The History of Every Video Game Genre（原声文稿）

Hey, it's Mark, I've got a chart for you.

It shows the number of platform games released each year over the last 50 years, from the 1970s when the genre simply did not exist, to its invention and evolution throughout the 1980s, a massive spike of popularity at the beginning of the 1990s, and then a pretty massive downfall in the middle of that decade before settling into being a pretty standard and familiar genre for the last 30 odd years.

And you know, I think a graph like this, plus some expert historical context to explain the various peaks and valleys, but a graph like this can give you a pretty good understanding of how this genre has changed over the last 50 odd years, like a history of the platformer in a single image.

But what if I did this? For every video game genre.

For every word and phrase and term we use to describe games, from the beat em up to the jrpg to the metroid brainier.

Well, we could see the genres that exploded into popularity before vanishing into thin air.

We could see the genres that only appeared when the time and the technology and the culture was right.

We could see how one genre's meteoric rise led to another's catastrophic downfall, and we could see shifting trends in the tastes of game makers throughout the last 50 odd years. So that is exactly what I did.

I used the website Backlogged to list the top 200 most popular video games for each year from 1975 to 2025, ignoring most remakes, ports, remasters, and Convalations, giving me a list of about 10 ,000 video games from Gunfight to Super Mario Brothers, to Chrono Trigger, to God of War, to The Witcher 3, to Claire Obscure.

I say almost 10 ,000 because up until about 1980 there simply weren't 200 unique video games released each year.

With this massive list of games, all I had to do then was figure out their genre.

Now I found the best source of this information was Wikipedia.

So I built a Python script to scrape every game's Wikipedia article and pull out the text next to the word genre in the info box on the top right of each Wikipedia page.

After a bit of time cleaning up the data, a lot of time cleaning up the data, it was a bit of a mess, I was left with my master dataset, 9 ,902 games in about 130 genres and subgenres.

And then, if you tally up the number of, say, point -and -click adventure games released each year, you can generate a nifty little graph like this to show you how prolific that genre was at different points in time.

Now, of course, there will always be biases and oversights in the data, so it's not perfect, But I think it does give a good high -level overview in the shifting trends in the way we talk about different types of game.

And it shows you which games were popular at different times, both with developers based on which games were getting made, and with players based on which games were put into the top 200 ranking on Backlogged.

And so, while it's not perfect, it does give us a good understanding of how things have changed in the world of game design. time.

And so, with that preamble out of the way, I say let's just jump right into it.

I'm Mark Brown, this is Game Maker's Toolkit, and this is the history of every video game genre ever.

So, where do the first video game genres come from?

Well, unsurprisingly, they come from games and challenges and competitions that predate the arrival of video games. Take, for instance, arcade games.

As in, the arcade games that existed before the likes of Pong and Pac -Man and Donkey Kong.

I'm talking about Pimble and Ski -Ball, and that machine where you pay a penny to look through a slot and see a photo of a lady in a pants, that sort of thing.

These electro -mechanical machines would prove very inspirational to the developers coming up with the very first batch of video games.

For instance, many of these arcade games featured driving.

thing, like Drivemobile from the 1940s, where you use a steering wheel to move a picture of a car on a big rotating drum.

And Sega's 1969 game, Grand Prix, which projected a scrolling road onto a screen.

So, as game makers moved away from electro -mechanical machines and towards video games, one of the first major genres was the racing game.

That includes early titles like Atari Space Race from 1973, Atari's Grand Track 10 from 1974, and Dave Nutting's 280 Zap from 1976.

That's probably how you pronounce that.

Games like these contributed to racing being the first big genre in my dataset, as racing games were the most popular type of game in 1975 and 1976.

In fact, in that year, 76, almost a third of all games were racing games of some sort.

Including the controversial Death Race from Exedy, which has you running over little pixelated people.

It was the first game to grab the attention of the news media, setting the scene for later video game nasties like Mortal Kombat and Grand Theft Auto.

Now many of these early racing games would take place from a top -down or side -on perspective, an obvious technical limitation.

But eventually, developers figured out a few technical tricks to fake a 3D perspective, as seen in Sega's 1981 game Turbo, Namco's pole position from 1982, and Sega's outrun from 1986.

And then in the late 1980s, properly polygonal 3D races appeared, with games like Winning run in 1988 and Indianapolis 500 in 1989, before the one -two punch of Ridge Racer in 1993 and Daytona USA in 1994, from back when Namco and Sega were constantly fighting to one -up each other's arcade efforts.

And so throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s, the racing game remained a popular and familiar genre, with an obvious spike in the year 2000, seeing about 24 different racing games released that year.

This gave us an era of hit franchises like Need for Speed, Colin McCrae, and Burnout.

There are also racing sub -genres, so in 1988 Sega released Power Drift, a game that ditched Ferraris and motorbikes for go -karts.

This gave us the cart -racer sub -genre that would feature characters like Crash Bandicoot, Mario, Sonic, Mickey Mouse and certified Mondays Hater Garfield.

A quick note that when there's only a limited number of games in a genre, I'll present it as a timeline rather than a full graph.

And then going back to Indianapolis 500, which marketed itself as a racing simulation, season, we've seen a bunch of realistic racing sims like Gran Turismo, Assetto Corsa, and Project Cars.

There's also the vehicular combat genre, for games where cars do battle with each other.

Sometimes this is a racing sub -genre, with games like Road Rash and Destruction Derby, but other times there's no racing at all, just carnage, as seen in games like Twisted Metal.

But, even with all that, you can see a slow decline in the number of racing games being released each year, from that massive peak in 2000 through to just a handful being published each year.

And ultimately, that tracks with what racing fans know.

Many of the major franchises have completely disappeared.

Series like Burnout, Project Gotham Racing, and Midnight Club have all but vanished.

and, outside of a few exceptions, you don't see a lot of indie racing games to pick up what the major publishers have put down.

And so, while I'm sure that racing will always be a popular genre, it doesn't look like it will ever be as prolific as it was during its heyday.

Of course, driving games weren't the only type of electromechanical game in those early arcades – one of the most popular was Pimble. pinball.

And that made its way to video games as well, with titles like Video Pinball on the Atari 2600, Pinball on the NES, and Balli Pin for the Balli Astrocade.

But this genre has largely gone away, with a few exceptions like Sonic Spinball, Pokemon Pinball, and Yoku's Island Express, which is a creative mix of Metroidvania and pinball mechanics.

Another early arcade favourite involved shooting targets using a physical gun -shaped peripheral.

In fact, these electromechanical gun games go all the way back to the 1930s, if not earlier, and companies like Sega, Nintendo, Namco and Midway made gun games years before entering the video game business.

And so, once the appropriate technology had been invented, the light gun shooter was another obvious genre for video games to adapt, both in the arcades with games like Operation Thunderbolt and Cheyenne, and at home with games like Duck Hunt, Lethal Enforcers, and Yoshi's Safari.

Like Pinball, this genre would eventually die out.

It received a shot in the arm with live -action laserdisc games like Mad Dog McCree, and then another with 3D games like Virtua Cop stop, and time crisis.

But it wasn't enough to save the genre.

The obvious death knell is the fact that the technology behind light guns is just fundamentally incompatible with modern flat -screen TVs. That certainly doesn't help.

There are also a few games that work a lot like light gun shooters, but without the light gun.

Games like Dynamite Duke and some parts of Sunset Riders.

But the so -called and shooting gallery genre has never been a particularly popular genre.

So early arcade games proved very inspirational to video game designers, but that wasn't the only place to look.

Consider Pong from 1972, engineered by Alan Alcorn.

Pong is arguably the world's first sports game.

Yes, that's supposed to be ping pong or table tennis, just pretend the white rectangle is Timothy Chalamet and you'll get it. Now Pong was a huge hit. It's considered the world's first commercially successful video game.

I mean the designers knew they had a huge hit on their hands when the machines kept breaking down simply because there were too many quarters jamming up the coin slot.

And so thanks to the massive success of Pong, many early video games were essentially just Pong.

In the early 1970s, the video game industry, if you could even call it that, was basically just a bunch of pong clones made by companies you've heard of, like Taito, Sega, and Nintendo.

Though some were at least creative enough to change the gameplay to represent a different sport, like hockey, soccer, or basketball.

But as games got more complex and designers got more creative, by the early 80s we started getting more inventive sports games that actually captured the specific sport on the box or arcade cabinet.

Stuff like track and field by Konami in 1983 and tennis by Nintendo in 1984.

Just like racing, sports was a very common theme for early games.

In 1978 it was the most popular genre of all the games in my dataset, and it would be in the top five genres from 1975 through to 1990.

And so, while developers would eventually find new ideas and subjects for games, making sports games less prolific from the 1990s and onwards, it has stuck around as a video game genre, a familiar mainstay over the last 50 years.

We can also zoom into the data and see how individual sports have fared.

For instance, according to my data set, only a few sports have maintained popularity through all of the last 50 years.

Like basketball with NBA Jam and the NBA 2K series, golf with Tiger Woods games and Mario Golf, American football with Tecmo Bowl and Madden NFL, and real football with FIFA and Provo.

But many other sports have seen their number of games sharply decline over time.

Like, boxing was pretty big in the 1980s, but it's only seen a few new games since then.

And there's a similar story for tennis, baseball, ice hockey, athletics, bowling, fishing, dodgeball, skeet -shooting, skiing, and volleyball.

Meanwhile, other sports have only shown up after becoming popular in the real world.

Like, skateboarding had a massive boom in the 1980s, and California Games and Skate or Die, ahead of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater and Skate.

Likewise, snowboarding became mega popular in 1998 when it first featured in the Winter Olympic Games, which is around the same time we got games like Cool Boarders, Snowboard Kids, 1080 Snowboarding and SSX.

We see something similar for Wrestling, which got its first video game in 1983.

But while some sports are more popular than others, the sports genre as a whole All has remained prolific for all 50 years in my dataset.

And it all goes back to Pong, which actually brings us on to our next genre.

So with everyone and their mum making Pong clones, Atari founder Nolan Bushnell wanted to do something new, a Pong game that could be played in single player.

The idea was this, rotate the screen 90 degrees and replace your opponent with a wall of coloured bricks.

works, and he put his best engineer on the project, a bloke named Steve Jobs, who probably didn't go on to do anything of importance.

That game was, of course, Breakout, released in 1976, and while a similar idea had already been done a few years prior with Ramtech's Clean Sweep, Breakout was the breakout success.

Just like with Pong, the arcade business quickly turned to churning out breakout style games, including the first video games made by Konami and the first game from Toro Iwatani who would go on to make Pac -Man.

And that all led to a short -lived block -breaking fad that would quickly fade away outside of a few anomalies like Arkanoid in 1986 and the manic roguelike Bull -X Pit released in 2025.

But ultimately, Breakout was just one tiny part of a much bigger movement.

A new breed of games that were about testing your reflexes, your aim, your quick -fire decision -making, your skill.

A genre that we would now call the action game, or sometimes the arcade game.

Now these games were often pretty simple, just a single screen and a clever idea that would challenge you to say, I bet I could do that, hold my beer, I'm going in.

Basically the video game equivalent of, you know, Ski -Ball or Whack -A -Mole.

So that includes games like 1977's Canyon Bomber, which is a timing game about dropping a bomb into a field of rocks.

1978's Avalanche, which is about preventing falling rocks from dropping onto the ground.

And 1979's Lunalander, which has you safely guiding a landing module onto the moon.

And so, in the 70s and 80s, this sort of game was super popular.

I mean, arcade games were basically either racing games, sports games, or action games.

And in my dataset, action was the most popular genre in the year 1977.

From there, action games got more complex and ambitious year after year.

Frogger in 1981, Cubert in 1982, Tapper in 1983, Paperboy in 1984 and Rampage in 1986.

Each one was wildly different and unique, often with weird and wonderful new control schemes.

games, and while we might now put them together in the loose action genre, that's just because otherwise they'd have to be on their own in their own genres.

Mark Cerny, who made Marble Madness, said of early arcade games, I loved more than anything else the variety of these games.

That's the way it was in the arcades those days.

