Tag: Fortnite

“The Resties Required Reading List” Includes the 25 Games You Need to Play to Understand the History of Games

Justin McElroy, Griffin McElroy, Chris Plante, and Russ Frushtick host The Besties, a podcast where they talk about “the best game of the week” every week.

The Besties is part of the sprawling McElroy media empire, but episodes produced solely by the non-McElroy members of the show appear as a spinoff show known as The Resties, and for the last 18 months they’ve been sporadically adding games to “The Resties Required Reading List“.

Not a Best Games list, the “Required Reading List” is a collection of titles that serve as the best introduction to the wider world of video games. Plante likes to refer to it as “a syllabus for Video Games 101” and further described the project like this…

Our goal is to curate and contextualize a “must play” list of 25 games released between 1980 to 2020. These aren’t the best games or even our favorite games. They’re the games that should be experienced by everyone who wants a fundamental appreciation of the medium. They’re the games that will give you a richer connection with every other game you play.

Plante and Frushtick split the “Required Reading List” into eight episodes, each covering a five-year span that lands somewhere between 1980 and 2020. Within these smaller chunks of time they picked two-to-four games that best represent the era and a specific corner of gaming they wanted to highlight. In the end, 28 games made it through these mini-debates before the hosts cut three titles to reach their 25-game goal. Counter-Strike (from the 2000-2004 episode), along with Hearthstone and Spelunky HD (both from the 2010-2014 episode) ultimately ended up on the chopping block.

So which games did make the grade? You’ll find all the foundational classics from the 1980s (Pac-Man, Tetris, Super Mario Bros., and The Legend of Zelda), as well as the modern games that are currently moving the needle (Fortnite, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Outer Wilds). In between there’s Doom (1993), Pokemon Red/Blue, Resident Evil 4 (2005), Minecraft, and more than a dozen others.

Wanting to argue with a Best Games list is the most natural reaction in the world, but it’s hard to quibble with any of the choices on “The Resties Required Reading List” as the games you need to play to best understand the history of games. Or, to steal a phrase from one of The Resties, the “Required Reading List” is a way of “thinking about the countless ways games inform our lives, our culture, and future creators”.

You can see all 25 games from “The Resties Required Reading List” after the break.

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Bite-Sized Game History: Prince Travels The Oregon Trail, Six Degrees of Ryu, and the Secret Origin of Mortal Kombat’s Secret Characters

Demographers love to refer to people born between 1977 and 1985 as the “Oregon Trail Generation.” Born on the borderline between Generation X and Millennials, members of the Oregon Trail Generation grew up using analog technology like rotary phones and rabbit ears, but they also became proficient in using computers and the Internet (often thanks to The Oregon Trail) while still in school.

However, an even earlier generation got a chance to play The Oregon Trail before it was immortalized in the glowing greens of an Apple IIe. So let’s travel back to 1971 and meet one of the game’s first players in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History.

And stick around to explore the connection shared between Ryu and Kevin Bacon, as well as the secret origin of Noob Saibot.

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The Washington Post Picks Ten Titles as “The Most Influential Games of the Decade”

The calendar is nearing the end of January, but here I am sifting through yet another “Best Games of the Decade” list. This time around, the Launcher team at The Washington Post gets their time in the sun, as they chose ten games to stand tall as “The Most Influential Games of the Decade“:

Gaming is now humanity’s favorite form of entertainment, and the medium’s legacy was cemented this past decade. While the early 2000s saw video games honing their ability to tell stories and build worlds in 3-D, this last decade built off those nuts and bolts of game making and propelled the medium toward bigger ambitions like open-world design, virtual and augmented reality and an influx of new genres such as battle-royale multiplayer.

The chronological list begins with 2010’s Amnesia: The Dark Descent, continues through the middle of the decade with 2014’s Destiny, and ends with 2017’s Fortnite. In between, you’ll find a few other familiar titles, as well as a more unusual choice in King’s Candy Crush Saga:

The Washington Post’s Launcher – The Most Influential Games of the Decade

  • Amnesia: The Dark Descent
  • Candy Crush Saga
  • Dark Souls
  • Destiny
  • The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
  • Fortnite
  • Minecraft
  • Pokemon Go
  • The Walking Dead
  • The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Apologies to all the games from 2018 and 2019 that didn’t make the cut for The Washington Post’s list.

