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Gamespy.com's "Top 50 Games of All Time"
Alex Bischoff writes "In this article, Gamespy.com rates the "Top 50 Games of All Time" (both console and computer games), including commentary from developers at 3DRealms, id Software, Monolith Productions and others. Needless to say, Daikatana is not on the list ;)."
What? Maniac Mansion didn't make it onto the list! That game was great. Pick your characters and depending which characters you pick, you solve the game differently (they all have special talents). I think the only combination that didn't work was picking the two people that could repair the phones, because the phone repairing required another talent. Alot of the game was thinking, but some of it was how fast you could react (such as going into the kitchen and running from Edna to not get caught and then just walk through the kitchen).
If only they'd come out with Maniac Mansion 3.
Well, as I'd have to think for quite a while before agreeing to put it at anything other than number 1 this is quite clearly a matter of opinion. Don't forget that this was voted for by a whole bunch of people rather than an arbitrary list, so someone must agree with me that its really good. SMB3 was great, but to this day people try to release third-person 3d platform games, and to this day there hasn't been an equal to its perfect control and camera. Just go grab a Tomb Raider or Sonic Adventure game and laugh at how hard the rest of the world finds making something so intuitive.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
No, it sucks. It also requires a special controller, something called a CowboyNeal. Instead of having a trigger or buttons, it has something called a slashdot effect.
I got past the final level by mashing the refresh button repeatedly. Damn, I hate simple button mashers.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
I wouldn't say teenagers, but instead game developers who are now obsessed with style rather than popularity.
A lot of the games that made the list made it because it was the style the developers liked (DOOM's #1 for one reason -- it was the anchor for game developing all the way into the 3D market today). But I would rate the greatest games as those that were the most popular, not the ones with the most fantastic storyline or the most fantastic graphics.
Deus Ex? Theif? Why are those there? Only because of the games style, not popularity. That's what I don't like about this list. The top 50 (at least the top 10) should have been about the games' popularity among players.
DOOM should have been in the top 10, but not necessairly #1. I'm glad they put Civilization at #3, because that game deserves it. But there were two games that I thought belonged there, because of their popularity rather than style:
1) Super Mario 3. It was the rave at the school, on the block, and even in the movie The Wizzard. Why the hell didn't it make it into the top 50? It should have been in at least the top 10.
2) Pac Man. Someone was smoking something sweet to keep this absolute classic from the list. The fact of the matter is that you can still find this arcade game in some arcades standing next to these dollar-crunching graphic-munching games, and people still play it.
Other notes: I'm glad to see they at least included Tetris, because it's right up there with PacMan in terms of still-played-classics. I was also disappointed not to find a single sports game up there on the list...they're just as big and popular a genre as RPG, Action, or Adventure.
Now, I'll agree that they are probably the biggest selling genre, but what about the games that predated them:
- Nethack / Moira / Etc - Where would the fps/rpg game be without these?
- Infocom games - Same as the last
- Just about any early Sierra game - There haven't been many games that have done as
much groundbreaking as say, the King's Quest
games
Other types of games:
- Microsoft flight simulator
- Lemmings
- Incrdible Machine
- Pong
I think there list should have been alot different
Agreed. The first few first-person shooters were impressive but since "Quake" there have been only a few that actually progressed the genre. I refuse to believe that there were that many genuinly good FPS games in the past few years.
One glaring omission (unless I missed it somewhere) was the lack of a single Sierra *Quest game. Sure King's Quest got pretty silly when it became all point-and-click but King's Quest I was a great game for it's time, King's Quest III was really well done, and the Space Quest series was really clever. At least one of these deserves to be on the top 50 games of all time. It's good to see they remembered Star Control II though. ;)
- j
For those of you who don't visit videogame sites with any regularity, you should probably know that these sites do an "Top $num Games" feature damn near every other week. So don't take this one to be the ultimate judgement of anything, if you think something is missing, it's probably because the few people who came up with it (surprise, surprise) have different tastes than you do.
They did list Zork, but in my opinion they were missing Colossal Cave Adventure & Nethack.
That list seems to be made by teenagers who never saw 80's games. There's no doubt that a person who has played games from the beginning of the 80's till today would've made entirelly different list.
