Curated playlist

The Game Awards winners

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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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 InfiniteHalo Infinite, the sixth mainline game in the Halo series, was first shown to the public on the 23rd of July 2020, and the response was harsh. Eurogamer wrote that it looked like "the fake plastic trees version of Halo, like a video game…
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…
Alan Wake 2Alan Wake 2 cost a reported 70 million euros, which makes it one of the most expensive cultural products in the history of Finland. Remedy Entertainment developed the 2023 survival horror game, and Epic Games Publishing released it. Its…
PUBG: BattlegroundsPUBG: Battlegrounds, a battle royale video game from 2017, once had 2,279,084 people playing it on Steam at the same moment. It reached that peak while still officially unfinished, listed as an early access title. The game began as a…
Final Fantasy VII RemakeFinal Fantasy VII Remake's reveal sent Square Enix's stock to its highest point since November 2008.
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.
Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii UA 2015 Smash fan poll kept its top winners secret until October 2021. Sora and Banjo and Kazooie led the vote.
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…
Super Smash Bros. UltimateSuper Smash Bros. Ultimate began with a dying wish from Nintendo's president. It was Satoru Iwata's last request.
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…
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,…
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.
CD ProjektCD Projekt began in May 1994 with only $2,000 and a friend's flat that served as a rent-free office. Two Poles, Marcin Iwiński and Michał Kiciński, founded the Warsaw company. Both had been selling games, and neither had ever built one.…
Persona 5Persona 5 opens in an interrogation room in Tokyo, and it keeps pulling the player back there. The 2016 role-playing game, built by the Atlus development studio P-Studio, is the sixth installment in the Persona series, which grew out of…
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…
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…
Black Myth: WukongBlack Myth: Wukong is a 2024 action role-playing game from the Chinese studio Game Science. On the 22nd of August 2024, more than 2.4 million people were playing it on Steam at the same moment. Only PUBG: Battlegrounds had ever drawn a…
Final Fantasy XIVSquare Enix rebuilt Final Fantasy XIV from scratch while the failed original kept running.
Astro BotBy April 9, 2025, the PlayStation 5 game Astro Bot had become the most awarded platformer of all time.
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…
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…
Umamusume: Pretty DerbyOn the 26th of March 2016, a panel at the AnimeJapan event revealed concept art for a cast of racing girls with horse ears and tails. An animated trailer from the studio P.A. Works came with it. This was the first public look at Umamusume:…
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…
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…
Nier: AutomataNier: Automata, a 2017 action role-playing game made by PlatinumGames and published by Square Enix, ends with an unusual request. When the story is over, the closing credits turn into a shooting game that the player must fight through.…
Helldivers 2Helldivers 2 begins with a fall. Players drop onto hostile planets inside a metal pod called a Hellpod, launched from a starship known as a Super Destroyer. Once on the ground, they call down bombardments by tapping out sequences of…
Final Fantasy TacticsFinal Fantasy Tactics tells of a war that its own church secretly engineered.
Donkey Kong BananzaDonkey Kong Bananza gives a gorilla one job: dig down, and smash whatever gets in the way. Nintendo EPD developed the 2025 platform game for the Nintendo Switch 2, and its landscapes crumble under nearly every punch, slap and throw. The…
Street Fighter 6Street Fighter 6 sold more than one million units within five days of going on sale. Capcom both developed and published the 2023 fighting game, and it counts as the seventh main entry in the Street Fighter franchise. That early number…
Grand Theft Auto VIGrand Theft Auto VI, the next game from Rockstar Games, drew 46 million views for its first trailer within twelve hours of release. That set a record for a non-music video on YouTube, and the game itself had not yet reached players. It is…
Resident Evil 4Resident Evil 4 is a 2005 survival horror game from Capcom, released first for the GameCube, and by March 2025 it had sold 15.2 million copies. Its hero is Leon S. Kennedy, a special agent dropped into rural Spain on a rescue mission.…
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…
Resident Evil 7: BiohazardResident Evil 7: Biohazard, a 2017 survival horror game from Capcom, begins with an email. It comes from Mia, a woman who has been missing for three years. Her husband, systems engineer Ethan Winters, follows the message to a derelict…
Disco ElysiumA man wakes in a trashed hostel room in the district of Martinaise, with a savage hangover and no memory of who he is. He does not know his name, his profession, or anything about the world beyond the door. This is how Disco Elysium…