You'd go in every week and you'd find something totally new you'd never seen before.

But this wouldn't last forever, and if we go back to the data, we can see a sharp drop -off at the end of the 1980s.

While action was in the top five genres from 1975 to 1987, it went away in 1988, never to return. So what the heck happened?

It's not like video games stopped having action in them after all.

Well, it's just that a few of these exciting new action games would go on to spawn entire genres of their own.

One game would come out and be so popular that it would inspire dozens of clones and copycats and eventually create a whole new genre to hold them all.

Some of these would be flash in the panfats, like the blockbreaker games I just mentioned, and also Snake games, inspired by the 1976 Gremlin game Blockade.

And yes, That is the idea that led to the snake games on Nokia phones in the late 1990s.

But other action games would inspire long -lasting genres that didn't fizzle out after a few years. These are genres we still play today. But we'll tackle those shortly.

So it's true that we do still use action to describe a few weird, uncategorizable games that don't fit neatly into any of the established genres, like Jet Set Radio and Katamari Damacy.

Plus, there's a recent spate of mobile and indie games that harken back to those simple arcade thrills, games like Fruit Ninja, Super Hexagon, and Super Flight.

And also, a game that could have once been a full arcade game might now be relegated to a mini -game inside of a larger product, including party games like Mario Party and Sonic Shuffle, or mini -game collections like Bishibashi Special, WarioWare, and UFO50.

But otherwise, action has basically stopped being a genre in of itself, and has instead become either a prefix for other genres as we will see later in this video, or an overarching mega -category to hold all of the genres that grew out of successful action games, which is what we will look at in the next act.

So action games like Breakout and Blockade would sometimes lead to short -lived genres filled with games riffing on that idea.

But in 1978, there was one action game that It started a genre we're still playing today, the Shoot 'em Up.

Now space shooters have been a part of games since… well, since games have existed.

After all, the first video game ever is often considered to be the ship vs ship dogfighting game Space War, made in 1961 for the PDP mini -computer at MIT.

And there were some other spaceship -based games in the very earliest days of the business, like the previously mentioned Space Race in 1973 and Starship in 1977.

But Space Invaders, released in 1978, was actually not really based on those games.

Instead it was more of a breakout clone, as Taito engineer Tomohiro Nishikado wondered what What might happen if the blocks could fight back?

Now to call Space Invaders a monster hit would be a disservice to monsters.

It was massive both in Japan and internationally.

By 1982 it had grossed over 3 billion dollars and it was so popular that many arcades in Japan were simply called invader houses because that was the only machine that people were interested in.

And so, naturally, just like with Pong and Breakout Before It, that success led to the creation of many clones.

In 1979 alone, we had Galaxian by Namco, Space Attack by Sega, Cosmic Gorilla by Universal, Space King by Konami, Osmo Wars by SNK and Space Fever by Nintendo.

If a company was making games in the late 70s, they probably made a Space Invaders clone.

But over time, things changed.

Game makers kept the basic building blocks of piloting a spaceship and shooting things, but they took that idea in various different directions.

Atari's Asteroids, which is to be fair more inspired by Space War than Space Invaders, players, let you move the ship around the whole screen.

Tempest, also by Atari, created a faux 3D effect by having you spin around the rim of a giant celestial Pringles can.

In 1981, Defender added horizontal scrolling, Sega's Zaxon from 1982 was isometric, and Namco's Xevious from 1983 firmly established the vertical scrolling shooter, which would be the most popular template for other developers to follow.

Plus, in 1985, Sega's Space Harrier gave us the Rail Shooter, which is still used today in games like Star Fox from Nintendo.

Now it's hard to overstate just how dominating the shoot -em -up genre was in this era.

Like so big, it doesn't even fit on my graph, I'm gonna have to triple the Y -axis for this one. That's better.

So it was bigger than sports, bigger than racing, bigger than action.

In my dataset of the 200 games from 1981, about 75 of them were shoot -em -ups, almost 40%.

That level of genre saturation never happens again in my data. later.

And from 1979 to 1986 it was the most popular genre of all.

Year after year, eight years in a row.

Now the reason why is that unlike the block breaker and snake formulas I discussed earlier, the shoot -em -up was much more versatile.

It was much more open to design changes and evolutions, which is why it wasn't just a flash -in -the -pan fad, it was a fully -fledged genre. Complete with sub -genres.

Like in 1993, Toplan released Batsugan, which flooded the playfield with colourful ordnance and started the bullet -hell sub -genre that birthed Dodonpachi and Toohu.

And it's an idea that's still showing up today with games like Fury and Returnal.

But, ultimately, the shoot -em -ups popularity would start to wane.

In the late 1980s and through the 1990s, it lost its top spot as other types of games started to dominate the charts.

And from the 2000s onwards, the humble shoot -em -up went from gaming's first mega -genre to a niche pursuit for shmup superfans who don't mind importing expensive games from Japan. man.

But really, the shoot -em -ups demise started much earlier than that, as early as 1980 and the creation of gaming's first mega mascot.

So Namco designer Toro Iwatani, who got it start making those breakout style games, realised that arcades were basically only interesting to boys because of the focus on spaceships, ropes, aliens and shooting.

So he decided to make a game that would be more universally appealing.

A cute and colourful cartoon game about gobbling down dots in a neon lit maze.

Now Pac -Man was not the first game to feature a maze.

There were a few earlier games in this style like Ianko Alien from 1979 and Sega's Head -On from the same year.

But But Pac -Man was a monster hit, and when everyone caught Pac -Man fever in 1980, there was an all -out obsession with maze -style games.

That includes Ladybug, Guzzler, Big Doug, Pengo, Crystal Castles, Clue Clueland, Devil World and Bomberman.

I mean, in 1981 alone, there were about 29 maze -like games released, all in the same year.

All of these would create the maze genre in the early 1980s, before it largely fizzled out by the end of the same decade.

But Pac -Man's legacy is ultimately much bigger than just this genre, because Pac -Man was the first proper video game character, a colourful mascot with a name, a face, and a line of branded breakfast cereals.

And he led the way for a seismic industry shift away from faceless spaceships and towards characters.

A trend that would absolutely define the next big genre.

That's right, let's talk about the platform game.

Now, it's kind of hard to believe, but it took a surprisingly long time for someone to come up with the idea of making a video game character jump.

And outside of the 1978 arcade game Frogs, characters were staying firmly on the ground.

But in 1980, things started to change.

We got Crazy Climber from Nichi Butsu, which has a character scaling a skyscraper while dodging falling objects and angry gorillas.

And also Space Panic from Universal, which plays like the maze game Hiyanko Alien but turned on its side, so your character now has to climb up ladders and fall down holes to get around the play space.

But they were both missing the jump.

For that, we'd have to wait one more year for 1981's Donkey Kong by Nintendo.

Now designer Shigeru Miyamoto initially wanted the hero to dodge barrels by climbing up ladders and simply waiting for the barrels to pass.

But that felt a little passive, So, Miyamoto added a jump button, and at that moment, the platformer was truly born.

Just like before, the mega -successful Donkey Kong quickly led to new games riffing on this formula, like Burger Time by Data East, Kangaroo by Sun Electronics, and Kongo Bongo by Sega, plus the 8 -bit Atari game Miner 2049er, which then inspired the legendary British platformer Manic Miner.

If you know, you know.

And then, inspired by the Williams Electronics game joust, Miyamoto put the Donkey Kong hero into a whole new game, Mario Brothers, which kicked off the beat -up -all -the -baddie -style platformer leading to games like Bubble Bobble and, decades later, Super Cratebox.

Now most of these early games played on a single screen, but the genre really came into its own when technology allowed for scrolling levels, as seen in Jump Bug, Moon Patrol, and Packland.

And then in 1985 we got Capcom's brutally hard Ghosts and Goblins.

But then later that same year, the most important platformer of them all, Super Mario Bros. The key part here was Mario's new jump.

You see, in early arcade platformers characters characters had these like stiff, pre -calculated leaps that played out the exact same way every time you hit the button. But Super Mario Bros was dynamic.

You could pull off a billion different jumps depending on your speed, your direction, and how long you held the jump button.

So the platformer was now truly here, and throughout the 1980s and 1990s, dozens of new platform games were released every single year, mostly on the new fangled consoles being released like the NES, Master System, and Mega Drive.

So there was Castlevania and Alex Kidd in 1986, Mega Man and Shinobi in 1987, Ninja Gaiden in 1988, and Psych the Hedgehog in 1991, plus a metric butt -ton of other forgotten cartoon mascots. Any Boogerman fans in the audience? Anyone want to go on a pick -and -flick adventure with me? Anyone? No?

And so, if we look at the data, we'll see where the shoot -em -up genre started to die off. The platform genre absolutely blew up.

And from 1989 to 1995, the platformer was the most popular genre in my dataset.

That's seven years in a row, peaking in 1991 with about 74 different platform games.

That includes combat -heavy games like Super Castlevania IV, Duke Nukem and Shatterhand, as well as pure platformers like Sonic the Hedgehog and Adventure Island 2.

But despite all of this success, just a few years later, the genre would see a massive decline.

You can see it right there in the mid -90s.

Like, my dataset has 44 platform games released in 1995, but by the very next year that number had halved to just 22 games. What the heck happened?

Well, I reckon it was mostly the move to 3D.

After all, this period marked the launch of the Sega Saturn, the Sony PlayStation, and the Nintendo 64.

This 3D technology would allow for exciting new genres that would draw developers and players away from the platformer.

But also, developers simply found it a struggle to make platformers work in 3D.

Nintendo figured it out with Super Mario 64, of course, but others found it hard to adapt.

Crash Bandicoot developer Naughty Dog summed it up nicely, saying we worried about the camera, dizziness, and the player's ability to judge depth.

Not to mention the whole Sonic's ass thing.

Basically, would anyone want a game where you spend the entire time looking at Sonic the Hedgehog's butt. Wait, wait, don't answer that. I already know the answer, and it upsets me.

But while the platform game lost its incredible dominance in the mid -1990s, it never really went away.

It even came back as the most popular genre in my dataset in 2000 and 2001, with games like Kirby 64 and Sonic Adventure 2.

It's also the single most popular genre in my entire dataset of the 9 ,902 games, 1 ,273 of them are platforms, about 12 % of all games.

And it has stayed in the top 5 genres from 1981 to 2024 without skipping a single year. That's crazy.

That's thanks to new games from legacy heroes like Mario, Sonic, Rayman and Mega Man, as as well as fresh indie takes like Super Meat Boy, Celeste and Shovel Knight.

Plus a handful of sub -genres, like the Cinematic Platformer.

It was born with the slick rotoscoped Prince of Persia by Jordan Mechner, which then spawned a number of platformers that have more realistic physics and more considered movement than the goofy -ass moon gravity of Mario and Sonic.

There's also the Endless Runner, where the character just constantly moves forward outward, so you can focus on jumping, a type of game that works wonderfully on mobile, which is why it's become more popular since the late 2000s.

And then, while most platformers are simply about going from left to right, 1987's Metroid made navigation more complicated.

You have to explore a large, sprawling maze -like map to find upgrades, pathways and secret routes.

Other developers would borrow this map design, game, most notably Konami with a number of Castlevania titles on PlayStation 1 and Game Boy Advance, which is when the genre name Metroidvania was first thrown around.

Initially, it was used to differentiate between the new Metroid -like Castlevania games and the older straightforward platformers, but it has since been used to refer to a whole bunch of games that riff on that Metroid setup, like Hollow Knight, Nine Souls, and Blasphemous.

So, just like the shoot -em -up before, the platformer was, at one point in time, the biggest genre in town.

But the platform party wasn't going to last forever.

Partly because of the move to 3D, and partly because other genres would appear to take the throne, including one that didn't dominate the platformer forever, but it did take its number one spot for a few years in the late 1990s.

To get to that next dominating genre, we need to first talk about the beat -em -up.

Now, there were a few early games about beating people up, like Warrior in 1979 and Samurai in 1980, but in 1984 we suddenly got an absolute glut of martial arts games.

