DOOM AND MYST

These two major digital games also managed to have a massive impact on the board gaming world.

Doom is most famous for popularizing the First Person Shooter genre, as a lone soldier guns their way through hell, fighting all manner of demons with a madcap armoury. The game itself was brought to tabletop in Doom: The Board Game, released in 2004 by Fantasy Flight Games. This modular map adventure game pits a team of heroes against a horde of player controlled demons, which was later re-implemented by the popular Descent franchise, which itself was massively influential on a wide range of tabletop franchises, such as Zombicide and

Imperial Assault.

On the complete opposite spectrum of games,

Myst wowed audiences for its impressive graphics, non-combative gameplay and focus on uncovering mysteries and solving puzzles. The interactivity of the game environments and central conceit of finding a way off the island inspired many game genres, including the popular digital and real world Escape Room”- games, a genre which has now found its way to the tabletop in various incarnations.

Both games were massive successes and are now considered some of the best games ever released. While many games have taken the mechanics here and improved on them greatly, it’s impossible to not recognise the importance of these titles and how much they influenced video (and tabletop) gaming today.