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

To put this question in perspective....

Consider what books we still talk about and think about from the 19th century.

• War and Peace (1869), Leo Tolstoy
• The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Feodor Dostoevsky
• Madame Bovary (1857), Gustave Flaubert
• Crime and Punishment (1866), Feodor Dostoevsky
• Anna Karenina (1877), Leo Tolstoy
• Moby-Dick (1851), Herman Melville
• Middlemarch (1872), George Eliot
• Pride and Prejudice (1813), Jane Austen
• Le Père Goriot (1835), Honoré de Balzac
• Wuthering Heights (1847), Emily Brontë
• Great Expectations (1861), Charles Dickens
• Emma (1816), Jane Austen
• The Idiot (1869), Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Bleak House (1853), Charles Dickens
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Mark Twain
• The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Henry James
• Les Miserables (1862), Victor Hugo
• A Hero of Our Time (1840), Mikhail Lermontov
• Sense and Sensibility (1811), Jane Austen
• Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), Thomas Hardy
• David Copperfield (1850), Charles Dickens
• The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831), Victor Hugo
• Vanity Fair (1848), William Thackeray
• Frankenstein (1818), Mary Shelley
• The Scarlet Letter (1850), Nathaniel Hawthorne
• The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), Edgar Allan Poe
• Washington Square (1880), Henry James
• The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Oscar Wilde
• Jane Eyre (1847), Charlotte Brontë
• Silas Marner (1861), George Eliot
• The Count of Monte Cristo (1846), Alexandre Dumas
• A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Charles Dickens
• Mansfield Park (1814), Jane Austen
• Ivanhoe (1819), Sir Walter Scott
• The Mill on the Floss (1860), George Eliot
• Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Harriet Beecher Stowe
• North and South (1855), Elizabeth Gaskell
• Around the World in Eighty Days (1873), Jules Verne
• Dracula (1897), Bram Stoker
• A Study in Scarlet (1887), Conan Doyle
• Nightmare Abbey (1818), Thomas Love Peacock
• The Three Musketeers (1844), Alexandre Dumas
• The War of the Worlds (1898), H.G.Wells
• The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Anne Bronte
• The Last of the Mohicans (1826) , James Fenimore Cooper
• The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), James Hogg
• Far From the Madding Crowd (1874), Thomas Hardy
• Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), Jules Verne
• Diary of a Nobody (1892), Weedon Grossmith
• The Red Room (1879), August Strindberg
• Lorna Doone (1869), R.D.Blackmoore
  
  There are five hundred others and I left out many American, British, Russia, Italian and French novels to to provide a short list with breadth.
  
  The point is 100 or 150 years from now enough games will be remembered to be a topic of discussion, and before we say "but they will be so clunky...we won't like them." Well cripes have you read a greek tragedy? Now that is some clunky, weird, and archaic staging for a play - but we still talk about them 2,000 years later.
  
  I will say that games that are most remember, might be part of the public conscious because of what people in that era will want to say about us as people. It might be that many of the games remembered will be games we admire now or have in the last 30 years. The thing to remember is that some game that might be great from technical standpoint could be very dull to people in 100 years because they say little about us. Nobody might care about Quake or Sim City V, but they might care about Doom (2016) or Until Dawn (2016) because they have a stories. Again, we don't remember Shakespeare's plays because the Globe theater allowed innovative staging techniques (technology)....we just the words because those words can be interpreted.

Tennis for Two, Custer's Revenge and Minecraft.

Minecraft makes the list because there will be 110 year-olds still playing Minecraft.

James Pond (the Amiga)

sonic

Mario and Zelda are an absolute given, on top of the obvious actual classics such as pong and tetris, as mentioned.

Surely Dark Souls will be remembered as "that," game that everyone talked about back in the day because beating it is believed to have been some kind of rite. A lot of people already talk about Dark Souls as some crowning achievement of completion so it'll only become more hyperbolic.

Beyond that, I'm not sure I'd be confident to say anything else. I think Halo could become that but who knows.

Any game which had a significant cultural impact on wider society. So WoW.

Knack.