I have to say that I'm more than amused of the choices that made to the list.
It's needless to argue about opinions, but some of those choices were like comparing the LOTR to a comic book.
The only game listed in that article is one I've never heard of. Has anyone played "Not enough storage is available to process this command.", and is it any good?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
I can't find Who Wants To Be A Millionaire or Deer Hunter at all on there. Goddamn elitists.
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
- Here's my take on what's missing:
- Dungeon Master. Very cool, very addictive, very Amiga. I think they eventually made a PC version.
- Myst/Riven. I may have missed them in the list, but I swear they weren't there. HUGE oversight. Even if you hate things without gunfire and splattering guts, Myst was an incredible paradigm break, spawned a few clones, sold a bazillion copies, and, most importantly it introduced a lot of non-gamers to gaming!
- Moria, Hack, NetHack. Or even Larn or Omega. Anything from rec.games.roguelike. I still like pulling up Moria on Linux because the gameplay kicks butt, even with VT100 graphics.
- Spaceward Ho! I still think that Ho! was the first real game that was able to adapt PBM-style gaming into multiplayer, turn-based network games. Heck, we had a Ho!-down for my bachelor party.
That's enough for now. Who could play all those FPS's without going crazy? I mean, yeah, I've played a few and enjoyed it, but the list was CLEARLY biased in that direction.Did anybody ever play Jumpman from Epyx on the Commodore 64? I loved that game. Spent many hours playing it back in high school.
More recently, I was sad that Myth II didn't make it to the top-50 list.
-Rob
Ok, maybe it's just that I hate GSI, it's questionable business ethics, it's crappy content, and it's lame humor, but why is this news? Front page news even? I could spend the next 5 years making a list of all the 5,000 gaming networks and the 20,000 lists they've made that rate games in every possible way by all categories imaginable. But it only takes one sentence to describe every single list: Useless content-filler written by people that have to pander to the company responsible for every eligible game, or risk being refused 'exclusive content' in the future. I'd be curious to know how many of the 50 asses that were kissed in this list are presently in no position to reciprocate.
I couldn't watch my dad or sister play Myst for more than 5 minutes without going, 'god, get that off my computer now before it makes my other -real- games suck.' Not quite as bad as 'Alone in the Dark', but really, really, really close.
The REAL sam_at_caveman_dot_org is user ID 13833.
Please, what kind of "top 50" list is this? they mentioned freaking DukeNukem and Quake -- blatent take offs of Doom -- but left out the best vehicular shooter game of all time, Descent? Descent is hands down a much more revolutionary and realistic game than its land-bound counterparts Doom, Quake, and DukeNukem. Why do I say that? Well, first of all Descent took the first person shooter genre and turned it upside down on its head -- literally. Secondly, Descent's graphics were revolutionary for the time: it was really the only game at the time that really looked 3D. Not to mention, the AI in Descent I(and the rest of the series) is arguably superior to any AI in any other 1st person shooter games. Most impressive, though, is the very realistic perception of physics in the Descent series: when you bump into something, it FEELS like you've bumped into it. Unlike in Duke Nukem or Doom or Quake, where when you bump into something, the legs of the character keep on moving, and it feels like you've just hita squishy force-field or something.
And also, where is Tomb Raider? Tomb Raider was also a revolutionary game, though buggy. It really pulled you in, because you felt like you were actually on some archeological dig.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Let me give props to my faves -
Give me Paradroid 90 on the Amiga. Give me Uridium on the C-64. Give me Attack of the Mutant Camels on the C-64. Give me the NES and Turbo Grafx 16 ports of Galaga. Gate of Thunder and Lords of Thunder on the Turbo Grafx CD are so beautifully perfect they'll bring tears to your eyes, and Super Star Soldier on the Turbo Grafx quite possibly has the most perfectly tweaked play of any shooter ever.
I loved Tempest 2000 on the Saturn (I'm biased - I wrote half of that and most of Tempext/X3 on PSX.) A&E was sweet and very replayable on the Apple ][, but not half as replayable as Lode Runner on the same. Jump Man was great on every platform, and cloyingly cute as it is, Flicky may have been the best Genesis game.