In the space of one year, we got Jordan Mechner's Karateka, Karate Champ from Data East, Kung Fu Master from Irem, and Yi -R Kung Fu from Konami, as well as Bruce Lee, Chinese Hero, and Nintendo's Street Brawling game, Urban Champion.

Perhaps it was inspired by the boom in martial arts movies.

these. Kung Fu Master was actually a Jackie Chan movie tie -in in Japan, after all.

And that's actually the one that stood out the most.

Kung Fu Master is strongly considered to be the forefather of the beat -em -up genre.

From there, we saw a bunch more side -scrolling brawlers in the same vein as Kung Fu Master.

But Renegade, released by Pekinos Japan in 1986 was the next evolutionary step, as it added combos, tougher enemies, and the ability to move in and out of the screen, giving us the familiar belt -scroll feature that would come to dominate the genre.

In 1987, Technos expanded on the idea even further with the co -op game Double Dragon, which would firmly establish the beat -em -up genre – both in the arcades and on console. And you can see that in the data.

From 1987, there was a sharp rise in the number of new beat 'em ups being released year after year.

That includes Sega's Altered Beast in 1988, Capcom's Final Fight in 1989 and the Mega Drive game Streets of Rage in 1991.

There were also tons of beat 'em ups based on hit IPs like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Simpsons, Marvel Comics and Alien Vs Predator, all leading to a spike in 1991 when about 23 different beat -em -ups were released in the same year.

Now the beat -em -up was never the most popular genre in any year, but it was in the top 5 from 1988 to 1994.

And while it was definitely not as prolific as the platformer, it was ultimately part of that same trend towards character -based games.

That's why their spikes occur at roughly the same time.

And perhaps also their declines as the beat -em -up genre faded away in the mid -1990s.

Of course, a few brilliant beat -em -ups have been released since then, like Sega's Dynamite Cop, Capcom's Beautiful Joe, the Yakuza series, which are basically RPGs but with street brawls instead of turn -based battles, as well as a host of charming retro throwbacks like Scott Pilgrim vs the World the Game and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Shredder's Revenge.

But the genre was definitely no longer the arcade favourite, and this time, the killer was obvious. It was the fighting game.

So, rewind the clock to Kung Fu Master.

Now, most of the time the game sees you fighting waves of cannon fodder baddies who can be defeated with a single kick.

But at the end of each floor there's a boss fight against a single overpowered enemy with an actual health bar.

This gave the game's designer, Takashi Nishiyama, an idea.

What if he made a game that was just all one -on -one boss fights?

So he released Street Fighter in 1987.

A game that took the nascent fighting game genre absolutely nowhere.

Yeah, the first Street Fighter was actually a bit of a dud and did not inspire any obvious clones.

Perhaps it was the weirdo arcade cabinet that had two massive pressure -sensitive buttons that you had to slam with your fists.

But the sequel, released in 1991 and after Nishiyama had left Capcom, was anything but a dud.

Though Capcom's Yoshiki Okamoto clarifies that, while Street Fighter 2 may look like a sequel to Street Fighter, we actually challenged ourselves to create a new genre, competitive fighting.

So with its huge cast of memorable characters, deep gameplay, awesome sprite work, and catchy music, Street Fighter 2 was an absolute mega hit. It truly defined the genre. genre.

Before this, we had games about fighting. After Street Fighter 2, we had fighting games.

So as you can see in the data, where the beat -em -up faded away, the fighting game genre exploded.

In the space of a couple years, the Brawler was almost dead, while the fighting game had grown to be the most popular genre in my dataset in 1996, 1997 and 1998.

That's thanks to new franchises like Fatal Fury, designed by Nishiyama now working at SNK, the gory Mortal Combat from Midway, Sega's 3D Smash Virtua Fighter and Namco's Brilliant Tekken, that's Sega and Namco fighting for the arcade crown once again.

Also, those last two proved that the fighting game could survive the shift to 3D, whereas the platformer struggled. world.

This all led to a spike of popularity in 1996, when more than 30 fighting games were released in the same year.

There have also been a few sub -genres, like the Arena Fighter, as seen in Palestine, and the Platform Fighter, as established by Super Smash Bros.

But if you want more detail, I'd recommend Core A Gaming's video on every fighting game type explained.

There have also been weirdo, experimental offshoots like the behind -the -back fighting game arms from Nintendo and the indie fencing game Nidhogg.

So, while the fighting game genre is a ways off from its arcade heyday, it's still going steady, with new entries in popular series like Street Fighter and Tekken, which is why the fighting game is in the top 5 genres from 1993 all the way to 2006, plus a few random years after that.

But let's circle back to the beat -em -up for a second, because we can't talk about that genre without mentioning another one, the hack -and -slash.

Now, this is a term originally used to describe beat -em -ups that feature bladed weapons like Capcom's Trojan, Taito's Rastan and Sega's Golden Axe.

Looking back, it's a little silly to split these games into two distinct terms, seeing as they play almost exactly the same, and in the data we can see the beat -em -up and hack -and -slash appear and disappear at roughly the same time.

But the hack -and -slash then saw something of a resurgence, that's thanks to a couple PlayStation 2 games that essentially redefined the term.

So on the one hand, Dynasty Warriors 2 featured epic -scale hack -and -slash battles against hordes of baddies.

And this has led to endless sequels, spin -offs and side franchises, including games featuring characters from One Piece, Dragon Quest, Persona and The Legend of Zelda.

And then on the other hand, there's Onimusha Warlords, a sort of samurai -flavoured Resident Evil complete with the pre -rendered backgrounds and slightly awkward tank controls.

This ended up inspiring a bunch of new games, like God of War, which was originally designed to be, Onamusha meets Greek mythology.

And also Devil May Cry, a game that tasks you with hacking and slashing enemies in the most stylish way possible, with the game even grading your ability to mix up moves and juggle enemies in the air.

DMC then led to a whole new wave of hack and slash games like Bayonetta and Astral Chain, which are sometimes grouped into the sub -genre of character action or stylish action.

This two -pronged reinvention has meant that the hack and slash genre is actually more popular now than it ever was during the arcade boom.

And in most years, it's bigger than the beat em up genre that birthed it.

So, between beat em ups, fighting games and hack and slash games, there have been hundreds of games about going toe -to -toe with enemies.

But forget fists and forget swords. There's a weapon even more popular than both.

Yeah, it's time to turn to the shooter.

Not to be confused with the Shooter Mup, that's for spaceship games.

This is a genre about using a gun to shoot humans. Or aliens, or zombies, or demons, or Nazis.

Now, we've already talked about light gun shooters and shooting galleries, so let's start somewhere else.

Back in 1982, a clever bod at Taito had an idea.

Take a shoot -em -up, like Xevious, but replace the spaceship with a little man holding a gun.

The result was Frontline, a top -down military game about running around and shooting enemies before hopping into a tank to lay waste to the bad guys.

It was to be the first game in a brand new genre, the Run and Gun.

Frontmine quickly spawned similar games like Commando by Capcom and Ikari Warriors by SNK.

And then, likely inspired by platform games, developers turned the idea on its end, with side -scrolling Run and Guns like Hortet by Sega and, more famously, Contra by Konami.

So through the late 1980s and the early 1990s, the Run and Gun was a pretty prolific genre and clearly part of that same character -based boom as platformers and beat -em -ups.

And while the Run and Gun was never the most popular genre in my dataset, it was at least in the top five genres from 1990 to 1993.

Oh, and an important side note that this genre doesn't include games like Metroid and Mega Man.

Sure, they feature both running and gunning, but the run and gun genre is more specifically about fast -paced games with loads of bullets, cannon fodder enemies and a focus on shooting over platforming or navigation, though I'll admit that the ballers can be fuzzy at times.

Now, sadly the run and gun genre would go dormant in the mid 90s, but a few games have kept this genre alive, most notably SNK's Metal Slug series and some indie installments like Broforce and The Masterpiece at its cuphead.

But the run and gun wasn't the only genre of games about shooting people. There's a whole other branch on the evolutionary tree of shooters.

It's just this one isn't as well known, it doesn't have an established name, and many of the games in this group are put under completely different genres on Wikipedia.

But I personally think they should all be grouped together and put into the same genre of top -down shooter. This kicks off with Gunfight.

Apparently the first arcade game to depict a gun, and fighting between two human characters.

It was made by Tomohiro Nishikado, the space invaders guy, and it was inspired by a Sega electromechanical game of the same name.

Now, Gunfight created a small fad of Wild West games, like Outlaw on the Atari 2600 and Sheriff from Nintendo, and also a sequel, Boot Hill, developed by a chap named Alan McNeill, which is relevant because McNeill would go on to make the game Berserk, a top -down shooter with some similarities to Gunfight, but now with robots and a spooky digitised voice.

Berserk was pretty popular, and influenced a number of developers, including Defender designer Eugene Jarvis, who thought the game was cool, but wondered if it might be better if you could move and aim independently.

So he made Robotron 2048, employing a second joystick to control aiming.

Jarvis would do the same again, with Smash TV, and then And this small, twin -stick shooter sub -genre would see a resurgence when console controllers added a second analogue stick, leading to games like Geometry Wars, Nuclear Throne, and The Binding of Isaac.

Berserk also inspired a chap called Silas Warner, who used the basic gameplay to make Castle Wolfenstein on the Apple II. Remember that one? It will be important later.

This top -down shooter genre also includes a number of games that combined the maze game with the shoot -em -up, games like Konami's Tutankham, the Atari ST hit Time Bandit, and the Dungeons & Dragons style Dandy.

That last one inspired Asteroid's developer Ed Logg to make Gauntlet, a dungeon -crawling maze shooter with four player co -op.

Gauntlet was extremely popular and ended up influencing a bunch of games itself, including Alien Breed, Gain ground, hell -divers and hotline Miami.

So all in all, the top -down shooter encompasses a wide range of games released across all five of the last five decades.

But while it was never particularly popular, one of these games would end up changing the shooter forever by helping establish the next genre, the first -person shooter.

Okay, so the idea of a first person shooter actually goes back surprisingly far, with games like Maze, or sometimes Maze War in 1974, Tail Gunner in 1979 and Atari's Battle Zone in 1980.

But WizKid programmer John Carmack wanted to blow them all out of the water with a truly immersive 3D game that didn't have to rely on simple vector lines.

And so, in 1991, he came up with Hover Tank.

He'd follow it up with Catacomb 3D, but his big hit came in 1992, when Carmack and his team at Id Software would be inspired by Castle Wolfenstein, yes, that old top -down shooter to make Wolfenstein 3D.

A lightning -fast shooter with secrets, powerful weapons, gory kills and a mechanised Hitler as the final boss.

And if there was any doubt that a new genre had just been born, Id's next game, Doom, had the final say.

And so, as we can see in the data, the FPS took off like a rocket after Doom's release in 1993.

Year after year, more and more first -person shooters were released.

Like Marathon from Bungie, Heretic from Raven Software, Duke Nukem 3D from 3D Realms, and Blood from Monolith.

They all played a lot like Doom, to the point that magazines often refer to these early first -person shooters as Doom clones.

But things would soon change.

In 1996, id Software won up themselves again with the polygon -based shooter Quake.

In 1997, GoldenEye for Nintendo 64 would prove that shooters can work on consoles too.

In 1998, Valve's Half -Life showed a vision of first -person shooters with a greater focus on story and cinematic set pieces.

1999 saw Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament, showing that the first -person shooter was perfect for online deathmatches, as well as Medal of Honor, which helped move the FPS away from sci -fi and fantasy and towards real world conflicts like World War II and Vietnam.

And then, after all that meteoric growth, the FPS has never gone away.

It doesn't have that drop -off moment like the platformer or the beat -em -up.

It has been in the top five genres almost every year since the new millennium, and it was the most popular genre of all in two years, 2020 2020 and 2023, which is three whole decades after the release of Doom.

John Carmack says, I think the first -person shooter is a stable genre that's going to be here forever, just like there are going to be driving games forever.

There's something just intrinsically rewarding about turning around a corner and shooting at something.

Oh, and you know, it might be tempting to say that the first -person shooter took over from the run and gun, just like how the fighting game replaced the beat -em -up.

I mean, look at the graphs, it's an open and shut case.

