions. All the characters were motioncaptured by genuine martial artists too, so the whole thing looked and felt as real and fluid as a Jackie Chan film.
The blueprint for what would become the biggest series in the history of anything nearly didn’t see the light of day, according to developer Gary Penn. “Every week, they wanted to kill it, and we had to argue to keep it going,” he says. And thank god – a world without Michael, Trevor and Franklin doesn’t bear thinking about.
21
20
(PLAYSTATION) 1998
SHENMUE
(DREAMCAST) 1999
With production costs of $47 million, Shenmue was for a long time the most expensive game ever made. It offered players their first real taste of a fully immersive world (OK, Japanese town), something that would later become the calling card of the GTA series. Shame no one bought it.
(PLAYSTATION) 1997
DOOM
Having shifted more than a staggering 80 million copies, Wii Sports is the secondbestselling video game of all-time and credited with giving the entire industry a shot in the arm with its innovative motion-sensing controls and (more importantly) broad, ladyfriendly appeal. It hauled us up from our arse-cheekcratered sofas and propelled us around the living room, colliding with plants, stereos and elderly relatives as we desperately attempted to perfect our wicked backhand.
17 QUAKE
(PC) 1996
The game that single-handedly revolutionised everything you love about running through 3D mazes, blasting your mates with plasma rifles. It introduced radical online technology that’s still used today, and pioneered 3D graphics for first-person shooters. It also had a rad soundtrack, provided by Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor.
MARIO KART 64 15 CHAMPIONSHIP MANAGER SEASON 01/02 14 (NINTENDO 64) 1996
(PC) 2001
(PC) 1993
A groundbreaking blend of spine-tingling visuals, mouthwatering weaponry and face-melting death-metal, Doom is credited with pioneering the first-person shooter genre and for being installed on more PCs than Windows was in 1995.
VIDEO GAMES ARE AS NUANCED AND RICH AS ANY BOOK
Held by many as the standout chapter in its celebrated history, Championship Manager 01/02 remains the perfect way to fritter away a lazy weekend. Set in an age before sugar-daddy oligarchs and £100 million transfers, this edition is the purest and most engrossing incarnation of the beautiful game the world has ever seen.
Repeatedly voted the most influential game of all time, Mario Kart 64 is the best in a brilliant series. It introduced the powerslide feature and was the first game where director Hideki Konno claimed he’d perfected the weapon system. “In a race, you’ll always get a natural separation,” he said. “What we were trying to do was push them back together.”
Just before releasing Angry Birds in 2009, Danish creators Niklas and Mikael Hed were on the brink of bankruptcy and considering quitting the video game business for good. The app, which asks you to catapult kamikaze birds at bulbous green pigs, has since gone on to become a global sensation, played by over 30 million weary commuters a day around the world and drumming up over £70 million in profit for the previously cash-strapped cousins. Never has there been a more entertaining or addictive way to avoid human interaction.
08 POKÉMON RED/BLUE
06 THE SIMS
When Satoshi Tajiri was a kid, he collected insects. He wasn’t a weirdo or anything; it was the 1970s and there was bugger-all else for children to do. When he grew up, he noticed that he didn’t see kids collecting insects any more – the urban sprawl of Tokyo had paved over the fields of his youth. This planted the seeds for what became Pokémon, the idea that a new generation could enjoy the feeling of collecting. And when he saw a Game Boy link cable, everything fell into place. Tajiri wanted the game to be non-violent, as he felt there were enough violent titles around, and thought the link cable could be used for two players to trade and share rather than compete with one another. The game took six years to develop, during which Tajiri didn’t take a salary. He compared the finished game to a new bike that everyone could take somewhere different. Pokémon became the bestselling RPG and handheld game series of all time (as well as a lucrative television and toy franchise), and ended up making Nintendo so much money that to this day, the company could run a deficit of $250 million every year and still survive until 2052.
“I’ve got an idea, a billion-dollar idea!” “Shut up, Will.” “No, no, I’ve got a billion-dollar idea!” “Look, just fuck off, Will, yeah?” It didn’t go exactly like that, but The Sims creator Will Wright was repeatedly shot down and mocked when he tried to get his idea for a virtual doll’s house off the ground. Despite his success with the hugely influential SimCity, Wright had to get sneaky to get anywhere, working with one designer in secret. Eventually, EA begrudgingly green-lit the game, known internally as ‘the toilet game’, expecting fewer than 200,000 sales. However, The Sims was an enormous hit, becoming the bestselling PC title ever and appealing to gamers and non-gamers alike with its accessibility and sense of fun (and toilets). Of the 100 bestselling PC games ever, 20 are Sims titles. Bonkers.
(GAME BOY) 1999
NOT SO MUCH A GAME AS A MUSICAL EDUCATION
10 TONY HAWK’S PRO SKATER (PLAYSTATION) 1999
13 SONIC THE HEDGEHOG 2 (MEGA DRIVE) 1992
Sonic is fast. So bloody fast, in fact, that programmer Yuji Naka was forced to decrease the iconic hedgehog’s sprinting speed after suffering from motion sickness while working on it. Sonic The Hedgehog 2 will go down as the most adrenaline-filled platformer of all time, and the definite peak of the spiky blue bastard’s career, which has since lost its famous momentum.
