Metacritic – Delfeir vs. the Backlog

The 150 Most Acclaimed Games of All Time: Updated Rankings and Project Status

We have not been idle.

Last year, I shared the early results of my friend James’ project to rigorously calculate the most acclaimed video games of all time. The original results can still be found here. We also answered a number of questions about the project in a follow up article.

At that stage the project was little more than a proof of concept, and the formula — despite already being far more sophisticated than the ones used by Metacritic, Video Game Canon, or pwnRank — still had significant weaknesses. Since then, the project has matured considerably, and all of the formula’s major weaknesses have been addressed.

This final list is no longer biased towards the most prolific publications, nor does it give undue weight to lists from less reputable sources. These issues were solved through a combination of clever weighting algorithms, and crude adjustments. Along with these improvements, a slight bias towards more recent lists has also been added to better reflect the current critical consensus.

The result is a much more authoritative representation of the most acclaimed video games of all time. It’s not just the formula that’s been updated, either: numerous data entry errors have been corrected, and more than 100 new lists have been added to the database, including the end of year lists for 2020 and 2021. The total number of lists is now more than 370.

The project will soon have its own website, but until then, enjoy this teaser: the definitive 150 most acclaimed video games of all time, as determined by games media critical consensus.

Answering Your Questions on the Most Acclaimed Games Project

Last week, I shared a friend’s attempt to calculate the top 100 most acclaimed video games of all time. Here’s that article and accompanying list. At first people treated it as little more than a curiosity; they perused it for their own personal favourites, celebrated inclusions, lamented omissions, but ultimately moved on.

However, later on, a few wanted to know more: how it was calculated, what lists were included, what games were eligible, why Metroid: Other M wasn’t in the top 10 (OK, maybe not that one). So in order to respond to these questions—and also just to satisfy our own desire to speak in more depth about the project—James and I sat down for an informal interview.

Kris: May as well jump right into the juicy questions: How have you actually calculated all of this?

James: Yeah that seems to be by far the most common question I get. As soon as it dawns on people that the types of data that I’m using don’t exactly combine easily, they want to know how I’ve solved that. And the first thing that I want to say is that I take no credit for this method. Part of it came from pieces of information that I gleaned from Acclaimed Music, another big part came from a friend of mine who is an expert in statistics (thanks Ian!), and all I really did was fill in the gaps.

The Best Video Games of All Time, According to… Everyone?

For years now, Metacritic has served as the de facto judge for what are considered the greatest video games of all time. That is because ranking the greatest games of all time is a tricky process; so tricky that it’s beyond the capacities of any individual, or indeed any one publication. Metacritic recognises this and, instead of publishing its own reviews, aggregates reviews by other publications and assigns a score based on a weighted average.

So why doesn’t Metacritic’s list of best games resemble the kinds of all time lists published elsewhere?

Part of the reason is because Metacritic doesn’t take these lists into account. Anywhere. At all. Metacritic looks only at scored reviews, meaning that an important data point is missing when they do their calculations. There are also inherent problems with scored reviews if you assume that they are directly comparable to each other without context. A game might score 80 on one website and 4/5 on another, yet both carry wholly different weights and comparisons in their own publication.

My friend James and I have discussed this repeatedly, and how a better system would involve lists as well as scored reviews. We knew that such disparate data could be combined in an elegant and fair way because we’d seen it done before (see AcclaimedMusic.net), but no one had ever attempted it for video games (at least not to our knowledge). So partly to rectify this problem — and also partly as a lockdown project — James made it happen.

The following list was made by collating almost 250 end of year lists, best of decade lists, and all time lists from a wide variety of publications. The project is still in its infancy, so this is not the final list. You can expect the places to shift around significantly as more data is added. Ultimately, we were just keen to get this first set of results out for people to see and discuss.

So on that note: Here are the top 100 best games of all time, according to as many lists as we could find at present.