I debated whether or not to include this game. Galerians was actually thinking ahead at a time when many critics accused it of treading familiar genre ground.

Future survival games would certainly utilize similar concepts, but I don’t know if I’ve seen many other games that make you sympathize with your character via taking care of them quite as this one does. There were quite a few great horror games in the late ‘90s/early 2000s that were written off as “ Resident Evil knock-offs.” While it’s worth diving deeper into that particular subject another day, I feel like Galerians might be the PS1 horror game that really deserved to make a bigger impact than it actually did.īuilt around its protagonist’s psychic abilities, Galerians brilliantly utilizes a multi-tier resource system that forces you to constantly manage your character’s well-being in order to get the most out of their psychic powers. Within a couple of years, that control scheme would usher in a new era of console FPS masterpieces. Hilariously, some critics at the time even said that the game’s controls made it unplayable. It even made that control scheme the default input option whereas previous games hid lesser versions of that scheme in the options menu. While there were other PS1 games that featured similar control schemes as optional input methods ( Quake 2 and Medal of Honor), Alien Resurrection is the earliest game I know of that featured a version of that dual-analog control scheme we know and love today. While most of the game is honestly pretty forgettable, Resurrection deserves all the credit in the world for its early use of the dual-analog stick control scheme that is now standard for console FPS games everywhere. Released near the end of the PS1’s life cycle (2000), Alien Resurrection survived a trip through development hell only to be met by mediocre reviews. With that out of the way, here are 20 PS1 games that were way ahead of their time. However, preferential treatment went to games that were released exclusively or initially for the PS1.

Any game released for the PlayStation was considered eligible for this list.

That is why games like Tomb Raider, Metal Gear Solid, and Gran Turismo are not on this list.

While this list includes some games that were successful in their day, I excluded obvious examples of innovative games that were widely appreciated upon their release.

For the most part, though, I tried to focus on games that featured some kind of technological or mechanical innovation that wouldn’t become standard (or appreciated) until after that game’s release.

The phrase “ahead of its time” is obviously somewhat subjective.While its status as such is a testament to its technological innovations and library of great games, it also speaks to the many PS1 games that somehow feel more relevant now than they ever have before.īefore we talk about those games, though, here are a few rules/selection criteria to keep in mind: That approach led to a lot of big swings and big misses, but it also resulted in a shocking number of games that were truly ahead of their time.Īctually, the PS1 may just be the ‘90s console that ended up having the biggest impact on the future of the industry. Yes, it was an incredibly successful console, but it was also a console designed and supported by a lot of people who were trying to figure things out as they went along. I know that this is going to sound strange, but I sometimes feel like the Sony PlayStation doesn’t get enough love.

Wild 9 psx