According to Todd Howard, the two most important games of all time are Pac-Man and Tetris...

According to Todd Howard, the two most important games of all time are Pac-Man and Tetris, and the two most influential are Super Mario Bros. and DOOM. Todd also said that Tetris is the greatest game of all time

Discuss

those are some really boring opinions

Doom being one of the most influential is probably true.

Yes but is he wrong?

pong mogs reddit man and meme shit like tetris

yeah. fuck Tetris. it's every boring faggot's answer.

Pong is for contrariatrannies like you

Remember, the first thing you should ALWAYS do after going through a traumatic experience is play Tetris.

This. Tetris is what non gamers and autistic chicks play.

no one that says tetris is the greatest game actually cares very much about it, it's just trying to turn a subjective question into an objective fact

Okay but is it or is it not an objectively perfect game?

Tetris is scientifically proven to help people recover from traumatic experiences. Everyone should play it.

Sounds a lot like some gen-x pseudo intellectual cock magic OP. Just gesturing vaguely towards something that has been accepted as fact for decades as if it's somehow profound and unheard wisdom.

Truly todd is one of the developers of all time, and not just a ghoulish twat lurking in the office while the actual staff grind games out.

He's probably not really all that wrong though. As an 89 baby I got to play all of these even if not directly in their release years but its not drastically after their release like what would happen for a zoomer lets say. So I guess I can appreciate them for what they were a lot more than someone much younger than me that to them these games would be ancient. I actually like Todd's opinion and probably would ultimately agree with it.

If we count important and influential 3D games, I would say Ocarina of Time and MGS1 would definitely have to count here. MGS1 more influential and Ocarina having both important and influential. FFVII was also very influential although for FFVII and MGS1 its mostly due to story and how it made devs realize they should go in cutscene story heavy directions with their games. Some other important and influential games would have to be Metroid and SOTN just due to how much indies copy the damn genre.

it's the most important game, not the greatest game.

Doesn't help me with chronic stress which physically feels like a kind of trauma.

doom is only "important" if you consider the first person shooter inherently one of the most important genres just by sheer fact of its dominance in the 2000s-2010s.

Otherwise what has it actually contributed to his. videogames are designed beyond fps?

The id tech 3d engine. People like Todd are mystified by the likes of the doom team because they can't imagine anything of value coming from a team of less than 12 people, let alone a functioning game engine.

Unironically my favorite games ever, they are simply timeless. You can give Pacman or Tetris to someone illiterate about games and they'll grasp all the main concepts in seconds.

Every time I homebrew a console I gotta install whatever variant of Tetris and Pacman was released for it, you can never go wrong with those. Recently homebrew'd the 3DS and got Pacman + Galaga Dimensions which features the funnest Pacman game released recently: Championship Edition. There are some good Tetris games on the system like Axis and Ultimate, I prefer Axis for the wacky modes. Hell, Tetris Effect might be the best version of the game ever released. I don't know if being exposed to these games as a kid has an effect on you but playing Tetris at 4 fucking blew my mind.

I think Todd is onto something. Space Invaders gets an honorable mention from me.

Is Mario really all that influential?
Sure, platformers were very popular 30 years ago when smooth scrolling was impressive but no one cares about them anymore.

None of those games have anything on super turkey puncher.

game success = impact on industry.

What an utterly empty thing to say.

Really nigga

3d platformers are dead, 2d platformers however are not

The contrarianism in this thread is insane. Yeah bro Tetris, DOOM, Mario, and Pac-man are only impactful because they sold well. Totally.

ridge racer and the original f-zero were more important than fucking tetris ever was, recognizing still that tetris came from behind the iron curtain and is still a fun game today
pac-man was just the first cod-tier hypebeast game, it got old fast and maze-chasers were out of public consciousness within 5 years. but pacman is a fun character with staying power and namco really knows how to milk their brands. or did anyway.

.

Yes.
What else is there besides Mario and games that want Mario's audience?

It's just the formatting and way you speak, but you made me feel I was reading a youtube comment

soft club

lol

Anon, a game being impactful doesn't mean it's good.

Mechanically, these games are important on a technological level, and they stand out because back then they basically revived the industry with exception to pacman which was from the previous generation of arcade games along with the original donkey kong.

The technology was already there to an extent though, it's only really Doom in that list that revolutionised it's genre of gaming. You might say that the inherent design of mario and tetris hasn't actually changed all that much since back then.

I've been away from Anon Babble for a long time, anon. I return to you now, from beyond the shadow.

most influential games of all time real list:
1. Doom
2. Carmageddon
3. System Shock
4. Descent
5. Wing Commander
6. Elite
7. Ultima
8. MSFS
9. Papyrus and ISI racing simulators
10. Street Fighter 2

literally in that order

he's correct and based as usual

it's only really Doom in that list that revolutionised it's genre of gaming.

