The Games Canon

Famous, infamous, radically innovative, critically acclaimed, or blockbuster successes, these are games everyone in the field should know about. They form the base of prior art. In any field, professionals work within a mainstream culture that references important previous work. These form the critical jargon (e.g., "this painting references Van Gogh's Starry Night") and the cultural context for new ideas.

Research is important in any field. It is how we build on the successes of the past and avoid their failures. You wouldn't try to write a book or create a car without first learning about the ones that preceded yours. When creating a game, you should research previous games. This list summarizes some of the most important games. It is intended as a jumping-off point for further research if a game sounds like one you'd like to make. Read through it to familiarize yourself with the previous work. No game designer would be taken seriously without at least passing familiarity with these titles, and most designers have studied several of them in depth.

For brevity, only the most critically acclaimed (or derided) and popular games are listed. In many cases, a previous game introduced a concept (e.g., Crystal Caverns predated Wolfenstein) but had a minor impact. These also include the games that designers often list as their major influences.

For additional cannon lists, see Lowder's book for an excellent recent review of major board games by famous game designers, boardgamegeek.com for up-to-date Internet ratings, and Wikipedia's best-selling (if not best) video game list at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games.

Minicanon

The minicanon contains the bare minimum set of games that you should be familiar with to appreciate the examples in this book and start making your own games. A games course should offer these or equivalents to students at a minimum, and anyone serious about games should own them. Most of these games are explained in more depth in the following sections and referenced throughout the text (see the index for references). Note that these aren't necessarily the absolute best games in their class, according to one specific design criterion, but they are likely the most widely acclaimed, easiest to acquire, and successful.

• Carcassonne by Klaus-Juergen Wrede is a board game that features tile-laying and semicooperative mechanics. It has multiple ways of earning points, relatively low variance, and deep strategy and is supported by a series of expansions and alternative rule sets.
• Settlers of Catan by Klaus Teuber is a board game with trading and building mechanics. Settlers and Carcassonne cover most of the mechanics found in modern strategic German board games and clarify the differences in mechanics and business models that distinguish them from ancient games and twentieth-century American games. They have also both successfully been converted to Xbox 360 video games. Puerto Rico is a good substitute for Settlers and features similar mechanics and theme but more advanced play and better balance.
• Chess is representative of ancient strategy games. It is played internationally from casual to tournament levels and features rich emergent play. Almost everyone is immediately familiar with the basics of the game, and the knight and king playing pieces are challenged only by the six-sided die for the iconic status as the symbol of gaming in general.
• Go beats chess in complexity (due to the large board), age, and elegance (there are only two rules to the game!). Although less popular in America than chess, many classic mechanics and strategies arise directly from the rules of go, including encirclement, flanking, captures, and variable board size.
• Poker is a gambling card game that rivals all other games in terms of tournament popularity and purse size. It is exemplary as a classic card game and relies almost exclusively on bidding mechanics, which can be studied in depth through the many variants on this game. Poker is familiar to most gamers and requires only a standard deck of cards to play.
• StarCraft, or any other major RTS/TBS video game (e.g., Warcraft, Civilization, Populous, Master of Orion, Empire Earth), is a requirement for any game developer. We have a slight preference for the Age of Empires series, which combines some modern RTS UI conventions and elements of casual gameplay to make the games more accessible to new players (and also has a free demo of the latest version). These play like a board game but with mechanics so complex that you need a computer to resolve them, nicely showing the transition from strategy to tabletop wargame to computer game. The character-building RPG mechanics made famous by Diablo and Dungeons & Dragons all appear in RTS games, but the "character" is the army or civilization. Mechanics are at the forefront of RTS games, and these are a celebration of complexity.
• Half-Life 2 stands out among FPS games. It is exemplary as a shooter, and the engine supports the other popular shooters Counter-Strike and Team Fortress, but HL2 also pushes farther toward storytelling than any other FPS and is among the most technically sophisticated of its time in terms of technology and Internet distribution business model. We believe that the original Half-Life had a better quality balance (HL2's graphics and physics advanced substantially, but the puzzles, mechanics, and story were at the same level as HL1) but believe that new gamers would appreciate HL2 more because they are accustomed to modern graphics and audio.
• Tetris is iconic as a puzzle and casual game, and decades after its introduction is still considered the standard to meet. The elegant gameplay, tremendous commercial success, and geometric twist on dominoes meets Connect Four make this game a classic. Bejeweled, Hexen, Maki, and other popular arcade puzzle games are directly inspired by Tetris.
• Guitar Hero and its sequels were neither the first rhythm games nor the first guitar games, but they took the genre to perhaps its natural acme. Guitar Hero 2 and Rock Band (by the same developer, Harmonix, and the moral sequel to GH2) are the best of the series. By combining a physical prop with popular music, these games offer broad casual gamer appeal and have consistently been among the best sellers every year since their introduction. Reasonable substitutes are Dance Dance Revolution (DDR), Karaoke Revolution, PaRappa the Rapper, and Guitar Freaks, although these do not have the same mass appeal.
• Super Mario Bros. and its many sequels (e.g., Mario 64, Super Mario 3, Super Mario Galaxy) stand out as best-of-breed platformers. These have tight arcade controls for hardcore gamers combined with cartoony content for casual players. They are polished to a shine by Nintendo's development team and feature a Japanese experiential aesthetic that is still grounded enough for mainstream Western audiences. The Mario games are consistently among the best-selling games of all time, and Mario is probably the most recognizable (and longest lived) video game character—the video game equivalent of Mickey Mouse. As with most of Nintendo's most popular games, the Mario games were designed by Shigeru Miyamoto.
• The Sims 2 and its sequels and expansions are the best of breed (and best-selling) of the god game/pet-raising genre games. These feature most of the mechanical complexity of an RTS, but that complexity is buried behind fiction so compelling that the player's mental model invariably aligns with the artificial characters and not the mechanics. The Sims series is often considered the best-selling video game of all time, taking sequels and expansion packs into account. The game was designed by industry veteran Will Wright, who dedicated it to the memory of Dan Bunten, author of M.U.L.E.
• Indigo Prophecy is deeply flawed in its action sequences, and the plot goes haywire halfway through the game, yet it is one of the best examples of the potential for interactive fiction. This arcane mystery game features characters that the player will really empathize with and scenes that inspire true anxiety, fear, desire, and awe. Although few narrative games can touch Indigo Prophecy, some other well-respected narrative games include Dreamfall and Jade Empire. The older Lucas Arts games (many by Tim Schafer and with writing by Orson Scott Card) feature rich characterization, humor, and fantastic scenes but only occasionally gripping narratives: The Secret of Monkey Island, Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, and The Dig.

