USA Today launched their irreverent sports blog, For The Win, in 2013. But in the last few years, the imprint has branched out to also offer coverage of video games with the editorial assistance of Good Luck Have Fun (GLHF), a media group headquartered in Sweden.
It’s an interesting arrangement, and earlier this month, several of GLHF’s editors got together to produce “The 100 Best Video Games of All Time, Ranked” for For The Win. That means that what we have here is essentially a European-centric list published under the masthead of a US-centric publication.
Yup, very interesting.
Scanning down the list, you can definitely see all the hallmarks of a ranking from listmakers located outside the US. Many of the Best Games lists produced by journalists based in Europe skew heavily towards more recent releases, and the selections found in “The 100 Best Video Games of All Time, Ranked” seems to bear that out. This is especially evident in the Top 40, which features just a single game (Tetris at #19) with a release date before 1997.
Peppered amongst the rest of the Top 20 are a large number of games that were sitting on the new release shelf not all that long ago. There’s The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (#4) and Bloodborne (#10) from 2015, Persona 5 (#11) from 2016, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (#5) from 2017, God of War (#13) and Celeste (#14) from 2018, Disco Elysium (#12) and Resident Evil 2 (#16) from 2019, Hades (#17) from 2020, and It Takes Two (#15) from 2021. But you only need to travel back to February of this year to find the most recent game on the list, From Software’s Elden Ring (#38).
Of course, 1997 is also right in the middle of the PlayStation’s lifespan, and an affinity for Sony’s first console is another sign of a European hand on the wheel. So it’s not too surprising that the PlayStation claimed a few games near the very top of the list, including Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (#2), Metal Gear Solid (#3), and Final Fantasy VII (#18). To further push home the point, all of those PS1-era classics were topped by Team Ico’s Shadow of the Colossus (#1).
The Video Game Canon’s 2022 Update (Version 6.0) is currently locked in and will be published sometime in the next few weeks, so the selections from For The Win’s “The 100 Best Video Games of All Time, Ranked” will be added to the dataset as part of the 2023 Update.