Curated playlist

Censored video games

Dota 2A month before its official launch in 2013, Dota 2 already had nearly 330,000 people playing at the same moment on Steam. That crowd outnumbered the players in the rest of the platform's top ten games combined. Dota 2 is a Valve game in…
Grand Theft Auto: Vice CityGrand Theft Auto: Vice City, a 2002 action-adventure game from Rockstar North, sold more than 500,000 copies within 24 hours of its release. Within two days it had reached 1.4 million, which made it the fastest-selling game in history at…
Quake (video game)Only one developer came in to upload Quake on launch day. That was John Romero, who left id Software soon after.
Silent Hill: HomecomingIn Silent Hill: Homecoming, the soldier hero was never really a soldier. Alex Shepherd has been in a mental hospital.
Fallout 3Fallout 3 is a 2008 action role-playing game from Bethesda Game Studios, and it begins with a 19-year-old leaving the shelter where they grew up. Vault 101 is a high-tech fallout shelter, built for survivors of a nuclear war fought 200…
Grand Theft Auto IVGrand Theft Auto IV sold more than 3.6 million copies in the first twenty-four hours after its release in 2008. That worked out to roughly 310 million dollars in revenue. The game came from Rockstar North and Rockstar Games, and it centres…
Grand Theft Auto IIIGrand Theft Auto III began with an art director's complaint about the games of his day. Aaron Garbut felt that most of them were "a thing you played". He wanted this one to be "a place you lived in". The core team behind that ambition was…
Doom (1993 video game)Doom crashed a university network the night it was released in 1993. Ten thousand people tried to download it at once.
Resident Evil (1996 video game)Resident Evil, the 1996 survival horror game from Capcom for the PlayStation, was never expected to become a hit. Its producer, Tokuro Fujiwara, said it was aimed at a core audience, and he thought it would sell only around 200,000 copies.…
EarthBoundEarthBound is a 1994 role-playing game for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and its American advertising declared, 'This game stinks.' Nintendo meant it as a joke. In Japan the game was called Mother 2, and it was led by Shigesato…
The Witcher 3: Wild HuntWhen The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt launched in 2015, Poland's prime minister, Ewa Kopacz, and its president, Bronisław Komorowski, visited the studio behind it. That studio was CD Projekt Red, and the game was an open-world action role-playing…
Final Fantasy IVFinal Fantasy IV began with a Formula One race. Hiroyuki Ito saw cars pass at different speeds and got an idea.
Final Fantasy VIFinal Fantasy VI lets its hero fail to save the world. The story's second half is called the World of Ruin.
Final Fight (video game)Final Fight, Capcom's arcade brawler, began as Street Fighter '89. Operators said the name was misleading.
EverQuestSony expected little from EverQuest, but it drew ten thousand subscribers in a day.
Dispatch (video game)Robert Robertson III has no superpowers, a heap of debt, and a hero's suit that no longer works. That is where Dispatch begins. Dispatch is a 2025 episodic adventure game from the American developer AdHoc Studio, and it calls itself a…
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…
Resident Evil VillageResident Evil Village is a 2021 survival horror game from Capcom, and its launch came with a drawing visible from far away. On the 7th of May 2021, Capcom marked the release with a chalk Lycan on a hillside in Somerset. The figure stood 58…
Resident Evil 4Resident Evil 4 is a 2005 survival horror game from Capcom, released first for the GameCube, and by March 2025 it had sold 15.2 million copies. Its hero is Leon S. Kennedy, a special agent dropped into rural Spain on a rescue mission.…