The most influential video game of all time

Words by Chris Schilling.

Video games’ influence on popular culture has never been more prevalent. Their effect is visible and audible in today’s music, across the world of TV and cinema, and on the catwalk. Even your favourite language-learning and fitness apps feature progression systems and rewards popularised by games. To reflect the medium’s universal impact, ahead of the 21st BAFTA Games Awards, we asked the public a provocative question : what is the most influential video game of all time?  

As more than one responder said, it’s unfair to have to choose just one. Do you pick the pioneers that shaped the early days of the medium, the innovators that were ahead of their time, the ones that proved formative to your own creative journey, or simply the ones that made you most emotional? As might be expected, among the extraordinary number of responses we received was a staggering variety of games — ranging from titles that launched the industry to contemporary giants released mere months ago. The top ten alone spans multiple genres, from platformers to shooters, sandbox adventures to simulations.

So, without further ado, here are the public’s top 21: each of which, it’s fair to say, has had a seismic impact on games and those who play them…

In 1997, Dundee’s DMA Design produced one of the great success stories of the British video game industry. GTA wasn’t the first game to let you play the bad guy, but it was the one that popularised the idea of video games letting you indulge in transgressive acts across a realistic urban sandbox. Inspired by American metropoles, its three cities — Liberty City, San Andreas, Vice City — proved vivid enough that the studio DMA became, Rockstar North, continues to revisit them to this day.

Credit: Bethesda Game Studios

Arriving the same year as Game Of Thrones, Bethesda Studios’ open-world role-playing game was every bit as important in bringing high-fantasy drama to a mainstream audience. Fourteen years later, it’s hard to find a piece of hardware it’s not been ported to. For many players, it remains the pinnacle of swords-and-sorcery adventure: the voter consensus is that just about every major RPG released since owes it a debt of gratitude.

A mere four years after the series debuted, its top-down action was transposed to third-person 3D. If Nintendo’s Super Mario 64 established the verbiage of 3D games, this expanded its vocabulary. As comedian Phil Wang accurately puts it, “It’s the granddaddy of the open world action-adventure game — you still see its legacy in things like the Assassin’s Creed series or Ghost of Tsushima, which is Grand Theft Samurai. I think we’re still living with the legacy of Grand Theft Auto III today.”

Credit: Bandai Namco

Hidetaka Miyazaki’s seminal dark fantasy saga has become so influential that “the Dark Souls of…” is a common indicator that a stern challenge awaits. Yet reducing FromSoftware’s RPG to its difficulty sells it short. Its genius lies in its wonderfully Byzantine level design, and the way it gives players an active role in its storytelling, as you piece together plot threads from fragments of lore, scattered across the unforgettable land of Lordran.

Credit: Square Enix

Arguably no game has more completely justified Sony’s decision to take console gaming from cartridges to CDs with the original PlayStation. That additional storage didn’t just allow Final Fantasy to move from 2D sprites to 3D polygons: it afforded Square Enix the opportunity to tell an emotive tale via expansive cutscenes. That it has required more than two games to remake speaks volumes to the legacy of its story, which, more than a quarter century on, features one of the medium’s most famous (and heartbreaking) deaths.

Credit: Larian Studios

Dungeons & Dragons’ influence on games is incalculable. Larian Studios’ multi-award-winner, the latest and perhaps greatest of all D&D-inspired adventures, is the new standard by which all tabletop-inspired RPGs will be judged. Beating out Nintendo’s astonishing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom to multiple GOTY prizes is the least of its accomplishments. Actor Neil Newbon, who plays the unforgettable Astarion, rightly points out that its “depth of interaction, romances, and also friendships, storytelling and freedom have [helped] legitimise games as an art form.”

Credit: Blizzard Entertainment, Inc.

Blizzard’s massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) helped bring a previously impenetrable genre to a mass-market audience; more than two decades on, it’s still going strong. Perhaps the secret to its enduring appeal is that it’s never quite been beaten. “Even now no ‘WoW killer’ has managed to dethrone it as the king of its genre,” voter Johan Friberg wrote. “It has inspired pop culture, and given — for better or worse — an image to the world of what a hardcore gamer is.”

