Curated playlist
PlayStation (console) games
- Metal Gear Solid (1998 video game)1998 video game
- Capcom vs. SNK: Millennium Fight 2000Capcom vs. SNK: Millennium Fight 2000 opens its story with two powerful organizations trying to ease political tension through martial arts. The Garcia Financial Clique and the Masters Foundation stage a tournament called Millennium Fight…
- Street Fighter CollectionStreet Fighter Collection arrived in 1997 carrying a promise that its title implied: everything you loved about Street Fighter, gathered in one place. Capcom developed and published the compilation for both the Sega Saturn and PlayStation,…
- Street Fighter Alpha 2Street Fighter Alpha 2 made its public debut at the February 1996 AOU show in Tokyo. It arrived less than a year after Street Fighter Alpha: Warriors' Dreams, its direct predecessor. Among the new characters was Sakura, a face that had…
- Mitsumete KnightMitsumete Knight, released in 1998 for the PlayStation, buries an odd detail in its story. A bomb threat happens inside a church, a moment the game leaves unexplained. Players only learn the truth years later, through separate audio…
- X-Men vs. Street FighterX-Men vs. Street Fighter arrived in Japanese arcades in September 1996 and claimed the top spot on Japan's arcade charts the following month. Game Machine tracked the country's most commercially successful arcade releases. The publication…
- Street Fighter Alpha 3Street Fighter Alpha 3 arrived in Japanese arcades during the summer of 1998. It ran on Capcom's CP System II hardware, a board that had powered previous entries in the series. The machine processed sprites and sound to create fast-paced…
- Street Fighter EX2The 1st of July 1998 issue of Game Machine declared Street Fighter EX2 the most-successful arcade game of the month in Japan. Capcom and Arika co-produced the game, releasing it as an arcade title for the Sony ZN-2 hardware. Street Fighter…
- Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super HeroesMarvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes arrived in Japanese arcades in February 1998, and within weeks it had done something its predecessors had not: it flung open the door beyond Street Fighter. For the first time in the series, players…
- Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street FighterMarvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter hit arcades in 1997. Game Machine ranked it the third most successful arcade game in Japan that August. Capcom built the game as the direct sequel to X-Men vs. Street Fighter, which had arrived in…
- X-Men: Children of the Atom (video game)X-Men: Children of the Atom arrived in Japanese arcades in December 1994 carrying a technical problem that would shape every decision its makers faced. The arcade cabinet ran on CP System II hardware and used 32 megabytes of RAM just for…
- Final Fantasy VFinal Fantasy V launched in Japan in December 1992, and within a single day it sold roughly 900,000 cartridges. That opening figure was about 4.5 times the first-day numbers posted by Final Fantasy IV the year before. Japanese authorities…
- Street Fighter: The Movie (console video game)Street Fighter: The Movie arrived on store shelves in September 1995 as a launch title for the PlayStation in North America, and it sold out within a month. That commercial triumph looked, on the surface, like a win. But the critics had…
- Fighter MakerFighter Maker is a series of games for PlayStation consoles and Microsoft Windows that handed players something unusual: the tools to build their own fighters. Not just to choose a character from a roster, but to design one, animate one,…
- Super Gem Fighter Mini MixSuper Gem Fighter Mini Mix arrived in arcades in 1997 with a simple, disarming premise: what if Capcom's most beloved fighters were shrunk down to chibi proportions and sent on ridiculous personal errands? Ryu is looking for worthy…
- Gensō SuikogaidenGensō Suikogaiden placed Nash Latkje at the center of its story. He served Holy Harmonia's Southern Border Defence Force on assignments that would entangle him in the larger conflict of Suikoden II. Both of its volumes are visual novels…
- Street Fighter AlphaStreet Fighter Alpha arrived in arcades in 1995 carrying a question that Capcom had not answered in four years: what comes before Street Fighter II? The last all-new Street Fighter game had been Street Fighter II itself, released in 1991.…
- Final Fantasy VIIFinal Fantasy VII arrived in Japan on the 31st of January, 1997, and within three days had sold over two million copies. That pace was not an accident. It was the product of a project that had burned through multiple platforms, consumed…
- Final Fantasy IXFinal Fantasy IX arrived on the PlayStation in 2000 carrying a quiet act of rebellion. While its two immediate predecessors had chased a sleeker, more cinematic realism, this ninth entry turned deliberately backward, back to medieval…
- Star Wars: Dark ForcesIn September 1993, Daron Stinnett began writing code for a game engine that would change how players saw the Star Wars universe. The team at LucasArts needed to build something new because existing technology could not handle verticality…
- Tokimeki Memorial (video game)Tokimeki Memorial arrived on the PC Engine on the 27th of May 1994, carrying a premise that made seasoned game journalists stop cold. Konami, the company behind Gradius and its reputation for punishing arcade-style challenges, had built a…
- Doom (1993 video game)Doom, released on the 10th of December 1993, crashed a university's network before most people had even heard of it. At midnight, after thirty straight hours of testing, the five-person team at id Software uploaded the first episode to an…
- Silent Hill (video game)Silent Hill arrived on the PlayStation in 1999 with a premise that sounds deceptively simple: an ordinary man drives into a small American town with his adopted daughter, crashes his car, and wakes up to find her missing. What follows is…
- Suikoden (video game)Suikoden, the 1995 role-playing game from Konami, asked players to do something unusual for its time: recruit 108 warriors to overthrow a corrupt empire. Not five. Not ten. One hundred and eight. The number was not arbitrary. It came from…
- Snatcher (video game)1988 adventure game directed by Hideo Kojima
- Final Fantasy IIFinal Fantasy II launched on the 17th of December 1988, almost exactly one year after the original game, and Square's small team of around ten people had already decided it would be nothing like its predecessor. The first game had saved…
- Final Fantasy (video game)Final Fantasy arrived in Japan in 1987 as a last-ditch effort by a company that nearly did not survive to publish it. Square was threatened with bankruptcy. Hironobu Sakaguchi, the game's creator, had privately decided he would quit the…
- Final Fantasy IVFinal Fantasy IV arrived in Japan in 1991, and with it came Cecil Harvey, a dark knight who steers warships through the sky for the Kingdom of Baron. The game opens not with a hero's triumph but with a crime: the Red Wings, Cecil's own…
- Final Fantasy VIFinal Fantasy VI arrived in Japanese homes on the 2nd of April, 1994, carrying a premise that broke from every rule the series had established. Where earlier installments placed players in medieval kingdoms, this game opened with…
- Final Fantasy VIIIFinal Fantasy VIII sold 2.21 million copies on its first day of release in Japan, grossing the equivalent of $151 million in a single day. That figure made it the fastest-selling entry in the Final Fantasy series at the time of its launch…
- Vagrant StoryVagrant Story arrived on the PlayStation on the 10th of February 2000 in Japan, and it came with a peculiar design decision: no shops. In a medium where buying potions and swords from a merchant was as expected as a health bar, Square's…
- Suikoden IISuikoden II arrived on PlayStation shelves in Japan on the 17th of December, 1998, and almost no one noticed. Konami had crafted a role-playing game with over 100 recruitable characters, warring nations, a fractured magical rune, and one…
- Space InvadersSpace Invaders arrived in Japanese arcades in July 1978, and within months the country was running out of places to put the machines. Pachinko parlors and bowling alleys were the first to adopt it when amusement arcade owners passed. Then…
- Final Fantasy TacticsFinal Fantasy Tactics arrived in Japan on the 20th of June 1997, bundled with a demo disc for SaGa Frontier, and it told a story most players had never encountered in a Japanese role-playing game. At its center stood Ramza Beoulve, a…