CRITICS’ CHOICE
In association with
INTRODUCTION This unfocused affection also
surrounds Nintendo. It has groups of games from its long-running franchises bunched together in the list. Their occurrence next to each other is coincidence, but is emblematic of the problem voters had in picking which from each series to nominate. We had, across all journalist contributions, a total of 60 votes for Mario games of some description, and 50 votes for Zelda titles. Another anomaly of this trend:
Star Wars games. A mix of titles inspired by the LucasFilm property were voted for a total number of 23 times by critics, but only two of them (TIE Fighter and Knights of the Old Republic) are in the top 100. There is also a real
predisposition to recent ‘core’ games. This Develop 100 is a real run of blockbusters. Few retro games. No kids games. Hardly any based on licences. Nothing ‘casual’. Elite isn’t in the 100. There are no LEGO games, despite them being the most lucrative UK-made games of all time. Only 44 games here were released during 1984 (Tetris being the oldest on this list) to 1999. The other 57 were released in 2000 and after. 15 were released during 2010 to 2012. Perhaps this is down to the age of the respondents (a rough guess says our critics are twenty/thirty-somethings), plus the wider volume of media and
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develop 100
TOP 10 GAME STUDIOS ACCORDING TO CRITICS
Valve Nintendo Rockstar North BioWare Bethesda Game Studios Blizzard Looking Glass Studios LucasArts Naughty Dog Kojima Productions
TOP 20 GAME FRANCHISES ACCORDING TO CRITICS
Mario The Legend of Zelda Half-Life Portal Grand Theft Auto Metal Gear Solid Final Fantasy The ‘Shock series Elder Scrolls Star Wars Mass Effect Resident Evil Deus Ex Fallout Metroid Civilization Halo Warcraft Street Fighter Monkey Island
noise around these more recent games versus older ones. And games are arguably still a nascent medium – you can see parallels in film critics’ affections for their medium, where the 1940s (circa our 2000s) are considered the start of a Golden Age for movies.
Lastly, what about omissions? Games on the list hail from
some very entrenched game development regions – 46 from the USA and 34 from Japan. Other territories are a minority. Just 11 hail from the UK and four from Canada. There’s one game each from Finnish, Russian, Danish, Swedish or French developers. Our panel is clearly skewed towards big budget games from the usual suspects. There’s also some very large
companies missing. For instance there’s nothing in the top 100 here for Ubisoft or Epic Games, two businesses so powerful in the industry that their absence sticks out like a sore thumb. Did many of our 200-plus panel just forget about them and their hugely lucrative and praised series like Rayman, Assassin’s Creed, Gears of War and Unreal? Plus, there are no mobile games at all in the list. And no handheld games either, for that matter. Again, this will stem from the preconceptions and notions of our panel. A Critics’ Choice list is hugely
subjective and prone to instinct, not hard facts. But this list is useful when it comes to understanding media sentiment, and what games are considered ‘the best’. Maybe your game is on
there – your favourite, or the one you worked on. Maybe it isn’t. And if it isn’t... do you know why? gTurn the page for the full Develop 100: Critics’ Choice
CRITICS’ CHOICE
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