Card

• Blackjack (a.k.a. 21). Working from one or more copies of a standard 52-card deck, players draw cards and attempt to build a sum that is higher than the dealer's but does not exceed 21. Except for changes to the payoff ratios, this game has been unchanged since its introduction in French casinos around 1700. Blackjack has several properties that are unique among casino games: the house's advantage over the player is minimal; the players are independently opposed to the dealer, and not each other; and by tracking (counting) the cards that have been played and changing their bets as the odds shift, players can gain a statistical advantage over the house and reliably win.
• Poker is a betting game with many variations; it seems to have been a primarily American game that spread up and down the Mississippi river in the mid-1800's. Players compete to build the best ranked hand. Hand rankings are designed to create a steep probability falloff, and the predominant strategy in the game regards the placing of bets. The Texas Hold 'Em variation has recently become extremely popular due to televised tournaments with multimillion-dollar pots and extensive Internet gambling sites.
• Rummy games, including the most popular gin rummy and canasta variations, have players attempting to divide their hands into sets called "melds" that match by either number or suit. Rummy games seem to date to the eighteenth or nineteenth century and were developed across the Western hemisphere. They are similar to the independently created nineteenth-century Chinese mahjong game.
• Bridge is played by four players who work in teams of two that sit opposite their partner. It is one of the classic trick-taking games, where each round is divided into several steps and players attempt to win the steps (tricks). Each trick involves players sequentially playing cards around the table. In straight bridge, players want to win as many tricks as possible. The popular contract bridge variation requires a team to make a contract declaring how many tricks they will win and then challenges them to meet that prediction to gain points.

Real-Time

• Set (1991) is a real-time card game played with a custom deck of cards. Players race to identify sets of cards that are either all similar along a certain axis (e.g., color or symbol) or all different along that axis.
• Pit (1904) is a real-time card game that simulates a stock exchange floor. The game uses a custom deck of cards that represents different commodities. Players make pairwise trades with each other, attempting to create a hand containing only one kind of commodity. Different commodities have different values, so when played for multiple hands, there is a tradeoff between completing a set quickly based on what is most popular in the hand you were dealt (low risk) and trying to switch to a more valuable commodity (high risk, high reward).

Racing

• Daytona USA ushered in detailed 3D graphics and compelling multiplayer gameplay to arcade racing at its 1994 release. Daytona USA is a stock car–racing game that enabled up to eight players to simultaneously compete over an intracabinet network. This game used Sega's Model 2 system board that was capable of rendering large numbers of texture-mapped polygons, distinguishing Daytona USA from other flat-shaded 3D racers. Daytona USA is one of the highest-grossing arcade games of all time.
• Burnout 3 was a critically acclaimed and commercially successful game for Xbox, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 2 that used road battles as a primary mechanic within a nominally racing game. Generic clones of real-life cars take and cause damage as they cover exotic road courses at high speed. Crashes are shown in slow motion with instant replay, whereas the other players' cars are driven by AI to avoid interrupting the game. In the innovative Takedown mode, players compete to maximize the damage caused by driving into intersections and oncoming traffic in short course setups.
• Gran Turismo. The Gran Turismo series has led to the most accurate simulation of race car driving in commercial games. In addition to its spectacular graphics, Gran Turismo has a highly accurate model of driving physics for a large number of licensed vehicles. These physics provide both a uniquely immersive racing experience and a means for actual car manufacturers to plausibly test new design ideas. The original Gran Turismo was the best-selling game for the original PlayStation.
• Mario Kart is a cartoony take on the racing genre, with Mario, Luigi, and other Nintendo characters piloting go-karts through short Mario-inspired courses. Gameplay is focused on controlling the kart's skid around corners, deploying power-ups, and exploiting shortcuts. Power-ups are randomly assigned, with the distribution favoring powerful offensive weapons for players near the back of the pack and weak defensive power-ups for leaders. The series originated as Super Mario Kart for the Super NES platform, where it used a series of 2D tricks to simulate a 3D third-person view. Later versions included true 3D graphics and more interesting courses enabled by them.
• Wave Race 64 became one of the most memorable games for the Nintendo 64. Sponsored by Kawasaki, licensed jet skis raced on water through various obstacle courses and weather conditions. The motion of the water and its reaction to the jet ski in Wave Race 64 were especially notable, given the difficulty in programming fluid dynamics at the time of its release.
• Wipeout was one of the first 3D racing games for home console systems, released in 1995 for the original PlayStation. (Virtua Racing for the Sega Genesis came earlier but lacked the processing power to make a significant impact.) Wipeout featured antigravity racing that replaced standard cars with hovering vehicles with weapons. This new take on racing along with a stylized futuristic look greatly contributed to the success of the PS1. (F-Zero for the SNES originated the futuristic racing genre for consoles but did not become a 3D racer until F-Zero X for the N64.)
• Track Mania is a racing game that allows players to create and share their own tracks in the style of the older Broderbund game Stunts.

Quest

Text

• Colossal Cave Adventure was the text-based start of the entire adventure/quest genre by Crowther and Woods in 1977 in Fortran for the PDP-10. This fantasy adventure combined the real-world Mammoth Caves in Kentucky with Lord of the Rings–inspired fiction. Also, it was the origin of the gamer in-joke "xyzzy," which was a magic word from the game that in fact had no effect.
• Hunt the Wumpus. Written in BASIC by Gregory Yob in 1972, the fantasy-themed game challenged players to deduce the location of the Wumpus monster within a dodecahedral grid.
• Zork and its sequels, originally created by MIT graduate students as a follow-up to Adventure, also launched the game developer Infocom. Zork was distinguished from its peers by richer storytelling and a slightly more sophisticated command-line parser than similar early text games.
• Multi-user dungeons (MUDs) were the extension of text quest games to multiplayer. Essentially the text predecessors of massive multiplayer online RPGs, MUDs are generally fantasy RPGs in the style of other text games but where the leading players frequently modified the source code of the game to craft new items and areas.

Point-and-Click

• King's Quest was the seminal series for Sierra On-Line. Designer Roberta Williams was one of the first female game developers. The series was built on cartoony graphics and Arthurian-style quests with occasional magic. The series is also notable for innovating the use of pseudo-3D, where predrawn scenes contained multiple depths and characters changed size appropriately as they moved into the distance.
• Leisure Suit Larry and its sequels by Chuck Benton are sex-comedy adventures released by Sierra On-Line. These are among the most mainstream of the "adult" games ever published, in part because they aren't as racy as advertised.
• Myst series introduced 3D rendering to point-and-click games by using prerendered images. Its photorealistic world, mixture of video and images, and puzzle-oriented gameplay made it one of the most popular games of all time and saw ports to many platforms. Myst has seen a number of less-popular sequels, as well as a reissue as a real-time 3D game RealMyst.