Eh, Doom was just a faster Wolfenstein.

there's no such thing as a greatest game but tetris is incredible, unfortunately to fully appreciate it you have to play a lot of it, but to me it is quintessentially video games

No? Bad RNG is such that people fully recognize "droughts" in professional play. Tetris is great fun but something like Puzzle league/puyopuyo is far more immutable and perfect

name the correct two

Tard Howard

Correct, but you see my point. Todd is just spouting off "popular thing" and expecting people to suck his cock for it. The sad thing is in the modern industry he won't be short of volunteers.

and wolfenstein 3d is just battlezone indoors and in color
if you really want to push it that far fps games are inspired by turn based first person dungeon crawlers.
doom really brought it all together. it was definitely one of the first games of the genre that really worked great and didn't play like a tech demo

PONG and Space Invaders are probably the actual most important games since they pretty much created the industry. Or perhaps SpaceWar if you really want to get autistic about it.

carmack/quake was huge in pushing openGL

People talk about boomer shooters to mean DOOM and maybe Quake but the actual boomer shooters were stuff like Galaga.

Tetris is the greatest game of all time

The most basic bitch opinion someone talking about video games could have.

any list without super mario bros is a meme list

Space Invaders is the oldest game that's still relevant to modern game design.

pong is relevant in that it's based off real pre video game games

Ultimately they're the same thing and I'm tired of pretending that they're not. The difference is in the presentation of the mechanics. As the player all you're doing is moving the bumper in both games.

Tennis for Two (1958) is the most influential because it used a controller and was a video game. All video games are video games, and were ultimately inspired by it.

Also PONG lead to Breakout which I imagine had some influence on the design of Tetris.

Chess and checkers are the same game because they're played on the same board and the player moves pieces in both games. Dumbass.

pong is just tennis for two without physics
spacewar/computer space is the last universal common ancestor of all modern video games
it is a top-down 1v1 instagib arena shooter with dynamic gravity and projectile physics. the video game industry as a whole literally couldn't even improve on what kind of game spacewar was until doom and quake and unreal came around.

Tetris,

HAHAHA
what the FUCK is important about tetris?

and DOOM

DOOM can't influence not even its own modern day sequels. the only thing that carries over is the shooting demons part.
when people think of boomer shooters they think of games that play more like quake.

yeah the todd answer is ok but hes missing
street fighter 2
ultima 4
super metroid
I would argue that megaman 2 is close to the sheer level of influence that super mario brothers achieved

and since we're using the word 'influence,' you literally cannot ignore how many details of chrono trigger quietly went mainstream, like save names, combat without screen transitions, new game+, and so on

That's retarded.
You are the same as a cockroach because you have legs, brown skin and eat shit.

smb is just the mario bros arcade game with an ubisoft-tier open world base-liberating gimmick shamelessly bolted on to it

Chess and checkers aren't videogames tho.

Although it does show that a game being influential doesn't prove its value. Skyrim was basically a fucking tech demo but no one talks about descent 3d.

yeah when theyre little kids like you

I'd probably put Ultima at least on par with those since nearly all video games these days are just advanced iterations of things that Ultima pioneered 44 years ago.

Super Mario Bros is just Donkey Kong and Pitfall put in a blender.

I appreciate the Ur-Anon Babble posting anon. Good talk.

The point being made is regarding game mechanics and physics engine you zoomer cuck.

Tetris is timeless, I can still play a round every so often, can't say the same about the rest

Accurate posts. Pong and Space Invaders were the first great video games. Galaga was the killer app for arcades. Pac Man was the first video game that became a pop culture phenomenon. Doom invented the FPS (aka Doom-like) genre.

There are a very few select titles that invented and mastered their genre in one fell swoop. For example, Mario, Roller Coaster Tycoon, The Sims, DDR, Guitar Hero. Most other genres of game developed over long periods of time.

And TES was just ultima, but the rise of open world games in the 2010s was almost entirely due to Skyrim.

spacewar predates pong even though it had a later commercial release
i don't disagree pong is highly influential but it's not because of the gameplay aspect, its marketing and sales success is way more interesting. meanwhile spacewar was a truly advanced game that most people didn't "get", like racing and flight simulators today

And yet here we are in 2025, wondering to ourselves if open world was a mistake.

You ever play an FPS, anon?
The entire genre practically exists because of Doom and its many clones.

If your game is just space invaders but with twelve more lines of invaders maybe you should just kys Todd.

but the rise of open world games in the 2010s

*ahem*

its only a mistake because its getting too difficult to make money with it, ultima 4-7 definitely weren't a mistake, oblivion to skyrim wasn't a mistake, nignog car stealing simulator wasn't a mistake

open world is fine, it's just fatigue, this pendulum swings every like 5 years, people will be complaining about linear games in the near future

You mean, back when open world games still had meaningful open worlds.

Oblivion to Skyrim wasnt a mistake.

