When we talk about the best video games of all time, one factor tends to outweigh all the others: innovation. Scroll through a list of the greatest games ever made, and you’ll constantly be faced with the games that changed the game. On IGN’sTop 100 Video Games Of All Time,Super Mario 64makes the top 10, while no other 3DMariogames do. The reason? You never forget the first game to blow your mind, to do something you’d never seen before. Super Mario Galaxy and Odyssey may be more polished, may have smoother controls, but Super Mario 64 presented a new way to play that changed the medium forever, and that tends to supersede everything else.
But as we look at the games that are up for the top prize at this year’sGame Awards, they are, by and large, games that build on prior success.
I haven’t played much ofAlan Wake 2, which I hear does some really cool stuff, so I’m going to leave it out of my considerations here.
Resident Evil 4 Remakeis great, but it’s a modern reworking of an established classic.Marvel’s Spider-Man 2is a lot of fun, but it’s an improvement on the formula established by Marvel’s Spider-Man and Miles Morales.The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdomis wonderful, but it reuses the map from Breath of the Wild.Super Mario Bros. Wonderhas a lot of new ideas, but none of them are big and bold enough to jump out of the shadow of 2D Marios that came before.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is the game I most expect to win, but its overwhelming popularity has little to do with actual innovation and more to do withthe appearanceof innovation. Larian’s latest is building on theDivinity: Original Singames the studio made before just as much as Tears of the Kingdom or Spider-Man 2 are standing on the shoulders of their predecessors. Baldur’s Gate 3 was such a breakout hit, though, that itfeelsentirely new for the mass audience that has discovered it.
But, isn’t that how we usually use the term innovative? WhenDoomlaunched in 1993, it was such a defining game that first-person shooters were just called “Doom clones” for the next decade. We look back on Doom as a game-changer. But was it really? id Software had released a first-person shooter the year before in Wolfenstein 3D. Most of Doom’s innovations weren’t mechanical, they were technological. Really complex texture mapping made the game look more immersive and realistic than games had until then, and it had an incredible sense of speed. But Doom wasn’t, fundamentally, a different kind of game than Wolfenstein. Just like Mario 64 wasn’t, fundamentally, a different kind of game than Jumping Flash!
While critics and players tend to put a premium on innovation, there isn’t much that’s truly new. What we’re actually prizing is the stuff thatfeelsnew. Breath of the Wild felt new because there had never been an open-world 3D Zelda game before. Baldur’s Gate 3 feels new because it’s bringing Divinity: Original Sin 2’s gameplay to a bigger audience with a huge increase in production value. That shouldn’t take away from these games. Not at all. But it should make us question how much innovation actually matters. Maybe another game did it first, but who cares? If a game incorporates ideas that feel fresh in a way that makes them compelling to play, that matters a whole lot more than whether those ideas are entirely new. After all, is anything?
NEXT:Why Tears Of The Kingdom Should Win Game Of The Year
