Listology 2.0: Exploring the Best Games From the 1990s

Video gaming went through some massive changes throughout the 1990s, greater than any ten-year period before or since.

The decade began with the familiar beeps and bloops of the NES, as Nintendo launched Super Mario Bros. 3 shortly after the New Year in 1990. The first shots of the “Console War” between the Genesis and the Super NES were be fired soon after, but the late night release of id Software’s Doom (and the rise of the PC as a gaming platform) in 1993 would change everything.

Doom didn’t just cement the First Person Shooter as gaming’s dominant genre, it blew open the door to more “mature” themes that Mortal Kombat hinted at a year earlier. Different philosophies on the public’s hunger for this type of content would lead Sega and Nintendo in opposing directions, and the market would be further splintered by the arrival of the Sony PlayStation. Emerging from the ashes of the planned “Nintendo PlayStation” add-on for the Super NES, Sony’s console introduced cinematic games like Resident Evil, Final Fantasy VII, Metal Gear Solid, and Tomb Raider.

Nintendo would strike back with the Nintendo 64, and a decade that began with pixelated plumbers flinging fire at a giant turtle would end with GoldenEye 007, Perfect Dark, Conker’s Bad Fur Day, and a vastly changed landscape for games.

That said, it was still Super Mario 64 on top. Find out where all 337 games released between January 1, 1990 and December 31, 1999 placed in Version 2.0 of the Video Game Canon after the break.

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Listology 2.0: Exploring the Best Games From the 1980s and Earlier

Tetris currently sits at the top of the Video Game Canon’s most recent update (Version 2.0), so you shouldn’t be surprised to also see it atop a list of the best games released before 1990.

The addictive puzzle game first made its mark on the world stage in 1984 thanks to the inspired design work of Alexey Pajitnov (and a subsequent IBM-compatible version coded by Vadim Gerasimov and Dmitry Pavlovsky), but it was Nintendo’s beloved revision from 1989 (for the NES and Game Boy) that propelled it to unexpected heights. The consolemaker’s output in the 1980s was practically unmatched at the time, and it must have required some kind of magic to add Pajitnov’s inspired puzzler to the middle of their hot streak.

Besides Tetris, four other titles in the top seven were produced by Nintendo (Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda, and Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!). Only Ms. Pac-Man (at #3) and SimCity (at #5) managed to break the consolemaker’s stranglehold on the decade.

1978’s Space Invaders, from Taito, was the top performer among the games released during the “Me Decade” (at #10). Though 1972’s Pong (at #13) and 1977’s Zork (at #14) weren’t far behind.

Even a pair of pre-commercial gaming pioneers managed to find a place on the Video Game Canon. 1962’s Spacewar!, which was designed by MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club for the school’s then-new PDP-1 mainframe, came in at #57. Meanwhile, a similar academic curiosity led William Higinbotham to take time off from researching advanced scientific concepts during the Cold War to create Tennis For Two (which ranked #113) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1958.

Find out how your favorites games from when video games were expressed in eight bits or less ranked after the break.

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