I can't load the pages up, but I'm willing to bet they never included Rocket Jockey.
;)
J ockey , tho it's not quite the same without the soundtrack. :)
This game is just amazing... it's one of the few where it's actually fun to try for a high score after you've finished it.
More people need to play this. ('Cause I *need* a sequal...
Check it out: http://www.theunderdogs.org/game.php?name=Rocket+
Wiwi
"I trust in my abilities,
but I want more then they offer"
While any Top N games of all time list is going to be biased and controversial, it just makes my jaw drop that pretty much no real adventure games were mentioned. Have these guys ever played a Sierra or LucasArts game? You mention modern 3D CPU hog garbage like Asheron's Call, Ultima Online and Deus Ex and you don't mention masterpieces like Maniac Mansion 2, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Quest for Glory, Space Quest, King's Quest, LSL, Rise of the Dragon or Monkey Island?
This list is completely devoid of heart and soul. There were some good picks, like Wing Commander, Starcraft, X-COM and Doom, but generally it appears they have no fucking clue what they're talking about.
Leave it to a bunch of FPS nerds to fumble this.
Go play SpaceWar or Pong, and then go play a game like Age of Empires or Civilization. Chances are you'll have a LOT more fun playing the latter.
I think the point of the original poster was a game's popularity during it's time. Comparing two different era games side-by-side is not conclusive at all in terms of popularity. Whether or not the list endeavors to measure popularity or just "quality" is not clear though...
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
With any top 50 list, someone's going to complain that games weren't included or were overrated. I think this one's pretty bad, though.
A breakdown by game type:
Statistics by year:
Just from those numbers, we'd expect the highest-rated games to be first-person shooters based in the mid-nineties (Doom, Quake), and the lowest-rated games to be sports games based in the late eighties (Earl Weaver Baseball).
I'd also like to point out there is a big difference between the greatest games of all time, and the most influential games of all time. A list of the influential games will likely have the games you're listing.
Enjoyment of video games is a completely subjective expereince. Different people put together different lists. You can either have a list from the perspective of one type of gamer that everyone else will disagree with, or you can poll a lot of different people and come up with a list EVERYONE will disagree with. Whats the point?
Why not just get some friends together and say "these are the games we liked in alphebetical order and why we liked them"? Its a subjective list, why drape it in a poor imitation of objectivity through numerical ranking?
Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
A *little* bias? Gimmie a break - these guys have the same tastes that I do (RPG and RTS), but there is a serious bias evident even to me. Plus a bias in terms of era of game play. You can see when the reviewers got into games, and what shaped their opinions.
Incidently, it doesn't include arcade games or early pre-PC games. Besides the easy Pac-Man Defender and Dig Dug, I'd have to toss a few into the hat like the friggin' incredible Below the Root (Beneath the Root?), Rescue Rangers (that was the choplifter where you built an army, right?), Apple Panic (okay, I'm starting to date myself), Epoch (damn, that was an addictive game), MULE (Ok, I didn't like it, but it was a classic), and Jumpman (no, not Jumpman VGA, the original C64 version).
Of course, they might have reasons (like a cut off date or something), but since I can't read the article...
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
I saw a little bias towards first-person shooters here. Personally, I am willing to admit that one first-person shooter should have been on the list, but that many on the top 10?
:) !
Also, not a single sports game on the list? I think any tennis game (or its simple predecessor PONG) should have been given a nod.
And ZELDA is the best game ever
w o r l d w i d e w e b e r
... to name but a few.
Where are they?
That list looked more to me like the best games in the last 10 years, not of all time.
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
How can you name fifty games no less without mentioning some of the originals that invented the form? This list reads like a list of the "50 greatest songs of all time" all of which were recorded since 1960.
Despite a couple of nods toward the C64 and Apple ][, this list is hopelessly 90's-oriented. "All-time" indeed! Where are...
