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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Puzzle Quest Challenge of the Warlords: a Match 3 game in the early days of Xbox Live arcade.
The timing would have had to be tight on this, had it come out around the time of monument Valley it would have been perfect to expose casuals to a match 3 game with more depth to it
But it was too easily for the match 3 craze, and now too late for the oversaturation of match 3 mobile games.
Eternal Darkness Lovecraft is all the rage among public domain IPs nowadays. Eternal Darkness was all the fun of bizarre 4th wall breaking spooks combined with non frustrating old school Resident Evil like gameplay. more of a wrong place wrong time kind of thing, in an attempt to bring a more mature crowd to the GameCube is underperformed.
I would love to see Nintendo at least attempt to emulate it on the Switch somehow.
I have so many fond memories of Jurassic Park Trespasser. I remember my dad picked it up for me right around launch time. I had read the previews in PC Gamer magazine and was fully into the hype.
The game was really attempting VR before we had VR. There was no HUD. Your lifebar was a heart tattoo on your chest that emptied as you took damage. There was no ammo counter for your guns. Your character would say things like, “feels full” or “feels a little light” to give you an estimate of ammo remaining.
The biggest flaw, apart from the broken AI for dinosaurs, was just like VR, you had to aim manually. You could turn and twist your gun freely which meant you had to aim down the sights. In VR, in 2023, with motion controllers, this is amazing. But in 1998, with a mouse and keyboard, it was really awkward. It’s a game I never finished.; Probably never even got close to finishing. But I was still in awe of the world they built and freedom offered in 1998.
I’ve revisited a lot of childhood games over the years thanks to mods but I don’t think I’ve ever thought about seeing where JPT ended up. Thanks for the suggestion. I think I have my weekend rabbit hole.
Dragon Quest IV has all the ingredients of a fine 16-bit RPG: multiple playable story characters with unique personalities, a plot with twists and turns, minigames, and a fairly unique villain with human motives.
Somehow, they made it work on the original NES, before 16-bit RPGs were even a thing.
Rescue on Fractalus! was a first person 1985 game where you pilot an orbital landing craft from space to the surface of fractal generated mountainous planet. Blew my mind.
yeah I had that for the C64. The ‘3D’ bit was cool but found it boring as hell to play. Same as the other Lucasfilm games. Having said that, them being pirated copies (thanks Dad!) and having no manuals probably didn’t help.
Tomb Raider on PlayStation is what I say is way ahead of it’s time which I think not many people give the game credit for.
It is one of the few early 3D games that nails the atmosphere and have tension. I always gets sense of adventure and I discovered part of the tomb by myself which I feel like modern games holds people’s hand a little where it feels less fun and more I been told to do XYZ.
Also the way they did the water effect is impressive that they distort the texture UV postion I believe.
It introduced many things we consider normal in fighting games.
Other popular, well-known, options might be Portal, the Super Game Boy (not a game but awesome idea)…
Those all sold well though, so they don’t meet the criteria.
I remember discovering the Sid Meier games because I bought a box of them for $1 (because the boxes were only printed in French) and I feel that despite the popularity they certainly could have sold even more had they been released a little later. Pirates, come on… awesome.
My brother and I were also obsessed with Crash and the Boys on Nintendo. Really didn’t find many games like that at the time.
Arguably the Sid Meier’s Civ board game was ahead of it’s time easily. But 4x board games today so remarkably well, and the latest Sid Meier board games can’t seem to catch up anymore sales wise to 4x board games
It came out before Doom, had full isometric 3D environments including looking up and down, and contained immersive sim and RPG elements. All the ingredients of a modern first person action RPG… in 1992.
Big Rigs Over the Road Racing would have blended in inconspicuously on Steam had it released 10-15 years later. At the very least it would no longer be remembered as “the worst game ever”, and it may even have gained some “so bad its good” meme fame from streamers and made some sales.