@monkeyking1969: Missed Heart of Darkness, the best 19th century work. Also missed the point where Video Gamers are commercial products and the culture will presumably continue to be consumerist which was not that much of a concept in the 19th century aside from the extremely wealthy. It's all going to be either the first handful of games and things like Mario etc. or whatever company survives for 100 years. There might be some point in the future where games are viewed on equal footing with other forms of media; probably in like 20-30 years; at that point games produced afterward will have the potential to attain some sort of classical state but that's a while away yet and even stuff like the Witcher 3 will just be considered in the same vein as Wings (i.e. too ancient to be relevant).

We'll probably reach a point where controls and graphics can't get any better. There has to be a point where the ability to create something artistically can't outweigh what a computer is capable of and where perfect 1-1 controls are like nothing we can currently imagine. What we play now are the video game equivalents of Edison's Kinetoscope. The Casablancas and Citizen Kanes of video games are decades off if they are even that close to fruition. Not to mention the fact that no video game has yet to really reach the pinnacle of what a well-written story can be. I find it hard to fathom we are anywhere close to the golden age of gaming. It's such a young industry.

I don't agree with this at all. Having more lifelike, virtual reality controls doesn't make a game better, necessarily. People will always appreciate old control schemes. These controls (or learning them) are a part of being a game. Secondly, not all games have to aspire to storytelling masterpieces like Citizen Kane because not all games need to focus on story.

@ezekiel: Come on, man. You couldn't have read my post more wrong if you tried. I wasn't saying every game has to be a well written masterpiece or that every game needs motion controls. If I thought that I'd be a lunatic. I'm only saying that we are in our infancy. To think that all the classics have already been made is equally crazy.

But masterpieces have already been made. We're already past the 1940s of cinema, the equivalent. (Great movies already existed before then.) Video games are over fifty years old. We already have games that will be remembered. Comparing games to movies just devalues the accomplishments of games and puts them in this weird position where they have to live up to movies, which have totally different aims.

@ezekiel: It doesn't devalue anything to say better days are ahead. You still aren't trying. I never said games have to live up to movies in anything other than one area, writing. It is one thing games are still pretty terrible with but again, it's the only area where I said they needed to play catch-up.

You're also making a mistake of equating years with technical advancement. Just because video games have been around for about the same amount of time as the film industry had in the 40s doesn't mean they've hit it the same sort of technical pinnacle. Now you're unfairly comparing games to movies and devaluing them. We will continue to see new technologies that expand what a designer can do. For fucks sake, we've barely scratch VR's monumental surface.

You're making a really lazy and pointless attempt to pick apart a very optimistic post, but if thinking games don't have a ton more growing room ahead of them makes you comfortable then more power to you. I think that's weird.

We've had great video game storytelling. I don't know what you're talking about. I never said games don't have the potential to become better. But what you're saying, that the Citizen Kanes and Casablancas, in other words masterpieces, are still decades off, is delusional.

I think the point here is whether or not such games can be available to the public in 100 years. To see a film from 1917, such as Cleopatra, I would have to go through a shit ton of hoops just to find a bit of the original print. Now, we can technically pirate old games as of today with a fair amount of ease, but if we want a legal and less morally ambiguous way of preserving history, then we're gonna have to demand it. But at this point in human history, we have plenty of written and filmed documentation available about these old games that if someone of the future wanted to know about what it was like playing Pong, they'd have ways of finding it out. It'd be the more obscure games that would be left to rot in this circumstance. That's why you should aim for being memorable instead of mediocre. I don't think any one of Ubisofts games will be remembered fondly enough to warrant a look at in 100 years time when we'll probably have a much bigger standard for games in which we explore and interact with an open world.

So tl;dr: Old games will probably not be easily available in 100 years, but we'll have enough documentation to make them relevant in some form for people who want to get into game history. If you wanted to play them yourself, it would be hard and only games that were landmarks will really be remembered enough for those who are interested.

This really fascinates me. Gaming historians will have to acknowledge WoW's importance and influence but at the same time that game just kind of isn't going to be playable like it was. Hell, it isn't even the same game now in so many ways. What the hell does that mean? Are they then going to show videos of WoW circa '06, '07, etc. and talk about Leroy Jenkins? At least with a lot of other culturally significant games they're still basically the same...Mario, Zelda, Minecraft, Dark Souls--you can still consume them as they were originally intended. You can still read Shakespeare as it was originally written or watch The Jazz Singer in its original resolution.

