Hyper, Australia’s oldest gaming magazine, has always had a slightly skewed perspective on the industry. Their previous stabs at “Best Games” lists in 1995 and 2013 often focused on titles that no one else was looking at. And the same is true for “The 200 Games You Must Play,” which was published earlier this year.
“The 200 Games You Must Play” is an unranked list, just like Hyper’s previous lists, so you won’t find a consensus pick for the “Best Game of All Time” from the magazine’s editors. Instead, the 203 games on the list (there were a few ties) cut across a huge spectrum of genres and decades, as well as the inclusion of almost three dozen titles that are brand new to the Video Game Canon.
This illustrious list-within-a-list can be further separated into the divisive (Hidetaka “Swery65” Suehiro’s Deadly Premonition and Hello Games’s No Man’s Sky), the obscure (side-scrolling shooter Sine Mora and narrative mystery Virginia), and a few beloved classics that just slipped through the cracks over the years (Dead Rising, Rayman Origins, Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis, Tron 2.0, and We Love Katamari).
Other first-timers in Hyper’s “The 200 Games You Must Play” incude The Ancient Art of War, Body Harvest, Bushido Blade, Buster Bros. (AKA Pang), Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, The Darkness, DoDonPachi, Earth Defense Force 2025, Etrian Odyssey V: Beyond the Myth, Icey, Jagged Alliance 2, The Last Express, Lost Odyssey, Mashed, Meteos, Myth II: Soulblighter, Nier, Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan, Point Blank 2, Realms of the Haunting, Sins of a Solar Empire, Tokyo Jungle, Yakuza 5, and Zen Bound.
Hyper’s “The 200 Games You Must Play” will be added to the Video Game Canon in a future update.