I see the phrase ‘ahead of it’s time’ used a lot like a long with words such as ‘underrated’ or ‘epic’ or ‘literally’, or ‘ironic’. I read how ahead of it’s time is used for literally any popular game that it alters the meaning of the phrase.
Anyways here is a list of games I feel would have sold or been more known had they been released several years in the future:
- Jurassic Park Trespasser: the YouTube channel ResearchIndicates and one of the most informative Let’s Play videos of all time best explains this game.
JPT had a rather ambitious physics engine AND open world environments which seemed pretty much undoable at the time, along with non gameplay breaking story flow with Attenborough himself. But just like with No Man’s Sky the hype engine and promising too much got the devs way over their heads and failed. Valve was able to continue what JPT started with Half Life, but I imagine if it had more time JPT could have been an immersive classic.
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Time Splitters Future Perfect an FPS with sharable Map Creation content. The problem I feel was many people didn’t try this as Halo’s Forge wasn’t out yet to bring to light what user content can really do, and less accessible online play at the time.
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Tony Hawks Pro Skater 3 Okay this doesn’t count, but I just want to mention this because the official Sony Network Adapter wasn’t even out yet when this released. You have to use a specific brand of Linksys or D-Link USb to Ethernet adapter on your PS2 to get it to work 😄. So I classify this ahead of it’s time due to the first party product not existing yet.
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Psychonauts. This was an easy one, non Mario platformers weren’t the trend among the ocean of best selling Xbox titles. Thankfully A Hat In Time much later showed the more mainstream appeal of small dev platformers.
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Dragon Quest 1 & 5 in the US. Not in Japan as you could shut down Japan for a day with the release of a new Dragon Quest game (tip for invaders). DQ has always struggled in the US partly due to, oddly enough, taking so long to reach the US. It’s a mix of too early and too late, with DQ 1 inventing the traditional console RPG format, and DQ5 being Pokemon before Pokemon, to quote Tim Rogers. But early DQ games releasing far too late on the NES life and not releasing on SNES I feel could have made DQ games closer to FF games in the US
Another World had the whole cinematic gaming figured out back in times the floppy disk, lengthy intro included. Took about 15 years for the rest of the industry to catch up.
Elite procedural open world universe in 3D all the way back in 1984. The sequel in 1993, Frontier: Elite II even let you land on planets.
Magic Carpet, fully destructible terrain in 1994 along with an interesting mix of (very light) RTS and FPS. Later on Red Faction and Red Faction: Guerrila offered even more destructibility. While we have some modern games like Teardown that focus on destruction, it’s still not a commonly seen feature in games. Magic Carpet is also still the most “3D” game I am aware of, supported almost everything, VR headsets, red&green glasses, even MagicEye-style auto stereograms.
EF2000, flight simulation with a full dynamic war simulated in the background. Falcon 4.0 improved on it. Carrier Command might be an even earlier example of similar mechanics. Mainstream gaming still hasn’t really had anything similar as far as I can tell and relies on scripted events instead of a simulated world.
Boulder Dash Construction Kit (1986), might not have been the first, but one of the early games including a fully featured and easy to use level editor.
Good stuff, thanks!
I was coming to scream “Another World” here. We played the future hard with this one. So many games are essencially Another World.