GameRankings

• 1. Introduction

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  GameRankings launched in 1999 with a straightforward premise: gather every review a video game had ever received, convert them all to percentages, and produce a single number that gamers could trust. Owned by CBS Interactive, the site eventually indexed over 315,000 articles covering more than 14,500 games. For two decades it became a default stop for anyone deciding whether to buy a title. Then, on the 9th of December 2019, it shut down entirely. The questions worth asking are how it worked, why its scoring philosophy set it apart from rivals, and which games ultimately sat at the very top when the lights went out.

• 2. Gathering the Reviews

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  GameRankings collected reviews from hundreds of American and European websites and magazines. Crucially, it linked to those reviews rather than hosting them. The site did not treat every submission equally. From the full pool of available reviews, only those GameRankings judged to be notable were factored into a game's average score. A game needed to accumulate at least six total reviews before it received any ranking at all. Once that threshold was crossed, the game earned two positions: one against every other game in the database, and one against other games on the same console.

• 3. Converting Every Score

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  Not every outlet rated games the same way. Some scored out of 5, others out of 10, and some used letter grades. GameRankings converted all of them into percentages through a consistent conversion process. An A-plus became 100%, identical to a perfect 10/10 score. A straight A landed at 95%, and the scale continued downward in five-point increments from there. That common currency made it possible to average scores across sources that would otherwise be incomparable.

• 4. A Mean Without Weighting

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  Where GameRankings diverged sharply from its chief rival Metacritic was in its philosophy toward aggregation. Metacritic applied a weighted system that assigned more influence to certain outlets. GameRankings refused that approach. Its average was a simple mean of every score from every accredited source, with no outlet treated as more authoritative than another. That design choice was a deliberate statement about objectivity, and it shaped the numbers the site produced for every game across its twenty-year run.

• 5. The Games at the Top

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  At the moment of closure in December 2019, only seven games had ever reached an aggregate score of 97% or higher. Those seven were Super Mario Galaxy, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Super Mario Odyssey, Super Mario Galaxy 2, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Grand Theft Auto IV, and Grand Theft Auto V. No other game in the database of more than 14,500 titles had cleared that threshold. The list leaned heavily toward Nintendo franchises, with five of the seven slots belonging to Mario or Zelda titles.

• 6. Shutdown and Merger

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  GameRankings did not close because it failed. Its staff were folded into Metacritic, the other major review aggregator under CBS Interactive, meaning the institutional knowledge did not simply disappear. The site's domain redirected to Metacritic from the 9th of December 2019 onward. The merger left Metacritic as the surviving standard in game review aggregation, carrying forward a space that GameRankings had helped define across two decades of indexed critical opinion.