Video Gamers Podcast - Most Influential Games - Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: April 11, 2022

Gaming hosts Michael, Josh and Paul are back with another absolutely epic Bonus Round. We talk about some of gaming’s most influential games. Watershed games that changed a genre, or the way games were developed that changed the future of gaming. This is one episode you don’t want to miss! Thanks to our LEGENDARY supporters: Redletter, Nevo, Waynerman, TFolls, AceofShame, Jake, RangerMiller, and Ad Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/multiplayerpodcast Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: instagram.com/multiplayerpod/ Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/MultiplayerPod Subscribe to us on YouTube: youtube.com/channel/UCU12YOMnAQwqFZEdfXv9c3Q Visit us on the web: multiplayerpodcast.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the year 2022, gamers everywhere are in despair, with no good gaming podcast to listen to, until out of the ashes arose the Multiplayer Gaming Podcast, with its funny hosts, incredible gaming content, and phenomenal community. You too can be the hero the world needs by heading over to MultiplayerSquad.com and helping support the show. Now let's hear from our champions in this incredible episode. What's up everyone? Welcome to the Multiplayer Gaming Podcast. We are three dads who love video games, and so we get together and talk about gaming on this show, and we release two episodes per week.

If you want to bump that up all the way to four weekly episodes, and if you want to help support this independent podcast, head over to MultiplayerSquad.com to see our Patreon page. And thank you so much to all of you out there who are currently supporters. Please make sure to rate our show five stars and leave a written review if your podcast app allows. And you can also find us on Twitter and Instagram at MultiplayerPod. I am your host, Paul. And joining me is the man whose beard changed the face of gaming forever. It's Josh.

I love that my beard is getting its own personality going. And what's funny is I had to go with the summer beard. It's getting hot in Arizona. I cannot carry the Kratos beard into an Arizona summer. And so I'm clean cut beard man right now. But I'm all for this, man. Maybe I need to put my beard on Instagram. Yeah, it doesn't matter. Your summer beard would still be like the most epic beard. If I collected all of my beard trimmings of my entire, hopefully, 92 to 94 year life, I might be able to spirit gum on what you have right now. Josh, you said exactly what i was gonna say i think you need to make a twitter page or something just for your beard i think it deserves it at this point

and then we have the man whose immaculate style and smile also changed the face of gaming forever it's michael my um man you're a poet and didn't know that was great rhyming there. Unfortunately, my smile does not have I'm still on. I'm still on Josh's beard right now. Like I can't I'm like my smile doesn't look complete because I don't have this beautiful man mane around. That's all right. But you know what you do have, Michael, you have a face meant for podcasting. That's true. That's why I do this. Oh, man. All right. Today is a bonus round episode, and we are going to be looking at watershed games that changed the gaming industry forever. So we are talking about games that were so influential that future developers and publishers had to copy certain elements from

those games. So we're talking about those major games that kind of took the industry one way or another, and there was no looking back. So if you want to think of it as watershed games, most influential games, that's basically what we're going to dive into today. Although before we jump into that content, Josh, I think you've got a couple of reviews people have left? We broke 300 reviews. Where's the confetti? Where's the balloons? Could the listeners not see it? But yes, we broke 300. Actually, we have 301 as of

now. So to everybody that has left us a review, thank you very much. They are still rolling in, and don't get me wrong we hit that landmark 300 but we want more so yeah we're gonna call this the sequel to 300 which is this is spotter no that's called 400 so so please keep them rolling in we're gonna keep reading them on the show and i'm going to read a couple these are good ones man this first one comes in from lord bob of the jungle and it is titled paul's shaking his head already it's titled pancakes all the way i started listening to this podcast when it was in its infancy and watched it grow to have some interesting perspectives and great takes on some of my favorite games not sure why it took me two years to write a review.

I don't often expect to be able to listen to a gaming pod with my kids, but the family friendly nature of this one is so refreshing because I listen to podcasts while driving. I often hop in my car to just drive around the block with my kids and appreciate the awesomeness of this show. While I miss Todd, I love the addition of Michael. Having three hosts allows the conversation to have a larger perspective,

and I actually appreciate when the guys disagree on some of their takes. Did I mention how awesome Michael is? Michael is great. Thank you for adding Michael. He's amazing. Also, Team Pancakes and 80s music win my heart. Yes. I would like to say this review is 90%

accurate, other than the Michael part. I'm not sure if Michael's 90% accurate myself, but that's amazing. I love that. Pancakes and 80s music are perfect. You're making fans already, which is great. Yeah, huge fans.

All right. Who is that written by? Lord Bob, a.k.a. Michael the Butler? Michael the Bootler. I don't know. I wonder who wrote that one. That was really good. Hey, got us over 300, though.

Really good job, Lord Bob the Jungle. All right, here we go. By the way, I can't believe that Michael is a co-host on the show and had not yet left us a review. Episode in and episode out, we're begging everyone to leave a review, and Michael finally got around to it, which I really love. Thank you, Michael. I thought that I did, too.

That's the funniest thing, is I'm looking back, and I remember I tried to leave a review. And at one point, it was a funny thing i tried to do on my computer there was a word cap the thing or whatever where i couldn't get through it and i was like i'll come back to this later i'll just handle it later on and then you know lord bob of the jungle took over my mind and pancakes and pancakes and 80s music for life for clarity yes this this was Michael's review. He actually left this review for the show, and yes, we know that. But it is a great lesson in the fact that if you're listening right now, you probably have heard us mention leaving reviews and have not left us one. So don't be like Michael, who is a host of this podcast and forgot to leave a review.

Please take the time to leave us one it really does help the show this next review is a legit review too so is it yeah let's hear it let's all right this one comes in from quite a tool who uh recently i do believe i've seen them in the discord server so thank you for joining the community and it's titled great podcast this one's a long one so strap in funny dudes and family friendly, occasionally wrong opinions about games. Five stars. I'll take it.

Thank you. Quite a tool. Who's also a patron. I was going to say that too, as a patron supporter. That's awesome. Yeah, that one's not me.

That's actually quite a tool. So, yep. So awesome. Thank you for that. And you know what? Hey, we,

I love the little jab. That's wrong opinions about games that's the beauty of this of gaming and this podcast is everybody's got different takes and that's why we're we're glad to be able to give some different perspectives uh on things so thank you to everybody left review including you michael thank you and i think that's a literal point of the discord is like to say, hey, do you guys disagree with some of our takes? Tell us about it. Let's talk about it. Let's maybe you'll change your minds. Probably not because our minds are awesome. Old.