Adventure

• The Legend of Zelda games for the Nintendo platforms by Shigeru Miyamoto have sold over 50 million copies collectively. They chronicle the adventures of Link, an elflike hero who collects magic items and befriends strange creatures in his repeated quests to save Princess Zelda or their world. The series is known for playful interaction with the environment, allowing significant replay in areas—for example, traveling back and forth in time at the same location, changing the size of Link relative to the environment, or changing the time of day.
• Grand Theft Auto III (GTA3), although the third in the GTA series, is really a distinct game from the previous incarnations. GTA3 features a fully open world where the main character is a minor criminal who rises to be a major crime boss. The game is known for its smooth integration of vehicle and foot travel and combat, seamless travel through a large city, and crime-movie cliches. The game gained notoriety in the popular press due to specific mechanics for car-jacking, soliciting (and optionally killing) prostitutes, and the general crime-spree theme. This notoriety ultimately helped sales because it acted as free advertising. The game spawned a series of imitators, including Mafia, Godfather, and Scarface.
• God of War combines rhythm-game mechanics for complex, cinematic interactions (a la Dragon's Lair) with standard fighting-game controls. Mature-rated game that pulls no punches: sex minigames, dark music and themes (suicide, betrayal, murder, punishment), and an Ancient Greece mythology setting that was novel at the time of its release. Massive set-piece battles and hundreds of custom animations create an epic feel. Followed up by sequel and imitator Heavenly Sword.

Educational

• Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? is a simple detective quest game released in 1985 for Apple II that was eventually ported to many other platforms and followed up with several sequels over the next two decades, as well as branching into other media, such as television. The primary mechanic in the original game is to use geocentric clues, such as currency and maps, left at a crime scene to predict the next destination of master spy Carmen Sandiego.
• The Oregon Trail is an RPG that simulates a journey west from Missouri to Oregon in the nineteenth century. The game was designed by student teachers in 1971 as a classroom aid and eventually published by Broderbund as educational software. The simulation is fairly complex and historically accurate, and it has been updated and rereleased about once a decade.

Alternate Reality

• The Beast was the first major game in this genre. Launched in 2001 by Microsoft to promote the film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, the game was primarily played through clues buried in an artificial website that helped players track down a killer in a plot somewhat parallel to the movie.
• I Love Bees was launched in 2004. Used by Microsoft as part of the advertising campaign for Halo 2, this game was integrated with major plot points of that game. Players entered the game through the website ilovebees.com, which purported to be about beekeeping but was actually the portal for the game.

Traditional Abstract Strategy

• Backgammon evolved from ancient Roman and Egyptian games and has been played in a recognizable form for the last thousand years. In the early twentieth century, the addition of the doubling cube mechanic changed gameplay to its modern form by taking the expected value of winning from each position into account.
• Checkers (a.k.a. Draughts). American checkers/British draughts is played on the diagonals of a chessboard, international draughts is played on the diagonals of a 10 x 10 board, and Canadian checkers on a 12 x 12 board. Players move uniform pieces by sliding along diagonals or leapfrogging opponent's pieces, the latter option also being the capture mechanic. Pieces can only advance until they reach the opposite row, at which point they are promoted to kings and can move in both directions. The game dates to around 1500 B.C.E., although so many variations exist that it is hard to precisely date the origin or the introduction of alternate rules. The game is currently solved in the sense that computers are unbeatable at it because they can make perfect plays (due to the relatively low tree size of 10^20); in solving for optimal play, it was discovered that checkers always ends in a draw between perfect players, and thus it is fair in some sense.
• Chess is an abstract strategy game played on an 8 x 8 board with pieces that have varying movement capabilities. The objective is to capture the slow-moving king piece. Split from its ancestor, Chinese chess, around 600 C.E. and moved steadily west, it evolved a number of variations that reduce the play time and increase the tactical complexity. Today, it is one of the most significant board games in the West, ranked second only to poker in terms of the significance of board-game tournaments. The branch factor of the decision tree is about 37, and computer programs with pruning and naive static evaluators are able to beat the best human players regularly.
• Chinese checkers is relatively young compared to other games in this category (actually originated in Germany in 1893; "Chinese" was for marketing purposes). The game is played on a six-sided star covered in a hexagonal grid using marbles. The goal is to move your set of marbles to the opposite side of the board using leapfrogging.
• Chinese chess is an early (circa 300 B.C.E.) variant of Western/Middle Eastern chess that features slower-moving and more restricted pieces. Games tend to involve more trading of pieces than chess. Not particularly popular in America but played seriously in Europe and Asia.
• Dominoes is an ancient game of parallel independent origins (circa 1120 C.E.), with the modern variant derived from the Chinese version. Introduction to Europe circa 1700 C.E. Played by matching pieces to the existing board (i.e., tile-laying), with the goal of exhausting one's own set of pieces before the opponent.
• Go is an ancient strategic board game of encirclement and territorial control. Originated in China, possibly around 2000 B.C.E., and moved through Japan and Korea around 400 C.E. Played on a 19 x 19 board by placing stones of alternating colors; shorter variations are played on 13 x 13 and 9 x 9 boards. The game is significantly harder in terms of computational complexity than chess and is one of the few abstract strategy games for which current computer algorithms are no match for skilled human players (the branching factor in the decision tree is estimated to be in the range 150–200). The most significant tournament game in Asia. Unlike most board games, players are very serious about the game materials, with the best sets constructed from nachiguro stone, clamshell, and Kaya wood.
• Parcheesi is a nineteenth-century American version of the traditional Indian game pachisi (a.k.a. parch’s in Spain). It uses dice, which some would argue makes it not an abstract strategy game.
• Mancala is a family of traditional, primarily African and Asian, board games, including kalah, oware, and congklak, that involve placing seeds in a series of pits in the board game and capturing based on this process.

Stealth

• Metal Gear Solid is a series of games by Hideo Kojima across multiple platforms, released between 1987 and 2008. These are credited as the origin of the stealth genre. Kojima is famous for combining many disparate mechanics into his games. Some of these go so far as to lie outside the game world proper; for example, in the Psycho Mantis battle at the end of the first MGS game, the player must unplug the controller from slot 1 and move it to slot 2. Kojima's approach is a subject of debate among developers and critics. Although most agree that his games are epic and beautiful, many argue that they are also incoherent and therefore not engaging for many players.
• Thief is a series of first-person stealth games in a medieval/steampunk setting by the famous Looking Glass studios. Thief is credited as introducing 3D and first person to the stealth genre and is notably one of the few stealth games not in a modern setting. The more recent Assassin's Creed title is a nominally sci-fi variation on Thief, where players are sent back in time to perform medieval assassinations. It is more combat-heavy than Thief and benefits from more recent character animation and rendering technology.
• Splinter Cell is a series of highly successful stealth action games primarily for Xbox in a world created by novelist Tom Clancy. The games can be thought of as a US-based and more mass-market version of the MGS games. Players control Sam Fisher, a US secret agent who infiltrates various terrorist bases. The later games feature cooperative play and team-based multiplayer matches as well as a single-player storyline. The team matches are interesting because the mechanics and strategies for the terrorists and spies are asymmetric. The signature look of the character is his trifocal thermal/night vision glasses, which glow green.

