The Nintendo 64 isn’t celebrating a milestone anniversary this year, but that hasn’t stopped Nintendo Life from asking their readers to pick the misunderstood console’s best games. While we wait for the results, I dug through Version 4.0 of the Video Game Canon to find out which Nintendo 64 games have been singled out over the years.
It’s not a particularly long list, but there’s no shortage of interesting titles…
Bite-Sized Game History is a column of extremes. Sometimes, it’s a mind-blowing revelation that completely upends the way we think about some part of the distant past. And other times, it’s a fun piece of concept art from a 30-year-old video game.
You’ll find both extremes in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, as well as the story of the extreme measures that Mattel used to take to stress test the Intellivision.
Eurogamer’s staff and contributors did a lot of looking back in 2019. The site’s video team traveled to PAX East last Spring to host a debate to determine “The Best Games of the Last 20 Years.” And just before the end of the year, more than 15 contributors highlighted a variety of unconventional titles as the “Games of the Decade” in a series of personal essays.
With the launch of the PS5 and Xbox Series X looming, it was time to produce another list. But this time Eurogamer turned things over to an outside panel of developers and journalists to help them pick “The Top 10 Games of the Generation.”
The Xbox Series X|S and the PS5 are steamrolling their way towards store shelves this November, and earlier this month, GameSpot became one of the first outlets to produce a retrospective of the generation we’re about to leave behind. Or are we? With cross-platform compatibility more important than ever, and the Switch still going strong, the upcoming generation will probably look a lot like our current one.
Which might explain why GameSpot’s staff made a few unexpected picks for “The Best Current-Gen Games You Need To Play.”
Microsoft continued their next-gen shopping spree yesterday morning with the acquisition of Bethesda Softworks for a whopping $7.5 billion. The purchase includes the rights to all of the publisher’s world-famous franchises (including The Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Doom, Wolfenstein, and Dishonored), as well as their stable of in-house development studios (including Bethesda Game Studios, id Software, Arkane, and MachineGames).
The Microsoft-Bethesda marriage is the biggest deal ever between two gaming companies, and instantly doubles the number of internal studios operating under the Xbox Game Studios umbrella. Naturally, all of the major players involved in this transaction had a lot to say.
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.
The latest update to the Video Game Canon, Version 4.0, has arrived!
The Video Game Canon now includes a total of 1,232 games, which were pulled from 59 Best Video Games of All Time lists published between 1995 and 2020. Each game was ranked against the rest of the field using the C-Score, a formula that takes into account a game’s Average Ranking and the complementary percentage of its Appearance Frequency across all lists.
Finally, games released after December 31, 2016 were excluded from the ranking because of their newness.
Three brand new lists were added to Version 4.0 of the Video Game Canon, including “The 100 Best Video Games in History” from GQ Spain, a “Top 100 Video Games of All Time” ranking from Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture, and a massive look back at “The Best Video Game the Year You Were Born” from Popular Mechanics. Alongside these new additions, updates to IGN’s “Top 100 Video Games of All Time,” Popular Mechanics’s “The 100 Greatest Video Games of All Time,” and Slant Magazine’s “The 100 Best Video Games of All Time” were also added to the calculation. Thanks to reader CriticalCid for providing research assistance with some of these new lists.
But even with all this new data, there was surprisingly very little movement near the top of the Video Game Canon, and the Top 3 was once again represented by Alexey Pajitnov’s Tetris (#1), Valve’s Half-Life 2, and Capcom’s Resident Evil 4 (#3). There was some slight shuffling in the rest of the Top 10, but no new titles were able to crack the highest tier. Nintendo’s classic quartet of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (#4), Super Mario 64 (#5), The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (#6), and Super Metroid (#10) all hung around, as did Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us (#7), Irrational’s BioShock (#8), and Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption (#9).
Things get more interesting as you move further down the Top 100, especially for the 2015 and 2016 releases that now qualify for inclusion in the Video Game Canon.
Google Bombing was a popular activity in the early 2000s, as coordinated groups of people attempted to link humorous results to seemingly innocuous searches.
The search engine had mostly put an end to the practice by 2010, which means that the top result for “miserable failure” no longer points to a WhiteHouse.gov page about George W. Bush. But quirks in the algorithm can still cause trouble for people who don’t bother to read beyond the first few links. Author John Boyne, probably best known for writing The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, learned that lesson for himself recently.
This edition of Bite-Sized Game History will look at Boyne’s blunder, as well as Dragon Quest Builders, and remembering Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World: The Game on its tenth anniversary.
Just last month, Heritage Auctions sold a sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. for $114,000, which set a new record for the sale price of a single game. But what we didn’t know was that another sealed copy of the game had already been sold for $140,000 in a private sale a month before that.
