I see the phrase ‘ahead of it’s time’ used a lot like a long with words such as ‘underrated’ or ‘epic’ or ‘literally’, or ‘ironic’. I read how ahead of it’s time is used for literally any popular game that it alters the meaning of the phrase.
Anyways here is a list of games I feel would have sold or been more known had they been released several years in the future:
- Jurassic Park Trespasser: the YouTube channel ResearchIndicates and one of the most informative Let’s Play videos of all time best explains this game.
JPT had a rather ambitious physics engine AND open world environments which seemed pretty much undoable at the time, along with non gameplay breaking story flow with Attenborough himself. But just like with No Man’s Sky the hype engine and promising too much got the devs way over their heads and failed. Valve was able to continue what JPT started with Half Life, but I imagine if it had more time JPT could have been an immersive classic.
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Time Splitters Future Perfect an FPS with sharable Map Creation content. The problem I feel was many people didn’t try this as Halo’s Forge wasn’t out yet to bring to light what user content can really do, and less accessible online play at the time.
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Tony Hawks Pro Skater 3 Okay this doesn’t count, but I just want to mention this because the official Sony Network Adapter wasn’t even out yet when this released. You have to use a specific brand of Linksys or D-Link USb to Ethernet adapter on your PS2 to get it to work 😄. So I classify this ahead of it’s time due to the first party product not existing yet.
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Psychonauts. This was an easy one, non Mario platformers weren’t the trend among the ocean of best selling Xbox titles. Thankfully A Hat In Time much later showed the more mainstream appeal of small dev platformers.
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Dragon Quest 1 & 5 in the US. Not in Japan as you could shut down Japan for a day with the release of a new Dragon Quest game (tip for invaders). DQ has always struggled in the US partly due to, oddly enough, taking so long to reach the US. It’s a mix of too early and too late, with DQ 1 inventing the traditional console RPG format, and DQ5 being Pokemon before Pokemon, to quote Tim Rogers. But early DQ games releasing far too late on the NES life and not releasing on SNES I feel could have made DQ games closer to FF games in the US
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Puzzle Quest Challenge of the Warlords: a Match 3 game in the early days of Xbox Live arcade.
The timing would have had to be tight on this, had it come out around the time of monument Valley it would have been perfect to expose casuals to a match 3 game with more depth to it
But it was too easily for the match 3 craze, and now too late for the oversaturation of match 3 mobile games.
- Eternal Darkness Lovecraft is all the rage among public domain IPs nowadays. Eternal Darkness was all the fun of bizarre 4th wall breaking spooks combined with non frustrating old school Resident Evil like gameplay. more of a wrong place wrong time kind of thing, in an attempt to bring a more mature crowd to the GameCube is underperformed.
I would love to see Nintendo at least attempt to emulate it on the Switch somehow.
A quote from a review of the game Alien: Resurrection written in 2000:
The game’s control setup is its most terrifying element. The left analog stick moves you forward, back, and strafes right and left, while the right analog stick turns you and can be used to look up and down.
You may recognize this as how every console FPS works now, but it earned the game a 4.7/10 at the time.
If that didn’t make it ahead of its time I don’t know what would. Thanks for sharing!
Kind of reminds me what half-life did for PC controls
I was about to post this. Amazing how things change.
Well that is hilarious xD
Also I claim this as further evidence that people are too quick to hate on novel control schemes, today too. The standardization of controls is in some ways great and in other ways very limiting - I hope for more variety and experimentation in this regard to be accepted one day.
I think System Shock belongs here too. It was an immersive sim in 1994, was one of the first games to make use of audio logs, and had 3D models and environments before Quake. It initially released on floppys without voice acting so it didn’t sell too well, and it wasn’t until later that it started getting more widely appreciated as the groundbreaking title it is. Another thing is that the controls and graphics can make it a bit of a pain to play today - this was before WASD and mouselook were standardized.
I think the first Deus Ex belongs there too. I played it a couple of years ago and was still impressed by the attention to detail
Honestly, anything developed by Looking Glass or Ion Storm (or basically just Warren Spector).
Thief is another one. Still does things that other stealth games don’t, although Dishonored gets pretty close and they wear that influence proudly on their sleeve (see: Stephen Russell voicing Corvo in Dishonored 2).
