Games Considered The Best: #0 - Introductions
Hello! I’m Owen, and I’ve just had an idea I will probably regret.
One of my New Year’s Resolutions for 2022 is to broaden my “media diet”- to try and branch out and read books, watch movies, listen to music, etc, from artists and genres I haven’t sampled before. I have a bad habit of only listening to what’s on the radio or watching the latest blockbuster movie- not out of any lack of curiosity or interest, but simply because I’m quite busy in my university CS studies and making time for all this stuff just hasn’t been a top priority.
This idea extends to games. I’ve always been meaning to sample more types of games, particularly the classics that helped shape the industry- but it’s always been an abstract desire. Like how I’d really like to learn how to become a good cook- I certainly would! But just making grilled cheese and rice is always easier in the moment, so that’s the only thing I make. In this case, games I play a lot like Halo or Destiny are my grilled cheese and rice.
I may have lost the metaphor somewhere.
The point is: if I want to go through with this, I’ll need a few things. First, I’ll need a list of games to work through. If I was just let loose in the entire back catalogue of the medium, where would I even begin? And if I make the list myself, I risk only filling it in with games or series that I recognize, which is counter to the point of doing this at all- I want to broaden my horizons, to play games I’ve never heard of.
Second, I need a way to keep myself motivated. Like (I imagine) many of you, I have a graveyard full of projects I worked a tiny bit on, then abandoned after losing interest or getting busy or whatever. (And of course, my track record for New Year’s Resolutions is even worse.)
To solve the first issue, I chose the Wikipedia list of “Games Considered The Best”. The article is a compilation, of sorts, of many other “Best of All Time” lists put together by game journalists over the last 50-odd years. The qualifications to be on Wikipedia’s combined list is that the game needs to be on 6 or more of those lists, which makes it lean towards older games a bit, but hey- I need to play more of the classics anyways!
Now that I’ve got my list, I can solve the second issue by, well, doing this. By writing about my experiences and posting it online, where updates are expected semi-regularly. It’s one thing to create a private project for myself, but I find it much harder to lose focus when there are suddenly eyes on me. Hopefully you, the readers, can be the pressure I need to finally commit to this idea.
Some ground rules: I’m going to play them in the order they appear on the list, which is alphabetical sorted by year (every game in 1982 A-Z, then every game in 1983 A-Z, and so on). This is not technically completely chronologically accurate, but if my goal is to chart general trends in design, this should be fine (a game released a few months before another one should hopefully not have sufficiently influenced another to the point where it would be bad to play them out of order). Also, the exact release dates of many of these games are fuzzy, particularly the older ones. Also also, there’s 237 games on this list and if I tried to track down exact release dates for all of them, I’d be here all year.
Next, I’m going to try and play as close to the original releases as I can get my hands on. Ideally that means the actual original release from the year I’m discussing, but also… I’m a university student on a budget, and there’s no way I can justify buying an ancient mainframe computer to play the “authentic” version of The Oregon Trail. So remakes/rereleased will be considered in cases where the original version is not readily accessible and the newer game is considered by fans to be mostly authentic. And if there’s no remake/remaster/modern port… I might just have to play them through The Way Nintendo Wouldn’t Approve Of.
Lastly, I wanted to get a more wholistic view of the game and it’s place in history when I cover each entry, so I’ll also be going over some of the background of the game’s creation and context. This might not always be strictly relevant to the actual discussion of the game, but I believe in a lot of cases it can be helpful to us in determining why these games are considered among the best.
Some of you might be thinking, why do this at all? If you took a look at that Wikipedia list of games I mentioned earlier (which I will be referring to as The List from now on), you may have noticed that there are… 237 games on The List. This is, objectively speaking, an insane thing for anyone to do.
So why do it? There’s a few reasons. First, I’m writing this from January 2022, and there really isn’t much else I can, legally speaking, be doing for fun right now. Second, as someone who wants to go into game development as a future career, I think it’s important for me to be “game literate”- to have a wide variety of design references and touchpoints I can pull from for inspiration or comparison.
Finally, and most importantly, I find the evolution of games as a medium endlessly fascinating. The confluence of conflicting artistic, technological, and business interests clashing and meshing to somehow, ultimately create something that can impact people in a way no other artistic medium can… it fascinates me in a way I find hard to accurately explain.
But somehow, if you’re this far into my rambling, I think it might fascinate you too.
So, thanks for coming along with me on this journey. I think I’m going to learn a lot, and I hope through my writing, I can help you learn a little too. I think this is going to be a lot of fun.
First up… The Oregon Trail (1971). Then… 236 more games. I can’t wait to get started. See you all there!
-Owen
