Author: VGC | John

John Scalzo has been writing about video games since 2001, and he co-founded Warp Zoned in 2011. Growing out of his interest in game history, the launch of Video Game Canon followed in 2017.

Over 1000 Games Have Been Ranked by Hardcore Gaming 101’s “The Top 47,858 Games of All Time” Podcast

The folks behind Hardcore Gaming 101’s “The Top 47,858 Games of All Time” podcast have been ranking their favorite games for nearly seven years, and while they haven’t reached their goal just yet, they hit a major milestone last month when they added the 1,000th game to their list.

The visually-impressive Vectorman, a side-scroller from Sega that debuted during the waning days of the Genesis, was the subject of the landmark episode, and the podcast’s hosts ranked it at #385 (just ahead of BioShock and just behind Wasteland).

“The Top 47,858 Games of All Time” features a dynamically-ordered list, and each new episode of the podcast adds at least one more game to the overall ranking. Unfortunately, Vectorman hasn’t been able to hold onto its position in the weeks since, and as of today, the game has fallen to #403 (where it’s still just ahead of BioShock and just behind Wasteland). You can visit Hardcore Gaming 101 to see where your favorite game is currently ranked.

Tetris currently holds the #1 spot, and you’ll find some interesting choices in the rest of the Top Ten (including NetHack at #2, Nier: Automata at #4, and Katamari Damacy at #7). There’s also a lot of Mario near the upper reaches of the list (including Super Mario Bros. at #3, Super Mario 64 at #6, and Super Mario Bros. 3 at #9), but things get pretty wild pretty fast (Minesweeper at #76!), and Mirage’s infamous Rise of the Robots sits at the very bottom at #1023.

Congratulations to everyone at “The Top 47,858 Games of All Time” podcast on this accomplishment. Just 46,835 games to go!

Bite-Sized Game History: Celebrating 30 Years of Mortal Kombat with Ed Boon and John Tobias

Ed Boon has nurtured the soul of the Mortal Kombat franchise for more than 30 years now. Development began in 1991 when Boon, alongside co-creator John Tobias, pitched a fighting game starring Jean-Claude Van Damme to their bosses at Midway. That part of the plan quickly fizzled out, but the decisionmakers at the company were still interested in creating an original fighting game to piggyback on the success of Street Fighter II.

A year later, Boon and Tobias (and John Vogel and Dan Forden) were ready to deliver the first cabinets for Mortal Kombat to arcade operators on October 8, 1992. Pre-release reactions to the game, both within Midway and from the public, were trending in the right direction, but the team had no idea just how much of an impact their creation would soon have on the game industry… and the entire world.

To celebrate the fighting franchise’s 30th anniversary, Boon and Tobias have been sharing stories from Mortal Kombat‘s development over the last year on Twitter. Let’s take a look at a few of them.

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The 2022 Update to the Video Game Canon’s Top 1000 is Here

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 2022 Update (Version 6.0) to the Video Game Canon is here… and it’s more or less a maintenance update.

I was able to add a handful of newly-published lists from 2021 (including Games Radar, IGN, and Shacknews), as well as a GamesTM list from 2018, but little changed about my ranking of gaming’s top tier. With these additions, the Video Game Canon is now comprised of 70 Best Video Games of All Time lists that were published between 1995 and 2021.

The Video Game Canon’s scoring system, known as the C-Score, has remained the same for the 2022 Update. This formula ranks each game against the rest of the field by adding together a title’s Average Ranking across all lists with the complementary percentage of its Appearance Frequency.

For a good example, look at Tetris, which yet again landed in the #1 spot on the Video Game Canon. The puzzle game has an Average Ranking of 17.63 across all lists and, because only four publications chose to exclude it over the years, a staggering Appearance Frequency of 94.29%. Plugging those numbers into the formula gives us a C-Score of 23.34, considerably lower than any other game.

But nearly every other title in the Top 10 was shuffled around, though nothing else managed to break into the absolute top tier of the Video Game Canon. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, A Link to the Past, and Super Mario 64 all moved up slightly, while Red Dead Redemption and Ocarina of Time dipped. And after flipping places in 2021, Half-Life 2 and Resident Evil 4 flipped back in 2022. Capcom’s survival horror masterpiece slid back into the #3 slot, while Valve’s shooter sequel reclaimed the #2 ranking…

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Press Run, a New Book Publishing Imprint, Launched by Limited Run Games

“Forever Physical” is the rallying cry of Limited Run Games, and the boutique publisher has done to their best to live up to those words over the last seven years, publishing hundreds of physical games across more than a dozen platforms.

Limited Run also recently invited several prominent game historians to their headquarters to create bonus material for some of their upcoming releases, as well as work on other projects. We got a look at one of those mystery projects last week, when the company announced that they’re expanding their already-pretty-massive operation with the launch of a new book publishing imprint.

Known as Press Run, the imprint will focus on “good reads for gamers” and it’ll be led by Jeremy Parish (the creator of Retronauts and the Video Works series) and Jared Petty (an IGN alum who also hosts the Top 100 Games Podcast).

“Readers searching for meaningful, informed, and entertaining stories by great writers will find a lot to love in Press Run books,” said Press Run Senior Editor and Project Manager Jared Petty. “We’re helping authors share their passion for games with larger audiences… it’s a thrill to get up every day and be a small part of that process.”

