Tamrielo

Based on my initial criteria, there are a LOT of games that make it into consideration. I want some way of organizing them sensibly, so that I can explain not just what games make the list, but why. To that end, I’ve got the following categories, to help me filter games:

1. Enduring Classics
2. Medium Changers
3. Genre Pinnacles
4. Right Place, Right Time
5. Honorable Mentions
6. Why Didn’t I Include…

The first four cover games that I think make the cut for “best games of all time”, the latter two are for things that are close, or aren’t eligible for inclusion for one reason or another. I’ll be doing each one, day by day.

There are a number of games that didn’t quite make my list for one reason or another, but are either oft-expected inclusions or are worth mentioning for various reasons. I waffled on including these, and while I ultimately didn’t, they’re largely excellent games that deserve recognition. This is the list that I suspect people will be mad about, and know that I waffled on pretty much all of these before ultimately deciding against their inclusion.

Final Fantasy VI

Boy, did I go back and forth on this one. It introduced the ensemble cast, it showed a villain with a complete character arc. It offered highs and lows, and it’s a finely crafted game. What kept it off the list was criteria #6. The game was excellent for its time, but hasn’t aged well. Its pacing is all over the place, making it hard for its strongest suit — its narrative — to stand up to more modern games with a higher caliber of writing. While it pioneered several interesting ideas (most notably the ensemble cast and no “true” main character), it set a drumbeat that, for the most part, other games have not marched to, or seen much success if they’ve tried.

We may see a resurgence in the kinds of ideas that FF6 pushed forward, but outside of a few PS1 era games (SaGa Frontier, for example), it hasn’t really influenced much beyond itself, and doesn’t quite hit the heights or the long-term relevance of its biggest Genre Pinnacle competitor: Chrono Trigger.

Metal Gear Solid

MGS is very, very similar to FF6 in terms of what prevented its inclusion. It’s still a great game, and it continues to fuel a beloved series, but it marches to the beat of its own drum in many ways, with a lot of its innovations not really making a splash in other parts of the gaming sphere. It does a lot of things that only it can get away with, because they wouldn’t be appropriate or sensical in other games. It’s also worked very hard to become almost entirely inaccessible from the outside, with in-jokes and nonsensical storytelling elements that you either “get” or don’t, but either way it rarely bothers to explain them.

That having been said, it’s still a very good game with some very compelling moments, it just forged a path that the rest of the medium didn’t really follow, and as time has passed, it’s pulled more and more from other games than it has come up with ideas that other games then take.

Resident Evil 2

A survival horror game where limited resources and slow-paced controls help amp up the fear. This sort of third-person horror game dropped off fairly dramatically in popularity as controls got more and more refined, because they largely became third person action games against monsters with jump-scares, rather than legitimately provoking fear and dread. Like the previous two, a lot of the things in Resident Evil died as controls got more precise and more responsive; the fear factor in a lot of modern horror games comes from a limited viewpoint, not limited controls.

That having been said, Resident Evil 2 offered some genuinely terrifying moments and had some interesting, arguably well-executed ideas about control limitations as a mechanic, just none that really took off.

Shadow of the Colossus

SotC nearly redefined the boss battle. It was a game almost entirely composed of just boss battles, and it was visually astounding and occasionally very moving. It had compelling controls and exciting gameplay, offering forms of climbing and traversal gameplay years before Assassin’s Creed would bring parkour into cities. Its enormous bosses were fought not by hitting their legs until an HP bar went away, but by climbing atop them and avoiding their attempts to shake you off until you could reach their weak point and strike.

Unfortunately, God of War beat it to market, and the visceral action with quick-time-event driven boss battles became popular instead of SotC’s boss mechanics.

Beyond Good and Evil

It pains me, but I can’t *quite* give BG&E a spot on the list. It’s a brilliant game, with one of the best female protagonists ever, a lot of compelling non-violent and stealth-driven gameplay, and a rich, compelling narrative. When I played it as it first came out, I expected that I’d see a lot more games that focused on non-violent, more nuanced gameplay, where victory is achieved through something other than “hit everyone bad until they stop moving”.

