Curated playlist

First-person shooters

Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy's EdgeIn Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy's Edge, you play a droid mechanic who crash lands on Batuu.
Call of Duty 4: Modern WarfareCall of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is the game in which a famous military shooter series walked out of World War II and into the present day. Infinity Ward developed it, Activision published it, and it was the fourth main installment in the…
Halo: ReachHalo: Reach, a video game from the studio Bungie, took in US$200 million on its first day on sale. That set a record for the Halo franchise. Yet the game asked players to defend a planet that the series' own fiction had already declared…
BioShockBioShock, a first-person shooter released in 2007, hides its sharpest trick inside a polite request: "Would you kindly." The phrase sounds harmless. In the game it carries a hidden weight, and it changes what the player believes about…
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (2022 video game)The final scene of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II belongs to a text message. A Russian terrorist cell is preparing to hijack a plane when a message arrives from Vladimir Makarov. His instruction is oddly specific: nobody is to speak…
Resident Evil RequiemResident Evil Requiem sold five million copies in its first five days, which made it the fastest-selling game in the long-running Resident Evil series. Capcom released it on the 27th of February 2026, and critics greeted it warmly. It is…
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 sold 6.5 million copies in the United States and United Kingdom within its first 24 hours. Those sales brought in $400 million. At the time, that made it the largest entertainment launch ever recorded. The…
BioShock InfiniteBioShock Infinite sends its hero to a city that floats among the clouds above America in 1912. Irrational Games developed it and 2K published it in 2013, and it is a first-person shooter that leans hard on story. The hero is Booker DeWitt,…
Grand Theft Auto VThree days after Grand Theft Auto V reached stores in September 2013, it had passed one billion dollars in sales. No entertainment product in history had reached that mark faster. The game came from Rockstar North and was published by…
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019 video game)Call of Duty: Modern Warfare earned more than 600 million dollars in its first three days on sale. Infinity Ward developed the first-person shooter and Activision published it. It reached PlayStation 4, Windows and Xbox One on the 25th of…
Halo 3Halo 3, the 2007 Xbox 360 shooter from the studio Bungie, came with a punishment attached for anyone who got it early. Players caught running a leaked copy before launch had their Xbox Live accounts banned until the year 9999. That is a…
Quake (video game)Only one developer came in to upload Quake on launch day. That was John Romero, who left id Software soon after.
Portal 2Adam Foster, a Valve employee, ran a bulletin board from his own home phone line. Valve's offices were too modern to support the old protocol. The board served ASCII pictures and scraps of Aperture Science documents to curious players.…
Metro 2033 (video game)In Metro 2033, a 2010 first-person shooter set beneath Moscow, the best bullets in the game are also the money. Pre-war military ammunition, the 5.45×39mm kind made before the bombs fell, is the main currency of the tunnels. A player can…
ValorantValorant, a free-to-play shooter from Riot Games, pulled in 1.73 million concurrent viewers on Twitch during the first day of its beta in April 2020. That made it the second most-watched game the platform had ever seen at one moment. Only…
Half-Life (series)Half-Life is a series of first-person shooter games from the studio Valve, and its hero never says a word. Gordon Freeman is a scientist at the Black Mesa Research Facility, and the player sees everything through his eyes. The first game…
Borderlands (series)The Guinness Book of World Records credits the first Borderlands game with the ability to generate more than 17 million different guns. Borderlands is a video game series from Gearbox Software, published by 2K, that mixes first-person…
Metro ExodusIn Metro Exodus, a gas filter lasts exactly one minute. When the minute ends, the player must fit a fresh one, and only if a spare is still in the pack. That ticking pressure defines the 2019 first-person shooter from 4A Games, the third…
Call of Juarez: Bound in BloodThe Bound in Blood team never planned a Civil War story. Counting back from the first game put them in 1864.
Half-Life 2Half-Life 2 is a 2004 first-person shooter from Valve Corporation, and it cost 40 million US dollars to make. Development lasted five years. By 2011 it had sold 12 million copies worldwide. In November 2024, twenty years after its release,…
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 reached stores on the 10th of November 2009, and within 24 hours it had sold roughly 4.7 million copies in the United States and the United Kingdom. Those sales brought in $310 million. At the time, that made…
Metroid PrimeMetroid Prime first reached the public as a ten-second video at Space World 2000, a flicker of footage for a game that would not appear on shelves until 2002. When it did arrive on the GameCube, published by Nintendo, it carried the weight…
Star Wars: Dark ForcesStar Wars: Dark Forces owes its existence to fan-made modifications of Doom. Some of those mods had levels set on the Death Star, and that sparked the idea of a Star Wars shooter built from the ground up. LucasArts, which developed and…
Call of Duty: Black Ops 7Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 reached players on the 14th of November 2025, and within weeks its user score on Metacritic had fallen to 1.5. That was the lowest rating any Call of Duty game had ever received on the site. Yet critics were…
Far Cry 6Far Cry 6 opens with a fishing boat full of refugees slipping away from the Caribbean island of Yara, bound for Miami. It never arrives. The island's own president, Antón Castillo, stops the boat at sea. He discovers that his 13-year-old…
Call of Duty: Black Ops IIICall of Duty: Black Ops III, the 2015 shooter from the studio Treyarch, was built by a team that once looked at its own progress and saw almost nothing. In March 2026, creative director Jason Blundell recalled that moment. When the…
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.
