The 21 best video games of the 20th century

Making a video game list is always riding on swampy ground. Have to choose the best games of the 20th century, stopping to choose one of each year from 1980 to 2000, is throwing yourself to the lions smeared with barbecue sauce. There are so many games, and so good, special or worth mentioning, that staying with one is tremendously difficult.

But I think that in the end we have dodged several bullets quite well and, in search of variety and that different great sagas can have their particular minute of glory, there has been a compilation with which it is worth doing a retro gaming marathon this summer. And of course, if you think that you ready It would be very different, the comments are the perfect place to share it with us and the rest of the users.

‘Pac-Man’ (1980)

• More great games of that year: ‘Centipede’.

If there were a Triforce in the world of early video games, its tips would be occupied by ‘Pong’, ‘Space Invaders’ and ‘Pac-Man’. The game that my parents knew as comecocos (at that time I was not even in their plans) knew how to deliver a different experience to all the copies of the other two games that were at that time. An excellent example of what innovation meant in those early years.

‘Donkey Kong’ (1981)

• More great games of that year: ‘Defender’, ‘Galaga’, ‘Frogger’.

The first Mario game, although at that time it was called Jumpman, and the first great success of the mythical Shigeru Miyamoto. It is one of the first games to tell a kind of story that, in the background, added some narrative, which added to the particular characters that swarmed there made the machine a media success. As a curiosity, the gorilla of that time is not the ‘Donkey Kong’ we know today, but Grandfather Cranky Kong.

‘Pitfall!’ (1982)

• More great games of that year: ‘Dig Dug’, ‘Donkey Kong Jr.’, ‘Q * bert’.

With four million copies sold and different versions for a good handful of machines, ‘Pitfall!’ became a benchmark in the video game world, as well as one of the most important pillars for what would later become a standard between genres, side-scrolling platforms.

‘Dragon’s Lair’ (1983)

• More great games of that year: ‘Mario Bros.’, ‘Spy Hunter’, ‘Manic Miner’.

From the hand of the mythical Don Bluth came a magnificent idea that would end up unnerving more than one. Mixing video games and cartoons, the game was a constant succession of quick time events, situations in which it was necessary to press the appropriate button to overcome each danger that presented itself to us. Far from being a game of skill, it was time to learn the game from cover to cover in order to overcome it.

‘Tetris’ (1984)

• More great games of that year: ‘Marble Madness’, ‘Balloon Fight’, ‘Duck Hunt’.

Without a doubt one of the great games on the list, and probably also one of the most important and universal. The tetriminos (that’s how the falling pieces are called) of Alexey Pajitnov’s ‘Tetris’ were a hit from the Soviet Union that enjoyed great fame during the 80s, especially when the market burst and put millions of adults to play after landing as a launch game alongside the Game Boy in 1989.

‘Ghosts’n Goblins’ (1985)

• More great games of that year: ‘Gauntlet’, ‘Super Mario Bros.’, ‘Gradius’.

Although there are other games from this year that would deserve the spot, if ‘Ghosts’n Goblins’ hadn’t existed, neither would the term “the ‘Dark Souls’ of the (insert any genre)” either would have. Difficult as he is alone, it is the perfect example of how arcade machines embraced extreme difficulty to become a profitable business.

‘The Legend of Zelda’ (1986)

• More great games of that year: ‘Kid Icarus’, ‘Dragon Quest’, ‘Bubble Bobble’.

With Miyamoto once again at the helm, ‘The Legend of Zelda’ comes to the NES with the intention of becoming the first of almost 20 video games under the same name, one of Nintendo’s most valuable franchises and also one of its largest gaming machines. make money with more than 80 million copies sold through all your deliveries.

‘Mega Man’ (1987)

• More great games of that year: ‘Contra’, ‘Maniac Mansion’, ‘Punch-Out !!’

From the hand of an android called Rock, Capcom gave us the definitive side-scrolling action platform, a game in which the character would evolve thanks to the objects collected when finishing different bosses, thus adding a constant change to the form to play. At some point in history the saga lost its touch, although it seems to want to regain it with its eleventh installment of the main series.

‘Super Mario Bros. 3’ (1988)

• More great games of that year: ‘Mega Man 2’, ‘Final Fantasy II’, ‘Altered Beast’.

Although the plumber might have topped the list from other years, we were saving the best for last with ‘Super Mario Bros. 3’, a game that we couldn’t taste in Europe until three years after its release. Probably the most acclaimed work of the first phase in Mario’s life, this is where many of the elements that we would later see in later games are introduced.

‘SimCity’ (1989)

• More great games of that year: ‘Golden Ax’, ‘Mother’, ‘Final Fight’.

From what he supposed in his day and the legacy that he has left us later in terms of management games, it was inevitable that ‘SimCity’ had a special place here. Building and maintaining your own city was the first in an almost endless list of simulators from which ‘The Sims’ would also be born, the best-selling game in the history of the PC.