Sadly, BG&E is a massively underappreciated game, and hasn’t quite gotten the cachet to influence the medium as a whole. It was, I think, ahead of its time just enough to keep it from being an instant classic. Its sequel has been in development hell for quite a while now, and while I’d like to hope we’ll see it, I’m not convinced we will.

Based on my initial criteria, there are a LOT of games that make it into consideration. I want some way of organizing them sensibly, so that I can explain not just what games make the list, but why. To that end, I’ve got the following categories, to help me filter games:

1. Enduring Classics
2. Medium Changers
3. Genre Pinnacles
4. Right Place, Right Time
5. Honorable Mentions
6. Why Didn’t I Include…

The first four cover games that I think make the cut for “best games of all time”, the latter two are for things that are close, or aren’t eligible for inclusion for one reason or another. I’ll be doing each one, day by day.

Today it’s the games that I call “Right Place, Right Time”. These games were released in such a way, at a particular point in the medium’s history, that they’ve left an unmistakable mark. Some of them, released slightly later, may not have made this list, others probably still would have, but they’re all most notable not necessarily for doing what no one else had thought of, but for doing it in the right way at the right time to make a huge splash. The biggest one of these will be no surprise:

Half-Life

First-person shooters had stories and puzzles before Half-Life. Modding games was a thing with its own community before Half-Life. These weren’t necessarily new concepts when Half-Life was launched, but Half-Life propelled them into the forefront. The wide spread of Duke Nukem 3D, Doom, and Quake mods paled in the face of the total conversions that Half-Life enabled. Counter-Strike, a hugely significant game likely worthy of inclusion in this list in its own right, started life as a mod for Half-Life. Making, acquiring, and using mods became highly accessible as the Internet spun up, and the impact of Half-Life on virtually every part of PC gaming is undeniable.

Furthermore, Half-Life introduced the concept of the active cutscene, where instead of taking you out of the game into a pre-rendered sequence, the game would simply have things happen that you could see but not necessarily reach, and allow you to keep full control of your character. The game is littered with these, big and small, including an extremely memorable opening credits sequence involving you, as Gordon Freeman, heading into Black Mesa for your first day of work. This kind of storytelling device is so common now it’s hard to imagine that it had even needed to be “invented”, yet it’s largely thanks to Half-Life that we see it in so many places.

Halo: Combat Evolved

Speaking of hugely influential shooters, it’s very difficult to talk about FPSes without referring to Halo. Prior to Halo, FPSes tended to have trickles of enemies, small numbers in small rooms slowly whittling away at your health, and obvious tells for boss fights coming right after a room full of health and other powerups. It gave the genre a somewhat predictable cadence, and you often knew what to expect. Halo changed the face of encounter design hugely, pulling regenerative shields from earlier games and putting them to use as a “breather” mechanic. Now, rather than a trickle, every encounter could be a challenging and satisfying fight for your life, and bosses could be true surprises. By limiting the weapons you could carry, Halo diversified its encounters even more, simply by continually altering the tools you had to approach them.

On top of this, Halo was one of the first big console multiplayer games, and the first to leave an indelible mark on console gaming culture. With Halo, multiplayer console gaming could go beyond the living room, offering a spectrum of opponents far more varied than one could necessarily get locally.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare

Continuing in the line of significant first-person shooters, the next major shooter to leave a huge mark was Modern Warfare. Shortly after Halo, shooters became dominated by a slew of WW2-era games, playing out the same battles in the same locations with the same groups repeatedly, remaining popular enough to keep generating sequels but never quite standing out. Modern Warfare changed a lot of that, moving into the near-future and making the conflict more real and present, and much less abstract than the WW2 games had become for the majority of their players, nearly all of whom were too young to see WW2 as much more than an abstract concept.

Modern Warfare offered a surprising amount of variety in its campaign, which had a strong story and a lot of high-quality moments liberaly spread throughout. It provided a narrative in a military shooter beyond “win this war”, and added depth and nuance that hadn’t been seen previously. It has one of the most powerful single moments in game storytelling, and does it with virtually no words.