Thief seemed really cool for a while, coming to it for the first time sometime after the release of Deus Ex: HR, but then I got really stuck in the weird sewer monster level which felt out of place. Ran out of arrows, couldn’t find my way through it, gave up 🙃
Yeah, parts of Thief can get weird. It kind of lulls you in with a regular medieval world and then a bunch of weird fantasy stuff and supernatural monsters come in.
I once accidentally quick saved just before a zombie thing killed me. That first quick load was a surprise.
Admittedly, the game in general has quite a few issues in terms of being accessible to modern audiences (mods help, and there are quite a lot). It got streamlined a lot by the time of the third game (it was also the first on console, so it had to be more accessible).
But man, that third game goes hard in one level that’s absolute survival horror. Shit still sticks with me today. That level was honestly a little terrifying. Like, I absolutely hate survival horror, but it’s probably one of the best designed levels I’ve played in a game. Even has its own Wikipedia entry!
I personally think Thief II: The Metal Age is the best because it sticks to a more steampunk kind of feel. There’s still a fantasy element, but it’s a bit less pronounced and there’s not much horror (it’s the one I feel influenced Dishonored the most, where there’s a kind of a “creep” factor, but not straight up terrifying), although I haven’t played it in a while and might be misremembering.
Fun fact about the first game, though: Ken Levine worked on some of the lore and level design. Eventually went on to develop System Shock 2 and eventually BioShock.
Fun fact about the third game: one of the level designers for the horror level went on to work with Levine on BioShock and worked on the level design for the “Fort Frolic” section of the game, which also had a bunch of horror vibes (more than the rest of the game, at least, which leaned into some horror a fair amount already).
I do want to try the later games - I’ll bump Thief 2 up my to-play list a bit. A stealth game sounds pretty good right about now.
It didn’t occur to me to look for mods before, too, so maybe I can patch up the first one and try that again as well. Thanks for the heads up about the mods!
I feel like I’m noticing an anecdotal pattern of horror levels in largely non-horror (or just less-horror than That One Level^tm) games becoming cult hits. People talk about Ravenholm in Half Life 2, and the haunted house level in Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines in the same way as you’re talking about this Thief 3 level.
I wonder how much of it is just that the shock and horror can feel all the more impactful when it is contrasted with something else, or when you aren’t expecting it? Or maybe because it catches people that wouldn’t normally play full horror games?
Re. The former possibility, I’ve noticed that with books it does seem to be the case that horror scenes in non-horror books stand out and hit me harder because of their context than scenes in fully horror books do. Like the horror scenes in Murakami books. shudder
And it is true that the best horror games give you moments of peace sometimes instead of being 100% scares all the time. Like the area in Amnesia after the water, or the typewriter saferooms in Resident Evil games, where you get calming music and more light and whatnot for a minute. That contrast is essential I think.
The original Deus Ex holds up better than most anything else of that era, imo, at least as someone who came to it post-Human Revolution release and didn’t have nostalgia goggles. Such an incredible game.
One thing I find really cool about it, weird as it may sound, the deliberately kind of blind AI. Apparently they originally had “better” AI that could see you from farther away, but discovered it was more fun if they were a little dumber, and in practice you can just accept that as you play. The dumb ai becomes invisible, at least to me, even though it isn’t invisible. Like inventories, I guess - just a video game thing to accept as a base premise and not worry about.
The remake of the original System Shock was recently released to great acclaim from die hard fans.
In addition to all that, due to its persistent world and the fact that you could (and in fact had to) backtrack to previously inaccessible areas after finding upgrades such as radiation suits and rocket boots, it was also an early example of a metroidvania. And by “early” I mean “three years before Symphony of the Night”. Yeah. It was that ahead of its time.
I played the original floppy version and even without the voice acting it was an incredible experience. The enhanced version just took it to the next level.
I’ve really been enjoying the remake so far.
Not a game, but the Dreamcast as a system. Supported online play that was not/under utilized. Had a mini screen in the save game cartridge. I miss that system.
Phantasy Star Online.
Crazy Taxi.
Shenmue.
Dreamcast had a few really cool unique games.
Finally got one a couple of years ago. Absolutely adore the thing. It also had incredible accessories that I’m still missing.
Fishing rod, steering wheel, keyboard, light gun…
It did a lot of thing that didn’t really happen again until the wii.
