Most original games you have played?

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Polterguy - A game on the megadrive/genesis where you get to haunt the family that killed you.

Paperboy - It sounds boring, but its actually a lot of fun.

Ecco the Dolphin - Very original, however I found the series to be incredibly dull.

Thats all I can think of for now...

 

Space Invaders.

 

What Tal said. Except I didn't play all of his games (much) but played something else. Prince of Persia, anyone? Remember Zool? That funny Chupa Chups commercial. Or Prehistorik. Or Eagle's Nest. Or Pipemania. I had more emotions with those pipes and more sense of achievement than ever after, including with RPG characters. Digger. Pac-Man. Epic Pinball. Dune 2. Sokoban. Except Epic Pinball, all of these ran on my 286 and most on my XT before it. Dizzy Collection, how could I forget. Pirates. Colonisation.

 

Castle Wolfenstein (the 1984 version)

 

There are original titles and then there are odd-balls. The Lost Vikings and Paperboy belong to the first group, where the Adventures of Dizzy, Linus Spacehead, Sacrifice, and Giants: Citizen Kabuto belong to the latter.

Linus Spacehead was pretty odd, since it mixed point'n'click with platforming and point'n'click was unheard of on NES, if you exclude Shadowgate. Dizzy came from the same authors and featured an egg(!) as a protagonist.

Sacrifice, on the other hand, was just plain weird mainly due of its psychedelic style. The models certainly looked like nothing I had seen before. Giants was pretty much the same, even though in a lesser degree, but the strange humour made up for it. Too bad that the last third of the game was utterly boring. Liked of the nude mermaid, though.

 

If we mention newer titles, I guess Black Moon Chronicles from Cryo from 1999 definitely deserve a mention. I liked the game. Pity there was no sequel.

In the "modern era", I guess only really KotOR felt so original. Although sure, the BG saga or IWD1 (IWD2 less so) had original elements and all.

 

Ha! I played Castle Wolfenstein (the 1984 version)! I can't remember how far I got but I think my copy of the game might have had a few bugs in it.

One of my favorite games that sticks out in my mind was for the NES and it was called Solstice. Unfortunatly I never could finish it because I was renting the game.

 

Ps:T is a very original game - can't think of anything else that takes that approach.

Fallout also, with the quirky retrofuturistic setting and non-linearity.

Cloud - this is a freeware indie game that has incredibly strange gameplay. The idea is that you gather clouds and make shapes out of them.

Defcon: Everybody Dies - an indie game where you play as a nation. The game counts down to Defcon 1, at which point the nukes start flying.

Allegiance - a game that Microsoft Research developed and - since it flopped commercially - released as freeware (kudos to them for that). It's a squad based multiplayer space simulation real time strategy game, basically...


I wouldn't say that originality is dead - I just don't think that the mainstream is where you should look for it. I recommend poking around this site - especially in the games of the year section with the 'innovation' award. http://www.gametunnel.com/

 

I think that's more a problem of all (well, at least most of) the good ideas already being used, so anything made now you can say, "oh, they already did that" about. The more original ideas that are used, the less you have left.

 

Sacrifice was a great game, and completely unafraid of doing weird / out of the norm stuff. Classic.

 

Comand and Conquer. The game practicly created the RTS game type.

 

I'd go even further back to the 80's when the Commodore 64 and Apple 2 were king. Back then, a single individual, working in his basement, could create games purely out of his imagination, crank out a few thousand disks and get them distributed. These days you can't make a game without half a million dollars and 100 employees, and who's going to risk that kind of investment on some odd-ball game that could very well flop?

 

Command and Conquer wasnt original in any way, Westwood had already created the RTS genre with Dune II och which C&C was merely a continuation of.

Almost all succesful game franchises started out by being extremely original. Every idea was original sometime.

 

Ultima 6

 

I don't know much about "pioneer-type" originality as I'm nowhere near as old as most of you oldies seem to be but originality isn't, at least imo, costrained to thinking of a whole new world/plot/idea. Putting a different spin on an existing concept would also count as being original and I guess that's what happening today. Don't ask me to point out specifics though, as I'm only assuming and generalizing.

I'd say FFVII is probably there though. How many games back then went and killed off a main character/party member?

 

@Enagonios - Phantasy Star 4.

 

Guh - Indie games people! Today in the thriving indie scene a single individual, working in his basement, can create games purely out of his imagination and get them distributed through the internet.

Mount&Blade, for instance, was created by two people (I think that they've hired two others now as well, but they created a fully playable game before then). There are numerous games out there that are created by only a few people, and they do take the risks that large companies won't.

 

Square had allready done this in Final fantasy 6 (you can abandon shaow, who then dies on the flying continent, at the end of the end of the world of warcraft)
and Chrono trigger (you can as Frog, chose to kill Magus or let him redeem himself)

Also Lufia 2 for the Snes, ends with the main Character and his wife dieing after the final battle (luckely thier child lives on cause he is the main character of the original game).

Final fantasy 5 actually also let a main character die

As the thread points out, everything been done before

Anyhows, chrono trigger felt very inovative for me, as I hadn't seen anything like it before.

Quest for glory stands out in my mind, has the first game to truly blend adventure and rpg, and also one of the first, if not the first, to let you export your characters from previous games on to the next. great serie.

Seiken dentetsu 3 also stood out, as you had 7 characters to chose from, you chose which two characters he would team up with and you had the choice of making him good-good, good-evil, evil-good and evil-evil (thats how the two choices when choosing a class upgrade was called). it gave an enormous replay value, because these classes where very different and so was all the main characters.

 

Bah! FFVII is about as old as it gets RPG-wise for me I stick to my point though. Lets try to go for an analogy: try chicken. everyone eats chicken but nobody (except real addicts) can keep eating chicken prepared the same way forever because it gets old. that's why there's all sorts or spices and stuff so you can vary between chicken a la kiev, chicken teriyaki, etc. but at the end of the day it's still chicken and you still enjoy it

that was a pretty good one if I do say so myself I can do one in beef and pork too if you guys want