Great Overshadowed Video Games You'd Forgotten

Video games come and go. Very few are well-received or sell well, and very few are well-received and sell well. Even profitability and short-term success do not mean that players will remember that game come five years or more. Sometimes, the best games are the ones overlooked, or the ones that were quickly eclipsed by games that have become cemented in the pantheon of video game history. Here's a personal list of three great games that were given short shrift.

1) Populous: The Beginning (Bullfrog, 1998)
Released in late 1998, Populous: The Beginning was Bullfrog Productions' third entry in the Populous series. Until that point, the titles were god games--a genre that 1989's Populous essentially invented, with players assuming control of a deity that bid small creatures below to do their work. The more worshippers, the more power players wielded.

God games were essentially a niche that never really took hold of the gaming population in general, outshone by the rising popularity of closely-related real-time strategy games. The Beginning essentially forged a novel hybridization of resource-management and follower-cultivation. Players could use shamans to send tornadoes ripping through enemy camps, or drop their entire city into the ocean via terrain deformation. The game's 3D engine allowed players to freely pan and rotate around the game worlds. The game also featured multiplayer stages. On release, the game was positively received, although Bullfrog founder Peter Molyneux left to found Lionhead Studios (maker of Fable, among other titles.) But the game would prove to be the last entry in the series.

Overshadowed by: StarCraft. Released earlier that year, StarCraft didn't feature fancy 3D graphics-gameplay was strictly from a comparatively antiquated isometric view. But StarCraft became the real-time strategy game to end all strategy games, creating a massive lucrative e-sports scene in Korea that endured for more than a decade and outliving any of its contemporary peers (1). Today, Populous is outdated and consigned to history books as a small footnote in the history of real-time strategy.

2) Turok: Dinosaur Hunter (Iguana Entertainment, 1997)
In 1997, publisher Acclaim Entertainment was in serious financial trouble. The company had been slow to migrate from the last-generation game consoles and equipment, and in the first quarter of 1997 lost an additional $19 million added to the $222 million losses recorded in 1996. Their best hope for a turnaround was an adaptation of a comic book character-a high-priced and restrictively-rated shooter game on the unproven Nintendo 64 platform. Their best hope was Turok: Dinosaur Hunter.

Turok proved to best expectations, surmounting its Mature rating and $80 price tag to become a massive success, grossing $60 million by mid 1997 and ultimately selling more than 1.5 million units. It was a modest critical success, but it paved the way for a franchise of games and proved Acclaim's savior at the time, although the company would fall into ruin by 2004.

Overshadowed by: GoldenEye 007. This James Bond tie-in shooter game appeared months after Turok began storming the N64, but it is the game critics and gamers alike think of as proving that first-person shooters, once the realm of the PC, could work on a console. Poor Iguana, poor Turok-their legacy of proving first-person shooters on the N64 first is long forgotten. According to most histories, there is only 007 and Halo: Combat Evolved, with nothing else linking the two.

3) Riven (Cyan, 1997)
Myst was the biggest bomb to hit video gaming in years when it appeared in 1994 for lowly Macintosh computers. Technologically, it was almost a multimedia slideshow, a point-and-click interface with small animations linking together pre-rendered scenes. Yet the game sold more than six million copies within a decade (2) and spawned a legion of inferior "Myst clones". Even The Simpsons referenced Myst in a Halloween episode.

After the critical and commercial success of Myst, Cyan set out to create an even more ambitious sequel, Riven. The game was bigger, the graphics and sound were better, there were more characters and more places to explore, and the storyline was even deeper and more involved. It seemed like the follow-up to the killer app of the early 1990s would be a sure-fire win.

Overshadowed by: 3D games. By the time Riven came out, the tides had shifted. Graphic adventure games were rapidly on their way out, and legendary adventure game developer LucasArts shifted away from the genre entirely after it did not weather the change to 3D that well at all.

Riven did well, selling more than 1.5 million copies within a year, and becoming the best-selling game of 1997 (3). Critical reception remained positive. But the smaller impact of Riven demonstrated the slow decline of the genre. No other Myst game that followed would make such a splash, in part because they remained mostly wedded to the point-and-click interface; not until the spinoff Uru: Ages Beyond Myst in 2003 that players could freely navigate through 3D environments. While Myst was remade for multiple platforms, most recently mobile smartphones, Riven has been the red-headed brother that was "too hard" or "too odd" for most players. That doesn't mean it wasn't one of the great games of our time.

References
* (1) "Samsung, SK Telecom, Shinhan Sponsor South Korean Alien Killers". Bloomberg News. Retrieved March 20, 2011.
* (2) Michael Guilfoil (May 22, 2001). "Beyond the Myst". Spokesman Review. Retrieved March 30, 2011.
* (3) Karen Lillington (March 1998). "Myst Partnership Is Riven". Salon. Retrieved March 31, 2011.

Read more video game stories by David Fuchs: "The Next Great Console War" / "The Future of Mac Gaming" / "Video Game History: Halo 2" / "A Tale of Two DotAs"