The Most Popular Video Game The Year You Were Born

The player's goal was to get Pitfall Harry through the jungle to discover the hidden treasures before time runs out. Of course there are obstacles along the way, like fire, snakes, rolling logs, and quicksand. Games like these are the reason you thought quicksand was going to be a much bigger real-life problem.

This was the first Star Wars arcade game, and the player would play as Luke Skywalker while flying an X-Wing fighter. There were three phases to the game, with the ultimate goal being to annihilate Death Star. You didn't even have to destroy every enemy thrown your way, you just had to survive each round to make it to the final phase. Use the vector graphics, Luke.

Using Nintendo's Zapper light gun, players attempted to shoot down ducks and clay pigeons. Then when they failed to do that, they would place the gun directly against the TV screen to really cause some carnage. If you somehow failed (or refused to cheat), your very unhelpful hunting dog would snicker at your poor shooting skills—and despite as many times as you may have tried, you could not shoot him.

There is no franchise bigger than Super Mario Bros., and this was the big console debut. Mario and his brother Luigi traveled through the Mushroom Kingdom, killing as many turtles and goombas as possible and to save Princess Toadstool from Bowser's castle—except she was never in the castle until the final level. It's enough to make a plumber want to break through the ceiling in the first dungeon and just warp on over to the fourth level.

One of the first real open-world games, The Legend of Zelda had players guide Link through an outdoor maze, traveling from dungeon to dungeon. He begins his quest with only a shield and a sword, but quickly starts picking up gear, including his trusty boomerang. Link's goal is to survive all nine of the underground dungeons and finally take down Gannon. Once you you beat the game, you make it to The Second Quest, a hellishly difficult remix of the vanilla game that showed so many gamers just how easy it was to break a NES controller.

The second installment of the Zelda isn't quite so fondly remembered now, and the decision to switch from an overhead perspective to a 2D side-scrolling POV in dungeons irked many fans. But Zelda II: The Adventure of Link has its redeeming qualities: The side-scrolling elements introduce many of the basic RPG elements that are found in essentially every major video game today, and while the platforming suffered from not being precise as possible, that never stopped Mega Man from becoming a classic.

Have any two brothers done more of the profession of plumbing? Mario and Luigi are back it in the third installment of the Super Mario Bros. series. This time the big innovations this time were two-fold: Players could not only navigate between each level, skipping entire bits of the map if they were clever, but also try on game-changing outfits such as the Racoon Suit, the Frog Suit, and (of course) the Tanooki Suit.

Tetris, like Candy Crush over two decades later, was one of the true crossover games. Kids were addicted, but so were grandmothers and dads and pretty much anybody who never felt alive until they got the I-block at just the right moment. Tetris for Game Boy was also the first game that was could be hooked up to the Game Link Cable, which enables two separate Game Boys to connect for multiplayer. While the Game Boy ended up largely abandoning the Game Link Cable, multiplayer Tetris was pure and wonderful madness—it's no coincidence that nearly every version of Tetris released since has featured some sort of competitive mode.

When the Super Mario Brothers made their debut in the 16-bit world, they came correct. Super Mario World—arguably the best of the Mario games period—introduced many new features, from a flying cape that let players hang glide through entire levels to Yoshi, the lovable dinosaur you could ride and then also sacrifice when you jumped off his back over a bottomless pit in order to grab a few more golden coins.

With Sonic, the rivalry that would tear '90s kids apart truly began: Were you a Nintendo diehard or a Sega fanatic? Sonic the Hedgehog made a convincing argument for the Sega Genesis. Sonic tears through level at super high-speeds, with players being forced to rely more on memorization and nailing the timing on jumps than slower but more consistent Super Mario World. Sure, Blast Processing may have been a marketing gimmick, but every kid who ever saw Sonic pull off his first loop knew one thing: Sonic has gotta go fast.

