Curated playlist
Video games developed in the United States
- Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1992 video game)To beat the 1992 NES Empire Strikes Back game, you must rescue Han Solo and defeat Darth Vader.
- Street Fighter 30th Anniversary CollectionStreet Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection put twelve arcade games on one disc, thirteen on Nintendo Switch.
- Silent Hill HD CollectionKonami had not kept the final source code for Silent Hill 2 and 3. That left the remaster team fixing old bugs again.
- Sid Meier's Antietam!A Sid Meier Civil War wargame skipped retail stores in December 1999. Firaxis tested online-only sales.
- Street Fighter: The Movie (arcade game)Street Fighter: The Movie was an arcade game based on a film based on a game. Critics widely panned the 1995 release.
- Sid Meier's Gettysburg!Firaxis Games made its very first game about the Civil War's bloodiest battle, Gettysburg. It came out in 1997.
- The Last of UsThe Last of Us is a video game series from the studio Naughty Dog, published by Sony Interactive Entertainment, and by early 2023 the franchise had sold more than 37 million games. It takes place in a United States ruined by a mutated…
- Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy's EdgeIn Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy's Edge, you play a droid mechanic who crash lands on Batuu.
- 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.
- Red Dead RedemptionRed Dead Redemption is a 2010 Western from Rockstar San Diego, and it opens with a man who has run out of choices. In 1911, federal agents take the wife and son of a former outlaw named John Marston. The price of their freedom is his skill…
- Capcom Classics CollectionCapcom Classics Collection Vol. 2 chose the Breakout-style Block Block over Super Street Fighter II.
- 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…
- Halo: ReachHalo: Reach, a video game from the studio Bungie, took in US$200 million on its first day on sale. That set a record for the Halo franchise. Yet the game asked players to defend a planet that the series' own fiction had already declared…
- God of War IIIEarly in God of War III, the sea god Poseidon dies at the hands of the Spartan Kratos, and the oceans pour across Greece. He is only the first of many gods to fall. This 2010 action-adventure game, made by Santa Monica Studio for the…
- 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…
- God of War (2005 video game)In God of War, a 2005 game from Santa Monica Studio, a Spartan named Kratos kills a Hydra for the sea god Poseidon. The victory brings him no relief. For ten years he has served the Olympian gods. Now he is tired of the work and the…
- Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade ClassicsIn December 2013, Capcom pulled three Marvel vs. Capcom games from sale. Their licensing deal with Marvel had expired.
- The Last of Us (video game)The Last of Us, a 2013 action-adventure game from Naughty Dog, ends with a man swearing to a girl that his story is true. It is not. Joel gives the oath because Ellie insists on it. Everything before that moment is a long walk toward it.…
- Star Wars: Jedi ArenaStar Wars: Jedi Arena builds a whole game on one Millennium Falcon scene. Luke deflects a floating ball's lasers.
- Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire (video game)The Star Wars game Shadows of the Empire starred a hero most fans had never heard of.
- Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1985 video game)The Empire Strikes Back arcade game was sold as an upgrade kit, which limited its reach.
- Heroes of the StormIn Heroes of the Storm, every player on a team levels up together. Fallen minions feed one shared team pool.
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (2022 video game)The final scene of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II belongs to a text message. A Russian terrorist cell is preparing to hijack a plane when a message arrives from Vladimir Makarov. His instruction is oddly specific: nobody is to speak…
- 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.…
- Five Nights at Freddy's (video game)Five Nights at Freddy's, released in 2014 by Scott Cawthon, ends with its hero getting fired. Night guard Mike Schmidt has just survived a custom seventh night, where the player sets how aggressive the hostile animatronics will be. Then…
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III (2023 video game)Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III reached its audience first as a phone number. In August 2023, Activision shared the number on social media. Players who agreed to a few terms began receiving anonymous messages, such as "we need someone…
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 sold 6.5 million copies in the United States and United Kingdom within its first 24 hours. Those sales brought in $400 million. At the time, that made it the largest entertainment launch ever recorded. The…
- 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…
- 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 3Halo 3, the 2007 Xbox 360 shooter from the studio Bungie, came with a punishment attached for anyone who got it early. Players caught running a leaked copy before launch had their Xbox Live accounts banned until the year 9999. That is a…
- Quake (video game)Only one developer came in to upload Quake on launch day. That was John Romero, who left id Software soon after.
- Silent Hill: Book of MemoriesIn Silent Hill: Book of Memories, a book appears on your birthday and you start rewriting your life.
- Silent Hill: HomecomingIn Silent Hill: Homecoming, the soldier hero was never really a soldier. Alex Shepherd has been in a mental hospital.
- Fallout 3Fallout 3 is a 2008 action role-playing game from Bethesda Game Studios, and it begins with a 19-year-old leaving the shelter where they grew up. Vault 101 is a high-tech fallout shelter, built for survivors of a nuclear war fought 200…
- 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…
- God of War IIGod of War II begins with a god being killed by his own king. Kratos, the Spartan warrior who became the God of War by killing Ares, joins an attack on the city of Rhodes. A giant eagle swoops in and drains a huge share of his powers. It…
- UnchartedBy December 2017, the Uncharted series had sold 41.7 million units worldwide. Uncharted is an action-adventure franchise developed by Naughty Dog and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment. Amy Hennig created it. Its heroes are…
- Portal 2Adam Foster, a Valve employee, ran a bulletin board from his own home phone line. Valve's offices were too modern to support the old protocol. The board served ASCII pictures and scraps of Aperture Science documents to curious players.…
- Shadow of the Tomb RaiderShadow of the Tomb Raider, the 2018 adventure game from Eidos-Montréal, begins with its hero doing something she was clearly told not to do. On the island of Cozumel in Mexico, Lara Croft finds a temple whose painted walls warn of a Mayan…
- God of War: Ghost of SpartaGod of War: Ghost of Sparta began as a puzzle hidden behind a trophy. Players who earned the platinum trophy in God of War III were pointed to a website, spartansstandtall.com. The page showed torrential rain falling into a body of water,…
- Final Fantasy IIIFinal Fantasy III's developers followed a programmer to Sacramento after his work visa expired.
- The Elder Scrolls V: SkyrimA modder made Falskaar for Skyrim as a job application to Bethesda. Bungie hired him instead.
- Prince of PersiaJordan Mechner asked his own brother to play the Prince. For the 1989 game Prince of Persia, Mechner used his brother as the model for the title character. The animation was then built with a technique called rotoscoping, which draws…
- ValorantValorant, a free-to-play shooter from Riot Games, pulled in 1.73 million concurrent viewers on Twitch during the first day of its beta in April 2020. That made it the second most-watched game the platform had ever seen at one moment. Only…
- The Last of Us Part IIThe Last of Us Part II is a 2020 action-adventure game developed by Naughty Dog and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment. It unfolds in a post-apocalyptic United States, four years after the studio's The Last of Us of 2013. Two…