But I don't think that's true, simply because the run and gun is a uniquely Japanese genre, and the first person shooter is almost exclusively made outside of Japan, so it's not like the developers of one sort of game moved over to making the other. Anyway.

There's also the third person shooter, which, according to the data, took a little longer to appear and has never been quite as popular as the FPS.

After some awkward early attempts like Fate to Black in 1995 and MDK in 1997, it found its feet in the 2000s with games like Max Payne, Ratchet & Clank and, most importantly, Resident Evil 4.

That one would influence games like Gears of War and Uncharted Drakes Fortune.

And both first and third person shooters have seen a number of sub -genres.

There's the tactical shooter, games like SWAT, Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six.

The immersive sim, games like Deus Ex, Dishonored and Prey, which give you more control over a systemic world and more options than just shooting.

And, well, it's hard to keep track of all the shooter sub -genres in recent years.

heroeshooters, extraction shooters, lootershooters, boomershooters, and battle royale games.

There's something for everyone, if you like shooting people, that is.

So the history of shooters is, I'll admit, a twisty spaghetti mess of influences, offshoots, dead ends, and evolutionary branches.

But once id Software made Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, everything just clicked.

And since then, we've seen dozens of first and third -person shooters released every year.

And with that, we've covered almost all of the genres that fit into that action mega -genre I mentioned earlier.

So let's quickly talk about the last one on my list, rhythm games.

The first rhythm game is generally considered to be Parappa the Rapper from 1996, a truly charming paper -thin cartoon about a rapping dog.

It plays a bit like the 80s toy Simon. Watch the notes and then play them back on the beat.

It was fresh and different and part of a mandate within PlayStation to come up with brand -new types of game.

Parappa writer Gabonito says we didn't make a good game for a pre -existing genre, instead we presented a new model for a new type of game, and I think we succeeded in that.

They surely did, though the rhythm game would actually get its defining game one year later.

In 1997 Konami released Beat Malia, an arcade game that simulates DJing by having you press buttons and scratch records when a falling icon reaches the bottom of the screen.

This simple premise would become the template for almost all rhythm games going forward.

Konami followed it up with endless sequels and spin -offs, most notably Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Freaks, which would be essentially cloned by harmonics for Guitar Hero, which in turn led to DJ Hero, Band Hero and Rock Band, each packaged with its own plastic peripheral, leading to a spike in rhythm games in 2009 with about 11 games released that year.

A few years later, however, the fad just kind of faded away, and I think everyone was a bit sick of all the tat clogging up their cupboards.

The last Guitar Hero game and the last proper Rock Band game were both released in 2015. But the genre didn't go away.

Games like Beat Saber, Thumper, Just Dance and Sayonara Wildheart have kept the dream alive just without the plastic shite.

it, and rhythm elements have crept into other genres like the FPS Metal Hellslinger and the hack and slash Hi -Fi Rush.

Okay, so now that we've reached the year 2000, I think it's a good time for a bit of a recap of what we've talked about so far, and a chance to see some of the key genres all on the same graph.

So at the birth of the medium in the 1970s, the earliest game genres were based on on pre -existing games, most notably racing and sports.

But developers soon started to experiment with other subjects which gave us the more general action genre.

Some of those action games would be so influential that they'd spawn entire genres of their own, starting with space invaders and the massive shoot -em -up genre that persisted through the early 1980s.

Then, into the early 1990s, we got a number of genres that are all about controlling characters, like the platformer primarily on consoles, and the beat -em -up, and the run -and -gun primarily in the arcade.

And then, as we move into 3D, we get slightly more grown -up games, I guess you could say, the fighting game, the first -person shooter, and the reinvented hack and slash.

But there's a genre that looms large over all of them.

A monster genre that was the most popular of all for 20 of the 50 years in my dataset.

But to get there, we need to go down a different route.

Because all of the genres we've talked about so far have been primarily about action – timing, reflexes, quick -fire decision -making.

But there's another side to the coin – games about thought, problem -solving, strategy, and brain power.

These were mostly born on the computer, as nerdy PC players laughed at the simpletons wasting their quarters on space invaders.

Let's start with a genre that often blurs the line between action and thinking. The puzzle game.

Yes, the puzzle genre features games that have you sitting back and staring at your screen for 20 minutes while you figure out the answer, but also games that require such quick reflexes that you can spin up an epic tournament between the world's fastest players.

But puzzle games didn't actually appear for quite a few years. I mean, there are some early examples.

Flagcapture is a sort of proto -typical minesweeper for the Atari 2600.

Codebreaker, from the same year, has something to do with figuring out numbers, I think.

And Taito's steel worker from 1980 has you plopping down pathways to stop a wandering worker from falling to his death.

They're sorta like puzzle games, but only just, and the term puzzle wasn't used very often.

Steelworker, for instance, was described as a game of strategy on its arcade flyer.

But throughout the 1980s, three games would come along that truly defined what a puzzle game should be.

In 1982, we got Soccerban, a warehouse management game where you have to push blocks around on a grid, which would lead to a handful of box -shoving games like Howell Laboratories, Eggaland and at least three Game Boy games, Quirk, Boxel and Mole Mania.

Soccoban also forged the template for a puzzle game being a series of carefully curated brain teasers put together by a game designer. Then in 1983 we got Load Runner.

It's based on Space Panic, that prototypical platformer earlier, but the focus is on solving conundrums, including player -made stages built using a level editor.

And because you control it like a platform game, we get the puzzle -platformer subgenre, which would lead to games like Dordor, Solomon's Key, and The Lost Vikings.

And finally, in 1980… well, it's complicated, but later that decade we got Tetris, made by Alexei Pajitnov in the Soviet Union.

It's the ultra -addictive block -dropping phenomenon that can put you in such a trance -like state that Tetris blocks might show up in your dreams. A real thing that scientists have studied.

Now much has been said about the race to snatch the worldwide distribution rights to Tetris, but long story short, it finally released in the West in 1988, published by Spectrum Holobite, and it gained even more popularity a year later when it launched alongside than Nintendo Game Boy.

And this led to endless block -dropping puzzle games like Doctor Mario, Columns, Puyo Puyo, Pack Attack, Panel de Pon and Kirby's Avalanche. And none of them were particularly subtle about it.

Columns designer Hisaki Namia says Tetris had just become a big hit and a whole new market had emerged.

From a business perspective, it was decided that we need to ride this wave.

So these three games, plus a few more that don't fit into those specific categories like Minesweeper and Lemmings, they created a genre that looked as if it was going to grow and grow until it didn't.

In fact, the puzzle game actually looked like it would completely die out, and in my dataset, not a single puzzle game was released in the year 2002.

Seriously, even if I go beyond my top 200 games cut off, there really isn't much.

A version of Puzzle Bobble with characters from the anime Azumanga Daioh?

A Pokemon Tetris for the beloved Pokemon mini console? A zoo cube? Who remembers zoo cube? Yeah, it was pretty dire.

But a few years later and the puzzle game was back and bigger than ever. But you know what?

I'll come back to that later.

For now, let's talk about another thinking man's genre, turn -based strategy.

So the idea of a strategy game obviously predates video games by many millennia.

From chess to Kriegspiel to risk, we've long played games about using strategy and tactics to win made -up wars one turn at a time.

And so it was a natural fit for computer games.

Now, at the beginning, this mostly came in two flavours.

On the one hand, there were digital replications of known board games, with computerised versions of Othello, Checkers, Backgammon and Chess, creating a semi -popular card and board genre that had quite a few games in the 70s and 80s.

That would eventually be replaced by digital card games like Hearthstone, Marvel Snap and just a buttload of Yu -Gi -Oh!

But on the other hand, there were computerised versions of war games, you know, with the big maps sprawled over tables and the little painted figurines.

Many early strategy games took on that flavour, including Empire in 1977, Starfleet Orion in 1978 and over in Japan, Dyson Ryaku.

This created a small war game genre in the 70s and 80s.

But this was very much its own niche pursuit, like take the magazine, computer and video games where the nerdy war simulations were given their own section to silo them away from the cool gamer games like Ikari Warriors and Gauntlet, totally rad dude.

But as time went on, we started to see more lightweight, streamlined and accessible strategy games that distanced themselves from that war -gaming past, games like Mule, Defender of the crown and over in Japan, Famicom Wars.

And then, in 1991, Sid Meier's Civilisation.

This was a sprawling, globe -spanning epic that saw you take your nation from a settler in antiquity through to a modern -day metropolis.

It was based on existing stuff, board games, SimCity, and war games like Empire, but it put it all together in a way that meant almost anyone could enjoy it.

Don't take my word for it, Maya explains that strategy used to be a bad word as far as computer games are concerned. You know, you.

That's a strategy game. It's going to take forever and be complicated and take an hour just to set it up.

I think, in a way, we kind of made the world safe for strategy and it became a legitimate genre.

And so, this led to a number of games that built on civilization as part of genre named 4x for explore, expand, exploit and exterminate, games like Master of Orion, Stellaris and Humankind.

And if you throw those in with other turn -based strategy games like Advance Wars and one half of every Total War game, we get a steady genre that is kept on trucking for all of gaming history.

And there are also a couple sub -genres here, like the artillery game, where you take turns lining up shots to lob towards your opponent.

The idea has been done for decades, but the worm series arguably made it most famous. There's also the turn -based tactic genre.

It's largely credited to Julian Gollup, who released Rebel Star Raiders in 1984, which was a strategy game, but focused on the small -scale battles of a few individual troops.

He'd come back to this idea in 1994 with the beloved XCOM UFO Defense.

Now this sub -genre didn't really catch on at first, with just a few XCOM sequels and spin -offs carrying the torch.

That is, until Sid Meier Studio for Axis gave it a modern polish -up in 2012, which gave the genre a second wind and led to loads of XCOM -like games such as Into the Breach, Invisible Ink, Gears Tactics and Tactical Breach Wizards.

– another one featuring Star Wars characters just came out, literally, while I was working on this video.

But despite all of these great games and a push towards more accessible design, the turn -based strategy genre has never been the most popular – I mean, these niche and nerdy games just can't compete with fast -paced thrills like Doom and Mario.

But who says strategy games have to be slow?

So, for the game June 2 released in 1992, developer Westwood Studios tried something different.

Inspired by their success with real -time role -playing games like Eye of the Beholder, they wanted to try a real -time strategy game.

They made a game where you couldn't take ages to plan out your next move, you just had to come up with tactics on the fly.

In June 2, your strategic thinking was just as important as your mouse -clicking speed.

A few years later, and developer Blizzard was like, that was rad. How come nobody else has done this?

And so, in 1994, they released their own real -time strategy game Warcraft Orcs and Humans.

They just weren't aware that Westwood was also working on a follow -up to Dune 2, 1995's Command and Conquer.

So, between these two games, the RTS was here.

Now, okay, sure, Dune 2 was not truly the first real -time strategy game, with pre -existing games like the Ancient Art of War and the Mega Drive game Herzog's Vi, but it was the one that catapulted the genre into popularity, leading us to games like Age of Empires, Starcraft and Rise of Nations.

And so real -time strategy games would actually overtake turn -based ones, but not forever.

And ultimately, in recent years, real -time and turn -based strategy games are roughly equivalent in their limited popularity, and neither has been in the top 5 genres in my dataset.

But the RTS has led to some important sub -genres.

So to go along with turn -based tactics, there are also real -time tactics games, where you command a small group of soldiers in dynamic battles.

That's games like Ogre Battle, Syndicate and Commandos, as well as the other half of every Total War game.

There's also Grand Strategy, which is like a Kingdom Simulation game with some real -time strategy elements.

I'll be honest, this one goes over my head, so I'm going to pass on trying to define this one better. I'll leave that to someone else.

There's also the Tower Defense Game, a super simplified spin on the RTS that's exclusively about fending off invaders by building turrets.

There were early games like Atari's Rampart and a minigame in Final Fantasy 7, but the genre came into its own inside other strategy games.

You see, Starcraft and Warcraft came with custom map editors, and a popular idea was to make scenarios where you defend a base from waves of enemies. these.