GoldenEye 007GoldenEye 007 started life as a side-scrolling platform game for the Super Nintendo. It finished as a first-person shooter for the Nintendo 64, released in 1997 and built by the British studio Rare. Nintendo published it. The game adapted…
Destiny 2Destiny 2 is a shooter made by Bungie, and in June 2026 it receives what is billed as its final update, called Monument of Triumph. That update ends active development. The servers will stay on, though. Bungie confirmed that the game will…
Far Cry 5Far Cry 5 opens with a federal warrant and a preacher who calmly says God will not allow him to be taken. The 2018 first-person shooter was built by Ubisoft Montreal and Ubisoft Toronto, and it is the fifth main entry in the Far Cry…
Call of Duty: Black OpsCall of Duty: Black Ops sold more than 5.6 million copies within 24 hours of going on sale in November 2010. That total beat the record set by Modern Warfare 2 by roughly 2.3 million copies. Treyarch built the game and Activision published…
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 was blocked from sale in Kuwait before release. Every pre-order in the country was cancelled and refunded, and Kuwaiti officials gave no reason. Publications guessed that the game's Gulf War setting was the cause.…
Call of Duty: Black Ops IICall of Duty: Black Ops II took in more than $500 million in the first 24 hours after it went on sale. That figure made the 2012 first-person shooter the largest entertainment launch of all time. The record stood until Grand Theft Auto V…
Wolfenstein II: The New ColossusWolfenstein II: The New Colossus opens with B.J. Blazkowicz, a war veteran in a wheelchair, cutting down Nazi soldiers. MachineGames made this 2017 first-person shooter, and Bethesda Softworks published it. Its world is an alternate 1961,…
Halo 2At E3 2004, Microsoft executive Peter Moore rolled up his sleeve to show the Halo 2 release date tattooed on his bicep. The date was the 9th of November 2004. Halo 2 was the Xbox sequel to Halo: Combat Evolved from 2001, built by Bungie…
Dementium: The WardKonami turned down Dementium: The Ward when it was pitched as a Silent Hill game for the Nintendo DS.
Star Wars Battlefront (2015 video game)Star Wars Battlefront cut its single-player campaign to make a Christmas 2015 release.
Darkest of DaysIn the game Darkest of Days, the enemy turns out to be a future version of the good guys.
The History Channel: Civil War – A Nation DividedThe History Channel: Civil War, subtitled A Nation Divided, is a first-person shooter that gives the player twelve different soldiers across twelve battles. Cauldron HQ developed it, and Activision Value and the History Channel released it…
Team Fortress 2Team Fortress 2 drew 253,997 players at the same moment after a 2023 update, the highest count in its history. That figure is remarkable for a Valve multiplayer shooter that had already been on sale for a long time. The road to that peak…
Call of Duty: GhostsWithin 24 hours of Call of Duty: Ghosts reaching stores in November 2013, Activision had shipped $1 billion worth of copies to retailers. The publisher still counted the game as a letdown. Ghosts was the tenth major Call of Duty release…
Call of Duty: WWIICall of Duty: WWII earned more than 500 million US dollars in the first three days it was on sale. Sledgehammer Games developed the shooter and Activision published it. It reached PlayStation 4, Windows and Xbox One players on the 3rd of…
Wolfenstein: The New OrderWolfenstein: The New Order is a 2014 first-person shooter made by the studio MachineGames, and it first reached the public as three still images with one caption: 1960. Nothing else was explained. The number gave no hint of the story,…
Far Cry 3Far Cry 3, a first-person shooter built by Ubisoft Montreal, once offered a free copy to anyone at the PAX East convention who received a permanent tribal tattoo. Shaving your head earned the same reward. It was a fitting stunt for a game…
Halo: Combat EvolvedHalo: Combat Evolved reached shops on the 15th of November 2001, the same day as Microsoft's first game console, the Xbox. Bungie built it, and Microsoft Game Studios published it. A reviewer at Edge magazine called it "the most important…
Prey (2017 video game)Prey, the 2017 first-person shooter made by Arkane Austin and published by Bethesda Softworks, opens by lying to the player about where they are. You wake up as Morgan Yu in an apartment in 2035, and within minutes you learn the apartment…
Apex LegendsApex Legends passed one million unique players eight hours after it went live in February 2019, and almost nobody had known it existed. Respawn Entertainment built the game, Electronic Arts published it, and it cost nothing to download.…
Star Wars Battlefront II (2017 video game)A Hawaii lawmaker called Star Wars Battlefront II an online casino designed to trap little kids.
Call of Duty: World at WarCall of Duty: World at War had sold 15.7 million copies by November 2013. That total belongs to a World War II shooter made by the studio Treyarch and released in 2008 for PlayStation 3, Windows, Xbox 360, and Wii. Its campaign sent…
Battlefield 6Battlefield 6 sold more than 7 million copies in its first three days, a figure Electronic Arts announced on the 16th of October 2025. That made it the biggest launch in the history of the Battlefield series. The online-only first-person…