* Basically everything FromSoft has put out (With Dark Souls 1 and Elden Ring probably being the most important - Dark Souls effectively kicked off an entire genre because of it's popularity (technically Demon's Souls came first, but Dark Souls was the first one to blow up).)
* Breath of the Wild
* Escape from Tarkov also kicked off a new genre in the extraction shooter, although noone else has quite nailed it yet imo.
* The Witcher 3 (heavily influentual towards the design of Breath of the Wild, and a number of other open world rpgs recently)
* As someone else pointed out, Baldurs Gate 3
* Skyrim
* Minecraft
* Dwarf Fortress (not exactly recent, but the Steam release propelled it into being much more well known)
* Path of Exile arguably revolutionized the diablo-style ARPG genre - any ARPG that comes out now is influenced by it - see Last Epoch for probably the biggest example.
Whether a game is "culturally relevant" or not really just hinges off of whether a significantly large portion of the population plays and talks about it for long enough though.
These days we get so many more quality game releases than we ever did in the 90s/2000s so it's much harder for a single game to grab everybody's attention in the same way that the stuff you mentioned did.
- Disco Elysium is a role-playing game largely about self-discovery and identity
- Kentucky Route Zero is a reflection on mortality and the true costs of poverty
- NORCO is a meditation on death and survivorship with meanderings into environmentalism and groupthink/cult thinking
( you're right they're all recent compared to Pong and the OP's point. )
Except BG3, most of what you've listed are around 10 years old.
BoTW: 7
Tarkov: 8 ( Technically, but was slow burning so hard to place exactly when it took off. )
Witcher3: 9
Skyrim: 13
Minecraft: 14? ( 13 if we're counting retail, but it was massively popular before then )
DF: 18?
Path of Exile: 11.
You skipped over mentioning Elden Ring, with it being from 2022.
Some others from the 2020s:
Hades, 2020
Animal Crossing, 2020
Among Us, 2020
Vampire Survivors, 2022
Half Life Alyx, 2020 (Still probably the only real example of a "true" AAA VR game)
I think it's tough to say what games will be long-term culturally significant when they've only been out a year or two, though. I think it's easier to look back in that 5-15 year range and see what stood up.
And indeed, PoE of 11 years ago isn't comparable, even PoE pre-delirium probably isn't recognisable to current PoE, and anything pre Incursion certainly isn't, but that's the nature of a live-service game. The power creep post-conquerors has been incredible, and there's been essentially no effort to bring that in after they decided that a reset with PoE2 would be preferable than trying to rein in power creep in modern PoE, and that adding upper end aspiration content instead was preferable.
The decision to rein in power with expedition backfired so hard that people still complain they don't have an item editor with harvest. ( Although with Locks it's come pretty close again at the right cost. )
I think they made a good choice, PoE is better than ever, but it's controversial, and every patch post 3.14 has had a lot of detractors claiming that "PoE is ruined".
In terms of cultural impact, it's still interesting that it's such an "old" game that's having an impact on (gaming) culture.
If we're talking about wider culture, you're right that "culturally significant" can take time to materialise. I'm not sure Alyx or even Hades really makes the cut. They're great games of their genre but I don't think they've had the cut through that the others you've listed have had.
Among Us was a cultural phenomenon that was immediately visible outside of gaming, akin to something like Fortnite although perhaps magnified by the pandemic massively boosting streaming audiences and people looking for some kind of social connection through the internet.
Survivors has had a massive impact on gaming, it's created a genre of it's own ("Survivors-like" is a thing) which can be seen with the release of "DeepRockGalactic: Survivors" which is a great improvement on the genre. It's fair to say that while Vampire Survivors itself might not have the cultural cut through, it defined a genre of games that have inspired clones from Brotato to DRG and deserves its place on that list if we're looking at gaming culture, but it's too soon to say if we're looking at culture outside of gaming.
This is exactly what I was thinking when writing this list, along with noting that OP mentioned games from the late 90's at the latest - my timeline for "recent" was pretty wide.
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"Culturally Relevant" to me means one of two things:
* So many people played the damn thing that it entered the public consciousness outside of gaming focused communities, and stayed there for a decent amount of time.
* It had a significant and fairly enduring influence on the design of later titles made by other studios.
You can tell within a few months whether a game is in the former category (Elden Ring, Palworld, Minecraft, Among Us, BG3 etc), but it takes years to know whether a game is in the second category (Dark Souls, also Minecraft to an extent, Path of Exile, Witcher 3, Tarkov etc).
* Breath of the Wild - boring temples, lifeless empty world
* Escape from Tarkov - unplayably buggy, awful servers, generic assets and models
* The Witcher 3 - good, but generic third person adventure/exploration
* As someone else pointed out, Baldurs Gate 3 - incredibly generic fantasy universe and fantasy trope story
* Skyrim - incredibly generic fantasy universe and fantasy trope story
* Minecraft - actually innovative, creative, and unique game. What LEGO bricks were to kids in the 80s and 90s, minecraft is to the 2010s and 2020s
* Dwarf Fortress - cool indie game
* Path of Exile - a decent game in a dead genre. bad story/art style. only noteworthy thing is the gameplay is tight, but so was Diablo
Yes, like -random example here- Uncharted :-P.
TBH i do not think what is "culturally significant" is something that we can answer right now, but something that will be up to future people to decide.
Though i do think that Uncharted is culturally significant in how it was part of a series of influences from the original Indiana Jones, to Tomb Raider, to Uncharted and back to Tomb Raider (in that each one of those influenced the next) - with some Prince of Persia thrown in for good measure. But for people to be able to tell, judge and discover these things, the games must be available to them - preferably in their original condition (remasters, rereleases, remakes, etc often tend to change things - though those should also be available so these changes can also be seen and perhaps talked about in the future).
Also not only "good games" or "influential games" are worthy of preservation - even bad or just mediocre game are worthy of that, for a variety of reasons. Games are often a snapshot of the times they were made at and multiple "snapshots" are always better than a single one. Even from a design perspective, a bad game can be interesting: for example the original Prince of Persia 3D seems to have been largely lost in the sands of time and yet it is an interesting game in its own right despite its flaws, in how its interpretation of (classic) Tomb Raider's controls combined with ideas from the original 2D games around realistic/captured animation ended up creating something inferior to its clear inspirations (but that is clear only really if you know about/have played the games that inspired it and know about/have played the game itself).
Of course if you just want to have fun, whatever is available on Steam will more than suffice.
Advanced Lawnmower Simulator probably has more cultural significance than "Another Call Of Duty 7", since I remember it from my childhood and an article gets posted that mentions it at least once a year. Does that make it a good game?
Definitely not.
Seriously, it’s converting people I never in 100 years would have expected to become gamers.
I think Pokémon Go was a much more visible and impactful phenomenon (in certain places) than anything else on your list. This might be different to "cultural importance" depending on your definition.
I mean did random churches and libraries have "Playing Red Dead Redemption 2 is not allowed here" signs up?
Were there flash mobs in NYC playing Half Life Alyx?
Fortnite certainly seems to be, for better or worse.
I enjoyed for example the Uncharted games a lot. But I don’t think anything significant will have been lost if future generations of people don’t get to play the Uncharted games, no matter how much I enjoyed them myself.
Whereas, things like Pong, and Pac-Man and the first Super Mario games and the Pokémon Red and Blue and Yellow games feel much more important for me, and of course the original Doom, all of these are important on a whole other level. And thankfully they are all sure to be able to be preserved at least in some form.