IGN's Top 100 Games of All Time Is Really a History of How Games Evolved

You may never have heard of many of these games: they are pixel-art titles in 48 colors that swept the Famicom last century.

Last week the gaming site IGN published its list of the "Top 100 games of all time." Players started arguing about it on social media the moment it appeared. (The list in English / Chinese translation)

A word as simple as "best" means very different things to different players. Many have argued themselves red in the face over their favorites: Pac-Man fans look down on Mario, and Minecraft devotees think League of Legends isn't worth playing.

The list covers nearly every famous game of the past few decades. There is Street Fighter or Donkey Kong, which hooked you in the arcade as a kid; Galaga, which you could play for hours on a Subor console; StarCraft, which you upgraded your computer to keep playing; and Grand Theft Auto V, which recently swept the world.

Some games you know are missing. Not one game on your phone made the list. Of all the online games, only World of Warcraft got in. And you may never have heard of many of the games at all: they are pixel-art titles in 48 colors that swept the Famicom last century.

What gets a game on the list is a "breakthrough"

What sets this list apart is that it doesn't rank games by how fun they are or how many people play them. IGN judges each game by where it stood in its own time. Many entries founded a whole genre, as Doom did for the 3D first-person shooter; others changed the course of games, as the Mario series did.

"What makes a game great to us? Is it one that broke through what came before and looked ten years ahead of its time, or one that came later and merely improved on established rules?" IGN's editors wrote on the list's front page. They lean toward the former. Keep that in mind and the list makes sense.

Take the No. 1 game, Super Mario Bros. 3. In its day it had already done everything a game of its kind could do: flying, jumping, swimming, with the graphics and the movement as good as they could be. For some time afterward no game of the same type got past the mechanics it set. So although its arrival caused less of a stir than the original Mario's, it still took first place.

Much of this list will come as a surprise

Many of these games are older than you are

A list billed as the "Top 100 of all time" spans several decades.

Many of these games came out before you were born. No. 97, Galaga, is an arcade game first developed by Namco and released in 1979. Pac-Man, Street Fighter and Donkey Kong are all from the 1980s, as is Tetris, which ranks tenth.

One of the youngest games on the list is No. 16, Grand Theft Auto V, released in 2013. With film-quality graphics and enormous freedom, it has sold 54 million copies worldwide.

But the great majority of the games date from the 1980s and 1990s. For influence and creativity, that young era of games could surprise you with anything. Advances in hardware then produced things hard to imagine in a game: how could Pac-Man, once played only in street arcades, suddenly be played on a console at home, and play just as well? How could Final Fantasy VII render 3D characters and CG so realistically, like a film? It laid the foundation for every 3D RPG that followed. Game technology rarely gives people that feeling now, and the next leap will probably have to wait until virtual reality succeeds commercially.

The list does leave out Spacewar!, the ancestor of video games, and Pong, the first commercially successful video game, released in 1962 and 1972 respectively.

Pong, the first game to appear on a home console

Not one of the 100 is a mobile game

Mobile gaming has grown fast in recent years, yet not a single mobile game appears on IGN's list. Perhaps smartphone games, with less than a decade of history, have yet to produce one that could be called epoch-making. Or perhaps mobile games have broken no new ground in genre or technology.

Angry Birds did not invent launching things along an arc, and Candy Crush Saga did not invent match-three. Timing, marketing, art style and other factors made them hugely popular, but they did little for games themselves. By downloads or player numbers, either could easily make the top ten.

Another reason may be the short life of mobile games. Once-huge hits such as Flappy Bird have vanished without a trace. Mobile games turn over so quickly that it is hard for any one of them to reach "breakthrough" status.

Looking back years from now, some mobile games may well make the list

Nintendo has the most entries, and Mario is the classic

Nintendo accounts for nearly one-sixth of the 100 games, 16 in all: 7 Mario games, 4 Zelda games, 2 Metroid games, Pokémon Yellow, Super Smash Bros. and Donkey Kong. Five of the top ten are Nintendo's.

According to the IGN editors' introduction, if the list hadn't excluded compilations, they would also have included Nintendo's Super Mario All-Stars. That shows how much Nintendo matters to the game world, or at least to the North American one.

In the early to mid-1980s, a flood of shoddy games left North America's console market in what can fairly be called "complete collapse." People were ashamed to talk about games.

Then, in 1985, Nintendo arrived with Mario. Games that had been crude arrangements of rectangles, circles and numbers somehow became a colorful plumber on screen who could jump, bump mushrooms out of blocks and stomp on turtles. The novelty made Mario a treasure in North America ever after. Nintendo's later Legend of Zelda series won over action-adventure fans with its vast world, intricately designed dungeons and wide range of items. And Pokémon, released on a handheld, showed players for the first time that an RPG could be about raising and collecting.

To many Western players, Nintendo is still the best game company in the world.

Nintendo is good, but IGN is far too fond of it

The Famicom's importance is hard to overstate

October 18 marked 30 years since Nintendo's console, the Family Computer (FC), launched in North America. Besides rescuing the North American game market, the console began the era of the modern home console. The list reflects this: 14 of the 100 games first came out on the FC or its successor, the SFC (the S stands for Super). Beyond Nintendo's own games, they include Mega Man 2 and Final Fantasy VI, and nearly all of them rank near the top.

