Curated playlist

Video games set in the United States

Ultra Street Fighter IIUltra Street Fighter II lets you throw Ryu's Hadouken by holding a Joy-Con in each hand.
Resident Evil (2002 video game)Resident Evil, the 2002 survival horror game that Capcom made for the GameCube, ended its development with an exhausting sprint. Its programmers worked for two straight months with no days off to meet the deadline. The game was a remake of…
Hyper Street Fighter IIHyper Street Fighter II, released by Capcom in 2003 for the PlayStation 2, contains only 17 unique characters. Yet those fighters appear in 65 different versions, each one carried over from an earlier arcade game. That number turns a…
Super Street Fighter II TurboIn Japan, no arcade game earned more in 1994 than Super Street Fighter II Turbo. Capcom built it for arcade cabinets as the fifth installment in the Street Fighter II sub-series, following Super Street Fighter II from 1993. Oddly, it did…
X-Men vs. Street FighterX-Men vs. Street Fighter gave each player two fighters instead of one. Capcom's 1996 arcade game used a tag system.
Metal Gear Solid: The Twin SnakesThe Twin Snakes began with a chance meeting in a Nintendo cafeteria.
Resident Evil 3 (2020 video game)Resident Evil 3 is a horror game from Capcom, released in 2020, in which a former police officer named Jill Valentine tries to get out of a city full of zombies. She is not simply fleeing. Something was built to find her, and it keeps…
Assassin's Creed IIIAssassin's Creed III went on sale in North America on the 30th of October 2012 with a secret that its own advertising kept from players. Every promotion showed Connor, a half-Mohawk Assassin. The game itself, however, opened with Haytham…
Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street FighterMarvel kept a comedian's fighter out of Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter abroad for over two decades.
Resident Evil 2 (2019 video game)Resident Evil 2, the 2019 survival horror game from Capcom, begins on the night of the 29th of September 1998. A rookie police officer named Leon S. Kennedy is heading for Raccoon City to start his first shift. A college student named…
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…
Resident Evil RequiemResident Evil Requiem sold five million copies in its first five days, which made it the fastest-selling game in the long-running Resident Evil series. Capcom released it on the 27th of February 2026, and critics greeted it warmly. It is…
Fallout (franchise)In the Fallout franchise, the world ends in a two-hour nuclear exchange on the morning of the 23rd of October 2077, eastern daylight time. Everything in the series grows from the wreckage. Fallout is an American media franchise of…
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…
Grand Theft Auto IVGrand Theft Auto IV sold more than 3.6 million copies in the first twenty-four hours after its release in 2008. That worked out to roughly 310 million dollars in revenue. The game came from Rockstar North and Rockstar Games, and it centres…
Resident Evil ZeroResident Evil Zero begins on the 23rd of July 1998, aboard a train called the Ecliptic Express. The train belongs to the pharmaceutical company Umbrella, and a swarm of leeches is tearing through its passengers and crew. On a nearby…
Manhunt (video game)Manhunt, a stealth game from Rockstar North, reached the PlayStation 2 in November 2003 with a premise that few players had met before. You control a death row inmate who is forced to star in snuff films, killing gang members while cameras…
Kingdom Hearts IIIKingdom Hearts III, a 2019 action role-playing game from Square Enix, sold more than five million copies in under two weeks. That made it the fastest-selling title in its series. The road to that launch was far slower. Rumors, delays and…
Street Fighter AlphaStreet Fighter Alpha was built for two different arcade boards at once. Capcom had leftover stocks of both.
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…
Street FighterStreet Fighter player Daigo Umehara parried 15 hits in a row with one pixel of health left in 2004.