Metropolis Street Racer (the better known sequel being Gotham Street Racing on the XBox) was ahead of it’s time, that they mapped out whole areas of a city and then divvvied it up into racetracks was mindblowing.
Midtown Madness did that to Chicago a couple years earlier. I seem to recall Vette did San Francisco? but I never saw it. Of course, Flight Simulator 2 did Seatle. ;-)
Midtown Madness was more of an approximation of Chicago whereas MSR was a proper scale recreation of a 2km square for each of the 6 areas; every alleyway, every building (plus it had realistic physics). You could learn an area in MSR and then know your way around in real life.
At the time that was super futuristic
I’m disappointed to find out I haven’t actually learned to get around the real Chicago, but that sounds very cool! I can’t think of a well known game with a faithful representation of a city prior to I guess Spider Man? That’s a big gap.
To think that in a few years, using real city locations will be the cheapest and easiest option, certainly as compared to building something convincing from scratch.
Absolutely! Newer racing games often use scans of the real life racetracks to get the details right; when I prepared for a track day at Cadwell Park (a notoriously complex circuit, it’s tight with lots of weird corners) I picked up a copy of Project Cars and by the time I was there I already knew the layout enough to settle into the finer details of the corners within a couple of laps.
When the same level of detail is available for actual cities it’s going to very interesting to see how people react
Pole Position was ahead of its time in 1982 by being the first racing video game to feature a track based on a real racing circuit. ;-) It also used the first arcade cabinet to use the Z8000 processor, and was the first to use multiprocessing with 16-bit processors! I had no idea it was so studly, I was just double checking the track fact and learned the other stuff.
Arcade machines pre-2000 had some amazing technological advances in them … check out the stuff that was done to get Daytona USA to work, for example
How was the post-apocalyptic Seattle representation in The Last of Us 2, do you know? Like, did they just throw the space needle in there somewhere, or was it in any other way recognizably the Seattle area (but post-apocalypse) otherwise?
In a way, Crysis. There’s a reason the “But does it run Crysis?” meme exists. Because most computers could barely run it on release. It was way ahead of its time technologically.
Almost the same with far cry used for Benchmarking years later
The water effects in Far Cry 1 were absolutely mind blowing at the time. It was one of the first things in a video game that I could feel the tangible stress it placed on the GPU. I could be looking away from it then as soon as it came into my field of view my GPU fan would sound like it was trying to fly off the motherboard.
Farcry 2, IMO, was pretty far ahead of its time.
Being able to shoot individual limbs and twigs from trees.
Fire, that would intelligently spread.
Weapon durability which was visually impacting, as well as alerted the firearm’s performance.
It had some really cool features for its time.
I still don’t think a game has used fire as effectively as this did, before or since. Even in later Far Cry games seem to have a much more fire-lite implementation.
I can confirm- me and the wife just finished playing farcry 6, a week ago.
Fire… is meh. It doesn’t spread. I remember having damn wildfires on farcay 2, which would be extremely dangerous.
Even, the physics for shooting limbs from trees appears to be gone now. That was a really cool feature.
For repairing cars, in far cry two, you would pop the hood, and do some stupid junk (that in no way would actually fix a car), but, it look pretty cool. In far cry 6, you just point a blowtorch as the body of the car.
you just point a blowtorch as the body of the car.
I melt the broke.
Car good now.
Same for healing. They included differen animations for different injuries, at least to some extent.
If the last damage you received was explosive the PC would pull shrapnell or a stick out of his leg.
It was such a visceral, immersive game.
Severance: Blade of Darkness. This game from the Spanish dev Rebel Act Studios is absolutely insane.
First of all, in gameplay terms, it’s basically Dark Souls ten years before Dark Souls. All the basic elements are there - very difficult lock-on based combat with heavy emphasis on distance, timing attacks/blocks/dodges, and stamina management, several equipment slots for your left and right hand that you cycle through individually (and the same for consumables), non-linear level design with shortcuts to earlier areas, weapons that you might hang onto for their moveset even though they’re not statistically the best… To be fair, there are some differences. The game is divided up into discrete levels rather than having an interconnected world, there’s no magic, RPG elements are pared down to the absolute minimum, and the controls are atrocious even by the standards of the day. But looking back on it, I find it extremely hard to believe that From Soft didn’t take some inspiration from this little-known title.