Yeah. Old. So we're stubborn. Can't teach an old dog new tricks, right? Oh, man. Well, yes. Thank you so much for leaving the review. And for those of you out there who haven't done it yet, please just take a couple of seconds. We can see the number of listeners on each episode, and it's certainly greater than 300. We know that only a percentage of you guys have left a review. So we would really appreciate if you could just take a couple moments and knock that

out and then come back to the episode and finish it up. All right. So are you guys ready for this bonus round episode? I think we all have a list of influential games we shared a little bit of info but we didn't really talk at all about this i know i'm really excited to dive into this topic how are you guys i i am super hyped for this one man the second we started talking about this one i got i got pretty amped up so i i it's going to be glorious i am over the moon on this one this is this is probably one of

my favorite things to just like i'm going camping this weekend and i might even bring this up with my camping buddies because it's one of my favorite things to talk about is just wait we haven't spoiled the whatever we're about whatever he's about to say i don't want to spoil it already but this is one of my favorite things to talk about with video games all right so as far as what we want to tackle first the way historically we've always kind of done this is where we all just come up with our own lists and we just keep going around in a circle picking a game and then we talk about it for a few minutes and then kind of take things from there i think my list is probably the shortest so i should probably go last but which of you guys want to nominate the

first game that we're going to talk about josh's beard does wants to go first hey guys this is josh's beard and i want to talk about a great genre and a great game uh no i'm gonna bring up if we're talking about defining games, genre defining games, watershed type games for me as a huge fan of fighting games, you guys have heard me mention this game in the past, but man, it is true. And that this set the bar. It is the bar by which almost all other fighting games have taken influence

from. And that's street fighter 2 now paul i know that you love mortal kombat and you're a fan of mortal kombat probably more so than street fighter 2 that is correct but it wouldn't exist without street fighter 2 it's i mean honestly that's very true and and so just so everybody's clear too we're not saying that these games that we're talking about are the best games right this is not Hey, this is the best game in a genre or a category or something like that. What we're saying is these are, these are like monumental games that influenced games that came after them. Like Paul said, watershed games, right? The developers after

this game came out, borrowed that they you know they leaned on that they thought this is so great that we have to copy certain features of that stuff too so you know i mean personally street fighter 2 in my opinion probably is the best fighting game but in this case as far as its influence in the gaming industry i mean what what did did it do, right? If people remember the original Street Fighter, do either of you remember the actual original Street Fighter, not Street Fighter 2? Absolutely not. And I hate saying this because I love Street Fighter, but I do not remember it. Paul, what about you? Do you remember anything? I'm sure I've played it on emulators at some point, but I certainly did not play it back in the day. It's terrible. It is.

The reason nobody remembers the original Street Fighter is because it is Ryu. Or Ryu. I've always said Ryu. How do you guys say that? I say Ryu. Okay. Because I've heard people go Ryu. Ryu.

And stuff. And I'm like, I don't say that. I just say Ryu. But it's literally Ryu exactly cloned with just a different color that faces off. And that's how Ken came to be. And that's it. It's just one-on-one, no characters, no nothing. That's why nobody remembers the original Street Fighter. But lo and behold, in the glorious year 1991, Street Fighter 2 was released. And it came with a cast of memorable characters that not any other fighting game had done, to my knowledge anyway. Maybe there's one out there that had a couple characters, but nothing that was like the cast of characters that Street Fighter II had.

They displayed health bars. You knew how close your opponent was to dying. That was very unique in the fighting game genre at that point did they not have that in one i don't know if they had it in one to be we just talked about nobody remembers one michael no because that's amazing i'm watching yeah i am watching gameplay of street fighter 1987 right now and it looks really bad it does have hp bars but they're not even on the opposite sides they're just stacked right in the middle player one and enemy that's how it's listed so you know we were both

googling just now because i googled whatever watershed meant because we've mentioned it many times on this episode i had no idea i was like wait did i did i did i research the right stuff should we read a definition of watershed we still have it up maybe we should i'm like wait watershed um here here we go watershed uh it's an area of land where all the water that drains off it goes into the same place that that was not it which is not what we're talking about ecological gaming guys guys oh man yes watershed definition let's see here we would define it as an event or period marking a turning point in a course of action or a state of affairs so yes things that just changed the ultimate we said makes a lot of sense i'm so happy i googled the right stuff

when i prepared for this episode mich Michael's like so the wetlands yeah like I was like Google images is very different from the Google search or Wikipedia search with this episode went off rails real quick it did not take long so yeah you know getting back to Street Fighter 2

I think the thing about this game is like it was so influential in the arcades, which is I think mostly what we've talked about in the past with Street Fighter. This was when you would have everybody line up, and if you won your match, you stayed on the machine. And if you lost, you had to give up your place. And so it was almost like in-person tournaments, if you will, in the arcades. And we had so many fighting games come out in the 90s because of how immensely popular Street Fighter II was. We got all the Mortal Kombats. We got Primal Rage.

We got Killer Instinct. We got, I even did a Quick Take episode about fighting games and even games like One Must Fall, which was like a robot fighting game marketed for kids because the Street Fighter games were a little bit more adult. And this extends all the way into Super Smash Brothers. We still have fighting games that are coming out today, like the Nickelodeon whatever brawl game that they have. These are games that are still being made today, and it's all because of how much Street Fighter II popularized the genre. With very fast action and quick, precise movement,

I think the technology was first ready for that when Street Fighter II came out, which is why the old fighting games just look so bad. They look slow. They don't look very good. Street Fighter II, I think, really took advantage of that technology yeah it's funny you mentioned because um when you look at the three of us we actually all have a different uh watershed favorite uh fighting game uh paul yours was mortal combat right yeah yeah absolutely street fighter 2 came out when i was six years old yeah and i mentioned a previous episode how much i love Soul Calibur, which, thank you, Street Fighter 2. I tip my hat to you because Soul Calibur, you would not exist without Street Fighter 2.

