Top 200 Video Games of All Time According to Game Informer

Introduction

Oh yeah, I have a blog! Lots has been going on in the intervening months (see my Twitter feed for short attention span details), but I figured a video game post during NaBloPoMo would be a good way to get back on the wagon, even if I’m not actually posting every day during November.

While visiting my Little Brother this weekend, I noticed a rather unusual magazine cover… a (very pixelated) monster from the original Doom. This turned out to be the latest issue of Game Informer, specifically Volume XIX, Number 12, Issue 200. In honor of this decimalist anniversary, they published their Top 200 Video Games of All Time list, which unsurprisingly is linkbait for any video game fan who likes to rant about what should and should not be included in such a list. I ran through my opinions quickly with my Little, mostly fixating on why so many recent games were already on the list, but decided a deeper analysis was in order.

Instead of complaining about the contents of the list, I thought I’d use it to track my personal video game history (much as my father has in the past used the Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums of All Time and Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Songs of All Time to guide his music purchases). I’ve also done some histogram breakdowns of what’s on the list. I would say that my guideline for inclusion on any such list would involve adjectives like “innovative” and “influential”, and explicitly avoid conditions like “critically acclaimed”, “popular”, or “best-selling”. This in turn means that inclusion must be viewed through a somewhat temporally distant lens, for sufficient perspective on a particular cultural artifact’s import.

How many of these have you played? Do you strongly agree/disagree with any of the rankings?

The columns are Game Informer rank, game title, platform(s), and year of publication from the original article; I believe using this data for commentary is covered by Fair Use. I added platforms in a few places to account for the particular port of a game that I played. I have also added columns for myself, for Played, Owned, and Completed. The full table and further analysis is below the cut.

Columns

A brief explanation before the table: I count a game as “Played” if I personally controlled the game for at least one significant play session (enough to see one full level, game, etc.); I count a game as “Owned” if I purchased the game or received it as a gift; and I count a game as “Completed” if I finished the primary plot levels for games with solo play, reached a reasonably high or maximum level in games with increasing difficulty level play, or played a simulation game to a goal threshold. Ownership and Completion are both subsets of Played, with some overlap, but not identical subsets.

Top 200 Video Games Table

Overall Breakdown

From browsing the list, I was expecting it to be skewed towards more recent offerings. A few quick histograms to some extent confirm this for the full list, but disprove it when you consider only the Top 20 games on the list. Click to embiggen any of the graphs.

Bar graph histogram of the Top 200 and Top 20 games by publication year

Bar graph histogram of the Top 200 and Top 20 games by console platform (including PC)

Bar graph histogram of the Top 200 and Top 20 games by console generation.

As you can see, the Top 200 list (in red) is skewed towards PC games, since that category is not further broken down by OS or era. It also seems to be skewed towards more recent consoles, particularly the Playstations 2 & 3 and both Xboxen.

However, if you consider only the Top 20 (in blue), a more historical perspective is available. Nintendo is more favored, and the breakdown is more even by by both year and generation. To me that implies that Game Informer recognizes Nintendo as an early innovator (particularly on the NES and SNES), but more lacking in recent offerings for the GameCube and Wii, especially compared to what’s available on the Xbox and Playstation.

My Breakdown

So, in total, of the 200 games, I’ve played 89 (44.5%), owned 25 (12.5%), and completed 26 (13%); however, I’ve only completed 11 of the games I’ve owned. There are three factors here: first, I’ve played games to completion on friends’ consoles/computers; second, I played several classic console games via emulation in high school, where I had downloaded the ROMs; third, I have purchased some newer games on the list that I’ve yet to finish.

Until the Wii, I never owned a console myself (with the exception of the short-lived Virtual Game Station PlayStation emulator for Mac), so all the other games I owned are listed under PC (which I mean to include DOS, Windows, Mac OS 9, and Mac OS X versions of games). PC is nearly impossible to split into “generation”, and since it includes multiple hardware/software combinations, I can’t easily get good stats for it. In spite of all of this, I feel like I’ve experienced most of the key points in video game history from the Nintendo revolution on. In that regard I’m in a historical sweet spot, I suppose. Click to embiggen any of the graphs.

Bar graph histogram of the Top 200 games broken down by my Played, Owned, and Completed lists organized by publication year

Bar graph histogram of the Top 200 games broken down by my Played, Owned, and Completed lists organized by console platform (including PC)

Bar graph histogram of the Top 200 games broken down by my Played, Owned, and Completed lists organized by console generation

As you can see, my own gameplay is heavily skewed towards the PC, although until recently that was almost exclusively games that were available on Mac. This makes sense, given that my mother didn’t allow game consoles in the house, but non-violent and arguably educational games my sister and I could sneak onto the computer.

There’s also a strong “bump” for games in the mid-’90s; this is when I would have been playing lots of console games at friends’ houses (for sleepovers and such), but it also includes the non-trivial number of SNES and Playstation games I played via emulation on my Mac in high school. (Incidentally, that very Mac is now functioning as the webserver displaying this blog entry.)

My ownership numbers have unsurprisingly gone up since 2005, given that I now have disposable income and can indulge my video game habits more easily than when I was living at home or in college. Additionally, I have added a Wii (my first console I can call my own!), a gaming-capable phone (first the original iPhone, and now a 3GS), and with the advent of Intel-based Macs, a drive booting into Windows 7 that I use to play various Windows-only games, such as Half Life 2 and Borderlands.

Conclusion

Overall, I’d say this list is skewed towards recent years, which I think is explainable largely by the target audience of the magazine: roughly, my age group (and a little younger) who probably started playing on SNES (4th-gen) consoles and are currently playing Xbox 360. The breakdowns for the Top 20 however makes me feel a little better, in that games that are more influential (or arguably started a genre) are reflected there.

There are definitely a few “classics” on here that I’d like to pick up and play for historical reasons, and a few I’d go back to for nostalgia, but most of the games I haven’t played aren’t in genres I particularly care about. A number are relatively obscure Japanese releases that only the hardest of hardcore video game fans would have seen in the US.

My biggest complaint about the list is a few items that had been out less than a week at the time of publication of this Game Informer issue! (I’m looking at you Modern Warfare 2…) I don’t care how good your opening sales weekend numbers are, or how good the previews are, you don’t deserve to be on this list yet if you came out in 2009. Give it time!

What do you think? How do you measure up?