Physics Games

• Jenga is a physical puzzle game where two players remove small wood planks from a large, stacked tower. The loser is the first to remove a structurally vital piece and bring the tower down.
• Toribash is a turn-based fighting video game where players explicitly position the limbs of their character to land attacks. Character animation and physics are the primary mechanic.
• Labyrinth is a physical puzzle to guide a ball bearing through a maze by tilting the roll and pitch of the maze floor. The maze path is relatively simple but is littered with holes that return the ball to the starting position.
• Line Rider is a video game in which the player draws a 2D track for a sled rider, who is then physically simulated through the course. There is no explicit objective, but players often seek especially complicated or long courses that avoid crashing the sled.
• Crayon Physics Deluxe is a video game in which players attempt to solve simple 2D physics puzzles by drawing new elements into the world. Rendered with a crayon-on-paper feel.
• World of Goo is a construction video game in which the player builds mass-spring systems out of "goo" to travel through the game world and solve physics problems.
• Khet is a chess-like abstract strategy board game where a special attack targets pieces hit by a real-world laser. Pieces are adorned with mirrors and beamsplitters to make basic optics part of the strategy.
• The Incredible Machine uses limited 2D physical simulation to present brain-teaser puzzles involving Rube Goldberg–style machines.

German Board Games

• Settlers of Catan is perhaps the most popular game in this genre. As a more sophisticated version of Monopoly, it bridges between causal players of American games and more hardcore German board-game enthusiasts. Gameplay involves trading resources and expanding one's own settlements to control more territory. Relatively high variance and a strong first-player advantage tend to turn off more-experienced gamers. Several expansion packs and a related card game are also available. Extremely popular as an Xbox Live game on Xbox 360, as well. It involves strong player interaction between the trading mechanic and competition for choice locations on the board.
• Puerto Rico involves player-run plantations and associated buildings. Players do not directly interact with one another; instead, competition for limited resources and indirect effects of neighbors' actions create nuanced strategy. This popularized the multiple-role mechanic originally introduced in Cosmic Encounter (1977).
• Ticket to Ride simulates a train network over America (or Europe, depending on the version). Players take turns building train routes, attempting to create paths between specific cities that are part of their secret agenda. Additional agendas can be purchased throughout the game, increasing risk and reward.
• Cartagena weakly embodies its setting of a pirate jailbreak but provides interesting leapfrog mechanics. Players use cards to advance their pirates toward freedom but can only replenish their hand by moving the pirates backward toward the jail. Opponents' pirates can be jumped over at no cost, so each piece is a springboard for oneself as well as for the opponent. It works well as a two-player game.
• Carcassonne is a board game in which players cannot move pieces but build a map in turns by placing tiles and optionally marking a newly placed tile with their control markers. Tile placement is constrained in a manner similar to dominoes, where tiles must match along their edges. Carcassonne is exemplary of the circa-2000 German board-game renaissance. It scales well with varying numbers of players, has essentially two game rules but complex strategy, and is published with several expansion packs that slightly alter rules and expand the available tile set. Tile placement is a widely used gaming mechanic (BoardGameGeek lists about 1,000 games with this as a primary mechanic). It is popular as an Xbox Live port for the Xbox 360 console as well as a board game.
• Citadels is a card game that combines rotating roles with city-building RPG mechanics. It plays a little like a simplified Puerto Rico but with more direct interaction between players. Today the game is always packaged with its Dark City expansion. The expansion is particularly noteworthy because it provides additional cards that can selectively replace (but not augment) cards from the original game. Gameplay is based more on the interaction of roles than the roles themselves, so this produces a combinatorial explosion in the number of variations. This keeps the game fresh for veterans, and amazingly, the game is fairly well balanced despite its design complexity.

American

• Sorry! was published in America by Parker Brothers in 1934, but it is based on an earlier English game. Up to four players move pawns forward or backward according to dice or cards (depending on the edition) in a race. The moves are proscribed by the dice; players only choose which pawn to move. The game is named after a rare roll, "Sorry!", that allows the player to move an opponent's pawn back to the start. The strategy is extremely limited, making this game popular with children.
• Rook is a trick-taking card game introduced in 1906 by Parker Brothers that is similar to bridge. Supposedly, the motivation for the game was to leverage the popularity of bridge but to use a custom card deck that avoids the stigma of gambling associated with standard cards.
• Scrabble is a crossword puzzle tile-laying game by Hasbro where players score points by constructing English words that intersect each other horizontally or vertically. Players with a large vocabulary, especially including obscure two- and three-letter words, have a distinct advantage. Strategy centers around placing tiles over multiplier squares and controlling such squares on the board as well as creating words.
• Boggle is a word game where players race against time to find the most English words in a 4 x 4 grid of letters formed by simultaneously rolling special six-sided dice printed with letters. In a sense, this is the inverse of Scrabble, because players must recognize words instead of synthesizing them. The game easily admits a large number of players. It rewards obscure and long words by discounting words identified by multiple players and quadratically increasing the value of words with their length. The difficulty of the game is related to the letter distribution, which changes between editions.
• Monopoly is often claimed to be the best-selling commercial board game. It is a relatively simple economic strategy game, where players purchase territory and charge each other rent for landing on spaces. The game has high variance and a single commodity (money), which limits strategy compared to later German board games in the same style, such as Settlers of Catan and Puerto Rico. Monopoly is highly regionalized, with special editions carrying the street and business names local to a particular city, country, or even college.
• Chutes and Ladders (a.k.a. Snakes and Ladders in the United Kingdom) is a children's game with zero choices; players simply roll dice and move pawns according to the board. This is helpful for teaching counting and rules to small children.
• Risk is a strategic conquest board game published in 1957 that presages the rise of German board games. It combines randomness with more strategy than other games in this section. The basic mechanics are positive feedback in the growth of units, statistically determined combat, and territorial control.

n-in-a-Row

• Tic-tac-toe (a.k.a. naughts and crosses in the United Kingdom) is a game where two players take turns placing their mark on the squares of a 3 x 3 grid. The winner is the first to achieve a string of three marks in a row, in a column, or along a diagonal. It is a classic example of a children's game, where once players understand minimax strategy, the game is always a draw.
• Connect Four is a game where players attempt to make strings of four marks on a 4 x 4 grid, with the constraint that marks must accumulate outward from one side of the board, as if they were physical objects fighting gravity. The game was proven to be a forced win for the first player.
• Gomoku is played on a go board with go stones, and players attempt to make strings of five pieces.
• Pente is a more interesting version of gomoku, where exactly two stones sandwiched by opponent's pieces because of an opponent's play are captured and removed from the board. In Pente, a player wins by making a string of five stones or by capturing five pairs. Pente is rare in that it is a simple (it has only two rules), abstract board game that is relatively young (circa 1978).