According to Ars Technica, that particular copy of Super Mario Bros. was purchased by Rally, a company that calls itself a “stock market of collectibles,” and what they plan to do with their new acquisition sounds wild.
Beginning next Friday, August 21, Rally will sell 3,000 “shares” in their copy of Super Mario Bros. for $50 apiece (which will raise the valuation of the game to $150,000). Like a publicly-traded stock, users can buy and sell those shares on the site’s marketplace, or cash out when an advisory board decides to sell the game to a collector.
In addition to the factory seal, this copy of Super Mario Bros. is nearly pristine, and has received a 9.8 A+ from Wata Games:
Still, Wata Games says this is one of only 14 factory-sealed copies of Super Mario Bros. it has seen among the so-called “hangtab” editions, which feature a hanger slot on the back that was removed from production lines around September 1987. Among that rarefied group, Wata says this is the “single highest graded sealed copy” it has seen, earning a 9.8/10 for box quality and a near-perfect A+ for the shrinkwrap seal on Wata’s scale.
“This is the first time that such an early print with a grade of 9.8 A+ has ever been offered for sale,” Wata Games President Deniz Kahn said in a statement. “This is the 1-of-1 highest graded copy of Super Mario Bros. in existence, considered by many collectors to be the ‘Holy Grail’ of the hobby. It’s the Action Comics #1 of video games.”
This is Rally’s first foray into purchasing collectible video games, but they’re excited for the chance to branch out from their previous focus on acquiring rare trading cards, watches, cars, and comic books.
“Over the last year or so we’ve heard from our members and have observed the industry grow, and it’s clear that there is a community that believes in both the financial and emotional value of these games and wants access to invest in them,” [Rally VP of Operations Fitz] Tepper told Ars Technica. “We’ve seen this demand from asset classes already on the platform, like sports memorabilia, trading cards, or collector cars and are now thrilled to add video games to that list.”
Tepper went on to say that this is just the first video game purchase Rally plans to make, and that the company is currently looking to obtain copies of The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros. 3, Stadium Events, GoldenEye 007, and Halo: Combat Evolved as well.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic forced everyone indoors, Animal Crossing: New Horizons was trending towards a massive launch. But I’m not sure anyone expected it to break as big as it did.
Nintendo has always played the long game, and they attracted a small, but very devoted, community between 2001 and 2017 after releasing four games (and a handful of spinoffs) in the Animal Crossing franchise. But after only four months, the consolemaker has already sold more than 22.4 million copies of New Horizons, making it one of bestselling games on the Switch (it currently trails only Mario Kart 8 Deluxe).
New Horizons promised players colorful island vistas and adventurous travel to faraway lands, so a lot people jumped at the chance to escape from the real world for a few hours every night. From there it exploded into an outburst of creativity, billions of requests for good turnip prices, celebrity sightings (including Elijah Wood, Danny Trejo, and multiple high end fashion designers), and a talk show hosted by Rogue One screenwriter Gary Whitta. In short, it was the right game at the right time.
The United Kingdom’s National Videogame Museum will attempt to capture this unique moment in gaming history with their next project, The Animal Crossing Diaries. Players from around the world will be able to submit stories about how they played Animal Crossing: New Horizons during the pandemic, which will help the NVM in their goal to “record for the first time a highly meaningful but ephemeral and intangible experience through the perspective of its players”:
This new collection will focus on the cultural phenomenon that followed the release of Animal Crossing: New Horizons for the Nintendo Switch in March 2020, just as the world was transformed by the pandemic. This videogame rapidly became an international sensation in which millions of players have been creating and managing their own tropical island along with a cast of talkative animal neighbours. The game became an important social and creative outlet for people unable to socialise in person during lockdown.
This innovative online exhibition will open up new ways of collecting and archiving videogame histories, and record for the first time a highly meaningful but ephemeral and intangible experience through the perspective of its players.
Iain Simons, Director of Culture for the NVM, said “Animal Crossing is the perfect experience for a lockdown. The coincidental timing of its release provided a welcome relief for millions of people who wanted to go outdoors but couldn’t, who wanted to meet friends but weren’t allowed. It’s no surprise that this incredibly creative, social space became a safe haven for millions during this turbulent year.”
Please visit TheNVM.org to learn more about future updates and events related to The Animal Crossing Diaries.
According to the community at HowLongToBeat, The Last of Us Part II (27 Hours), Ghosts of Tsushima (42 Hours), and Horizon: Zero Dawn – Complete Edition (61.5 Hours) all require a substantial time commitment from players if they want to experience the full story and at least some of the sidequests. Their recent back-to-back-to-back launch over the last six weeks has also reignited the debate about game length.
It’s probably a coincidence that all three games were published by Sony, but the consolemaker’s recent focus on creating bustling single-player adventures has put them in the hot seat for this round of the debate. Ironically, it was a former executive from Sony that fired the first salvo this time around.