And that's a huge thing. And I mean, honestly, Tekken, right? So this was like the glory days of fighting games because Street Fighter 2 came out in 1991. And it turned everything upside down as far as the fighting genre goes, right? You had Mortal Kombat came out the year after that. So 1992. Tekken, the original Tekken came out in 1994. Soul Calibur, I feel like came out a little bit later. If I had to guess, I would say that's 95 or 96 because maybe even a little bit later on that one. I loved Soul Calibur. But it's interesting because Tekken and Soul Calibur went with the 3D aspect where it wasn't on a 2D plane and you could

actually circle around your opponents and stuff like that. And so you saw where other fighting games were trying to continue to revolutionize what Street Fighter 2 started, but what followed? The cast of characters, the unique characters, the unique movesets, all of the special moves that each character had. That's, to me, what I really loved about those style of fighting games is I was a kick-butt Ken. I could not be beat if I was playing Ken. Honestly, I was at the peak of my game. But the goofy thing was you'd see some guy and he picked Dhalsim, the yoga guy. And you'd be like, Dhalsim? And then that guy would destroy me. And I'm like, where did this guy come from? Nobody plays Dhalsim. What are you talking about?

And that's what I loved about it is there was a character for everybody. People would gravitate towards certain ones. You think you would know what to expect, and then you wouldn't. And I love that aspect. You never know what you were going to come up against. I totally understand why you would pick this one, Josh. I think there's no denying that Street Fighter II left its mark on the gaming industry. I mean, people still play Street Fighter II, and you'll still see articles and things where they still do tournaments, and there's still this huge cult following even all these years later um all right so michael i think we are now on to you what you got as one of your watershed games it's so hard um to pick because i have a long list and there's no way we're getting through this um my whole list and they're all like, all of my games are near and dear to my heart. But, excuse me,

my favorite gaming style is RPGs. We can agree with that. We've talked about it a whole bunch. And my favorite sub-genre of RPGs is open world. You know, we just did our Elden Ring episode a while back. And Elden Ring would not exist, probably, along with Skyrim Oblivion, which is my favorite RPG of all time, without a little tiny Rockstar game called GTA 3. Grand Theft Auto 3. A lot of people don't know this. I didn't know this,

but it really was the first popular open world game. It was the first one to say that, hey, we're going to have side quests and side stories. And sometimes you're not going to know your progression. You're not going to know where you're supposed to go, which some people love, some people hate. But the idea is that it's open world. It's the first true open world game where it's what do you want to do? Where you want to go and just go do that and all the side missions which unfortunately is a bad thing for me because i've talked about how many times i have not finished a video game and i have 400 elden ring is a perfect example i had 52 hours in elden ring i didn't kill the first boss because i was like riding bicycles all over

town there's no town or bicycles in the game, but it's a figure of speech, guys. Roll with me. But I was all over the place with the side stuff. I just wanted to go explore the world. And so GTA 3, thank you for kind of being a bad thing for Michael Butler and also kind of being a good thing for the rest of the world. Yeah. It's such an advancement to give players the ability to go out and explore. Because you had stuff like Mario 64, right? When you would get into a level and the level itself

was open to explore, but you always still had that structure where you would finish the level, you'd go back to the castle, you would jump into another painting, whereas GTA 3, all of the NPCs, all of the mission givers, all of them are in that open world. You can go anywhere you want. You can shoot anyone you want. You can find collectibles and do crazy jumps off things. I mean, I just went through GTA 3. Unfortunately, I hate to admit, I did buy the remasters from Rockstar, and I went all the way through and beat GTA 3. It's still one of my favorite games to this day. And yeah, what a watershed moment being able to go into open world.

I feel like GTA 3, like, yes, I agree with you in the RPG nature of that. You're progressing your character. You have quests and things like that. A lot of people look at GTA 3 as the defining game for the sandbox genre. And it's like, I disagree with that a little bit because it's like, I don't know that I consider it sandbox in the traditional sense, like you would with Minecraft, right? For me, if you're going to talk about what's the defining sandbox game, I don't think that you can say anything but Minecraft in that regard. But if you're talking about open world, what helped to

define gaming in that category moving forward, I think you have to give credit to GTA 3 because it did things that no other game had at that point or not to the scale and the scope that other games had. And look where that's taken us. I mean, you mentioned it, Michael, Oblivion and Skyrim, that's got huge roots in GTA 3 at that point. Now you can get back into, I don't know what came first, Daggerfall or GTA 3. I'd have to look at the years on that or Morrowind, but I still feel like even then it's probably GTA 3 is the older of the bunch there. But yeah, I'm with you, man. I think that that defined a lot of the future of gaming. And the GTA series moving forward has just exponentially built on that amazing foundation.'s funny you mention minecraft because

i famously have not played minecraft i say this because i'm a famous person because i'm on the greatest podcast ever um and so i'm calling myself famous person but i have never played minecraft i've watched it a million times my kids played it like i feel like i've played it because i've watched them play it so many times but with i think minecraft is almost even like a sub-genre of sandbox because you literally don't have anything you have to do whereas gta3 what i think it did was said you don't have to progress the story with the missions that you're supposed to do in the main storyline you can go to other missions too so you kind of bring up a good point that makes me think right now like is minecraft a sub-genre of a sandbox and his sand i'm starting my head's about to explode on me

trying to think about what i actually think sandbox actually means at this point i'm gonna watershed that on google real fast um and type it yes proper proper usage of the word nailed it uh well i think gta 3 is a watershed game for other reasons as well. I remember GTA 3 being the first video game that I ever played that had famous, well-known movie stars who were voicing the characters. And I feel like GTA 3 was one of those first games that had the money to throw around to hire voice talent like that. I mean, and I guess they're not necessarily all A-listers, but anybody who loves movies knows Joe Pantoliano, Michael Madsen, Michael Rapaport, Debbie Mazur, Kyle MacLachlan. Like, if you're a movie buff at all, you absolutely know all of those people. And they weren't even necessarily in main character roles. You would get like a small side character and it would be voiced by someone that you maybe didn't know by name, but you absolutely recognize the voice.

