10 Games That Defined the Genre

Doom (1993) — First-Person Shooter

id Software's corridor shooter defined the FPS genre's visual language, movement speed, weapon variety, and multiplayer deathmatch — still the design against which every subsequent FPS is implicitly measured.

Street Fighter II (1991) — Fighting Game

Capcom's six-button system, special move inputs, character specialisation, and tournament-viable balance created the modern fighting game genre from near-scratch.

Civilization (1991) — 4X Strategy

Sid Meier's turn-based empire builder codified the Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate structure that defines every subsequent 4X game from Master of Orion to Endless Space.

Ultima (1981) — Computer RPG

Richard Garriott's game established the top-down tile-based RPG with virtue-based morality, open world exploration, and narrative consequence — the template for Western computer RPG design for two decades.

Super Mario Bros. (1985) — Platformer

Nintendo's game set the platformer's foundational rules: scrolling momentum, jump arc timing, item-based power progression, and enemy defeat through positional accuracy.

The Legend of Zelda (1986) — Action-Adventure

Item-gated world access, dungeon map progression, and an overworld that rewarded non-linear exploration defined the action-adventure genre and its vocabulary for thirty years.

Rogue (1980) — Roguelike

Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman's procedurally generated dungeon crawler invented the entire roguelike genre — random maps, permadeath, and ASCII tile-based navigation — and gave its name to a category that thrives today.

SimCity (1989) — City Builder / God Game

Will Wright's city simulation created the god-game and city-builder genres, demonstrating that a game with no victory condition could sustain indefinite play through the pleasure of systemic management.

Mortal Kombat (1992) — Competitive Violence

Midway's fighter defined the fatality system, mature content rating category, and the regulatory response that produced the ESRB — changing how games were sold, rated, and discussed by governments worldwide.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (1997) — Metroidvania

Koji Igarashi's PlayStation classic fused Metroid's exploration structure with RPG progression and gave its name to an entire genre of non-linear action-exploration games that remains commercially and critically vital.