Hey have you watched this?

Well if you haven't, you should. If you have, keep reading!

Metagame fever has been taking over the office, so much so that tomorrow there will be a podcast about it that we are recording tomorrow. Here's the deal, we want you, YES YOU, to play along. Below is an image, and we want you, the listener, to pick a game as an answer. Here is the question and possible answers that we randomly drew.

So there it is. Which game changed the industry more: Pokémon or Sim City? Answer below and we'll pick some of the best responses. (Don't just leave one-word responses!)

GL:HB

Pokemon

Pokémon, probably.

@scarace360: But WHY!?

@scarace360: But WHY!?

@scarace360: But WHY!?

I'd go with Pokémon, since it revitalized interest in the aging Game Boy, invented an entire subgenre of RPGs, gave the Game Boy Link Cable thing a use, for once, created a pop culture craze, etc.

I don't think either had a massive impact on the industry however Pokemon probably edges this one. It was one of the original 'mainstream' games.

Personally I'm going to say Pokémon. Mostly because I was never really into SimCity, and also because I'm a HUGE fan of Pokémon. I was in Elementary School when Pokémon Red and Blue came out and everyone I knew had it. I remember going to the movies and seeing other kids playing Pokemon. It was everywhere, at least from my perspective. Though the original Sim City came out before I was even born, so obviously I'm not a great source of knowledge on how much it may have changed the industry. Either way, Pokémon will always be special to me and that is why I choose you, Pokémon!

Pokemon.

It pretty much introduced the RPG genre to a generation who would otherwise not be interested and it defined the game boy as a platform worth having. I might be a little biased considering I spent a good chunk of my youth playing the various releases and to be honest, I haven't played minute one of a Sim City game but fuck me If I didn't enjoy wasting away those early years. Everyone on the playground knew who Pikachu was, didn't care if you fit into the nerd category or any of that bullshit. THAT GAME WENT DEEP.

Also it produced this picture.

Sim City. While Pokemon is really popular and sells a lot of units it really didn't change anything. Sim City showed that games could take a realistic thing like designing/planning/running a city and make it into a game that anyone can pick up and play. It's because of Sim City that games like Railworks or the Sims exist. You can take a real job like driving a train and make a game out of it, or you could even make a game about your day to day life. Games didn't have to be abstract or fantastic, they could be about ordinary every day things and still be fun to play and because of this we have all these modern simulations.

Sim City.

Pokemon was a huge success for Nintendo, but changed very little in the gaming world. It was an RPG with Mons elements, which is hardly new (but did spawn a lot of imitators, granted) since DQ and SaGa and others had been messing around with the idea of capsule monsters to a lesser extent for a while. All Pokemon really did was change the world in other ways, such as making anime a more accepted and common animation type in the western world and demonstrate that games can make a fuckload of money from merchandizing.

Sim City did nothing less than to establish an entire genre of the real-time creation sim. Though newer than simple God-sim games like Populous, it opened the doors for difficult strategic games not based on armies and wargaming, but maintaining something as mundane as a city and keeping it engrossing all the while. I'm not saying it's the first, because that's not something you ever want to throw out without major research, but it was certainly an early contender and a clear influence on the games like Civ and Theme Park that followed in its footsteps (and then you have the ones that followed in their footsteps..)

@scarace360: But WHY!?

Pokemon

SimCity. Because without it, there would be no Farmville. QED

Sim City was the aim to perfect a previous game type.... pokemon was the simplification of a previous game type....

This seems like a great post by a great person.

@questions said:

This seems like a great post by a great person.

ALT'S ARE AGAINST THE SITE RULES.

you can't cut my funding, you'll regret this

YES!

YES!

Pokemon because of the widespread acceptance/knowledge?

Pokemon without a doubt...
 
The topic is which one changed the industry more? Look no further than sales and units pushed my friend. Pokemon not only did a service to its genre, but the idea of portable entertainment.
 
As a 19 year-old who lived through first hand of that goddamn Pokemon craze in the second grade, it was a terror. To see the school system shaken to its core and take further steps to really get a hold on Gameboys and cards in the classroom is pretty amazing in hindsight. 
 
It was a system seller where now you have an entire demographic hooked on portable games to take to school. This more or less spurred the Gameboy and Gameboy Color into the forefront and other companies took note. Even today companies and manufacturers are still feeling the ripple effects of how addictive games can be a great distraction on a handheld. Pokemon on the gameboy served more or less a model for the smart phone business. I honestly wouldn't be too sure if we would have seen this little tech boom for smart phones if it wasn't for Pokemon making sure kids brought their gameboys everywhere and now those same kids are making sure to bring their expensive ass phones.

Pokémon, without doubt. While Sim City is obviously a landmark title, even people who have never actually played a Pokémon game (or don't even play video games in general) can look at a picture of Pikachu and say "oh, Pokeymans!" In terms of cross-media saturation that appeals to Joe Public, with its movies and TV and merchandising, there's not a lot that comes close to the Pokémon phenomenon in the gaming world. Plus that shit's been around for-fucking-ever now, and people are still buying it.

Also, there was never a Sim City television show that made a legion of Japanese children flip into epileptic paroxysm. That's a pretty big game changer right there.

While it would be more impressive to come up with a solid justification for Sim City, I can't help but go with pokemon.