And I feel like GTA 3 is the very first game that really kind of blended gaming and movies and started making them not quite so separate because you had really fantastic cut scenes you had really interesting storylines and you even had famous voice actors so i feel like they were kind of a pioneer in their own right in that regard as well yeah i'm with you also gta 3 came out in 2001 and marwin came out in 2002 so there you go wow yeah so it. So it so yeah, because I actually was thinking I'm like, did I pick the wrong game just now? Because Morrowind is famous for one thing is it didn't have quest markers

and it was at the time the largest game. It still is the largest open world game in the Oblivion series, the Elder Scrolls series. And that's interesting. So GTA 3 really kind of probably paved the way for more. Yeah, I mean, they were probably being developed, you know, right at the same time but gta3 released so they get the title you know hey everything that came after that yeah that's off yeah yeah absolutely i i love gta3 and uh

it was definitely a turning point in that industry no no question all right i think the first game that i'm gonna bring up taking a look at my list here um all right let's let's just go for wolfenstein 3d all right i mean we are talking about a game that released in 1992 it came out in dos it was made by id Software, and it is actually considered to be the, quote, grandfather of 3D shooters. That's what IGN had named them. And the Wolfenstein series was actually already around. There's a game called Castle Wolfenstein that truly looks horrific from 1981. And what they decided to do was to take that game, but instead put it in a 3D world where you are looking through the eyes of the main character. And while Wolfenstein was not the absolute first to do it, this is the game that is seen as the beginning of the FPS genre.

This game was very successful, and it certainly birthed things like doom and then going out to every fps that you know today i think we probably would have gotten there anyway but wolfenstein 3d is the game that just lit that match and totally set the whole industry ablaze i mean fps games i'm pretty sure are the best selling games today and this was the very first one that was popular. What's weird to me is when most people think about the shooter genre, the FPS, Wolfenstein was the start of all of that. But what's odd is that if you ask the majority of people out there and you say, hey, what was the first major first-person shooter that gained huge popularity?

What do you think 90% of people are going to say? Probably Doom. Doom. I don't think you're going to get that many people saying Doom. I think people our age knew Wolfenstein when it came out. But see, that's what I'm saying, right? I'm not disagreeing with you at all. I just think that-

If people who are like 25 and younger might say Doom, but I think people in their mid to late 30s and in their 40s, I think they would say Wolfenstein. I played Wolfenstein, you know? That was, I feel like I was eight. When did that come out? 92. 92. Okay, so I was four.

No, 92. You were born in 1988. Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you said 82. 92. so i was four no 92 i thought you said 82 92 so i was 14 i was like wait a minute okay i'm a little bit older than that guys we know you we know your beard is like 50 something but we think you're like in your 30s right i was yeah sure michael yes absolutely i was 14 well i mean think about you know i'm at the heart of like teenagerhood and Wolfenstein releases. And I go, dude, this is the greatest thing ever. I'm blowing up Nazis. You know what I mean? I'm knocking, I'm opening doors. You didn't know it was going to be in a room. And there's a captain and some soldiers and stuff like that. And then you're like, oh, no. So Wolfenstein absolutely started the genre. And I'm with you in that, yes, I think Doom was what brought it into mainstream popularity. But Wolfenstein has to get its due in that regard, because I think Doom made it better for sure. But Wolfenstein

was the OG in that regard i think doom really only gets more credit sometimes because it did sell more copies you know what i mean it was it was the first one that blew up like it blew up but doom would not have existed without wolfenstein i mean maybe it would have at the same point but i think wolfenstein really is what made people look at these games at the fps genre and say hey you're onto something this was good and i love the way it was structured with each level that you went i think because i think it was subterranean so you were going down but in my mind at the time you know tenure of michael was going up um where level nine was like oh man now i'm at level 10 it's gonna be real hard

and real rough uh you know what true story um because i think you guys have said all the stuff that i would want to say about wolfenstein except for one thing i got wolfenstein youngblood a couple years ago which is a really really fun shooter i liked it a lot there's a wolfenstein emulator inside of wolfenstein youngblood oh that you can play i think i have like 12 hours in the emulator and like eight hours in the main game because I don't own Wolfenstein 3D. So I kept playing the Wolfenstein game in the Youngblood emulator. I mean, that just shows how amazing it was. I will say that I think Doom aged better. I know that Wolfenstein released some recent releases. it a Colossus or what's the most recent Wolfenstein? It was good,

man. Graphics were amazing. Gunplay was great. I can't think of the name of it. I want to say it was Colossus or something like that, but I think you're right. Um, but doom just got better and better and better.

And I think maybe that was because of the mainstream popularity and people said, Hey, we want more doom. And at that point they didn't either, they didn't know about Wolfenstein or they just didn't care at that point. Well, id Software stopped. It's the only Wolfenstein game they ever made. All the others are made by other developers.

That's right. So they licensed out the Wolfenstein name to other companies. So id actually made Wolfenstein 3D. Then they made Doom. So they're both made by the same developer and then they stuck with making their own doom games where like doom eternal is made by id but all of the wolfenstein games are are you know licensed out now one thing that i think id software did really well is when you're talking about converting games from being side scrollers or being 2d to being in a

first person perspective and you're gonna run around and shoot things you can already and if you're like my age you remember all the controversy around violence in video games oh yeah and what a smart decision to say okay we're gonna move to fps we're gonna shoot things with real guns well we don't want to get too many you know letters complaining about this so let's just make it nazis because right right who's right who's gonna defend like running around shooting nazis it's a little bit easier of a pill to swallow when the violence is perfectly well deserved against nazis and then what did they do with Doom? They made it demons.

I feel like if you're going to run around and shoot Nazis and demons, it's a little harder to complain. Yeah. I love it. So, yeah, without Wolfenstein, you don't have Doom. And also, one other thing is that Wolfenstein really solidified the shareware model. So for anyone who is not aware of what shareware means, they actually released the first episode of Wolfenstein 3D for free, and they would distribute it. Anybody could play it.

And if you liked it, then you would order the other episodes and they would come by mail. And Wolfenstein was, I believe, the most successful shareware game to date. And not only that, fans loved Wolfenstein so much that they actually created their own level editors that they would share with other programmers. And id loved the fact that users did that. They actually ended up releasing a pack of 800 fan-created levels in Wolfenstein. Wow. And they ended up incorporating that into Doom and in later installments.