The FC is what Chinese players call the "red-and-white machine." In the 1990s, an FC with a keyboard attached was the Subor learning computer we all knew. When, as a child, you happily played the console you had finally nagged your parents into buying, you were playing something that had appeared in Japan and the West a decade earlier and had already faded from the stage.

Playing an already dated-feeling Mario on the Famicom in the 1990s, we had no idea how huge this console had been in Japan, Europe and America ten years before. It was relatively cheap, its graphics were excellent, and it had a rich library of original games and arcade ports, so for the first time players could get a good gaming experience at home instead of in an arcade. It is no exaggeration to say this machine began the real era of home video games.

The Family Computer, renamed the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) when it reached North America

Top 3: Super Mario Bros. 3, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Doom

Coincidence or not, the three top-ranked games represent the three most popular genres: action, role-playing and shooters.

Super Mario Bros. 3 is the culmination of action games on the FC. In it Mario can fly, jump and swim, and even turn into a Jizo statue; players can pick levels and start where they like. Its graphics and colors are far more refined than the first game's. It is arguably the peak of the FC era.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is the high point of the Zelda series. It earned a then-record 39 out of 40 from Famitsu, the most respected game-review magazine of the day. Its complex quests and very open world lifted this blend of action, adventure and RPG to a new level.

Doom's pseudo-3D stunned players used to 2D graphics. It was not the first FPS (first-person shooter), but by breaking out of the side-scroller and giving the screen depth, it became a classic for countless players.

Action RPGs and shooters still dominate Western games today. Action RPGs such as Grand Theft Auto V (No. 16) and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (No. 14) still follow the open-world path, while Halo 2 (No. 9) and Halo: Combat Evolved (No. 22) carry the FPS torch and set the basic framework of the modern shooter.

Pseudo-3D built from 2D graphics.

The only online game: World of Warcraft

The whole list contains just one "online game" in the usual sense, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG): World of Warcraft. At its peak it had more than 10 million monthly paying players. It ranks 35th, ahead of Counter-Strike 1.6 (No. 42) and Pokémon Yellow (No. 52).

Released by Blizzard in 2004, World of Warcraft inherited the grand world of the Warcraft series, became a cultural phenomenon, and set the basic interface and shared vocabulary for every online game that followed. In its day, everything in it, from the systems, dungeons and bosses to the quests and maps, looked unprecedented, and for a long time nothing matched it. It also popularized the "instance," the private dungeon run by a single group, though it was not the first game to use one. You can see echoes of its many dungeon boss fights in recent online games such as Final Fantasy XIV and Guild Wars 2.

Even now, with its player count at an all-time low and its new expansions no longer so appealing, no company making an MMORPG can escape World of Warcraft's influence.

Past its best days, World of Warcraft is still impossible to ignore

For many series, the game on the list is not the latest one

For many games, simply existing was an innovation; their sequels were not necessarily so. IGN's list includes early installments of many series, while the newest, best-known versions are absent. Examples include Call of Duty 4 and Diablo II.

The clearest example is Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness. Chinese players know Warcraft III best, but it was its predecessor that truly established Blizzard Entertainment in the industry. Warcraft II set Blizzard's left-click-to-select, right-click-to-move controls, and it brought fog of war and online multiplayer to real-time strategy for the first time. Warcraft III had better graphics and gameplay, but it influenced games less than its predecessor did.

Call of Duty 4 broke with the FPS tradition of the time, which centered on World War II, and turned to the modern era for the first time, as its full title, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, suggests. It lacked the epic scale of World War II, but its level design could still make you sweat. After it, the whole FPS genre turned to post-war subjects.

The fog-of-war system in Warcraft II

League of Legends and Dota 2 made the list too, though not high

Not everything on the list is unfamiliar, of course. League of Legends and Dota 2, two hugely popular and much-discussed games in China, are both on it: Dota 2 at No. 50 and League of Legends at No. 74.

As one of the most-played games in the world, League of Legends has certainly shaped games. It was the first to take esports, until then a fairly niche kind of gaming, to a mass audience, making possible companies and organizations such as Twitch and YouTube Gaming that profit from game streaming. Its way of making money by selling skins, accessories and other add-ons inside the game also became a model that later games of its type copied.

Dota 2 made the list as the successor to Dota. With its heroes fighting heroes and its character skill designs, Dota essentially created a new genre: the MOBA, or multiplayer online battle arena. If League of Legends is the Emperor Wu of esports, the ruler who brought the Han dynasty to its height, then Dota is perhaps Liu Bang, the founder of the dynasty.

But Dota itself was a custom map for Warcraft III, not a standalone game, so Dota 2, made by the same designer, collected the honor on its behalf. Dota 2's other breakthrough is the staggering 110 million yuan prize pool of its tournament, The International. Beyond the sheer size of the number, it has done a lot of good for the industry, for staging tournaments and for turning esports into a real sport.

Let's hope the ranking doesn't start a flame war