With more than 50 years of history to pick from, a milestone birthday for some game or console happens nearly every day. But 2021 is a particularly big year for the fine folks at Nintendo. The consolemaker extinguished 25 candles for the Nintendo 64 over the Summer and blew out 20 for the GameCube just last month.
We’ll talk a bit about both of those anniversaries in this edition of Bite-Size Game History, as well as a new way to play Doom (which will officially turn 28 in a few short weeks).
It’s an oft-repeated mantra in certain circles (and I’m sure it’s come up in this column before), but game development is hard. Projects morph and mutate as they wind their way through development, and many never make it out the other side. So for this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, let’s look at a few things that disappeared over the years, but still live on in their own way…
This article refers to an older Version of the Video Game Canon. View the Top 1000 to see the most recent changes to the list.
Version 5.0 of the Video Game Canon is now available. Aggregating the critical consensus from 66 Best Video Games of All Time lists published between 1995 and 2020, this updated and expanded edition of the Video Game Canon has grown to include a total of 1,396 games.
Seven lists were added to the dataset in 2021, including recent lists published by GamingBible and Hardcore Gaming 101. Several legacy lists that weren’t part of previous calculations were also collected for the first time, including lists from Flux Magazine (1995), Hyper (1999), GamePro (2007), The Irish Times (2013), and Power Unlimited (2015).
As in years past, each game was ranked against the rest of the field using the C-Score, a formula that adds together each game’s Average Ranking and the complementary percentage of its Appearance Frequency across all lists. To give recent titles a chance to build their reputation, a game must also be at least three years old (and released on or before December 31, 2017) to be eligible for inclusion. So a game with a lower C-Score will rank higher on the Video Game Canon.
With these rules established, there was one game that was far ahead of the pack… Tetris (just as it’s been for the last four iterations of the Video Game Canon). Alexey Pajitnov’s puzzler reached the zenith of Version 5.0 of the Video Game Canon thanks to its extremely low Average Ranking (18.09) and extremely high Appearance Frequency (93.94%). Those components give it a C-Score of 24.15, which is well below the average C-Score of 195 and almost 12 points better than the runner-up.
Are you looking to delve deeper into game history and the study of game culture? Then look no further than the Big List of Books About Games.
Obviously, the Big List of Books About Games is not a list of every book ever published about video games. But it’s certainly a good place to start… and there is a lot of options about exactly where you could begin.
History buffs would do well to begin with Steven Kent’s The Ultimate History of Video Games, a book that provides a pretty good overview of everything from Pong through the beginnings of the PS2/GameCube/Xbox era. David Sheff’s Game Over: How Nintendo Zapped an American Industry, Captured Your Dollars, and Enslaved Your Children fills in a lot of the gaps with a very detailed account of Nintendo’s rise from the early 1980s up through the dawn of the Nintendo 64. And Tristan Donovan’s Replay: The History of Video Games travels across the pond to cover the same timeframe with an additional focus on the game development industry in Europe.
If you want to go way back, David Sudnow’s Pilgrim in the Microworld is a wild game-specific study about how one non-player got sucked into an obsession with video games. Out of print for decades, the book was republished by Boss Fight Books in 2020.
Closer to now, Jason Schreier’s Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made and the anthology The State of Play: Creators and Critics on Video Game Culture will give you a painfully accurate picture of what game development and game culture are like today.
I would also strongly recommend David Kushner’s Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture, especially if you ever wanted to know more about the creation of Doom or the diverging career paths of John Romero and John Carmack.
With hundreds of choices like this, the Big List of Books About Games is currently split into four categories (and like these titles, some will be highlighted as “Recommended” picks):
▶ Commentary, Criticism, and Cultural Studies
▶ History (Before 2000)
▶ History (2000 – Present)
▶ Memoirs
The Big List of Books About Games will be updated on a regular basis, but if there’s a title you know I’m missing, please let me know through the Contact page.
Dozens of publications used the final weeks and months of 2019 to pick the Best Games of the 2010s, but Keza MacDonald and Keith Stuart stood apart from their peers.
Instead, the Guardian’s game journalists decided to poke convention in the eyeballs and reminisce about the 20 years since the turn of the millennium with a ranking of “The 50 Best Video Games of the 21st Century.”
But now here we are in 2021, a full two years later, and they’ve decided that the time is finally right to publish their ranking of “The 15 Greatest Games of the 2010s.” And even though they’re (technically) playing catchup with their colleagues, MacDonald and Stuart didn’t take the assignment lightly, crafting an epic-length blurb for From Software’s Dark Souls, which was selected as the best game of the decade…
IGN’s editors and contributors have produced multiple Best Games lists over the last 20 years (the most recent, the “Top 100 Video Games of All Time,” was published in 2019), but they’re doing something a little different with their “Best Video Game of All Time Bracket.”
