Roughly a month ago, a discussion about the distinctly American flavor that dominates most of the discourse around classic games broke out on Twitter. Some of the UK’s best-known game writers weighed in throughout the thread, and they all agreed that games that were popular in the US, but virtually unknown in UK, somehow managed to push out many would-be blockbusters that never made it across the Atlantic.
Games such as Contra and Chrono Trigger were specifically called out by name as titles that weren’t all that big in the UK, but are still widely remembered all the same. And at some point, the conversation shifted and began to ask where the retrospectives and re-releases were for Sensible Soccer, Zool, Turrican, Elite, and many others.
Do you ever feel the discourse on gaming (particularly retro) is generally based on what was popular in America? Games that were big there but not here (Contra, etc) continue to get name-checked today, but Sensible Soccer, Zool etc were big here and are barely mentioned.
— Chris Scullion (@scully1888) November 20, 2019
As an American, it’s fair to say that I know little to nothing about all four of those games. But what would happen if the UK had more say in which classic games get remembered? It’s an interesting question to ponder, so I pulled out all the UK-based “Best Games of All Time” lists from Version 3.0 of the Video Game Canon to peak into this alternate reality.
Zoom in on specific portions of the Video Game Canon and explore alternate sorting options from the Version 3.0 Update with Listology 3.0.
This Listology article is based on an earlier Version of the Video Game Canon. Visit the Top 1000 to see the most recent changes to the full list.
One of the things I found was a treasure trove of weird and wild games that barely garnered a mention in the US. While we were dealing with the aftereffects of The Video Game Crash of 1983, players in the UK were chasing down interesting (and influential) creations from a band of “bedroom coders” on a wide variety of computer platforms. The Commodore 64 appeared on store shelves in 1982, years before Nintendo slapped that number on every game they released, and it amassed a library of over 1,000 games. It was followed by the Amiga a few years later, and both platforms would end up competing with the Atari ST, the BBC Micro, the Amstrad CPC, and the ZX Spectrum (which was affectionately referred to as the “Speccy” by UK gamers).
As Microsoft began to take over desktops in the UK, these computer platforms drifted from memory. It’s also unclear who owns the rights to many of the games produced for them, making any plans for a re-release very difficult.
But while the Speccy and the C64 and the rest were a huge part of the UK’s identity, the consensus among most of the UK’s critics about the “Best Games of All Time” actually appears to be laser-focused on more recent titles. Sifting through the “Best Games” lists produced by UK-based publications, critics crowned 2013’s The Last of Us as the best game of all time. Grand Theft Auto V, which was also released in 2013, was close on its heels in the #2 spot.
Multiple games from 2014 populate the top 50 as well, including Nidhogg (#27), Hearthstone (#35), Bayonetta 2 (#37), Mario Kart 8 (#38), Trials Fusion (#48), and Far Cry 4 (#50).
But what of Sensible Soccer, Zool, Turrican, Elite, and those other local-to-the-UK hits? They’re there, and positioned much higher than they are on the full version of the Video Game Canon. Sensible Soccer is #78, Zool is #591, the second game in the Turrican franchise is $473, and Elite is all the way up at #43.
As for Contra, it wasn’t selected by a single UK-based publication, and it’s popularity on the main Video Game Canon list is solely due to American fans. Konami’s shooter was originally released in most European countries as Probotector, a bowdlerized version of the game that replaced all the human characters (and some of the aliens) with robots. The NES always played second fiddle to the Genesis in Europe, and Konami retired the Probotector name in 1999, so it’s not surprising that most people in the UK don’t have any nostalgia for the franchise.
Chrono Trigger wasn’t officially released in the UK until 2009, but it’s reputation as one of the greatest RPGs of the 16-bit era helped lift it up to #52.
So, if we were to use just the 20 “Best Games” lists produced by UK-based publications, the Video Game Canon would look like this:
Video Game Canon (Version 3.0): UK’s Choice
C-Score = Average Ranking + (100 – Appearance Frequency)