& CONQUER: RED ALERT 12 COMMAND 11 TOMB RAIDER
(PLAYSTATION) 1996
(PC) 1996
The first game to let you fire shit-tons of artillery at your mates over the web, this is the undisputed daddy of the strategy genre. Also responsible for inspiring StarCraft – essentially the national sport of South Korea.
Designer Toby Gard based Lara Croft on ’90s pop star Neneh Cherry, and made her animations slow so the player would empathise with her more easily. He also boosted her breast size by 150% by mistake, but it proved so popular with his work mates, he kept it.
It’s weird to think about now, but once upon a time, Tony Hawk’s name was only known to actual skateboarders. This changed in 1999, when the Gary Lineker of the skate world was approached by Activision to work on a new skateboarding game, starting a franchise that would make over half a billion coconuts. Unlike, say, the 1987 console classic California Games, where all the skateboarding took place in a clean, nice-looking half-pipe, THPS had you skating in schoolyards, army bases and roofs, fucking shit up in a manner far more like actual skateboarding than
anything that had come before. While it would be an exaggeration to credit the huge skate resurgence of the early 2000s entirely to THPS, the platinum sales figures didn’t exactly hurt, and tons of people who wouldn’t previously have known an ollie from a kickflip found themselves well versed in skate lingo. Then there was the soundtrack, which introduced a generation to the punk bands like Dead Kennedys and The Vandals. Kerrang! magazine editor James McMahon reckons the game says a lot “about how important getting on a game soundtrack can be for a band”.
(PC) 2000
LOOK AT HIM, THE GLORIOUSLY CHILLED BASTARD
07 SUPER MARIO 64 (NINTENDO 64) 1996
Starring the face of Nintendo and acting as the launch title for their new console, Super Mario 64 had high expectations to meet, but ended up as one of the most influential games ever. It hurled gaming into the 21st century by providing the model for all subsequent 3D games. Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto created everyone’s
favourite non-porno plumber and a fully explorable 3D world, complete with an innovative player-controlled camera system that seems really unexciting now, because every game in the world copied it. It didn’t feel like a game so much as inhabiting a world, where flight was possible and everything looked like sweets.
NONE OF THESE PEOPLE HAVE JOBS OR MEANINGFUL RELATIONSHIPS
09 THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: OCARINA OF TIME (NINTENDO 64) 1998
When Shigeru Miyamoto was a child living in the Japanese town of Sonobe, he would regularly explore the surrounding countryside. One day he found a cave in the middle of a forest. The experience of discovering it remained with him, and years later when developing the Zelda games, he tried to recreate it, combining it with a love of the Wild West and a colleague’s love of chanbara (Japanese sword-fighting) movies. Developed concurrently with Super Mario 64 but released two years later, Ocarina Of Time is the fifth Zelda game and the best-loved – it holds the highest-ever score
on Metacritic of 99/100. An absolute shutter-upper of anyone that claims video games can’t be art, it’s a beautiful experience, and definitely features the best horse in any game ever. The easiest way to appreciate the legacy of Ocarina Of Time is through Google image search – have a look at how many tattoos there are celebrating it. There was even a notable increase in the sale of actual ocarinas when the game came out (looks like a shell, sounds like a recorder, was used on the awesome solo on The Troggs’ original Wild Thing).
05 WORLD OF WARCRAFT (PC) 2004
The highest-grossing game of all time, at its peak in 2012 WOW was being played by 12 million people at once, all paying a monthly subscription. MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games) meant players could live huge chunks of their lives in-game, forming relationships
that had nothing to do with geographical proximity and everything to do with big fuckin’ swords. Also, you can’t smell people over the internet. The time-sucking nature of the game has led to claims that up to 40% of players are addicted, and there are thousands of ‘Warcraft widows’.
A thriving black market economy also means lazy players can buy their way through the boring bits by outsourcing the work to China. ‘Gold farming’ is said to be worth up to $200 million of real dosh a year – that’s a real economy being shaped by non-existent gold. Wow.
04 MINECRAFT
02 MORTAL KOMBAT II
(PC) 2011
At the same time that major studio’s budgets have gone through the roof (Grand Theft Auto V cost £170 million to develop), there’s been a quiet revolution in the indie gaming world, where micro-budget games made by tiny teams have often outgrossed and out-awesomed big-bucks corporate products. Nothing has demonstrated this more than Minecraft, which started off as one dude’s spare-time project and has sold 35 million copies so far. Bearlike bearded Swede Markus ‘Notch’ Persson went from working on Minecraft around his day job, to quitting in order to work on it full-time, to now being valued at over £100 million and having to enlist bodyguards when he visits video game conventions.
