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.

IGN Updates Their “Top 100 Video Games of All Time” List for 2019

It’s been roughly 18 months since IGN last revised its “Top 100 Video Games of All Time” list, but the popular publication has just issued a new update that welcomes a huge number of new games into the club.

That said, it might feel a little familiar at the top, as Super Mario World is once again ranked at #1, which is a holdover from their 2018 list. Thankfully, a closer examination of the rest of the list was produced by IGN themselves in the companion article, “Why We Made the Changes We Made.”

There we discover that Capcom’s remake of Resident Evil 2 (#81) from earlier this year is the most recent game to be added to the list. It was joined by 14 other new additions, including Sony Santa Monica’s 2018 reboot of God of War (#29), Left 4 Dead 2 (#45), Rise of the Tomb Raider (#55), Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (#61), Red Dead Redemption 2 (#62), Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (#68), Fable II (#76), Fortnite (#77), Monster Hunter: World (#82), Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 (#83), Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (#95), Dishonored (#97), Divinity: Original Sin II (#98), and Borderlands 2 (#99).

This newfound variety was possible thanks to the removal of multiple games from the Mario and Zelda franchises, though several other games were also removed from last year’s Top 100 to make room. Among the games getting the boot were Team Fortress 2, Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, Fallout 3, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, Galaga, Grim Fandango, Banjo Kazooie, and The Oregon Trail.

IGN’s 2019 update to their “Top 100 Video Games of All Time” list will be added to the Video Game Canon in Version 4.0.

More Than 2,500 Playable MS-DOS Games Added to the Internet Archive

The Internet Archive has made it their mission to safeguard as much of the Internet as they can, but the group is also heavily involved in preserving classic video games and making them playable for a new generation of players through in-browser emulation.

Earlier this week, they massively expanded the number of retro video games available in their collection thanks to the addition of more than 2,500 MS-DOS games from the 1980s and 1990s.

It wasn’t easy getting all of those titles to work in a browser, and Curator Jason Scott had a bit to say about the process on the Internet Archive Blog:

The update of these MS-DOS games comes from a project called eXoDOS, which has expanded over the years in the realm of collecting DOS games for easy playability on modern systems to tracking down and capturing, as best as can be done, the full context of DOS games – from the earliest simple games in the first couple years of the IBM PC to recently created independent productions that still work in the MS-DOS environment.

What makes the collection more than just a pile of old, now-playable games, is how it has to take head-on the problems of software preservation and history. Having an old executable and a scanned copy of the manual represents only the first few steps. DOS has remained consistent in some ways over the last (nearly) 40 years, but a lot has changed under the hood and programs were sometimes only written to work on very specific hardware and a very specific setup. They were released, sold some amount of copies, and then disappeared off the shelves, if not everyone’s memories.

It is all these extra steps, under the hood, of acquisition and configuration, that represents the hardest work by the eXoDOS project, and I recognize that long-time and Herculean effort. As a result, the eXoDOS project has over 7,000 titles they’ve made work dependably and consistently.

Even with 2,500 new additions, you’re not going to find every MS-DOS game ever released in the Internet Archive’s collection. But you will find a wide variety of games from the Video Game Canon, including id Software’s The Ultimate Doom (#23), LucasArts’s The Secret of Monkey Island (#86), Psygnosis’s Wipeout (#192), EA’s original The Need For Speed (#587), and many more.

Mashable Selects Their “15 Favorite Games of the Decade”

Yet another publication has thrown their hat in the ring with a look back at the best games of the decade. This time around, it’s Mashable, and the site’s Entertainment editors have sifted through the past decade of new games and selected “Our 15 Favorite Games of the Decade.”

While the listmakers accepted their charge, they also quickly realized that choosing “the best” in a decade that contains games as varied as Pokemon Go, Papers Please, and Fortnite (among others) was too daunting of a challenge:

It’s nearly impossible to choose the best games of this decade because so many provided us with amazing and unique experiences. There are too many factors to consider when thinking about what makes certain games “the best.” Is it story? Gameplay? Innovation? Cultural impact? So instead of debating endlessly about what makes some games better than all the rest, we chose our favorites.

Mashable – Our 15 Favorite Games of the Decade

  • Batman: Arkham Knight
  • Celeste
  • Destiny
  • The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
  • Firewatch
  • God of War (2018)
  • Gone Home
  • Journey
  • Just Cause 2
  • The Last of Us
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
  • Minecraft
  • Red Dead Redemption
  • Resident Evil 7: Biohazard
  • Stardew Valley

In the end, Mashable’s list featured 15 unranked selections: Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham Knight, Matt Makes Games’s Celeste, Bungie’s Destiny, Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Campo Santo’s Firewatch, Sony Santa Monica’s God of War (2018), Fulbright’s Gone Home, thatgamecompany’s Journey, Avalanche’s Just Cause 2, Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us, Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Mojang’s Minecraft, Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption, Capcom’s Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, and ConcernedApe’s Stardew Valley.