Artistic Rendering

• Okami, rendered in the style of Japanese watercolor, uses character drawing as a gameplay element to allow players to summon objects.
• Jet Grind Radio (a.k.a. Jet Set Radio) is a roller-skating simulator with rhythm-game graffiti sequences. It is rendered in an anime-cartoon style and was followed by and acceptable GameBoy port and a poorly received Xbox sequel.
• Viewtiful Joe is a GameCube and PS2 side-scrolling brawler with a comic-book appearance. The feel of the fighting gameplay and the comic-book look were highly praised by critics. It launched a series of sequels for Nintendo and PlayStation platforms.
• XVIII was a relatively stock FPS but was rendered in a comic-book style to match its namesake graphic novel. It used comic-book elements in some interesting ways, such as using a separate panel to show action taking place elsewhere in the scene simultaneously.

Games by Scientists

• Subway Shuffle, by Bob Hearn, is a puzzle game for OS X that involves sliding subway cars around specific graphs; each graph is a new level. The game grew out of his thesis that explored the computational complexity of board games.
• Game of the Amazons is a chess variant created by Walter Zamkauskas. Players control four queens on a 10 x 10 chessboard. After moving, queens shoot arrows at an additional square to which they could move. Squares on which arrows land are removed from play. The winner is the last player to make a move. The game has become very popular for analysis among computer scientists.
• Hex was created independently in the 1940s by John Nash and Piet Hein. It was later famously touted as an example of a game that is always won by the first player. Ironically, it has since been produced as a commercial game and is still played online today.
• Façade, written as an experimental game by researchers, is an immersive computer role-playing game set at a dinner party. The player sees a 3D first-person, cartoon view and interacts using typed natural language in real time. The goal of the game is to prevent the breakup of the other characters' marriage. Façade received critical praise for its AI and nontraditional gameplay. It was originally released as freeware, and a commercial sequel is reportedly in production.
• Werewolf. The original incarnation of this party game, known as Mafia, was created by a psychology student in the 1980s. It has since become both a popular party game and a subject of some fascination by computer scientists.

Game Books

• Tunnels and Trolls is a single-player, pen-and-paper RPG similar to first edition D&D; the books are adventures that require separate manuals to play. It was revised heavily between 1975 and 1979 and experienced limited popularity with occasional reissues. This was the series that created the game-book genre.
• Choose Your Own Adventure was the most popular of the game-book series in America, with over 200 titles. Unlike other game books, these used a straight decision tree and avoided all other RPG mechanics. The writing style notably used the second person to avoid gender pronouns for the main character. The series was created by R. A. Montgomery and Edward Packard in 1979, who were also the primary authors for the remainder of the series.
• Fighting Fantasy is a popular game-book series in the United Kingdom, with over 60 titles that existed as self-contained, single-player RPGs. It was created by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone in 1982, and it was played using a combination of RPG-like die rolls and player statistics, as well as explicit player decisions. It eventually expanded into a multiplayer RPG as well.

Unique

• Shadows Over Camelot is a cooperative board game, where players battle "evil" that the rules force on them and a potential traitor among their number.
• Indigo Prophecy (a.k.a. Fahrenheit) is a point-and-click adventure that actually succeeds as an interactive movie and has players controlling both the cops and robbers in a horror-crime drama.
• Dogs in the Vineyard is a pen-and-paper RPG that resolves conflict by bidding for control of the narrative rather than statistical combat. Thus, players compete to be the game master; it is slightly reminiscent of Amber.
• Shadow of the Colossus and its effective predecesser, Ico (see http://www.dicesummit.org/speakers.php?sp_id=83), each took four years to develop into the full-blown works of art that took the gaming press by storm when released. The games are extremely cinematic and raise complex ethical questions through the player's and character's internal dialog, not external narrative. Both games focus on relationships between two characters and their environment in a dream-like fantasy world.
• Katamari Damacy is a PlayStation 2 game by Namco in which the player effectively drives an ever-growing ball of junk through the world, collecting objects of about the same scale by adding them to the ball. The bizarre plot behind this game and innovative mechanic made the game first a cult hit and then a major success.

Pen-and-Paper Role-Playing (RPG)

• Dungeons & Dragons is the classic RPG game, which simulates a Tolkein-style world using detailed statistical mechanics. The basic D&D system has been revised and expanded continuously (to this day) and was recently generalized from fantasy into the d20 System, similar to GURPS. As computer games grew in popularity, D&D successfully incorporated business ideas from them, including versioned releases with minor ("point") and major releases corresponding to the scope of rule changes, expansion packs such as Oriental Adventures, and the open-source d20 rule system/one-game engine, multiple games.
• Paranoia is a black-humor sci-fi game, where a schizophrenic AI dictator named The Computer rules over a dystopian city. The primary appeal of the game is the wacky setting and items. The game is intended for lighthearted play. Players have substantial secret alliances and agendas, and paranoia arises from these and The Computer's semi-irrational actions. Player characters have clones and frequently die during missions.
• Generic Universal RolePlaying System (GURPS) is a role-playing system by Steve Jackson that defined generic simulation rules instead of those specific to a setting (such as D&D's fantasy world). This was the first instance of a generic system. Today, the most famous is the d20 System by Wizards of the Coast. Compared to other pen-and-paper RPGs, the character creation is deterministic, and the statistics are streamlined. All dice used are six-sided. In 1990, the Secret Service believed that the under-development GURPS Cyberpunk expansion was "a handbook for computer crime" and raided the offices of Steve Jackson Games, seizing much of their equipment. This raid and the subsequent lawsuit popularized both that game and the Hacker card game that Steve Jackson designed in response.
• Amber is a diceless RPG by Erick Wujcik based on the fictional setting of Roger Zelazny's Amber universe in the 1980s. It emphasizes actual role-playing over statistics, although characters are described by a point system that is used to resolve certain situations. The game has long been out of print but can be downloaded as a PDF from the Internet.

