10 Best Next-Gen Reveals In Gaming History
Remember the first time you saw Metal Gear Solid 2?
Few mediums of entertainment and art have evolved as quickly as video games. Growing by leaps and bounds in the less than fifty years that games have been commercially available, from pixels to polygons, one thing has consistently excited gamers and players: The feeling of being on the cutting edge.
New technology presents better music, prettier graphics and new possibilities for how games can be experienced. Scrolling screens gave birth to action platformers. The first person perspective gave birth to pulse pounding shooters while polygons and three dimensional spaces became the perfect breeding ground for character-action and survival-horror.
When something new hits gaming, things change.
The games and the hardware that best know how to flex that new technology are held in high regard not simply for their execution, but for all the possibilities they can fill a player's imagination with. Games and consoles that make the cutting edge a defining aspect of their experience excite people because they give us a taste of the future in the present day.
These games and consoles are what set the standard and broke new ground, shining in the limelight as they changed the gaming landscape for everyone.
10. Call Of Duty 4 Makes Modern Warfare Beautiful
2007 was supposed to be the year that Halo 3 would announce it dominance over the gaming industry, becoming the game that would perpetually spin in broken homes and fraternity houses all across the world. The problem is, no one told Activision, who would successfully wrest the position of top-franchise from Bungie with their game, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.
The game's success was a perfect storm of America not being able to process its collective grief, while gamers were all harboring a collective appetite for something different after being flooded with sci-fi shooters, and Call of Duty 4 actually feeling like a next generation shooter.
When players first slipped on the night vision goggles to see their targeting lasers dance across the screen, or the deserts dust particles blow through the environment, they knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the sci-fi shooter was dead, and that the seventh console generation wouold be dominated by the modern military aesthetic.
Taking the fight online, gamers would spend hours in lobbies more toxic than Chernobyl, creating their own classes and customizing with perks to make sure they could top the next game's leaderboards.
From this point on, all shooter games would be judged by the standard that Modern Warfare set.