Dave's Video Game Hall of Fame

Portal (2007)

Portal exemplifies the art of crafting an entire game around a central mechanic. Even without its stellar theme and personality, the game would be a hit because the fundamental puzzle mechanic is inventive, captivating, and thoughtful. Then, add in the characters and (somewhat obfuscated) plot and it becomes what I consider the best game ever made. Its blend of immersion, motion, aesthetics, smart puzzles, pacing, calm reflection, and an overall cohesive experience is simply unparalleled.

Minecraft (2011)

In my early days of diving into game creation, I had the idea to build a game where users could add or remove items, build buildings, and generally modify their world. I started work on it, but due to other commitments was never able to finish it. Years after that, Minecraft came out, and it is the best embodiment of that idea for me. Minecraft is by far the most creative video game I've ever played. It is meditative and beautiful, and I've gone back to play it for long hours many times over the last decade, both solo and with friends.

Factorio (2020)

Factorio is an ode to automation. You do a task such as mining resources, then create a machine to automate doing the task for you. Then you chain together these machines using conveyor belts and robot arms, automating more and more. The raw technical achievement of this game is incredible -- the sheer number of automation machines and conveyor belts you can have running at one time, in real time, is simply amazing. The game's fun, addictive mechanics, combined with its ability to push the boundaries of what's possible in a game, more than earn it a spot on this list.

Hollow Knight (2017)

Hollow Knight is a crowning achievement in the metroidvania genre. It is dark, beautiful, engaging, and immersive. It is quite difficult and combat-oriented, but also at times quiet, calm, and meditative. When you explore the world of this game, you are rewarded tenfold with gorgeous surroundings and curious oddities. The value for dollar of this game at $15 is astronomical.

Braid (2008)

Braid masterfully builds an entire experience around a single core idea. Each level adds a new inventive mechanic around the theme of controlling time. The puzzles are fun and well-tuned for difficulty without any need for explicit mechanisms for managing flow or difficulty settings. The art for the game is absolutely top-tier and is much of the reason for the game's commercial success. Braid is a game I look to when I need a model for how to make a game as a small development team.

Half-Life 2 (2004)

Half-Life 2 is an exemplary mix of first-person action, adventure, and heartfelt, engaging story. It is a game that really defined what gaming is and can be for me. Its villain, Dr. Breen, is magnificently philosophical and intelligent and his motivations are honestly believable. The worldbuilding, scenery, character development, and voice acting all combine into an experience that will shape you as a gamer and even possibly as a person. If you can look beyond its older graphics and texture resolutions, this game is an absolute must-play for any PC gamer and is the game that made Steam into a platform.

The Talos Principle (2014)

The Talos Principle carves its niche as a philosophical puzzle game. It is contemplative, emphasizes tradition and belief, and mixes in dynamic puzzle gameplay in beautiful settings that show various cultures in various stages of decay. Its musical score is wandering, mystical, and curious, and I've listened to it on its own even outside of the game. The game includes nostalgic old-style green text terminals, which allow you to explore the concepts and philosophies of the game through reconstructing an old text library of knowledge. This is the only game I've ever played that has given me cause, space, and time to reconsider and contemplate my own actual core beliefs.

Shadow of the Colossus (2012)

Fumito Ueda, designer of Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and The Last Guardian, has a unique design style that he refers to as "design by subtraction". The game's landscapes are sparse, and the story is minimalistic, telling only the bare minimum to involve the player in the story. In addition, he avoids using words and explanations, which ends up dramatically improving the player's sense of immersion in the game. In Shadow of the Colossus, the player fights gigantic enemies, which helps to create a dramatic sense of persisting alone against an insurmountable situation. The game's mechanics can be frustrating at times, but if you have it in you to endure, you will be rewarded with a magnificent, unforgettable experience.

Journey (2012)

"Flow" is the concept that if a game is too hard, it will be frustrating, and if it's too easy, it will be boring, so the game must walk a careful tightrope of difficulty between these pitfalls. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi discovered the idea of flow, and Journey's designer Jenova Chen used the concept of flow to design mechanisms of dynamically adjusting the game's difficulty that he used for Flow, Flower, Journey, and other games. Dynamically adjusting the difficulty avoids the awkward problem of asking the player to select a difficulty, and then the risk of that decision being incorrect, even for a relatively short time as the player is playing the game. Built on that foundation, Journey is a meditative, memorable, beautiful experience.

The Dig (1995)

Early Point-and-click adventure games often seemed indifferent, if not downright hostile, to players. The player was expected to click through their inventory, randomly trying items together and in the world, to see what works with no rhyme or reason. Games would allow the player to proceed down long dead-end plot paths, then force them to reload a much earlier save and play again. This was fine if your goal was to give the player a challenge, but then Lucasarts games such as The Dig came along and showed us that there was another way. The Dig didn't treat the player as an opponent; instead, it involved the player as a character in an engaging movie-style plot, with only minor gameplay elements. It did have some puzzles, but the puzzles weren't nearly as hostile, and the game helped the player work their way through them to arrive at a solution without the need of external help such as message boards. In addition, The Dig has the best use of color of any game I've played, with fantastic, foreign landscapes populated by inventive creatures and lore.

