1. Alien: Isolation
The developers of Alien Isolation must have had a checklist of things they wanted to nail - the look and feel of Ridley Scott's movie Alien, the exploration of System Shock 2's mostly abandoned spaceship and a fearsome beast you simply cannot kill. A sole main enemy you cannot kill? That's an interesting new step for gaming... But over thirty years ago and without sound, without colour and even without true pixel graphics came the Sinclair ZX81, a mute home computer offered extremely limited black and white blocky visuals and the crudest gameplay. And on it in 1981 was one 3D Monster Maze that changed everything. Controls were nothing more than four cursor keys and there wasn't any combat or anything else to do but traverse the maze-like environment avoiding a monster. You were warned of it closing in on you not via a motion tracker's blip but via simple sentences such as "Rex lies in wait!" and "He is hunting you!" culminating with the terrifying words "Run he is behind you!" The game served up block by block 3D walls later emulated by games such as Dungeon Master and Eye of the Beholder and it was that brand new POV perspective that caused the real anxiety the player felt. Much like the most recent Alien Isolation you couldn't fight the monster, only avoid and escape. Yes nearly thirty four years ago a game came out which had a single enemy who hunts you in a maze-like environment and cannot be killed. Without 3D Monster Maze it's worth wondering if we would even have half the games we have today and it's interesting to note that despite having no sound and very basic onscreen representation, the game offered just as much if not more fear than the new Xenomorph game does with all its bells and whistles. And so we go from one of the oldest games to one of the newest, and hopefully we've paid some respect to the games that truly innovated in a time where 16KB of RAM and video resolutions of 256x192 were the norm.
What forgotten gem games do think were the real innovators in video gaming? Serve up your nostalgic thoughts in the comments!