Games are the only medium where the great works are also engineering problems. A novel does not have to solve how reading works. Ocarina of Time had to solve how fighting in three dimensions works, because in 1998 nobody had.
That's why the all-time lists look strange to outsiders. Half the entries are there for craft — story, atmosphere, the feeling of playing them. The other half are there because they answered a question nobody had answered yet, and everything after them inherited the answer.
Here are the twenty games that did one or both, and what each one actually contributed.
The Foundations
The games that established what the medium was for.
Tetris
Year: 1984 · Platform: Everywhere
Designed by Alexey Pajitnov on Soviet computing hardware, and arguably the most perfect game design ever produced. Its rules fit in one sentence, it has no ending, and it becomes harder at exactly the rate your competence increases.
Tetris also did something no other game has managed: it is genuinely universal. It requires no cultural context, no reading, no reflexes beyond the ordinary, and no explanation. Bundling it with the Game Boy put it in front of an audience that had never considered themselves gamers, and it has never really left.
Pac-Man
Year: 1980 · Platform: Arcade
The first video game character anyone outside the hobby could recognise. Toru Iwatani designed it deliberately to appeal beyond the young male audience that shooting games had captured — no violence, a friendly protagonist, bright colours and a maze rather than a battlefield.
It worked, and it created the concept of the gaming mascot, which the entire industry then built its marketing around for two decades.
Super Mario Bros.
Year: 1985 · Platform: NES
The best tutorial ever written, and it contains no text. The first screen of Super Mario Bros. teaches you movement, jumping, enemies, power-ups and the consequences of failure purely through level layout — the mushroom bounces toward you so you cannot avoid learning what it does.
It also arrived at the moment the American console market had collapsed, and is one of the main reasons that market came back.
Doom
Year: 1993 · Platform: PC
The most influential game ever made, and it wasn't close at the time. Doom popularised the first-person shooter, but its more important contributions were structural: shareware distribution that put it on an enormous number of office and home PCs, networked deathmatch that made competitive multiplayer a mainstream idea, and file formats open enough that players could build their own levels.
That last one created modding culture, and modding culture created Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, the MOBA genre and a substantial share of the industry's current developers.
Street Fighter II
Year: 1991 · Platform: Arcade / SNES
The game that invented competitive fighting as a genre and, with it, the arcade as a social arena. Its roster of distinct characters with genuinely different tools created the concept of the matchup — the idea that a game's depth lives in the interactions between options rather than in the options themselves.
Its most famous mechanic was an accident: combos, where certain attacks chained together faster than an opponent could recover, were an unintended consequence of the timing system. Players found them, Capcom kept them, and every fighting game since has been built around them deliberately.
The 3D Problem
The mid-to-late 1990s, when the entire medium had to be reinvented in three dimensions.
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
Year: 1998 · Platform: Nintendo 64
The most acclaimed game ever made, and the reason is a single feature. In early 3D games, combat was close to unplayable — you could not aim, track a moving enemy and control the camera at once with the controllers of the era.
Z-targeting solved it. Lock onto an enemy and the camera keeps them in frame while your movement reorients into a circle around them. Suddenly 3D swordfighting was readable. Almost every 3D action game since — including entire genres Nintendo has never worked in — uses a descendant of that system.
Everything else about it is also excellent: the time-travel structure, the world design, the fact that a musical instrument is your primary tool for interacting with the world.
Final Fantasy VII
Year: 1997 · Platform: PlayStation
The game that made Japanese role-playing games mainstream outside Japan. Pre-rendered backgrounds, full-motion cutscenes and an enormous marketing push turned a genre that Western audiences had largely ignored into a cultural event.
It is also, underneath the spectacle, a genuinely strange story about ecological collapse, corporate power and identity, and it contains the medium's most famous narrative moment — one that worked precisely because games had trained players to assume it could not happen.
Metal Gear Solid
Year: 1998 · Platform: PlayStation
Hideo Kojima's stealth game established that avoiding combat could be more tense than engaging in it, and that games could be directed — camera angles, pacing, and voice performance treated as cinema rather than decoration.
It also contains the medium's best fourth-wall joke, where a boss reads the contents of your actual memory card and comments on the other games you have been playing. That gag only works in this medium, which is exactly why it is still cited thirty years later.
Resident Evil 4
Year: 2005 · Platform: Multi-platform
Took survival horror, moved the camera over the character's shoulder, and accidentally designed the template for the next fifteen years of third-person action games. Gears of War, The Last of Us, Dead Space and dozens of others are working from this camera.
It is also a masterclass in pacing — the game introduces a new mechanic, enemy type or setting roughly every twenty minutes for its entire runtime, and never repeats a rhythm.