Credit: Konami Digital Entertainment

If Final Fantasy VII vindicated Sony’s shift to the higher storage capacity of CD-ROMs, Konami’s stealth-action masterpiece was the game that heralded a new era of mature storytelling in games. Introducing auteur creator Hideo Kojima to the world — and establishing protagonist Solid Snake as a gaming icon — this inventive, thrilling espionage adventure combined genre-leading storytelling with metatextual flourishes to inspirational effect.

Credit: Atari Inc.

When Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell tasked engineer Allan Alcorn with making a game of electronic tennis, he set in motion a series of events that would spawn an industry. Technically, 1971’s Computer Space came first, but one year later, it was Pong that popularised the video game: just two paddles and one bouncing ball were enough to ensure the pinball machine’s dominance of the amusement arcade would soon be over. No game produced so many similar responses for why it was chosen; voter Harvey Auzorst sums it up most succinctly: “It started it all.”

Credit: Embracer Group

Only a handful of characters transcend video games: the likes of Sonic, Mario and Pikachu are almost universally recognised, and Lara Croft belongs on that short list. The intrepid archaeologist was born out of necessity — designer Toby Gard wanted to make an Indiana Jones-like game, but it would have been too costly to create two playable characters. Gard stuck with his preferred choice, and the result was a new gaming icon. As actor Jane Perry explains, “Lara…opened the door for strong female characters in games. She’s a positive role model for everyone and a true hero.”

Credit: Tetris Holding LLC

“It’s the game everyone knows and everyone thinks of when they think of gaming,” one anonymous voter wrote. So approachable that anyone can pick it up, yet ferociously fast and demanding at the highest levels of competitive play, Alexey Pajitnov’s seminal puzzle game is a work of art, a masterpiece of design, and a genuine pop-culture phenomenon. And, of course, it has one of the all-time great theme tunes. As BBC film critic Ali Plumb notes, “If you’re not already dealing with that earworm in your head, well, you are now.”

Credit: EA Studio

Having simulated a city, Will Wright and Maxis decided to zoom in and let you take control of its inhabitants. The result was effectively a virtual doll’s house that let you set your own goals for your characters: would you give them a better life or turn their world into a waking nightmare? The Sims expanded the medium’s audience, attracting more casual and female players, and later proving a safe space for LGBTQ+ players to express themselves. As voter Anna Higgs explains, it was “a god game that became a social phenomenon. It brought joy and made us all feel a little bit more in control of our lives — even if the baby was on fire on the kitchen floor.”

Credit: Valve Software

Eleven years after DOOM established the tenets of the first-person shooter, Valve’s sequel redefined the genre — demonstrating how to tell a gripping story when looking at the world through another character’s eyes. Combining tense combat with exploration and puzzles, it set a new standard for the FPS, and for simulated physics. And with the Gravity Gun, it gave us one of the medium’s greatest gadgets — less a weapon than a tool of chaos, destruction and slapstick comedy.

Credit: Nintendo Studios

Having created the template for side-scrolling games, Nintendo repeated the trick when the medium embraced a third dimension. Super Mario 64 wasn’t the first game to trade sprites for polygons, but its DNA is coded into just about every 3D game released since: in one fell swoop, it established a new standard for movement and camera controls in three dimensions. According to voter Alex Cazin, it remains so intuitive “that even 30 years later anyone can pick up a controller and know instantly how to play.”

Credit: Warhorse Studios

Not even two months old, the most recent entry in our list has clearly attracted a vocal and supportive fanbase. Offering a handsomely rendered and wonderfully open-ended sandbox where you’re free to shape everyman apprentice Henry as you please, Deliverance 2’s commitment to authenticity found favour among voters; the word “immersive” showed up in more responses than for any other game. If its future impact has yet to be determined, this historical RPG has already left a mark on its players — as one put it, “It gives me hope for the future of gaming.”

