However, some of the biggest game franchises in the world are now almost unrecognisable from the games which started them. Here are ten such examples.
That's right, kids: it's another exciting Digitiser listicle!
In every other respect, it shares few similarities with his later games. Compare this single-screen nonsense to, say, Super Mario Odyssey, and your trousers will literally fall off, and blow away down the street!
"Come back, my trousers!"
"What's going on here, sir?"
"I'm sorry. officer, but my trousers fell off when I compared Mario Bros. to super Mario Odyssey - and now they've blown away!"
"Could you come with me, sir?"
Interestingly, the game wasn't a hit upon its initial release - which coincided with the 1983 games industry crash. It was ported to home systems - the Apple II, Atari's assorted consoles, the Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum and, of course, the NES - but it wasn't until Super Mario Bros. that the character really became an icon, and his future trajectory was locked in.
You know: locked in like a bunch of late-night pub-drunks.
The structure of the original Street Fighter was similar, superficially, to its successor; playing through as Ryu, you had to defeat a sequence of enemies in best-of-three bouts. There were special moves, and six-button controls (though deluxe versions featured two pressure-sensitive attack buttons, which responded to how hard you hit them). In the two-player game, fights took place between Ryu and Ken - with their identical move sets ensuring an evenly-matched "ruckus".
There were also a few enemies who later recurred in the franchise, but in almost every other respect, Street Fighter is now exposed to be exactly what it was; a massive nude (a faltering, tentative, less-good version of Street Fighter 2)!
Duke Nukem: the Roy "Chubby" Brown of video gaming. But less racist.
Though bearing little graphical resemblance to the more recent entries in the series, there are many elements which carried over to Metal Gear Solid on the PlayStation; the exclamation marks above the enemies' heads when they detect you, the slightly peculiar plot, the weird character names, and moments where the characters break the fourth wall and address the player directly...
It was, of course, later ported to the NES - as well as the Commodore 64. Betcha didn't know that, you knowledge-less freaks.
The main thing lacking was massive, open-world scale of its sequel, being divided into a more traditional, linear, video game structure, with levels (in several of which you controlled other characters) and boss fights. It was relatively well-received, but not to the degree that anybody was crying out for a sequel. Consequently: not everybody realised that Redemption even was a sequel.
Check out my cool cowboy song:
Cowboys, cowboys,
Taking Indian land by force!
Why are you even called cowboys,
When you ride around on a horse?
Yee-hah!
While it certainly strived for the epic scale that the series would become known for, what it lacked were the later ham-fisted attempts to wring emotion out of its combat. Here you're just dropped into the fight, and everyone you meet is fairly featureless cannon-fodder.
"Oh, boo-hoo... isn't war sad?"
Not here it isn't. It's well wicked, guy!
Obviously, its isometric viewpoint is starkly old-school in comparison to the lush, 3D, open world of the later games, but you don't need a geneticist to tell you that the series' DNA is all-too apparent.
There was no 3D here, but an isometric viewpoint, which made it markedly different to most other football games. Furthermore, the license didn't extend to local teams and players. Even the international teams featured players with made-up names (such as Ken Trifle, Ben-Bob Danube, and Trenchington Campus). Foreshadowing what a cash cow the series was to become for EA, FIFA International Soccer was the best selling game of 1993, shifting half a million copies - 200,000 more than EA had estimated.
Get this: did you know that "soccer" is actually a British word? It's a contraction of the term "association football". We should all be thankful they didn't shorten it to "asso".
The graphics were basic, even for the time, but the game's sound - it boasted multiple radio stations, just like its successors - was singled out by reviewers for being well good, brah.
No plots here, sir!
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