“Our long-term goal with Press Run is to create an ever-growing library of great books covering a wide array of topics, across a variety of formats and styles by a diverse lineup of authors,” said Press Run Media Curator Jeremy Parish. “Press Run will exist to keep great books in circulation for as long as people want to have them.”

Parish had even more to say about this mission in a lengthy blog post published on LimitedRunGames.com.

The first batch of titles from Press Run will include…

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Bite-Sized Game History: The Godfather II’s Brass Knuckles, The Lurking Horror’s Centipede, and StarTropics’s Letter

Game publishers seem to love a little friendly (and not so friendly) competition with each other, and we’re now about 20 years out from a rather silly arms race over which one could produce the most elaborate special edition package.

It wasn’t the first fancier bundle for collectors, but the bonus disc included with Halo 2‘s Limited Collector’s Edition (which was housed in a “luxurious” tin) was one of the first I remember from that era. The practice quickly escalated from those humble beginnings, and prospective players were soon being wooed with promises of night vision goggles (Call of Duty: Modern Warfare), drones (Call of Duty: Black Ops II), a Batarang (Batman: Arkham Asylum), so many wearable helmets (Doom Eternal and Mass Effect, to name just two), and even a statue of a bloodied and bikini-clad torso (Dead Island: Riptide).

This retail trend has mostly run its course these days, but not before Volition tried to sell Saints Row fans on a one-of-a-kind “Million Dollar Pack” for Saints Row IV. The ridiculously over-the-top bundle included multiple cars and trips, as well as admission to a spy training school, and a voucher for plastic surgery. While obviously a parody of all the weird and wild special editions mentioned in the previous paragraph, I’m sure Volition would have tried to mass-produce the “Million Dollar Pack” if anyone had offered to buy it.

Publishers definitely went a little overboard chasing this fad, but it was more or less an extension of the old “Big Box” releases that would often include a world map or a small trinket with a highly-anticipated game. Let’s look at three of those bundles in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History…

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Masters of Doom’s David Kushner is Back With “Easy to Learn, Difficult to Master: Pong, Atari, and the Dawn of the Video Game”

After battling imps and cacodemons on the surface of Mars and confronting gangsters on the streets of Liberty City, David Kushner is ready for his greatest challenge… two paddles and a small dot that represents the ball.

That’s right, the latest book from the author of Masters of Doom and Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto is all about Pong.

Unlike those earlier stories, Easy to Learn, Difficult to Master: Pong, Atari, and the Dawn of the Video Game is presented as a graphic history as it details the epic feud that flared up between Ralph Baer, the creator of the Magnavox Odyssey and the “Father of the Video Game,” and Nolan Bushnell, the co-founder of Atari:

A deep, nostalgic dive into the advent of gaming, Easy to Learn, Difficult to Master returns us to the emerging culture of Silicon Valley. At the center of this graphic history, dynamically drawn in colors inspired by old computer screens, is the epic feud that raged between Atari founder Nolan Bushnell and inventor Ralph Baer for the title of “Father of the Video Game.”

While Baer, a Jewish immigrant whose family fled Germany for America, developed the first TV video-game console and ping-pong game in the 1960s, Bushnell, a self-taught whiz kid from Utah, put out Atari’s pioneering table-tennis arcade game, Pong, in 1972. Thus, a prolonged battle began over who truly spearheaded the multibillion-dollar gaming industry, and around it a sweeping narrative about invention, inspiration, and the seeds of digital revolution.

Easy to Learn, Difficult to Master: Pong, Atari, and the Dawn of the Video Game was illustrated by Kushner’s constant collaborator, Koren Shadmi, and the graphic history was published by Bold Type Books. It’s now available in stores as a paperback or an ebook.

USA Today’s For The Win Ranks “The 100 Best Video Games of All Time”

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.

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Bite-Sized Game History: Religion in The Legend of Zelda, Nintendo Power’s Game Boy Design Contest, and Super Punch-Out’s Secret 2-Player Mode

Even though Sega launched the Genesis in 1989 (a year after the console debuted in Japan as the Mega Drive), Nintendo spent the early part of the 1990s without a true rival in the “Console Wars.” Their dominance of the living room was so complete, most people just referred to any video game as “a Nintendo.”

This lack of competition (and its sudden appearance after the release of Sonic the Hedgehog) informed almost every move Nintendo made throughout the decade, including the three items in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History.

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Bite-Sized Game History: The Strange Saga of Doom 3DO’s Scrapped FMV Scenes

Thanks to its flexible system requirements, id Software’s Doom has become a popular piece of software to use to test the processing power of some rather unorthodox devices. A group of dedicated modders have managed to install the classic shooter on a wide range of hardware over the years, including an ATM, a home pregnancy test, a piano, and a whole lot more. But before all that, not every console platform could contain the awesome power contained within the game’s Martian corridors.

Believe it or not, one consolemaker even tried to inject a little live-action into the franchise long before The Rock starred in 2006’s Doom…

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Video Game or Videogame? An Answer to the Most Important Question of Our Time

Don’t think of this as a spelling test, but do you like to play video games? Or do you like to play videogames?

I pondered this question in a piece for Warp Zoned back in 2012, and a lightly edited version of that article has been reprinted here.

Walk over to your media shelf and pick up a copy of Wii Sports or Halo 3 or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Odds are at least one of these titles will be in your collection. What do you call the item in your hand? Some people consider these items part of the “interactive entertainment” medium, but most of us just call them something else.

Though they’ve existed for over forty years, no one has ever definitively answered the question… are they video games or videogames?

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