The 30 Best Video Games of All Time, Ranked (Photos)
What makes a video game “the best”? Technical prowess? A moving plot? A huge amount of features? It’s a difficult concept to nail down for an entertainment medium as young and as all over the place as gaming. But we tried our best even so.
30. “Roller Coaster Tycoon 3” (2004)
It wasn’t the first video game to let you design a roller coaster and then ride it, but it was definitely the best and most robust example of that sort of thing. You could make whatever you wanted, and it was one of the few games to make that claim and actually deliver something legitimately compelling.
29. “The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay” (2004)
It’s the story of how Riddick (played by Vin Diesel even in the video games) got those cool glowing eyes, and it’s also a thrilling sneakfest that makes the “Metal Gear Solid” franchise seem super quaint.
28. “Uncharted 2: Among Thieves” (2009)
Video Games love to try to emulate the experience of watching a (very long) movie, and this was the closest one ever came to succeeding. While its sequels were major regressions from that peak, “Uncharted 2” remains representative of an ideal that, quite possibly, no game will ever fully realize.
27. “Zork” (1977)
This is a video game experienced entirely through text — thus the label “interactive fiction” being thrown around a lot — a type of thing that was pretty common as personal computing started to become a thing back in the ’70s and ’80s in the early days of gaming. But “Zork” was operating on a whole other level from its peers, allowing a complexity in player interaction and a depth to its storytelling that was unheard of at the time.
26. “SimCity 2000” (1993)
The best way to describe “SimCity 2000” is as a sand castle simulator. You spend hours painstakingly constructing your masterpiece, and then when you’re done you tear it down in a cathartic fit — thanks to its surprisingly robust disaster scenarios, which you can trigger on demand. The series never bested this one.
25. “Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2” (2000)
Strategy video games rarely manage to be all that accessible, but “Red Alert 2” was both funny and easy to get into — moreso than any of the other “Command & Conquer” games before or after. And so it remains a delightful gem worth revisiting every once in a while.
24. “Full Throttle” (1995)
An example of what in the ’90s was referred to as an “adventure game,” “Full Throttle” today feels like the direct predecessor to the part of the current wave of independent games with well told stories that has adopted a similar visual style — “Kentucky Route Zero,” “Kathy Rain,” and the like. But it remains just as good as (almost) all of the games it inspired.