Chrono Trigger

From shooters to RPGs. Chrono Trigger is a classic, and a superb game in its own right, but it’s immensely notable for the huge variety of things it introduced to the genre, and games in general. It provided narrative and mechanical firsts like its selection of unique, interesting characters and the ability for your party composition to enable combos and other powerful moves, as well as previously-unknown concepts like non-random encounters that took place in the actual parts of the game you were in, no screen transition, nothing.

However, what really sets Chrono Trigger apart are its big ideas. Other games had multiple endings before Chrono Trigger, but they were relatively unimportant, and rarely represented a different path to beating the game. Chrono Trigger allowed you to beat the game in a huge variety of ways, at a surprising variety of times, and all of these would cause the game to play out differently, and not all of them were nice. You could “beat” Chrono Trigger and not feel like you’d won. Furthermore, Chrono Trigger allowed you to go back and try again, with New Game Plus, where you could take what you’d learned and some of the spoils of your adventures into a new game, hoping to do better this time. NG+ is now a staple in RPGs and many other games, and it all started with Chrono Trigger.

Final Fantasy VII

Time for me to start a fight. Final Fantasy VII is the only Final Fantasy game to make this list. Many other FF games are excellent, but none are as hugely influential as Final Fantasy VII. As the series’ foray into 3D, and absolutely gorgeous at the time, one of the best villains in video games, and a cast of memorable, complex characters, not to mention a game world that suggests it’s much bigger than what you see in the game itself (reinforced by the game’s variety of spinoffs, all telling stories of different parts of that world), Final Fantasy 7 is an incredibly significant game.

Furthermore, it pushed JRPGs into 3D in a big way, one of the first significant moves forward for a very static genre, and quite possibly the only notable one of that generation. It brought a lot of players into the genre who hadn’t seen it before and weren’t wowed by 16-bit sprites, and made a lot of games relevant that otherwise might well have vanished into the ether during the early days of 3D. While other RPGs may have appeared instead of FF7, given time, its release was timely and extremely important, bringing a gorgeous, complex RPG into the public eye right as games started to go more mainstream and draw more people’s attention.

Everquest

World of Warcraft is the game that locked down and defined the MMO genre. Everquest is the MMO that taught us how awesome MMO worlds could really be. Everquest was a social game, one of the first of its kind, where you couldn’t succeed without help and you could get just as far by knowing people in the game as knowing things about the game. Everquest was a huge, expansive world that was extremely dangerous and, by today’s standards, incredibly punitive. These things together made it a place where, by and large, players hated the world, and pushed back against it, rather than hating each other and pushing each other around over an easy world.

It was possible to meet new people every time you logged into Everquest, because the really big guilds and the clique-mentality of smaller guilds hadn’t fully formed yet. Everquest was a fiercely social game in an era when games (and gamers) were criticized for being antisocial, and it gave rise to friendships and meetings that could previously never have happened.

Mass Effect (series)

For a long time, the Action-RPG was an awkward cousin to the more standard RPGs. Real-time combat with the endless numbers of possible options simply wasn’t possible or feasible, and games tended towards “more spells and more attacks” rather than individually more interesting ones. Action-RPGs tended to be simpler, and less involved than their more established counterparts, and outside of Zelda games and Elder Scrolls, often not very good.

Mass Effect carved a niche out by blending RPG mechanics and shooter mechanics, launching a more “hard” sci-fi space RPG at a time when swords-and-sorcery made up the overwhelming majority of RPGs. It brought dialogue forward from a single “right” answer and several incorrect/informational choices, and saved a ton of what you’d done from game to game. Most of these things had appeared individually before Mass Effect, but the ME series was the first to bring them all together in a coherent, fully functional and complete way. It offered polish and high production values, and while none of the games in the series are individually quite ‘there’ for this list, the series as a whole deserves a mention.

