Video game genre
A video game genre is a simple way to describe a game by how you play it, not by where it’s set or what the story is about. A game can fit into more than one genre, and people may disagree on the exact category. Genres can evolve over time as games change.
Long ago, catalogs grouped games with broad labels like Skill, Space, Adventure, Race, Sports, Combat, and Learning. Early lists also split games into wide ideas such as arcade, wargame, and adventure, with other categories popping up as tech and ideas grew.
As publishing grew, Nintendo and other makers started using labeled series to organize games for consoles. The NES had eight major series, including Adventure, Action, Sports, and Arcade, with others added or retired later. To get licenses to publish games, developers tended to reuse familiar gameplay, which helped certain genres stay strong on each system.
Technology changes opened new genres. More memory, 3D graphics, online play, and new controllers let designers try new ideas. Indie games in the late 2000s and 2010s brought experimental styles back, often outside big-budget publishing.
What counts as a genre usually comes from how you play. The same game can have several subgenres, like “first-person shooter” vs. “shooter,” or “real-time” vs. “turn-based.” Prefixes such as first-person, top-down, or side-scrolling help describe these ideas. Genre names can drift over time; for example, platform games started as climbing games, and first-person shooters were once called Doom clones.
New genres often come from mixing ideas from different games. Colossal Cave Adventure helped inspire the adventure genre and then action-adventure games like The Legend of Zelda. Sometimes a game is labeled by its audience or purpose (like “Christian game” or “serious game”), but these aren’t true genres because they don’t say how you play.
Genres vary in how specific they are, and many popular games mix elements from several genres, making classification tricky. Grand Theft Auto III combined shooting, driving, and role-playing in a new way, which made it hard to fit neatly. Terms like roguelike come from games that resemble Rogue and describe those shared ideas, not just visuals.
Besides gameplay, some labels describe goals or themes, but they aren’t genres. In sales, broad genres like puzzle games can be very popular on mobile even if their traditional market changes.
In short, a video game genre focuses on how you play, changes as games evolve, and often blends with other ideas to create new experiences.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 19:10 (CET).