Video games, as a medium, have existed for over half a century now, with some of the earliest cited examples dating all the way back to the late 1950s.
As with any medium, be it art, writing, or television, games have experienced quite a few trends and evolutions over that lengthy period. As a result, some game genreshave been either gradually left to the annals of history or absorbed into other, more dominant genres.
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While it’s unlikely that these game genres will ever become major tentpoles of the industry, it would be cool to see some new games take a crack at their older sensibilities, just to see if they can.
You know what they say: what’s passé today is retro tomorrow. Some ambitious dev could end up staging a massive comeback of gameplay styles long forgotten. We would applaud an effort to revive any of these nine gaming genres.
9Text Adventures
Get Ye Flask
In the early days of home computer games, things like graphics were a far-off luxury. It took everything a computer had just to write out lines of text, so visual elements weren’t really on the table. It was in this age thattext-based adventureslike Zork rose to prominence, a theater of the mind for those who knew how to flex their imaginations.
In these games, everything was laid out to you in a lengthy (or sometimes not-so-lengthy) description, from what you see to what you may get to where you can go. This was before mouse cursors were a thing as well, soyou had to type specific commands into a prompt like “go west” or “get sword.”
It was a genre that required a fair bit of out-of-the-box thinking, as a room or item’s useful properties may not have always been readily apparent from just the description. Text adventures have largely been absorbed into visual novels and RPGs, but it would be fascinating to see a story on par with something like Disco Elysium with no visual component whatsoever.
8Light Gun Games
We Have The Technology
Light guns used to be one of the dominant means of controlling your games, both at home and in the arcade. One of the most popular light gun games ever made was Duck Hunt on the NES, thoughthere were also many arcade classics like House of the Dead, Point Blank, andTime Crisis. It just wasn’t an outing at the arcade without at least a few minutesgripping a plastic pistol.
It’s been hard for light guns to keep up, not only because peripheral-based gaming has fallen somewhat out of vogue, but because changes in TV formats have made light-based sensors obsolete.
However, there are still a very small handful of home-playable light gun games using tech like the Joy-Con controllers. Obviously, making an entirely new light gun game for anything but the Switch or Switch 2 would be an uphill battle, but the genre is such a vital tentpole of arcade gaming history that it deserves to persist, and with its ideal hardware at that.
7Side-View Platformer
Broaden Your Scope
Here’s a fun fact: prior to Super Mario Bros., a lot of platformers used single, static screens because devs couldn’t figure out how to make backgrounds scroll. In lieu of that, these games would instead present larger maps with smaller character sprites, showing you the action from a sideways view. This included games likeDonkey Kong, Burger Time, and Dig-Dug.
Scrolling graphics are no problem these days, so if you’re gonna make a platformer, there’s no real reason not to go for the more elaborate approach. However,games like Burger Time were fun precisely because the action was so tightly packed.
It was fast-paced, almost claustrophobic, really emphasizing timing and skill. The whole map is right there in front of you, and you need to be 100% aware of where every single thing is. It’d be a great genre for making competitive games.
6Puzzle-Strategy
Really Flex That Noggin
Sometimes, in strategy RPGs, you may have a mission that’s a bit puzzle-y in nature, like “defeat this enemy with this specific unit” or “destroy this objective without touching this hazard.”
In those games,the strategic combat is still the primary draw, and puzzles are just a little icing on top. In ages past, though, there were certain games that managed to blend puzzles and strategy in equal measures.
The most well-known game of this particular hybrid genre is Lemmings, a game where you not only need to command and manage a large number of autonomous units, but you also need tosolve an open-ended puzzleof traps and terrain to guide them to safety.
There have been some miscellaneous games inspired by this formula; “Lemmings” is even an entire search tag on Steam. That said, there haven’t been any prominent releases that blend puzzle and strategy in equal measures in a long time, and with genre hybridization at an all-time high, it could be a good time for a comeback.
5Edutainment
It’s FunAndEducational!
As far back as the 80s, games have made attempts to be educational as well as fun, ina genre commonly known as edutainment.