Similarly to JPT, the Carnivores games seem like an early version of ARK. It’s set in the future, in a planet with animals that resemble dinosaurs, and you’re sent in to kill them. You gain weapons and tools as you kill more. I remember when I first played ARK, I was instantly transported back in time to the days when I played Carnivores 2.
The radio in Silent Hill was genius. Rather than making the game easier, it amped up the tension when that static started up. Especially in the dingy locales that made up the majority of the game.
I rented Populous for SNES as a kid but they didn’t have a manual so that was a pretty tough one to figure out.
Same for me, on the Amiga500, especially finding out how hero-raids and Armageddon work ^^
Played the crap out of Maniac Mansion but didn’t realize it was before the PC point and click craze
Got it on the C64, did you find out all five possible endings?
I freaked out finding the fuel for the chainsaw in Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders ;)
I still don’t think a game has used fire as effectively as this did, before or since. Even in later Far Cry games seem to have a much more fire-lite implementation.
I can confirm- me and the wife just finished playing farcry 6, a week ago.
Fire… is meh. It doesn’t spread. I remember having damn wildfires on farcay 2, which would be extremely dangerous.
Even, the physics for shooting limbs from trees appears to be gone now. That was a really cool feature.
For repairing cars, in far cry two, you would pop the hood, and do some stupid junk (that in no way would actually fix a car), but, it look pretty cool. In far cry 6, you just point a blowtorch as the body of the car.
Ultima 4: first CRPG where the main goal was moral and ethical development of the main character instead of killing a big baddie.
Dwarf Fortress: founded the detailed fortress-building subgenre of city builders.
Nethack: While not the first Rogue-like game (this title is reserved for the game called Rogue) or even the first Hack (this title is reserved for the game called Hack), Nethack brought in so much detail to the game that it was way ahead of the curve at the time. Perhaps still is.
Add to that Ultima Underworld - the first FP hack + slash, paved the way for Elder Scrolls. The fully immersive plot in 2 where you went into different worlds all with their own backstory was huge. The magic system was pretty good too
I wish there were a version of Nethack that had modernized controls at least, if not also modernized graphics. I remember it so fondly but it’s a real headache to go back to these days.
Shattered Pixel Dungeon (PC & mobile) is the closest thing I’ve found to it these days, but it’s still quite different.
A quote from a review of the game Alien: Resurrection written in 2000:
The game’s control setup is its most terrifying element. The left analog stick moves you forward, back, and strafes right and left, while the right analog stick turns you and can be used to look up and down.
You may recognize this as how every console FPS works now, but it earned the game a 4.7/10 at the time.
Also I claim this as further evidence that people are too quick to hate on novel control schemes, today too. The standardization of controls is in some ways great and in other ways very limiting - I hope for more variety and experimentation in this regard to be accepted one day.
Severance: Blade of Darkness. This game from the Spanish dev Rebel Act Studios is absolutely insane.
First of all, in gameplay terms, it’s basically Dark Souls ten years before Dark Souls. All the basic elements are there - very difficult lock-on based combat with heavy emphasis on distance, timing attacks/blocks/dodges, and stamina management, several equipment slots for your left and right hand that you cycle through individually (and the same for consumables), non-linear level design with shortcuts to earlier areas, weapons that you might hang onto for their moveset even though they’re not statistically the best… To be fair, there are some differences. The game is divided up into discrete levels rather than having an interconnected world, there’s no magic, RPG elements are pared down to the absolute minimum, and the controls are atrocious even by the standards of the day. But looking back on it, I find it extremely hard to believe that From Soft didn’t take some inspiration from this little-known title.
Secondly, there’s the technical aspect of the game. Remember Doom 3? Remember those pre-release videos in which id Soft bragged about their new engine having 100% dynamic lighting with every single polygon casting an accurate real-time shadow? Yeah, guess what, Blade of Darkness had the exact same lighting system three years earlier. Ridiculous!