So even the fact of user-created levels, shareware, first-person perspective, all of that stuff was pioneered by Wolfenstein. Does that almost make that the beginning of the modding community? I believe so. Honestly, quite possibly. Wow. It's certainly right up there now there were people modding arcade systems but that technically was like a breach of service and that was not very accessible you had to like hardwire boards and connect them i think wolfenstein was like the beginning of like modern modding so yeah had to include wolfenstein uh good pick yeah or actually josh

you're the one who went first right so coming back to josh what you got for another influential game okay um i have a little bit more to say we'll see if we have time but there is another shooter that i think defined things moving forward but i'll save that just so we can switch gears a little bit um so let's go into rpgs for a minute okay now now what an amazing i mean we all are huge fans of rpgs rpgs go all the way back man i i mean I don't know if you guys... Did any of you play Ultima? Like the actual original Ultima? No. I watched my buddy play it. And he was playing it later on. I was playing EverQuest and Ultima was still around. I said, you got to play EverQuest instead because that... Yes. Yes. And so, I mean, RPGs go way, way back. But for me, there an rpg that i think changed everything and it brought rpgs again into

the mainstream it did everything you could possibly want an rpg to do and that is final fantasy 7 okay now i know i don't paul you never played final fantasy 7 right oh yeah i've played it did you the original multiple times okay i couldn't remember i thought i had i thought you had Now, I know, Paul, you never played Final Fantasy VII, right? Oh, yeah. I've played it. Did you? The original? Multiple times. Okay. I couldn't remember. I thought you had mentioned maybe you didn't play it.

No, I did not play it like in 97 or whenever it came out. I probably played it around like 2000, 2001. It was a couple years later, but I definitely played it. Okay. So, Michael, maybe it was you then. It was. And I'm guilty of this. This is one of those things that I do is that I take things that I've always wanted to do,

like watch The Godfather. I watched The Godfather for the first time my entire life a year ago, and I take these things and put them on such a high pedestal, and I'm like, the Final Fantasy VII is on a pedestal. I'll play it someday, but I don't know if I want to do that right now, because I know-

It would be terrible. It would be terrible today. Which is terrible- You missed your window. I've waited so long. I'm bringing that window back. We're remastering it. It would be terrible today, which is terrible. I'm bringing that window back. We're remastering it. It's got a remake. Yeah,

it does have remake, which is really good part of it, right? Yes. It's just like the first kind of quarter of the game, I think, but final fantasy seven did so many things that no other RPG had done in such a complete package.

And that's the thing, right? I've never played Chrono Trigger. I know that there's a lot of people out there that have said, hey, if you're talking about Final Fantasy being a watershed type game, then you can't leave out Chrono Trigger. I hear that a lot, but I've never played Chrono Trigger because I was so involved in Final Fantasy VII. But I mean, can you think of an RPG at that time, Paul, that did everything that Final Fantasy VII did? Number one, the character system, the party, right? You had to build your party. You'd meet people and they'd join your party. And you'd have healers and you'd have tanks and DPS guys. I mean, we could spend an hour talking about the casino part of Final Fantasy VII. I spent days in the casino grinding. I don't even know what the credits are called anymore.

You know, Sol? Was it Sol? Maybe that's a different game. Or all the Chocobo content. The Chocobo content, the summons. That was the real thing that, let's be honest, set Final Fantasy VII apart, was you could get these massive summons that would do this huge cinematic you know and then it would help obliterate the enemies in that game and i remember grinding for weeks to get like the neo bahamut guy that was the dragon that would go out into space and then would like rear back and do this omega blast all the way down to the planet you'd see it and it would hit all the enemies and just light them up and stuff like that but you know the materials that you could play that part of it i mean there's so many aspects of final fantasy 7

i think that rpgs that came after that honestly in a way they could not duplicate everything that final fantasy 7 did on that scale. So they didn't try. What they did is they said, hey, you know what? We're going to take pieces of this and we're going to use them. But I think it was an absolutely defining game in RPGs. I'm a huge fan of turn-based RPGs. So obviously, the combat in Final Fantasy VII was amazing. The story. We talked a long time ago about games with super memorable moments. And I don't remember if it actually made that episode. But there's a super emotional moment in Final Fantasy VII. I'm not going to spoil anything because they're doing

the remakes and I don't want to ruin anything. You know what I mean? But it's one of those... I love everything that it did when that game was out there was absolutely nothing like it that that was out at the time and i love what it did for the rpg genre moving forward after that the electronic gaming monthly magazine actually is on record by saying that final fantasy 7 taught gamers, quote, how to cry. And so they were citing that as being really influential. And GameSpot actually named it the second most influential game ever made back in 2002. So it certainly left its mark, no question. If anybody wants to learn how to cry, just sit down with me sometime and watch Love Actually.

I'll show you how to cry. Just sit down with me sometime and watch Love Actually. I'll show you how to cry. But that's the sad thing, right? Today, I don't think you could go back and really enjoy Final Fantasy VII. I think it's going to be way too dated. The remake is super good, but it's only a portion of the game and it doesn't capture all the magic because you had to experience it from beginning to end to truly understand the grandeur that was Final Fantasy VII. And I don't think you get that with the remake. The remake is great, and it's super fun, and I highly recommend it to people that are interested. But Michael, I fear you missed that window because I don't think it would hold up today.

What is so dated about it? Is it the old 3D graphics? Because I play some old turn-based games. I think Heroes of Might and Magic 4, I load it up still sometimes i love those games it does not even scale to a 16 by 9 monitor like it's an old 4 by 3 crt and it looks terrible and i'm like i'm but i'm still i'm still playing i'm still doing turn-based stuff right is it is it just because that was an early 3d modeled game and that just doesn't translate well yet i mean honestly for the time the graphics were revolutionary they were great you know and so i don't know it's not always just the graphics it's

very grindy to to do like a lot of the stuff that you need to do in final fantasy 7 you legitimately had to spend days grinding stuff yes running in circles and just doing random fights. You know, or hoping for a drop, a materia drop, so that you could get one of those amazing summons. I mean, for a completionist like you, I feel like Final Fantasy VII probably had two, three, 400 hours worth of content, like legitimately to where, you know,

I think today's day and age, it's probably just too grindy for a lot of people. You guys would never see me again, because I am a completionist. You would like never like they're just like, Hey, we're supposed to record the podcast. What's Michael doing? You go look on my PlayStation emulator or something like that. Like I was playing Final Fantasy VII for like the 60th hour in the last week. Yeah. Yeah. I think the remake is more for people who want the nostalgia of playing through it again. It's not the most exciting RPG today, but it certainly was back in 97.

Yeah. It captures a lot of the original and does it justice in modernizing it. I mean, I think it's a plenty. If you'd like the JRPGs, I think it's great. It definitely follows that. There's definitely better ones out there, though. All right, Michael. All right.

