16th November 2025, 11:30 PM
(This post was last modified: 16th November 2025, 11:35 PM by Dark Jaguar.)
1998. It was a very good year. It was a very good year back in 1998, and you made that point well.
I have a hard time ranking a single year as a "best ever", but wow were there some amazing hits that really established some important developments in 3D gaming while 2D gaming was still delivering some hits as well.
It's also worth mentioning Unreal, the single player game that created a gaming engine empire but was also a very well made game in it's own right. I could list a massive number of games released in the earlier part of the decade, but they're spread out over multiple years, which is why it's hard to use this metric.
1993 probably comes closest, with Link's Awakening, Doom, Secret of Mana, Castlevania Rondo of Blood (probably the best of the "old school" style Castlevania games), Day of the Tentacle, Gabriel Knight Sins of the Father (one of Sierra's very best adventure games), Illusion of Gaia, Kirby's Adventure (the game that solidified Kirby's copy ability and actually defined the series), Myst, Alone in the Dark! .... 2... Alright missed that first genre defining game by a year. Ogre Battle: Queen Song, Mega Man X, Sonic CD, Star Fox (That's two games demonstrating new tech for consoles), The 7th Guest, and so on.
It was also a very good year. It's a question though. Do those first few years of the 90's have more influence than 1998 as a single year did? I think so, though admittedly it's hard to compare apples to oranges like that. It's just, maybe it could be a year but slide the cutoff point a little, so we get Dune II, the creator of the RTS genre.
Again, this isn't an exercise I'm particularly good at, so I'll only say both periods of time were very influential, and I could definitely get behind an argument that the 90's as a decade was the most impactful biggest year in gaming, and had the biggest leap in apparent hardware capability in gaming history over a very short time span.
As for the modern era? It's not that there aren't great games coming out today, it's that the design behind them feels far more exploitative than the game design of "kill the players for quarters" arcade game design. All these built in delay timers, FOMO activities, microtransactions, loot boxes, and all kinds of other exploitative practices are the norm all too often. Nintendo do better than most, but even they are slipping in some ways and making it hard to recommend their console for their own unique exploitative reasons.
That said, the indie scene is absolutely amazing right now, and I think each year sees more and more incredible offerings from the smaller scale studios. Just recently, we've had Vampire Survivors, Balatro, Animal Well, Another Crab's Treasure, Silksong, a new chapter of Deltarune, and very revolutionary "boomer" shooters that seem to take game design in new directions we might have seen if every developer wasn't trying to ape Valve's "storytelling" from Half-Life (Half-Life is amazing, don't misunderstand, but it wasn't what every single studio needed to copy, and we suffered for it). Cultic Chapter 2 is a perfect example of that, now that it's out. Amazing stuff that reminds me a lot of Dusk, which itself reminded me a lot of Blood, but it's doing a lot of new things where Dusk felt more like it was simply celebrating the old boomey shooties. Dusk was still good though, and that's the common thread here. Indie is where gaming's future lies. It makes sense. Most of the gigantic studios today started as tiny indie devs after all, back when video games themselves were a tiny little outfit.
I have a hard time ranking a single year as a "best ever", but wow were there some amazing hits that really established some important developments in 3D gaming while 2D gaming was still delivering some hits as well.
It's also worth mentioning Unreal, the single player game that created a gaming engine empire but was also a very well made game in it's own right. I could list a massive number of games released in the earlier part of the decade, but they're spread out over multiple years, which is why it's hard to use this metric.
1993 probably comes closest, with Link's Awakening, Doom, Secret of Mana, Castlevania Rondo of Blood (probably the best of the "old school" style Castlevania games), Day of the Tentacle, Gabriel Knight Sins of the Father (one of Sierra's very best adventure games), Illusion of Gaia, Kirby's Adventure (the game that solidified Kirby's copy ability and actually defined the series), Myst, Alone in the Dark! .... 2... Alright missed that first genre defining game by a year. Ogre Battle: Queen Song, Mega Man X, Sonic CD, Star Fox (That's two games demonstrating new tech for consoles), The 7th Guest, and so on.
It was also a very good year. It's a question though. Do those first few years of the 90's have more influence than 1998 as a single year did? I think so, though admittedly it's hard to compare apples to oranges like that. It's just, maybe it could be a year but slide the cutoff point a little, so we get Dune II, the creator of the RTS genre.
Again, this isn't an exercise I'm particularly good at, so I'll only say both periods of time were very influential, and I could definitely get behind an argument that the 90's as a decade was the most impactful biggest year in gaming, and had the biggest leap in apparent hardware capability in gaming history over a very short time span.
As for the modern era? It's not that there aren't great games coming out today, it's that the design behind them feels far more exploitative than the game design of "kill the players for quarters" arcade game design. All these built in delay timers, FOMO activities, microtransactions, loot boxes, and all kinds of other exploitative practices are the norm all too often. Nintendo do better than most, but even they are slipping in some ways and making it hard to recommend their console for their own unique exploitative reasons.
That said, the indie scene is absolutely amazing right now, and I think each year sees more and more incredible offerings from the smaller scale studios. Just recently, we've had Vampire Survivors, Balatro, Animal Well, Another Crab's Treasure, Silksong, a new chapter of Deltarune, and very revolutionary "boomer" shooters that seem to take game design in new directions we might have seen if every developer wasn't trying to ape Valve's "storytelling" from Half-Life (Half-Life is amazing, don't misunderstand, but it wasn't what every single studio needed to copy, and we suffered for it). Cultic Chapter 2 is a perfect example of that, now that it's out. Amazing stuff that reminds me a lot of Dusk, which itself reminded me a lot of Blood, but it's doing a lot of new things where Dusk felt more like it was simply celebrating the old boomey shooties. Dusk was still good though, and that's the common thread here. Indie is where gaming's future lies. It makes sense. Most of the gigantic studios today started as tiny indie devs after all, back when video games themselves were a tiny little outfit.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)