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My goal wasn’t to pick out the “best” game of each year, but to pick out a historically significant title, and to try and make sure that most of the big names appear somewhere in the list. It turned out to be harder than I imagined, and I still missed a few big names like Halo and Wolfenstein.
I did notice that the number of titles exploded in 1980. I was only nine years old at the time, so I never had a sense of just how huge that year was. We went from having two or three meaningful games a year to having dozens. Everyone sort of entered the market at once.
There were a few years which were incredibly dense with titles and it was impossible to do them justice. 1998, 1999, and 2004 were all huge years with multiple earth-shaking titles all showing up together.
It was quite a long way from Pong to Modern Warfare 2. Can’t wait to see what happens next.
Happy new year.
Shamus Young is a programmer and writer by trade, videogame nitpicker by inclination. If you have the patience for more of his ramblings, they can be found here.
