Hello there, my name is Jack, and this is my documentary on my personal greatest video games, from the

1970’s, all the way to the current day games that we all know and probably love. With this documentary of
mine, I will attempt to figure out whether games have improved overall over the years, and whether there are
trends that still carry on from the past all the way to now.

First game to talk about is Pong. One of the first games that is seen as starting cabinet games being much more
popular. Was inspired by a tennis game made in 1964, however. Sold 150k units in 1975, which is impressive
due to being handmade mostly and large wooden cabinets. Is seen as the start of video games and is very well
known for its gameplay. This is some old cabinet gameplay of the game. (Play Video)

The next game that I placed onto my list is Metroid, the original one from 1986, a game from Nintendo that
took inspiration from games that they made before. You may have heard of these games. This game was one
of the first that had side scrolling that went in both directions, bringing in back-tracking into the gameplay
loop, making the game more interesting. It also had one of, in my opinion, the biggest surprises when you
finished the game, where it is revealed that you were playing as a female character the entire time, which I’m
sure confused and surprised a lot of people when they played it back when it came out. Some of the awards
that the game won are on screen now, including being ranked top 70th game by Next Generation in 1996.
Here is some gameplay of the game. (Play Video)

Moving onto the third game, being DOOM, a game that I’m sure you all know in one way or another. DOOM,
made in 1993 by iD Software, is a first-person shooter game that used a sort of false 3D look to its level
layouts, which really suited the style of gameplay that was used for the game in my opinion. Impressive fun
fact about DOOM, by 1995, it was estimated that it was installed on more computer systems than Windows
95, so yeah, just a bit popular. Being so popular, the game won a few awards, including 1994’s Game of the
Year, and #2 on Top 100 Shooters by IGN. Here’s some gameplay of DOOM. (Play Video)

Half-Life and Half-Life 2 are the fourth and fifth games that I have decided to include in this video, and thought,
why not put them together, makes sense. The two games are both made by Valve and are both First person
shooters. Half-Life 1 was made in 1998 and was inspired by quite a few games, including DOOM, which I just
talked about. The game revolves around first person combat in different gameplay scenarios, following the
story of your character, Gordon Freeman after an incident at a facility, leading you to fight your way out. Half-
Life led to a lot of modded versions of the game, which if seen from an outsider perspective could have passed
as whole other games, some being Counter Strike and Sven Co-op, built around the Half-Life engine. Half-Life
was in high regard for its graphics, gameplay and narrative, winning over 50 PC “Game of the Year” awards,
very impressive. (Have gameplay in the background while speaking).

Half-Life 2, the sequel to the game I just spoke about if you remember, was inspired by its prequel gameplay
wise and with the same main character and enemies to fight but was more of a capable game due to there
being more recent technology that could be used in the games production, being made in 2004, 6 years after
the first game. The game had a lot of interest once again from the modding community, giving life to very
popular games, such as Team Fortress 2 and CS: GO, which became standalone games in themselves not long
after. Half-Life 2 has an aggregate score of 96/100 on Metacritic, a very impressive score if you ask me. The
way that levels in Half-Life 2 were laid out was done in a way that was seen as unusual at the time, placing
random little objects and pathways to progress, just to add that little bit more depth to the gameplay, which
made the game more fun to play and more interesting. (Have gameplay in the background while speaking).

World of Warcraft, or as I shall be saying, WoW, as it is more convenient, is a game made by Blizzard
Entertainment back in 2004, following the world and game universe from their previous game trilogy,
Warcraft, actually only taking inspiration for certain game elements, and making an entirely different genre of
game for the series, being an MMORPG instead of an RTS (real time strategy). The reasoning behind this may
have been due to the success of other MMORPGs that were around at the time and popular, like RuneScape
and EVE Online, but that is just speculation on my behalf. The gameplay of WoW is very repeatable, as there is
a lot to do, even when it was first released, having lots of different races to choose from to play, and lots of
different classes to mix and match the races with, giving different gameplay experiences every time, with
content also available for long time players, like raids or dungeons. The game received very positive reviews
upon release, having a highly anticipated release from the community that was following it. Reviews on the
game, some more recent and others being older, some say the WoW may not have been the creator of the
 MMORPG genre but is seen as the one that mastered its gameplay and how it is done correctly, being still to
this day one of the most played and popular MMORPG to date. On screen are some awards that the game
won, including being recognized at the 2005 Spike TV Video Game Awards, where it won Best PC Game, Best
Multiplayer Game, Best RPG, and Most Addictive Game. Here is some gameplay footage. (Play video)