The Storytellers
Games where the writing and the systems are doing the same job.
Half-Life 2
Year: 2004 · Platform: PC
The most seamless game on this list. It never takes control away from you — there are no cutscenes, and the story happens in front of you while you are still holding the controls, which was radical at the time and is still uncommon now.
Its physics system was the other leap. The gravity gun turned the environment into ammunition and made a technical showcase into a genuinely new verb. It also shipped alongside Steam, which reshaped how PC games are sold entirely.
BioShock
Year: 2007 · Platform: Multi-platform
An underwater city built on an ideology, and a game that uses its own mechanics to make an argument about player agency. Its central twist works because it interrogates something players never question — why you do what a game tells you to do.
Rapture remains one of the most completely realised environments in the medium, told almost entirely through architecture and audio logs rather than exposition.
Portal 2
Year: 2011 · Platform: Multi-platform
The best-written comedy in games, and one of the best-designed teaching systems. Portal 2 introduces roughly a dozen mechanics across its runtime and never explains any of them in text — each is taught through a room whose only solution requires understanding it.
Its co-op campaign is separate, complete, and built around problems that literally cannot be solved by one person, which almost no co-op mode bothers to do.
Mass Effect 2
Year: 2010 · Platform: Multi-platform
The most ambitious consequence system anyone has shipped. The game imports your choices from its predecessor, spends its runtime assembling a crew, and ends with a mission where every character can live or die based on decisions you made hours earlier without knowing they mattered.
It is the strongest existing argument that branching narrative can be more than an illusion, and the fact that so few games have attempted anything similar since tells you how expensive it was.
The Last of Us
Year: 2013 · Platform: PlayStation
Naughty Dog's post-collapse road story is the clearest demonstration of what performance capture and prestige-television writing can do in a game. Its achievement is restraint — long stretches where nothing happens except two people talking, in a genre built on constant stimulus.
Red Dead Redemption 2
Year: 2018 · Platform: Multi-platform
The most detailed simulated world ever built, and deliberately the slowest. Almost every action takes longer than it needs to, which is either the game's great flaw or its entire point depending on who you ask.
Its story — a dying man in a dying way of life, unable to stop being loyal to people who no longer deserve it — is among the most sustained pieces of character writing in the medium.
The Worlds
Games you live in rather than finish.
Minecraft
Year: 2011 · Platform: Everywhere
The best-selling video game ever made, with over 300 million copies sold, and the only one on this list that is genuinely a creative tool as much as a game. It has no required goals, no story to speak of, and an aesthetic that was outdated on release.
What it has instead is the simplest possible rule set — take a block, place a block — applied at a scale that produces genuinely emergent complexity. It has been used to teach programming, model real cities and host a functioning library of censored journalism.
World of Warcraft
Year: 2004 · Platform: PC
Not the first massively multiplayer game, but the one that made the genre approachable, and for a decade the centre of gravity for online gaming. Its real innovation was making a persistent shared world playable solo — you could log in for forty minutes and accomplish something, which no MMO before it allowed.
Its social structures — guilds, raids, scheduled group commitments — produced a form of online community that predates and predicted most of modern social gaming.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Year: 2011 · Platform: Multi-platform
The most re-released game in history, and the most modded. Skyrim's design philosophy is that the world matters more than the plot — you can ignore the main quest indefinitely and the game barely notices, which is precisely why people are still playing it more than a decade later.
Grand Theft Auto V
Year: 2013 · Platform: Multi-platform
One of the best-selling entertainment products ever released in any medium, and the most technically accomplished open city anyone has built. Its three-protagonist structure was a genuine structural experiment, letting the game switch perspective mid-mission.
Its online mode then became a decade-long phenomenon in its own right, and effectively rewrote the industry's expectations for how long a single release can generate revenue.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Year: 2015 · Platform: Multi-platform
The game that fixed side quests. Before it, optional content in open-world games was largely filler; The Witcher 3 wrote its side stories with the same care as its main plot, and several of them are better than it.
Its expansions, particularly Blood and Wine, are frequently cited as being of higher quality than most full-priced releases, which set an uncomfortable standard the rest of the industry has been measured against since.
The Data
Every game here — platform and category tags — is available as a structured, downloadable dataset, alongside a much larger chronological catalogue of significant releases.
Explore the Video Games dataset →
Related: Best Video Games of All Time (full catalogue) → · Gaming Consoles → · Best-Selling Game Franchises → · Nintendo First-Party Franchises → · Indie Game Hits →
Settle It
Ocarina or Breath of the Wild. Half-Life 2 or Portal 2. Whether Minecraft counts as a game at all, which is an argument that has been running for fifteen years.