Secondly, there’s the technical aspect of the game. Remember Doom 3? Remember those pre-release videos in which id Soft bragged about their new engine having 100% dynamic lighting with every single polygon casting an accurate real-time shadow? Yeah, guess what, Blade of Darkness had the exact same lighting system three years earlier. Ridiculous!
Daggerfall. Ah yes, the infamously undercooked open-world RPG from Bethesda. In some ways it was actually the last of its kind; nobody really makes old-school dungeon crawlers like this anymore. But it was also one of the first games that pioneered a procedurally generated world deliberately made too large for a single human to explore. With a world containing 320,000 square kilometers of wilderness and almost fifteen thousand locations of various types, it would take a lifetime to see everything. It’s quite literally not built for human consumption, since you can never fully consume it. The best you can do is sample it. This achievement went thoroughly unappreciated at the time due to technical limitations making the vast world invisible and therefore pointless. The very faithful Daggerfall Unity remake can be modded with a draw distance of some 150 kilometers, however, and the sheer size of Daggerfall’s world thereby revealed is extremely impressive to see. Despite its primitive graphics, it feels far more real than the compressed geography of Skyrim and Fallout. Ridiculously huge worlds that the player can never hope to fully explore would go on to be used in games such as Minecraft and No Man’s Sky.
Turbo Esprit. I mean, just watch this video. Yes, that is a third-person open-world city driving game with realistic traffic and pedestrians, i.e. an early predecessor of GTA. It came out in 1986 and runs on a ZX Spectrum, a machine with 48 KB of memory.
Driller. The first game on the Freescape engine, a first-person shooter (of sorts) featuring fully 3D environments and enemies. In 1987. Running on the same machine as the previous game.
Jurassic Park Trespasser: the YouTube channel ResearchIndicates and one of the most informative Let’s Play videos of all time best explains this game.
Oh god yes, that’s one of my favorite games and let’s play series of all time. Hey, remember how Half-Life 2’s physics engine blew everyone’s minds with those seesaw puzzles where you had to weigh down one end with bricks or other items so that you could walk up the other? Yeah, guess what, Trespasser had that before Half-Life 1 even came out.
Thanks for the info on Severance I’ll check it out
I was going to say Morrowind. But yeah, Daggerfall is a good pick too.
1 set of games that felt ahead of their time were Pokemon Gold/Silver and Crystal.
They had so many interesting mechanics and mechanics that (for some reason) were not introduced in the later games that it almost feels like robbery.
- Day/night time switch with corresponding pokemon. I remember you could encounter night specific pokemon and also daytime pokemon in the night who were fast asleep when starting the battle.
- Two regions in 1 game.
- End boss as Red in MT silver
- Rematches with trainers.
- Pokewatch system overall
- Hapiness system for Eevee evolutions
- The encounter system for suicuine, Entei and Raikou
- Pokemon crystal with the Battle tower.
- Moving sprites in pokemon crystal.
Probably even more, but for me it is still the best designed pokemon game to date and really ahead of it’s time.
It also felt like one of the last games that was oozing with the passion that the developers put in it.
I would also add Shenmue on the Dreamcast. It was the first open world sandbox action/adventure game, with an amazing amount of content, and realistic (for the time) character modeling and animation, but sadly, few people played it. Many more people played Grand Theft Auto III, which came out several years after Shenmue.
Shenmue is a good example, I was hyped for it back in the Dreamcast days. I’m fairly certain we have quick time events to thank shenmue for popularizing, for better or for worse.
For better because wonderful 101 created the greatest quick time event of all time
I’ll give a mention to FUEL, an open-world offroad racing game with a map that was over 5,000 square miles. The racing itself was fairly medium, but the absolutely massive open-world is something that I can see in Forza Horizon and some others
I recall reading on how they were able to make the map and was rather impressive. I love seeing how devs find some creative way to overcome a technical hurdle.
I absolutely loved Fuel, the vastness of the world was incredible. There are very few games like this, even Forza and the like have relatively small maps with very compressed geography, and you can feel that when you play. Only Daggerfall Unity gives me a similar vibe when modded with insane draw distance.
Ultima 4: first CRPG where the main goal was moral and ethical development of the main character instead of killing a big baddie.
Dwarf Fortress: founded the detailed fortress-building subgenre of city builders.
