What, in your opinion, is the most influential PC game ever made? Not necessarily the best, or the most technically impressive, or even the most popular - simply the one which had the greatest impact on shaping the world of PC gaming as we know it today.
Personally I'm not sure. I'm tempted to say Doom, because from that point onwards it pretty much established the First Person Shooter as arguably the most dominant genre in the industry. It wasn't the first FPS of it's type by any means, but what it did do was bring it the masses, and established the concept of deathmatch gaming. When you think about it, modern multiplayer FPS haven't really changed all that much since Doom. Plus we're still using phrases like frags, respawning, strafing and so forth - Doom also helped to create a special gaming vocabulary.
However, there are other games down the years which maybe have just a good a case. Quake took us properly 3d and introduced the TCP/IP client<->server model for FPS gaming which we are still using 10 years later, as well as being a killer app for 3d accelator cards. Whereas Dune2 effectively created a new genre too, the RTS, which has changed little over the years. Some people might even suggest Counterstrike(Halflife), as it helped to bring multiplayer pc gaming into the mainstream.
So, what do you think? I've set 1990 as a starting point, since prior to that there's probably a whole range of titles we could mention simply because they were first to market within a certain genre. The modern MMORPGs could arguably be traced back to MUDs from the 80s for example.
Personally I'm not sure. I'm tempted to say Doom, because from that point onwards it pretty much established the First Person Shooter as arguably the most dominant genre in the industry. It wasn't the first FPS of it's type by any means, but what it did do was bring it the masses, and established the concept of deathmatch gaming. When you think about it, modern multiplayer FPS haven't really changed all that much since Doom. Plus we're still using phrases like frags, respawning, strafing and so forth - Doom also helped to create a special gaming vocabulary.
However, there are other games down the years which maybe have just a good a case. Quake took us properly 3d and introduced the TCP/IP client<->server model for FPS gaming which we are still using 10 years later, as well as being a killer app for 3d accelator cards. Whereas Dune2 effectively created a new genre too, the RTS, which has changed little over the years. Some people might even suggest Counterstrike(Halflife), as it helped to bring multiplayer pc gaming into the mainstream.
So, what do you think? I've set 1990 as a starting point, since prior to that there's probably a whole range of titles we could mention simply because they were first to market within a certain genre. The modern MMORPGs could arguably be traced back to MUDs from the 80s for example.