Credit: Xbox Game Studios

Mojang Studios’ world-conquering phenomenon is the best-selling video game of all time for good reason. A dynamic universe made of blocks, it both embodies the spirit of adventure and taps into the very essence of play. In Survival mode, you’ll use the world’s own resources to craft the tools you need to stay alive and explore ever farther and deeper. In Creative mode, it’s nothing less than a digital Lego set, where the player’s imagination is the only limit. Endlessly surprising, collaborative, and even educational, it continues to welcome in new generations of players.

Credit: Nintendo Studios

Not content with defining the 3D platformer in Super Mario 64, just two years later Nintendo EAD laid the foundations for the modern 3D action-adventure — setting a new high-water mark for the genre in the process. Frequently topping ‘greatest game of all time’ lists, Ocarina of Time pioneered ideas that are now commonplace, such as context-sensitive actions, while its ‘Z-targeting’ aiming system has been adopted by countless games with combat systems, not least FromSoftware’s Souls series. From its outstanding soundtrack to its dark, melancholic story, its every facet spoke to a developer operating at the peak of its creative powers.

Credit: Valve Software

Presenter, writer and podcaster Jane Douglas chose Valve’s 1998 first-person shooter “for its wide-ranging achievements in visuals and in physics, but also in storytelling and world building.” At the time, the company’s president Gabe Newell said he hoped that building “worlds and characters” would be more compelling for players than “shooting galleries”. The result bore out his philosophy, not least in its terrifying opening as an experiment at the Black Mesa research facility goes horribly wrong. To this day, it holds its power as one of the medium’s greatest ever set-pieces.

Credit: Nintendo Studios

In 1985, a blue-collar hero rescued the princess from the clutches of the evil Bowser, and helped save the game industry in the process. Following the infamous crash of 1983, the North American console industry needed a hit, and Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka duly provided one. World 1-1 remains perhaps the most famous first stage ever made: an object lesson in level design. And, of course, it gave gaming a new household name. As actor Samantha Béart notes: “Everyone knows Mario.”

Credit: id Software

Id Software placed a gun at the bottom of the screen, gave the player a legion of demons to shoot, and a medium was changed forever. Doom’s influence can’t be overstated: the rise of the first-person shooter genre can be attributed to its success, both the modding and speedrunning scenes can both be traced back here, and brought the multiplayer deathmatch to a mainstream audience. In doing so, it spawned hordes of would-be imitators, few of which came close to matching its technical excellence and design ingenuity. “Doom gave us the first-person shooter, really,” actor Doug Cockle says. “All the first-person shooters that we play today came out of Doom.” More than 30 years later, its impact on games still resonates.

Credit: Sega development studios

A surprise number one in some respects, and yet Yu Suzuki’s 1999 opus increasingly feels like the original blueprint for the dynamic, detailed settings that have since become the expected norm at gaming’s bleeding edge. Settings used in such industry titans like the Grand Theft Auto and Assassin’s Creed franchises. The phrase “living, breathing world” might be a marketing cliché today, but when Shenmue arrived, it accurately described the game’s astonishingly vivid rendition of Yokosuka, where taciturn hero Ryo Hazuki searches for his father’s killer.

That straightforward but absorbing revenge plot played second fiddle to the simple pleasures of inhabiting such a convincing urban space with its own timetable. Non-player characters were granted lives of their own, and so Ryo would have to fit into their routines and rituals. In both its embrace of a slower-paced lifestyle and its use of an in-game clock to dictate the player’s activities, it could be seen as a precursor to Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley. The quieter moments in otherwise noisy blockbusters such as Uncharted 4, The Last Of Us Part II and God of War surely took their cues from Suzuki’s game. And its spirit lives on through the increasingly popular Yakuza/Like A Dragon series, which similarly encourage you to slow down every now and again.

Shenmue may have struggled commercially on release, but if it felt out of step with its peers, that’s only because it marched to its own leisurely rhythm. And as we all know, the genius of the true pioneers is often only appreciated after the fact. Its unique appeal is summed up by voter Jessie Strife: “I played this game when it initially launched, and even now, I’ve yet to encounter another game quite like it. Shenmue holds a special place in my heart.”

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