Cognitive training games. Everyone was getting into shit like Brain Training or Big Brain Academy in that weird era where Nintendo was so ubiquitous that "non gamers" all had a DS or Wii
this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2025
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Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.
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The grey brown modern military shooter slop published during like the early 2010s. God that was some fascistic garbage.
classic spunkgargleweewee shooters, priming the next generation for mindless imperial slaughter on the television
You already nixed Pokemon, but it seems like Pokemon Go 
could be considered enough of its own thing to be included
Pokemon Go fucking changed the world for like 3 months. I dont think there has been anything like that in my life that just put the world on its head and then put it right back
It was so barebones at the time too. It's actually bloated at this point and guilty of every mobile game sin, but it's wild to see so many people still playing it. I still boot it up every now and then but haven't gotten nearly as into it as some people have.
Though with that recent sale, it's definitely time to abandon it for good.
PoGo had crazy broad appeal, ranging from kids to the elderly
I remember seeing grandmas doing raids downtown
I played it a bit when it started, and then got back into it a couple of years later because a friend of mine was into it. I gotta say, seeing crowds of people at local parks during community events was quite heartwarming.
Around 2016 it felt like the industry was pivoting to vr and now 9 years later does anyone even care about vr anymore?
In my experience, no matter how cheap it gets, VR still requires a lot of space. Most people under 40 live in shoeboxes.
cockpit games work but they don't make enough of those that are enough better than a flat screen to justify the extra effort at home
I care, because it is still neat tech, but yeah it feels like it's kinda dead for a while. Apple's thing made a bit of a splash, but didn't linger.
vr needs something more transformative than 200 shooting galleries and to be able to replace my desktop monitor.
it also needs to not weigh a ton, not have cables, and somehow also last all day on battery.
I had a lot of fun with VR from like 2019-2021. But it really does still feel like a gimmick. I loved whipping it out at a party or kickback, and people were always eager to play some games on it, but it really was the novelty that made it fun. It offers unreal immersion but the space requirements, up front costs, and isolating feel are big turn offs. And using it longer than 2 hours or so is near impossible. That said, my friends all got quests and quest 2s during quarantine and it gave us a lot of new and more immersive ways to play pc games and socialize that I valued during that time.
There was a good fifteen-ish years staring in the mid 90s where game advertising had to be very confrontational or gross for some reason. That feels like a very era defining thing. Like I remember the Hitman ad showing a dead woman in a bathtub, or the Gamecube Wavebird controller that had a guy playing on the toilet. And of course everyone remembers being made John Romero's bitch.
Acclaim was notorious for this kinda thing, like they had a campaign for Shadowman 2 where they offered to pay the funeral costs of anyone who put an ad on their tombstone.
Or just anything involved with the campaign for the Dante's Inferno game. Part of it involved hiring actors to portray Christian protestors to call the game sacrilegious. Then EA sent boxes to game critics like Yahtzee. When opened the boxes would play that Rick Astley song and wouldn't stop until destroyed with a hammer. Like who tf was hired to think of all of this stuff and why did game companies pay marketers to do this
Part of it involved hiring actors to portray Christian protestors to call the game sacrilegious.
Ok, this is actually really funny. They should do this again but for "woke", they can invent an outrage cycle and see how much the chuds fall for it
Earthbound: This Game Stinks
The height of RTS 90s early 2000s... I played more or less every RTS game made because it was my favourite genre. May it rest in peace. Thanks blizzard for killing it permanently
how do you reckon that blizzard killed RTSes?
It's a bit of a trick question, Blizzard didn't really do anything to kill RTS persay, it was more that after SC2 released every publisher was trying to get a piece of the starcraft esports pie. You can see elements of SC2isms starting around with RA3 when that released, and most other RTS games were trying to go hard on streamlining near everything like how SC2 did eventually culminating to being like C&C4's gameplay and design, and some RTS games got forced to hard pivot to being a MOBA (remember End of Nations?)
