This week, Kitfox Games founder and CEO Tanya Short swings by the studio to unveil the latest output from game design retreat Polaris: an expert-led list of the 100 most influential video games of all time.
Any such list is purely subjective, but unlike those made by sites like IGN, this one is assembled from the perspective of professional game designers like Brenda Romero, Derek Yu, Soren Johnson, and more. Today Short discusses the process of assembling the list, the influence of each game on the list, and Polaris’ mission to document the ethereal truths and processes of designing games.
Speaking of those ethereal truths, Short set out to explain how these games are a great tool for designers to improve their craft and grow to make influential games of their own.
For your convenience, read the full list below:
Process & Errata
Ties are listed chronologically (oldest first).
Some typos were corrected (there is no such game as Super Smash Bros 64 or Mario 64).
When games were released multi-platform in the same year, they were counted as the same entry (for example, Catherine for PS3 or Xbox).
If someone wrote ‘series’, it was included in the most-populated entry in that series. If an exact entry couldn’t be discerned, it was combined with its most populated version (for example, Spelunky was assumed to be the most-populated, Spelunky (2008)).
In cases where there were ties between two entries in a series as ‘most-populated’, the oldest version ‘won’ the tie (this only happened once).
Pokemon Red, Blue, and Yellow were counted as a single entry.
Despite only videogames being allowed, 6 people wrote in Magic: The Gathering, so we interpreted that as Magic: The Gathering Online.
About the Game Developer Podcast
The Game Developer podcast is a bi-weekly podcast chronicling the triumphs, catastrophes, and everything in-between of game development, sharing lessons and strategies fellow developers can use to hone their craft. The Game Developer Podcast is hosted by Bryant Francis, edited by Pierre Landriau, and features music by Mike Meehan.