Sim City isn't without it's merits. It even has "Nintendo" characteristics in such that it attracted a subset of new gamers. You know you are on the cusp of something special when girlfriends and moms start getting into pc gaming.

Pokemon is an industry giant on it's own. It would be hard to disagree that the various iterations did not have a direct correlation between Nintendo hardware sales. Pokemon is the "Mario Brothers" of handheld gaming. Even outside of video game sales, when you have a franchise that has great popularity in the movie industry, television, trading card games and any merchandise you could think of putting the pokemon label or characters on... it's hard not to identify Pokemon as revolutionary regardless if you personally like the franchise or not.

Pokemans!

Hmmm.. that's tough, but I got to go with the Pocket Monsters on this one. Sim city is great and all, but Pokemon is one of the largest game franchises of all time(second only to Mario in terms of sales.) A very large part of Nintendo's success in the mobile space can be attributed to Pokemon, simply put people bought nintendo handhelds for the sake of playing pokemon. While Sim City may have legitimized and popularized a specific genre of games, Pokemon had the same effect on not just a platform, but on mobile games in general.

If you go by popularity Pokemon would probably win, but what exactly did it bring new to the table? I can't think of anything, where as sim city is the first of it's kind. done set match.

Pokemon, because it's more popular apparently, which makes me sad.

Pokemon, because it made every kid on the planet buy a Game Boy.

SimCity. Pokemon was popular, sure. Pokemon was awesome, yeah. It was unique in a lot of ways, but it wasn't overly influential on the industry. You could argue that it got a lot of kids interested in gaming, popularizing it and making our hobby more mainstream. Sure, I can see how you would come to that conclusion, but gaming was already well along that pathway, and it would have continued along it without Pokemon. And another game would have come along soon enough and given it the same jump that Pokemon did. As for influencing other games, Pokemon just didn't do that on any significant scale. Apart from the copycats that cropped up imitating Pokemon, it really hasn't influenced many other games in the industry. Pokemon is still very much a unique experience, with no one really adding those unique elements to other games.

Now, SimCity on the other hand invented an entire genre. City building games just didn't exist before SimCity game along. There were a few management type games around, but they all focused on a specific goal, usually to build up an powerful army then defeat your enemies. They all had a very specific endgame. SimCity reinvented that. You were building a city for the sake of building a city. Sure, there was the scenario mode that gave you goals, but the most popular mode was the sandbox mode, where there weren't any formal goals beyond "build the best city you can". And what constituted the "best city" varies from player to player. Games had never really done that. Games had always about achieving a very specific ending. Open ended games did not exist. Now they do. And it's all thanks to SimCity.

SimCity hasn't introduced the world to the number of new and strange sexual fetishes that Pokemon has.

Pokemon, it introduced an entire younger generation to classic RPG gameplay by being super accessible, yet deep enough to get really invested.

Pokemon had a bird... that could turn into a bigger bird.

Revolutionary!

Pokemon duh!

I'm inclined to say Pokémon because the impact of SimCity seems largely like an undercurrent; if the question were "which game is more revolutionary?," SimCity all the way, but outside of The Sims (which, in turn, had a larger impact on the industry than SimCity itself) and Farmville I can't say that anything SimCity has led to can really be considered "super-important." That's hard to say for me; I really loved RollerCoaster Tycoon as a kid, and both Animal Crossing and even Assassin's Creed II and Brotherhood certainly take elements from The Sims and SimCity.

Pokémon and its surrounding elements were the first game series I can think of in memory with a significant social element. "Trading" and "battling" Pokémon is superbly different from four friends sitting around playing GoldenEye; people were either meeting for the first time in real life in the hopes the other player has that Scyther you've been hunting for, or they're gathering twenty people around three link cables just to get the chance to prove that their Clefable is way better than your Charizard. It provided something almost similar to the arcade experience, except it could be anywhere and convince anyone that you were having more fun than them. Without the social elements of Pokémon, we still would've never had Farmville; without "exclusive" Pokémon, game developers would've never learned that people like to get exclusive stuff (and will pre-order at GameStop for it!)

On top of that, Pokémon and its surrounding elements were the first video-game franchise that were aimed at children and still taught family values (not to mention reading skills.) Anyone in the Pokémon games is either respectful, can be won over through a side quest, or is painted as a "rival," and the TV show obviously painted a lot of parents' perspectives on the games (and games in general.) Obviously, there were those who were never won over because of the "fantasy" violence; those people, in fact, could probably only be won over by SimCity and its ilk, and then they'd still say that games are not for children. I was in elementary school when Pokémon released, and I remember a lot of kids whose parents (who normally did not support video games at all) picked up a Game Boy and a copy of Pokémon Blue.

Before Pokémon, games aimed at youths were just those games not deep enough for adults to play, and kids spent their time playing most of the same games as the adults (maybe not Ninja Gaiden, but Zelda and Mario.) Any RPGs at that point had dark storylines and some intense difficulty, and most other games really just didn't have much text. Thanks to Pokémon, we have the incredibly fleshed-out games for youths, such as Animal Crossing andViva Piñata. Also, there's Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 that owes at least a bit to Pokémon.

EDIT: I FIGURED OUT ANOTHER GAME! PERSONA 4!