This would eventually spin off into standalone games like desktop tower defence and Bloons TD in 2007 and then Plants vs Zombies, Kingdom Rush and Thronefall.

But that's not the only genre to spin out of Blizzard level editors.

Aeon of Strife in Starcraft and then Defense of the Ancients in Warcraft 3 both feature a single powerful unit with an entourage of minions, which would serve as the basis for the multiplayer online battle arena or MOBA.

Like Tower Defense, this would spin off into standalone games like League of Legends, Dota 2 and Heroes of the Storm.

Plus, Legion TD, a mod for Warcraft 3, introduced the idea of an auto -battler, which once again spun off into dedicated games like teamfight tactics, dota underlords and super auto -pets.

These three would join many more genres that started life as mods, like the original team fortress, which would one day lead to the hero shooter starting as a quake mod.

And the battle royale starter pubg being a mod for the survival game DayZ, which was in turn a mod for armor 2.

What? Finally, Finally there's one more strategy subgenre, though this one is a tad contentious.

So the 1989 Amiga game Populous is basically a real -time strategy game, as two players plot to wipe out each other's tribe.

But because you can't give your subjects direct orders, only suggestions, it's more typically referred to as a god game.

This term is sometimes just used to refer to the games of designer Peter Molyneux, including Dungeon Keeper and Black and White. 8.

Sometimes it's used for any game where you play as a god, including Actraiser, Spore and From Dust.

And sometimes it's used much more broadly, with Computer Gaming World magazine using the term to refer to everything from populace to civilisation to the games in our next category, Simulation.

Now I've always found the genre Simulation to be a little confusing as it can hold both SimCity, and Power Wash Simulator, two completely different games.

But I think it's useful to think of this as actually two different genres, Simulation and Simulator. I'll start with the first one.

So one of the very earliest games was the Sumerian game released in 1964.

It's a text -based game by designer Mabel Addis that puts you in charge of an ancient city state in Summa.

It has you allocating workers and grain while dealing with natural disasters and technological innovations.

It is the first of what we might call a management simulation game, a game that puts you in charge of some kind of community or company and asks you to keep it running by dealing with finances and personnel.

There are a few more examples in the early days of gaming, like Lemonade Stan from from 1973, Santa Peruvia and Fumasio from 1978 and Three Mile Island from 1979, which has you running a nuclear power plant and trying to avoid the same real -life meltdown that happened earlier that year.

But the real breakout hit came, sort of, in 1984.

So that year, designer Will Wright released the Commodore 64 shoot -em -up raid on bungling bay.

And to make it, he created a world editing tool that let him place down buildings and roads.

Now he soon realised that this editor was actually more fun than the game itself, so he turned that into a game.

SimCity released in 1989, an urban planning city -building management sim about raising taxes, building factories and averting disasters.

And it was unlike anything else being released at the time, which is true for a lot of games of this era.

Wright explains, back then every game was sort of its own genre.

All of the games coming out were different from each other in some sense, so it felt like there was a lot of unexplored territory.

Now, SimCity didn't immediately lead to loads more management games.

The only notable one in the immediate aftermath was Railroad Tycoon from future civilisation maker Sid admire.

But eventually, other developers got the management bug.

There was Theme Park in 1994, Theme Hospital in 1997 and the first Anno game in 1998.

Before long there were Sim games, Theme games, Tycoon games, a whole bunch of different games but all giving you the same fantasy of managing some kind of business.

Now they typically fall into a few categories.

There are those that let you run a community or colony, as seen in SimCity, Ferro, Tropico and City Skylines.

This often overlaps with the city building subgenre, which pretty much does what it says on the tin, but there are a few games that have the building bit but focus more on battles like the Settlers and Stronghold, or they just let you build without having to worry about taxes and income, like Islanders and Townscape.

Another category is the amusement park manager, with Zoo Tycoon, Planet Coaster and Jurassic World Evolution.

There are also sports management games, starting with the first football manager game from 1982.

And a more recent theme has been the factory management sim, with games like Vectorio and Satisfactory.

But the most popular category, at least in my dataset, set is actually the Farm Management Game.

That's initially due to a bunch of Harvest Moon games, and then the super -casual Farmville and Hay Day, and finally Stardew Valley in 2016, which is a nostalgic throwback to the old Harvest Moon games, but also inspired a whole new batch of them, like Coral Island and Fields of Mysteria. And of course there are other topics as well.

There are management simulations that put you in charge of a nuclear power plant, a game development studio, a government, a criminal empire, a museum and so on.

This is still very fertile ground for developers to explore, which is why management simulation games have actually been trending upwards with no signs of stopping.

Simulations don't always have to be about managing businesses, though.

In 1970, British mathematician John Conway showed how simple rules could lead to extremely complex patterns in Conway's Game of Life, and so over the decades more developers have used computers to simulate life forms of different types, giving us the life simulation genre.

That started with little computer people in 1985, then with some of Will Wright's experiments after SimCity, like SimEarth and SimAnt.

There was also Creatures in 1996 which had surprisingly complex AI in its weird furry critters, as well as Seaman, released in 1999, which put a fish with a face onto your Dreamcast. Cool.

The biggest game of the bunch, though, is undoubtedly The Sims, also made by Will Wright.

Now, the original idea for the game was actually for it to be a pretty dry interior decoration game, with computer people just there to rate your furniture arrangements.

But designers Winners Roxy Wallaceko and Claire Curtin convinced Wright to make it more about the people, their motivations and their relationships.

The Sims and its sequels would make up most of the life simulation games released after 2000, but with a few exceptions like Peter Molyneux's Black and White, we'll write Ambitious Spore, the bizarre Viva Piñata from Rare and Nintendo's Tomodachi Life Games.

There's also some crossover here with the virtual pet genre, though these games games usually have less complex AI and are more about letting you care for a single creature, like with Tamagotchi, Heiyu Pikachu and Nintendox.

So simulation games are really about using the computer to simulate some kind of dynamic and emergent system, maybe a city filled with people and traffic, or a creature with thoughts and feelings.

And then you get to fiddle with this system, often from a bird's eye view and with god -like powers.

But on the other hand, simulator games are about being on the ground and getting your hands dirty.

So first up is what I'm calling the Job Simulator.

These are games that let you play out the quote -on -quote fantasy of doing some interesting job, like 1984's Trash Man, who doesn't dream of being a bin man.

Slightly more glamorous roles include being a hacker in introversions uplink, a surgeon in the DS game trauma centre, a chef in Cook served delicious, and the border guard of some dodgy Eastern European state in papers please.

This was never the most popular genre, but in recent years it's actually become way more prolific and it looks like it's going to grow even further.

I feel like 2022's power wash simulator really kicked things off.

This game was extremely popular, – leading to a sequel and endless themed expansion packs.

And since then, we've sent dozens and dozens of games that let you perform interesting jobs.

I guess developers realise that there are fantasies beyond killing orcs, blowing up space stations and saving the world.

I mean, in 2026, the most audacious fantasy you can think of is a steady and gainful employment. Bleak.

There are also life simulators, not to be confused with life simulations.

Instead, Instead, these are games that give you the experience of living an everyday existence.

This also describes most of those farm management games like Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley, so they go in both genres.

But perhaps the most famous life sim of all is Nintendo's Animal Crossing, which is about living a calm and peaceful life within a tight -knit community and without social media.

Again, probably why this simple genre is slowly becoming more popular over time. Bleak.

I also feel like there's a case to be made for a creature simulator genre for games where you get to embody some non -human entity like with Octodad and Goat Simulator, but I'm not sure if there are enough examples to make a full genre out of them, at least yet.

But there definitely are enough games for the vehicle simulator genre, games where you get to drive or pilot some interesting vehicle.

That includes flight simulators like, well, Flight Simulator from 1979, as well as Pilotwings, the Microsoft Flight Simulator series and… oh, don't forget about Kazeno Notam, the Japanese exclusive Hot Air Balloon Simulator, where my Notam heads at.

Even more popular are Air Combat games, which simulate realistic dogfights between planes.

These were a big deal in the early days of gaming, and civilisation maker Sid Meier got his start making such games.

So in 1984 alone we saw F -15 Strike Eagle, F -16 Fighting Falcon, Raid Over Moscow and Skyfox all in the same year.

The genre is less popular now, but you do get the whole Ace Combat franchise and the game you've seen advertised in a hundred YouTube videos, War Thunder.

By the way, that earlier bit was just a joke.

There are also spacecraft simulation games, such as Elite and various Star Wars games, and there are submarine simulators, but they've pretty much all gone away.

The only vehicle simulator type that's really growing in popularity is road and rail vehicles, with games like Euro Truck Simulator, Mud Runner and My Summer Car. Planes and submarines are boring, apparently.

Big -ass hauler trucks and parcel delivery engines are the new hotness.

So, simulations and simulators of all types have been around forever, but these genres are currently on the rise, particularly management simulations, job simulators and life simulators.

And it's mostly thanks to indie developers who are exploring this space to its fullest.

Okay, enough of that.

So cast your mind back to when we were talking about war games and how they led to the strategy game genre.

Well, wargames would actually worm their way into games in another form and create a genre that had an even bigger impact on the medium.

Basically, back in the 1970s, Gary Gygax came up with a diabolical combination. Wargames and Tolkien -style fantasy creatures.

The output was, of course, Dungeons & Dragons, and with that game being a massive hit among nerds, many of the earliest computer games built for bulky mainframe computers in colleges around America, are basically just D &D in computer form.

But this would give us the first computer role -playing games. These were games like Orthanc, Moria and The Dungeon.

And even though they came out in the 1970s, don't be fooled into thinking that they were crude.

Not only did they have D &D staples like stats, spells, characteristics and equipment, but they even let you party up with other players over the early internet.

But the genre really kicked off in the early 80s now that computers could be brought home with devices like the Apple II and the Commodore PET.

That includes Rogue in 1980, though we'll come back to that, that's a whole other thing, and then in 1981 the double whammy of the Dungeon Crawler Wizardry and the sprawling open world of Ultima.

From here the genre took off with games like The Bard's Tale, Dungeon Master and Wasteland, but this didn't actually last very long, and we can see this in the graph.

A spike in the early 80s, but a slow trickle ever since, with just a handful of notable games like Planescape Torment, Star Wars Night of the Old Republic and most recently Baldur's Gate 3.

But then again, this is not the whole story of the RPG. Not by a long shot.

So, those early role -playing games, Ultima and Wizardry, were also extremely popular in Japan and it wouldn't be long before Japanese developers would make their own homegrown take on the genre.

Most notably, Dragon Quest, made by Yuji Hori.

This is a simplified take on Ultima, squished down to fit on the Nintendo Famicom and given charming anime graphics by Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama.

This game would kick off a massively popular franchise, as big of a Japanese gaming icon as Space Invaders and Super Mario.

So while RPGs in the West would continue to be made in the vein of Dungeons & Dragons, RPGs in Japan, often called Japanese role -playing games or JRPGs, would be made in the vein of Dragon Quest. That meant more of an anime influence.

It meant pre -defined protagonists rather than blank slate character sheets.

And it meant a focus on working through a storyline rather than taking on disconnected quests.

So while the computer RPG in the West kind of dragged itself along, the JRPG went from strength to strength with games like Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, Grandia, Pokemon on Persona and Claire obscure Expedition 33, that last one proving that Japanese RPGs don't need to be made in Japan.

Yeah, video game genre names can be pretty silly, and we haven't even got to the really dumb ones yet.

But this is still not the full story, because the RPG has also spun off into another genre that's grown to be even more popular than either the computer or the Japanese role -playing game.

So, several years before Dragon Quest, other Japanese developers were taking influence from western role -playing games like Ultima and Wizardry, as well as Dungeons and Dragons itself.

Which is when Xevious developer Masa Noboendo came up with the idea for a fantasy Pac -Man, which became Tower of Duaga in 1984.

This game had elements from role -playing games like dungeon crawling, fantasy monsters, items and equipment, but instead of slow, No turn -based battles, you fight in quick, real -time scraps.

This would inspire Hide -Lite, which has role -playing stats and experience points, but simple, fast -paced battles.

And the Dungeon Crawler Dragonslayer, which runs in real -time so you can't pause and think before taking your turn.