ArmA 2 is a Mil-Sim, or military simulator game, made by Bohemia Interactive, a Czech Republic game
development studio released in 2009. I picked this game for different reasons from the rest, as you’ll find out
with a game on the list soon but felt like it would also be fun to research and talk about due to its impact on
games afterwards. The gameplay of ArmA 2 itself was very repeatable, with different scenarios and
customisation options for the game and how you played it, including modding and community made content /
scenarios in game. The mods that were made for the game, some were seen as full of separate game modes
within the game, changing how you play the game, some drastically. The game was well received when it was
released for its realism and graphics, along with the sheer scale of the gameplay involved, even with having
quite a few bugs and slightly poor AI quality, that were fixed over time. There was an incident where a news
source received gameplay footage of ArmA 2 and mistook it for real life footage from an IAF air strike in
Balakot, which was later discovered to be faked not long after, which just shows how well the game was made
to be realistic, huh. Anyways, here’s some gameplay of ArmA 2. (Play Video)

Minecraft, as I’m sure most people watching this have played or at least seen / heard of, is a game that in my
opinion changed a lot in game making and also a lot of kids or adults’ life when they played it for the better
with its gameplay, community and creativity it allowed, at least it did for me personally. The game was made
by Mojang Studios in 2011, a studio from Stockholm, Sweden, and is a sandbox / survival game with honestly
infinite replay ability, with procedurally generated terrain and worlds, with the way that you play the game
being completely up to the player and how they want to, being able to go from having a peaceful little farm, to
blowing up every structure possible with TNT, something I’m sure everyone that has played it has done at least
once. The game contains so much content that this documentary would most likely last hours if I went into too
much detail, so I’ll just say a few, like the different game modes, being multiplayer and single player, both of
which have a lot of different aspects to them separately. The game has won a multitude of awards, of which
are on screen, including on 5 May 2011, where Minecraft was selected as one of the 80 games that would be
displayed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum as part of The Art of Video Games exhibit that opened on
16 March 2012. Anyway, here’s some gameplay that I’m sure is very familiar. (Play Video)

DayZ (Mod) is a mod of ArmA 2, which I mentioned before as the main reason that I chose to include it as one
of the games I have talked about. DayZ mod is made by a mod creator in the ArmA community from New
Zealand by the name of Dean Hall, created and released back in 2013. The mod takes assets and content from
ArmA 2 and one of its DLC, and creates an entirely new gameplay experience to play, involving surviving in
forests and abandoned cities in a post-apocalyptic world, containing threats from zombies and other NPC’s
alongside other players that you may encounter. Every server that ran DayZ on the ArmA servers would have
been a different experience to play, as people used different maps, different addons and different server rules
to make the gameplay experience fit as many players preferences as possible. There was a standalone version
of DayZ made and released onto steam in 2018 after the success of the mod, which received... mixed reviews
for many reasons, but mostly due to the choices made during development. DayZ mod had different
communities built into it, for different ways that players enjoyed the game, for example servers that would
include base building, to have a safe area to store loot, or more PvP based servers where there was no safe
space and combat was necessary to survive longer than a few minutes. The DayZ Standalone decided to pick
only one of these many communities to be how the game was played, which upset a lot of the community and
caused some controversy, leading those communities to go off and form smaller communities, some even
making games based off the community. There’s a video that I would recommend watching by a great content
creator called “Soviet Womble” who did a great video essay about the mod and its effect. Anyways, I got off
track, this mod, even though that’s all it was, a mod, was nominated for the "Online Innovation" category at
the Game Developers Conference Online Awards 2012, which shows the amount of depth and work the mod
creator and the community put into the content. Here is some gameplay of the mod! (Play Video)

Fortnite, the final game on my list, and a game that everyone at this point on this planet has heard about. It
released back in 2017 and was created by Epic Games, a North American game studio, and is a Battle Royale
and survival sandbox game, having 2 different game modes, which may as well be 2 different games at this
point with how different they are from each other. The main one that everyone has heard of is the Battle
Royale game mode, which released after the Save the World game mode, the survival sandbox game mode of
Fortnite. Battle Royale is by far the most popular game of 2018 and maybe 2019 and 2020, reaching over 125
million players after its release onto the Nintendo Switch. The battle royale gameplay loop, as I’m sure nearly
everyone knows at this point is where several players, 100 in this case, are put on a map, and have to fight in
an ever-shrinking map until they are the last one standing, where they achieve a Victory Royale, and is then
played over and over again, which is where its popularity exploded. The game has a very large community,
especially with content creators and platforms like that, including Twitch and YouTube, while having a mostly
younger audience, which Epic Games definitely used to their advantage with how they would profit off it as a
company. The awards that this game has won or even been nominated for is staggering, and a picture of how
many will be on screen... would say it’s impressive, but It’s concerning at this point. Here is some gameplay.
(Play Video)

So, out of all those games, can I answer the question that I asked at the beginning, of whether games have
improved, and whether they carry on traits from previous games in history. Well, in my opinion, most games of
today have drastically improved since arcades and cabinet games and seem to be going even further every
day. With content that has carried on through the generations, a lot of content and ideas that were seen in
older games, are absolutely seen in new games, including gameplay elements and how games are produced.

Well, that’s been my documentary, I appreciate you watching.