Great First Impressions: The Prologue that sold you the game

[ZombieFish]

The intro to Super Metroid was pretty dope. Not easy to build that kinda atmosphere with 16 bits.

Silent Hill was pretty strong up front too. Getting stabbed to death by toddlers in an alley made of rusty chain link fencing lit only by my Zippo? Sold.

Ooh, the WW2 sequence in Wolfenstein: The New Order as well. BJ being an actual character in an actual story hooked me.

 

[qw90700]

My situation is mostly the opposite. If I played 2 million video games, like 1.9 million of their beginning has so shitty start I just say "the game is rubbish" and stop playing it. Only perhaps 2000 of them made me think "hmm despite a shity start I have to endure the rest of the game is good" after I randomly learned about significant fun feature and situation I learned about the game. I mostly say "big no" to any video game that opens with cinematic BS that you have little control over. I get for like 15 years video game starts are mostly cinematic for 2 hours and then actual gameplay start but it never worth to waste that much time for me.

That being said for the sake of answering the thread my prime example is:

Honestly this game changed my expectation for video games because it did something new and different that raised my bar on "how to develop video game 101". Before this game I didn't see such a cool logo of a video game. Logos are important yo, and then it has brief cool cinematic intro to get into the mood. I understand that I dislike cinematic shit in games but for intros they gotta be brief and give you enough about the game just so you can go with it. After such an intro you get hiped up and wanna play the game. And then I was like "OMG" for there was character selection screen. You can select between 4 dudes with all have their difference in gameplay. This was the first time I saw such stuff. And OMG you can actually change your powerup to use different weapons!!! On top of it it has amazing graphics. This game is like my dudes travelled back in time to release this. If I didn't know I could say they released this game in 2025.

But twat toxic fan community hated this game because "it's not like Contra" and "slowdoowwwnnn!" but dude imagine it's like being GTA fan but hating GTA 5 because you can select between 3 characters, the game is TPS, giant ass map, modern graphics instead of simple 3D top down camera and people are made of few pixels lol.

 

[ScriptorFaust]

The intro to Super Metroid was pretty dope. Not easy to build that kinda atmosphere with 16 bits.

Silent Hill was pretty strong up front too. Getting stabbed to death by toddlers in an alley made of rusty chain link fencing lit only by my Zippo? Sold.

Ooh, the WW2 sequence in Wolfenstein: The New Order as well. BJ being an actual character in an actual story hooked me.

Yeah, totally agreed! Wolfenstein:TNO had such a great, immersive introduction. Fps have it rather easy to construct a bombastic introduction imo although going the opposite can work quite well; just look at Half-Life :D

 

[Cu-Neo]

The prologue in Tales of Berseria, made me say "I want to know what happens next"

 

[Dyne]

This might be an obvious or cliche choice, but

The Last of Us.

The end of that intro sequence just hit me so hard. I had to keep playing.