Also @ezekiel and @slaps2 you've got an interesting discussion, though I think you're both sort of misunderstanding each other. I agree that better days of games are ahead of us with truly beautiful, timeless masterpieces and that yes, no game has yet reached the level of plot or character development or genuine, soulful, human insight quite like books and movies have; but I also agree that masterpieces have already been made and people will look back on some already released games as timeless and worth studying.

I don't think there's a problem with comparing games to movies in that they're both infantile media and it's nice to see where movies were when they were about the same age as games. There is a problem in comparing games to movies in that we might think making games "cinematic" is the ultimate end goal, but aren't we as a community generally in agreement on that? Video games are video games, not something else.

On that note, I'll predict that the most cinematic games will be the least studied i.e. Uncharted, Call of Duty, Horizon, GTA, etc. It will be the games that really know they're games and really play with that knowledge that will be the most studied. Bare in mind I'm not talking about being remembered, here. Call of Duty and GTA will be known as cultural phenomena much like westerns and sitcoms with laugh tracks were--but I don't think future enthusiasts/students of game design will care too much. At least that's my prediction :)

@ezekiel: If you think storytelling in games has reach what it has in books or film, then you are the one who is delusional. If you really think I'm saying no one has ever made a masterpiece of a video game, then you'd have to wonder why I play games for at least an hour a day and discuss them as my favorite art form on a website like this. If you want to put any thought into a post I'll gladly read it, but if you are going to continue to make wild presumptions that make no sense then I'm not going to waste my time. Go start a pointless fight with someone else.

I think it is important to consider the internet in this discussion. A game you buy at launch isn't necessarily gonna be the game you're gonna be playing tomorrow. So when talking about WoW, /do/ you talk about its launch or version 7.3? Films also go through edits themselves which makes categorizing them kinda confusing. I mean, which version of Star Wars /will/ be remembered? I mentioned piracy in my old post, but I think it should be mentioned that the best way to play these games in 100 years will probably be through sketchy means like that. There's no museum of static or original releases of games that can be played. If I wanted to play WoW's launch version, I could join a private server, sure, but that gets into my point of getting such things through sketchy and possible illegal means. It's not an easy thing to think about since a lot of old games are already lost to things outside of piracy and gaming as a whole isn't even 100 years old yet.

I said storytelling, not story. A video game story typically doesn't need to be complex. You seem to be asking for deep, complex narratives from games that don't need and usually shouldn't have them. (Well, Citizen Kane isn't that deep, but it's a technical marvel.) The idea that games need to compare to books and film to be considered art and worthy of being appreciated/studied in a hundred years is simply wrong.

He isn't necessarily asking for "deep, complex" narratives. I think you're reading into something he didn't say.

So, while I don't disagree with you that comparing books video games to other media is wrong, it really is only natural. Even if there are fantastic games without any story at all (Journey, Flower) and games of course don't need to tell a story and that's what makes them a unique entertainment medium, there are still games that do tell stories and I think it's just fine to compare the best video game stories to the best novels and movies...I agree with Slaps that games just haven't gotten there yet.

BUT! At the same time it is important to note that a story like Dark Souls—which, on the surface, is really kind of cryptic and hidden and not even really there at all, but once you do some digging turns out to be fascinating and elevates the game to some place really special—can really only exist in video games and what do we do then? How do we properly judge it? Then if we compare it to Anna Karenina or Star Wars we're doing it a terrible disservice—I agree with you there.

I am curious though @ezekiel, what games think you have fantastic storytelling? And what games you think have fantastic story?

Call of Duty 4.

@shivermetimbers: You bring up lots of interesting points. I was also literally thinking about Star Wars when I was making that post about WoW lol. Like...the only way to watch the unedited versions are those VHS copies, right? Holy hell. I don't even know if you can pirate those. Also don't forget the whole Peter Dinklage being removed from Destiny thing.

