Curated playlist

Golden Joystick Award winners

Quake went live with just one developer uploading it on launch day, John Romero, who left id Software soon after. The winners here are mostly studios and machines with odd beginnings. Sega started in 1940 by supplying slot machines to American military bases in Hawaii. Nintendo began in 1889 making handmade playing cards in Kyoto. FromSoftware spent nearly a decade on office software before King's Field changed it. Street Fighter II's combos came from a bug the team kept, found in the car-smashing bonus stage.

PlayStation 5The PlayStation 5 beat the PS4's record launch within two weeks. Sony called it its largest launch ever.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the KingdomIn The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, fusing a rocket to a shield is enough to send Link soaring through the air. That one trick says a great deal about this 2023 action-adventure game for the Nintendo Switch. Nintendo EPD built it…
SegaSega began in 1940 by supplying slot machines to American military bases in Hawaii. It later made Sonic the Hedgehog.
Game (retailer)By April 2026, every standalone Game store in the UK had closed. The video game retailer once had 609 UK stores.
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,…
Red Dead Redemption 2Red Dead Redemption 2 is a 2018 action-adventure game from Rockstar Games that puts the player in the boots of Arthur Morgan, an outlaw living in the year 1899. The frontier he knows is closing. Government forces, rival gangs and the march…
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…
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…
Quake (video game)Only one developer came in to upload Quake on launch day. That was John Romero, who left id Software soon after.
Xbox (console)Microsoft's marketing team disliked the name Xbox and used it in testing to show it would lose.
Sony Interactive EntertainmentThe first PlayStation began as a CD drive add-on for a Nintendo console. Sony rebuilt it as a standalone console.
Life Is Strange (video game)Life Is Strange opens in October 2013, as an 18-year-old photography student named Max Caulfield returns to Arcadia Bay, Oregon, to attend Blackwell Academy. During class she has a vivid vision of a tornado destroying a lighthouse and…
Rockstar NorthRockstar North, the Edinburgh studio behind Grand Theft Auto V, began its life in Dundee under another name. By March 2024, that game had sold 200 million copies, making it the second-best-selling video game ever. It is also described as…
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,…
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…
Fallout: New VegasFallout: New Vegas, a 2010 action role-playing game from Obsidian Entertainment, was built on a schedule that journalists called remarkably short for a major release. Publisher Bethesda Softworks allowed the studio 18 months. The game…
Final Fantasy VII RebirthFinal Fantasy VII Rebirth was released on Leap Day, the 29th of February 2024. Square Enix chose that date deliberately.
Final Fantasy XVIIn Final Fantasy XVI, the hero hunts a fire monster that turns out to be him.
Lara CroftIn 2009, the English city of Derby let its residents vote on a name for a new ring road, and the winner was Lara Croft Way. More than 27,000 votes were cast, and the name took 89 percent of them. The road opened in July 2010. Lara Croft is…
Stardew ValleyStardew Valley had sold more than 50 million copies by February 2026, and one person made it. That person is Eric Barone, who works under the name ConcernedApe. After college he could not find a job in the games industry and ended up…
Resident Evil 4 (2023 video game)Resident Evil 4, Capcom's 2023 survival horror remake, earned an unusual compliment from the man who made the original. Shinji Mikami, who directed the 2005 game, said on Twitter that he enjoyed the remake very much. He also admitted that…
Fallout (American TV series)The television series Fallout opens with a young woman named Lucy leaving Vault 33 to search for her kidnapped father. Amazon Prime Video released it as a drama based on the role-playing video game franchise created by Tim Cain and Leonard…
Naughty DogNaughty Dog, the Santa Monica, California studio behind Crash Bandicoot, Jak and Daxter, Uncharted and The Last of Us, began under a different name. In 1984 it was JAM Software, and JAM stood for Jason, Andy and Mike. One of those three…
Fallout 4Fallout 4 begins on the 23rd of October 2077, the day the nuclear bombs fall. The 2015 action role-playing game comes from Bethesda Game Studios, and it is the fourth main entry in the Fallout series. Earlier games in the series start long…
NintendoNintendo began in 1889 as a maker of handmade playing cards. Fusajiro Yamauchi opened the shop in Kyoto.
Super Smash Bros. UltimateSuper Smash Bros. Ultimate began with a dying wish from Nintendo's president. It was Satoru Iwata's last request.