- SPACEWAR, the first video game EVER
- PONG, PONG, PONG, and PONG variants like BREAKOUT, the first home video games EVER
- TANK WAR for the 2600, still holds its own with any modern game for quick 2-person play
- BATTLEZONE, first first-person 3d game EVER
- SPACE INVADERS, ASTEROIDS, each owned the world for a couple of years
Meanwhile I've never even heard of some of the games they nominated. Then again, I'm not a "gamer" any more -- guess I got it out of my system when we were still carving video games out of wooden blocks.Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
> Rescue Rangers (that was the choplifter where you built an army, right?),
. htm
On the Apple ][ it was called: Rescue Raiders
Easter eggs can be found here:
http://www.gamewinners.com/apple_ii/RescueRaiders
There's even an open source clone !
http://216.254.0.2/~morse/copter-commander/
Cheers
Full Throttle. Yep. Full Throttle. It was yet another story board adventure game from Lucasarts. The art and the music gave it a distinctive style that I wish they'd developed further. Here's webpage about it.
I got it up and running a while back because I remembered it so fondly, only to realize how amazingly short the game was. It was pretty easy, because even after a few years, I could still remember how to solve the puzzles. There's almost no replay value, which I guess fits its lack of popularity. It's really just like watching a really cool cartoon. You can watch it once but after that it's tedious. For that matter, I wish they had made it into a cartoon. It'd be one kick ass cartoon.
I didn't see Unreal at all. I haven't had much experience with quake and half life but Unreal and Unreal Tournament were pretty awesome games in my opinion. The first unreal inspired me to buy a voodoo2 and UT inspired me to buy an athlon and a GeForce and a T1.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I think another title that they're missing is ZZT- the first game with a level editor, and it was so damn engrossing... I truly loved ZZT in every way.
-bugg
My favorite game of all time is Electronic Arts's Mail Order Monsters. You bought selected a body for your monster (arachnid, brontosaurus, hominid, amoeba, lyonbear, etc), improved its attributes (strength, life, armor, speed, muscle, and brain), added traits to it (photosynthesis, hands, tenticals, poison spit, etc), outfitted it with weapons and armor, and then sent it into battle.
I spent many a day coming home from grade school, and wasting many an afternoon and evening playing as my mom put it "that mind numbing game".
Granted, LORD was an amazing game, but once you delve into the realm of BBS games, you simply can't do better than the MBBS version of Tradewars 2002. God, I wasted a lot of my life playing that...
Marathon is #44! It deserves number 1! Or at least number 7...
You want both?
Check out Falcon's Eye. It is a visually pleasing version of Nethack that I've been totally addicted to. It even has a big intro and a soundtrack. How can you go wrong?
I think compiling a list of games that are more fun than Pong wouldn't be too hard. Now, if the list was of the most important games of all time, I'm sure Pong would top the list.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
- Wizardry I-III (Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, LL, etc, which I still play on occasion under Apple ][ emulator)
- Zork/Enchanter (I lump them as one, and yes, I still have my box sets)
- Eye of the Beholder I-II (which I still play on occasion)
- Sim City 2000 (which I wish I hadn't broke, I was SO addicted to this game)
- Ultima III (which I don't play anymore, although you can under Apple ][ emulator)
- Warcraft II
One of the reasons I REALLY love Blizzard games (and no, I don't work for them) is that their hardware requirements vs. how great they look and play is absolutely right up there with the best in the 'biz'. Check out the hardware requirements for Starcraft or Diablo, probably a P-90. And I -loved- those games. Call me biased (bait) but I hate overloaded FPS games like Quake, UT, Daikatana, etc, etc. They take a P-300 and mega graphics cards to play. I'll stick with Blizzard and my trusty P-120, but I just might upgrade for Warcraft IIIThe REAL sam_at_caveman_dot_org is user ID 13833.
Where is Legend of the Red Dragon? Can we not include our BBS Door-game brethren in this fine list?
and how is Counterstrike not in the top ten.. tisk tisk.
//Phizzy
"Most European technology just isn't worth our stealing," -- Former CIA chief James Woolsey, referring to Echelon
I'd point out that Thief and to a fair extent Deus Ex aren't 'pure' shooters at all, and as leaders of the sneak-em-up genre are as close to being first-person RPGs as they are to a shoot everything and run like crazy blaster such as Quake 2 or Doom. Goldeneye is also very laid-back, and actually makes you play a bit more like Bond than a Duke Nukem character. So both your most popular genres are quite broad, and between them encompass most major PC releases of recent times.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
God Lord, i didn't even noticed it. But you are right. And it is a shame the game is not on the list. I've played this game forever on my C64! I didn't know you could save the game so i had to start i new game every time and unfortunately the day is quite short and me and a friend of mine probably replayed it 50 times until we finished it :)
Oh my, that brings some memories back.
keep it simple.
