Daniel's Top 100

In the spring of 2009, I assembled a list of my top thirty favourite video games. It was off the back of a community trend on a video game forum I was frequenting at the time, and I thought it would be fun to get involved, look back on all the games I'd played and try to identify the handful of titles that meant the most to me. At the time I'd just turned nineteen, I was in the first year of an English degree at university, and outside of my studies, I didn't have anything in the way of responsibilities or cares in the world.

As I write this, it's now the summer of 2024. I'm firmly in the middle of my thirties, I work a full-time job, I have a wife and a nine-month-old son, and with those things come a whole host of roles and responsibilities that I didn't have fifteen years prior. And yet, in spite of all that, I still ensure that I make time for video games. In the intervening years I have played a ton of titles both old and new, I've acquired new consoles and discovered entirely new franchises, and I found myself starting to wonder how that list from fifteen years ago might look if I tried to make it today.

The result of that curiosity is below, and as you can probably tell from the title and length of this page, I spent a little bit longer thinking about it this time.

I don't normally go in for ranked lists, but by the very nature of a beast this size, there has to be some kind of hierarchy involved. To that end, I feel it's important to know the criteria I used when assembling this list. Perhaps most importantly, I must stress that this is not supposed to be a list of the best games of all time; it is a list of one hundred titles that have had an impact on me personally over the course of my game-playing life. While a game's quality is always going to be the main consideration for its inclusion and overall placement in this ranking, my own personal experiences playing these games and any significant memories from my life that have attached themselves to these titles are also going to have an impact. There are games on this list that don't conform to the critical consensus, and others that I will concede are just downright bad, but they are nonetheless important to me, and therefore feel like fitting inclusions on this list.

I have also had to place limitations on my selections, mostly to prevent this list from becoming disproportionately stacked with Final Fantasy, Grand Theft Auto and Pokémon titles. I have restricted myself to picking only one game per franchise released within each console generation. As an example, the Final Fantasy series saw three main-line releases on the PlayStation, but unfortunately, I can only pick one of these titles for inclusion on this list. Furthermore, I am limiting myself to no more than three games from each franchise. I have bent this rule ever so slightly in one specific case, but since the game in question belongs to a spin-off series with its own distinct gameplay style, I've decided to allow it.

A list of this nature is only as meaningful as the explanations that accompany the entries, and I realise that presently it's a little bereft of detail. I plan to correct this in the coming months, adding short blurbs for each title explaining why I have included them in my top one hundred. As time goes on, I would like to visit every one of these titles and write something more substantial for each entry. This is a time-consuming prospect, and writing retrospectives for all one hundred of these games will likely take several years. Furthermore, as time passes, the content of the list itself is likely to undergo changes as I play new games, revisit old ones, and forge fresh memories that warrant inclusion below. What I'm trying to say is that this list will likely always be a work-in-progress. I will endeavour to keep a log in the comment section at the bottom of this page to reflect those changes and ensure every game from every iteration of this list remains represented in some way.

With all that preamble finally complete, read on to discover my top one hundred video games...