Kerbal Space Program (2015)

If you're in orbit, and you want to move faster forward, which way do you thrust? It turns out you thrust backwards, which drops you into a lower orbit and therefore speeds you up. Kerbal built a game around rocket design and orbital mechanics, and somehow managed to make it whimsical and fun at the same time. This is a great achievement both for the public understanding of science and for the art of gamification. Kerbal is my #2 most played game, and it was worth every hour. It provides a marvelous sense of beauty and achievement on every successful flight, and can help you understand real-world rocketry as well.

Plants vs. Zombies (2009)

Before its inundation with microtransactions, PvZ was the best embodiment of a tower defense game. Its perfectly tuned difficulty curve, cute and engaging graphics and sounds, and healthy mixture of core gameplay with variety makes it an addictive classic. The best version to play is probably the Game of the Year edition on Steam.

Star Control II (1992)

Star Control II built on the inventive melee combat of Star Control 1, adding a plot, plenty of character interactions, a gigantic starmap, and 3d renders of spinning planets. It's hard for me to separate the actual quality of the game from the high level of nostalgia I have for it, but this game makes it into my hall of fame because of its inventive variety of races to interact with and surprising depth of combat. It was truly the first open-world (really open-universe) game that I played, and I felt the freedom of being able to go anywhere. To 13-year-old me, it was a true adventure among the stars.

Super Mario Bros. 3 (1988)

Super Mario Bros. 3 marks a change in the gaming industry for me. Before this game, games were all about programmers and video game teams experimenting and striving to give the player a memorable challenge. But SMB3 is different. Rather than trying to obtain fun by showing the player something more extreme, difficult, or surprising than before, SMB3 builds on its traditional heritage, learns from mistakes of the past (Japanese SMB2 was too hard, and US SMB2 was simply a re-skin), and focuses more on having a consistent visual theme and music good enough to stand on its own merit even without the game. It provides the player the right level of challenge, allowing the player to adjust their own difficulty in subtle ways, without explicitly having a difficulty setting. This is the first spark of the idea of flow in video games, and it's part of our international shared cultural history.

Super Mario World (1990)

Super Mario World, on it surface, seems like a logical progression of the Mario series, which own its own would be fun and worth investing in, but not hall-of-fame worthy. But Super Mario World's design is deceptively complex. The addition of the switch palaces allows the player to directly control the difficulty of the game, indicating the game's focus on flow, but then the game adds in the cape, haphazardly allowing Mario to fly over entire levels. The idea that a game could simply break the parameters of flow, saying to the player "Sure, you can skip the whole level, why not?", boosts the player's curiosity and engagement tremendously. The first time you skip a level using the cape, you think "Well! That was fun. But what did I miss?" and you go back and play it again. It indicates the game's confidence in how fun its level designs are, that players will go back and play them just to see them even if they aren't required to to progress. Plus you get to ride a dinosaur.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007)

I'm not usually a fan of war simulators, but this one in particular is interesting for the wide variety of different scenarios it puts you in. You can experience everything from being a camouflaged sniper mere feet from the enemy to avoiding radiation in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. It was clearly made with care and precision, and if you have any interest at all in fighting simulators, this one (really the remastered version) should be on your bucket list.

Doom (1993)

There were 3D shooters before Doom, but Doom was the first major one to have a high level of gore, born of Generation X cynicism and counterculture. Its graphics and world design were revolutionary for the time (it had outdoor areas!) and it really stole the imaginations of tons of teenage and college-age gamers when it was released as shareware. Anti-video game activists like to say that Doom is a cause of violence in the world because it contains violence, but I think the truth is more complex -- the violence of Doom was successful because of the mindset of young adults at its time of release. Gen X's mantra was a general rejection of the core values of the baby boomers (a strong work ethic, an appreciation of luxury and extravagance, and even optimism). Gen X would rather slack off and make fun of the world than try to live in or domineer it, and somehow Doom fit into this culture perfectly. It contained taboo topics such as satanism and wanton violence, and because of that everyone needed to see it and play it for themselves, myself included.

You can't talk about Doom without addressing the Columbine massacre. The perpetrators had an affinity for the Doom series and had created custom maps for it. My take is that their interest in Doom was adjacent to or even a result of their interest in violence, not the other way around. Censorship is not the answer to the problem of violence -- preventing young adults from enjoying interactive entertainment that touches on tough topics doesn't in any way safeguard them from those topics when they encounter them in real life.