Nethack: While not the first Rogue-like game (this title is reserved for the game called Rogue) or even the first Hack (this title is reserved for the game called Hack), Nethack brought in so much detail to the game that it was way ahead of the curve at the time. Perhaps still is.
I wish there were a version of Nethack that had modernized controls at least, if not also modernized graphics. I remember it so fondly but it’s a real headache to go back to these days.
Shattered Pixel Dungeon (PC & mobile) is the closest thing I’ve found to it these days, but it’s still quite different.
Add to that Ultima Underworld - the first FP hack + slash, paved the way for Elder Scrolls. The fully immersive plot in 2 where you went into different worlds all with their own backstory was huge. The magic system was pretty good too
Big Rigs Over the Road Racing would have blended in inconspicuously on Steam had it released 10-15 years later. At the very least it would no longer be remembered as “the worst game ever”, and it may even have gained some “so bad its good” meme fame from streamers and made some sales.
I often hear about the original “Elite” in this context. It managed to do real time 3d rendering on home computers (albeit wireframe) in a time when that was usually relegated to pre-renders or supercomputers. Came out a good decade before making 3d games was more generally viable.
To properly qualify how groundbreaking Elite was for the time, for those who don’t know it: it was a space sim that simulated 8 galaxies with 256 star systems each, each system with a star, a planet, and a space station. All of that was wireframe-3D rendered, had a lot of complexities like different ship and enemy types, different playloops like trading, mining and combat, and it was one of the few games of that time that pioneered open-world gameplay.
This was initially released on the mid-80’s for 8bit computers of the time, which had anything between 48Kb to 128Kb of RAM, and thus, the game binaries was also that small - they accomplished that by also being one of the few games of the time that pioneered procedurally generated content.
Elite was released in 1983. It was originally made on and for the BBC model B, which had 32Kb of RAM!
Wikipedia and other places says 1984 - I think 1983 is when development started. I wasn’t quite sure how much RAM the BBC Micro had, so I played safe and went with the ZX Spectrum’s configuration, which I had, although thinking about it now, the way the Speccy mapped memory meant that it actually had about 32Kb useable RAM as well. I don’t know how the BBCM mapped memory, so I’m not sure if a similar situation applied (less actual available memory).
some genre pioneers
- M.U.L.E. (Multiplayer Strategy)
- ELITE (3D space sim)
- Populous (Godmode RTS)
- Maniac Mansion (Point & Click)
I rented Populous for SNES as a kid but they didn’t have a manual so that was a pretty tough one to figure out.
Played the crap out of Maniac Mansion but didn’t realize it was before the PC point and click craze
I rented Populous for SNES as a kid but they didn’t have a manual so that was a pretty tough one to figure out.
Same for me, on the Amiga500, especially finding out how hero-raids and Armageddon work ^^
Played the crap out of Maniac Mansion but didn’t realize it was before the PC point and click craze
Got it on the C64, did you find out all five possible endings?
I freaked out finding the fuel for the chainsaw in Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders ;)That and gave Ed his microwave hamster. I even tried to stay up late to watch the Maniac Mansion TV show but didn’t understand the VCR too much
I have so many fond memories of Jurassic Park Trespasser. I remember my dad picked it up for me right around launch time. I had read the previews in PC Gamer magazine and was fully into the hype.
The game was really attempting VR before we had VR. There was no HUD. Your lifebar was a heart tattoo on your chest that emptied as you took damage. There was no ammo counter for your guns. Your character would say things like, “feels full” or “feels a little light” to give you an estimate of ammo remaining.
The biggest flaw, apart from the broken AI for dinosaurs, was just like VR, you had to aim manually. You could turn and twist your gun freely which meant you had to aim down the sights. In VR, in 2023, with motion controllers, this is amazing. But in 1998, with a mouse and keyboard, it was really awkward. It’s a game I never finished.; Probably never even got close to finishing. But I was still in awe of the world they built and freedom offered in 1998.
There are mods to make JPT much more playable I recall if you ever tried to take another crack at it.
And it had some very clever immersion but just needed more tweaking to reach Dead Space levels of HUD without HUD kind of play
I’ve revisited a lot of childhood games over the years thanks to mods but I don’t think I’ve ever thought about seeing where JPT ended up. Thanks for the suggestion. I think I have my weekend rabbit hole.
Deus Ex (2000)