Assassin’s Creed II

Most game series make this list as a whole group. Assassin’s Creed II stands on its own. Its predecessor was promising, but somewhat repetitive and tech-demo-feeling; AC2 was an amazing jump forward, and set up plots, metaplots, game mechanics, and characters that the series would struggle to make as compelling in later games as they were in AC2. The game delivered on the promises of its predecessor and set up the edges of a fascinating world. Stealth was interesting, and different from the light/dark systems used previously. Whereas the first only asked you to stealth occasionally, AC2 introduced more and more enemies who could simply overwhelm you, a staple for stealth games. AC2 is still a largely “stealth-lite” game, but it has enough varied systems and interesting mechanics from the first to really earn a spot, and while it didn’t invent the concept of parkour gameplay, it perfected it in a way that its predecessor and its contemporaries never quite managed.

Based on my initial criteria, there are a LOT of games that make it into consideration. I want some way of organizing them sensibly, so that I can explain not just what games make the list, but why. To that end, I’ve got the following categories, to help me filter games:

1. Enduring Classics
2. Medium Changers
3. Genre Pinnacles
4. Right Place, Right Time
5. Honorable Mentions
6. Why Didn’t I Include…

The first four cover games that I think make the cut for “best games of all time”, the latter two are for things that are close, or aren’t eligible for inclusion for one reason or another. I’ll be doing each one, day by day.

Today, “Genre Pinnacles”. These are games that are, straight up, represent the very best of bygone eras of gaming, that are still relevant and still important even though games like them largely aren’t being made anymore. Most (all) of these are 2D-era games, mainly because I feel like claiming that a game is the pinnacle of a genre that’s still being developed is somewhat premature. They each represent a start of a thread that has moved forward and influenced the games that follow in subtle ways, not the massive shifts of the Medium Changers.

Additionally, this was an interesting list to put together, because the results weren’t what I expected. I expected to see a fairly broad spectrum of games in this category, but as I did research and double-checked my initial criteria, things started gravitating to a particular place. Here we go:

Super Mario World

Like Super Mario 64 after it, Super Mario World launched a console, and left a lasting mark on 2D platformers. It had exploration, it had secrets, it had varied environments and exciting enemies. It had a world map that felt gigantic, and entire hidden worlds to find. It demanded that other platformers keep up with its tight controls and sharp features, and only a small number could. It combined wide open levels and tight, cramped spaces, difficult platforming and fiendish enemies, and through it all still introduced new concepts to Mario games that have endured.

It also introduced Yoshi, a character so beloved he’s gotten his own spinoff series multiple times over, and who also took center stage in the one generalist platformer that managed to dethrone Super Mario World:

Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island

Yes, it’s a sequel. No, it’s not even remotely the same game. Five years after the launch of Super Mario World, Yoshi’s Island hype started circling, and it was weird. It was a Mario game where you didn’t play as Mario, where Mario was a macguffin for you to keep ahold of. Then we got to play it. The game is brilliant, with delightful music, levels that are more than just “run right until the end”, which described a majority of levels even in Super Mario World, clever bosses, and memorable mechanics. In the same way that Doom became a primer for 3D level design, Yoshi’s Island was a primer for the highest tier of 2D level design ever devised, and it largely hasn’t been topped since.

In addition, Yoshi’s Island introduced the very start of an idea that has continued to develop ever since: the minimalist UI. Yoshi’s Island’s UI appeared contextually, showing you what you had as you needed to see it, rather than all the time. Rather than a counter for ammunition, you could see your actual ammo trailing around behind you in the form of eggs, and you could see how many you had without referring to a text overlay. It proved that in-game messaging could be highly effective, and was a game that wanted you to look at IT, and not the overlay on the screen. The better our technology has gotten, the better we’ve gotten at this, and Yoshi’s Island kicked it all off.