There were some of these on consoles, but if you were a ’90s kid, you’re probably thinking of the classics like Carmen Sandiego, Super Solvers, and the many Humongous Adventure games.You’re lying to yourself if you say you didn’t learn at least one thing from those games.
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That particular style of educational media has largely fallen out of vogue, unfortunately, with most of the relevant developers having long since folded or been absorbed by other companies.
Obviously, edutainment is never going to have the same level of production or gameplay as a regular release, but it’s still a part of gaming history, not to mention our collective childhood. Gamers who grew up with those games would probably love to have some new ones of a similar caliber for kids of their own.
4Rail Shooter
Let Them Come To You
In a first- or third-person shooter, you control your character as they hunt for unsuspecting punks to gun down. However,in a rail shooter, the targets instead come to you, whether you’re on foot or flying through the sky. You might assume this to be redundant, given we’ve already mentioned light gun games.
Indeed, manylight gun games were also rail shooters, such as the aforementioned House of the Dead, but that doesn’t mean the genres are mutually inclusive.
For instance, games like Star Fox, Space Harrier, and Sin and Punishment were rail shooters with traditional controls. When you don’t have to worry about controlling your character as much, you’re able to focus a lot more on shooting down incoming enemies and racking up a really big score.
Rail shooters are also great for making really flashy games, as it’s immensely satisfying to deploy a bomb or special ability and watch targets crumble by the dozens. High scores and flashy presentations would make for perfect streaming games in the modern age.
3Arcade Sports
Less Realism, More Fun
The majority of sports games released today are focused on realism, licensing the newest and hottest players, and setting up the most elaborate control schemes to emulate league play as faithfully as possible.
It’s fine if you’re into realism, I guess, but in the previous generations, when realism wasn’t really a consideration, sports gamesfocused more on being fast-paced and funthan anything else.
Arcade sports games likeNBA Jamor NFL Blitz eschewed most of the nitty-gritty elements of their respective sports, trimming things down to just a couple of buttons and a joystick. Part ofthe fun of real-life sports is that almost anyone can play them, and that can be the fun of sports games as well.
There are a scant few sports games in the modern age that opt for this approach, but they’re usually fairly small productions and often make up more fantastical sports than use anything we know. Imagine how hype a lightning-paced, accessible sports game would be with the production level that current sports games get.
2Looping Shoot ‘Em Up
All Around The World
The archetypal shoot ‘em up game, both in the past and present, features auto-scrolling levels where enemies file in with set patterns and formations. It’s a good way to emulate a lone ship flying into dangerous enemy territory. However, if you wanted to portray a ship defending its own territory, a better approach would be a looping shoot ‘em up.
In games like Defender or Fantasy Zone, your ship has free rein of an entire horizontal map, with enemies spawning outside your view in set intervals. You may not necessarily be defending an actual objective, but that could certainly be an element.
Mostly,it’s just about shooting them all down without getting shot yourself, which is harder than it sounds when targets are coming from both sides.
Fantasy Zone, in particular, added cool elements like the parts shop for upgrading your ship on the fly. Regular shoot ‘em ups have managed to persist into the modern age, so it’s only fair the loopers get their shot as well.
1Tube Shooter
A Hallmark Of 3D
Perhaps one of the most under-represented genres in gaming history is the tube shooter, to the point that there’s a good chance you don’t even know what we’re talking about here.
Popular in arcades in the early 1980s,there are only two instances of tube shooters that come to mind: Gyruss and Tempest. The concept is similar to a shoot ‘em up, but instead of a horizontal or vertical screen, your character moves in a circle around the screen’s perimeter, shooting targets that fly toward you as though they were in a tube.
It was a great way to show off early 3D gaming concepts and technologies. Tempest 2000 was even a launch title for the Atari Jaguar in ‘94, for whatever that’s worth. 3D doesn’t need to be shown off anymore, but it’s a novel form of game control that never really got its spot in the limelight.
With today’s more elaborate graphics, you could depict all kinds of wacky monsters crawling up a tube at you, which would be great for sci-fi or even horror aesthetics.
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