PC Gaming

Really, anything from the Game Canon is a good choice: Mario, Doom, Tetris, SimCity, Civ I, Warcraft, SpaceWar, Zork, that soccer game I don't remember, StarRaiders.

I haven't seen anyone mention Zork yet, and it really ought to be in contention here. Pretty much all video games can trace how their narrative is structured through gameplay back to the foundations laid by Zork, even doom. It drew on Colossus, sure, but it built on it so much that it became revolutionary to both games as a storytelling medium and to natural language processing. Really cool stuff.

Might be biased but not only does the FF7 story hold up close to three decades later but it was also the catalyst for introducing Japanese RPGs into a western market.

Since it is BAFTA I will limit myself to a UK game. Tomb Raider with special mention for Elite. My main memories of my 3dfx card was low poly Lara, not Quake. The mix of story, setting, problem, solving and combat lives on in a lot of popular titles. And I can't look at space sims like NMS today without thinking of Elite miraculously shoe horned into an 8bit micro.

BattleBorn, Lawbreakers, Skull&Bones and Concord; the biggest f* to AAA (and "AAAA") industry. You crash, so the Indie rise.

Minesweeper.

I would have said Doom, but I think in the long run it's Minecraft or Skyrim.

Pong

I'm saying pokemon. It's still a dominant franchise today. It's inspired countless spin offs and copy cats. It made gaming social and the connector for Gameboys a required accessory. Pokemon Go was a covid time revolution. The series is likely responsible for a sizable growth in the gaming market in the late 90s and early 2000s. People who never played a video game can identify Pikachu, and might even have a plushie. We are closing in on 30 years of pokemon being a dominant franchise.

Minecraft

Concord!