Daggerfall. Ah yes, the infamously undercooked open-world RPG from Bethesda. In some ways it was actually the last of its kind; nobody really makes old-school dungeon crawlers like this anymore. But it was also one of the first games that pioneered a procedurally generated world deliberately made too large for a single human to explore. With a world containing 320,000 square kilometers of wilderness and almost fifteen thousand locations of various types, it would take a lifetime to see everything. It’s quite literally not built for human consumption, since you can never fully consume it. The best you can do is sample it. This achievement went thoroughly unappreciated at the time due to technical limitations making the vast world invisible and therefore pointless. The very faithful Daggerfall Unity remake can be modded with a draw distance of some 150 kilometers, however, and the sheer size of Daggerfall’s world thereby revealed is extremely impressive to see. Despite its primitive graphics, it feels far more real than the compressed geography of Skyrim and Fallout. Ridiculously huge worlds that the player can never hope to fully explore would go on to be used in games such as Minecraft and No Man’s Sky.
Turbo Esprit. I mean, just watch this video. Yes, that is a third-person open-world city driving game with realistic traffic and pedestrians, i.e. an early predecessor of GTA. It came out in 1986 and runs on a ZX Spectrum, a machine with 48 KB of memory.
Jurassic Park Trespasser: the YouTube channel ResearchIndicates and one of the most informative Let’s Play videos of all time best explains this game.
Oh god yes, that’s one of my favorite games and let’s play series of all time. Hey, remember how Half-Life 2’s physics engine blew everyone’s minds with those seesaw puzzles where you had to weigh down one end with bricks or other items so that you could walk up the other? Yeah, guess what, Trespasser had that before Half-Life 1 even came out.
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I have so many fond memories of Jurassic Park Trespasser. I remember my dad picked it up for me right around launch time. I had read the previews in PC Gamer magazine and was fully into the hype.
The game was really attempting VR before we had VR. There was no HUD. Your lifebar was a heart tattoo on your chest that emptied as you took damage. There was no ammo counter for your guns. Your character would say things like, “feels full” or “feels a little light” to give you an estimate of ammo remaining.
The biggest flaw, apart from the broken AI for dinosaurs, was just like VR, you had to aim manually. You could turn and twist your gun freely which meant you had to aim down the sights. In VR, in 2023, with motion controllers, this is amazing. But in 1998, with a mouse and keyboard, it was really awkward. It’s a game I never finished.; Probably never even got close to finishing. But I was still in awe of the world they built and freedom offered in 1998.
There are mods to make JPT much more playable I recall if you ever tried to take another crack at it.
And it had some very clever immersion but just needed more tweaking to reach Dead Space levels of HUD without HUD kind of play
I’ve revisited a lot of childhood games over the years thanks to mods but I don’t think I’ve ever thought about seeing where JPT ended up. Thanks for the suggestion. I think I have my weekend rabbit hole.
Dragon Quest IV has all the ingredients of a fine 16-bit RPG: multiple playable story characters with unique personalities, a plot with twists and turns, minigames, and a fairly unique villain with human motives.
Somehow, they made it work on the original NES, before 16-bit RPGs were even a thing.
Now you can play as a tedious weapon shop owner lol.
I vaguely recall reading DQ3 players in Japan loved the merchant in the early game so much they made it more of a thing on future outings
Rescue on Fractalus! was a first person 1985 game where you pilot an orbital landing craft from space to the surface of fractal generated mountainous planet. Blew my mind.
yeah I had that for the C64. The ‘3D’ bit was cool but found it boring as hell to play. Same as the other Lucasfilm games. Having said that, them being pirated copies (thanks Dad!) and having no manuals probably didn’t help.
Tomb Raider on PlayStation is what I say is way ahead of it’s time which I think not many people give the game credit for.
It is one of the few early 3D games that nails the atmosphere and have tension. I always gets sense of adventure and I discovered part of the tomb by myself which I feel like modern games holds people’s hand a little where it feels less fun and more I been told to do XYZ.
Also the way they did the water effect is impressive that they distort the texture UV postion I believe.
I’ll throw an easy one into the mix:
Street Fighter II: The World Warrior (1991)
It introduced many things we consider normal in fighting games.
