What games do you think will be known in about 100 years?

I know it's such a hypothetical topic, but it's something I think about frequently.

You can look at the literature/music that have lasted over 100 years (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Twain, Poe, Shakespeare, the Bible/Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Mozart, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Bach and I believe—when the time comes i.e. 2065 or so—Beatles, Beach Boys, Pink Floyd, Bowie etc.) and you can see why people still consume those pieces of media. I won't go into detail, but they're all "classics" for perfectly valid reasons. I'm sure we'll look at Kubrick and Hitchcock and Lynch and Tarantino and Anderson and Kurosawa and other directors in the same light, though film is so new (and frankly not my area of study) that it's difficult to gauge.

Which brings me to my topic question: What video games do you guys think will be classics? As in, are there any video games that in 2080/2090/2100, people will still be playing and enjoying and genuinely saying "Wow...What an incredible game"? This is such a difficult question because video games are inherently slaves to the technology of the time, whereas music/books/movies haven't necessarily been.

Or do you think that maybe there will be so many video games during that time—which their undoubtedly will—that no one will bother with the "classics" and they'll just look forward to Madden 2081, etc.? Or a combination of the two?

Personally, I think people will always come back and play classic SNES games like Super Mario World, Super Metroid, Link to the Past. They'll probably even play some original Super Mario Bros if only for some kind of weird "retro" factor (whatever that means in the future!). I think 3D games may be more up in the air though I do believe a game like MGS3 will stand the test of time but then of course the ultimate question is: How will people play these games? If only via emulators, will people desire to go out of their way to do so? Or will there be a sort of "Penguin Classics"/"Greatest Hits"/"Game Preservation" that gets people into older games?

It's all fun to think about...Ultimately I think Nintendo games will stand the test of time. It's important to keep in mind that Bach/Beethoven/Tolstoy/Steinbeck all had TONS of contemporaries and yet the aforementioned are the particular men we still study and admire to this day. When you think of 19th century composers it's basically just Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Chopin and Wagner. So what developers will be thought of as 20th century developers? Nintendo and...Sony? Rare?

What are your guys' thoughts?

The tales of Murder Island are vast and perverse.

by that time, games like witcher 3 will be playable on smartphones WITH VR support and holograms, etc

i think traditional console gaming as a hobby is slowly dying though, i don't think people in a 100 years will be as interested in these "masterpiece" games that we have now, i think they'll move into a new spectrum of game entertainment beyond what we know now. But for the rare that will be interested in old tech like the PS4... bloodborne and TLOUR for sure, maybe bioshock and classic stealth like MGS

I'm of the mind that video games will be tossed aside in favor of something like simsense from Shadowrun, so none of our current video games will be played 100 years from now. We're all gonna be chipheads.

I suppose everybodys answers to this will be biased. We try not to be, but I'm not Mr. Gerstmann, I don't have his encyclopedic knowledge of games. If I was building a game 'time capsule' of games that I consider 'my classics': I'd put in:

The (rumored to be released) mini snes

Bioshock 1 and Infinite.

Half Life 1, 2 and episodes.

Halo MCC

Portal 1

GTA 1, Vice City and 5

Call of Duty (Black Ops II I guess)

Tony Hawks 2x

Sonic 2

Streets of Rage

Golden Axe

Far Cry 1

Pac Man/Dig-Dug/Galaxian (I had a pc triple pack of these as a kid)

I dont have a deep nintendo knowledge so I included the mini snes to cover that time/company. I've also never played any CoD, except 3 so I don't really know which one is the classic.

I haven't owned a playstation since 1 and my best memories are THPS and Crash Team Racing. I love CTR but not for this list.

Super Mario Brothers

Grand Theft Auto (as a series at least, not such which game in particular, if you go by sales maybe 5?)

Ocarina of Time

Pac Man

Tetris

I've heard many people say they believe OOT hasn't aged well, but I've known some 14-15 year olds who are cite it as one of their favorites despite it obviously being well before their time. I think the ability of people to appreciate older highly influential 3D games is generally underestimated.

Dark So- no, not going to say it.

I very much doubt anything outside of stuff like Tetris or Super Mario Brothers. Certainly nothing relevant to today, like Dark Souls or Skyrim or Call of Duty etc.

Bubsy 3d

I highly doubt the majority of these games will be relevant in 100 years. From this list, I can see Half Life, GTA (the whole series), Pac-Man and maybe some SNES games, but that's it. Also, if any Call of Duty will still be important, then it will be COD4: Modern Warfare, but that name would most likely only come up if people are discussing shooters.

