VGC Updates – Page 3 – Video Game Canon

2021 Update to the Video Game Canon Shakes Up the Top 1000 in a Big Way (But Tetris is Still #1)

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.

[Continue Reading…]

Long-Defunct Flux Magazine Picked “The Top 100 Video Games” All the Way Back in 1995

With the 2021 Update to the Video Game Canon just around the corner, I thought it would fun to look at one of the historical lists I plan to add to the calculation in Version 5.0… Flux Magazine’s “The Top 100 Video Games” from 1995.

Proudly featuring the tagline “The most dangerous video game & comic ‘zine” along the top of each issue, Flux Magazine launched in 1994 as a more adult alternative to GamePro and Wizard. The magazine folded a year later after publishing just seven issues, though not before creating one of the first Best Games lists to cover the full spectrum of games available at the time (arcade cabinets, consoles, PC platforms, and handhelds).

[Continue Reading…]

The Four Inductees from the World Video Game Hall of Fame’s Class of 2021 Have Been Announced

There usually isn’t a theme associated with the World Video Game Hall of Fame‘s annual induction ceremony, but a desire to explore new destinations seems to be at the core of each of this year’s selections. We’ll probably never know if this is just a coincidence or a reaction to last year’s pandemic-related lockdowns, but it’s certainly something to think about it.

On that note, fresh off the success of last year’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the first member of the Class of 2021 is Nintendo’s Animal Crossing, a game where players move to a new town and meet a wide variety of colorful characters as they build their home. Likewise, the 2020 launch of the newest edition of Microsoft Flight Simulator probably helped the original 1982 release succeed in its bid for Hall of Fame immortality.

The Class of 2021 also includes Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, an “edutainment” classic where players follow the clues and chase a master thief across the globe. And finally, Blizzard’s StarCraft was inducted this year after it sent players hurtling across the galaxy for an RTS space opera that also rewrote the rules for esports.

Historians and curators from the World Video Game Hall of Fame shared their own thoughts about what made each of these games special in a short video, which can be found after the break.

[Continue Reading…]

World Video Game Hall of Fame’s 2021 Finalists Include Animal Crossing, Portal, StarCraft, and More

The Strong Museum’s World Video Game Hall of Fame has announced they will enshrine this year’s inductees on May 6th. We’ll know which games comprise the Class of 2021 in just 47 days, but it’s safe to say that one of the clear frontrunners was identified exactly 365 days ago.

It was on March 20th of 2020 that Nintendo released Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and in the year that followed, it transformed the way a lot of people think about video games. So it wasn’t much of a surprise that the franchise’s GameCube debut, Animal Crossing, was chosen as a finalist in 2021.

It’ll be joined by six other first-time finalists vying for a spot in the Hall of Fame this year. That lists includes 1977’s Mattel Football, which introduced the world to handheld gaming, as well as 2009’s FarmVille, a game that minted an entirely new generation of “gamers” on Facebook. There’s also Blizzard’s StarCraft, which further popularized the RTS genre in 1998 and helped birth the esports scene. Finally, three games from 1982 (Microsoft Flight Simulator, Namco’s Pole Position, and Midway’s Tron) impressed the Hall of Fame’s internal committee, which chose to highlight the variety found in some of the industry’s earliest efforts.

These games will be competing against a handful of returning finalists that are getting another crack at the Hall of Fame in 2021, including Activision’s Call of Duty, EA Sports’s FIFA International Soccer, Harmonix’s Guitar Hero, Valve’s Portal, and Broderbund’s Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?

The members of the Hall of Fame’s International Selection Advisory Committee are the final decisionmakers on which of these titles will become part of this year’s induction class, but the public can once again have a voice in the proceedings by visiting WorldVideoGameHallOfFame.org between now and March 25. The three games that receive the most votes in an online poll will be submitted as the “Player’s Choice” ballot when the Committee meets later this Spring.

You can learn more about this year’s finalists after the break, and be sure to tune in to the virtual ceremony celebrating this year’s inductees into the World Video Game Hall of Fame on May 6 at 10:30 AM (Eastern Time).

[Continue Reading…]

GamingBible’s Editors Select “The Greatest Video Games of All Time” to Celebrate the Site’s Relaunch

GamingBible opened the doors to their redesigned website last month, but this rollout didn’t just consist of a new coat of pixels on their digital digs. The British outlet also published “The Greatest Video Games of All Time,” their first-ever Best Games list.

Starting out with Codemasters’s Dirt Rally at #100, GamingBible’s editors tapped ten titles with their first appearance on a Best Games list, including Soma (#96), TimeSplitters: Future Perfect (#95), Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 (#83), Total War: Warhammer II (#81), RuneScape (#62), Oxenfree (#56), and 2017’s Prey (#40).

A pair of gems from 2020, Supergiant’s Hades (#48) and Moon’s Ori and the Will of the Wisps (#75), made an instant impact on players and wasted no time in qualifying for a Best Games list.

While GamingBible dug up a few forgotten favorites for their list, the Top Ten looks very familiar, including The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild at #1. Link’s newest mainline adventure was followed by CD Projekt’s The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (#2), Valve’s Portal 2 (#3), Mojang’s Minecraft (#4), Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (#5), Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto V (#6), Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us (#7), Nintendo’s Super Mario Galaxy (#8) and Super Mario Bros. 3 (#9), and Bungie’s Halo 3 (#10).

