10 Video Games That Blew Your Mind (Without You Realising)

What is and is not mind-blowing really depends on the context of the time period in which it came out. What seems utterly ordinary to a fellow of today would be utterly inconceivable back then.

Hence, the original Metroid.

Everyone talks about the revolutionary reveal of Samus Aran being a woman the entire time, but right at the beginning is something that made the game ground-breaking that people nowadays take for granted: going left instead of right. In side-scrolling platformers, this was completely unheard of.

Up until then, if an object left the screen, then that object ceased to exist. But Metroid - at the cost of the game's environments coming off a bit samey, maintained a massive (for the NES) ever-present world to explore. Thus laying the groundwork for multiple entire genres of gaming today.

And it all started with the first screen of the game, where you're started off in the dead centre and told "pick a direction, see what you find."