‘The Secret of Monkey Island’ (1990)

• More great games of that year: ‘Super Mario World’, ‘F-Zero’, ‘King’s Quest V’.

The game with which Ron Gilbert was crowned in the world of graphic adventures, a point-and-click adventure that forced us to break our heads creating combinations of objects as crazy as a rubber chicken and a pulley to overcome their puzzles. A game that falls short of the word mythical and that is, even today, referenced in many cultural works.

‘Street Fighter 2’ (1991)

• More great games of that year: ‘Another World’, ‘TLoZ: A Link to the Past’, ‘Lemmings’.

Despite being the second in the saga, he is the first with a face and eyes that showed his characters as we know them today. He also took it upon himself to show us what could be done when you could fight a friend and create endless combos and special attacks to leave him shattered.

‘Wolfenstein 3D’ (1992)

• More great games of that year: ‘Super Mario Kart’, ‘Sonic 2’, ‘Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis’.

The typical example of a game that changes everything and marks the future of a genre, in this case that of FPS. Turned into a great success with the public and critics, ‘Wolfenstein 3D’ took us to World War II to end the N***s in a castle full of dangers, colored keys and final bosses.

‘Doom’ (1993)

• More great games of that year: ‘Myst’, ‘Secret of Mana’, ‘Day of the Tentacle’.

With the revolution of its previous game still brewing, id Software presented ‘Doom’, a game with a great violent load that would become one of the first titles to receive battles and become controversial. That mattered little to their sales figures, managing to generate with their success a fever for this type of titles that generated a festival of clones.

‘Super Metroid’ (1994)

• More great games of that year: ‘Donkey Kong Country’, ‘System Shock’, ‘Earthworm Jim’.

After a second installment for the Game Boy, ‘Super Metroid’ returned Samus to the desktop machines to finish defining much of the game’s imaginary, including the dinosaur-shaped pirate boss Ridley. We owe him the metroidvania genre at a time when a large part of the public was already thinking about the launch of a new generation of consoles.

‘Chrono Trigger’ (1995)

• More great games of that year: ‘Warcraft 2’, ‘Command & Conquer’, ‘Rayman’.

Until now there were few RPGs on the list, but with ‘Chrono Trigger’ the revival of the genre begins. From the hand of the old Squaresoft, one of the most ambitious games of that time came to the NES. At the wheel were the creator of ‘Final Fantasy’, the one from the ‘Dragon Quest’ saga and the artist Akira Toriyama. A dream team that Nobuo Uematsu ended up completing by collaborating on its soundtrack.

‘Pokémon Red and Blue’ (1996)

• More great games of that year: ‘Quake’, ‘Resident Evil’, ‘Super Mario 64’.

96 was a year to frame that even the addition of other great games doesn’t really do it justice. However, you had to stay with one, and it has been impossible to ignore the wonder that the first edition of ‘Pokémon’ was, undoubtedly one of the most recognized and important franchises in the history of the video game.

‘Final Fantasy VII’ (1997)

• More great games of that year: ‘GoldenEye 007’, ‘Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee’, ‘Castlevania: Symphony of the Night’.

After a license that passed from hand to hand until Sony managed to get hold of it to launch it exclusively on PlayStation, the seventh installment of the ‘Final Fantasy’ saga is probably the most mythical of all (although not the most acclaimed at the playable level) . Its embrace of 3D made it one of the most expensive games to develop at the time, but also an unprecedented hit in the RPG genre.

‘Half-Life’ (1998)

• More great games of that year: ‘StarCraft’, ‘Metal gear Solid’, ‘TLoZ: Ocarina of Time’.

Another one that undoubtedly marked the future of an entire generation of video games was Valve’s title, ‘Half-Life’, Gordon Freeman’s first adventure. An enviable game that taught us that the story could be told through in-game situations and without the need for cinematics. Even more impressive is that we are facing a title that ran on a modified version of the ‘Quake’ engine.

‘Super Smash Bros.’ (1999)

• More great games of that year: ‘Age of Empires 2’, ‘System Shock 2’, ‘Silent Hill’.

A game on the agenda for the presentation of its latest installment for Nintendo Switch with ‘Super Smash Bros. Ultimate’, it was the first to include different characters from the most important Nintendo franchises, placed here to fight each other and that Let’s spend whole afternoons in front of the television in the company of three more friends.

‘Diablo 2’ (2000)

• More great games of that year: ‘The Sims’, ‘Deus Ex’, ‘Counter-Strike’.

Having already placed great games from other companies on the front line, in 2000 we must take advantage of the launch of the second installment of ‘Diablo’ to make room for another mythical, Blizzard, on the list. A tremendous RPG that has found its way into many lists of the best games in history and that, of course, also deserved to be here.