The History of Every Video Game Genre

Summary

Mark Brown traces how video-game genres emerged, peaked, faded, and returned, using a dataset of 9,902 popular games released from 1975 to 2025. He compiled the top 200 games per year from Backloggd, then gathered genre labels from Wikipedia. The data offers a broad view of trends, but it is imperfect: genre labels can be inconsistent, and some games—especially Japanese visual novels—are underrepresented.

Early Arcade Roots and the Rise of Action Games

• Many early genres adapted pre-video-game amusements. Electromechanical driving games helped inspire racing, while pinball and physical target-shooting games led to video-game pinball and light-gun shooters.
• Pong helped establish sports games and sparked a wave of clones. Sports has remained a steady genre, though individual sports have waxed and waned.
• Early arcade experiments—including Breakout, Frogger, and Lunar Lander—were grouped broadly as action games: short, skill-focused challenges. As successful ideas inspired their own genres, “action” stopped functioning as a distinct category.

Arcade and Character-Driven Genres

• Space Invaders launched the hugely popular shoot ’em up boom. Developers expanded the formula into horizontal and vertical scrolling shooters, rail shooters, and eventually bullet hell. It later became a niche genre.
• Pac-Man sparked a brief maze-game boom and helped shift games toward recognizable characters and mascots.
• Donkey Kong introduced jumping, and Super Mario Bros. refined it with responsive, variable jumps and scrolling levels. The platformer dominated the late 1980s and early 1990s, then declined during the move to 3D—but remained one of gaming’s most enduring genres. Its offshoots include cinematic platformers, endless runners, and Metroidvanias.
• Beat ’em ups grew from martial-arts games into side-scrolling brawlers such as Double Dragon. The genre declined in the mid-1990s as fighting games—defined by Street Fighter II and followed by series such as Mortal Kombat and Tekken—rose to prominence.
• Hack-and-slash evolved from weapon-based brawlers into several modern forms, including large-scale Dynasty Warriors battles and stylish action games such as Devil May Cry and Bayonetta.
• Run-and-gun games brought fast, bullet-heavy combat to a character-controlled format. Contra and Metal Slug exemplify the style.
• Top-down shooters range from twin-stick games such as Robotron: 2084 to maze-like co-op games such as Gauntlet. One of their key descendants was the first-person shooter: Wolfenstein 3D and Doom established the template, followed by innovations in 3D, console controls, storytelling, and online multiplayer. Third-person shooters, tactical shooters, immersive sims, and newer shooter subgenres followed.
• Rhythm games took off with PaRappa the Rapper and Beatmania, later driving the plastic-instrument boom of Guitar Hero and Rock Band. The fad subsided, but rhythm games continued through titles such as Beat Saber and Just Dance.

Puzzle, Strategy, and Simulation

• Puzzle games took shape through Sokoban, Lode Runner, and Tetris, spawning block-pushing, puzzle-platform, and falling-block games. After a lull, indie and mobile releases helped the genre rebound with hidden-object, deduction, automation, and knowledge-based puzzles.
• Turn-based strategy grew from board games and wargames. Civilization made the genre more accessible and helped establish 4X games; X-COM helped define turn-based tactics.
• Real-time strategy rose with Dune II, Warcraft, and Command & Conquer. Strategy-game editors also produced standalone genres and modes, including tower defense, MOBAs, auto battlers, and hero shooters.
• Management simulations put players in charge of cities, businesses, farms, parks, or factories. SimCity helped make the genre familiar, while farm-management games became especially prominent.
• Life simulations model people, creatures, or relationships, with The Sims as the defining hit. Related categories include virtual pets, job simulators, everyday-life simulators, and vehicle simulators.

Role-Playing and Narrative Games

• Computer RPGs adapted Dungeons & Dragons-style systems; Wizardry and Ultima helped establish the genre. Japanese developers reshaped the format through JRPGs such as Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, often emphasizing authored protagonists and story.
• Action RPGs combined character growth and equipment with real-time combat. Diablo helped popularize the approach in the West, while other branches include MMORPGs, tactical RPGs, dungeon crawlers, and monster-taming games.
• Adventure games evolved from text adventures to graphic and point-and-click titles. In Japan, story-focused adventures developed into visual novels, often minimizing or removing puzzles.
• Interactive dramas and walking simulators similarly reduced traditional puzzles or combat to emphasize story, dialogue, atmosphere, and player choice.
• Action-adventure became a dominant hybrid, combining exploration and storytelling with combat and other mechanics. Games such as Grand Theft Auto III, Tomb Raider, and Metal Gear Solid illustrate how it could absorb elements from several older genres.

Indie Games and Newer Genre Waves

• Rising budgets and retail distribution made publishers more risk-averse, helping established, large-scale genres dominate. Digital storefronts, mobile platforms, and indie distribution later lowered the barrier to making and selling games.
• Independent developers revived older genres and broadened their definitions. Horror, for example, expanded beyond survival-horror conventions: games could focus on fear without combat, complex inventories, or even much movement.
• The roguelike grew from Rogue’s procedurally generated dungeons and permanent death. Spelunky showed how those principles could be combined with other genres, inspiring a wave of roguelikes and roguelites, including deckbuilding roguelikes and bullet-heaven games.
• Other newer categories include incremental/clicker games, sandbox games built around player-defined goals, survival games, cozy games, and social multiplayer “friendslop.”
• Rather than one genre replacing another, the number of distinct game types has continued to grow. Genres remain useful but subjective labels, not fixed recipes—and games often fit several at once.

People and Sources Featured

Research and references: Backloggd and Wikipedia; Core-A Gaming’s “Every Fighting Game Type Explained”; Noclip’s interview with Ralph Koster; Game Developer Magazine; Eurogamer. The video’s listed background sources also include Penny Machines, The Dot Eaters, and Street Writer.

Creators and commentators discussed or quoted: Mark Brown; Allan Alcorn; Nolan Bushnell; Steve Jobs; Tōru Iwatani; Tomohiro Nishikado; Mark Cerny; Shigeru Miyamoto; Takashi Nishiyama; Yoshiki Okamoto; John Carmack; Gabin Ito; Alexey Pajitnov; Hisaki Nimiya; Sid Meier; Julian Gollop; Will Wright; Mabel Addis; Gary Gygax; Roberta Williams; Don Woods; Yuji Horii; Akira Toriyama; Koichi Nakamura; Masanobu Endō; David Brevik; David Cage; Hideo Kojima; Dan Pinchbeck; Robert Briscoe; Thomas Grip; Glenn Wichman; Derek Yu; Jay Ma; Eric Fredricksen; Ian Bogost; Peter Molyneux; Gabe Newell; Jeff James; Toby Gard; Warren Robinett; Ron Gilbert; and Bad Viking.