Wired Goes Their Own Way With “The Decade’s 10 Most Influential Videogames”

“The United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language.”

Whether you attribute this quote to George Bernard Shaw or Oscar Wilde, it turned out to be fairly accurate when comparing “The Best Games of the Decade” lists created by Wired and Wired UK. The publications could only agree on three games… Mojang’s Minecraft, From Software’s Dark Souls, and Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Instead, Wired’s “The Decade’s 10 Most Influential Videogames” hit upon some rather obscure indies in the bottom half of their Top Ten (including Thirty Flights of Loving, Pathologic 2, and Cibele), before locking on to some more mainstream titles (including the aforementioned trio) in the Top Five:

Wired – The Decade’s 10 Most Influential Videogames

  • 1. Fortnite
  • 2. Minecraft
  • 3. Dark Souls
  • 4. Gone Home
  • 5. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
  • 6. PT
  • 7. Nier
  • 8. Cibele
  • 9. Pathologic 2
  • 10. Thirty Flights of Loving

In between, the outlet delivered a nice little note about Hideo Kojima’s PT, the legendary Silent Hills demo that never got the chance to become a full game, as well as Fulbright’s Gone Home, and Square Enix’s Nier.

But it was Epic’s Fortnite that landed at #1 on Wired’s list, with Julie Muncy praising the battle royale as “one of the only games of the decade to truly infiltrate broader pop culture.”

“The 10 Best Video Games of the 2010s” Have Been Selected by Time Magazine

The editors at Time Magazine have produced several “Best Games of All Time” lists, and with New Year’s Eve fast approaching, they’ve once again turned their gaze backwards. This time, they’ve selected “The 10 Best Video Games of the 2010s,” though like most outlets, they make an exception for two very huge games from 2009:

The video game industry was already a billion dollar behemoth when it rolled into the 2010s. Over the past decade, the cultural cache of video games has grown and its profits are now greater than movies, television or music. The 2010s are when the hobby stopped being something semi-niche, and solidly took its place in the mainstream.

Those games, of course, are Mojang’s Minecraft and Riot’s League of Legends. Describing them as a “global phenomenon” and a “cultural institution,” respectively, Time’s editors argue that the rules should be bent for them as the two games were so important to what gaming became in the 2010s.

Time Magazine – The 10 Best Video Games of the 2010s

  • Dark Souls
  • Disco Elysium
  • The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
  • Fortnite
  • Grand Theft Auto V / Grand Theft Auto Online
  • League of Legends
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
  • Minecraft
  • Pokemon Go
  • Portal 2

The remaining eight selections went to Dark Souls, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and Portal 2 from 2011, Grand Theft Auto V from 2013, Pokemon Go from 2016, Fortnite and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild from 2017, and Disco Elysium from last year.

Destructoid is Talking About “The Games that Defined the Decade” This Week

Destructoid’s staff combined forces this week to deliver “The Games that Defined the Decade,” a series of essays that looked back at some of the highlights of the last ten years.

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Edge Honors the “Games of the Decade” in Their Christmas 2019 Issue

The venerable and prestigious Edge Magazine is jumping on the “Games of the Decade” discussion with their Christmas 2019 issue (“E339”), selecting a dozen different games that shaped the “ten industry-changing years” of the 2010s.

As seen on Twitter, each selection has been given its own variant cover, and collectors will even be able to purchase all the variants in a special boxset.

Edge – Games of the Decade

  • Amnesia: The Dark Descent
  • Broken Age
  • Dark Souls
  • Destiny
  • Dota 2
  • Fortnite
  • Gone Home
  • Grand Theft Auto V / Grand Theft Auto Online
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
  • Minecraft
  • Spelunky
  • The Walking Dead

Like many of their peers, the editors at Edge selected Derek Yu’s Spelunky, Mojang’s Minecraft, and Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild as three of the decade’s best. The outlet also chose to highlight Telltale’s The Walking Dead, Double Fine’s Broken Age, Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto V, Frictional’s Amnesia: The Dark Descent, From Software’s Dark Souls, Bungie’s Destiny, Fulbright’s Gone Home, Epic’s Fortnite, and Valve’s Dota 2.

Edge’s “Games of the Decade” boxset and single issues are on sale now.