DS brain and focus boosting or learning "games"
The enormous amount of World War II games after Saving Private Ryan came out, as part of an even bigger wave of WWII media in general.
*slaps roof* You can fit so many media properties in this war!
EDIT: There was a big flowering of Half-Life mods for a time, and it is the reason we have Subnautica
The roguelite genre will probably be seen as a hallmark of the last decade-ish of gaming.
Maybe not a fad so much as the natural change in the industry towards digital distribution, but I miss the days of "feelies" - physical promotions like cloth maps included with games.
Then again, I had to call Nintendo because I lost the letter that provided the clue you needed to complete Startropics.
1776! This thing is chock full of america tropes
Wii sports
Yeah, motion control/waggle in general.
Those little shits:
Quick time events and good riddance
Unless you're playing a yakuza game LOL
Though their worst offenders are definitely the mid-2010's tbf, except for Lost Judgment's weird multi-input QTEs. Dead Souls in particular speeds them up so fast on higher difficulties that it's basically impossible to hit them consistently unless you use the PS3 menu to buffer them
Quick time events are still alive and well. I played Star Wars Outlaws recently and they had quick time events for eating food
The call of duty modern warfare and black ops games during the early 2010s and very late 2000s. It seemed like every second game, no matter the genre, tried to copy call of duty. The subculture around these games on early internet/YouTube was a thing.
Mascot Platformers in the 90s
I dont think anyone is still really trying the Kinect thing anymore. nobody wants to do motion controlling anymore.
Some VR headsets detect hand movement through the headset cameras, eliminating the need for controllers. Probably the closest thing to a successor the kinect has.
The Isometric RPG era (late 90s-early 00s) with Baldurs Gate, Icewind Dale, Temple of Elemental Evil, Fallout, Neverwinter Nights, Planescape Torment, Arcanum etc. They have made a bit of a comeback lately though.
Shadowrun!
I still think about that game. my friend had it on SNES and I would watch him play for hours. the music still gets in my head.
it is wild to me how 5 out of 7 of the games you listed were directly based off of D&D.
Game manuals lol. It was a 70s-90s fad that didn't make it to modern times.
This is a weird fad of the 90’s, but classic 90’s ‘tude: it was everywhere and carried on even in the 2000s.
I’d say the quintessential 90’s ‘tude character was Bart Simpson: the rebellious kid who wasn’t afraid to put teachers in their place. More relevant to the conversation, Simpsons video games were crawling with ‘tude. Almost immediately after sonic came out and was a more benign version of this. Unlike Mario, he was cool and edgy.
We got a little bit of this still in the 2000s and Sly Cooper’s a good example. Sly Cooper was arguably 90’s ‘tudes mature, suave older brother in college. Sly himself was always confident and quick with the joke, and regularly flirted with Carmelita. Even when he got angry in the first game, he spoke in a somewhat calm manner as if he knew what he was doing. Look at boss banter with the fiendish five vs his banter with Bentley.
In some ways, I liked it because American media was flirting with more moral ambiguity, even if it meant having objectively good but “chaotic” characters like Sly Cooper.
Goldeneye for N64. so realistic. mind blowing stuff.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I do play Fortnite but I don't know about its impact on the real world. It's not implausible that it gets people dancing on TikTok, but that's just a guess.
Its also kept going, I dont think that format and formula are going to really go out of style
I think a big part of that ongoing success is that they're constantly switching it up. There's the core gameplay but they really don't let you get bored with the game
pubg wasn't the first battle royale game but it was the first one where 100 people jump out of a plane worked well enough and that created the cultural moment that catapulted fortnite's free BR mode into a position to funkopopify itself into the juggernaut we know and loathe today.
there were a ton of companies scrambling to shit out battle royale games after 2017 but they're pretty much all dead as of a couple years ago. Both actually out of business and adding bots to keep up the façade of a full lobby.
Pac Man had several games, a cartoon, a cereal, and a hit song, and spawned many imitators.