Guide: Games That Created Unique Mechanics

For many years, video games boiled down to going from left to right, jumping over obstacles, defeating enemies, and saving the world, a princess, a friend, a relative, or whatever the story presented as your objective. This was by no means a problem. Most classics follow this formula. But when developers think they can do better, ideas emerge that become mechanics and shape all the games that come after.

Some ideas are good, like proximity chat, which makes you feel like you're spying on an enemy behind a wall or that you need to get close to an ally to talk and plan a strategy. Others, like microtransactions, aren’t so welcome and well-received and could’ve been discarded immediately. For better or worse, these 10 games created, innovated, and changed the way we play today.

Let's talk about 10 games that created game mechanics, or at least refined them and made them what they are today, and if you have any questions, just leave a comment.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was released in 2006 and is an open-world RPG from Bethesda. In the game, the main story revolves around the assassination of the emperor, Uriel Septim, and the campaign to prevent Tamriel from being invaded by the forces of the plane of Oblivion led by Mahrunes Dagon. It has a large city, dungeons, guilds, side quests — the classic Bethesda open-world RPG package that remains popular to this day.

But what put Oblivion on the list is that it was one of the first AAA games to sell small paid content after launch: microtransactions. The most remembered case is the “Horse Armor” package, which cost about two dollars and only changed the horse's appearance. It didn't give a real advantage in the game, it was clearly cosmetic, and yet it generated a strong reaction from the community. Why? Because the game was already paid and people understood this as getting extra content for something that already had a high cost.

Bethesda argued that it was a way to maintain support for the game and test ongoing revenue streams. Ultimately, what Oblivion showed was that it was viable to distribute paid post-launch content even in full-price games.

The practical consequence was enormous: it paved the way for DLCs, microtransactions, and other monetization schemes that now populate the market. The ethical discussion remained there, but the mechanics themselves spread, and many people copied, refined, and transformed it into a central part of the gaming business.

Dota 2, from Valve, became a benchmark in 2013 not only for its competitive scene, but also for the monetization model that was established there.

Valve launched the Compendium at The International 2013, a kind of seasonal pass with challenges, goals, and rewards. Part of the revenue raised from these sales went to the tournament's own prize pool, which led the community to contribute directly to increasing the prize pools.

The pass brought progression through levels, cosmetic rewards that didn't alter gameplay, and cooperative goals that motivated the entire community. This did two things at once: it increased engagement, because many people wanted to complete the challenges and get the rewards, and it created a revenue stream that fueled the championships themselves.

The format proved to be scalable and profitable without creating a direct competitive advantage, so other games picked up the idea and adapted it: Fortnite, CS:GO, PUBG, and many others now use passes or variations of them.

Halo 2, released in 2004 by Bungie for Xbox, has a campaign story with Master Chief facing the Covenant and the Flood, but the biggest impact came from the multiplayer. Microsoft introduced matchmaking systems that took into account the skill of the players using the TrueSkill ranking. The idea was to pair people of similar skill levels for more balanced matches, avoiding matches where newcomers to the game became easy targets and the game became boring.

At the same time, Halo 2 introduced proximity-based voice chat: speech through the microphone was only heard by those near another player on the map. This created curious and intense situations—hearing enemies taunting you from the other side, coordinating ambushes with nearby allies, or simply the chaos of live taunts.

TrueSkill helped structure fair matches; proximity chat added a new charm and tactical ideas to the games. These two mechanics together changed what we expected from multiplayer on consoles: it wasn't just about the map and weapons, it was also about intelligent matchmaking and spatial communication that affected real-time decisions.

Final Fantasy XI debuted in 2002 and was ambitious: Square created an MMORPG that ran on PlayStation 2 and PC (and later also on Xbox 360), allowing players on different platforms to share the same world, Vana'Diel.

In the game, you create a hero, explore tropical islands, complete quests, and face threats like the Salik Empire, all with a class system, crafting, and combat that demands strategy and cooperation.