Beginning today, IGN’s readers will guide the process by voting in a March Madness-style tournament that features 64 of “the very best” games, as selected by IGN staff.
To build the bracket, games were sorted randomly into four different regions, and then seeded by IGN’s editors. Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption, Valve’s Portal 2, Nintendo’s Super Mario World, and Nintendo’s Super Metroid were the #1 seeds in each region, but voters will have to make some hard choices in this first round.
I mean, how do you choose between The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim? Or Halo 2 and Mass Effect 2? Or Street Fighter II and Pokemon Yellow? Or The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Final Fantasy VII?
Let’s take a look at the full seeding…
The National Videogame Museum began collecting stories about the public’s lockdown-fueled fascination with Animal Crossing: New Horizons back in August 2020. The museum’s curators and archivists solicited hundreds of diary entries from players all around the world, all of whom were more than happy to share the details of their island adventures with Tom Nook, Isabelle, Blathers, and all the other villagers.
Now, after more than a year of hard work, the NVM is finally ready to open the virtual doors to their Animal Crossing Diaries online exhibition:
While the world was on pause, the island paradises of Animal Crossing: New Horizons thrived, welcoming those in isolation with open arms (and paws). The game became a routine part of everyday life. Cancelled plans were reimagined and reprogrammed to the virtual sandy shores of players’ islands. For many people unable to socialise in real life, the game became a vital creative space for personal connection.
Using Animal Crossing: New Horizons to maintain that personal connection with friends and family quickly became a huge part of the game’s appeal. Players also gravitated towards it’s strong emphasis on creativity and personal style, as well as the importance it placed on maintaining a daily routine. The NVM saw these common threads appear again and again throughout the diaries, ultimately sorting each entry into one of five categories:
Keeping A Routine – Faced with an uncertain day to day life in lockdown, players turned towards the game for an escape. If you couldn’t find a comforting routine in real life, the game could provide. For many players, Animal Crossing: New Horizons was not a comforting distraction. It saved 2020.
Making Your Space – An island can be a place of comfort to create a world that expresses its player’s personality. It can be a social, artistic and cultural space shared with others across the world. For some it is a space in which processing feelings of stress, anxiety and grief can take place. Players making spaces to travel, connect and share experiences opened up new possibilities. For many players, events were accessible for the first time via virtual spaces.
Representing Yourself – Many games, like Animal Crossing, have a main hero you can customize to look like you.
Sharing Creativity – The closure of museums and other cultural events limited access to creativity. And while the island does have its own museum of art, insects, fish and fossils, it also has a range of design options. You can create your own outfits, patterns and even games! Players could recreate cultural and artistic events that couldn’t happen in 2020.
Staying In Touch – For many people, the pandemic means social distancing from friends and family. This creates a sense of isolation many struggle with. In the game, welcoming new neighbours to your island placed a big focus on social connections.
Visitors to the Animal Crossing Diaries exhibition can also explore diary entries through a timeline feature that highlights important days on the New Horizons calendar (like Wedding Season and Toy Day), along with more impromptu in-game events (such as Biden Island and Pride Month) that were created by the players themselves.
The NVM plans to maintain and expand the Animal Crossing Diaries exhibition project going forward, and you can add your story to the collection using their Online Submission Form.
LucasArts and Factor 5 were joined at the hip in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But what sorts of games did LucasArts create before their collaboration? And what happened to Factor 5 after the Rogue Squadron series faltered? Oh, and where does the long-forgotten Independence Day Online fit in with both companies?
Find out in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History…
Nintendo made last year’s pandemic-related lockdowns more bearable with Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Naughty Dog ruled the Summer with The Last of Us Part II. CD Projekt finally showed us their vision of the future with Cyberpunk 2077. And Valve brought virtual reality to a new level with Half-Life: Alyx (the first expansion to the Half-Life franchise in over a decade).
Oh, and Sony and Microsoft each launched brand new consoles in November.
But it was Hades, developed by the small team at Supergiant Games, that walked out of Hell with the most “Game of the Year” accolades in 2020.
You can find the other four, as well as more of last year’s most-acclaimed titles, after the break in the 2020 GOTY Scoreboard.
The market for retro games has exploded exponentially in the last few years, with the record for the price paid for a single game rising steadily from just over $30,000 in July 2017 to $114,000 in July 2020, $660,000 in April 2021, and $1,560,000 in July 2021. Earlier this month the record climbed again to $2,000,000.
It would be easy to chalk this phenomenon up to an aging base of collectors ready to spend their hard-earned dollars on something they could never obtain as children. After all, you saw the same thing with comic books and baseball cards in the 1980s and 1990s.
But something else might be going on here…