I'm going to go ahead and flip the script real fast because we've been talking about things, games so far, that have revolutionized gaming in a positive way. And I'm actually going to kind of break the rules, but I'll be quick about it because I'm going to bring up two games real quick that actually destroyed the gaming industry at the time. I love this. Influential in a bad way.

Influential in a bad way. And yeah, it's a negative watershed. The watershed has like creaking wood. It's not holding water well at all the water is just on the ground that i'm sorry i'm just googling watershed pictures again and it's just all right so the first one is et the extraterrestrial and the second one is shen mu and what i'll do is i'll just really quickly say how they destroyed what they were doing at the time. So E.T., of course, was like one of the biggest movies in history. Still love that movie. It's great. It's great.

It basically put Steven Spielberg on the map, right? That was Spielberg, right? Yeah. Yeah, he already did Jaws. Jaws put him on the map, but Spielberg... E.T. solidified it. Yeah, some of those great directors, you see something they do that's amazing, and they do one, they're one and done. And then E.T. came out, and they're like,

maybe the Spielberg guy's a big deal. We need to get this E.T. game, Atari says, out by Christmas. We need it out by Christmas, and we're going to throw so much money at it to make it out by Christmas. I think they took a different game and just called it E.T.

and threw things on top of it. And it was so bad that it literally made atari go away like not literally it was atari was already kind of on a downward spiral a tiny bit it was kind of like what vr did a decade ago when the oculus rift came out and everyone's like hey this is amazing and then people just kind of walked away from it they're like hey is that home gaming really gonna be a thing for a while? Maybe not. Maybe it is. It's great. And then E.T. came out and people are like, we're over it. We don't want to go buy consoles anymore. We're not doing this, which ironically enough, paved the way for Nintendo,

because a few years later, Nintendo came out with their NES system and the Mario Brothers and all that stuff. And they're like, oh, wait, maybe we do want to and the Mario Brothers and all that stuff. And they're like, oh, wait, maybe we do want to come back to this and do have fun with it. And so E.T. destroyed Atari. And just like Shenmue made Sega make a transition from being a console maker to just a software maker. So Shenmue cost $47 million to make. And when they were developing it, they were thinking, hey,

Sega Dreamcast is coming out. It's great. It's going to be amazing. It's going to be the biggest thing in the world. And then unfortunately, nobody bought a Dreamcast. But because Shenmue was so expensive, it would have... There was a famous thing that they said that in order for Shenmue to actually survive or to make its money back, every single person that owned a Dreamcast would have had to

have bought two copies of Shenmue. And so it destroyed Sega. And then Sega, a few months or a few years later, it was a very short time later, said, hey, we're going to focus on making arcade games and we're going to focus on making software. And so that's my whole thing. I know I kind of went in a big circle there with a whole bunch of stuff, but these are two games that almost derailed. Like Sega before Shenmue was enormous. Sega Genesis, SNES. What else was there?

Sony came out with the PlayStation around the same time. The PS2 came out right when the Dreamcast came out. And I think that might have paved way to Sony's success because at that time, Sony could do no wrong and Sega could do no right. So anyways, just wanted to throw that out there. What was the documentary?

Paul, I think you watched it. It talked about a lot of the history of gaming and they mentioned, because they were talking about Atari, they mentioned E.T. and they brought it up in that documentary. It was... I think it's called High Score.

High Score. And it's on Netflix. Yes, it was on Netflix. Everyone go watch it. Really good series. Yes. And they actually go into the absolute downfall that was E.T.

because E.T. had taken the world by storm as a movie. I still, to this day, remember watching E.T. in the movie theater with my parents. It's the first movie experience that I can actually remember. And I remember crying like a baby during E.T. I thought it was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen. I mean, I was a baby, basically.

And then I was a huge fan of Atari. My parents got us an Atari for Christmas one year. I absolutely lost my mind because it meant we could play games at home. And I remember being very excited for E.T. And that game flopped harder than any other game in history, man. And it's funny because they cover a large part of that in the documentary. So if you haven't seen High Score, I don't know if it's still on Netflix or not, but that was a great documentary. 100% agree. Yeah, I believe it's still up there uh I was not born yet when E.T. the movie or the game had come out but when you watch that documentary you see news stories

where they're basically saying all right that's it we're going back to the arcades the home gaming industry is dead like this is this is the kill shot and uh yeah it's rather remarkable that Nintendo even was able to turn it all around single-handedly it's so weird to think that we almost like almost missed and completely derailed the gaming industry whereas now today it's one of the highest grossing industries around like it makes so much money even compared to like movies and stuff it's it's wild it's crazy that games cost what movies cost and sometimes more now because you think about it like what was entertainment you go to blockbuster video okay

roll with me back to 1997 you go to blockbuster video on the way back home you get pizza and popcorn or something like that and your whole family does that and the movies cost a ton of money and now you're like movies were a big event and now just like almost every game now costs as much as a movie costs yeah the industry's so big well and even now like netflix gives you a new movie every single week so it's like they just come rolling in and these games on the other hand take sometimes eight years or more like when we talked about red dead 2 you know it's a game that costs 700 million dollars That's insane. Movies aren't costing that much. All right.

So let's see here. I think we're back to me. I'm taking a look because obviously we are already three quarters of our way through this episode. I think, hmm, what do you guys want to talk about? Do you want to talk about Team Fortress Classic or do you want to talk about Tomb Raider? Ooh, I have Tomb Raider. Tomb Raider? Yeah.

All right, let's talk about Tomb Raider. All right, so Tomb Raider came out in 1996. It was released on PC for DOS and also on Sega Saturn. And Tomb Raider, I think, is such a watershed moment because it really popularized having a female protagonist. Now, I know that Lara Croft is not the first, right? You get the whole reveal at the very end of Metroid that Samus is actually a female character. That was cool. There is nothing about Samus that makes you think you're playing as a woman, right? You're in a full suit. It's

kind of almost like an Easter egg at the end of the game. And even then, if you get the quote, best ending, she's in a bikini. So it's like even objectifying women in the first appearance of women in video games. And yes, I know Lara Croft suffers from that a little bit as well. All right. I know that. I know. But I feel like it was such a turning moment to be able to play a woman who's just going to run around and kick everybody's butt. This is not Peach being kidnapped and the damsel in distress being stuck in the castle.