I think the most relevant either now or in 100 years have to be games that are known not only by "hardcore" gamers but also by casual gamers or just public knowledge. That's why I think games like Super Mario Brothers, Tetris and Pac-Man will still be known in 100 years just like they are today.

Beyond Good and Evil 2, because it will just have been released.

That was quite the jump.

I don't see why there wouldn't be niche players of just about any popular game around today in a hundred years' time. I still regularly get enjoyment out of 20-30 year old games now. Some of them relatively obscure. Some people still enjoy silent films. Obviously your household names won't be as household as they are now. People (most likely) won't be playing Elder Scrolls 35 - That Peninsula on the West Coast of Tamriel nor Saints' Row the Forty-Eighth.

Now, the year 3000, who the fuck knows? Maybe we'll be playing Super Mario Bros. in full-immersion, haptic body suits.

I think humanity will have obliterated itself by then.

On the off-chance someone is still around, I think it could go different ways. Maybe technology will advance to the point that video games as a thing you played on screens with controllers is all that's retained except to hardcore history nerds. In the sense that any individual games will be remembered as relics of cultural significance, I just don't think that'll happen with anything we have now. Our society is so bombarded with options for recreation and only growing that it's way too difficult for any singular thing to stand out to enough people for such an extended period of time. I don't think history as we view it now will even be how people in the future view theirs.

League of legends and hearthstone will probably still be running with minor changes every decade

Super Mario 64

You're right, they will still be playing Skyrim on whatever consoles will be available by the year 3000 because Bethesda isn't going to do another Elder Scrolls game, they'll just re-release Skyrim forever until the giant asteroid hits the earth and wipes humanity from existence.

MGS2 and Nier: Automata should be taught in universities, along with Kentucky Route Zero, if that last act ever comes out.

I think for games to "survive" that long they need minimalist (2d) Graphics so your OG Mario is probably ok, Tetris and Pacman anything with 3d graphics is gonna be rough because of Rapid development in those kind of games. Let's face it Mario 64 looks like shit !

@johnymyko: Oh man endless Skyrim sounds like a Nightmare ! Don't Do it Todd !

Pong and Tetris seem likely. Both truly iconic. A lot of it just seems too recent to tell. I too wonder what video game history will look like in the future.

Came here expecting to see Minecraft and surprised I haven't. It's not that I think people will be playing Minecraft in 100 years, but it's so essential to youth culture at this point that it will be known, the same way that we know about Horatio Alger and other popular writers/artists of the past. It will be embedded in so many cultural artifacts.

Think about what films from 1917 are still remembered. It's basically foundational stuff that moved the format forward. So I think that things like Super Mario Brothers and Tetris will be known by people with an interest in such things, but the general public will have at best a passing familiarity with one or two games from now.

On the other hand if lifespans increase and there are more people around who were alive now, that could change things. Of course they will remember some video games from their youth, but they will also pass them on to next generations. How many of you know about the Beatles and the Beach Boys in part because your parents/grandparents played their music for you and shared it?

No Man's Sky and Forza. Both, for different reasons.

The Witness.

Gonna agree with everyone saying that games like Tetris, Super Mario Bros, Pac-Man, etc. are the ones by far the most likely to be remembered; the foundational stuff that got the format moving.

Beyond them, I think there are some milestone games that will be less well-known but that a decent number of people will still be familiar with (sort of like how there's a decent number of people that can name movies and musicians from the 1930s, but its not that widespread), stuff like: Final Fantasy 7, Doom (the original), Minecraft, Grand Theft Auto (series as a whole, not individual games), Myst, Pokemon, The Sims.

With the way that old games are hard to play since controller options change, screen resolutions change, video connections change making old consoles hard to hook up to shit, etc., I expect very few games to stay relevant a hundred years later, except maybe stuff like Tetris and Pong which have a simple concept you can recode for a new platform.

Books and film are much easier to transfer to new formats without a lot of hassle. Even then, when you go back and watch film from the 20s and 30s, it's hard to enjoy them on anything other than an academic level because the filmmaking standards are so primitive compared to later decades.

I feel like there will always be a match of Counter Strike 1.6 going on at some place in the world.

Mario and Zelda

The very act of looking at a flat screen for information may be obsolete by then, so the answer may be nothing.