The only reason I didn't bring those up was because, well, they're pretty small. Having Han's head magically move in A New Hope or a weird alien-sex-karaoke-party in Jabba's Palace is egregious—and you could make the argument that those additions detract from the work and I would agree with you so fast you wouldn't even have time to talk after your sighing and head-shaking—but how much does it matter really?

Something like WoW which went through expansions and entirely different ways of playing the game and the fact that the whole game relies on people to be playing it with you and experiencing it you just...You don't do anything with that. Yeah you can set up private servers but then what? University professors are going to have servers set up so their students can experience old video games? Will it even be legal?

As for games being available only via piracy, I think that's a bit presumptuous. Like I said, you can still play Super Mario Bros on the WiiU eshop and that game is over 30 years old. I wouldn't doubt if, in another 70 years, Nintendo has some way to sell you a copy of that damn video game on whatever console they've got going on. The more obscure games being relegated to piracy? I think I can see that. But what about games hitting public domain? Will that happen? When they do, ROMs will be perfectly legal and there will probably be whole websites dedicated to that stuff.

@ezekiel I must admit I haven't played COD4's campaign so I can't weigh in at all.

I think a game with a truly great story (as in it makes me feel things man...it's a god damn roller coaster and i love all of the riders) is MGS3. It's got spies, it's got love interests, it's got patriotism, it's got intrigue, it's got unique, memorable characters, it's got the most tear-jerking ending in any video game...I really think that game is the closest we've gotten.

Both of you assume I don't think video games bring there own unique flavor to the table, which is something I never said. It should be obvious and if you really think I'm arguing that point than I say again... you are putting in zero effort to try and understand me. That is a very basic implication. The original point I wanted to make and the entire crux of this argument I never asked for is the following.

Games have not reached their full potential yet. It isn't even close. I think the eventual "classics" everyone will be studying are far from even a conference white-board.

I don't understand why this is such a provocative idea. That prospect excites me to know end. I just don't get how you can read that and somehow infer that I think everything else that came before is garbage (gonna point out I might be putting words in zeke's mouth here, but it's just how it's seemed so far. I'm open to clarification). It's the most inoffensive idea I've ever managed to rile someone up over.

Edit: I really didn't want to insult anyone's tastes here and I hesitate to point this out, but as long as the argument over writing quality exists... I don't understand how anyone with what looks to be a Sopranos avatar can think Call of Duty 4 has a "fantastic" story. It's a pretty generic context for the campaign. It's a fine context, but there are no memorable characters and so much of that dialogue is rote modern combat jargon or lines that are straight ripped from film. The lines ripped from film, "Check those corners" (Aliens) and "I am serious, and don't call me surely" (Airplane), kind of prove my point.

Honestly man, I'm not saying you're saying anything other than that. Just because I made the point that video games are a different medium and tell stories differently doesn't mean I think you don't think that. It's just an idea I had that I put up above...I'm certainly not riled up and Ezekiel doesn't seem so either...Tbh you seem the most fired up about whatever the hell is going on here.

What I AM saying, and what I think Ezekiel is also saying but I don't want to speak for him because this has become a bit of a mess, is that we disagree with you about that last bit. I do really believe that there are "classics" that have already been released that people will be looking at 100 years from their release—like some of the games mentioned in this topic.

I'm not saying you think games are garbage, I don't think Ezekiel ever said you think games are garbage, I'm really just trying to make my point crystal clear. There already exist classics and masterpieces. Video games will continue to foster more classics and masterpieces and yes those will probably make our current ones pale in comparison, but classics are classics for a reason.

I thought my sarcasm was pretty obvious. I couldn't have picked a more obvious example. Jesus.

You made me think of how the library of congress has started cataloging games recently. Even so, version control is impossible. I don't know if anyone's mentioned this, but online games present the problem that in 100 years... how are you possibly going to find a group of people to play your specific version of WoW with, let alone WoW at all. Maybe AI will be so advanced that they can simulate online human behavior, but that's Star Trek stuff. This is another reason I always harp on single player story and why I think those games will stand the test of time, because player bases and common game mechanics change, but story pacing and solid writing is forever. WoW might not be so loved 100 years from now, even though it has proved so far to be the game with the most all-time staying power. I can't believe it would be possible that people who are used to the multiplayer games of 2117 would still be fervent Wow players. I can imagine they'd still enjoy The Last of Us.

