The Best Video Game The Year You Were Born

Although far from its final version, Minnesotan teachers Don Rawitsch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger created The Oregon Trail for the teletypewriter and debuted the game in Rawitsch’s 8th grade history class on December 3, 1971. Three years later, it’d begin its journey to becoming the game that taught millions about westward expansion and the definition of the word “dysentery.”

When Atari released the arcade version of Pong in 1972, it marked the beginning of something big. Before Pong, there’d been small games, mostly written in BASIC, but nothing that compared to the popularity of Pong. it wasn’t until this game that people thought of electronic games as something you could sell to the average person. In 1975, Atari would release an in-home version of Pong, forever cementing its legendary status in video game history.

Less remembered that its popular forebear, Space Race was Atari’s sophomore game, released in the summer of 1973, and was the first racing game ever made. The point of the game is to get from the bottom of your screen to the top without hitting any asteroids (represented by simple dashes). It’s not the most complex game ever made, then again, there weren’t many others to compare it to.

Although technically created in 1973, it was when game co-creator Greg Thompson connected Maze War to the proto-internet known as ARPANET at MIT in 1974 that it became a forebear to modern online gaming. In the game, players navigate a maze and when they encounter another player, they could shoot them or negatively affect them in some other way, making Maze War also the first first-person-shooter ever made.

The first game to depict human-on-human violence goes to Gun Fight. Known as Western Gun in Japan, where it was created, the game featured two sprites facing off in a low-res Western setting. If you successful shot the other player, a text bubble popped up exclaiming “GOT ME!.” It’s not exactly Call of Duty, but it was the beginning of something big nonetheless.

Breakout has a much bigger importance than just video games. For one, it was originally built by Steve Wozniak with the help of Steve Jobs, the co-founders of Apple Computers. It was also the inspiration for many features in the Apple II computer. Of course, it also helped that it was mindlessly addicting. Although Atari eventually redesigned Wozniak’s creation, you can still find Breakout, or some updated knockoff, on smartphones and tablets today.

Although it’d be a few more years until it reached its final form, the first playable version of Zork was created in the summer of 1977. It was a text adventure game, similar to the previous year’s Colossal Cave Adventure, that mimicked Dungeons & Dragons. In fact, the creative team tried to name the game Dungeon but ran into copyright issues and reverted back to Zork. To this day, it remains of a beloved classic of RPG fans worldwide.

Designed by Tomohiro Nishikado (who also made Gun Fight), Space Invaders drew inspiration from Star Wars and Breakout to create an endearing arcade classic. The game is simple—destroy all alien ships before they destroy you. It’s mega-popularity helped solidify the games industry and was the inspiration behind many arcade classics to come.

Who knew that a small triangular ship navigating space debris would sell 70,000 cabinets and become a giant in the golden age of arcades. Supposedly, Asteroids became so popular in the U.S. that arcades had to install bigger coin buckets to hold all the coins.

Creating a new genre of game between space shooters and pong copycats, Pac-Man remains one of the most memorable arcade games ever made. Simply piloting your ravenous yellow dot—without bumping into Blinky, Pinky, Inky, or Clyde—Pac-Man’s simplicity betrays its intense difficulty for players to reach the kill screen. That’s why its ancestor, Ms. Pac-Man, is a test for AI capability some 37 years later.

The year 1981 was such an explosion of arcade classics that picking one almost feels criminal, but no game would introduce such lasting characters as Donkey Kong. The titular enemy Donkey Kong, along with an unnamed carpenter (not plumber), would create Nintendo’s lasting cast of characters. The game Donkey Kong was also one of the world’s first platformers and a game where high score records are still being broken to this day.

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.

Dragon’s Lair was a gaming first in many ways. The first and most obvious being that it looked so different from everything else. Where Dig Dug and Space Invaders embraced its pixelated beauty, Don Bluth’s Dragon’s Lair looked like an fully animated work of art. It was also the first arcade games to run on Laserdisc technology, a forebear to the DVD. Soul-crushingly hard and hungry for quarters, the tech behind Dragon’s Lair ultimately proved too finicky to go mainstream, but it created one of the most memorable early arcade games.

Although it’d be a few years before Tetris would find its way into the hands of Game Boy players everywhere, programmer Alexey Pajitnov released Tetris in the summer of 1984. It was the first game ever imported from the Soviet Union to the U.S., finding its way onto the Commodore 64 and eventually to Nintendo’s Game Boy. Simply put, it is one of the most addicting games ever created.

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.

When Square (now Square Enix) created Final Fantasy, the creators truly thought this would be the final game the bankrupt company would make. This simple fantasy game not only saved the company but also spawned one of the most popular RPG franchises of all time. Although extremely basic compared to games only a few years later, Final Fantasy laid the groundwork for a franchise that would loved by millions three decades later.

Have any two brothers done more of the profession of plumbing? Mario and Luigi are back it in the third instalment 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.

Before SimCity, games had objectives. Whether it was to reach the end of the level, survive a barrage of alien fire, or save a princess in some far away castle. But SimCity had no such objective, only creating a sandbox with which to build your own sprawling metropolis. The game would mark the beginning of Maxis’ efforts to port real life into video games.

When the Super Mario Bros. 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.