Tag: Grand Theft Auto

“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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“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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Staff of DualShockers Selected Their “50 Best Video Games of the Decade”

The parade of publications picking the best games of the decade continues to roll on this week as DualShockers got their turn in front of the microphone with “The 50 Best Video Games of the Decade (2010-2019).”

DualShockers focused their list on “games that had significant impact on a cultural, artistic, or development level across both the landscape of video games and larger mainstream culture,” while also trying to encompass the rise of live service games, the return of single-player adventures, and nearly a dozen different platforms.

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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.

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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Bite-Sized Game History: Exploring the US’s Best-Selling Games from the 1990s to Now

Using data from The NPD Group’s vast archive, Mat Piscatella recently shared some historical data on the best-selling video games from the 1990s to today.

Tracking the weekend box office results has become something of a spectator sport for moviegoers of all stripes since the lists were introduced in the early 1980s. Arguing about the financial merits of Star Wars, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Titanic, and Avatar became just as important as discussing each film’s critical reception.

You won’t find this sort of organized ranking of moneymakers in the video game industry, but the closest analogue would have to be the monthly Best-Seller Lists published by The NPD Group. However, the proprietary nature of this report means that the picture will always be incomplete.

Using data from the analyst firm’s vast archive, Mat Piscatella recently tried to pull back the curtain a little bit by sharing the list of best-selling games on several legacy consoles (the Saturn, the original PlayStation, the Nintendo 64, the Game Boy Color, and the Dreamcast) and a nearly defunct handheld (the Vita). He also examined the best-selling games through September 2018 on two modern consoles (the PS4 and Xbox One) and published a list of the top-selling titles for each year from 1995 to 2017.

It’s a very interesting collection of information, and the lists provide our best window yet into what games were considered popular in the United States in the 1990s and into today.

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