Curated playlist

MacOS games

Hades IIHades II arrived without warning on the 5th of May 2024, and a rival studio rearranged its calendar because of it. Evil Empire had planned to release The Rogue Prince of Persia on the 14th of May. It pushed the launch to later that month…
Star Wars: X-Wing (video game)Star Wars: X-Wing sold out its first 100,000 copies before the weekend was over.
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…
Grand Theft Auto: San AndreasGrand Theft Auto: San Andreas, a 2004 action-adventure game from Rockstar North, gave players one of the most repeated lines in gaming. Early in the story, a mission called "Wrong Side of the Tracks" goes badly, and Big Smoke shouts, "All…
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…
Heroes of the StormIn Heroes of the Storm, every player on a team levels up together. Fallen minions feed one shared team pool.
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…
The Walking Dead (video game)The Walking Dead, a 2012 episodic graphic adventure from Telltale Games, begins with a convicted criminal named Lee Everett in the back of a police car. On the first day of an outbreak, the car strikes a walker and crashes. Dave Fennoy…
League of LegendsLeague of Legends is a multiplayer online battle arena game from Riot Games. Its 2019 World Championship drew more than 100 million unique viewers. That same year, the game regularly reached eight million players online at the same moment.…
AGEOD's American Civil WarIn AGEOD's American Civil War, you run both the army and the government. You can lead either side.
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…
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…
Assassin's Creed IIAssassin's Creed II is a 2009 action-adventure game developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft. It is the sequel to the 2007 game Assassin's Creed. Its hero is Ezio Auditore da Firenze, a young man in Renaissance Italy. His…
Fallout (video game)Fallout, the 1997 role-playing game from Interplay Productions, opens with a narrator voiced by the actor Ron Perlman. In 2026 he recalled that the job paid "40 dollars and a sandwich." It is a modest origin for a game that players and…
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,…
Batman: Arkham AsylumBatman: Arkham Asylum, the 2009 game from Rocksteady Studios, once kept a single developer busy for two years on one garment, Batman's cape. Eidos president Ian Livingstone said the job involved more than 700 animations and sound effects,…
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…
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…
Dragon Age: OriginsDragon Age: Origins got its title before it had any dragons. A random name generator produced the name first.
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…
RobloxRoblox, pronounced ROH-bloks, reported an average of 85.3 million daily active users as of February 2025. The company also says its monthly players include half of all American children under the age of 16. Those numbers belong to an…
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,…
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…
Batman: Arkham CityThe blueprints for Batman: Arkham City were hidden in a secret room inside the warden's office of Batman: Arkham Asylum, the game that came before it. Rocksteady Studios planted those hints in the 2009 original while that game was still…
DeltaruneDeltarune began as a fever dream. In 2011, while Toby Fox was in college, he saw the ending of a video game in his sleep and resolved to build it. The result is an episodic role-playing game from the American indie developer, set in a…
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…
Star Wars: The Force UnleashedIn Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, a small child pulls Darth Vader's lightsaber from his grip.
Darkest of DaysIn the game Darkest of Days, the enemy turns out to be a future version of the good guys.
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…
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…
FortniteFortnite is a 2017 online game from Epic Games that now behaves more like a platform than a single title. Seven distinct modes share one engine and one overall look. They include a contest where up to 100 players fight to be the last one…
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…
Baldur's Gate 3Wizards of the Coast first turned down Larian Studios' bid to make Baldur's Gate 3 in 2014.
Pac-ManPac-Man was first called Puck Man, until executives feared vandals would change the P to an F.
Final Fantasy XIVSquare Enix rebuilt Final Fantasy XIV from scratch while the failed original kept running.
EverQuestSony expected little from EverQuest, but it drew ten thousand subscribers in a day.
Age of MythologyAge of Mythology dropped real history for Zeus, Ra and Odin. Ensemble Studios feared becoming stale and repetitive.
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…
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…
DaikatanaDaikatana sold only 40,351 copies in the United States through September 2000. Forecasts had once hoped for 2.5 million.
Star Wars: The Old RepublicStar Wars: The Old Republic set a Guinness record for the largest voice-over project in entertainment.
BalatroBalatro is a poker-themed card game made by a man who says he does not play poker. The developer goes by LocalThunk, an anonymous solo creator based in Saskatchewan, Canada. He has also said he does not want casinos or gamblers to use his…