(MEGA DRIVE) 1994
In the first month the game was on sale, a million copies were sold, spreading almost entirely through online word of mouth rather than through traditional advertising. PayPal even froze Persson’s account at one point because he was making so much money so quickly, it looked dodgy as hell. A weird and awesome combo of game, toy and tool, Minecraft has ended up being used for a variety of educational and charitable uses as well as keeping a lot of very excited fat guys up very late at night. The anything-goes nature of the ‘creative’ mode is like having access to an infinite supply of Lego in an infinite world, which you can use in as simple or complex ways as you wish. Lego itself even produced its own Minecraft
set in 2012, which was brilliant. Markus Persson was named as the second-most influential person in the world by Time magazine in 2013, which was possibly partly due to his handy surname, but mainly due to how Minecraft has pretty much taken over the planet by letting people build their own worlds within worlds. Whoa.
MINING: STILL CAPABLE OF GALVANISING A STAGNANT ECONOMY
The first Mortal Kombat game isn’t bad at all – it introduced the world to now-iconic characters like Sub-Zero, proved that the letter K was kooler than the letter C, and also included a few Fatalities – semi-secret over-the-top finishing moves that were way gorier and bloodier than anything anyone had seen in fighting games ever before. For the sequel, they went bigger, bolder and badder with the Fatalities, introducing finishers like Jax’s arm-rip, where he yanks his opponent’s arms
clean off their body, leading to torrents of blood spunking out. This tonguein-cheek ultra-violence, combined with everimproving graphics, caused a mahoosive controversy, with parental groups calling for bans. This led to the formation of the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, the video game equivalent of the BBFC’s U, PG, 12, 15 and 18 rating system. MKII became the first game to carry a ‘mature’ rating, and was banned in Germany after being deemed harmful to young people. The
controversy didn’t have any lasting benefits though, with Mortal Kombat II becoming the bestselling game there had been up to then. The presence of Fatality alternatives Babality (transforming your opponent into a baby) and Friendship (which nobody ever chose to do, obviously) led to rumours of more hidden modes like Sexuality and Nudality. They didn’t actually exist, but the prospect of seeing what lay beneath Mileena’s cloak can’t have hurt sales. More like Phwoar-tal Kombat, right? Right?
03 TETRIS
(GAME BOY) 1989 (ORIGINAL VERSION: 1984) The most popular video game of all time nearly didn’t make its creator a rouble. Alexey Pajitnov was working for the Russian Academy of Sciences when, along with a few pals, he created a game based on arranging falling shapes into lines, naming it after the prefix tetra, meaning four, and tennis, his favourite sport. Tetris went apeshit-crazy, with Soviet Russians desperate for something to do other than eat goulash and drink vodka. An enterprising British publisher who heard about it decided to get on board and was soon selling the rights (which he didn’t have) to global
developers. And, since Pajitnov was working for the Russian government at the time, they were up for selling the rights as well… It all became a giant legal mess, one Pajitnov got nothing from (until 1996, when he set up The Tetris Company, finally acquired the rights and relocated to Hawaii). Nintendo bought the rights in 1989 and made Tetris the launch title bundled with every Game Boy. Its simplicity appealed to both gamers and non-gamers, kick-starting the puzzle game genre, without which the modern mobile gaming market would be a barren place.
Tetris has since appeared on every gaming platform imaginable, and is the most downloaded paid-for mobile game, with more than 100 million phone downloads. Careful, though. Some scientists warn about the Tetris effect, where playing it a lot leads to seeing Tetris shapes everywhere like a madman. They might have a point. Vladimir Pokhilko, one of the game’s co-creators, eventually killed his wife and son before killing himself, leaving a suicide note which read, “I’ve been eaten alive. Vladimir. Just remember that I am exist. The davil.”
OFT IMITATED, NEVER BETTERED; THE CAUSE AND RUIN OF A BILLION FRIENDSHIPS
01
GOLDENEYE 007
(NINTENDO 64) 1997
GoldenEye 007 had no right to be anything other than shit. It was a film tie-in coming out two years after the film, a first-personshooter for a console which, at the time, was universally regarded as a waste of time, and eight of the 10-strong team that made it hadn’t ever made a game before. Then it came out, and it was fucking magnificent, the team’s inexperience coming through as excitement and ambition, leading to some amazing ideas. “Because it was most people’s first game,
we did things we might not do again,” said Graeme Norgate of the development team later. “If something sounded like a good idea, it was like, ‘Yeah, let’s do it!’ Only afterwards would you find it was a world of pain.” The team ended up working 80-hour weeks, so came up with innovative ways of cutting corners. The physics to have objects show battle damage proved so complicated that they decided to make everything explosive instead, inadvertently
making everything more super-awesome. A coding problem meant that characters who got blown up did so with a tiny delay, giving their deaths a South Park-esque quality, again upping the fun stakes. GoldenEye isn’t the highest critically rated game of all time. It’s not the bestselling, or the most awards-laden, but it’s the best in a way that numbers can’t prove; a way that comes from the heart rather than the head. Because you know what happens to heads? They get shot.
THANKS TO RETRO GAME BASE IN STREATHAM, LONDON, FOR HELPING OUT WITH ALL THE GEAR. CHECK OUT RETROGAMEBASE.CO.UK FOR ALL YOUR RETRO GAME NEEDS
095