Tag: Tetris

Listology 3.0: North American Critics Choose the Best Video Games of All Time

A few weeks ago, I reordered the Video Game Canon to focus solely on the picks made by UK publications. That Listology article, Critics from the UK Choose the Best Video Games of All Time, was an interesting look at how our friends across the pond feel about some of the “universally-acclaimed” classics. They weren’t too fond of games like Contra and Tecmo Bowl and Ninja Gaiden, but they had a lot of praise for homegrown heroes like Sensible Soccer and Elite and Lemmings.

But what would Version 3.0 of the Video Game Canon look like if I flipped the switch the other way? What if North American publications had all the power? Let’s find out…

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Bite-Sized Game History: Liberty City’s Early Days, an N64 Controller Prototype, and Jeopardy’s Tetris Blunder

Diving in to the sometimes subtle (and sometimes major) differences between a prototype and the final product is probably one of the most exciting parts of video game history. In many cases, you’ll be looking at the (literal) building blocks of what came before.

In this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, let’s look at one prototype that served as the foundation of something great and another that was ultimately sent to the scrapyard. And after all that, we’ll have a good laugh at a hoax that recently fooled the Jeopardy! writer’s room.

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Celebrate the 35th Anniversary of Tetris With A Look Back at its History

I think it’s fair to say that most video game fans are at least a little familiar with the basic beats behind the creation of Tetris. Alexey Pajitnov, a technician with the USSR’s Computer Centre, programmed the puzzle game in his spare time using only the text display of an Electronika 60. After porting the game to IBM-Compatible PCs with the assistance of his co-workers, Pajitnov’s supervisors would go on to sell the international rights to the game to multiple companies, creating a legal mess that would drag on for years.

In time, Pajitnov would move to the United States and regain the rights to Tetris after partnering with Henk Rogers to form The Tetris Company in 1996. Since then, dozens of developers have put their own stamp on Tetris, including the eye-popping VR effects of Tetris Effect in 2018 and the hyper-competitive multiplayer of Tetris 99 in 2019.

Today is Tetris‘s 35th Anniversary, and if you’re unfamiliar with the story behind the game’s creation (or just want to hear it again), there’s no better time than now to dive back into this fascinating story.

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Tetris Remains the Best Game of All Time in Video Game Canon’s Version 3.0 Update

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.

Once again, Alexey Pajitnov’s puzzle masterpiece, Tetris, stands atop the Video Game Canon.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Video Game Canon, it’s a statistical meta-analysis of 53 Best Video Games of All Time lists that were published between 1995 and 2018. To qualify for inclusion, each list had to include at least 50 games, as well as some form of editorial oversight in the process (lists made up solely of reader polls or fan voting were excluded), and no restrictions on release dates or platforms.

After feeding each Best Games list into the Video Game Canon machine, the games were ranked against each other using the C-Score, a formula that adds together a game’s Average Ranking across all lists with the complementary percentage of its Appearance Frequency. Combining these two factors allows us to create a list of games that have universal appeal across a long period of time without punishing any game for being too old or too new.

Five new lists were added to the Video Game Canon in the Version 3.0 update, bringing the total number of games to be selected by at least one list up to 1,167. The most expansive new list came from Game Informer, which published “The Top 300 Games of All Time” in April of last year. Hyper (“The 200 Games You Must Play“), IGN (“Top 100 Video Games of All Time“), and Slant Magazine (“The 100 Greatest Video Games of All Time“) also published new lists in 2018.

I was also able to reach back into the history books a little bit after stumbling upon a list from 2009 by Benchmark.pl, one of Poland’s largest technology blogs. Aside from a handful of titles (most notably, 2015’s The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt), most of the games created in Eastern Europe or played by Eastern European players aren’t on the radar of your average gamer, so digging through “The Top 100 Best Games of the Twentieth Century” gave me an interesting window into a population of gamers that I probably don’t think about as often as I should.

