HAL Laboratory, Nintendo, Game Arts, Monolith Soft Video Game Canon updates its scores roughly once per year. Long-term consensus (lists of best games) Video Game Canon's weighted scores This list mostly includes games since the ' third generation' of gaming onwards, along with some prior arcade games of the late 70s to early 80s. A few non-English sources are used, such as Japanese reader polls from Famitsu and Dengeki, a Spanish critic list from GQ Spain, and a German reader poll from Maniac magazine.

In general, contemporary reviews do not necessarily reflect the long-term consensus, hence only a single source of credit for high Metacritic reviews and open player-submitted polls, while obviously measuring an important facet of a game's reputation, tend to be easy to rig or otherwise influence, hence the primary usage of critic lists.īecause most sources are from the English-language press, this list generally reflects the preferences of the English-speaking world, rather than those of other video-game-playing areas, such as Japan and South Korea.

There were two notable exceptions to critic 'best of' lists: games are credited for having Metacritic scores of 95 or greater, and several large reader-submitted polls are used. Some of the lists are outdated in that the same publication later published another best-of list. Games which consistently showed up in multiple lists are featured below. For sources restricted to the ' seventh generation' of gaming, only the top 25 games are considered.Ī number of sources taken from across publications, from 1985 to the present, were used to compile the list. The fourth list includes all ranks from a large number of lists, with the minimum criterion for inclusion being at least ten sources for sources listing the top 200 games, only the top 100 are considered.The third list only includes the top two ranks from most lists.The second list is based on weighted scores, ranked according to a system of top-ten weighted ranking scores from a handful of selected lists, originally devised by the Filibuster site in 2012.This system has been used by the Video Game Canon site since 2017. The first list is based on weighted scores, ranked based on appearance frequencies and rankings from critic lists.

The article has several lists based on several methodologies:

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998) is widely regarded as the greatest video game of all time, according to most criteria.

3 Short-term perceptions (review scores).

2 Long-term consensus (lists of best games).

Top video games of 2015