Computer Role-Playing (cRPG)

• Ultima and its nine sequels by Richard Gariott at Origin Systems were seminal fantasy cRPGs that contained large worlds and highly branching plots.
• Diablo is perhaps the best-of-breed cRPG, fantastically polished with an elegant online multiplayer component. Essentially based on the classic role-playing game (e.g., Dungeons & Dragons character-building mechanics), it took the "role playing" out; players are more focused on inventory and points than on the story and character. Diablo spawned a series of similar fantasy hack-and-slash games (many quite well regarded), including direct sequels, Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, and Titan Quest.
• Fallout moved from the traditional fantasy to a postnuclear holocaust setting and incorporated a stronger story than previous games in the genre.
• Bioshock is the moral sequel by the same development team.
• Knights of the Old Republic (KotOR) is set in the Star Wars universe and uses a variant of the D&D rules. It was notably the first RPG in that setting. The game's production values, including story, are generally well regarded, and players can choose to act either for good or evil.
• Nintendogs is really exemplary in the pet-raising genre and not traditionally considered an RPG, but such games feature the same kinds of character building and role-playing mechanics. Players raise a group of puppies on Nintendo DS, using the microphone and touch screen to interact with their pet. The puppies grow over time and require regular care. Players can purchase toys and other accessories in-game to use with their virtual pet.
• Fable is an aggressive Xbox RPG by veteran designer Peter Molyneux that sought to give players complete freedom to develop their character's personality. The game was a critical success despite complaints that it failed to deliver on the total freedom promised by early advertising. In-game characters respond to a player based on his or her past actions, and the physical appearance of the player character alters to appear good or evil, strong or weak, and so on, based on those actions. It is notable as one of the first major games where the player's actions determine his or her in-game sexuality, with gay romance supported within the game.
• Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon are casual anime RPGs for Nintendo platforms in which players gather resources and friends. Although Harvest Moon and its sequels have relatively complex farming simulations, both games stress social interaction with nonplayer characters over other mechanics. Animal Crossing is notable for allowing time to pass in the virtual world even when the game is not being played by tracking a real-world clock.

Computer Strategy

• M.U.L.E. was the original economic computer game. It was written for Atari 400 in 1983 and featured multiple players, relatively complex simulation mechanics, and a science-fiction settler setting. M.U.L.E. was written by Dan Bunten, who later underwent sex reassignment surgery and became Danielle Berry and thereby became the first known transsexual game developer.
• SimCity was the game that introduced the modern "tycoon" and "sim" types of games and launched Will Wright's career as one of the most prominent game designers. A SimCity player takes on the role of the mayor of a growing city. The mayor must balance the functional needs of the city with the happiness of its citizens by setting taxation levels and building new infrastructure and entertainment facilities. It led to a series of similar successful simulation games by Will Wright, including SimAnt and The Sims, as well as less significant games by other designers, including Rollercoaster Tycoon, Railroad Tycoon, and Sim Theme Park.
• X-Com is a turn-based tactical combat game renowned for its atmosphere and combat micromanagement. A squadron of marines face off against invading aliens, upgrading technologies between missions based on discoveries from alien remains.
• StarCraft was the genre-defining strategic combat game. It takes place in a science-fiction setting where different alien races with radically different technology trees battle over control of a planet. This introduced what is now called the "4X" combination of elements—eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate—that has come to define RTS games, although ironically StarCraft is typically not considered a 4X game because later entries allowed more subtlety of negotiation and trade. Other major series with similar mechanics include Rise of Nations, Age of Empires, Empire Earth, and Warcraft. StarCraft has aged particularly well; it is still played heavily and is one of the most respected RTS games despite being over a decade old and having very dated graphics and UI elements.
• Civilization (Civ) and its sequels by Sid Meier are the best-known and most-respected of the turn-based strategy games. They simulate real-world civilizations throughout history, combining technology, economics, and warfare. The scope of the games is incredible: 4000 B.C.E. through near-term future.
• Advance Wars. This series for handheld consoles (GB, GBA, DS) showed that the depth of a tactical turn-based strategy wargame could be implemented on a handheld. Innovative primarily for its simplifications: single resource (money; resource-gathering automatic through taxes), few different units, small maps, and discrete grid movement. Cartoony graphics and battle cutscenes increase the friendliness for nontraditional wargamers.
• Populous and its sequels by Peter Molyneux introduced the notion of the player as god rather than leader of a civilization. As a god, the player has the ability to affect terrain as well as the civilization but can only influence the civilization instead of controlling it. Sequels expanded the gameplay and mechanics, and the effective sequel, Black and White, introduced gestural input and a physical incarnation of the god's power in the form of a giant animal that the player must care for like a pet.

Classic Arcade

• Defender is a horizontal 2D scrolling game in which the player pilots a spaceship that must destroy incoming aliens to defend humans along the ground. If captured by aliens, humans can be rescued by catching them when they fall from destroyed alien ships. The game is known for the difficulty of its control scheme, which contains five buttons as well as a directional joystick control.
• Pac-Man is a pie-shaped character that navigates a fixed maze, attempting to cover every square of the maze before being caught by four ghosts. The character can turn the tables and chase the ghosts for a limited time by eating a power pill. The game was followed up by an almost identical sequel, Ms. Pac-Man (introducing the first female game protagonist), and in 2007 the original designer Toru Iwatani created Pac-Man Championship Edition for Xbox Live Arcade, which critics consider a worthy sequel and extension of the basic gameplay. Other 3D and arcade sequels not involving Toru Iwatani have been released but are generally considered insignificant attempts to exploit the brand.
• Missile Command was released in 1980 during the Cold War between America and the USSR, capitalizing on global fears of nuclear war. The player controls two gun batteries that must shoot down incoming nuclear missiles that threaten the player's cities.
• Centipede is a vertical shooter game in which the player fires upward from the bottom of the screen at swarming insects. The player loses if hit by the centipede that continuously winds down the screen (as in Space Invaders). It was designed by Dona Bailey, the first female arcade game designer.
• Asteroids is a free-direction space shooter where the player destroys asteroids that recursively fragment into smaller pieces. The playing field is toroidal, in that it wraps at both the top and bottom and left and right (as in SpaceWar).
• Tempest is an abstract shooting game where the player moves around a closed or open set of vertices near the viewer while obstacles fly out at him or her from the distance. It introduced the notion of continuing a previous game when lives run out. The original arcade version was played with a dial instead of a joystick.
• Frogger. In this game, players hop a frog across rivers on logs and across streets, trying to dodge incoming traffic.
• Pong was one of the first commercial games, released in 1972. It is a simple table-tennis game where players move paddles to reflect a ball at each other. The original form was a hobby project by William Higinbotham at Brookhaven National Laboratory, called Tennis for Two, that was played on an oscilloscope and created in 1958, thus making Higinbotham the first video game author.
• SpaceWar is a two-player space shooter created by Steve Russell, Martin Graetz, and Wayne Wiitanen in 1962 for the DEC PDP-1. The players fight in the presence of a gravity well, using it to slingshot themselves to conserve their limited fuel while battling with missiles.
• Battlezone was the first first-person game, the first 3D game, and the first color game (using monochrome graphics behind a color film). The game was designed by Ed Rotberg. Players drive tanks around a planar battlefield filled with obstacles, attempting to shoot opposing tanks. A variation was commissioned by the U.S. military for use in actual tank training.
• E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was released for the Atari 2600 as a spin-off of the film of the same name. It is notable for being unplayably bad and a complete commercial failure despite sales of 1.5 million units, since 4 million units were produced. This was widely considered one of the biggest failures in gaming history and led to Atari's bankruptcy and contributed to the collapse of the games industry in 1983.