It's not Zelda getting kidnapped by ganondorf who needs to be saved right you just run around as laura you're running around with these guns you're shooting everyone you are uh just an action hero that also just so happens to be female and i really love that i thought it was really cool at the time i'm really happy you brought this up because it really did pave the way for a lot of female protagonists. I don't even think maybe necessarily just for gaming. Around that time period, there was a lot more female protagonists in movies and all that kind of stuff. But she wasn't, like you said, not a damsel in distress. I mean, one of the earliest video games ever that became popular was Donkey kong and it's like cut and dry like oh this helpless

woman and this plumber mario has to go up there and help this woman and they did the same formula in mario and then here comes tomb raider and tomb raider is like no no no first of all this is one of the most amazing like like action heroes you've ever seen. And it's one. And it was amazing. And it was really fun to play. It also helps that the game was awesome. Yes.

Honestly, let's be honest. The entire Tomb Raider series is super enjoyable, man. So that's one where they've done a very good job of just making those games an absolute blast to play. But the original Tomb Raider was so much fun, man. I mean, this came after the whole Indiana Jones trilogy. We're not going to talk about the fourth one, but that whole thing had happened. It was still popular, even though this happened a while past that. But there wasn't a game that captured that feel like Tomb Raider did. You got to explore. You got to kick butt. You got to go up against

these puzzles and these challenges and make these discoveries and stuff. And the game was just great. And the fact that it was great with the female protagonist in it and that she was so bad you know i'm family friendly right but she was bad and and you did get to just you know kick booty man and like i love the fact that they were able to do that in a game that is absolutely amazing and has carried the series to this you know into this decade into the 2020s at this point. Still making them. Right. And they're making it because they're great, you know, and they all feel that.

I mean, there's some similarities there, but I feel like they're all unique enough. And they kind of they add on to that that I mean, great pick, man. I mean, and it's got good movies. And that's exactly what I was going to bring up. And who played Lara Croft? Angelina Jolie. Who was bigger in the early 2000s? No one was bigger than Angelina Jolie.

Nobody. Nobody. Which is Jon Voight's daughter, by the way. I don't know how many people know that. Yeah. Yeah, Jon Voight's daughter. Yeah. And then, of course, I love Alicia Vikander.

So I loved the new movie. It was not fantastic. But Alicia Vikander, so I loved the new movie. It was not fantastic, but Alicia Vikander, she was great in that. But I do think it's incredible, though, that the things about the game, too, is the games. I don't know if the first ones did this because I can't remember because I'm old. And they came out a long time ago. But they have little history lessons in them sometimes where you find this artifact and you learn in Lara's voice, like, Hey,

this happened. This is something from this. And I'm like, that's kind of cool. I didn't know. I don't get a history lesson from this video game. I love that stuff. It's a small things.

Yeah. I don't specifically remember that necessarily, but I do remember playing Tomb Raider with Josh's brother-in-law, Andy, because he and I were friends back in grade school. And I remember in seventh grade, he bought Tomb Raider and we would play it on his computer. And I remember it being the first game that would set you up for jump scares where you would like turn a corner and then a dog would like

jump on you and it would play the sound really loud. And I remember that being the first game that almost gave me a heart attack for, know 12 year old paul or whatever at the time and i remember that also being a neat part of it it incorporated like certain horror elements along with the adventure and the puzzles and even though lara may have not been like the most well-drawn character back in 96 i do think over time they've done a really good job with that like she's a fully realized character um I really love what they've done in that series. I buy every single Tomb Raider game because I think they're all absolutely fantastic. And sure, Pac-Man stuck a little bow on Pac-Man and called it Ms. Pac-Man. That's great and fine. I feel like Tomb Raider did a little bit more for

female protagonists to where you don't even bat an eye anymore right like we've got games like horizon zero dawn hellblade celeste bayonetta control no one cares that you're playing as a female because it's no big deal it was a big deal back when tomb raider came out in 96 i mean even the small thing like i have two characters in lost ark they're both female characters because different classes, you have to play as a female. And I'm never like, like back in EverQuest,

I never made a female character. I was like 17 years old when it came out. And now I'm like, I don't even think about it. I'm like, oh, cool. I made it as a female.

I'm gonna give her a cool name. Yeah. So we are almost out of time. We have just a couple minutes left. Do you guys want to mention maybe like, maybe give like a 45 second spiel on one or two games that are being left on the cutting room floor rapid fire i like this actually yeah rapid i gotta bring up super mario brothers as far as the platformer genre goes i mean the reason i say that is because i played pitfall which was one of

the original platformers so fun but. But there was Pitfall, like Donkey Kong. Donkey Kong involved jumping over obstacles, right? But it was all on one screen. You just tried to make it up to the top and jump the barrels and stuff. But Super Mario Brothers absolutely revolutionized that platforming, jumping over obstacles kind of idea that the industry kind of sort of had. They hadn't quite wrapped their brains around it yet. And then here comes Nintendo doing Nintendo things and saying, hey, we know how to make this an actual thing.

And they gave you the freedom of that smooth side-scroller and different levels that all had their own flair, their own flavor. You had missions, right? You had to go save the princess. You had bosses. You had missions, right? You had to go save the princess. You had bosses. You had Bowser and stuff like that. And without Super Mario Brothers, number one, I don't know that we'd have

the insane popularity with Nintendo that we had back in the day. And I don't think that we would have games like Mega Man, like Celeste, like Hollow Knight, like all these other platformer games and even some of the Metroidvanias, right? Because what's a big part of a Metroidvania is platforming to a certain degree.

So I think it's hard to quantify exactly what Super Mario Brothers did for gaming. I mean, again, we could probably spend an entire episode on it, but I mean, if we don't mention that in this, I feel like we would have missed out on something. So I to bring it up i know we're trying to move quickly so you know what you got great music yeah essential music too yeah i want to see if paul can go next because i'm going to challenge myself to get through six games in 60 seconds and spend 10

seconds on each of them talking about how they change the world and maybe paul will take one so that i can get 12 and a half seconds per each game well yeah i was gonna say good luck to you michael because uh i'm gonna bring up team fortress classic which i don't think you had on your list so team fortress classic and i think to a lesser extent unreal tournament both came out in 1999 and team fortress classic is what i want to focus a little bit more on. It was made by Valve, which seemingly cannot make a bad game. All of their games are just amazing. And these were online matches between two teams.

