15 Video Game Firsts We Take For Granted
12. Open World Games
Nowadays you can barely move for open world games dominating the charts. It often seems like absolutely every game coming out is trying to take on the open world formula.
It's not hard to see why. Open worlds can be loads of fun. When they're filled with meaningful quests, loads to see and plenty to keep you occupied, that is. There's been examples of when this doesn't happen - when you just get a massive map for the sake of it, with hardly anything in it to actually play around with.
Do you know what game is actually credited with giving birth to this genre? No, it's not the Elder Scrolls...
It's actually, amazingly, a 1970 electro-mechanical arcade flight simulator named Jet Rocket!
This complicated cabinet, complete with controls set out like a cockpit, allowed the player included free-roaming, first-person flight shooting gameplay.
Even more amazingly, it did this by using a scrolling track of actual printed terrain inside the cabinet. As the player 'moved' in the game world, so did the track!