Rhythm Games

• Simon is a physical electronic puzzle in which the player must press buttons in response to a proscribed sequence.
• PaRappa the Rapper was one of the first rhythm games. It expanded the basic Simon gameplay to the PlayStation console and required the player to match both timing and sequence of button presses. The game responds to correct play with the main character singing a rap song rather than abstract sounds.
• Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) popularized the rhythm game genre, taking it mainstream in America and introducing one of the first major "exercise" games that the Wii console later leveraged extensively in its marketing campaign. DDR players match a sequence of dance steps on an eight-button dance pad as popular music plays.
• Karaoke Revolution expanded rhythm games to karaoke singing by requiring a player to actually sing the lyrics of the song and grading him or her by both pitch (effectively, sequence) and rhythm. The series is wildly popular and at this time contains six sequels as well as music-genre specific versions such as Country Karaoke Revolution. Although it has produced other innovative rhythm games in the past, this was the first real hit for developer Harmonix.
• Guitar Hero was developed by Harmonix and later continued by various Activision studios in sequels. In the style of previous guitar game Guitar Freaks, it is a straightforward rhythm game played with a plastic guitar peripheral. Harmonix's attention to detail and inclusion of five fret buttons and a tremolo arm on the guitar polished the game to a shine, and it stood as the best-selling game for two years in America. After MTV purchased Harmonix, they lost the rights to the series but followed up with best-selling Rock Band, which merges Karaoke Revolution singing, Guitar Hero guitar and bass, and PaRappa the Rapper drumming.

Massive Multiplayer

• Ultima Online was one of the first MMO games, released in 1997, and continues successfully to this day. The design team included major designers Richard Gariott ("Lord British") and Raph Koster ("Designer Dragon"). It is distinguished among most other MMOs in that players can build and buy persistent buildings within the game world and that skills are not based on experience points.
• World of Warcraft by Blizzard is the largest and most successful MMO to date, with approximately 10 million subscribers as of 2007, dwarfing all its competition. The game does not stray far from the fantasy and D&D roots of the genre, but it is beautifully polished and is credited with bringing many female players into a previously male-dominated genre.
• Lineage and Lineage II are second only to World of Warcraft in terms of raw popularity, although their player base is largely Korean as opposed to more international.
• Star Wars Galaxies is a complex MMO by designer Raph Koster that is set within the Star Wars universe. Despite initial commercial success, the game experienced early controversy over the difficulty of becoming a Jedi and suffered huge commercial and critical losses over a series of major changes that reduced complexity in favor of real-time combat and altered winning strategies in the game.
• RuneScape is unique among MMOs in that it is written in Java and runs in a web browser. The graphics and sound are extremely poor compared to other MMOs, yet it has a tremendous player base of about 6 million users and is growing at a substantial rate.
• A Tale in the Desert is set in Ancient Egypt. It is unique among MMOs in that it has no combat system and has a distinct beginning and ending (after the ending, the game begins again). It contains proactive interaction between developers and players, with the actual game rules changing according to player petitions.
• Second Life is a sandbox virtual world that is a source of great controversy; it has many press releases, branding, and licensing deals but perhaps few actual players. It has significant player building control, and because of the media popularity, it is also beloved by academics. It consists of entirely player-created content, in-game currency tied to real-world currency, sale of virtual property, companies with virtual presence, and no censorship. The lack of censorship has led to significant sales of in-game sex toys and prostitution.
• Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates is a casual, puzzle-based MMO in which simple puzzle games substitute for typical RPG combat and resource gathering. Developer Three Rings has since followed up with the cowboy themed Bang! Howdy MMORPG.
• Planetside This is a science-fiction MMO FPS where three factions fight massive battles for territory on different worlds. Player actions can lead to actual gains for a faction on the world scale, unlike most other MMOs. It combines vehicle and foot combat and is estimated to have 20,000 players, 60,000 at its peak.
• Guild Wars is a critically acclaimed RPG series, also notable for allowing MMO play without subscription fees. It offers both adventures and PvP play. Adventures are run as instanced levels, where only the current party appears within the level. Thus, the world is MMO, but the actual adventures are effectively just multiplayer. Play is socially and mechanically focused around guilds and alliances between guilds.

Sports

• Fantasy football blends the performance of real professional American football players with the personnel decisions of game participants. Players (or "owners") in a fantasy football league select a roster of real players through a draft process and subsequent trading and deals. The individual performance statistics of these players during real competition contributes to the score of an owner in a fantasy league. Fantasy leagues have become immensely popular, allowing football enthusiasts to enjoy the sport in a more interactive manner.
• John Madden Football '92 was the first console release of this flagship American football series, appearing for the Sega Genesis in 1991 and setting the template for modern football games. Although it used 2D rendering and sprites, Madden '92 featured 3D-like gameplay and physics, allowing for effects such as tipping of a pass, tacklers bouncing off ball carrier's, and more prominent weather effects. This 3D-like feeling also emerged from rendering the field about the ball carriers perspective, slightly elevated off the field and tilted downward, providing greater vision of the field. Quarterback vision was also improved by isolating each receiver in his own window on the screen, associated with a specific button. Madden '92 featured an extensive offensive playbook and defensive schemes for each team based on what NFL teams actually used. Players, serving as their own coach, could seamlessly select various personnel, formations, and plays for each snap. Arguably, the greatest impact of Madden is its exclusive licensing of NFL players and teams and modeling of their abilities in the game, giving players a unique sense of immersion into NFL football. Electronic Arts has successfully followed this formula of exclusive licensing, immersive graphics, and compelling gameplay in its series for other sports, such as NHL Hockey, FIFA Soccer, and Tiger Woods PGA Tour.
• Tony Hawk is a series of skateboarding games for both PC and portables. The series is named after famous skater Tony Hawk, who appears in the games both as a character and in video sequences. The series was inspired by the classic 1987 Skate or Die! title and heavily influenced by Jet Grind Radio. These combine racing, rhythm, and quest mechanics with a skateboarding simulation engine for emergent play. Later games in the series were commended for their punk-rock soundtracks featuring popular bands. The latest installment, Tony Hawk's Proving Ground, is a great example of portable game design. It can be played in two-minute sessions, yet combines RPG mechanics, about six different quest styles, and free-form exploration along the lines of GTA3. The reward cycles are tuned such that the player always has a sense of accomplishment on some quest that can be achieved yet is also always facing a set of new quests that he or she cannot yet beat.
• NBA Jam brought about a new form of sports game focused on unrealistic gameplay with exaggerated physics that appears cartoonish. NBA Jam is a two-on-two basketball game featuring real NBA players. Although the rules of basketball are roughly followed, players can jump to superhuman heights and perform unbelievable dunks. Defense often involves shoving and pushing over of an offensive player. Midway successfully extended the action-over-rules approach into football with NFL Blitz, which featured seven-on-seven games, limited playbooks, and wild tackling.
• Wii Sports is notable for its ability to integrate the movement-based Wiimote into six different sports games with plausible physics. The game also has been noted to improve the physical fitness and weight loss of its players. A fitness mode allows players to undergo training, where their performance is graded with an "age" and plotted over several months.
• Tecmo Bowl was a highly popular American football game for the NES console. Unlike Madden, it featured highly limited gameplay with four plays per team and virtually no plausible notion of physics. Gameplay was driven mostly by simple deterministic triggers to generate game events such as tackles, receptions, and interceptions. However, these triggers were set up in such a way that gameplay was more like a highly compelling strategy game. At every snap, defenses can select one play of the four to shut down, forming something like a rock-paper-scissors dynamic.
• Duck Hunt is the seminal gun-based shooting game, originally appearing in arcades and for the NES. Duck Hunt involved shooting ducks that randomly flew across the screen, using a physical light-gun technology. Although a simple gameplay mechanic, games such as House of the Dead, Virtua Cop, and Time Crisis use similar technology with a more involved story.
• Baseball Stars is one of the author's favorite games of all time, released for the NES. Baseball Stars was one of the first games to have data memory. This allowed player, team, and season data to persist when the console was powered down, extending gameplay beyond a single sitting. Users could create teams of their own, improve player abilities based on money earned from winning games, and compete in six-team leagues with up to 125 games. For stat junkies, the game also featured tracking over individual player stats and statistical category leaders over the course of a season. Baseball Stars was the first to feature female baseball players. Although the basic gameplay mechanic was straightforward, Baseball Stars set itself apart with excellent fielder controls for diving, jumping, and climbing walls to catch balls. If you see one of the authors playing with his iPhone, he is mostly likely playing Baseball Stars on the iPhone NES emmulator.