Mega Man X

Mega Man X is a brilliant game. It’s challenging, highly complex, with lots of twitchy mechanics and a selection of usable weapons broader and more varied than even the most insane FPS, and yet it is a game that seamlessly and effectively teaches you how to play it every step of the way. It holds your hand without letting you realize it’s doing so, and as a result you learn to play it without realizing that you’re being taught. It invented the tutorial level, and while it’s been implemented inexpertly ever since, it’s also allowed deeply complex games to arise without forcing players to pore through a manual just to figure out how to play. Mega Man X taught through gameplay, and it’s no coincidence that manuals started getting slimmer and less necessary starting then.

On top of that, the game has excellent visuals, memorable music and sounds (I can still hear the blaster charge-up sound in my sleep, and the sound of getting health back), and extremely clever level design and bosses, breaking free from the boxes of previous Mega Man games and, indeed, most platformer boss battles and showcasing wide open boss stages that were playable while still being more than just a single screen. It also showed off how movement could make a huge difference, and wall-jumping is now standard in platformers, as is the dash.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2

While Mario was showcasing the beauty of wide-open generalist platforming, Sonic the Hedgehog was delivering a different thing: intensity. The name of the game for Sonic was speed, and it offered a visceral satisfaction that’s hard to top. Sonic was about speedrunning before speedruns were a thing, and the game leaned heavily on its tight, responsive controls, arguably even tighter and cleaner than Mario. Really pushing the envelope for visuals and effects, Sonic attempted to make the battle about cool graphics and high skill, an angle that Mario couldn’t compete in, and thus Sonic found its niche.

Sonic 2, however, had a little detail that made it different. In the game, you ran around not as just Sonic, but as Sonic and his friend Tails, who by default ran along behind Sonic and kept pace, mimicking his moves but contributing relatively little except for the occasional ring pickup or followup hit on an enemy you missed. That is, until you plugged a second controller in. Do that, and suddenly Sonic 2 wasn’t a game you were playing by yourself, it was a co-op game. Better yet, unlike Mario with its shared lives and “I go you go” co-op, you were both playing at the same time and the second player couldn’t really interfere. You could play with a friend as good as you were and crush levels, or (if you’re me) you could play with your four year old sister. Not only could a (much) younger sibling or other unskilled player join you, it didn’t matter how bad they were at the game. They got to contribute, and you were happy to have them, no matter how awful they were.

It would be almost 20 years before we’d see this implemented so well again.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

The Legend of Zelda is a really important series. It’s a style of gameplay that blends puzzles, exploration, and action-RPG mechanics in an extremely iconic way. In a lot of ways, it has struggled to differentiate itself as it’s moved to 3D, skewing towards new mechanics and more outlandish settings with classic Nintendo polish, rather than simply being an expression of the very best action-RPG out there. A Link to the Past is the last Zelda of that time, when Zelda games were the highest quality action-RPGs available, and everything tried to be like them.

From the moment you step out of your house, unarmed, into the pouring rain to look for your uncle, the entire game feels weighty, and huge. When you’ve gotten your bearings and have mastered the world map, the game shifts, revealing that no, in fact there is an entire other world map hiding in the background, with more than twice as many dungeons, and that you’ve only just started.

A Link to the Past has been the style that Zelda games have continued to return to as well, with many of the most successful releases drawing on its style, particularly for handhelds. It says a lot about the quality of Link to the Past that some of the most glowing praise for a recent entry is that it’s “just like it”. To be so good that players crave the experience more than two decades later says a lot.

Super Metroid / Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

I don’t know a lot of games that people religiously play more than once a year, but Super Metroid is on the list. It combines the open-world exploration of Super Mario World and the exciting, varied combat of Mega Man X into one big package. It advanced on its predecessor with improved graphics, more varied gameplay, more powerups, and more of, well, everything.

Castlevania is a similar design, but a totally different approach. It was one of the few successful platformers of the time where your primary attack was a melee strike, and it paved the way for a variety of similar games. Special weapons were temporary, and cycled through frequently, but the overall experience wound up being varied and almost a precursor to the limited-ammo survival horror games to succeed it.

Together, these two games make up “Metroidvania”, its own subgenre that has seen a huge resurgence recently in a variety of ways, and drove a huge amount of that style of game both while they were new and fresh and since.