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 ;)."

Bias towards FPS Games

[doozer]

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

This is news?

[Sarcasmooo!]

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.

Rocket Jockey

[Wiwi Jumbo]

I can't load the pages up, but I'm willing to bet they never included Rocket Jockey.

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+J ockey [theunderdogs.org] , tho it's not quite the same without the soundtrack. :)

Bah! Where are Pacman? Asteroids? Missile Command?

[Anonymous Coward]

They skipped the real classics that made billions of dollars in arcades everywhere. And I didn't see any games before 1981. Guess games didn't exist before the IBM PC. How could they? Also, they seemed not to want to mention the 'A' word (Atari). They even showed a picture of Atari's arcade Tetris and claimed it was released by Spectrum Holobyte?!

Damned revisionist basterds[sic].

nethack, manic miner, bubble bobble.....

[MartinG]

... 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.

Top 100 Games Of All Time

[znark]

Here you can find almost the same thing looked from another angle: Amiga Report Top 100 Games Of All Time [datapart-as.no] .

Re:It's play, not flash

[hearingaid]

while in general I agree with the post (well kinda), I feel the deep inner need to nitpick. :)

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.

and yes, this explains why on the 2600, Atari's Pac-Man did very well while Sierra On-Line's Jawbreaker (playtested by virtually nobody except a few geeks at Sierra) collapsed.

I don't know about Lode Runner. (Which was an amazing game, much better than the horror which happened later, known as Super Mario.)

That said, I don't know when it went bad. I also don't think there's anything wrong with immersiveness.

The most immersive game I've ever played is Sid Maier's Alpha Centauri. It's intense. You get the what-do-you-mean-it's-sunrise effect.

The next most immersive game, I think, was Paradroid. I played that for days sometimes. (Well nights anyway :) It didn't have flashy graphics (not by today's standards) - but it did have a very intense soundtrack (even if rather low-fi on '80s equipment). And it had a fairly high level of sophistication: although all the different parts of the game were basically speed & dexterity tests, they worked differently; in particular it took a bit to get the hang of the take-over challenge screen.

the other games I miss are the construction games. Quake has tried to step up a bit with level editing, but it's just not the same. racing destruction set especially was an amazing game.

which is another complaint about the green-hat (heh, anybody else notice a similarity to a specific open-source corporate logo there?) list. no racing games. none. geesh. I spent countless hours as a teenager playing great american cross-country road race. not really the greatest game ever, I don't even know who made it. (this was in the heyday of the underground. you just got disks with games on them, had to figure out what they were when you got them.)

so anyway, tangent over, I hope. when it's all said and done, I like quake, and think it's probably the most radical thing to happen to gaming in the '90s (being as it basically introduced both OpenGL and TCP/IP gaming). what I find frustrating actually is that while gaming graphics have come very, very far in a short time, and we've seen some pretty major strides forward in the mainstream for networked play, there hasn't nearly been as much work done on either (a) simple games that function as a test of skill, or (b) storylines. I'd like to see a game on a DVD-ROM that uses the format to hold a whole world. why not?

hmm, maybe it's time for me to get back into programming after all... :)