Paste’s Editors Glue Together a Ranking of “The 100 Best Videogames of the 2010s”

We’re still waiting to see how a few of this Fall’s biggest new releases turn out, including Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding, Respawn’s Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, and Game Freak’s Pokemon Sword/Shield. But the editors of Paste Magazine’s Games section, Garrett Martin and Holly Green, have poured over the digital publication’s last ten years of coverage to compile “The 100 Best Videogames of the 2010s.”

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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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“Game Masters: The Exhibition” Opens at National Film and Sound Archive of Australia

Earlier today, the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia in Canberra officially opened the doors to Game Masters: The Exhibition, a new exhibit that chronicles “an interactive journey through five decades of video game history.” Museumgoers who visit the Game Masters exhibit will be able to view “interviews, never-before-seen concept artwork, [and] an amazing display of vintage consoles and collectable items,” as well as an arcade installation with dozens of games.

Game Masters is an interactive journey through five decades of video game history, offering both a behind-the-scenes look at the creative process behind the world’s most popular characters and franchises, and a chance to play them. Featuring interviews, never-before-seen concept artwork, an amazing display of vintage consoles and collectable items, and 80 playable games, visitors won’t want to leave!

[…]

Game Masters is divided into three sections: Arcade Heroes, Game Changers and Indies. It features unique experiences such as a spectacular multiplayer dance stage for Dance Central 3 (2012), hands-on experiential music booths and a selection of original classic arcade machines from the 1970s and ‘80s acquired especially for the exhibition, all playable in their original form.

The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia will also use this opportunity to begin archiving important games developed within Australia. The first eight games selected by the program include a nice variety of titles released over the last 37 years:

Initial List of Games Selected for Preservation by the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia

  • The Hobbit (Beam Software, 1982)
  • Halloween Harry (Interactive Binary Illusions / Sub Zero Software, 1985/1993)
  • Shadowrun (Beam Software, 1993)
  • L.A. Noire (Team Bondi, 2011)
  • Submerged (Uppercut Games, 2015)
  • Hollow Knight (Team Cherry, 2017)
  • Florence (Mountains, 2018)
  • Espire 1: VR Operative (Digital Lode, 2019)

More games will be added to the archive on an ongoing basis, and Game Masters: The Exhibition will remain open to the public through March 9, 2020.

Former IGN Editor Jared Petty Launches “The Top 100 Games Podcast”

As a former video producer for IGN and Kinda Funny, Jared Petty has been around video games for a long time. In addition to his editorial work, he’s also dabbled on the development side as a social content editor at Electronic Arts.

But Petty is also an avid podcaster, and now he’s breaking into “Best Games” analysis with a new series. The Top 100 Games Podcast launched earlier this week with episodes devoted to Resident Evil 2 Remake (#100), Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (#99), and The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask (#98). But please take those numbers with a grain of salt. Petty stressed that The Top 100 Games Podcast would probably end up being a “horrible list” as the topic of each episode will be chosen by a wide-raning series of guests. Sound like fun though:

Counting down the top 100 video games of all time! Host Jared Petty and a series of guests travel through the history of classic gaming and take a close look at the most important contributions to electronic entertainment over the last 50+ years.

More episodes of The Top 100 Games Podcast will be produced in the coming days and weeks, and you can subscribe to it on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and other podcast services.

Bite-Sized Game History: The History of Speed Boosts, Street Fighter ’89, and a Hyundai-Branded NES

Bite-Sized Game History has reached way back to talk about a lot of video game firsts, and I’ve got a few more today.

So let’s get right to it and dig into the history of speed boosts, the working title for Final Fight, and Nintendo’s initial collaboration with Hyundai.

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ETC Press Will Publish Kyle Orland’s “The Game Beat: Observations and Lessons from Two Decades Writing About Games”

Kyle Orland is a veteran game journalist who has also been writing about what it means to be a good game journalist for over 20 years. He recently collected many of those columns in The Game Beat: Observations and Lessons from Two Decades Writing About Games, and it’s now being published in hardcover and paperback from Carnegie Mellon’s ETC Press.

The collection offers an extremely interesting and insightful look back at how game journalism has changed in the last two decades:

Game journalism is young enough that we’re still trying to collectively agree on the answers to some pretty fundamental questions. What makes a good review? Should we be evaluating games as consumer products or works of art? What role should scores or grades play in the review process? How should we deal with Metacritic’s outsized influence?

How close should game journalists be with the publishers and developers they cover? How can journalists get around the information control of the PR machine? How should outlets handle gifts and publisher-sponsored junkets? How are we supposed to make any money off any of this in the age of the Internet?

The Game Beat catalogs years of my own scattered attempts to answer those questions, and many more that continue to vex the field, through dozens of blog posts, columns, newsletters, and interviews focused on the art and craft of writing about games. In the process, this book also serves as a sort of public diary of my own education in and advancement through the world of professional game journalism, from eager outsider blogger to hustling freelancer to entrenched staff writer.

A PDF version of The Game Beat is also available to download for free.