10. Portal (2007) PC or Xbox 360
This senior thesis cum sleeper hit showed that students could hit it big in the games business — not after years of obscurity but immediately. But the space-bending puzzles of Portal will also have an influence on the way games are sold. Valve could have padded out the four hours of gameplay with extraneous cut scenes or boss battles, but instead it let the game be concise (and a bargain at $20). Portal proved that quality can trump quantity.
It’s the most popular game franchise that debuted this decade, with more than 100 million copies sold. Yet many people don’t even consider The Sims to be a game at all. Will Wright’s people simulator so completely disrupted our beliefs about what a videogame had to be that non-gamers with no expectations had the easiest time wrapping their heads around it. Sims has had a profound influence on videogames in a dozen different ways. The simplified human models with their carefully calibrated hierarchies of needs were revolutionary. The open-ended, accessible game design was the cornerstone of what came to be known as casual games. It was a sandbox game of unprecedented flexibility, allowing every player to create his own goals and play style. It was a platform for both modular add-on packages and user-created content. It was a highly visible property that was ported to every platform in existence, and is the basis for an upcoming feature film. The Sims, to a greater extent than anything else released this decade, broadened the definition of what a game could be.
8. Grand Theft Auto III (2001) Parents Only
Few games this decade generated such controversy — or inspired so many other designers. Yes, any game released a month after Sept. 11, 2001, that allowed players to kill civilians and public servants was certain to be controversial. But beneath those attention-grabbing elements was a revolutionary open-world gameplay system. Grand Theft Auto III defined the “sandbox,” a sprawling playground with sports cars instead of swingsets, rocket launchers instead of monkey bars. Players weren’t forced to advance theScarface-style criminal narrative; they could just amuse themselves in Liberty City. Forget the avalanche of clones: It’s hard to find any third-person action adventure game nowadays that doesn’t crib at least something from the GTA formula.
7. Guitar Hero (2005)
Not very long ago, Red Octane and Harmonix were tiny companies producing Dance Dance Revolutioncontrol mats and experimental music games that critics loved and nobody bought, respectively. Everyone’s fortunes changed when the two firms teamed up to create a rock ‘n’ roll game with a controller in the shape of a guitar. Similar games had been moderately popular in Japan for years, but had never really taken off.Guitar Hero was the sleeper hit of the year, and just as it was exploding, the two companies parted ways.Guitar Hero and Rock Band are the Coke and Pepsi of music games, waging an all-out war for market share while continuing to raise the bar for music games in general. The games are breathing new life into the music biz, letting artists expose their songs to a new audience and bringing in new revenue from downloads. But more importantly, Guitar Hero took music games from a tiny niche to one of the biggest game genres around.
6. World of Warcraft (2004)
The MMORPG had its genesis in the ’90s with EverQuest and Ultima Online. But Blizzard’s World of Warcraft blew them all away, taking MMOs from niche pursuit to mainstream passion. Besides establishing that a critical mass of players will pay $15 per month to play a single videogame if it is sufficiently complex,WoW created a gold standard by which all other massively multiplayer games are measured. By grouping players into alliances and guilds, WoW created strong social circles among its devotees, who are so deeply involved in the culture that they attend the yearly BlizzCon convention. The game has influenced many other publishers to jump feet-first into the MMO genre. Most, so far, have failed miserably.
4. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (2006) Parents Only
If you’re going to spend dozens of hours of your life engrossed in an RPG, it might as well be a world as perfectly realized as Bethesda’s fourth installment in the Elder Scrollsseries. From the very first scene, you feel caught up in an epic medieval adventure that engages both your brain and adrenal glands in equal measure.
3. Fallout 3 (2008) Parents Only
A game with brilliant writing, astonishing art direction and a healthy dose of family drama, Fallout 3’s indelible moment arrives when you stumble out of Vault 101 for the first time and are blinded by sunlight. It takes a good three or four seconds before your pupils contract enough to take in the devastated wasteland stretching out for you to explore. Each hill you traverse reveals new adventures and quests to undertake.
If you’re going to spend dozens of hours of your life engrossed in an RPG, it might as well be a world as perfectly realized as Bethesda’s fourth installment in the Elder Scrollsseries. From the very first scene, you feel caught up in an epic medieval adventure that engages both your brain and adrenal glands in equal measure.
3. Fallout 3 (2008) Parents Only
A game with brilliant writing, astonishing art direction and a healthy dose of family drama, Fallout 3’s indelible moment arrives when you stumble out of Vault 101 for the first time and are blinded by sunlight. It takes a good three or four seconds before your pupils contract enough to take in the devastated wasteland stretching out for you to explore. Each hill you traverse reveals new adventures and quests to undertake.
2. Half-Life 2 (2004)
If Halo is the game of choice for the trigger-happy, Half-Life 2 is the thinking man’s shooter, the game that got our brains churning. Puzzles relied on physics, the well-written story wasn’t spoon-fed, and the protagonist saw the world through prescription lenses. Half-Life 2 ensured that we’d never think about the first-person shooter in the same way again. Half-Life 2 takes place in a world in which the events of Half-Life have fully come to bear on human society, which has been enslaved by the extraterrestrial civilization known as the Combine. The game takes place in and around the fictional City 17and follows the adventures of scientist Gordon Freeman who must fight against increasingly unfavorable odds in order to survive. The game garnered near-unanimous positive reviews and received critical acclaim, winning over 40 PC Game of the Year awards and has been called The Greatest Game Ever Made .
1. Halo (2001)
Nintendo’s Goldeneye 007 was the game that took multiplayer first-person shooting on game consoles and made it mainstream. But it was Halo that truly rallied the troops. When the futuristic shooter debuted alongside the Xbox in 2001, its well-tuned controls made Halo the rallying point for a new generation of gamers. Of course, the tangle of CAT-5 cables at every Halo LAN party was also ground zero for the culture of frat-boy gamers that plague Xbox Live. You win some, you lose some.
Release Date: Dec 27, 2009
