[mattmanser]

Also some now incredibly main-stream new gaming concepts that are very recent:

- Minecraft was released in 2011 and revolutionized building in most games, as well as basically inspiring a whole "survival" genre (Ark, Rust, DayZ, etc.)

- H1Z1 was released in 2015 and that Battle Royale format has taken over most casual shooters

- Garry's mod (2006) inspired a whole new genre too

- An entire genre of simulators like Farming Simulator or whatever that would have been unthinkable 15/20 years ago (I have no idea what the provenance of that genre was)

It's very easy to miss revolutionary ideas in your own lifetime because you sometimes don't realize how revolutionary they are.

EDIT: A few other things have popped into my head:

- Dark Souls-esque has become a genre in itself, and it took a while to become main-stream

- rogue-like became a big idea for indie devs to cheaply produce a game in the 2000s

- A lot of the revolutionary stuff today is happening around being able to move what were single player games into multiplayer and you can see that in recent games like No Man's Sky, Sea of Thieves, FO76, etc. (some more successfully than others ;)

- It's also easy to forget that there's been a whole lot of phone game innovation going on, Angry Birds was only 2009

[datalopers]

> Farming Simulators

Harvest Moon started that as far as I know, came out in 96/97, though it was more of an RPG with farming as the core gameplay loop rather than just a farming sim.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvest_Moon_(video_game)

[mattmanser]

I meant more the "simulator" games like Train Driver Simulator, Truck Driver Simulator, etc. that only really took off in the last decade (AFAIK).

But certainly Harvest Moon has been a genre that's now entered the western mainstream much more, and took a while to 'take off' in the western markets with things like Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing in recent years.

[kryptiskt]

The mundane simulator genre did exist in Germany way back in the 80s/90s, I remember a nice airline simulator I bought on a trip there (I'm from Sweden).

[ajmurmann]

As a kid in the 80s I was obsessed with a C64 shareware game called Agricola. You owned a farm and could buy and sell farm land, forest and farm animals. Probably the most exciting part was that you could also race horses (or rather watch them race and place bets). Never thought about it before as a mundane farming simulator. And yet it mostly was a mundane farming spreadsheet.

[0xcde4c3db]

Fun fact about "Harvest Moon": the western publisher lost the contract to localize the original series, but still commissions new games under the same name. Remakes of the original series are localized by a different publisher under the name "Story of Seasons". It's a little bit like the Guitar Hero vs. Rock Band saga.