Some important early 2000s games off the top of my head:
- BF1942. The Desert Combat mod was a blueprint for the “dudebro” FPS boom
- Counter-Strike, DOTA two mods for other games. Both took aspects of other genres (FPS duels and RTS) and made them more accessible to non-hardcore players.
- GTA3 and sidequels. Vice City really anticipated the 80s nostalgia boom of the mid-late 00s. San Andreas was unlike anything I had ever played before in terms of pure scope.
- MGS2. Insane production values (Kojima described it as a “Hollywood game”) mixed with an interesting story and subverting player expectations. The shitstorm surrounding it reminds me a lot of “The Last Jedi”.
I'm not asking about their sequels and follow-ups, like DotA 2. People still enjoy The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past (1991) today when many more good Zelda games exist. But it appears to me that not even nostalgia would compel someone to play an early-2000s PC game.
I do enjoy some early-2000s games today more than recent AAA titles (PlayStation 1,2 Gamecube, and I'd throw the Sega Dreamcast in there too).
On the other hand, I grew up with a SNES emulator with more than 300 games, I played a lot of them, and despite the unusual gem like TloZ, most SNES games were totally unmemorable, to say the least.
My point is, that I don't see a fundamental difference between SNES-era games and the early 2000's, both were markets saturated with crap, and a few gems that have stood the test of time.
That seems orthogonal to what I asked. ALttP has player-made mods (randomizers) too.
Let's put it this way. At this moment on Twitch, there are:
- 4 people playing Warcraft 3 (any mod)
- 0 people playing Half-Life 1 (any mod)
- 1 person playing GTA 3 (any mod)
- 21 people playing A Link to the Past (any mod)
- 13 people playing Super Mario 64 (any mod)
So I am totally on board with Al-Khwarizmi's claim. The role of even the best early-'00s games was to show us what better games could be made. Once those better games were made, the '00s games were abandoned, in a way that '90s games weren't.
That’s apples and oranges, though. Super Mario 64 wasn’t a PC game. For a better comparison, how about Super Mario Sunshine (2002; not as popular as 64 but pretty popular), or perhaps Super Smash Bros. Melee (2001; currently one of the most popular competitive fighting games)?
- BF1942. The Desert Combat mod was a blueprint for the “dudebro” FPS boom
- Counter-Strike, DOTA two mods for other games. Both took aspects of other genres (FPS duels and RTS) and made them more accessible to non-hardcore players.
- GTA3 and sidequels. Vice City really anticipated the 80s nostalgia boom of the mid-late 00s. San Andreas was unlike anything I had ever played before in terms of pure scope.
- MGS2. Insane production values (Kojima described it as a “Hollywood game”) mixed with an interesting story and subverting player expectations. The shitstorm surrounding it reminds me a lot of “The Last Jedi”.