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Curated playlist

Apocalyptic video games

  • God of War IIIEarly in God of War III, the sea god Poseidon dies at the hands of the Spartan Kratos, and the oceans pour across Greece. He is only the first of many gods to fall. This 2010 action-adventure game, made by Santa Monica Studio for the…
  • Legacy of KainLegacy of Kain is a dark fantasy video game series that landed in a legal fight in 1998, before its second game had reached shelves. Silicon Knights, the studio behind the first game, sued Crystal Dynamics for the rights to the franchise.…
  • Mass EffectMass Effect began in 2003 as a pitch to build a universe on the scale of Star Wars. BioWare wanted to own it entirely.
  • Persona 3Persona 3 asks its player to press a gun-shaped device against their own head and fire. The device is called an Evoker, and the shot summons a Persona, a physical form of the shooter's psyche. Atlus developed this role-playing game, which…
  • Star Wars: Knights of the Old RepublicStar Wars: Knights of the Old Republic begins with a character waking aboard a doomed Republic capital ship, with no memory of who they are. The setting lies four thousand years before the Star Wars films. This one amnesiac premise…
  • Half-Life (video game)Half-Life, the 1998 first-person shooter from Valve Corporation, was budgeted on the assumption that it would sell around 180,000 copies in its entire lifetime. That forecast came from Gabe Newell, one of the studio's two founders. Yet the…
  • Chrono TriggerChrono Trigger is a 1995 role-playing game that Square developed and published for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. It began with a research trip. In October 1992, three veteran creators traveled to the United States to study…
  • Outer WildsOuter Wilds, a 2019 action-adventure game from Mobius Digital, gives its player exactly 22 minutes to live. At the end of that time the sun goes supernova and the whole planetary system is destroyed. Then everything begins again. The…
  • BloodborneIn the game Bloodborne, the miracle cure that heals almost any ailment slowly turns people into beasts.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Majora's MaskA grimacing moon looms over the land of Termina in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. Nintendo released the game for the Nintendo 64 in 2000. The moon is predicted to strike at dawn on the day of the Carnival of Time, an annual harvest…

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