The System Sellers: The Games That Made Their Systems Worth It

Image via Complex Original

Year released: 1985

Almost obligatory in its inclusion, but it's easy to forget just how unusual the concept of Super Mario was at the time.

With its 'shroom-consuming plumber brethren, and blonde-stealing reptilian overlords, Super Mario Bros. helped bring gaming back into the public eye in the U.S. after a notorious slump. The title generally defines games in the public eye to this day—take note of Wreck-It Ralph's crowd-pleasing bleeps and boops, an example surely not designed to invoke nostalgia in the minds of ankle biters. It's a true canon classic of the '80s.

Year released: 1987

Released in Japan at almost exactly the same time as the first Final Fantasy game on the NES, Sega's Phantasy Star is possibly the first game to cement the classic JRPG formula for Western gamers, with its epic, story-driven quest and random battling.

Phantasy Star is primitive by today's standards, but its graphical style has arguably aged better than those of its aforementioned rival, with its proto-Dungeon Master first-person monster slaying and colorful cutscenes helping it stand out as one of the Master System's most iconic games.

It's also notable for its use of a strong female protagonist, Alis Lansdale, in a time when few games really bothered trying; Metroid, released on the NES one year prior, still referred to Samus Aran as a male in the manual, while Square wouldn't get round to it until the release of Final Fantasy VI in 1994.

Year released: 1990

Continuing in the vein of its predecessor the NES, the first must have for the SNES was also a Mario game, and the title that introduced the world to lovable dinosaur sidekick Yoshi.

Introducing a bevy of new gameplay features, Super Mario World eventually sold over 20 million copies worldwide, and debates still rage as to whether this or its NES predecessor Super Mario Bros. 3 is the best 2D entry (or Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, if you're trying to be trendy).

Year released: 1993

Doom was the game that single-handedly popularized mainstream PC gaming. Sure, there had been a raft of classic games before its release, and Wolfenstein 3D set the template for the FPS one year earlier. However, Doom established concepts that are now core to the PC gaming experience, such as online multiplayer, as well as a highly creative modding community that still exists to this day.

Less salubriously, it also represents, alongside the release of Mortal Kombat in 1992, the birth of the video game violence debate that would lead to the founding of the ESRB. Its upcoming reboot, the first entry in the series since Doom III dropped 10 years ago, recently whipped up a frenzy at Quakecon 2014, making a return to the blisteringly fast gameplay the original is renowned for.

Year released: 2001

Halo: Combat Evolved has the distinct honor to rank alongside Super Mario 64, Soul Calibur, and  Super Mario World as possibly the greatest launch title of all time. It legitimized the upstart Microsoft in the console race, an unexpected development considering it was a release from a relatively untested developer best known for Apple Macintosh games. Borrowing liberally from sci-fi writers such as Robert Heinlein and Larry Niven, Halo is one of gaming’s great space opera, and the original remains surprisingly humorous, lacking the po-facedness of the most recent entries.

Year released: 1991

Another obvious pick perhaps, but Sonic the Hedgehog gave credence to the bluster of Sega's much-hyped 'blast processing', a shorthand term providing much playground ammunition against Nintendo diehards.

Sonic the Hedgehog's gameplay was a compelling mix of tricky platforming and high-speed traversal, and it is the former that the newer 3D games still tend to struggle with. It also produced a memorable gaming villain in Dr. Robotnik (he's only called Eggman if you were born in the '90s, in my opinion), a totally hardcore scientist who enslaved cute bunnies and birds inside robot minions, because that's just how evil he is.

In hindsight, Sonic perhaps lacks the earnest timelessness of Mario, but he sums up Sega precisely—sky blues, high speed, and trash 'tude.

Year released: 1995

It’s hard to argue the Sega Saturn was an underachiever in the west, held back by an overpriced and muddled launch in North America.

Due to its ill fortune, it's hard to pin down a system seller per se, and while it found its critical darlings in games such as Guardian Heroes, Panzer Dragoon Saga, and Nights into Dreams, it's probably the console release of AM2's Virtua Fighter 2 that impressed the most initially, representing a vast improvement over its rushed port of a predecessor, and a worthy and technical rival to Tekken 2 on the Playstation.

Simultaneously featuring a style more aerial than the first Virtua Fighter, yet more grounded than Tekken, Virtua Fighter 2 taxed the Saturn's designers, as it was a notoriously hard console to develop 3D games for due to its botched architecture, making the results even more impressive.

