At a recent press gathering in which Sid Meier hosted but didn't really talk about Civilization Revolutions:Sid offered up his list of three greatest gaming innovations:
- The IBM PC, for being created.
- SimCity, for the idea of creation being a gameplay element, rather than destruction.
- Nintendo's Seal of Quality, for offering a gamers a certain level of quality in their games.
Given that Sid Meier has been in the games industry about 20 years longer than I have, I think his focus on the 1980s as the era of game innovations is an interesting one; my own list would probably look something like this:
- DirectX, for not requiring all game programmers to develop their own graphics drivers.
- Magic: The Gathering, for inventing a game genre that was collectible, and didn't include all the playing pieces necessary to play a game.
- Maniac Mansion, for moving adventure games away from text commands into the age of point-and-click.
There's definitely many more innovations out there, like the Wii, which finally included cordless controllers that responded to kinetic movements. (Remember those old days of playing Nintendo when you'd practically pull the controller out of the box because you were "jumping" so high?) When I think about gaming life in the 80s, and now, there's a lot that has been changed and invented in the last three decades -- we've gone from playing videogames at the university-owned mainframe to being able to play our games on our watches or our cellphones, and making sure that a device is capable of playing DOOM (an innovative game created in 1993) seems to be a popular hobby of hardware hackers these days.
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