Beaten to the Punch (Part 2 of 2)

Cover-based shooters were all the rage during the late 2000s and early 2010s.  The mechanic was popularized with the release of Gears of War in 2006, but had existed at least as far back as 1995 in the form of the arcade machine Time Crisis.  Granted, that was a light-gun game.  However, even if we were to limit the genre to third-person cover-based shooters there was kill.switch in 2003 and WinBack: Covert Operations in 1999.  Both of these titles have largely been forgotten to time compared to Gears of War, which has since gone on to become one of Microsoft's tentpole franchises (with four mainline sequels and several spinoff titles).  If I had to hazard a guess as to why, I'd say it has something to do with WinBack and kill.switch being more techno-thrillers and less Warhammer 40k adjacent.  I guess people really love guns that have their bayonet attachments replaced by chainsaws.

Angbad is one of those venerable ASCII roguelikes whose lineage can be traced back through Dungeons of Moria to the original Rogue.  As one might guess based on its name (and the name of its immediate predecessor), Angbad is heavily inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth setting.  The player begins the game in a small town consisting of some shops and a few NPCs.  Bellow is a hundred floors of procedurally generated dungeons filled with monsters, traps and treasure.  At the bottom level is Morgoth, who must be defeated in order to win the game.  In other words, Angbad is basically Diablo without music, sound or graphics.  It even has the randomized loot drops and a color coating system that is practically the standard for games of these types.  It's also free-to-play, obviously, for copyright reasons.  Despite not having much in the way of monetization potential, Angbad has been in active development for over three decades with a surprisingly active mod making community.  Even so, it has been completely eclipsed by the Blizzard franchise that was inspired by it.

Saving the most unusual for last, we have Herzog Zwei.  German for "Duke Two", this Sega Genesis exclusive was the inspiration for not one, but two whole genres of video games - the RTS and the MOBA.  As the title is perhaps trying to imply, the game can be played either versus the CPU or via split screen.  Players only directly control a single transformable air/ground vehicle, but are able to build a number of other units to assist them in capturing key locations on the map.  These subservient units can be given simple orders, but generally require a lot of micromanagement to be effective.  Because the game is real-time this can lead to feelings of being overwhelmed.  It's a problem that prevented the game from achieving wide-spread appeal.  Regardless of that, Herzog Zwei is the grandfather of Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander, not to mention Dune II: Battle for Arrakis and Warcraft as well as the Command and Conquer series.  It even got a spiritual successor in the form of the free-to-play online-only game AirMech.  Despite recieveing this polished up re-imagining the original concept has never really attracted a large playerbase.

There are more games I could cover.  Meridian 59 (the first MMORPG to feature three-dimension environments) comes to mind, but I think I have written enough for now about humble trend setters.  It's also worth mentioning that one can always dig deeper.  Back at the beginning I mentioned Sweet Home being the starting point for the survival horror genre.  In truth though one could go back further to Project Firestart in 1989 or even Haunted House way back in 1982 (for the Atari 2600) and claim that either of them is where it all really got started.  Of course that can lead to very reductive statements like "all games are based on the first distributed game ever - Space War!"  Tempting to declare, I'm sure, but the fact of the matter is game designers are influenced by things outside the realm of video games too.  The same holds true for other kinds of media as well.  One could claim that the 1982 film TRON was inspired by electronic entertainment, but if you sit down and watch the movie you'll gradually realize that it was based on Frisbee, handball, tennis and motorcycle racing as much as Pacman or Pong.