Batman: ArkhamBatman: Arkham is a video game series built on one long feud between Batman and the Joker. Its main games have sold more than 32 million copies worldwide. Eidos Interactive first published the series, and Warner Bros. Games publishes it…
Uncharted 4: A Thief's EndUncharted 4: A Thief's End was already in strangers' hands on the 26th of April 2016, ahead of its official launch. Amazon had begun shipping copies early. The next day, a batch bound for retail stores in the United Kingdom was stolen in…
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,…
Resident Evil (1996 video game)Resident Evil, the 1996 survival horror game from Capcom for the PlayStation, was never expected to become a hit. Its producer, Tokuro Fujiwara, said it was aimed at a core audience, and he thought it would sell only around 200,000 copies.…
Resident Evil 2Resident Evil 2 is a 1998 survival horror game made and published by Capcom for the PlayStation. Across every platform it reached, it sold more than 6 million copies. That success came from a second attempt. The sequel players bought was…
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…
Batman: Arkham KnightBatman: Arkham Knight is a 2015 action-adventure game made by Rocksteady Studios and published by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. It opens on Halloween night, as Gotham City's six million civilians are evacuated. Only criminals…
Beyond: Two SoulsBeyond: Two Souls, a 2013 video game from the studio Quantic Dream, was built on a script of around 2,000 pages. A typical screenplay runs between 95 and 125 pages, with each page worth roughly a minute of screen time. Elliot Page, who…
Silent Hill 4: The RoomIn Silent Hill 4: The Room, the safest place becomes the deadliest. Henry's apartment first heals him, then hurts him.
Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Fate of Two WorldsLegal disputes kept Marvel vs. Capcom silent for close to ten years. Capcom won back the Marvel license in 2008.
Street Fighter X TekkenStreet Fighter X Tekken shipped with 12 paid characters already on the disc. Capcom said it locked them to save space.
Super Street Fighter IISuper Street Fighter II let eight players compete in one tournament across four linked arcade cabinets.
Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3The 2011 Tohoku earthquake led Capcom to make Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3. Planned add-ons became a separate game.
Grand Theft Auto OnlineGrand Theft Auto Online went live on the 1st of October 2013 and asked its players to start as nobodies in the state of San Andreas. The state is fictional and based on Southern California. Up to 30 players can share its open world at the…
Death Stranding 2: On the BeachHideo Kojima, the director of Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, responded to glowing playtest results by tearing up part of his own script. Roughly halfway through development, audiences testing the game liked it a great deal. Kojima told…
Batman: Arkham OriginsBatman: Arkham Origins, a 2013 action-adventure game, begins on a snowy Christmas Eve in Gotham City with a price on one man's head: fifty million dollars. Eight professional killers are on their way to collect it. The man who posted the…
Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive EditionGrand Theft Auto: The Trilogy , The Definitive Edition sank to a user score of 0.4 out of 10 on Metacritic, among the lowest the site has recorded. Some of the players behind that number were demanding refunds. The collection bundled three…
Metal Gear Rising: RevengeanceMetal Gear Rising: Revengeance, released in 2013 by PlatinumGames and Konami, carries a grudge in its very title. The final word was chosen because Kojima Productions wanted to get revenge on an earlier project that had failed. That…
Tekken 3Tekken 3, a fighting game from Namco, sold more than one million copies in Japan on the day it reached the PlayStation. Few games begin their life at home with a number like that. Behind it lies a story that starts in the arcade, runs…
Street Fighter IIStreet Fighter II's combos began as a bug that the team chose to keep. It appeared in the car-smashing bonus stage.
Final Fight (video game)Final Fight, Capcom's arcade brawler, began as Street Fighter '89. Operators said the name was misleading.
Resident Evil 6Resident Evil 6 was made by a development staff of more than 600 people, the largest team Capcom had ever put on a single production. The 2012 third-person shooter was a major installment in the Resident Evil series, and Capcom both…
Call of Duty: VanguardCall of Duty: Vanguard reached players on the 5th of November 2021, the 18th main game in the Call of Duty series. Sledgehammer Games built it and Activision published it. It launched on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One, and…
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six SiegeTom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege is a Ubisoft shooter with no story campaign, and it still passed 70 million registered players by December 2020. Ubisoft Montreal built it around a single idea: two teams fighting over one building at a time.…
Heavy RainHeavy Rain, the 2010 video game from the studio Quantic Dream, grew out of a scare in a shopping mall. Its writer and director, David Cage, briefly lost track of his son there. The episode made him ask himself "what it means to love your…
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…