Game|Life

We've all heard of some of the videogames that had a dramatic impact on everything that followed after. Tetris launched a puzzle-game craze that never slowed down; Super Mario 64 laid down the ground rules for 3-D action games.

But there are games that had just as significant an influence that aren't remembered at all. Maybe they weren't commercially successful outside of a certain region of the world – or at all. Maybe a rip-off version became more successful. Or maybe their ideas weren't quite ready for prime time.

What all of these games have in common, however, is that one can draw a bright line connecting the relatively unknown original and the successful game or genre that it inspired. These are cause-effect relationships that, for one reason or another, often go unnoticed.

Above:

Table Tennis (Magnavox Odyssey)

Most remember Atari's incredibly successful Pong as the progenitor of the arcade-game business. What few knew back in the day was that Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, after first producing an overly complicated game called Computer Space, got the idea for the simplified, accessible tennis game when he saw the home gaming machine Odyssey (pictured above right) at a trade show. Magnavox proved the infringement in court when it showed that Bushnell had signed the guest book at the show. The historical record has since largely been corrected to credit Odyssey inventor Ralph Baer with the original concept for the tennis game that made videogames a household word.

Photo: George Hotelling/Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0