God of War RagnarökGod of War Ragnarök sold 5.1 million copies in its first week, the fastest launch week any first-party PlayStation game has recorded. Santa Monica Studio released the game on the 9th of November 2022 as the sequel to 2018's God of War. Its…
Death StrandingDeath Stranding is a 2019 video game in which a courier named Sam Porter Bridges crosses a wrecked United States on foot, carrying a premature baby in a pod. The baby is not cargo. It is a tool, a companion and, as the story unfolds,…
Epic GamesEpic Games lost the last of its founding products in November 2013, when a man named Paul Sweeney packed and mailed the final copy of a game called ZZT. He was the father of Tim Sweeney, who had started a small company in his parents'…
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.…
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom PainMetal Gear Solid V was first announced as an indie game from a fake Swedish studio. Kojima's team made it.
Shigeru MiyamotoDonkey Kong began as a way to use up unsold arcade machines.
It Takes Two (video game)It Takes Two, a 2021 adventure from Hazelight Studios, is a video game that nobody can finish alone. It has no single-player option. Every player needs a partner, either sitting nearby or connected online, and the story simply will not…
MinecraftMinecraft, the 2011 sandbox game from the Swedish company Mojang Studios, tells its only story through a poem of roughly 1,500 words. The End Poem was written by the Irish novelist Julian Gough. It scrolls past in about nine minutes when a…
Ghost of YōteiGhost of Yōtei, a 2025 action-adventure game from Sucker Punch Productions, begins with its heroine as a girl pinned against a burning ginkgo tree by her own father's katana. Her family has been slaughtered. Her home has been destroyed.…
Among UsAmong Us, an online deduction game from the American studio Innersloth, arrived in June 2018 to an audience of roughly 30 to 50 players online at any one time. In late September 2020, the same game peaked at 3.8 million concurrent players.…
Hades (video game)Hades is a 2020 action game from Supergiant Games in which the hero dies again and again, and that failure is the point. Its hero, Zagreus, is the son of the ruler of the Underworld, and he badly wants to leave home. Every attempt turns…
Hollow Knight: SilksongHollow Knight: Silksong, a 2025 Metroidvania from the Australian independent studio Team Cherry, spent years as a game people talked about more than played. On the 16th of January 2021, a YouTube fan channel called Daily Silksong News…
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…
Street Fighter IIStreet Fighter II's combos began as a bug that the team chose to keep. It appeared in the car-smashing bonus stage.
Final Fantasy XIVSquare Enix rebuilt Final Fantasy XIV from scratch while the failed original kept running.
CapcomCapcom was close to financial collapse in the late 1980s. A strip mahjong game called Mahjong Gakuen pulled it back.
Electronic ArtsElectronic Arts, which once put its programmers in full-page ads, agreed in 2025 to a $55 billion buyout.
Super Mario 64Super Mario 64 is a 1996 platform game from Nintendo for the Nintendo 64, and a sealed copy of it holds the record for the largest sum ever paid for a video game. That sale happened in July 2021. Heritage Auctions' specialist said: "It…
Hitman 3Hitman 3 was announced on the 11th of June 2020 at the PlayStation 5 reveal event, under the tagline 'Death Awaits'. It is a stealth game from IO Interactive, the eighth main installment in the Hitman series and the third game in the World…
Mortal Kombat 1Mortal Kombat 1 is a fighting game that Japan, South Korea and China have banned because of its violence and gore. NetherRealm Studios developed it, and Warner Bros. Games published it. It is the twelfth main entry in the Mortal Kombat…
Cyberpunk 2077Cyberpunk 2077 broke a record within hours of its midnight GMT launch on the 10th of December 2020. More than one million people played it at once on Steam, and one million viewers watched live on Twitch. Together, the figures doubled the…
Ghost of TsushimaGhost of Tsushima is a 2020 action-adventure game from Sucker Punch Productions, published by Sony Interactive Entertainment. Its hero is Jin Sakai, a samurai defending Tsushima Island during the first Mongol invasion of Japan, which began…
Genshin ImpactGenshin Impact, a 2020 action role-playing game from the Chinese studio miHoYo, caused an uproar before anyone could play it. At the ChinaJoy convention in 2019, fans of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild gave the Sony booth the…
Control (video game)Control is a 2019 action-adventure game from Remedy Entertainment, and nearly all of it takes place inside a single building in New York City. From the street, the Oldest House looks like a featureless concrete skyscraper. Inside, it is…