I see the phrase 'ahead of it's time' used a lot like a long with words such as 'underrated' or 'epic' or 'literally', or 'ironic'. I read how ahead of it's time is used for literally any popular game that it alters the meaning of the phrase.
Anyways here is a list of games I feel would have sold or been more known had they been released several years in the future:
- Jurassic Park Trespasser: the YouTube channel ResearchIndicates and one of the most informative Let's Play videos of all time best explains this game.
JPT had a rather ambitious physics engine AND open world environments which seemed pretty much undoable at the time, along with non gameplay breaking story flow with Attenborough himself. But just like with No Man's Sky the hype engine and promising too much got the devs way over their heads and failed. Valve was able to continue what JPT started with Half Life, but I imagine if it had more time JPT could have been an immersive classic.
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Time Splitters Future Perfect an FPS with sharable Map Creation content. The problem I feel was many people didn't try this as Halo's Forge wasn't out yet to bring to light what user content can really do, and less accessible online play at the time.
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Tony Hawks Pro Skater 3 Okay this doesn't count, but I just want to mention this because the official Sony Network Adapter wasn't even out yet when this released. You have to use a specific brand of Linksys or D-Link USb to Ethernet adapter on your PS2 to get it to work ๐. So I classify this ahead of it's time due to the first party product not existing yet.
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Psychonauts. This was an easy one, non Mario platformers weren't the trend among the ocean of best selling Xbox titles. Thankfully A Hat In Time much later showed the more mainstream appeal of small dev platformers.
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Dragon Quest 1 & 5 in the US. Not in Japan as you could shut down Japan for a day with the release of a new Dragon Quest game (tip for invaders). DQ has always struggled in the US partly due to, oddly enough, taking so long to reach the US. It's a mix of too early and too late, with DQ 1 inventing the traditional console RPG format, and DQ5 being Pokemon before Pokemon, to quote Tim Rogers. But early DQ games releasing far too late on the NES life and not releasing on SNES I feel could have made DQ games closer to FF games in the US
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Puzzle Quest Challenge of the Warlords: a Match 3 game in the early days of Xbox Live arcade.
The timing would have had to be tight on this, had it come out around the time of monument Valley it would have been perfect to expose casuals to a match 3 game with more depth to it
But it was too easily for the match 3 craze, and now too late for the oversaturation of match 3 mobile games.
- Eternal Darkness Lovecraft is all the rage among public domain IPs nowadays. Eternal Darkness was all the fun of bizarre 4th wall breaking spooks combined with non frustrating old school Resident Evil like gameplay. more of a wrong place wrong time kind of thing, in an attempt to bring a more mature crowd to the GameCube is underperformed.
I would love to see Nintendo at least attempt to emulate it on the Switch somehow.
I often hear about the original "Elite" in this context. It managed to do real time 3d rendering on home computers (albeit wireframe) in a time when that was usually relegated to pre-renders or supercomputers. Came out a good decade before making 3d games was more generally viable.
To properly qualify how groundbreaking Elite was for the time, for those who don't know it: it was a space sim that simulated 8 galaxies with 256 star systems each, each system with a star, a planet, and a space station. All of that was wireframe-3D rendered, had a lot of complexities like different ship and enemy types, different playloops like trading, mining and combat, and it was one of the few games of that time that pioneered open-world gameplay.
This was initially released on the mid-80's for 8bit computers of the time, which had anything between 48Kb to 128Kb of RAM, and thus, the game binaries was also that small - they accomplished that by also being one of the few games of the time that pioneered procedurally generated content.
Elite was released in 1983. It was originally made on and for the BBC model B, which had 32Kb of RAM!
Wikipedia and other places says 1984 - I think 1983 is when development started. I wasn't quite sure how much RAM the BBC Micro had, so I played safe and went with the ZX Spectrum's configuration, which I had, although thinking about it now, the way the Speccy mapped memory meant that it actually had about 32Kb useable RAM as well. I don't know how the BBCM mapped memory, so I'm not sure if a similar situation applied (less actual available memory).
Not a game, but the Dreamcast as a system. Supported online play that was not/under utilized. Had a mini screen in the save game cartridge. I miss that system.