More than 70 Best Games lists have been used to create the Video Game Canon’s Top 1000 (with the oldest going all the way back to 1995). But did you know that an even earlier generation of writers were compiling notable lists in the 1980s?
It’s true. People were already having fierce debates about which games should be considered the Best Games of All Time, even though we were just a decade removed from the launch of Computer Space.
Dan Gutman and Shay Addams, the editors of Computer Games magazine, were two writers who wanted to try their hand at creating just such a list. Branching out from their day jobs, the pair took their gaming expertise to Compute! Books, who agreed to publish The Greatest Games: The 93 Best Computer Games of All Time in January 1985.
The Greatest Games first appeared in bookstores during a very strange time for the industry. This was just after “The Great Video Game Crash” of 1983 marked the end of the line for the Atari 2600. But it was also a time when players were migrating over to a growing number of different computer platforms (especially outside the United States). You also have to remember what was still to come, as the book was published before Street Fighter II revitalized the arcade scene, before Tetris escaped the USSR, and before the NES changed everything.
So what were a couple of video game experts talking about as the best games ever in the 1980s?
PC Magazine’s Jordan Minor will publish his first book in 2023, and for the subject of this tome, the journalist has zeroed in one that’s very near and dear to my heart.
Whether you know him as CliffyB, Dude Huge, or The Guy Who Made Gears of War, game developer Cliff Bleszinski just added another title to his long list of monikers… Memoirist.
After battling imps and cacodemons on the surface of Mars and confronting gangsters on the streets of Liberty City, David Kushner is ready for his greatest challenge… two paddles and a small dot that represents the ball.
Boss Fight Books will return.
The global recognition of the Japanese RPG can be placed squarely at the feet of Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, which launched outside of Japan within 12 months of each other in 1989-1990. But interestingly, the genre itself goes back much further than you might realize, and you’d need to take a detour that goes through Sir-Tech’s Wizardry, Koei’s Dragon and Princess, and Tetris to get the full picture.
Even though the franchise has flourished for more than 20 years, there’s never been a definitive history written about Pokemon. Daniel Dockery, an entertainment writer who got his start at Cracked, is hoping to change that this October with the release of Monster Kids: How Pokemon Taught a Generation to Catch Them All.
John Romero’s about to make you… listen to his life story.