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.
-
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.
-
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 😄. So I classify this ahead of it’s time due to the first party product not existing yet.
-
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.
-
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
-
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 think System Shock belongs here too. It was an immersive sim in 1994, was one of the first games to make use of audio logs, and had 3D models and environments before Quake. It initially released on floppys without voice acting so it didn’t sell too well, and it wasn’t until later that it started getting more widely appreciated as the groundbreaking title it is. Another thing is that the controls and graphics can make it a bit of a pain to play today - this was before WASD and mouselook were standardized.
I think the first Deus Ex belongs there too. I played it a couple of years ago and was still impressed by the attention to detail
Honestly, anything developed by Looking Glass or Ion Storm (or basically just Warren Spector).
Thief is another one. Still does things that other stealth games don’t, although Dishonored gets pretty close and they wear that influence proudly on their sleeve (see: Stephen Russell voicing Corvo in Dishonored 2).
Thief seemed really cool for a while, coming to it for the first time sometime after the release of Deus Ex: HR, but then I got really stuck in the weird sewer monster level which felt out of place. Ran out of arrows, couldn’t find my way through it, gave up 🙃
Yeah, parts of Thief can get weird. It kind of lulls you in with a regular medieval world and then a bunch of weird fantasy stuff and supernatural monsters come in.
I once accidentally quick saved just before a zombie thing killed me. That first quick load was a surprise.
Admittedly, the game in general has quite a few issues in terms of being accessible to modern audiences (mods help, and there are quite a lot). It got streamlined a lot by the time of the third game (it was also the first on console, so it had to be more accessible).
But man, that third game goes hard in one level that’s absolute survival horror. Shit still sticks with me today. That level was honestly a little terrifying. Like, I absolutely hate survival horror, but it’s probably one of the best designed levels I’ve played in a game. Even has its own Wikipedia entry!
I personally think Thief II: The Metal Age is the best because it sticks to a more steampunk kind of feel. There’s still a fantasy element, but it’s a bit less pronounced and there’s not much horror (it’s the one I feel influenced Dishonored the most, where there’s a kind of a “creep” factor, but not straight up terrifying), although I haven’t played it in a while and might be misremembering.
Fun fact about the first game, though: Ken Levine worked on some of the lore and level design. Eventually went on to develop System Shock 2 and eventually BioShock.
Fun fact about the third game: one of the level designers for the horror level went on to work with Levine on BioShock and worked on the level design for the “Fort Frolic” section of the game, which also had a bunch of horror vibes (more than the rest of the game, at least, which leaned into some horror a fair amount already).
The original Deus Ex holds up better than most anything else of that era, imo, at least as someone who came to it post-Human Revolution release and didn’t have nostalgia goggles. Such an incredible game.
One thing I find really cool about it, weird as it may sound, the deliberately kind of blind AI. Apparently they originally had “better” AI that could see you from farther away, but discovered it was more fun if they were a little dumber, and in practice you can just accept that as you play. The dumb ai becomes invisible, at least to me, even though it isn’t invisible. Like inventories, I guess - just a video game thing to accept as a base premise and not worry about.
The remake of the original System Shock was recently released to great acclaim from die hard fans.
In addition to all that, due to its persistent world and the fact that you could (and in fact had to) backtrack to previously inaccessible areas after finding upgrades such as radiation suits and rocket boots, it was also an early example of a metroidvania. And by “early” I mean “three years before Symphony of the Night”. Yeah. It was that ahead of its time.