Games that sold you on the genre.

Games
1

In this thread I’d like to hear about games that sold you on genres you were otherwise unfamiliar with, not interested in, or outright disliked up to that point. For example!

RTS - My introduction to the RTS genre came from a PC Gamer CD (January 99) which contained a demo of Age of Empires: The Rise of Rome. As a 14 year old boy who liked shooting things in the face in Doom and driving Lamborghinis in NFS, the screenshots didn’t really excite me much, but I was also broke and wanted to play basically anything I could get my hands on, so I gave it a shot.

Needless to say I ended up adoring everything about the game. Hell I’m listening to the soundtrack as I type this. While I never became an enormous consumer of RTS games, I have played and enjoyed a few (AoE 1 and 2, AoM, Homeworld, CoH, and Rise of Legends for example).

TBS - This one eluded me for a long time. I had tried the demo for a Civilization game and tried numerous times to get into FreeCiv, but they absolutely bored me to tears and I gave up on the genre. The game that changed my mind was actually not a pure TBS at all, but Rome: Total War, which I received as a surprise gift from my brother in law. I was interested in the real time battles, but I eventually grew to love the more deliberate nature of the turn based elements as well.

So after reading constant praise for Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri on here, I decided to give the TBS another shot and I picked it up during a GOG sale. I proceeded to play it for about 6 hours straight. I won’t lie and say I’m completely sold, but that game is wonderful and pushes all sorts of buttons for me, and I can see why people love it.

RPG - I was completely unexposed to the RPG genre until I received a demo CD with Diablo 2 on it. I installed it not expecting to enjoy it, and I ended up playing it until the sun came up (and for weeks after). When I collected enough money, I bought the full game and played that until the LOD expansion was released, after which I bought that and played it until…well I still play it, actually.

I don’t really view Diablo as much of an RPG, but it opened my eyes to the genre, and when a friend recommended Fallout, I ended up falling in love with it and giving other games a chance. When Morrowind was released to critical acclaim in 2002, I purchased it and spent the better part of a year completely consumed by it. After that, RPGs began taking up more of my gaming time than any other genre, and it has stayed that way since.

So what say you?

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Only two examples jumped at me:

Racing games, and Le Mans 24 Hours for the Dreamcast. I disliked racing games so much, but this one gently introduced me to the obsessive aspect of learning each and every turn to the .01 of second. The incredible eye-candy may have helped holding my attention.

Then, RTS as well, and Offworld Trading Company. Although I really doubt I’ll ever play any other RTS, so that might be considered cheating on the concept of your thread!

Oh, and forgot the most important: I thought strategy games (and History in general, even!) were horrible boring affairs, before Sid Meier’s Pirates! blew my mind. This game probably has changed a lot of things in my life.

3

RTS - Command & Conquer Multiplayer on the LAN at work
TBS - Warlords (the first one) - I eventually worked on Warlords 3 and Darklords Rising
RPG - Wizardry - Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. D&D on a computer? Yes please!
aRPG - Diablo - waited up all night babysitting my 28.8 download of the demo, and then unlocked the extra levels.
3d Shooter - I played Doom with a friend, but it didn’t really click until Team Fortress lunch LAN parties, as well as Tribes

4

RTS- Kohan only one I ever liked, have never been able to like anything else.
Fighting games- Samurai Shodown the original. I was never a SF fanboy, but being able to have a whiteboy ninja with a dog was so cool in the 90s, even if it was a character that didn’t suit me. Hopefully this series comes back
TBS- Age of Wonders 1/Alpha Centauri got those two at same time, they were both great in different ways

5

I never liked stealth/action games until Dues Ex Human Revolution. Opened a lot of amazing doors for me afterward.

6

For RTS, it has to be Dune 2 - Building of a Dynasty
For RPG, well, it’s Dungeons and Dragons: Warriors of the Eternal Sun
TBS - Global Conquest

7

I have no interest in elves and goblins and all that nonsense, so Darklands was my first RPG. I didn’t play another one until Fallout. I was only able to convince myself to try fantasy RPGs after I had learned to like the genre through those games.

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RPG - Final Fantasy 6 and Fallout
RTS - The only ones I really like/play are the Homeworld series, so they may not count
Flight Sim - An old wireframe F16 Falcon sim for C64 (can’t remember the name)
Fighting game - Tekken 1
FPS - Doom or GoldenEye 64
Space Sim - X-Wing

I don’t really play other genres.

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MMO - World of Warcraft. Well, it sold me on World of Warcraft, anyway. I haven’t spent much time in MMOs since.
MOBA - Heroes of the Storm. If it wasn’t for the toxic playerbase I might have played more of it.

