1976. 10 years old, I wake the family up on Christmas morning.

Like every Christmas before, I impatiently wait while the adults get themselves out of bed, come downstairs and start the coffee brewing.

That particular year there was an especially noteworthy present waiting for me under the tree. One of those colorfully wrapped packages contained a shiny yellow Magnavox Odyssey 300 Video Game System, my first game console.

Countless hours were spent playing the three variations of Pong available on that system, and despite my mother’s warnings, it never did damage my eyesight or my parent’s television.

It wasn’t long afterwards that real videogames started to appear alongside pinball machines in the arcades. Games like Space Invaders, Galaxian, Frogger, Pac Man and many other games from the videogame boom of the 1970s are still being discovered by new players, 30 years later.

Dad owns most of the videogame consoles at the AV Enthusiast crib. After a post-marriage housecleaning, 6 game consoles still remain in my home theater. Some of my old systems were harder to give up than others. I only miss my 3DO for one game, Star Control 2, and it’s hard to justify keeping a system around for one piece of software. In the case of my Turboduo, I miss that quite a bit because of the loss of Dracula X, the best Castlevania game ever made. The Nintendo Wii made losing the Sega Genesis, NES, Super Nintendo and Nintendo 64 painless, as the Wii’s Virtual Console is doing a great job of making games I liked on those systems available.

For the enthusiast, much like movies, music and tattoos, videogames place timestamps on the roadmap of your life. Certain games really evoke nostalgic sentiments in me, and remind me of what was happening in my life the first time I played them.

Videogames have come a long way. Every time there is a substantial bump in graphics technology, the games become that much more immersive. However, more often than not, the innovation that changes videogames as we know them has nothing to do with how they look, but how they draw us in. Along the way, special games have come along that raised the bar and led the way for developers to engage players in new and exciting ways. Here are 10 instances that I feel stand out from the crowd:

1. Intellivision Sports (series)

The Intellivision Sports series was the EA Sports of it’s day. Prior to the Intellivision Sports series, sports games were clunky, pixellated abberations that barely resembled what they were supposed to represent. Not that anyone looking at a screenshot today would be terribly impressed, but at the time the Intellivision delivered graphics and gameplay that overshadowed it’s arch nemesis, the Atari 2600. Playing Football with a friend was more fun than anything that preceded it. The Football, American Football, Baseball and Hockey games offered by the Intellivision Sports series were way ahead of their time, and introduced play mechanics that others would imitate for years.

2. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Treasure of Tarmin

For those of us whose parents didn’t have an Apple II, Treasure of Tarmin was a revelation. First person dungeon crawling in 1982. It doesn’t look like much now, and the level of interaction with the enviroment is ridiculous by today’s standards. In 1982 however, it was a game that kept me up til sunrise many, many nights. The very first time videogame console owners got a taste of a real RPG.

3. Super Mario Bros

Singlehandedly laid the foundation for a new genre of gaming. Super Mario Bros was challenging, but not smash-your-gamepad-against-the-wall-and-stomp-the-remains challenging. You’d die and come back for more. Again and again and again and again. Super Mario Bros included enough hidden paths and surprises that you never felt you had discovered everything the world had to offer. This is one of only two games that I used to see on the back of my eyelids when I went to bed at night after playing it.

4. Tetris

The second game that I played so many hours, upon closing my eyes at night I would be greeted to falling Tetris pieces on the back of my eyelids until I fell asleep. Simple, addicting, ingenious. If it didn’t establish the puzzle game genre, it set the bar for the imitators.

5. Phantasy Star II

Sure, the NES had a handful of RPGs, but Phantasy Star II on the Sega Genesis was the father of the modern console RPG. Good graphics for it’s time, character development, a long quest and convoluted dungeons. Phantasy Star II was better than the sum of it’s parts, because it was the first game to put those parts together and offer them up to gamers. Phantasy Star doesn’t get the hype that Final Fantasy does, and unfortunately Sega let the series die, but Square would not have built the empire they did without Phantasy Star blazing the trail before them.

Next week in 10 Videogames That Changed Everything - Part 2, we’ll finish out the 90’s to see what games have had the most influence on the titles that we’re playing in the 21st century.

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