Sports Illustrated has been a staple of mailboxes and magazine racks for nearly 70 years, but it’s not a publication you would normally associate with video games.
That said, they’ve published a few great pieces about video games over the years, including an oral history of NBA Jam that helped kickstart a new appreciation for the arcade classic and this colorful interview with John Madden about his namesake football simulation. Believe it or not, they’ve even branched out into esports, with the launch of the aptly named Esports Illustrated in the Spring.
The magazine also (sort of) published their first-ever Best Games list earlier this year, though I missed it at the time.
“The Best 100 Games of All Time, Ranked” was created for Sports Illustrated by Good Luck Have Fun (GLHF), a European collective of writers who provide content for several publications that don’t have a traditional video game desk. It also serves as a slight update to a list they created for USA Today in 2022.
The basic structure of both lists is fairly similar with Among Us sliding in at #100 and Shadow of the Colossus sitting at the very top, but a lot of games in between have undergone some changes.
More than a dozen games got the boot between 2022 and 2023. That list includes several very recent releases (including Deathloop, Half-Life: Alyx, and Metroid Dread), a few indie darlings (Firewatch, Into the Breach, Outer Wilds, and Papers Please), and a trio of certifiable classics (The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, Super Mario Bros. 3, and Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness)
A slightly different set of editors brings a new set of opinions and those titles were replaced with a batch of games that felt like shocking omissions in 2022, including Irrational’s BioShock, Square’s Chrono Trigger Valve’s Half-Life 2 and Portal 2, and LucasArts’s The Secret of Monkey Island). A trio of Nintendo’s finest (EarthBound, Super Mario World, and Super Metroid).
Ironically, a list of the “Best 100 Games” published by Sports Illustrated only includes a single sports game, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2. Perhaps its the international makeup of the panel, but this has become something of a trend among other recent lists.
“The Best 100 Games of All Time, Ranked” from Sports Illustrated and GLHF will be added to the Video Game Canon later this year.