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Fighting Games: Street Fighter 2 (SNES)
FPS: Halo (Original Xbox)
RPG: Final Fantasy (NES) or AD&D (2nd Edition)
Racing Games: Gran Turismo 5 (PS3)
Monster Hunter: Monster Hunter Freedom (PSP)
RTS: Remain Unsold
MMO: DCUO (PS3)
Souls Games: Demon’s Souls (PS3)
Board Games: Space Hulk (First Edition)

11

Fun thought experiment, this question takes me back. Let me think back to my formative years:

Text Adventure: My first one, the one that really pulled me in, was Zork 2. Yeah I know, I should have started with Zork but I didn’t have that. A friend and I spent a lot of time mapping that game out, working out the puzzles. We spent time in class thinking about this game when we should have been focused. And I don’t think we ever beat it.

RPG: My first real one, the one that kind of sucked me in, was Ultima IV. Same friend as above and I worked on this one a bunch too. Pages of notes and runes and spells and … just pages of stuff. We were so sucked into that game. Not sure I’ve been as consumed by another RPG quite the same way.

Roguelike: Think it would have to be Sword of Fargoal on the C64. I didn’t know it was a roguelike, didn’t know about Rogue or anything like it, but it was. Had random dungeons and when you died, that was game over, restart. I played that game so much.

Point and click adventure: I played others before this one, but the one that really grabbed me was Secret of Monkey Island. That game cracked me up and made me think, really opened up the possibilities of this type of game to me. I got to be very good at these type of games because I started to think like a designer. All those puzzles most people called bullshit were just another day in the office to me.

MMO: I resisted MMOs for the longest time. No Everquest, no Eve online, no World of Warcraft. No, it was Star Trek Online that got my attention and I couldn’t jump in there fast enough. I still played (and continue to play) like it’s a single player adventure, and that’s just the way I like it.

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I can’t really remember games that warmed me up to a genre that I didn’t like, but I do remember some that got me into the genre.

Point and Click Adventure: King’s Quest. I loved solving the puzzles and some of them were pretty obscure. I had a friend who also played it and we helped each other out.

Sports Sims: Microleage Baseball. I loved managing the Yankees since I was a big baseball fan then.

Racing Games: Test Drive. I remember the frame rate being pretty bad which made driving difficult, but I still loved it.

Turn Based Strategy Games: Empire. My friend and I would play until the sun came up.

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RTS - Utopia: The Creation of a Nation (1993 SNES) I had never played anything like it, battles were fought off screen, loved seeing the tiny tanks scoot off the map heading to fight.
TBS 4x - Sid Meier’s Colonization (1994 PC) , just loved setting up colonies and trade.
FPS - Wolfenstein 3D (1992 PC) My first time killing nazi’s, and it was so amazing.
ARPG - The Legend of Zelda (1988? NES) Just an amazing game for the time. The second quest after completing the game just blew my young mind.

14

Is it weird that my go to point and click game had always been Quest for Glory? I remember booting up the Quest for Glory 3, and just loving the jokes and style. Also, you had some great RPG elements in the game

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That kind of collective adventuring is what I enjoyed the most about the early point’n click adventures. I played King’s Quest III along with a friend and would share notes in class.

And one of the best gaming-related memories I have is the night we spent with three other friends trying to crack Monkey Island’s puzzles over a few boxes of pizza. Good times.

The original Tomb Raider is the only game I can think of that “sold” me on a genre I generally disdained (third-person action-adventure). Went into it with low expectations despite the great reviews and was promptly blown away.

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RTS - Sid Meier’s Railroad Tycoon
TBS - Sid Meier’s Civilization
RPG - Pool of Radiance
MMO - EverQuest

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In recent years, Braid was the game that made me really start loving 2D platformers for the first, and had the effect of making me finally grok puzzle games, and appreciate that “aha” moment when you see various pieces of data and your brain finally puts them together, and what seems really obtuse makes logical sense suddenly, and that moment of revelation was really, truly, amazing.

Most of my other entries would be fairly boring in comparison, so I’ll skip them for now. I don’t know why I keep doing this to myself, but I’m still looking for the magical game that will let me enjoy Rogue-likes for the first time. I have maybe found that with Galak-Z since it has a rogue-like structure, with the gameplay of a Star Control-style 2D ship combat with some nice physics. So maybe that’s cheating? You would think it would be a game like Spelunky, which is the game for a lot of other people, but I absolutely hated it. Spelunky, to me, seems like a 2D platformers with really over-sensitive controls that is not pleasurable in any way.