78. Soldier Of Fortune

(PC/PS2/Dreamcast, Raven Software, 2000)
As mentioned before in this list, at the time of writing, Activision are an mighty giant smothering the videogame market, they have gotten to this position purely on the sales of two type of game, Rhythm action music games and military shooters, with the Call of Duty series dominating videogame sales.

Nearly ten years ago, Activision had success with a different uber-violent first-person shooter, a game which took videogame gore to a new level, in fact, it was pretty much the main selling point. Soldier of Fortune saw the player taking the role of mercenary John Mullins who works for an underground organisation known as "The Shop" John is sent on a series of missions in order to uncover a plot featuring, guess what, terrorists getting hold of nuclear weapons. Quelle suprise.

What this essentially boils down to is John, armed to the teeth, massacring his way from country to country (at one point even attempting to take down Saddam Hussein) all the obvious locations are used: subway, warehouse, trainyard, office block and the obligatory "arctic" mission.
The game's main draw was the debut of Raven's "GHOUL" engine, in a nutshell, this was the ability to shoot any of 20+ points of impact on the enemy and have them react accordingly, so the enemy would scream and sell the hit body part, providing it was still attached to them. The game was REALLY violent, with the potential to take a body down to just a torso, whilst many games have this level of dismemberment now, at the time SoF was the first to do it so realistically.
The violence caused controversy with the ratings boards and various countries rated the game accordingly, its strange to actually think of people making a big deal over a game getting an adult rating, today many games are giving adult ratings without anyone blinking an eye. In the videogame world, 10 years can change a lot.

Other than the violence it was your bog-standard FPS, featuring all the weapons, locations and plot twists you would expect.
Soldier of Fortune was very successful, it spawned two sequels and the games are still played online to this day. Activision have moved on now and prefer their military murder sims glossier and with added patriotism. Whilst it was fairly numbing and unoriginal, SoF did set a standard in physics engines which is totally taken for granted in FPS games today.