Summary
Many of us enjoy today’s popular and successful games without realizing the deep, often overlooked legacy behind them. In the world of video games, there are numerous pioneering titles that broke new ground in genres and mechanics but remained largely underplayed or forgotten.
This is often due to technical limitations, poor marketing, orsimply being ahead of their time, preventing them from reaching a wide audience. Years later, their ideas are revived and refined by spiritual successors—modern games that blend these core concepts with advanced technology and gameplay, achieving global success. This list highlights those forgotten pioneers alongside the beloved successors that carry their legacy today.
Including a game that no one “ever” plays in a list is both impossible and meaningless. Therefore, the games on the list are statistically titles that most people know little about or haven’t played. While older players are naturally more likely to have played these games, looking from a broader perspective, the spiritual successors of currently popular games are generally less well-known than the originals.
Long before Inside captivated players with its wordless horror and surreal world, Another World pioneered this minimalist narrative style. Developed solo by Eric Chahi, it follows physicist Lester,teleported to an alien planetafter a lab accident. With no dialogue or HUD, players must interpret the hostile world through visuals and animation alone.
This design philosophy deeply echoes in Inside, where silent storytelling, atmospheric tension, and trial-and-error gameplay dominate. Both games foster empathy through isolation and vulnerability, emphasizing mood over exposition. Even Chahi himself acknowledged the spiritual kinship, stating that Inside reminded him of his own work. It’s not just influence—it’s a continuing legacy.
Thief: The Dark Project,first-person stealth gameplayas we know it today began here. Developed by Looking Glass Studios, it placed players in the shadows—literally—using light and sound as core mechanics. As Garrett, a lone thief in a dystopian medieval world, players were rewarded for patience, planning, and silence over brute force.
Its legacy lives on in Dishonored, which expanded Thief’s immersive sim roots with supernatural powers and vertical level design. Both games emphasize freedom of approach, player agency, and stealthas a form of puzzle-solving. Dishonored’s creators have openly credited Thief as a major inspiration, cementing it as a true spiritual successor.
Planescape: Torment redefined RPGs by placing philosophy, identity, and dialogue above combat. Set in the bizarre multiverse of D&D’s Planescape, the game follows the Nameless One—an immortal who wakes up in a morgue, stripped of memory, searching for truth across twisted planes and with equally broken companions.
Disco Elysium inherits this legacy, swapping swords for inner voices and dice for introspection. Both games feature amnesiac protagonists whose fragmented identities unfold through rich dialogue and moral complexity. For ZA/UM, Planescape was a direct inspiration. Where Torment asked “What can change the nature of a man?”, Disco Elysium replied with: “And what if that man is you?”
System Shock pioneered the immersive sim genre with its blend of FPS, horror, and RPG mechanics. Set aboard the Citadel Station in 2072, the game follows a hacker battling SHODAN—an unshackled AI with a god complex and a legion of twisted cyborgs. Its atmospheric storytelling, environmental interaction, and player agency laid the groundwork for future narrative-driven games.
BioShock (2007), designed by System Shock 2’s Ken Levine, inherits this DNA. Both games pit the player against a charismatic, unhinged antagonist driving a failed utopia. With moral ambiguity, world-shaping choices, and eerie worlds, BioShock reimagines System Shock’s vision with Art Deco flair—becoming its undeniable spiritual successor.
4Syndicate
A Spiritual Predecessor To The XCOM Series
You love the tactical depth of XCOM, but chances are you’ve never played Syndicate. Set in a bleak cyberpunk future, Syndicate puts you in charge of a mega-corporation waging a brutal war for global dominance. As the ironically titled Marketing Director, you lead a squad of cybernetically enhanced agents through missions of assassination, sabotage, and abduction.
Blending real-time tactics with strategic oversight, R&D management, and ethical ambiguity, Syndicate pioneered the very loop that defines modern XCOM: elite unit control, limited resources, and globe-spanning threats. Though thematically distinct, Syndicate laid the groundwork for the squad-based, high-stakes tension that XCOM fans thrive on today.
XCOM’s roots are closely linked to X-COM: UFO Defense, while Syndicate’s spiritual influence is felt more broadly across the strategy genre, especially in its focus on tactical squad management.
You love Fallout’s post-apocalyptic setting, moral choices, and dark humor—but Wasteland walked that irradiated path first. Developed by Interplay, this CRPG casts you as a squad of Desert Rangers—descendants of U.S. Army survivors—tasked with keeping the peace in a devastated, mutant-filled American Southwest.
With deep character customization, branching storylines, and harsh consequences for every decision, Wasteland laid the foundation for Fallout’s iconic style. Unable to secure the rights to a sequel, Interplay’s team went on to create Fallout as a spiritual continuation. The nuclear wasteland, moral ambiguity, and freedom of choice that define Fallout were all born in the irradiated soil of Wasteland.
You love Dark Souls for its punishing combat and cryptic worldbuilding—but have you heard of King’s Field? Developed by FromSoftware for the original PlayStation, King’s Field was the studio’s first foray into first-person action RPGs. Set in a cursed medieval kingdom, the game follows Alfred, a lone swordsman descending into haunted catacombs in search of his missing father.
King’s Field laid the foundation for what would become the Soulsborne formula: slow, deliberate combat, environmental storytelling, and a world that punishes impatience. While primitive by today’s standards, its oppressive atmosphere and emphasis on cautious exploration mark it as the true ancestor of Dark Souls’ brutal elegance.
Ultima Underworld redefined what a first-person RPG could be. Released in 1992 by Looking Glass Studios, it introduced real 3D movement, dynamic lighting, complex item interaction, and open-ended exploration—all in a single, massive underground dungeon. Unlike its grid-based contemporaries, it offered freedom to jump, swim, and look around freely, immersing players like never before.
Its influence on The Elder Scrolls is undeniable. Arena, Daggerfall, and even Morrowind inherited its core design philosophy: player agency, environmental storytelling, and immersive freedom. Todd Howard himself has cited Underworld as foundational to their vision. Simply put, Ultima Underworld walked so Elder Scrolls could run.