Mortal Kombat was the arcade game you parents always warned you about, and it took arcades (and, later on, consoles) by storm. At heart a pretty simplistic one versus one fighting game—this is no Street Fighter II —what Mortal Kombat had going for it was pure gore. You rip people's heads off, tear out hearts, set people on fire. The fact that it was later part of Senate hearings in 1993 only increased its appeal. (Pro gaming strat for lawmakers: If you want to make sure kids really, really want to see something, hold hearings on how awful and disgusting it is.)

It's an understatement to say Doom changed the game; Doom created it. There were plenty of first-person shooters before Doom—including id Software's own Wolfenstein 3D—but it was Doom that wildly popularized the first-person shooter genre that would go on to dominate gaming for years and years. The tissue-paper thin plot involves playing as a space marine on Mars fighting off demons, but the real gameplay was simple: Kill everything in front of you, and then spend 10 minutes trying to find that blue or green key you forgot to grab somewhere.

At its core, Donkey Kong Country is pretty simple. There are 40 side-scrolling levels, where Donkey Kong and his nephew Diddy Kong are trying to get back their stolen bananas. But it was the tightness of the platforming, combined with the ability of the game to continuously switch up what the player had to do to get to the end of each level, that made Donkey Kong Country part of the Great Canon of video games. Between timing cannon launches, riding in mine carts, swinging from vines, Donkey Kong Country never let you get comfortable with one mode of play. It also broadly popularized the idea of a completionist game: There was a way to get to 100 percent in Donkey Kong Country, but you had to willing to put in the hard time and grind to get there. As games more and more shifted away from the arcade format, where simply making you die over and over to suck more quarters out of your pocket wasn't enough, Donkey Kong Country was smart enough to realize that if a player could spent infinite amounts of time with a game, you better have enough secrets to make it worthwhile.

The genius of Nintendo is that not only will it take risks, it will take really weird risks. Case in point: The sequel to one of the its popular games ever was not a similar game but instead Yoshi's Island, which completely disregards the basic tenants most Mario games. In this prequel to Super Mario World there are baby versions of Mario and Luigi while Yoshi is the hero. Completely unexpected and yet somehow absurdly, incredibly fun.

This is Patient Zero for the Pokémon craze that we know and (maybe) love. The secret sauce of Pokémon was they way it mixed several key ingredients together: tried-and-true RPS gameplay, a horde of adorable monsters to collect, and multiplayer battling to keep the frenzy alive. There's a reason this quickly became one of the biggest franchises around.

Gran Turismo is no Crusin' USA. The racing game has eleven different race tracks and 140 vehicles. It took around five years to develop before being released due to the ridiculous precision with which the real-life cars and tracks were simulated. In the Arcade Mode you're free to choose your car and course. In Simulation Mode, you're competing as driver would, and need to earn trophies and money to advance to the higher levels.

This was the game that proved Pokémon wasn't a one-off fluke. With gameplay much the same as the first entries in the series, Pokémon Yellow has one important twist: Pikachu comes into play, just like in the cartoons, and he actually decides if he likes the gamer or not, depending on their actions.

Starting to sense a pattern here? In 1999 we meet other super famous Pokémon like, Suicune, Entei and, Raiko amongst others. By this point in the series there are 251 different creatures running around the fictional land of Johto. The gamer's goal here is to acquire Gym Badges in Johto, then defeat the Champion and the Elite Four in order to become the Pokémon Master. And, of course, catch 'em all.

As we entered the 21st century, Pokémon Crystal showed the franchise was still very much alive and well. In Crystal, the player can now choose to be a male or female character, compared to past versions where the character was always male. About time! Developers also added in the Battle Tower, where players could play in stadium fights real time with other players using their cell phones.

While Grand Theft Auto III may have been the third game in the series, it essentially spawned a whole new genre of game. Players—as the silent, unnamed criminal often referred to as "Claude"—were free to roam around Liberty City, a (very) rough approximation of New York City. While players were free to take on missions and simply stick to the story, the true joy came from the realization that at any moment you could jump out of one car, pull some poor sap out of another, and speed away, perhaps with a few police officers in pursuit.