When the issue of violence in video games started to make it into the courts as a result of Columbine, a judge in a prominent case ("Sanders v. Acclaim Entertainment, Inc.,") had this to say:

To shield children [...] from exposure to violent descriptions and images would not only be quixotic, but deforming; it would leave them unequipped to cope with the world as we know it. Setting aside any personal distaste, as I must, it is manifest that there is social utility in expressive and imaginative forms of entertainment even if they contain violence.

Games allow you to explore your imagination in ways that other media don't. When the game involves violence, this does mean it allows players to explore violent thoughts in an interactive setting. It is important that gamers be able to build their mental ability to deal with these tough topics, and while games empirically don't cause violence, it is still important to treat these topics carefully and with respect and caution. This is why games have ESRB ratings.

Descent (1994)

Early FPS games such as Doom couldn't render basic architectural elements such as slanted floors or multi-story buildings. Descent challenged this limitation by providing free movement in any direction -- you could strafe, move up and down, roll, and turn. Its levels were three-dimensional caves with circuitous paths that could go any direction and reconnect with themselves. It was a ground-breaking technical achievement for the time. After Descent showed what was possible, no games that succeeded after it had any such limitations. Descent's actual gameplay was a bit basic, in that it was just flight combat with robotic ships, but the kind of freedom it represented was exotic.

Duck Hunt (1984)

In 1984 when Duck Hunt was released, CRT TVs were ubiquitous. These TVs all emitted some infrared light in addition to visible light when they were displaying white. The Nintendo Zapper took advantage of this fact by detecting IR light. When the trigger is pulled, the screen goes black for one frame, and the gun's light sensor is polled. Then, the screen goes white where the duck was on screen, and the sensor is polled again. Only if the gun detects black followed by white in these two frames does it count as a hit. It's a brilliant use of technology and a wonderful example of successful outside-the-box thinking.

Mirror's Edge (2008)

A while ago, I had a stretch of a few years where I wasn't into gaming. Mirror's Edge rekindled my passion, masterfully blending lighthearted gameplay with intentional design. At their core, many top games are athletic in nature, and Mirror's Edge is one of the most athletic. It provides a deep level of immersion through rendering the player's body and providing realistic sound effects such as breathing and footsteps. Its minimal use of color is surprisingly engaging and aids the player's navigation through the world. Its music sets a futuristic mood of precision and encouragement. It's downright inspiring, both as an example of building a simple, effective game concept and having fun with it, and as an experience that makes you want to go outside and try parkour.

Quake (1996)

In the early days of 3D first-person gaming, there was no commonly-accepted control scheme. In Doom, you couldn't look up and down, and some people used the keyboard for both movement and for controlling direction. In the mid-90s, games started experimenting both with allowing the player to look up and down and with using the mouse to control it. When Quake was released, it had this feature (called "mlook", and it wasn't enabled by default!) which allowed you to look around using the mouse, both horizontally and vertically, and it included the option to reverse the Y axis, so moving the mouse forward could optionally make your character look up or down. As gamers discovered the idea of using the mouse, it became revolutionary, and the modern control scheme of WASD with mouselook was born. Now this control scheme is default on nearly every first-person game released. Quake was not the first game to have mouse look, but it was the one that really popularized it, in part due to the inclusion of multiplayer game modes. Allowing players to compete head-to-head made it really apparent that the mouse was indeed better than the keyboard for player control, as mouse players consistently defeated keyboard players.

Ragnarok Online (2002)

For a lot of gamers, World of Warcraft was their first serious introduction to MMORPGs. For me it was Ragnarok Online, which came out two years earlier. For any MMO, it is important to have an immersive, engaging world, well-defined character progression, and collaboration, and Ragnarok Online earns high marks in all three categories. Its combination of cute 2D characters with immersive 3D worlds seems unusual at first, but once you're used to it it works well overall. It has both a "base level" and a "job level", and these two levels progress somewhat independently of each other, which is quite clever because sometimes it means you're close to gaining a level, and other times you get two different kinds of levels at once. It allows players to buy and sell items from each other, giving the game a strong bazaar feeling as well. If you are a less-social player (as I am), and want to play independently, it's also possible to succeed this way, as long as you avoid solo boss fights. Ragnarok is still operational and getting regular updates today, more than 20 years after its initial launch, and despite the existence of sequels and knockoffs.

The Witness (2016)

The Witness teaches us how puzzle games should be designed. The puzzles are unique and engaging. The world is gorgeous and immersive. The game allows, even encourages, you to leave a difficult puzzle, to go to some other part of the island, and to continue to progress. Then whenever you want to return to the puzzle you can. Even though the player is alone, the game manages to give you some sense of community by making parts of the world feel lived-in. It provides a universe you simply want to visit and relax in.