You mean Morriwind to Oblivion and you're wrong.

All four of those games are extremely playable by modern standards, which is noteworthy because most games from the 80’s and 90’s aged like milk

Just as Survival Crafting was, or Zombies.
Developers love to flood the market until they drown it out. Sad thing is those Genres that die because the Devs move on before the players do. I'm still miffed about the death of RTS and the Classic Arena Shooter.

the only problem with open world games is technological limitations make them basically impossible. even daggerfall is not truly open world. you can't go to vvardenfell or cyrodil or whatever, you have to play different games for that.
the problem is marketing takes advantage of normies not understanding this and the games are constructed in a way that feels confined because they don't want you to notice the seams at the edges, nor do they want people to complain about walking for 5 minutes or more, so "open world" just ends up being "really big room"

Does it matter?

I think early blizzard games are the most influential. Diablo 1 took isometric RPG games and popularized real time combat.

tetris is basically just tennis. but i didnt grow up with tetris, maybe it was a social phenomenon

Take a listen to the behind the scenes of Open-World games after 2011, and they'll directly quote Skyrim as being their inspiration.
I know for a fact that both Witcher 3 and BotW do.

I dunno anon, I'm not sure I can handle being expected to run from one empty vista to another on foot again. At least RDR2 and GTA acknowledge the inherent ask by giving you fast transport.

It's always weird to me how Bethesda shit works struggled with fast travel but refused to give any sort of improvement to actual fucking movement except in earlier games where you could just huff restoration.

and they'll directly quote Skyrim as being their inspiration.

*Because it made a lot of money

The isometric aspect is only to depict the wide array of locations anons. Would you rather visit a hundred unique and interesting places in a world or twelve and have to run between them?

yeah, Wizardry or Ultima were more influential than SMB. So were some Westwood games like Dune 2 and C&C

Tetris is the most overrated fucking game of all time. Everyone's like "omg tetris is so influential and it's the best game ever" but it's fucking boring after five minutes. I'm old as shit...probably twice as old as whoever you are reading this comment right now but nobody gave a shit about tetris all that much until the Gameboy came out and even then people only cared because it was a pack in title but no one played it all that much. Plus that was like 1989/90 and video games were pretty well established by then. Fuck tetris.

Super mario brothers on the NES is the most influential game of all time,at least in the United States. It's what ushered video games into a suburban mainstay. Without SMB vthe trajectory of video games would have gone much different in the US because it was shallow and ugly atari shit and very very niche. Nothing mainstream. It's like how Pokémon and mighty Morphin power rangers created a demand for anime and set a standard/baseline for it in the US. Sure, it might have gotten popular eventually but it's impossible to imagine it taking hold so quickly without those

Absolutely nailed it. Survival crafting became a meme because everyone wanted to chase Mojang money without understanding what made Minecraft special in the first place—emergent play, creativity, and sandbox freedom. Instead we got endless half-baked hunger meters and clunky inventory management slapped onto generic worlds. Same with zombies: they're either a thematic backdrop you manage cleverly (Project Zomboid), or a tedious horde to shoot at with no real consequence or tension. Devs forgot gameplay loops matter more than trendy aesthetics.

1.pong
2.pacman
3.Mario bros
4.Doom
5.zelda
6.metroid
7.dragon quest
8.Pole position
9.Tetris

I think what makes ocarina of time so much better is because it managed to reach for nes level of influence.

Of course being first will have an advantage of how influential you are.

ET

I guess he's mostly right. I want to say that tetris isn't important because someone would've inevitably come up with that puzzle format, but that's probably true of super mario too.
It's definitely not the greatest though. As far as that goes, as sad as it is, candy crush has probably blown it the fuck out many times over by now.

Anon Babble still tsundere for our next president

You'd vote for him faggot. Don't deny.

zoomer brainrot is so extreme they care more about """hot takes""" than being correct and truthful

Faggot

Todd Derangement Syndrome

I guess it depends on how you judge what makes a game important, but in terms of "timelessness", it's hard not to put Tetris as the most timeless game of all time. You could hand a copy of Tetris to a human 500 years in the past or 500 years in the future and they'd all have just as much fun with it as we do now. Not sure the same can be said with the other games on the list.

You can tell how correct an opinion by the level of seething effort posts it generates, and oh boy is Todd Howard correct af

pew pew through corridors and repeat

Bong bing wahoo, yahoo!! Wah wah!

Wow so influential.. Truly the culmination and essence of videogames as a whole..
Was this retard even involved in Morrowind?

What exactly does Pac-Man and Tetris do for gaming to make them important?

those games are shit

Tetris sucks. I recognize its historical significance in the early days of vidya, but these days a tetris-like game is dumb phone shit like Candy Crush. It hardly even counts as a videogame.
Doom and Mario are much more relevant to modern games. Zelda should also be on that list.

Daggerfall is just Doom with swords and procedural maps.

I am forgotten