Which is the Best Video Game in the World?

But it took IP newcomer Bethesda’s application of exhaustive, obsessively traditional roleplaying ideals tempered in its fantasy Elder Scrolls games to craft an experience in 2008 that surpassed the original in virtually every way.

Both vast yet densely textured, packed with unforgettable characters and ethical nuance, sonically bleak yet whimsically tuneful once you found the right radio station–Fallout 3 showed us what a haunting and freewheeling post-apocalyptic masterpiece could look like.

Galaga
What’s the plot of Galaga? Who cares: You’ve got a bunch of quarters, and you want to blast a bunch of aliens.

Released stateside in 1981, Galaga is the exemplar of the arcade’s golden age, a simple shoot-em-up where the only objective is to beat the other jerks’ high scores.

Serious players know the trick is to let the aliens tractor-beam your ship, then blast it free with another life, thereby getting double the firepower.)

It’s one of the few old-school arcade games that’s still just as much fun to play today, thereby passing the often cruel test of time.

Red Dead Redemption
Red Dead Redemption‘s gorgeous high plains and scrub-filled landscapes, multilayered missions and sprawling story told with both the verve of a Leone and introspection of a Peckinpah, are just a few of the reasons Rockstar’s 2010 open-world opus deserves top honors on this list.

The player follows former outlaw John Marston through an imagined, at times hallucinatory version of the West (circa 1911), where sudden gun duels and galloping chases ensue, counterbalanced by less treacherous diversions like herding cattle or playing mini-games like five finger fillet.

Yes, it was Grand Theft Auto meets a Western, but in a way that proved Rockstar’s mettle as far more than mere mischievous satire-slinger.

Super Mario Kart
Transforming competitive racing into zany fruit-tossing fun, Super Mario Kart was much more than one of the smartest-looking games on the Super Nintendo.

As the first in what would become a dynastic line of racers, this 1992 gem was full of kart-racing firsts: a circuit mode with varying degrees of difficulty, a split-screen versus mode so you could take on your friends and a battle mode to break up the monotony of straightforward sprints.

And Super Mario Kart launched the series to a rocket start with memorable tracks like Rainbow Road, expert tactics like drifting and maddening equalizers like the lightning bolt.

Wolfenstein 3D
Achtung! If Doom is the father of modern first-person shooters, Wolfenstein 3D is their granddaddy. Made by id Software and released shortly before Doom in May 1992, Wolfenstein 3D cast players as William “B.J.” Blazkowicz, an Allied spy captured by Nazis in World War II.

As Blazkowicz, your job is simple: Escape from Castle Wolfenstein and shoot a bunch of bad guys in the process, which was (and remains) the definition of “thoughtless catharsis”—words that to this day define so much of Wolfenstein 3D‘s progeny.

The Sims
Game designer Will Wright has said The Sims, first released in 2000, was intended as a satire of American consumer culture. Millions of players seem to have missed the joke, happily occupying themselves with the mundane tasks of running a digital minion’s life—from kitting out a new pad to managing bathroom breaks (or else).

It innovated both the “sandbox” category of game in which “goals” are loosely (or not at all) defined, as well as the kind of minutely detailed task management that’s a common feature of so many games today.

Pokemon Red & Blue
For many growing up in the 1990s, the Pokémon craze was unavoidable. And when Pokémon Red and Blue launched in 1998, those franchise-obsessed kids were given the chance to start a critter-filled adventure of their own–one they’d only to that point experienced through TV shows, toys and trading card games

Red and Blue also had all the hallmarks of a strong roleplaying game: addictive turn-based battles, a seemingly endless goal (to catch ’em all), plenty of attainable yet rewarding goals (earning gym badges, leveling up) and an expansive, uncharacteristically friendly world.

The games also managed a feat all-too-rare in the games industry: a setup simple enough to appeal to children, but with layers of strategic depth sufficient to hook adults as well.

Myst
Myst is a perfect example of a monumentally influential game that would be almost excruciatingly painful to play today.

The 1993 graphical adventure famously let players loose—sort of, since it consisted of a slow-loading series of beautifully rendered photos—on a mysterious island.

Despite its now-clunky mechanics, it established an entirely new kind of fiction whose influence can be felt in everything from mythic sci-fi novels to the ABC television show Lost. Its vast popularity also helped establish the then-nascent CD-ROM format.