World of Goo (2008)

Carnegie Mellon has (had?) a course called the "Experimental Gameplay Project" where students would rapidly prototype 50-100 games in one semester. One of the results of this was a prototype called "Tower of Goo", and this prototype was so successful the author made it into a full game called World of Goo. The Experimental Gameplay Project was where the idea of "juiciness" in games comes from -- that is, the idea that every action the player takes should have immediate auditory/visual feedback. The game is at once wondrous and simple, and it's worth trying out even if you don't like bridge builders.

Super Mario Bros. (1993)

As you probably already know, Mario defined the side-scroller genre. It's an essential, core game for any gamer, even to this day. The way Mario moves was very carefully considered and tuned, and even this early in gaming history, the height Mario jumps is dependent on how long the player holds the jump button down for. Mario is very athletic, and this athleticism helped to sell millions of NES consoles across the world.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (1991)

Zelda games have fueled the imaginations of so many people over the decades. A Link to the Past is one of the earlier in the series, and I think it's the first one for which the game mechanics melt into the background and you really just become the adventurer every child wants to be. It's not particularly easy or particularly hard, it has action, puzzles, dialog, and catchy music, and by all regards it's just an early SNES title, but when you swing your sword into a rock you really feel the jarring impact and the first time it rains in game, the rain really affects your mood. Somehow the game has managed to be appealing, colorful, immersive, engaging, and just downright fun. And this is all with a top-down perspective. Zelda tried out a sidescrolling perspective in Zelda II, and while that game has a huge nostalgia factor for me, the return to form marked a huge success for the Zelda development team, and the game is a masterpiece of its era.

Celeste (2018)

Celeste started at a game jam as a Pico-8 game. At first, it seems like a run-of-the-mill platformer, but as you play you realize it has a lot of depth. The player movement is tuned absolutely perfectly. The mechanics are forgiving -- you very rarely think "But I pushed the button!" -- but the game is anything but easy. There are speedrunning techniques built in that no normal player would ever need, but that are there for the serious players. The game scales its difficulty well with optional sections and pick-ups. The dialogue is a little on-the-nose, but still somehow manages to add to the atmosphere of the game well. The art in the different areas is detailed and charming. However, the real reason this game is here is because of its music, composed by Lena Raine. The music is varied -- it can be simple, complex, slow, fast, moody, nostalgic, or haunting... but above all, it is spellbinding.

Stanley Parable (2013)

It's hard to pin down what genre of game Stanley Parable is, and I like to call it a "causality simulator". It's inventive, funny, and hugely original. It unabashedly breaks the 4th wall, but in a way that somehow maintains immersion in the game's wacky universe. This is a thinking man's game, and if you've ever asked the question "why", this game is for you.

Tetris (1984)

You know what Tetris is. In addition to being fun for so many millions of people in all of its many forms over the years, it has been shown that playing Tetris can measurably help people work through trauma and PTSD.

Dwarf Fortress (2006)

Dwarf Fortress is the deepest video game ever made. It was started in 2002, and has been consistently developed since then. It started as a text console game, but now has a Steam release. Its motto, "Losing is Fun", allows it to infuse real meaning into in-game events. Its entity component system allows everything in the game to interact in unique and unexpected ways. Just as an example of how deep the game is, a dwarf's pet cat in the game, despite being a single ascii character, has fully simulated eyelids. If said cat happens to step in a puddle of beer, it can lap the beer off of its paw and become drunk. The game simulates eons of history for its imaginary world, and it truly transports you there. Just be sure to watch some how to play videos before starting.

Papers, Please (2013)

I've always been a huge fan of games with innovative gameplay. In Papers, Please, you play as a border guard in a facsimile of the Eastern Bloc. You have to check the paperwork of people immigrating into a fictional country. On paper, this idea would never fly, because it just sounds boring. Who would treat paperwork as fun? But the way the game mechanics and social interactions are implemented, and the surprising amount of actual skill it takes to succeed at checking the paperwork, give the game a unique mood, a diversity of ways to play, and genuinely earn it a spot here. If you want to improve your attention to detail, play the heck out of this game.

Starcraft (1998)

Starcraft was a logical progression of the real-time strategy genre after Warcraft. It was built with care, and tuned carefully over time, and becamse a worldwide phenomenon as one of the first e-sports games. One result of the competitive Starcraft scene was the concept of "APM" - Actions Per Minute. Players who did a large number of meaningless actions such as pressing buttons and clicking (i.e. making selection boxes or clicking on units) many times a second generally outperformed their peers who didn't do these things at the game. Why is that? Is it because the sheer number of orders they're giving units is overwhelming the enemy? No. It's because interacting with the game more often increases your connection with the game. When you're reading a novel, you're interacting with it constantly, and that increases your immersion in the novel's world; likewise, the more you interact with a game, the more immersive it is. This is a surprising and core concept, and Starcraft (perhaps unintentionally) taught it to us.