Basically these games combined role -playing with action, giving us the Action RPG, a genre that has gone from strength to strength as players adore the mix of fast -paced combat with the addictive thrill of levelling up and collecting equipment.

That includes games and franchises like Ease, Secret of Mana, Shenmue, Vagrant Story and Kingdom Hearts, plus Yakuza, and Demon's Souls.

That one also gives us a very specific subgenre that's still kind of being debated whether it even exists.

The Souls -like, which refers to the From Software games games, and those that mimic the combat and difficulty seen in those games.

So the action RPG was quickly adopted in Japan, but it took a bit longer for it to catch on in the West.

There are some early examples like Temple of Apsai, Eye of the Beholder, and the early Elder Scrolls games, but most agree that the trigger that made this genre stick was Diablo.

Now the game is actually being developed as a more traditional computer RPG with turn -based battles.

But the guys at Blizzard, fresh off the success of that real -time strategy game, Warcraft, suggested that designer David Brevik try this RPG in real -time.

Brevik says, I remember I clicked on the mouse and the warrior walked over and smacked the skeleton down, and I was like, oh my god, that was awesome, and the sun shone through the windows, and god passed by and the angels sang, and sure enough, that was when the ARPG was kind of born.

Which, wait, hold up a minute, that means the action RPG inspired the real -time strategy game which then inspired the action RPG. Eh? What? Oh well, pretend that didn't happen.

Because Diablo and its sequel were smash hits and they proved a very important lesson that wouldn't just change RPGs, but almost all games we play today.

And that lesson is, if you slowly dole out new skills, abilities and power on a slow drip feed, that can be incredibly addictive.

And so it's not actually the case that RPGs lost popularity in the West, it's just after Diablo developers mostly wanted to do them as action RPGs.

So we saw Gothic in 2001, Fable in 2004, Mass Effect in 2007 and The Witcher 3 in 2015.

Now, you might have noticed that this is the same graph as when I was talking about Japanese action RPGs.

And that's because, unlike turn -based role -playing games, action RPGs are generally not split along western and Japanese lines.

You don't really get a C -A -R -P -G and a J -A -R -P -G genre, that's just too much. Too many letters.

But even if we combined the turn -based RPGs into a single genre, you'd see that action RPGs are generally still more popular.

In fact, the action RPG was the most popular genre of all in 2018, with games like Kingdom Come Deliverance and Monster Hunter World making it very comparable to other action genres like the FPS and the Platformer.

There are also quite a few role -playing sub -genres.

There's the massively multiplayer online role -playing game or MMORPG.

It had an early showing with the text -based multi -user dungeon or mud on Usenet, but the real deal was Ultima Online, followed by EverQuest, Asheron's Call, World of Warcraft and many more.

To be honest, the MMO would require a whole video to itself, so I recommend this no -clip interview with Ralph Costa if you want to learn more about this massive genre.

There's also tactical role -playing, this is for games where the turn -based fights take place on large battlefields, where the positions of your party members are really important.

Examples include Fire Emblem, Mega Man Battle Network, Valkyria Chronicles and Final Fantasy Tactics.

There's the dungeon crawler for games that focus on… well, dungeons.

And finally, you've got monster taming RPGs, where your party is made up of critters who you collect and tame.

The most famous franchise is of course Pokémon, but you've also got the Shin Megami Tensei games and some JRPG spin -offs like Dragon Quest Monsters.

So between all of these games, from computer RPGs like Wizardry to JRPGs like Dragon Quest, MMOs like World of Warcraft, action RPGs like Diablo, and tactical role -playing games like Fire Emblem, the whole role -playing super -genre has been a significant part of gaming for the last 50 years.

And it all goes back to Dungeons & Dragons, which would also give us our next genre.

So, in 1976 William Crowther made a game for his two daughters.

He was inspired by D &D, but instead of writing about fantasy kingdoms and evil monsters and magic missiles, his game would be more grounded.

It would just be about exploring an underground cave network.

The result was both the name of the game and the genre it would create. Adventure. adventure.

So adventure, which would soon be expanded into colossal cave adventure by fan Don Woods, described the world through text, like, you are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building, around you is a forest, a small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.

You can then tell the computer what you want to do with somewhat natural language, though only two words at a time.

This ain't exactly led to a number of text adventures, sometimes called interactive fiction, and includes games like Zork, Adventureland, and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

That genre was popular in the 70s and 80s, but naturally, as technology improved, the text adventure died out, though it's worth noting that there's a whole cottage industry of independent interactive fiction games made with tools like Twine, though none of them made my dataset. set.

Now one fan of Adventure was Roberta Williams, who was like, this is cool, I want to make one, but why does it have to be all text?

So for her debut game, Mystery House, in 1980 she would add visuals to represent the current location, giving us the next innovation, the graphic adventure.

This took over from interactive fiction, with games like Kings Quest, also by Roberta Williams, Space Quest and Leisure Suit Larry.

But the adventure genre was set to change again, this time not with the visuals, but with the means of control.

That came first with the Mac Venture game Deja Vu, where the developers questioned why you'd want to use a text parser or a menu of options now that we have these fancy newfangled mouse things. Why not just point and click?

And so we got the point -and -click adventure, a genre that would give us such treats as Monkey Island by LucasArts, the longest journey by Funcom, and Mist by Cyan.

This grew out of the graphic adventure to newfound heights of popularity.

And combine them all together and you get the overarching adventure genre, a genre that grew and grew into the 1990s, before plummeting into obscurity in the 2000s.

Now much has been written about the reasons for this genre's death, maybe it was the goofy moon logic puzzles, or the fact that pointing and clicking doesn't really work on a console controller.

But I think the most compelling argument of all is that it was killed by another genre, a genre that actually came from the exact same sorts.

I'm talking about that genre that had overtaken all of the action genres.

But before we get to that, one last tangent.

So the adventure game ultimately combines two things, storytelling and puzzle -solving.

But just how important is that second part?

Now Roberta Williams wasn't the only one enamoured with text adventures, over in Japan, Yuji Hori, the Dragon Quest guy, was playing imported interactive fiction games like Deadline by Infocon, and he decided to make a similar game.

So in 1983, he released the Portopia Serial Murder Case for Japanese PCs, and then ported it to the Nintendo Famicom in 1985 with a command list and cursor -based interface to replace the text parser.

This kicked off the adventure genre in Japan, leading to dozens of games that are barely known in the west due to the obvious language barrier.

But a few will be familiar to those of us outside of Japan, like the Famicom Detective Club series by Nintendo, the Ace Attorney series by Capcom, and Snatcher and Police Norts by Hideo Kojima.

Kojima explains his desire to make an adventure game by saying, part of it was the impression that the Portopia serial murder case had left on me, and of course, my desire to Movies was part of it too, so I wanted to create a game with cinematic nuances, something with a more developed world, story and dialogue.

But, over time, developers began to ask that question I just posed. How important are the puzzles?

Could you make an adventure game without them and just use a game to tell an interesting story?

That led to story -first adventure games like Dome by System Seicom as part of its novel -ware series, Oto -Giriso by Chunsoft, which was labelled as a sound novel, and Shizuku by Leaf, which was branded with the term we'd now use for the genre -at -large, the visual novel.

Over time, more and more visual novels would be released, including Outside of Japan and by non -Japanese developers.

Which partly explains the increasing popularity on this graph.

To be honest, it's hard to tell exactly how prolific this genre has been over the years, as most visual novels didn't make it into my dataset, again, because of the language barrier.

It's one of the limitations of my approach, I will readily admit.

Same goes for the visual novel subgenre of Dating Sim, which started with the 1995 game, Dokyosei.

Almost all of the Dating Sims in my dataset are English -first games, like Monster prom, date everything, and I love you, Colonel Sanders, a finger -licking good dating simulator.

Unfortunately, you'll have to look elsewhere for a deeper dive into this style of game. But hopefully the point still stands.

The adventure genre in Japan started as a mix of puzzle solving and storytelling, but visual novels found success by ditching the puzzle solving altogether.

And the same thing would happen, albeit much later on, in the West.

So, in 1999, French developer David Cage released Omicron the Nomad Soul, an ambitious mashup of demons, serial killers, government conspiracies and David Bowie.

He'd followed it up in 2005 with Indigo Prophecy, this time a combination of Mayan history, artificial intelligence and casual racism.

In terms of this game's genre, Cage says the closest I can think of is probably the adventure genre, but he notes that Indigo Prophecy has no traditional puzzles or inventory items as it focuses almost exclusively on the narrative.

So he prefers to call it an interactive drama because it suggests the fact that the player acts and interacts in a narrative and emotional experience.

Cage would explore this idea even further with Heavy Rain released on PlayStation 3 in 2010, which is a game that would completely change the trajectory of another game developer.

So, Telltale Games started life by trying to bring back the largely dead point -and -click adventure genre with games like Sam & Max and Tales of Monkey Island.

But when they saw Heavy Rain, they were like, okay, that's cool, let's do that.

Which led to the Telltale game that everyone loves and remembers… er… Jurassic Park.

Yeah, okay, it might not be Telltale's most famous game, but it was the start of a new direction for the company, a move to reduce the puzzles and, in their place, add in more cinematic cutscenes and quick -time events.

The next game, The Walking Dead, went much further, with tricky moral choices that would change the direction of the story and affect how characters think about you in the future.

From there, the interactive drama would gain momentum.

There were more telltale games like The Wolf Among Us and Game of Thrones, more quantic dream games like Beyond Two Souls and Detroit Become Human, and others too like Life is Strange and Dispatch.

So just like the visual novel, the interactive drama grew out of the adventure by reducing or removing the puzzles to focus on storytelling, dialogue and drama.

But could you also do that with a genre that that gave us Doom and Duke Nukem?

Well, in 2008, academic Dan Pinchek released Dear Esther, a quiet, contemplative and poetic game built in the engine that powers Half -Life 2.

A standalone commercial remake was released in 2012.

Pinchek wanted to show that a first -person game could be immersive, captivating and a great canvas for storytelling, even if you remove the shooting, the puzzle -solving and the endless action.

The idea wasn't without contention, some players derisively called it a walking simulator because moving around is basically the only interactive part of the game.

But for others, it was the start of an exciting new way to tell stories with video games.

It led to games like Gone Home, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter and Firewatch, all proving that the goofy walking simulator genre was actually a very legitimate one.

Because between visual novels, interactive dramas and walking simulators, game developers have proven again and again that there is room for games that are almost exclusively about storytelling. You don't need puzzles or combat or action.

Instead, developers can make use of the unique properties of games, like branching storylines, dialogue dialogue choices, immersive 3D worlds and mechanics that are layered with meaning, they can use those to tell stories that would be impossible in any other medium.

And so as developers continue to use games to tell stories and beyond the three genres I just discussed, I think we probably just need a general narrative genre to hold them all.

Otherwise we'll end up in a situation where Venba, a beautiful game about the immigration experience, as told through cooking minigames, gets put into the family, puzzle, or trivia sections.

Or where Florence, a charming relationship drama told through a series of vignettes, gets classified as an adventure, family, or minigame collection.

If we had a catch -all narrative genre, we could hopefully move on from tedious conversations about whether mixtape is even a video game, man.

Now I will admit that narrative is a tag on steam, but a history of every steam tag ever is a video for someone else.

I'm tired, this was a lot of work. And we haven't even talked about.

So roll back the clock all the way to the 1970s, and game developer Warren Robinette was, like Roberta Williams and Yuji Hori, slightly obsessed with adventure.

And he wanted to make a similar game, though this time not just with graphics, but with direct control over the player character, and with more action heavy elements like being chased by dragons.

The result was adventure for the Atari 2600.

Yes, it has the same name. Yes, that's slightly confusing.

But just like how we went from role -playing to action role -playing, this Atari game combined action and adventure to create the action -adventure genre.

And if you need a more modern example, consider the Legend of Zelda series, which designer Shigeru Miyamoto refers to as a real -time adventure game.

It has elements of adventure games like exploration, storytelling and puzzle solving, but it also has elements from action games.

you have direct control over Link, there's real -time combat, and there are consequences for failure.