It might be akin to asking folks in 1900 "Hey what sheet music do you think people will still pull out a hundred years from now?"

@jaycrockett: People do still pull out sheet music though?

It will probably wind up being a whole lot like movies in their first fifty or so years of existence are now. There will be a handful of people who really get into games and really want to know and study things from this era. We already have some people who are way more interested in games from the 80's and early 90's than anything coming out today. Hell, I think it would be cool to play dnd, an RPG from 1974.

But that will only be a few people. Most people will probably be able to tell you something about Mario (he's a short fat guy who runs and jumps through levels) and people might still be playing some form of Counter-Strike (that game is approaching its 20 year mark and people are still playing de_dust), but only a few people will have heard of Super Metroid or Chrono Trigger. And even fewer will have played them.

Whichever company is still around, so probably Galgun.

It's an interesting question to discuss, but ultimately unknowable. As others have said, the ways that people will engage with information in 100 years is something we can predict, but can't really be sure of. A lot of sci-fi from the mid-20th century features some kind of global computer network, but it's not really something we would recognize as the internet today.

The real classics, like Pong or Pac-Man or Tetris or even Mario might be known by name, but I don't think we'll be seeing people playing old games like we do now. I mean, I don't think we'll be seeing any GoTY contenders from now on a list of franchises that people play.

Now, I do think people will still be playing some form of digital game. It may very well be Hyper-Immersive Virtual Entertainment (HIVE, trademark pending) with neuro-synaptic feedback and [insert technobabble here]. I just think it will be so DIFFERENT from how we experience games today that the question can't really be answered.

Of course, I said all that while trying to answer the question. :-) It's fun to talk about ideas like this, and to the folks reading this in 2117, hi! Hope you had fun reading our primitive ideas!

Zilch. They won't give a shit. Interactive porn and future drugs will turn their brains to mush!

In 10 years we'll all be playing PUBG anyway.

Clash of Clans, Candy Crush, stuff like that.

It'll be this

@sinusoidal said:

Oops sorry I was pretty drunk last night lol. I edited it to say 2100 :P

I think it's important to keep in mind that yes we will probably be playing video games totally differently in 100 years, but also nobody is using actual NESes to play Super Mario Brothers anymore or, if they do, they're probably in the minority. If you're playing Super Mario it's probably on an emulator or on Switch/WiiU VC or something...And it's been thirty years which, in video game/media consumption time, is really pretty long.

Kids are probably going to be making computers capable of running Doom using everyday objects, like they're taught to make pinhole cameras and develop black-and-white photographs today.

I'd like to imagine that in the year 3000, the inter-stellar subspace communications network will still have a few lines of idtech3/quake 3 arena network code by John Carmack hidden somewhere.

None, by then the great water wars will already have happened, earth will be like a madmax sorta place

Only ET for the Atari will remain.

Probably nothing from this period outside of the significant stuff like Pacman and Tetris, maybe Mario Bros. Games are only just getting to be "mainstream", so the hope of anyone remembering the stuff that's popular now 100 years in the future is pretty low already. I'm sure even something like Last of Us or Red Dead Redemption which people hold up as top quality games will be forgotten because they don't do anything new, they just did something good.

The Sims

Pong and Quake. All other current games are basically irrelevant from a historical perspective?

It's so hard to tell. Old films exist in ways that are easier to play back than old games even though tons of early films are completely lost to us. Books are even easier. That's why we still have stuff written thousands of years ago and read them today. They need that "staying factor" to remain relevant for anyone to want to play them in the future. As much as I love MGS3, I just don't think it has any oomph to it to make it interesting far in the future. I think everything it did will have been done better by then. If it's remembered for anything, it's for The End fight because of the PS2's internal clock thing. It's an out of game way to beat him and I don't think many games have done that since. Also I'll include Psycho Mantis's controller rumble too. Even if haptics become way more commonplace in the future, these things still work even though they are so simple. Their simplicity makes them special.

There's also the issue of are we living in a digital dark age? Old hard drives don't keep like pottery shards and even pieces of paper so if something is deleted, it's really just gone without a backup. Maybe NES games will last longer than newer stuff but I'm no expert on how those insides keep.

Really though, I think Super Mario Bros. and Pong are going to stand the test of time just like Gilgamesh and that Great Train Robbery movie. Not because they're necessarily good but because they're firsts (sort of) and you remember early things because they were well, early.