Perhaps I’m showing my age, but the density of games that were able to chart completely new territory is impressive.

• Dune II - 4X strategy
• Sim City - simulation games
• Star Control II - open world procgen
• Doom - first-person shooter
• Monkey Island (or Age of the Tentacle) - adventure
• Civilization - strategy

I’m not sure if they’ve had the same impact, but they had a massive impact on me.

• XCOM: UFO Defense - still the scariest game I’ve ever played
• Syndicate - I just keep thinking about it
• Master of Orion II - another space 4X game

I haven’t played nearly as many games as I used to recently, but here are some titles that created space for a new genre:

• Cookie Clicker - clicker games
• Minecraft - crafting
• Stardew Valley - idle games

Why?

A few thoughts.

The 90s was an interesting time to be a game developer.

The skills that you honed on 8-bit systems could be used to create significantly more impressive games. The 16- and 32-bit systems that emerged in the 90s were wildly more powerful. Although it might look hobbled by today’s standards, a 40Mhz 386 processor was a beast compared to what might have expected 10 years’ prior.

A lot of the computing capabilities were new and demanded . Graphics cards and sound cards were being added to consumer devices. Some computers even had large resolution monitors, e.g. 640x480 .

Prince of Persia demonstrated that it was possible to for individual programmers and small teams to create seriously competitive titles. All that was required was some creativity.

You competition was arcade games in physical arcades. It would be late in the decade for developers to learn how to make use of Sony PlayStation, such as Crash Bandicoot.

Multi-player options were fairly limited, which meant that the single-player version needed to be really good.

A lot of the cultural expectations for what a video game should provide were not set. This allows game designers to discover

Small teams have less bureaucracy to deal with. There are fewer approvals needed to try something interesting.

Small teams didn’t need to be ridiculously profitable to create something that was commercially successful. This provides space for more creativity. Just as how large movie studios need to re-hash old content and tropes because they need things to be commercially successful, large game studios are similar. They need to make lots of money because the games built by large teams are are expensive to make.