GamingBible’s “The Greatest Video Games of All Time” will be included in the next update to the Video Game Canon, which will be published later this year.

Familiar Favorites Top the 2020 Update to Video Game Canon’s Top 1,000

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.

[Continue Reading…]

World Video Game Hall of Fame Welcomes its Class of 2020: Minecraft, Bejeweled, Centipede, and King’s Quest

After selling more than 200 million copies over the last decade, it’s hard to remember a time when Minecraft wasn’t nearly synonymous with the entire medium of video games. And though it was only available in an unfinished state from 2009 to 2011, it seemed to emerge from Mojang’s offices as a fully-formed phenomenon even in its earliest days.

So as players continued to flock to its Lego-like world in droves, it was a bit of a shock when the game was denied entry into the World Video Game Hall of Fame three separate times. Shortlisted as a finalist in 2015, 2016, and 2018, the title was passed over again and again and again. But Minecraft’s creative sandbox become too big to ignore this year, and it has finally been enshrined among gaming’s greats.

In a stunning upset, three unlikely candidates also garnered enough support from the Hall of Fame’s Selection Advisory Committee to join the Class of 2020. A genre-defining match-3 puzzler from PopCap (Bejeweled), a classic coin-op from Atari (Centipede), and one of earliest adventure titles from Sierra (King’s Quest) won out over more popular titles such as NBA Jam, GoldenEye 007, and Guitar Hero.

While this year’s class might look a little surprising, historians working at the Hall of Fame’s parent organizations, the Strong Museum and the International Center for the History of Electronic Games, helped put their importance into perspective.

[Continue Reading…]

Zelda: Majora’s Mask is at the Top of Slant Magazine’s 2020 Update to Their “100 Best Video Games of All Time”

Slant Magazine recently published a new update to their list of “The 100 Best Video Games of All Time,” and it looks like not much has changed since 2018.

The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, the quirky and somewhat-polarizing sidequel to Ocarina of Time, took the top spot once again. While Link’s adventure in Termina doesn’t usually rank that high on other “Best Games” lists, Slant’s reshuffled Top Ten includes a lot of the usual big hitters… Final Fantasy VI (at #2), Super Mario Bros. 3 (at #3), Tetris (at #5), Metroid Prime (at #7), and Resident Evil 4 (at #8).

Old standbys may populate the top of the list, but Slant also elevated several more recent titles above the fray. A handful of titles were even added to a “Best Games” list for the first time… IO Interactive’s Hitman 2 (#97), Lucas Pope’s Return of the Obra Dinn (#53), Mobius Digital’s Outer Wilds (#37), and ZA/UM’s Disco Elysium (#32).

Slant Magazine’s latest rendition of “The 100 Best Video Games of All Time” will be included in the Video Game Canon’s upcoming Version 4.0 update.

Finalists for the World Video Game Hall of Fame’s Class of 2020 Have Been Announced

The finalists for the World Video Game Hall of Fame’s Class of 2020 have been announced… and they’re on fire.

This year’s honorees include titles from every era of gaming, though the Star Power of Guitar Hero looms large over the competition. But that’s OK, because there’s a few other firestarters vying for a spot in this year’s class, including Midway’s NBA Jam, Mojang’s Minecraft, and Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. Melee.

There’s also the groundbreaking GoldenEye 007, the unforgettable Nokia Snake, the edutaining Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, and the addicting Bejeweled. Rounding out this year’s crop of finalists is Naughty Dog’s Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, and a trio of classics from the early 80s (Centipede, Frogger, and King’s Quest).

This isn’t the first opportunity to join the World Video Game Hall of Fame for some of these games, and fans will have the chance to make their voice heard by submitting a Player’s Choice Ballot. The public can vote once per day now through April 2nd, and the three games that receive the most votes will join the 29 other ballots submitted by members of the Hall of Fame’s International Selection Advisory Committee.

The Strong Museum’s International Center for the History of Electronic Games, the entity that oversees the World Video Game Hall of Fame, will announce the inductees from the Class of 2020 at a date to be determined in a special ceremony. For now, you can learn more about this year’s finalists after the break.

[Continue Reading…]

Untitled Goose Game is Popular Mechanics’s “Best Video Game the Year You Were Born” for 2019

Popular Mechanics has has added a handful of titles from 2019 to their ongoing collection, “The Best Video Game the Year You Were Born.”

House House’s Untitled Goose Game was picked by Popular Mechanics’s editors as the best game of 2019, both for its “havoc-causing” stealth elements and its “wholesomeness”:

There were lots and lots of great games for 2019, but none had quite the reaction (and the wholesomeness) of Untitled Goose Game. The objective to be the most havoc-causing goose in existence, and it generates so much joy its almost hard to fathom. It just goes to show that sometimes a year’s best game doesn’t need giant budgets and super crisp graphics. It just needs a goose with a bad temper.

From Software’s Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Kojima Productions’s Death Stranding, and Electronic Arts’s Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order were all given “Honorable Mention” status, along with a pair of Nintendo-produced titles for the Switch (Fire Emblem: Three Houses and Pokemon Sword and Shield).

Popular Mechanics’s “The Best Video Game the Year You Were Born” will be added to the Video Game Canon in the Version 4.0 update, which should be ready to go in 2020.