Here you can find almost the same thing looked from another angle: Amiga Report Top 100 Games Of All Time .
Back when Doom was the big thing, Marathon came out. You actually had to aim up and down. Enemies would float down on you from above and behind. There were real puzzles. And the story! Never have a played a game with as engrossing a story. Marathon II took things up a notch, but wasn't as revolutionary. Marathon Infinity was a whole new story--a troubling and confusing one, at that. And Marathon still lives. There are tons of interesting mods (Tempus Irae, a Rennaissance Italy mod, is one of my favourites), and even an open source (yes, that means Linux!) version. Marathon II had a Windows version; all other commercial version were Mac-only; the open source is Mac, Linux, Windows and BeOS.
Want an exploration game? Want to be a space trader (remember trading games?)? Want an arcade space combat game? Want to conquer the galaxy? Escape Velocity allowed one to do all that and more. An incredible engine, not in terms of graphics, but in terms of capabilities. Truly outside-the-box thinking, it was one of the real greats. It is Mac-only.
First there was rogue. Then there was Moria. And then there was Angband. Expandable, extensible, just plain fun. It was winnable, too, which I cannot say for NetHack (which is in many ways a superior game, except that I spend all of my time on the first 6 levels) or Omega (I've just not played it enough).
Another one that came out right around Doom. Doom (and Marathon) had a boring map type--walls went straight from floor to ceiling; all floors and ceilings were parallel. The player ran around killing things. Descent changed all that by offering a FPS with true spherical movement: the player flew through tunnels, able to turn in any direction, control pitch, yaw and elevation. The gameplay was incredible. I'm not certain why this genre has not caught on. In many ways, it's similar to a flight simulator, but with an arcade flavour. A ripping good time; I'm playing Descent III on Linux these days. Descent was originally offered for Mac and Windows boxes.
I'm not certain why, but Contra was one of those games I could just play for hours and hours without end. I loved it deeply, and was awful at it. But man was it fun!
Incidentally, when's slashdot going to support <dl>?
I have to mention Saturn Bomberman, and this seems to be the right thread to do it in. What other non-mainstream sports game gives you ten human-controlled players on one screen at one time? In that mode there's very little having to get used to controls -- up, down, left, right, BOMB. The ultimate party game.
The early games couldn't rely on the crutch of snazzy graphics to grab your attention so they were meticulously tuned for playability. The distance and speed torpedoes travelled, the EFX reward for explosions and captures, the size and brightness of images and responsiveness of controls, were all play-tested for months before a game was released to market. At a place like Atari, dozens or even hundreds of people might play a game for hours before it went out the door. All that feedback went back into making the game more playable.
Today, games are built in closed shops which do not have these resources, and much of the resources they have are spent creating necessary artwork. Simple games of dexterity or strategy are simply not to be found. Doom is not a hopped-up Battlezone; it is another thing entirely. Wolfenstein 3D comes somewhere in between. But the closest you will get to Battlezone today is the Microsoft port, which doesn't play like the original. Sure, it looks like the original, but it doesn't play the same, especially when the missiles come out -- I should know, since in its heyday I could walk up to an arcade Battlezone machine and write my name vertically on the high score list.
Game makers just don't pay attention to that fine-level play any more. Early games made awesome play out of limited graphics and CPU time. DigDug took a liability of early hardware -- difficulty of re-rendering the landscape after an object had passed and erased it -- and turned it into a play feature. (Lode Runner took this to the next level on the 8-bit home computer.)
I trace the beginning of the death of game play to the Intellivision. Every console since has continued the trend -- immersiveness substitutes ever more for cleanness and simple play. A great game takes minutes to learn and a lifetime to master, but most of today's games are the other way around; by the time you can even get through them without cheat codes, they're lame and stale and you're ready for the next new even more immersive experience that will bore you just as fast.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]