Year released: 1996

The first bona fide phenomenon for the Sony Playstation. Tekken and Ridge Racer were great arcade games and Wipeout broke Britain, but Lara Croft took over the world. Tomb Raider was also released on the Saturn and PC, but its association with the Playstation brand wouldn't be challenged until Crystal Dynamics took over the franchise from Core Design in 2006.

Tomb Raider had a spooky, ethereal atmosphere that was rarely seen in games at the time. Unlike its sequels, enemies were sparse and almost entirely comprised of beasts, rather than humans, and crucially, there were actual tombs in it; later entries tried to mix it up with cities, secret bases, and labs to mixed results.

Last year's excellent reboot, though far removed from the style of the original, has also gone a long way to showcase the brand's continued relevance 18 years after Lara Croft's original adventure.

Year released: 1997

Super Mario 64 changed everything with its breathtaking use of 3D, and Mario Kart 64 just edges it in overall sales, but Goldeneye 007 did three very important things for Nintendo's last cartridge-based home console. 

It broke the cycle of bad movie tie-ins, helped the N64 move away from its child-friendly image, and made the FPS genre viable for consoles in a way no game before it had ever done. The Mario series may always be Nintendo’s staple, but Goldeneye 007 is the game most responsible for broadening the company’s audience in the '90s.

Year released: 1999

On release,  SoulCalibur was possibly the best-looking and most fluid console game ever made, and it's occasionally cited as the greatest launch title of all time. There was a brief period following the Dreamcast's memorable launch date (9/9/99), and before the release of the PS2 in 2001, where it seemed Sega may have been staging a comeback. SoulCalibur led the way, making every fighting game before it look positively archaic.

Even after the PS2's release, SoulCalibur was being held up as a high point for 3D fighters following the fuzzy graphics of games such as Tekken Tag Tournament and obscure Square brawler The Bouncer.

Year released: 2001

An argument could be made for Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty as the PS2's first great system seller, but Grand Theft Auto III, released a month earlier in the U.S., is probably the most influential to future game development. It popularized the open-world 3D sandbox that, until then, had proven such a technological strain.

It also pushed buttons in the public consciousness that fuels the censorious to this day. A constant Fox baiter, GTA III was the first entry in the series to really take a knifey stab at making fun of the very same outrage it provoked from the media old guard, particularly with the tongue-in-cheek radio banter and quick-fix commercial promises of in-game station Chatterbox.

Year released: 2001

The Super Smash Bros. series is the first great Mario spin-off since Mario Kart debuted in 1993. While the mascot brawler saw its debut on the N64, it was its sequel Melee that really took off, becoming the biggest selling game on the Gamecube and inspiring a rabid fan community.

The novelty of seeing cute characters such as pink blob Kirby beat the shit out of gorillas, dinosaurs, and intergalactic bounty hunters never gets old, and its upcoming release for the Wii U and 3DS is much hyped, with Nintendo's online social network Miiverse a near-constant stream of requests for new pugilists.

Year released: 2006

The other great sci-fi franchise on Xbox, the ultraviolent Gears of War was possibly the first great advertisement for next-gen technology, showing off the abilities of Unreal Engine 3 with the gnarled musculature of its grotesque characters (both human and alien) and highly detailed war-torn environments.

It was also the game which brought the concept of using cover during firefights into the mainstream, a mechanic now taken for granted, as well as the greatest use of chainsaws in a game since the heyday of Doom.

Year released: 2008

It’s easy to forget now, but the Playstation 3 was pretty dried up for standout titles in the first two years of its release. It didn’t hit its stride until 2008 with the release of games such as LittleBigPlanet, Bioshock—a whole year after its release on Xbox 360—and this, the most overwrought, jumble,d and expensive entry in Hideo Kojima’s complex sci-fi spy series.

For non-devotees of the long-running franchise, the story of MGS 4 was a nightmare to follow (infamously, its ending takes over an hour of cutscenes to wrap up), but it was also extremely cinematic and boasted some of the best gameplay in the entire series. Six years later, its looks and design still hold up.

Year released: 2014

Super Mario 3D World is the first AAA classic for Nintendo’s Wii U, but as far as system sellers go, it's the recent Mario Kart 8 that has proven the biggest boost to the struggling console’s fortunes.

It helps that it's both the best looking Wii U game and the best Mario Kart game in years, of course, with its slow-motion replays inviting total admiration for the game's beautiful colors and standout soundtrack. The Luigi Death Stare is just the icing on the cake.