It is a game about love and identity, but it also has forklift truck races. It is a game about bloody revenge, but while youre waiting to retaliate, you can buy lottery tickets and visit the arcade. When Bafta recently asked gamers to vote on the most influential game of all time, Im not sure even the most ardent Sega fans would have gambled on the success of an idiosyncratic Dreamcast adventure from 1999. Yet the results, released on Thursday morning, show Shenmue at No 1, with perhaps more predictable contenders Doom and Super Mario Bros coming in second and third respectively.How has this happened, especially considering the game was considered a financial failure at the time of its release, falling short of recouping its then staggering development costs (a reported $70m, which would now get you about a third of Horizon Forbidden West or Star Wars Outlaws)? Well, nostalgia is a funny thing and so is the concept of cultural influence. When it was released more than two decades ago, Shenmue was an oddity: an open-world role-playing adventure that followed martial arts student Ryo Hazuki as he sought revenge for the murder of his father. But while there were fights and puzzles galore, there was also a lot of other stuff. The game used an internal clock to switch between day and night, and to cycle through seasons. Often, the people Ryo needed to speak to (or beat up) were only available at certain times, so he had to kill time by wandering the streets of mid-1980s Yokosuka. You could go to shops, play old Sega arcade games, you could visit the hotdog stand. The world was filled with eccentric characters and strange mini-games including the aforementioned forklift races.What players also enjoyed were its systemic and narrative oddities. Designer Yu Suzuki, who spent the 1980s making some of the greatest arcade games of all time, including OutRun, After Burner and Hang-On, was a stickler for authenticity and simulation he understood that Ryos life would be boring and mundane at times so thats what the player got. He also loved to experiment with gameplay conventions, which in Shenmue led to the adoption of quick time events, highly choreographed action scenes in which the player dictates the action by following specific button prompts. It was, lets say, controversial at the time, but it was interesting. Even the games rather wooden voice acting and clipped dialogue enraptured players. To this day, the thought of Ryo wandering the docks asking Do you know where I can find some sailors? is comedy gold to those in the know.It was the first time that an epic, immersive role-playing adventure also drew in elements of life simulations and dating games, to expand the interactive repertoire for players. Later titles such as Grand Theft Auto III, would expand on the idea, but we can perhaps say that the concept of living, explorable worlds came from Shenmue and flavoured everything that has followed, from Assassins Creed to Skyrim.Shenmue did end up getting a sequel and, much later, a third title to close the trilogy. I was at the video game event E3 in 2015 when Yu came on to the stage during Sonys press conference and announced that Shenmue III was in development. It was pandemonium. Sure, you could say that Super Mario Bros has been more influential because it popularised the platformer and also the concept of a video game mascot character; you could say it was Doom because it made the first-person shooter the most important genre in PC gaming. But I like the fact that Shenmue has won, and not only because I love Sega and edited a Dreamcast magazine at the time. Its because it shows that gamers still enjoy strange, exotic games, and if thats the case, strange, exotic games will continue to be made. We certainly see that in the success of Shenmues illegitimate children: the Yakuza and Like a Dragon games, where action, dating and silly games still combine to hilarious effect.I like to think that there will always be players willing to just stop fighting for a second, head down to the docks and hunt for sailors.Bafta most influential video game of all time list in full1. Shenmue (1999)2. Doom (1993)3. Super Mario Bros (1985)4. Half-Life (1998)5. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998)6. Minecraft (2011)7. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II (2025)8. Super Mario 64 (1996)9. Half-Life 2 (2004)10. The Sims (2000)11. Tetris (1984)12. Tomb Raider (1996)13. Pong (1972)14. Metal Gear Solid (1998)15. World of Warcraft (2004)16. Baldurs Gate III (2023)17. Final Fantasy VII (1997)18. Dark Souls (2011)19. Grand Theft Auto III (2001)20. Skyrim (2011)21. Grand Theft Auto (1997)