You really think sarcasm works on the internet?

Lol then really, what games do you think have fantastic storytelling?

Also, what about Looney Tunes? Bugs Bunny is almost 80 years old...What child didn't grow up on some Looney Tunes?

What child won't grow up on some Mario or Zelda?

Let me clarify, and I hope I don't need to go farther than this without writing a book's length of lawyerly verbiage that points out every implication and every possible loophole of thought that could possibly be used for the purposes of misinterpretation.

Sure, many classics have already been made - many that undoubtedly lay the groundwork for games to come. Casablanca (to use what I hope ends up being a simple analogy) did not invent parallel editing or subtext, after all. I fully believe, that the vast majority of games that will be considered classics have not yet been made. Your Mario 64s and your Half Life 2s will be similar to film's Battleship Potemkin and literature's Odyssey by Homer as opposed to the writings of Hemingway or the movies from the film school generation. But who, other than college professors, talk about cyclopes's or Odessa Steps sequences? Not many do.

I think it's too early to assume we've seen the video game Looney Tunes, and the question isn't necessarily who won't grow up on Mario or Zelda, but which Mario or Zelda game they will grow up on. It's also plenty presumptuous to think those franchises will be around forever or that they will be the best games to have come between now and the next hundred years.

Ah! I see what you're saying...That is a real interesting point.

It is certainly presumptuous, yes...but we're sort of just throwing tennis balls into a manatee tank here.

It is also so strange to think that Mario or Zelda could at one point just not exist. Like...Does Nintendo just say "Alright, that's the last one. We had a good run. Thanks everyone!" or do they just go completely under or what? More baseless predictions, yes, but it is all pretty fun to think about.

I don't want to take away anyone's fun in imagining which games from today will be immortalized. I think this is actually an interesting thread. I've even given my own insight as to which game or type of games I think will be around longest. I didn't write that original response so as to shut down conversation. I don't feel I've come up with the answer, so much as an answer that may have been a little outside the box. Can't speak for Zeke, but maybe that's the idea he got. I wish he had answered your question about a fantastic story seriously, though, and I'd be interested to see your pick if you haven't posted it already.

You really think it'll be out by then? There's been some talk of delusion in this thread, but damn. You might be disappointed.

This sounds about right which means Mario is guaranteed to be a part of that discussion as well.

• Zelda
• Call of Duty
• Tetris
• League of Legends
• Street Fighter
• Grand Theft Auto
• Final Fantasy
• Pac Man
• Pokemon
• Sonic
• Mortal Kombat
• Minecraft
• Halo
• The Sims
• SimCity
• Madden
• FIFA

...are also all very likely candidates. I'm probably forgetting a bunch, but those are the first big names to come to mind.

Honestly? Outside of "History of Video Games 4XX/5XX" taught in college, I think it's safe to say the vast majority of even the most popular/well-received games that exist now will be lost to time for any number of reasons, but the biggest of which is probably the fact that a lot of critically-acclaimed games today don't really mean shit in the grand scheme of things if you try to take a step back and really look at them. Just think about all your favorite old games that no one gives a shit about anymore. Someone probably called those instant classics at some point too. It's the sad truth that I don't think a lot of people have realized.

You asked for fantastic, which is why I didn't answer. That's too demanding a word. I simply said there have already been great examples of storytelling. Portal is quite good. It's simple, but effective, as most games should be. It never feels disruptive, like cinematic games usually do, and it's never boring and silly like freaking audio logs. Same with Limbo. The original Walking Dead had a pretty good video game story. Some will complain about inconsequential choices, but I enjoyed the ride and Lee's redemption. Majora's Mask is a great example of how to do an open world video game story, for how the theme of death ties into the three day cycle, in which you try to help the same people over and over. I'd love to see another game explore that idea. Soma is kind of similar to that with its theme of survival and what it is to be human. The story couldn't have been told like that in any other medium. But the protagonist is a moron. Shadow of the Colossus is an easy example. I'm sure there are many. I don't play that many story games.