You had the red team versus the blue team. This game had modes like capture the flag, territory control, escort a VIP. But what this game did as making it a watershed game is the fact that it included different classes that had completely different abilities where you played a different role based on what you selected. So they had a scout, sniper, soldier, demo man, medic, heavyapons Guy, Pyro, Spy, and Engineer. And one of the cool things about that game, I'm not going to talk, obviously, about all the classes, but as the spy, you could disguise yourself to look like the enemy team, and you could then pull out your knife and try to kill someone, and you could also feign death.

So you could be keeled over on the floor wait for them to pass hop up and shank them and if we didn't have a game like team fortress classic we wouldn't have overwatch or league of legends or all of these games that have that built in it's all because of team fortress classic and the fact that the Orange Box came out having Portal, Half-Life, and Team Fortress 2. And I don't remember which entry of Portal was in there. I think it was Portal 1, Half-Life 2, and Team Fortress 2, if I remember. But what a killer's row. That all-time is the greatest collection of games at the time. The Orange Box was single-handedly the best thing to hit video

gaming because you got three absolutely incredible games that were all different for cheap, man. I actually had the original Orange Box. I wish I still had it. It'd probably be worth something. Probably, yeah. Yeah. And was Half-Life the FPS you were thinking that we might run after? It was. That's exactly... It's on my list. And I was going to say it defined that first-person shooters moving forward with the campaigns and the missions and the interaction and the set pieces. You know, like, I mean,

Call of Duty and these games that use those amazing scripted events and stuff like that. Half-Life pioneered all of that stuff. Half-Life also may be a dotted line to the fact that you know valve made that right without valve we wouldn't have steam the valve index we wouldn't have like if if half-life was not such a successful series would steam even exist i don't know but i wish they'd make more half-lifes

me too more half-lifes and more portals what are we doing they don't have to because they've got every single game ever they take yeah they print money for themselves and i spent a thousand dollars on this valve index which is beautiful and i never use it it's great all right michael are you ready for your quick hits? Do you need to take a deep breath? Oh, no, I'm not doing Micro Machine Man since we're going back to nostalgia. I can't do the Micro Machine Man. Nobody, I have a natural lisp and nasally voice anyways.

If I tried to talk that fast, everyone was like, what did he just say? All right, you got 10 seconds to game. We're starting the timer. All right, here we go. Tetris, what it did for mobile gaming. Without it starting the timer. All right. Here we go. Tetris. What it did for mobile gaming. Without it, the Game Boy would not have been a household success.

EverQuest. Because Josh is here, enough said. Yes! Just kidding. EverQuest. Because it was the first open world online game. It took what the other MMOs did before that and made it mainstream. And World of Warcraft, I don't care what you say, Paul, wouldn't exist without it.

Gran Turismo. Because it took the racing genre and made it real you could upgrade cars you could actually feel the stickiness of the tires in the game it did so much on a different level and the customization graphics were amazing dance dance revolution i don't want to talk about it because i hate it but that game was huge it had done something that no one had ever done it was responsible for rock band and guitar hero and it added an element of exercise to gaming what hold on who are we we're gamers 10 seconds oh gears of war because it added cover style shooting and there is never ever ever i'm gonna go 15 seconds over i'm so sorryars of War, because there was never...

So there was... An installed in-person shooter. Hold on. Hit the gas, Michael. Hit the gas. All right. There's never been a third-person shooter before that had cover-style shooting.

There is not a single third-person shooter after that did not have it. Boom. And it was co-op fun. And SM City, because without it, there'd be no Civilization, Total War, or The Sims. I'm done. I can breathe.

Well done. Very nice. You know, talking about Sim City, I do need to jump in and say, dude, that started like a whole industry by itself between not just the Sim games, but like the Caesar series, the Tropico series, Cities Skylines. The Tycoons. series the tropico series city skylines i mean you still have stuff like frost punk that are still built on the same dna as what you had in sim city yep it's pretty cool yeah that was a good list well done michael i agreed with a lot of those too i'm so glad you brought up years of war because that really changed a lot as well i just didn't want to only talk about shooters so yeah and then sim city i mean that's that's another one that i'm really glad we got to

mention at least because paul you hit it on the head man it changed a lot in gaming it really did even stuff like spore and the sims i mean the sim Sims 4 alone has probably grossed like $7 trillion or something by this point. It's been such a successful game. The Sims is the only game in... The Sims was the first game in a decade to knock off Myst as the most popular selling game of all time. So even

SimCity couldn't do that, and it begat The Sims. Yeah. And if you didn't have SimCity, you wouldn't have had the Sims. No, Myst would still be the highest selling game of all time. Just kidding.

Everyone knows it'd be Minecraft. Still drastic. It's true. Oh, on Gears of War, though, yeah, one of the things is I felt like it was interesting being an imposter here

bringing up a shooter, but since I'm not an FPS person, Gears of War is technically a third person shooter, so I felt honorable bringing it up. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Come on. Yeah, Gears of War rules. My aim is not any better, though. third person shooter so i felt i felt honorable bringing it up oh yeah absolutely come on yeah

gears of war rules my aim is not any better though all right well we're keeping this one actually pretty close to an hour i know we've been very chatty and we've been going really long lately but thank you so much for listening i know we were really excited to talk about some of these really influential games and as always we'll be back with our next episode on Thursday, breaking down this week in gaming. And the next deep dive will be tiny Tina's wonderlands, which we have been playing here the last week and a half. And I think that's it guys.

Anything else before we all say goodbye? Can we do another one of these? Cause I feel like there's a lot more games that we could talk about. Yeah, I think, I think you're right. I think we'd have to cut out like my minute long spiel. another one of these because i feel like there's a lot more games that we could talk about yeah i think i think you're right i think we'd have to cut out like my minute long spiel so i can just take all those for all our younger listeners that go i don't know any of those games those guys were talking about maybe we'll do one where it's like of the last 10 years sure i'm down we can

always do a part two and yeah any any only games that are in the 2000s or something, maybe. Yeah, good idea. All right. Well, thanks, everyone. And make sure to check us out on MultiplayerSquad.com to see our Patreon page. And we'll see you all on Thursday. Happy gaming, everybody. Cheers, all.

All right. See you, everybody.