Summary
- BAFTA has revealed its 21 most influential video games of all time.
- Shenmue has taken the top spot with Doom right behind it, and then Super Mario Bros. rounding out the top three.
- Two Grand Theft Auto games, Half-Life and Half-Life 2, and Minecraft have also made the list.
BAFTA caused quite a stir when it awarded Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft the crown for most iconic video game character of all time, and it may be about to do the same again. To celebrate its 21st Game Awards, BAFTA has named its 21 most influential games of all time, and Shenmue has topped the list.
If you run down all 21 games BAFTA has included on its most influential list, which you can find below, pretty much every game on there is a well-known title with clear influence (apart from number seven, more on that in a second). However, to see Shenmue rise above them all might be something that irks quite a few people, especially when the likes of Doom, Grand Theft Auto, and the original Super Mario Bros. have been forced to settle for lower spots in BAFTA’s influential rankings.
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While placing Shenmue at the top of the list will undoubtedly rub quite a few people the wrong way, the influence the Dreamcast classic has had on games to this day is undeniable. It changed the way developers approached open worlds, and perhaps more importantly, how players could interact with those worlds and everything in them.
BAFTA Has Run Down Its 21 Most Influential Games Ever
How Do We Feel About Shenmue At Number One?
Those elements were clearly a direct influence on the 3D GTA games that started to arrive just two years after the original Shenmue launched on Dreamcast, not to mention most other games that feature an explorable open world. Between that, its NPCs, and how it handled the in-game flow of time, Shenmue was inarguably the foundation for so much we see in video games to this day.
Moving on down BAFTA’s list, you’ll find the aforementioned Super Mario Bros. Without that first Mario game, we wouldn’t have 2D sidescrollers in the way we would come to know them via the games that followed. The same applies to Doom and first-person shooters, and 1993’s Doom rounds out BAFTA’s top three.
While Tetris, Metal Gear Solid, and Final Fantasy 7 all deserve to be in there, number seven is the only confusing entry on this list. BAFTA has named Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 the seventh most influential game of all time. I’m not entirely sure how a game that was only released two months ago has managed to have that much influence on the games industry as a whole, and there’s no real explanation as to why it made BAFTA’s list, let alone ranked so highly, placing higher than games like Dark Souls and Super Mario 64.
BAFTA’s 21 Most Influential Games Of All Time
- Shenmue
- Doom
- Super Mario Bros.
- Half-Life
- The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time
- Minecraft
- Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2
- Super Mario 64
- Half-Life 2
- The Sims
- Tetris
- Tomb Raider
- Pong
- Metal Gear Solid
- World Of Warcraft
- Baldur’s Gate 3
- Final Fantasy 7
- Dark Souls
- Grand Theft Auto 3
- Skyrim
- Grand Theft Auto
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