What games popularized certain mechanics?
I was trying to think of which games created certain mechanics that became popular and copied by future games in the industry.
The most famous one that comes to my mind is Assassin’s Creed, with the tower climbing for map information.
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Spacewar! was a F2P PvP game with no microtransactions and no battle pass. Although it's hard to quantify exact player numbers (it precedes Steam charts), for a while it was the most played videogame in the world.
Its real-time graphics and multiplayer combat were very influential, and widely copied by many other games.
It also popularized the "mechanic" of online matchmaking through steam for pirated and abandoned games. Thank you Spacewar, very cool.
Edit: the Steam one is a test game for their steamworks system with source code from the original game. The more you know.
Wow this brought it full circle, the name looked familiar but then it clicked, back in my pirating days lol
I see what you did there!
::: spoiler Space War history
SpaceWar is the first game to be frequently ported to different computers, back when computers took up a big portion of the room they sat it, and when "porting" was practically re-coding, from scratch, in Assembler.
:::