Fighting

• Karate Champ established the one-on-one, side-perspective style of fighting games during the mid-1980s. Gameplay followed the format of formal karate competitions in a dojo, unlike the street-based "knockout" style of current fighters. Two 2D characters wearing solid color uniforms sparred to land single blows to score a point or half-point toward winning a two-point match. Characters were controlled by a two-joystick system for selecting moves that had a high learning curve, which quickly distinguishes a player's skill level.
• Street Fighter II set the standard for the 2D fighting genre in the early 1990s. Characters were given distinct stories and personalities, matched with special moves and stylistic appearance, allowing players to customize their fighting techniques. Graphically, the game provided a greater sense of immersion through animated backgrounds customized to locales around the world and large sprites for displaying characters.
• Mortal Kombat followed this template toward a darker theme, using images of real actors for sprites and fatality-inducing finishing moves.
• Virtua Fighter was the first 3D fighting game. Moving away from the sprite-based models of 2D fighters, characters were modeled as articulated geometries. Each character had unique body parts represented as polygonal geometries that were kinematically connected by rotational joints. The motion and fighting moves for each character were hand-animated and adapted from actual martial arts disciplines. Characters were rendered with flat shading with Sega's Model 1 board.

First-Person Shooters

• DOOM from id Software revolutionized the PC games industry. It could be considered the most significant game of all time, in part because of when it was released and the influence it had over subsequent games and the growth of the industry.

  DOOM was the first major success of the shareware business model. It introduced first-person 3D perspective, the "looking over your gun" view, mouse-look, co-op and competitive network multiplayer, sci-fi marine versus demons/aliens storyline, and a moddable game engine. Every pure shooter since has been a minor refinement of this powerful set of elements. The game was created by the development dream-team of programmer John Carmack; level designers John Romero and Sandy Peterson; graphics by Adrian Carmack, Kevin Cloud, and Gregory Punchatz; and sound designer Bobby Prince. Most of these developers went on to create other successful games and movies at other companies.

  Several sequels and games using the same engine (e.g., fantasy world Heretic) were later released. The original DOOM I and II engine used billboard characters and a ray-casting trick for 3D rendering that was only slightly more computationally intense than 2D rendering. The same technique was also used in id's Castle Wolfenstein, released prior to DOOM but with less cultural impact.

  Notable contemporaries of DOOM include Duke Nukem 3D, which included innovative weapons such as a holographic decoy, laser trip mines, and shrinking gun, and Dark Forces, which immersed players in the universe of Star Wars. The DOOM 3 game was technologically sophisticated but lacked the raw power and innovation of the original relative to its peers.

• Quake and its sequels are the spiritual successors to DOOM, taking the core gameplay and enhancing the graphics with a fully polygonal real-time 3D world. The Quake engines were licensed to create hundreds of other first-person games, including Half-Life.
• Half-Life is one of the most critically acclaimed shooters of all time. Half-Life's only gameplay innovation was the use of crude physics to make "crate pushing" and "jumping" puzzles, but the carefully scripted world immersed players in the story. That story's interesting characters and captivating plot twists led to the game's massive success and several sequels. Half-Life extended Quake's natural moddability, which led to the creation of Counter-Strike and other popular online games.
• Counter-Strike (CS) is a terrorist/counterterrorist mod for Half-Life that has been the most popular online game for over a decade, combining light RPG elements, strongly strategic team play, and first-person shooting skills. Team Fortress Classic expands that recipe with RPG classes and was second in popularity only to CS.
• Unreal and the Unreal Tournament series brought shareware developer Epic Megagames great success and introduced several FPS-game subtypes, including capture the flag and last man standing. These led to the technologically similar game Gears of War by Epic.
• Halo was the game and the series that launched Microsoft's Xbox consoles and brought back co-op gameplay that had been absent in FPS games since DOOM. It offers little innovation over other titles but has impressively polished gameplay, providing an experience that delivers consistently and plays smoothly on the Xbox consoles.
• Daikatana was designed by DOOM veteran John Romero. It is famous for gameplay (and resulting commercial) failure, largely because the nonplayer character sidekicks have such bad AI that they keep dying and thus making it impossible for the player to progress. As the first title by Ion Storm, it was also released three years late, which made it an expensive early mistake for the company, and the advertising campaign with the slogan "John Romero's about to make you his bitch" was poorly received.
• Trespasser was an aggressive attempt to create a truly immersive FPS. Set in a Jurrassic Park–like world, it features full physical simulation for all elements and no on-screen display of statistics. Unfortunately, it is infamous in the industry as a massive control failure. The physics and poor controls simply made the game too hard to play, and most players simply stumbled around, accidentally knocking over crates.
• Deus Ex and its sequel are adventure games with RPG and FPS mechanics. They are primarily notable for presenting at least two ways to complete each challenge—for example, stealth versus brawn. Designed by Warren Spector.

Appendix F of Creating Games: Mechanics, Content, and Technology by Morgan McGuire and Odest Chadwicke Jenkins. Copyright © 2008, A K Peters, Ltd. Order the book from A K Peters. See the authors' website for the book.