The technical and social novelty was cross-platform play. Making PS2 and PC play together required coordination with manufacturers and significant technical adjustments. For the player, the effect was direct: being able to form groups with friends regardless of platform helped fill servers and kept the community active for a long time. It was an important step towards the concept of "crossplay," which is now the goal in many multiplayer titles: bringing people together, not hardware, to keep the experience alive.

Total Annihilation was released in 1997 and was an RTS with two main factions, The Arm and The Core, full of robots and futuristic units. What became a historical landmark was the fact that Cavedog regularly made new units and updates available via download after launch. In practice, it was one of the first examples of distributing extra content over the internet, what we now call DLC.

Back then, the internet wasn't as straightforward for distributing large files, so releasing extra content monthly had both technical and strategic merit. Even though it was free, the format taught the market that it was possible to extend a game after its release with new elements. This fueled continued interest and kept the player base playing, and later the idea evolved into the paid model we all know.

Alien Front Online, released in 2001 for the Dreamcast, is a first-person shooter that pits futuristic tanks against Triclops aliens. Its major distinguishing feature was the integrated voice chat: the Dreamcast had peripherals and supported modem connections, and the game used this to allow real-time conversations between players on the console.

On PCs, voice chat already existed, but it was rare on consoles; Alien Front Online brought the experience closer and showed that voice communication could be a central part of multiplayer on consoles. The result was more coordinated and "expensive" matches; insults and taunts aside, voice communication changed the dynamics of cooperation and competitiveness, and other games followed suit.

The Legend of Zelda on the NES is simple and straightforward: Link needs to rescue Princess Zelda and confront Ganon while exploring Hyrule. The innovative idea came after completing the game: the cartridge contained the Second Quest, a modified version for a new run with rearranged maps, more difficult enemies, and items in different locations.

This is the direct predecessor to the "New Game +" concept: using the same game material to create a second experience that challenges the player who already knows it.

At the time, it was an efficient way to increase replayability without creating entirely new content. Second Quest made it clear that replaying can be just as interesting as the first time, as long as the experience delivers real novelty instead of simple repetition.

Shadow of Mordor, released in 2014, puts you in the role of Talion, a Gondor guard who, after gaining powers from Celebrimbor, goes after Sauron. What became a benchmark was the Nemesis System: procedurally generated orc enemies that resemble encounters with the player and evolve according to the personal history of each war.

In practice, this means that if Talion is defeated by an orc, that orc can rise in rank and become a hunter who returns to take you down; if you kill a boss, he leaves the hierarchy. Each orc has a name, traits, and memories of encounters. This generates small emergent stories: your enemy returns different, resentful, or disappears because he was defeated by another.

The system transformed enemies into characters with their own arcs, all dynamically generated, and gave the player a sense of consequence and personal revenge within combat. It was a great step in using AI to create emergent narrative instead of purely disposable enemies. It's sad that no other game can use this system, since it's patented by Warner Games.

Pokémon GO, released in 2016 by Niantic in partnership with Nintendo, took a simple idea and made it explode: using GPS and the phone's camera to spread creatures throughout the real world. The player walks, encounters Pokémon in real-world locations, participates in raids at gyms, and visits PokéStops to collect items.

The success lay in bringing augmented reality and geolocated gameplay to a massive scale. Local events with crowds in squares and parks, communities organizing for raids, and the feeling of playing within the real world were what truly stood out. Furthermore, the freemium model with microtransactions showed that it was possible to monetize without turning the game experience into pay-to-win. Pokémon GO proved that location + AR + social gameplay is a powerful combination (and a dangerous one: cases of people being run over and trespassing to catch Pokémon are well documented).

Adventure, from 1980 for the Atari 2600, is a simple game: the player explores a kingdom, faces dragons, and tries to recover a chalice. The real story is something else: Warren Robinett hid the game's credits in a secret room. At the time, Atari prohibited developers from signing their work, so Robinett placed an invisible pixel that, when moved to a specific point, revealed the message "Created by Warren Robinett".

This is the first documented easter egg: it required specific actions and knowing that it was there to be found, and this led other games to start hiding things as a way to reward the curious. Today, easter eggs are part of gaming and software culture, but it all started with a hidden pixel that became a legend.