Other popular, well-known, options might be Portal, the Super Game Boy (not a game but awesome idea)…
Those all sold well though, so they don’t meet the criteria.
I remember discovering the Sid Meier games because I bought a box of them for $1 (because the boxes were only printed in French) and I feel that despite the popularity they certainly could have sold even more had they been released a little later. Pirates, come on… awesome.
My brother and I were also obsessed with Crash and the Boys on Nintendo. Really didn’t find many games like that at the time.
Arguably the Sid Meier’s Civ board game was ahead of it’s time easily. But 4x board games today so remarkably well, and the latest Sid Meier board games can’t seem to catch up anymore sales wise to 4x board games
Ultima Underworld
It came out before Doom, had full isometric 3D environments including looking up and down, and contained immersive sim and RPG elements. All the ingredients of a modern first person action RPG… in 1992.
ESPN NFL 2K5, and All-Pro Football 2K8 were very ahead of their time. In many areas, Madden has still failed to catch up to these titles.
Also $20 freaking dollars MSRP for 2K5!!
That could have led to years of football bliss for affordable gaming. But I recall EA and the NFL took exclusivity to the license and killed 2K quick
Big Rigs Over the Road Racing would have blended in inconspicuously on Steam had it released 10-15 years later. At the very least it would no longer be remembered as “the worst game ever”, and it may even have gained some “so bad its good” meme fame from streamers and made some sales.
Similarly to JPT, the Carnivores games seem like an early version of ARK. It’s set in the future, in a planet with animals that resemble dinosaurs, and you’re sent in to kill them. You gain weapons and tools as you kill more. I remember when I first played ARK, I was instantly transported back in time to the days when I played Carnivores 2.
Silent Hill and Resident Evil 1 for PS1
The radio in Silent Hill was genius. Rather than making the game easier, it amped up the tension when that static started up. Especially in the dingy locales that made up the majority of the game.
I loved the camera view shifts and the fog elements, the whole game atmosphere knew how to go under you skin.
I love how they used the console’s limitation to improve the game!
some genre pioneers
I rented Populous for SNES as a kid but they didn’t have a manual so that was a pretty tough one to figure out.
Played the crap out of Maniac Mansion but didn’t realize it was before the PC point and click craze
Same for me, on the Amiga500, especially finding out how hero-raids and Armageddon work ^^
Got it on the C64, did you find out all five possible endings?
I freaked out finding the fuel for the chainsaw in Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders ;)
That and gave Ed his microwave hamster. I even tried to stay up late to watch the Maniac Mansion TV show but didn’t understand the VCR too much
Farcry 2, IMO, was pretty far ahead of its time.
Being able to shoot individual limbs and twigs from trees.
Fire, that would intelligently spread.
Weapon durability which was visually impacting, as well as alerted the firearm’s performance.
It had some really cool features for its time.
deleted by creator
I still don’t think a game has used fire as effectively as this did, before or since. Even in later Far Cry games seem to have a much more fire-lite implementation.
I can confirm- me and the wife just finished playing farcry 6, a week ago.
Fire… is meh. It doesn’t spread. I remember having damn wildfires on farcay 2, which would be extremely dangerous.
Even, the physics for shooting limbs from trees appears to be gone now. That was a really cool feature.
For repairing cars, in far cry two, you would pop the hood, and do some stupid junk (that in no way would actually fix a car), but, it look pretty cool. In far cry 6, you just point a blowtorch as the body of the car.
I melt the broke.
Car good now.
Same for healing. They included differen animations for different injuries, at least to some extent.
If the last damage you received was explosive the PC would pull shrapnell or a stick out of his leg.
It was such a visceral, immersive game.
Ultima 4: first CRPG where the main goal was moral and ethical development of the main character instead of killing a big baddie.
Dwarf Fortress: founded the detailed fortress-building subgenre of city builders.
Nethack: While not the first Rogue-like game (this title is reserved for the game called Rogue) or even the first Hack (this title is reserved for the game called Hack), Nethack brought in so much detail to the game that it was way ahead of the curve at the time. Perhaps still is.
