Curated playlist

Linux games

Star Wars: X-Wing (video game)Star Wars: X-Wing sold out its first 100,000 copies before the weekend was over.
Tomb Raider (2013 video game)In November 2010, Square Enix filed a trademark for a slogan, "A Survivor is Born," to promote a new Tomb Raider game. That game arrived in 2013 from the developer Crystal Dynamics, and it did not simply continue Lara Croft's story. It…
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,…
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…
Quake (video game)Only one developer came in to upload Quake on launch day. That was John Romero, who left id Software soon after.
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…
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,…
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…
Hollow KnightHollow Knight has sold more than 15 million copies as of August 2025, and it was built by Team Cherry, a small independent studio based in Adelaide, Australia. The player controls a nameless insectoid warrior, commonly called the Knight,…
UndertaleUndertale began as a request for US$5,000. When the crowdfunding campaign for the role-playing game closed on the 25th of July 2013, 2,398 backers had pledged US$51,124, more than ten times the goal. Behind the page stood Toby Fox, an…
Portal (video game)Portal, a 2007 puzzle-platform game from Valve, begins with an artificial intelligence promising a silent woman named Chell a reward of cake. The reward is for surviving a long run of laboratory tests. Players soon learn to distrust that…
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…
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…
Alien: IsolationAlien: Isolation is a 2014 survival horror game in which the monster hunting the player cannot be killed. Creative Assembly developed it and Sega published it. No weapon in the game ends the threat. The player can only hide, listen and…
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…
Baldur's Gate 3Wizards of the Coast first turned down Larian Studios' bid to make Baldur's Gate 3 in 2014.
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…
DaikatanaDaikatana sold only 40,351 copies in the United States through September 2000. Forecasts had once hoped for 2.5 million.
Rise of the Tomb RaiderRise of the Tomb Raider, a 2015 action-adventure game from Crystal Dynamics, opens a year after Lara Croft's ordeal on Yamatai. She is an archaeologist who cannot explain the supernatural events she lived through there, and she is…