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.
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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.
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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 π. So I classify this ahead of it's time due to the first party product not existing yet.
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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.
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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
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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.
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.
I was going to say Morrowind. But yeah, Daggerfall is a good pick too.
Thanks for the info on Severance I'll check it out