Add to that Ultima Underworld - the first FP hack + slash, paved the way for Elder Scrolls. The fully immersive plot in 2 where you went into different worlds all with their own backstory was huge. The magic system was pretty good too
I wish there were a version of Nethack that had modernized controls at least, if not also modernized graphics. I remember it so fondly but it’s a real headache to go back to these days.
Shattered Pixel Dungeon (PC & mobile) is the closest thing I’ve found to it these days, but it’s still quite different.
A quote from a review of the game Alien: Resurrection written in 2000:
You may recognize this as how every console FPS works now, but it earned the game a 4.7/10 at the time.
If that didn’t make it ahead of its time I don’t know what would. Thanks for sharing!
Kind of reminds me what half-life did for PC controls
Well that is hilarious xD
Also I claim this as further evidence that people are too quick to hate on novel control schemes, today too. The standardization of controls is in some ways great and in other ways very limiting - I hope for more variety and experimentation in this regard to be accepted one day.
I was about to post this. Amazing how things change.
Severance: Blade of Darkness. This game from the Spanish dev Rebel Act Studios is absolutely insane.
First of all, in gameplay terms, it’s basically Dark Souls ten years before Dark Souls. All the basic elements are there - very difficult lock-on based combat with heavy emphasis on distance, timing attacks/blocks/dodges, and stamina management, several equipment slots for your left and right hand that you cycle through individually (and the same for consumables), non-linear level design with shortcuts to earlier areas, weapons that you might hang onto for their moveset even though they’re not statistically the best… To be fair, there are some differences. The game is divided up into discrete levels rather than having an interconnected world, there’s no magic, RPG elements are pared down to the absolute minimum, and the controls are atrocious even by the standards of the day. But looking back on it, I find it extremely hard to believe that From Soft didn’t take some inspiration from this little-known title.
Secondly, there’s the technical aspect of the game. Remember Doom 3? Remember those pre-release videos in which id Soft bragged about their new engine having 100% dynamic lighting with every single polygon casting an accurate real-time shadow? Yeah, guess what, Blade of Darkness had the exact same lighting system three years earlier. Ridiculous!
Daggerfall. Ah yes, the infamously undercooked open-world RPG from Bethesda. In some ways it was actually the last of its kind; nobody really makes old-school dungeon crawlers like this anymore. But it was also one of the first games that pioneered a procedurally generated world deliberately made too large for a single human to explore. With a world containing 320,000 square kilometers of wilderness and almost fifteen thousand locations of various types, it would take a lifetime to see everything. It’s quite literally not built for human consumption, since you can never fully consume it. The best you can do is sample it. This achievement went thoroughly unappreciated at the time due to technical limitations making the vast world invisible and therefore pointless. The very faithful Daggerfall Unity remake can be modded with a draw distance of some 150 kilometers, however, and the sheer size of Daggerfall’s world thereby revealed is extremely impressive to see. Despite its primitive graphics, it feels far more real than the compressed geography of Skyrim and Fallout. Ridiculously huge worlds that the player can never hope to fully explore would go on to be used in games such as Minecraft and No Man’s Sky.
Turbo Esprit. I mean, just watch this video. Yes, that is a third-person open-world city driving game with realistic traffic and pedestrians, i.e. an early predecessor of GTA. It came out in 1986 and runs on a ZX Spectrum, a machine with 48 KB of memory.
Driller. The first game on the Freescape engine, a first-person shooter (of sorts) featuring fully 3D environments and enemies. In 1987. Running on the same machine as the previous game.
Oh god yes, that’s one of my favorite games and let’s play series of all time. Hey, remember how Half-Life 2’s physics engine blew everyone’s minds with those seesaw puzzles where you had to weigh down one end with bricks or other items so that you could walk up the other? Yeah, guess what, Trespasser had that before Half-Life 1 even came out.
Thanks for the info on Severance I’ll check it out