Now in the early days, basically the 2D era of gaming, the term was used somewhat sparingly.

For the most part, games fell neatly onto one side of the coin or the other.

Games were either focused on action, like with run and gun, beat em up and platform games, games, or they were focused on exploration and storytelling, like role -playing and point -and -click adventure games.

Only a few games found themselves in that iffy middle ground, like the aforementioned Legend of Zelda, Star Tropics, and Echo the Dolphin. Plus the isometric games made by Rare before they were called Rare.

These were also sometimes called arcade adventure games in magazines of the day.

But as games went 3D, things started to change.

Oops, we're going to need to triple that y -axis again, aren't we?

So there was Tomb Raider by Core Design in 1996, Metal Gear Solid by Konami in 1998, and Grand Theft Auto III by Rockstar in 2001.

These games don't fit into the simple, single -lane genres of the 2D era, they were fully immersive, multimodal, action -adventures.

And they were just the start.

By 2002, 20 % of all games in my dataset were action -adventure games, including GTA by City, The Wind Waker, Metroid Prime, Mafia, Splinter Cell, and Star Fox Adventures.

The action adventure was absolutely massive, eclipsing all other types of game.

It was the biggest genre of all in 1999, and then again in 2002, which is when it would stay on top every year for 16 years straight, and then it was top again in 2019 and again in 2021.

And it likely contributed to the downfall of other video game genres, like the point -and -click adventure and the platformer because it could incorporate elements that used to be exclusive to other types of game.

Like Grand Theft Auto is at times a racing game, a third person shooter, a beat em up and a job simulator.

Uncharted is a third person shooter, an adventure game, and a platformer.

And Assassin's Creed is a mix of platformer, hack and slash, action RPG, and adventure.

And that includes other genres too, like stealth, which started with games such as Metal Gear on the MSX and the original Castle Wolfenstein, but is now more commonly used as another element in action -adventure games.

And open world, which is arguably more of a structure than a genre, but since Grand Theft Auto 3 it has become a key part of many action -adventure games like Assassin's greed and far cry.

And so, in some ways, it felt like the action adventure was the final genre, the one that every other genre was building up to.

In 2004, Tomb Raider designer Toby Gard said talking in terms of genre is virtually worthless these days.

You have to hyphenate so many things together just to describe a game, it becomes a bit pointless.

And so, was there even any point coming up with new genres?

Because if we look at all the major genres we've talked about so far, well in the 1970s we got sports, racing, action, adventure, and a shoot -em -up.

In the 1980s we got the platformer, the computer RPG, the run -and -gun, the beat -em -up, the JRPG, the puzzle game, and the management game.

And in the 1990s we got the modern strategy game, the fighting game, the real -time strategy game, the first -person shooter, the rhythm game, the action RPG, and the stealth game. But in the 2000s?

I guess we got the reinvented hack and slash and the proper open -world game.

But other than that, new genres just sort of vanished. finished.

It's like everything had been discovered, and video game design was finished. Roll credits, achievement unlocked.

But of course, that's not actually what happened.

Other genres would eventually topple the action -adventures dominance, and more importantly, other genres would be discovered. Lots of them, in fact. So what happened?

Well, this time it wasn't about some new technology being invented or some lone clever clogs coming up with some brand new idea.

This time, it was a fundamental shift in the way games were made, sold, and distributed.

So, by the mid -2000s, two major things had changed about the way games were made and sold.

For one, games used to be relatively cheap to make, and a very small team of people could put together a hit game.

Like, Wolfenstein 3D has ten people in its credits. Super Mario Bros. has seven. Pong has one.

This meant you could try a brand new idea, even if there was no existing proof it would be successful.

As Sid Meier explained in 2007, the graphics and the sound technology were limited, so the investment wasn't so high to make a game.

It was a little less risky, so we could take a chance with games because they didn't cost as much money to make.

To that point, Sid actually did all the graphics for his early games, until finally hiring an artist for Silent Service in 1985.

But as games got more complicated and graphically impressive, budgets started to balloon.

Big Games now required teams of 100 -plus people, and they cost tens of millions of dollars to make.

So they would inevitably be backed by publishers with deep pockets, but small appetites for risk.

Will Wright explained in 2000, most large companies seem a bit too risk -averse when it comes to developing new ideas outside of the mainstream.

Everyone is getting very good at milking their cash cow sequels, but very few are putting substantial investments into developing new genres or taking bold risks.

But okay, there's like an obvious solution here, right?

Forget the publisher, just make a really small game with a tiny crew of people and sell it for cheap.

Except the other thing that had changed was the way games were distributed.

So there were arcade machines and consoles, which of course required working with manufacturers and publishers and distributors, but you could also just put your game onto a floppy disk or a cassette tape, put it into a ziplock bag, and post it to your customers.

That's how genre pioneers like John Carmack, Sid Meier, and Peter Molyneux got their start in this industry.

For instance, id Software gave away the first few levels of Wolfenstein 3D for free, hosting the file on their FTP server.

If you like what you had played, you could send a check or just a watch of cash in an envelope and get the rest of the game posted back to you in a few weeks, it was called shareware.

But over time, those methods all but went away.

Sure, you could still make games independently, just look at the avalanche of Flash games released in the 2000s, but there were no obvious routes to sell those games.

Instead, everything had to be distributed in a shiny box and had to fight for the same Walmart shelf space, plus that shelf space increasingly favoured console games over PC.

In a 2002 issue of Game Developer Magazine, columnist Jeff James said from the standpoint of the independent game developer, the current system increasingly favours large software publishers with the distribution and marketing muscle needed to get vital shelf presence at retail outlets.

Which I think helps explain the dominance of the action -adventure genre. genre.

Like, in 2002, if all of the games are being put on the same shelf at the same price, how could you compete with Grand Theft Auto Vice City or The Legend of Zelda The Windawaker?

These action -adventure games have massive 3D worlds, rich stories and mechanics from a whole bunch of different genres all put together.

And you're bringing ZooCube? You think ZooCube can cut it for $50? Sorry, sorry.

So games had gone from a space where a small company, or just a few hobbyists, could make and sell a video game, and maybe discover a whole new genre in the process.

It had gone from that to a place where a small number of large, risk -averse companies were controlling what games were made and sold.

And this led to a stagnation of creativity.

But, in that same 2002 magazine column, Valve's Gabe Newell said that he hoped his newly announced Steam platform? Never heard of it.

He hoped that it might one day allow for riskier game designs and alternative content development models to flourish.

And then in 2006, Peter Molyneux envisioned a sort of experimental section on Microsoft's new Xbox Live Arcade service, a place to host creative new games and maybe wave the $10 ,000 development kit fee.

And this world that Gabe Newell and Peter Marlin envisioned, well by the end of the decade it would be reality.

In the 2000s, PopCap brought back shareware in order to sell its casual puzzle games like Bejeweled, Bookworm and Peggle, which then inspired other casual gaming portals like Big Fish Gaming.

Microsoft started working with a few independent developers to bring their games to Xbox Live Arcade, including PopCap, Garage Games and Ninja Bee.

Then they added Braid, Castle Crashers, Super Meat Boy and Fez, before opening the floodgates to thousands of games made by individuals and small teams.

Sony and Nintendo joined in later on.

In 2008, Apple opened the App Store, letting anyone make a game for the iPhone. Hey, I recognise that guy.

Google Play, then named Android Market, launched that same year.

In 2012, Valve introduced Steam Greenlight, which would let indie developers submit their game to be added to the platform, and then, in 2017, it launched Steam Direct to let anyone submit a game as long as you paid the $100 fee.

With all of this, the independent developer was back.

You could make small games with small teams and distribute them on one of these platforms at a small price point.

That allowed creativity to flourish and it let developers return to genres that had seemingly finally become unsustainable.

Like, consider the puzzle genre.

It was dead and buried in 2002, without a single game in my dataset for that year.

But with those new distribution methods, well, the casual space gave us bejeweled in 2001, Zuma in 2003, and Mystery Case File Huntsville in 2005, which started the hidden object game sub -genre.

On mobile, there was Angry Birds in 2009, Where's My Water in 2011, and Candy Crush Saga in 2012.

And in the indie space, well, we got physics -based puzzle games like World of Goo and Human Full Flat, deduction -based detective games like Return of the Obra Dinn and Case of the Golden Idol, and problem -solving automation games like Spacechem and Infinifactory. story.

We got the Metroid Brainiere, yes, really, which are games about finding and applying knowledge around the world, Outer Wilds being the best example.

Plus, the block -pushing sub -genre that started with Soccerban got new games like Steven Sausage Roll and Patrick's Parabox.

All of these games meant that puzzle, as a genre, had a dramatic comeback, from being being almost completely forgotten to being a strong and popular genre that's slowly trending upwards.

And the puzzle platformer saw a newfound popularity as well, with games like Braid, Limbo, Fez, and Cocoon. I even made one.

So, like before, the puzzle platformer almost vanished before it came back as a strong indie favourite.

Plus, look at how the adventure genre took a break, but then came back with an upward trajectory.

For one, that's because the point -and -click adventure received new indie releases like Gemini Rue, Botanicular, and Thimbleweed Park.

But we've also seen an increasing number of indie games that have adventurous gameplay, you know, a focus on exploration, puzzle -solving, and storytelling, but not necessarily with a point -and -click interface.

In fact, Monkey Island designer Ron Gilbert has referred to games like Blueprints and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes as the future for adventure games.

And to be truthful, almost every genre has been resurrected, to some degree, by independent developers who played these games as kids and wanted to bring them back for a new audience.

The platformer, the beat -em -up, the farm life simulator, the Metroidvania, the run -and -gun, the shoot -em -up, the top -down shooter, even the block breaker and the maze game. game.

But for some genres, indie developers didn't just bring that type of game back, they completely reinvented what that genre could be. I'll start with horror.

Now horror has been a part of games forever.

A few early games that traded on being spooky include 3D Monster Maze in 1982, Ghost Manor in 1983, Ubisoft's Zombie in 1986, and the a utterly absurd chiller in 1986, a light -gun shooter with a level set in a gruesome and bloody torture chamber.

It's from the same people who made Death Race, presumably they were trying to double -dip on those controversy headlines. It didn't work.

Exody stopped making games a couple years later and went defunct in 1999.

But ultimately, horror was just a theme for games in other genres, like the spooky Halloween platformers, Ghost and Goblins, and Castlevania.

In 1992, though, we got a game that would help make horror a bona fide genre, alone in the dark, by infograms.

This was clearly inspired by adventure games, with its inventory management and its environmental puzzles, but it also has combat against monsters.

And the game would directly influence Shinji Mikami to make Resident Evil in 1996.

This would create the survival horror genre, which includes a bunch more Resident Evil games, but also other franchises like Silent Hill, Dino Crisis, Fatal Frame and Dead Space.

These are all games where you fight zombies and other monsters while solving puzzles, carefully managing your resources and trying to avoid a grisly death.

But then, independent developers started to tackle the genre, and they started questioning those genre tenants.

For instance, Thomas Grip removed combat from his games Penumbra Black Plague and Amnesia the Dark Descent, and found that it made the game more scary.

Grip says with combat gone, players approached the game quite differently.

The enemies were seen as more frightening, and players started to notice, experience -wise, more important things.

Amnesia would then inspire more combat -free horror games like Slender the Eight Pages, visage and outlast.

And then consider a game like Five Nights at Freddy's, a game about simply watching CCTV monitors and trying not to poop your pants.

This game doesn't have inventory management or combat or even movement. It's a long way from Resident Evil, right?

Basically, indie developers realise that you don't necessarily need combat, inventory management and the fear of death.

Horror is such a strong emotion that you can make game that's simply about being scared.

And so if you consider horror, its own genre, separate from survival horror, well it has exploded in popularity in the last decade.

It not only eclipsed survival horror entirely, but in 2022 it became the most popular genre in my dataset with 19 games in this genre.

It's also huge on itch .io, with over 100 ,000 games tagged tagged with horror.

And on Steam, there are over 30 ,000 games tagged with horror, but only 7 ,000 tagged with survival horror.