I think games, the majority, are getting worse, not better. Games have become too big, expensive and risky. The budgets are barely sustainable. The AAA games almost all feel manufactured now, to be playable for as many people as possible. There was more creativity when it was niche. Games weren't so afraid to challenge the player and do their own thing. They also weren't all trying to be shitty movies and going for boring realism every time. I think it's overly optimistic to assume most games are just gonna keep getting better.

Mario, cause he's the mickey mouse of video games.

If you play Uncharted 2 today, you'll notice how klunky it is compared to 4. This means the genre hasn't matured into perfection yet.

If you look at great classic platformers, their physics were simple, they were sometimes perfect the way they were, and their way of controlling have become standards. Mega Man, for example. Jump, release direction and then you fall STRAIGHT down. These games will remain perfect. Games that try to emulate real life, like 3rd person and 1st person games of today, they still have a ways to go before they're perfected. However, some are as close to perfect as can be achieved, such as Quake 1 and 3.

Stuff like Skyrim and Fallout look janky by todays standard. Enormous open worlds will be done spectacularly within 100 years. The metaverse will exist then in it's near perfect form in lenses or implants in our eyes. Very hard to envision a world where you can live in a game world while still wanting to play extremely klunky old RPGs. Super Mario World, on the other hand? Absolutely.

There will be no games. All will be conscripted into the various army's during the global "water war" as the great extinction begins.

@slaps2: Like I said up above, I think MGS3 is the closest we've gotten. It's no East of Eden or Lolita, but I do think it's a fine work in terms of storytelling.

Lots of other interesting points brought up in such a short time:

I can see why you think this, but I think you're leaving out the importance of indie games in the market and also the fact that some AAA games (Phantom Pain, Breath of the Wild, Souls series, Doom 2016...Is Yakuza 0 AAA? Splatoon is AAA, right? Though I doubt Splatoon's budget is anywhere NEAR Assassin's Creed or CoD) are truly incredible works and also do new, creative things. Yes you have your Maddens and your CoDs and your Ubisoft games (though don't forget just how awesome those two Rayman games were) and those may seem like the majority, but good AAA work is still being done.

And where AAA is lacking, like I said we have indie games filling their place. Undertale, Superhot, Her Story, Stanley Parable/Beginner's Guide, Battlegrounds, Minecraft, Hollow Knight, Witness, Spelunky, Gone Home, Stardew Valley, Limbo/Inside...Even more wild/obscure games that really challenge the medium like Pony Island, Frog Fractions, That Dragon Cancer, NORTH, etc.

Imo this whole discussion is worth its own thread and kind of veers off the original point of this topic, but whatever!

The sad thing about Doom is that it is only allowed to exist like that because of its history. If it were a new IP, it would have iron sights, slow movement with a sprint button, health regen, frequent cinematic moments and corridors like every other modern shooter. Shooters aren't allowed to be fast anymore.

I found The Phantom Pain disappointing. It lacked the creativity and soul of the previous games, was needlessly tedious and had pretty mediocre storytelling. It's the only numbered MGS game that I will never replay. I've lost a lot of respect for Kojima over the years.

Indie games can be awesome. Some of my favorite games are indies. But I'd get bored playing just indies, since they're so limited production-wise.

I think part of the problem with coming up with games that would still be remembered that far in the future is that the games industry is constantly evolving, a lot more so than other media such as books and movies.

The way we play games in the 22nd century will likely be completely unrecognizable to how we play now whereas books and movies are pretty much consumed in the same way since their inception with more subtle changes here and there. Still some games like the Mario series, Metal Gear Solid series, Grand Theft Auto games and so on might still get mentioned far into the future but they will more likely be strange oddities of a bygone era that won't be completely taken seriously compared to some old films that people still enjoy today such as The Wizard of Oz.

Still it makes you wonder what gaming will fundamentally be in a hundred years time...

When was this golden age of creatively risky niche million dollar AAA games?

My point was that games have become too expensive to be creative and do their own thing. Games like Shadow of the Colossus, Metal Gear Solid 2, the old Zeldas, Demon's Souls, GoldenEye and Mario 64, while not super expensive, are more complex or bigger than what indie developers typically make.