Even with these new additions to the dataset, Version 3.0 didn’t signal any huge changes to the Video Game Canon over last year’s Version 2.0 update, but the movement amongst the games in the top ten does bring to mind a round of musical chairs. And after the music stopped, nearly all the titles scrambled to find a new place to sit.

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Listology 2.0: What Does the Video Game Canon Look Like Using Only Modern Best Games Lists Published After 2010?

Tetris earned the top spot in the first version of the Video Game Canon, and easily repeated in the Version 2.0 update I put together earlier this year. But what happens if you limited the formula to just Best Games lists that have been published this decade?

Not much, it turns out.

No other game was able to knock Alexy Pajitnov’s puzzle masterpiece off the top of the heap, though Valve’s Half-Life 2 (#2) came very close. The remainder of the Top 10 also looks fairly familiar, with Resident Evil 4 at #3, Super Mario 64 at #4, BioShock at #5, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past at #6, Super Metroid at #7, The Last of Us at #8, World of Warcraft at #9, and Grand Theft Auto V at #10.

However, using only the 27 Best Games lists that were published between 2010 and 2017 does produce a few interesting swings. Some games moved up (like Portal from #19 to #11), while others slid down (Street Fighter II went from #16 to #28).

Other games made bigger leaps, which might lead to some massive changes to the Video Game Canon’s Top 100 in future updates. For example, Nintendo’s EarthBound may have launched to a rocky reception in the mid 90s, but critics in the 2010s are coming around on it as it moved to #62 (it was #119 on the regular Video Game Canon) Likewise, Myst had a strong showing, and landed at #87 versus #137 on the regular ranking.

See where the rest of the 1,041 games from Version 2.0 of the Video Game Canon landed 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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Video Game Canon’s Version 2.0 Update is Now Available

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 Video Game Canon has been upgraded to Version 2.0 thanks to the addition of four new lists that were published throughout the last year. Edge Magazine’s “100 Greatest Videogames” issue, Jeux Video’s “Top 100 Best Games of All Time,” Polygon’s massive “500 Best Games of All Time,” and Stuff UK’s “50 Greatest Games of All Time” have reshuffled the ranking in a big way.

Let’s take a look…

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A Brief History of Video Games – Tetris

The latest VGC Essay looks at how moms helped Tetris become the gaming gargantuan it is today. Here’s a teaser….

In 1989, most mothers believed that video games were a childhood distraction that eventually would be brushed aside as their offspring grew into responsible adults. But something happened along the way that prevented this. Perhaps the Nintendo Entertainment System, the most popular console of its day, was just that much better than previous attempts to bring video games into the living room. But I have a different theory. I believe it was Tetris.

Tetris brought mothers and their children together to play video games for the first time. And then something magical happened. Instead of jerkily moonwalking Mario into a pit or being the most unrad racer on the planet, the mothers were good at Tetris. They were so good that brother and sister soon had to compete with mom for control of the television. And mom wasn’t going to be finished until she made the castle take off into the stratosphere.

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An Introduction to Version 1.0 of the Video Game Canon

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.

Is it possible to rank the greatest video games of all time in a scientific way? Do you just throw the question to so-called experts and let them hash it out in a no-holds-barred debate? Or is there some way to create a Video Game Canon that the wide-ranging community of developers, critics, and players can all agree on?

Probably not. But we can try.

Since gaming’s earliest days, dozens of publications have tried to sort through the noise and compile their own list of The Best Video Games of All Time. By analyzing all of these attempts at ranking the greatest games and combining them into a single list, we can apply a little scientific rigor to the process and possibly create a Best Video Games of All Time list that everyone can agree on.

Before we go any further, let me just say… no matter how we try to justify it, it’s impossible to prove, by science or otherwise, that one game is definitively better than another. My attempt at adding science to the mix is just a way to add some zing to the numerical formula doing all the work behind the scenes.

Ideally, this project will give us the chance to look back at the history of video games reflected through some the medium’s greatest titles. The list itself will serve as something of a road map to help us learn how the best games of all time are connected to each other, to better appreciate how players interacted with video games in the past, and to explore what video games might become in the future.

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