And this has been a common thing for indie developers to do, to strip a genre back to its foundations and build upwards from there, expanding the narrow definitions of that genre. Like Reigns is technically a strategy game.

That's what it says on Wikipedia after after all, but it's nothing like Civilisation or Starcraft.

But no genre has been as radically reinvented by indie developers as the Rogue -like. So remember Rogue?

That was like 30 minutes ago, or 15 if you're watching on 2X Speed. It's fine, I understand, we're all busy people.

So Rogue was part of that early band of computer role -playing games that were trying to digitise the Dungeons and Dragons experience. But this one had a unique twist.

Instead of giving the dungeon a predetermined layout, the map would be generated randomly on each play session.

One of the original designers, Glenn Witchman, explains that this was so we could be challenged by our own creation and so we could come back and play it over and over.

Also, dying in the dungeon was permanent.

Instead of loading back to some earlier save, you'd have to start all over again with a fresh dungeon layout.

Throughout the 1980s, Rogue was a popular game to clone, especially because the game was a freely distributed executable on mini -computer systems for several years before it was sold as a commercial product through Epic's.

So games like Hack, Moria, and Angband all cropped up, which led to fans coining the catchall term Rogue -like.

The genre was also picked up in Japan, just like how Yuji Hori was inspired by Ultima and Wizardry to make Dragon Quest, his colleague Koichi Nakamura was inspired by Rogue to create Mystery Dungeon in 1993.

And this spawned a whole bunch of dungeon crawling RPGs with randomised dungeons, sometimes featuring characters from other franchises like Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy and Pokemon.

There's even a rogue -like sequel to Tower of of Duraga, that game that kicked off the action RPG in Japan.

Despite all of this, the roguelike stayed pretty niche. That is, until something happened.

That something was Derek Yu, an indie game maker behind games like Eternal Daughter and Aquaria.

For his next game, he wanted to combine his two childhood favourites, so he took the platforming action of a game like Super Mario Bros.

and he combined it with the randomised level layout and permadeath of a roguike like hack.

The result of this unconventional pair -up was Spelunky, a punishing platformer where the layout of the levels changes every time you perish.

Spelunky was released for free online and quickly gained fans, including other indie developers who were inspired to implement those roguike rules in other genres.

This led to games like The Binding of Isaac and FDL Faster Than Light.

FDL designer Jay Marr said, I did play a ton of traditional roguelikes in the previous few years, but it was only spelunky classic that made me think about how the principles of roguelikes could apply to other genres.

From there, the roguelike genre exploded.

Risk of rain, rogue legacy, nuclear throne, downwell, enter the gungeon.

It's exactly like Pong, Breakout and Space Invaders 30 odd years ago.

One popular game created a cottage industry of developers all exploring and experimenting from the same seed of an idea.

A particularly important one was Slay the Spire, which mixed the roguelike with a deck -building card game like Ascension.

This would influence Luck be a Landlord, which would inspire Elattro, and now suddenly we have a whole subgenre of deck -building roguelikes. Hey, I made one of those, too.

And there's also Vampire Survivors, which created the super -trendy bullet -heaven subgenre that's still all over Steam.

And I am very confident that these will not be the last of the roguelike subgenres.

Oh, and I'm not going to get into the whole roguelike -slash -roguelite thing, because I don't even really know what the difference is these days.

And a lot of games on Steam are tagged with both.

So, with all these creative twists on the formula, the roguelike has gone from a niche and forgettable RPG subgenre to one of the most prolific genres in gaming.

In fact, in 2025, it became the final, most popular genre in my dataset, with about 20 roguelikes released in the same year.

Okay, sure, it was actually tied with action adventure, but hey, roguelike is better for the narrative of this video.

So indie developers revived dormant genres like the run and gun, metroidvania and point and click adventure.

And they completely reimagined the roguelike and removed survival from survival horror.

But they also came up with brand new genres that have barely any basis in the games of years gone by. Like the incremental game.

So, in 2002, developer Eric Fredrickson released Progress Quest, a satirical game that made fun of shallow, MMO experiences like EverQuest.

In this game, battles just play themselves while you sit back and watch.

Then academic Ian Bogost made Cow Clicker, a satirical game that made fun of shallow Facebook games like Farmville. In this game, you just click a cow and a number goes up.

Both Progress Quest and Cal Clicker reduced the original games to their foundations to reveal that they were passive, shallow, and built to addict. The only problem? Both games became hugely popular.

Whether I like it or not, says Bogoast, Cal Clicker was easily the most successful game I have ever produced.

Cal Clicker went viral and picked up more than 50 ,000 players. And Progress Quest was popular too.

Bethesda boss Todd Howard even named it as an inspiration for Fallout Shelter.

And so, ultimately, these games spawned clones and copycats that went beyond parody, Cookie Clicker, in 2013, Adventure Capitalist in 2014, and Node Buster in 2024.

By now, the incremental game, or sometimes Clicker or Idol game, had become a legitimate at genre, and growing.

There are more than 9 ,000 games tagged incremental on Steam, after all.

And while my graph cuts off in 2025 because this year isn't through, there would be about 10 incremental games in 2026's data. Not bad for a genre that started as a joke. Next up, Sandbox.

Now the term Sandbox was commonly used before the rise of modern indie games.

Magazines used it to describe simulation games like The Sims and Rollercoaster Tycoon and, for a while, it was basically synonymous with Open World.

Like, in 2006, you're a gamer called Grand Theft Auto, the most famous sandbox game of them all.

It's also sometimes used for games where you can make your own levels.

Wikipedia editors refer to the LittleBigPlanet games as sandbox box games, for instance.

But I think the term game creation system is better for that, covering everything from pinball construction set to Super Mario Maker and Dreams.

But the term sandbox has taken on a new meaning in the last couple decades, it now more commonly refers to games where the player is allowed to come up with their own goals.

For instance, Garry's Mod, first released in 2004, is a freeform playground that simply really lets you mess around with the Half -Life 2 engine.

You can spawn in non -player characters and props, you can toy with the physics, and you can even write your own scripts.

And players found they could have plenty of fun without old Gary needing to come in and set up rules and goals.

Players used GMod to make machinima films and new multiplayer game modes like Prop Hunt and just noodle around.

It proved that a game could be fun one, without a formal structure, and profitable too.

Garry's Mod was named the best -selling PC exclusive game ever in 2024. Then in 2011 we got Minecraft.

The base idea of mining and placing blocks in a big 3D grid was taken from the Death Match FPS in Finna Mining.

But what made Minecraft truly great was its open -ended structure.

you could be a builder, a farmer, a warrior, a sculptor, a redstone coder.

Sure, there is a boss and end credits, but that's not the point.

The point is for you to find the point, alone, with friends or in front of an audience of millions.

It's also the overall best -selling video game of all time, so you know, maybe there's something in this whole sandbox genre thingy.

Now new sandbox games are kind of rare, it's hard to compete with Minecraft after all, but between Astroneer, Teardown, Satisfactory and Tiny Glade, it's a genre that has come into its own since the rise of the modern indie game and it's probably going to grow even bigger.

Now, indie developers removed survival from survival horror in order to focus on the spooks.

But that didn't mean it went away entirely, it's just become a genre in its own And right, the survival game.

This is a genre about needing to find food and shelter to stave off death.

Those mechanics can be found in some earlier games like Stalker, some of the old roguelike games and the educational title The Oregon Trail, but it's ultimately Minecraft, again that turned survival into its own genre.

The blocky building game does have a creative mode where you can just build to your heart's but in survival mode, you must hunt for food in order to stave off hunger and stay alive.

This would inspire games like Don't Starve, Raft and Subnautica.

Minecraft survival mechanics are quite simple though, so other games would go much deeper.

The Long Dark is about managing your temperature, Daisy has a multiplayer focus, and Pacific Drive puts you in a dilapidated vehicle.

Between all of these twists and experiments, the new survival genre has been growing over the last few years.

Now the fun thing about indie games is just how varied they are.

On the one hand, you've got extremely hardcore and punishing genres like survival and roguelike, where one poor decision can lead to permanent death and a total restart.

But on the other hand, we've seen a huge upswell in so -called cosy games, which are all about comfort, relaxation and almost never punishing the player for failure – games like A Little to the Left and Kind Words.

There are some earlier examples of chill and cosy games like Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing, but this is an entirely modern trend – circa 2019 or so.

And some have linked its rise to the COVID -19 pandemic, as both developers and players looked for relaxing experiences to take them away from the stresses of lockdown.

The first cosy games were only named such in retrospect.

Bad Viking, who made the atmospheric strange horticulture, says, we didn't set out to make cosy games, but by happy accident our strange games are.

But as the genre has grown in popularity and profitability, and as wholesome and cosy festivals started to crop up, more and more cosy games have been released, giving us a genre that looks set to grow and grow.

Same goes for our last and most stupidly named genre, Friends Slop.

Again, this one largely came out of lockdown.

People were looking for ways to socialise and interact with each other, and games were the perfect spot.

Like Among Us, a forgotten 2018 game about trying to get away with murder on a spaceship suddenly became one of the most played Steam games of 2020.

It also kickstarted the small social deduction genre.

Also, Phasmophobia, a co -op horror game released at the end of 2020, was a giant hit.

So, before long, developers cottoned onto the fact that players wanted something akin to a hangout game.

A cheap, replayable multiplayer experience that had just enough gameplay to keep you busy, but not so much that it would get in the way of conversation and jokes.

Games like Peak, Lethal Company, and Repo would firmly establish the friend -slop genre, a genre that shows no signs of slowing down.

So, here's the thing. It's not like indie games killed the action adventure.

There are about 20 of them released in 2025 after all, both from the big publishers and from indie developers.

And we don't see that immediate crash -out drop -off like we did with previous top genres such as the shoot -em -up and the platformer.

It's more that there are just so many types of games now.

Like if we tally up the total number of genres represented each year, it just keeps going up and up and up, showing a greater variety of games to pick from.

But it also means that there's no obvious winning genre that dominates everything else for years on end.

And so, since 2018, we've seen different top genres each year, including the action RPG, the first person shooter, horror, and the roguelike.

So that is the history of every video game genre, from ancient game types like the shoot -em -up and the maze game, to rad 90s favourites like the fighting game and the first person shooter, to modern indie categories like Cozy and Survival.

Now, okay, sure, I did miss out a few, just a handful that didn't fit my neat and orderly narrative, like casino games that let you play Digital Blackjack and Poker, educational games that teach you maths, typing, history, art, or the experience of dying of dysentery, Quiz and trivia games, usually based on TV game shows, there was sadly a complete lack of buzz recognition in my dataset.

You've also got FMV games for those that play video of real -life actors or pre -drawn cartoons, not sure if that's truly a game genre or just an art style.

There are art games for games that use mechanics for more emotive, artistic or psychedelic purposes.

games, exercise games to help move your stinky sedentary body, and location -based games for a new batch of mobile apps that make you visit places in the real world.

But okay, that really is it, for now at least, because new genres will always be discovered.

I mean, as I made this video, I was seeing people talk about tidy up games, or is that sort -slop? A range -em -up?

But more game types will arrive, as developers experiment with removing features from genres by combining two genres together, by changing the fantasy of a genre, or changing the controls of a genre, or, most importantly, by just ignoring genres entirely and making cool stuff.

Because here's the thing, genres aren't recipes or factory moulds that developers used to make their games perfectly conform to some specific category of game.

They're just loose categories of common mechanics, fantasies, and ideas that we can use to group together similar types of game.

They are useful, absolutely, but they are also messy, confusing, convoluted, and ultimately subjective.

Like, depending on which store you go to, Prince of Persia the Lost Crown might be an action game, an adventure game, an action adventure game, a platform game, a hack and slash game, or a graphic adventure game, but the hell PlayStation.

So I've done my best to describe all 100 plus genres, but I'm sure there will be instances where I've put a game in a genre that you do not agree with, or I've misnamed a genre, or I have forgotten a genre entirely.

I look forward to hearing your spirited arguments comments in the comments down below.

Until then, I'll say goodbye and catch you in the next video, which hopefully doesn't take three months for me to make. Oops. Bye -bye.