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History of Video Games 1972-2007

When we visited my parents in February, it occurred to my dad that both my brother Jamie and I now work in the video game industry. Jamie started his own company, Klei Entertainment, whilst I joined an early stage startup for gamers called Raptr. My dad said,

I let you guys play too many video games when you were kids.

Well it turns out that may have been true. Of the 114 games listed in this video (via DocPop), I’ve played 83. Here are the 31 that I somehow skipped. As a side note, the biggest omission, Civilization, was very deliberate.

  1. Adventure 1980
  2. Pitfall 1981
  3. Final Fantasy 1987
  4. Maniac Mansion 1987
  5. Mega Man 1987
  6. Commander Keen 1989
  7. Civilization 1991
  8. Micro Machines 1991
  9. Sensible Soccer 1992
  10. Dune II 1992
  11. Virtua Racing 1992
  12. Starfox 1992
  13. Myst 1993
  14. The Settlers 1994
  15. Earthworm Jim 1994
  16. Donkey Kong Country 1994
  17. Chorono Trigger 1995
  18. Rayman 1995
  19. NiGHTS Into Dreams 1996
  20. Pokemon Gold/Silver 1999
  21. Ratchet and Clanck 2002
  22. Call of Duty 2003
  23. Wind Walker 2003
  24. Warioware 2003
  25. Rome: Total War 2003
  26. Final Fantasy XII 2006
  27. FIFA Soccer ‘07 06
  28. Sam and Max Episodes 1-6 2006
  29. Elder Scrolls: Oblivion 2006
  30. Viva Pinata 2006
  31. Motorstorm 2007

3 Comments

I’m not going to be annoying and say “Oh shit, you never played Mega Man!?!!1!!”.
Instead, I’m just going to go through your list and say…
It’s a shame you missed out on Pitfall. It had great sound effects and colors. Another good Atari sidescroller was H.E.R.O.
I do think it is pretty crazy you haven’t played the Megaman series. That was the first game I remember really being obsessed with. Wait… naw, maybe Super Mario was, but Megaman was a bigger influence on my artistically than any other video game. The style of the figures was so different, considering I was used to reading Marvel comics, and so fresh. More inspired from modern design than manga or other video games, the designers somehow gave Megaman that cute/sad look with just a few pixels.
Earthworm Jim wasn’t that great of a game, but it was one of the first games that sort of had that “straight from a comic book” look to it that games like Sam and Max would later adopt. A fantastically animated game (for the time) whose game cartridge contained a whopping 24 megs.
It looks like our gaming history’s are a little different. I’ve always been a generation or two behind in terms of gaming, even when I was young. I was rocking my atari for a couple of years after the NES came out, since there were hardly any games being made anymore, I picked up hella games from yard sales. Eventually, my parents “splurged” and bought a used NES family set (with Rob the Robot and the light gun), but of course the Turbografx had been out for a while and the Genesis had just been released. Anyways, I recently got a modded xbox on ebay and I burned through a ton of games from about 3 years ago. there was some great stuff, like Psychonauts! Man I loved that game.
Anyways… are you sure you haven’t played Megaman?

Posted by Doctor Popular on 5 April 2008 @ 11pm

btw, if you are interested, feel free to come talk about games at the next Game Theory. http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/467714/
It’s just an informal get together, sometimes we play games, sometimes we talk about making new games, mostly we talk about pr0n.

Posted by Doctor Popular on 6 April 2008 @ 12am

Ha! I haven’t tallied what games I’ve played to get a count yet, but Doc, Game Theory sounds totally up my alley and I’m going to try and make it out for it.

Posted by Jason on 6 April 2008 @ 7pm

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