Yeah, I would like to hear your opinnions on this one. There are many answers and of course the art of games is a bit dependent on the decade the game was released. Though I would like to receive suggestions on games that really have reached new levels on the concept of game arts when they came out. I am looking for the kind of projects that reached out for something that no one could imagine before seeing/playing it.

I am mostly these days playing retrogames so here are my two cents:

Ultima 8, I think this is one of the first games that really hit through the impression of a game where you "could do anything", the depth of the game is awesome, though they did screw up with the controls and the game was a bit too hard to play through without a pathc to fix the controlsm, I think this was the first time I felt that a game had much more depth than I could have time to spend with it. Ultima 7 was nice, but I think Ultima 8 was on a very different level.

Final Fantasy VI vs. Chrono Trigger, this comparison just because both of the games were very extreme compared to Final Fantasy V or Secret of Mana etc. but preceed the time when Final Fantasy series became too much Game-As-A-Movie style games. Both of the games have scenes that really were on the edge on what you could do with the technology vs. the creativity of the team which had the incredible vision. Opera, even though done with midi-voices in Final Fantasy VI was a historical milestone. Chrono Trigger broke more barriers in the sense of story telling and game play.

Blizzard and Virgin... they really made it all work better than in Dune... but I am not sure if I would say that either of the publishers have really made art in the sense of gaming... good games though. And the former has been able to tell at least decent stories.

Wolfenstein, Doom, Duke Nuke 'em... I don't think so. Just tech evolution.

Fallout vs. Baldurs Gate etc. I think that compared to Ultima 8 these games had too much freedom and the feel of "could do anything", but still caged on a bit boring game mechanics, not enough fast paced character development after the beginning of the game.

X-Com... I think here we have something special, and I am probably opposed by most people, but I think X-Com Apocalypse is one of the most diverse RTS/TBS games that actually has nice balance in game play.

Master of Orion's, Civilization's, Settlers etc. again, great games but no art.

GTA series... the quality of the games is very fluctuating.

Yoshi Island, one of the mario series games that I actually think has reached the art level of games.

Racing, sports etc. games... just technological masturbation here?

Resident Evil, really made the horro scene of games emerge... I still think that the Resident Evil I is more scary than it's successors, mostly because of the cleverly though out still camera angels...



I guess it's your turn now!

My list http://hamatsahi.blogspot.com/2011/04/best-gamesever.html

Also people will have their own definition of 'art' (usually based on whether they like something aesthetically). To me 'art' in a game is the skill and attention to detail with which it was crafted.

In that regard I would consider well done simulation games (see Grand Prix Legends) are works of art in my eyes.

The other part of what I consider the 'art' of games is how well the human/machine interface promotes emergent behavior on the part of the user as they hone their skill. That is, it has a 'tall' learning curve. This is not necessarily just technical skill in operating the controller, but also orginizational/managerial/problem solving skill as in games like Master of Orion II.

Pong

Hmm... it is hard to decide, because we aren't specifying what counts as art. Prettiness? Elegance of code? It's hard to say in general. Here are some of my ideas:

Shin Megami Tensei I & II: One of the earliest games to utilize the unique possibility a game offers as opposed to a painting or book or whatever: choice. They only gave you three overall things to choose from, but they cast them against some very heady themes and allowed players to explore what their choices meant in the game world itself as well as in their everyday lives. I included both here because SMTI technically did these first, but was inconsistent and buggy and nearly unplayable. SMTII was a vast improvement, but obviously came second.

Final Fantasy VII and Super Mario 64: I group these together because they are (in my opinion) the games that blasted everyone into the 32-bit era. Mario 64 took an existing and wildly popular franchise from the 8-bit and 16-bit days and showed the possibilities that the new-gen consoles offered by translating those play experience into 3D successfully.

FFVII, while definitely given to cinematics, defined the direction of games ever after. Post-FFVII, the expectation was that games would offer renderfests, and still offered plenty of non-movie gameplay that was deep and well balanced. It's true that FFVI and Chrono Trigger did a lot of things well, including cinematics, but they were of a fundamentally different type than FFVII and beyond. I see them as good games (in the case of Chrono Trigger, a great game), but I don't see them as as important to video gaming overall as FFVII. FFVII created trends which are still followed today throughout the industry. FFVI and CT, not so much.

GTA III also shifted what games presented to players. Rather than the on rails, mission based, episodic play that dominated video gaming, sandbox play became the next wave. You may say, perhaps accurately, that other games did this first. But it was not until GTA III that it became an industry standard across consoles and computers.

Breaking from my focus on their importance to the medium of video games via influence on others, Shadow of the Colossus did quite a bit of storytelling through gameplay rather than dialogue or in the instruction manual. It also played on the tropes of video gaming to provide a unique experience for the player in terms of that story. Not to mention its beautiful art and sound direction

Gah, doube posted from my phone

I think the most significant game for me was Master of Orion. It was the first non-educational game I've played as a kid. It captured my imagination, and I visioned epic space battles between empires, with spies going around their business doing nasty things. Ever since, I've always wanted to recapture that feeling, and it motivated me to learn programming.

Now, about 15 years later after I first played it, I've finally started to achieve my dreams (working on clone, link in signature). I think master of orion had a huge impact on the 4x series, people still compare MoO 2 to other games.

Doom II
MDK

Most important? History hasn't ended yet so whose to say but up to this point i would say..

Wolfenstien (kicked off the FPS genre)
SimCity (kicked off all the sim games, civ games, edu games.)
Ultimate Online(kicked off the MMOs)
Madden NFL( I don't know if it kicked off the franchise sports games but its the most well known)
Pinball Construction Set (probably made EA?)

Those are good i think.. I'm sure there are many others..

-ddn

By art do you really mean graphics?

If that is the case then here's my list:

Phantasy Star - master system

Sonic the Hedgehog - Genesis

Wolfenstein - PC

Starfox - SNES

Flashback - Genesis

Sewer Shark - Sega CD (don't flame me on this)

Goldeneye - N64

Final Fantasy 7 - Playstation

Soul Calibur - Dreamcast

NFL2K - Dreamcast

<I kind of skipped the GameCube/PS2/Xbox generation so I'm lacking here>

Halo - Xbox

<I didn't play too many 360 or ps3 games either so I don't have anything really for that either>

Crysis-PC


All of the above made me excited about how awesome the graphics were in comparison to other games at the time. Probably Phantasy Star, and the Dreamcast games when they came out were the biggest jumps in my book. Most of the ones on your list I'd disagree with. Chrono Trigger, while a great game, didn't really add anything groundbreaking to art or graphics. In fact, there were about 5 or 6 games all around that time for the SNES that all had pretty sweet graphics. It was also a few years older than some genesis RPG's that had comparable graphics. Same for FF6.

Warcraft and C&C, again great games, but there was no major graphical leap from Dune. Also, they weren't really graphically intensive games so the envelope wasn't really being pushed.

Yes Wolf3d and Doom were mainly tech evolutions, but the end result was a graphical experience that was pretty much unmatched.

Fallout, Baldur's Gate? Fun games but graphically not that interesting.

X-com is a joke. It was an awesome game but there were was some pretty kickass artwork around that time for other platforms.

GTA IMO was always behind graphically. There were certainly better racers/3rd person shooters for almost every GTA release. The first 2 were top-down shooters in an era of 3D for crying out loud.