A couple of months back, the British Academy Film Awards (BAFTAs, more or less the British Oscars) got bored of figuring out which things were good by itself. Instead, it decided to ask you, the humble gaming public, to divine the most influential game of all time. And boy, you've really made a hash of that.
In results announced today, the BAFTAs declared, with an entirely straight face, that Yu Suzuki's 1999 Dreamcast opus is the most influential videogame ever made, according to the results of its poll. The academy calls Shemue "a pioneer for open-world gameplay and laid a roadmap that others continued on in the years that followed," and credits/blames it for popularising "the use of Quick Time Events (QTEs)" in games that came after.
None of which, I suppose, is necessarily untrue, but the game bringing up the rear in second place is literally Doom, and even if you're absolutely bonzo-dog doo-dah nuts for forklift simulators and characters who say things like "Years ago I was Chinese", I still don't think you can credit Shenmue with greater and longer-lasting influence than the game that codified the FPS as a genre.
It only gets loopier as the list goes on. Third place belongs, sensibly enough, to Super Mario Bros. Fourth goes to Half-Life, which is reasonable. Fifth and sixth? Ocarina of Time and Minecraft, which can both hold their own in the history books. And then, well, apparently the seventh most-influential game of all time is Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, which released two months ago. They're not even done patching it yet.
This is, I think, possibly even more absurd than calling Shenmue the medium-defining benchmark for videogames as a whole. I love KCD2, don't get me wrong: I gave it 90% in our KCD2 review, but it has literally not existed on this Earth for long enough to influence much of anything yet.
But according to John Q Public, it's easily more influential than Super Mario 64, Half-Life 2, The Sims, and Tetris. Tetris. Tetris! So I think what we have here is a bunch of poll respondents who interpreted 'Which videogame is most influential?' as 'Which videogame do you think is good?'
Is this a searing indictment of the democratic process? Yes. But also, it's mostly just funny, and serves as a striking example of how ultimately hollow these attempts to crowdsource plaudits are in the grand scheme of things. Far better to rely on panels of experts, like us at PC Gamer, to do this stuff properly. We'd never make a wild, controversial decision that pursues us for the rest of our days.
The BAFTA most influential list in full:
- Shenmue
- Doom
- Super Mario Bros
- Half-Life
- The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
- Minecraft
- Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2
- Super Mario 64
- Half-Life 2
- The Sims
- Tetris
- Tomb Raider
- Pong
- Metal Gear Solid
- World of Warcraft
- Baldur's Gate 3
- Final Fantasy VII
- Dark Souls
- Grand Theft Auto 3
- Skyrim
- Grand Theft Auto
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