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Nov 7, 2019 · Counting Minecraft among the most influential games of the 2010s is a no-brainer. According to its developer, Mojang, Minecraft recently became the bestselling video game of all time,...
- Undertale
- Binding of Isaac
- Super Meat Boy
- Doom
- Dark Souls
- Overwatch
- Amnesia: The Dark Descent
- Skyrim
- League of Legends
- PUBG
Earthbound Blues
Undertale is far from the first game to be inspired by Earthbound (games such as Lisa the Painful preceded it, for example), but it’s undeniable that Undertalewas a pop culture craze. People fell in love with its colorful cast of characters and subversive deconstruction of “gaming” as a whole. It’s a simple, charming yet surprisingly emotional experience. RELATED: The Best Indie Games Of 2022 That Nobody Knows About So Far, According To Ranker Thanks to Undertale, games like Omori and Oneshot...
Roguelite Renaissance
Binding of Isaac is the visceral black comedy game about a young boy being tormented in his mother’s basement. Despite the morbid premise, its weirdly charming art style and addictive gameplay loop made Binding of Isaac a massive indie success and would start the trend of roguelitesbecoming a staple of the indie genre. Several games such as Crawl, Enter the Gungeon, Vampire Survivors, and of course, Hades can trace their success back to Binding of Isaac’s runaway success. There’s always been...
Hardcore Platforming
Binding of Isaac wasn’t the first cutesy gross indie darling to grace the gaming world. Super Meat Boy can be thanked for startinga new age of ultra-hard platforming for a new generation of gamers. While I Wanna Be The Guy precedes Super Meat Boy, it was Super Meat Boythat really broke into the mainstream thanks to its charming art style and regular updates. Super Meat Boy paved the way for platformers such as Celeste, Cuphead, and Spelunkyto find widespread success. Platforming is practicall...
The Return Of “Boomer Shooters”
For a good while, the 2000s up to the early 2010s were oversaturated by Call of Duty and Counter-Strike clones. Even non-military first-person shooters tended to fall into the industry standard of linear corridors that railroad the player. Suddenly, Doom 2016reminded gamers how it innovated gaming decades before. RELATED: 10 Most Devastating Weapons In The DOOM Franchise Gone are the linear maps and grounded realism, Doom 2016leaned into its over-the-top roots. Levels were a maze of hidden ro...
Soulslikes
Although many Demon Souls fans will insist they came first, it’s still Dark Souls that popularized what is now known as the Soulslike genre of video games. While the definition of Soulslike wanes and waxes, the core takeaway is that games designed to be hard and punish players have a huge market. Thanks to Dark Souls, FromSoftware has developed a highly successful niche that blends elements of Metroidvania-style games with tactical combat. Games outside of the company such as Nioh, Hollow Kni...
Hero Shooters
MOBAs were already a big market thanks to the popularity of DOTA and League of Legends. However, they all mostly played the same, as arena battlers from an isometric perspective with a huge cast of heroes. Blizzard (before the bad times) innovated the genre by taking notes from Team Fortress 2 and streamlining it for a competitive market. On top of that, Overwatch’s cast of charactersis some of the best designs Blizzard has made. It also helped that the early days of Overwatch got a lot more...
Survival Horror
Although gems such as Bioshock and Dead Space would keep the horror genre chugging along, it wouldn’t experience a boom of popularity until the release of Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Unlike many games before it, Amnesiatook away all forms of combat from the player, forcing them to only run and hide from the monsters that chase them. RELATED: The 10 Best Horror Games Of 2022, Ranked This simple yet highly effective gameplay loop started the boom of a new era for horror. Many horror games such a...
A New Kind of Open World
Open-world games typically followed the Rockstar formula before Skyrim arrived at the scene. Afterward, it can be argued that the open-world genre started seeing true innovation. The infamous quote “Far Cry 3 is like Skyrim with guns” wouldn’t be so hilarious if Skyrim hadn’t set the tone for open-world games moving forward. The popularity of Skyrim certainly gave publishers the confidence to try out their own open-world games. While the quality has varied, from the rather lifeless worlds of...
The Esports Craze
Although esports already existed before League of Legends’ late 2009 release, it wasn’t until 2011 when League of Legendsheld its Season 1 World Championship that it took the esports industry to a whole new level of mainstream popularity. From a moderate $100,000, the success of Season 1 led Riot to announce a whopping $2,000,000 pot for the second season. From there, games such as Dota 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and Rainbow Six: Siegetook the esports ball and ran with it, leading t...
Battle Royale
Fortnite is the current undisputed lord of the Battle Royale genre, but it was PUBG that started the trend. Fortnite simply took the ball and ran with it. While Minecraft’s “Hunger Games” servers preceded the likes of DayZ and PUBG, there’s no doubt that it was PUBGthat really elevated the game to its mainstream status. Although Fortnite has the child demographic on lock, PUBG still attracts a lot of players in its own right. PUBG being more of a military shooter sim in the vein of ARMA makes...
- Senior Writer
Nov 11, 2019 · How Minecraft, Spelunky, and other games from 2010 to 2019 altered the course of the video game industry forever. The most important games of the decade, a series of essays by writers...
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- Matthew Gault
- Grand Theft Auto V (2013) Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto V is the most financially successful entertainment product of all time. At $6 billion in revenue and growing, the open world crime simulator has raked in more cash than Gone With the Wind or the Star Wars film franchise.
- The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017) With The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Nintendo proved it could make a modern open world game. More than that, it proved it could create an open world game that was more interesting than what the competition was doing.
- Fortnite (2017) PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds may have popularized the 1 vs. 100, battle royale shooter genre, but Fortnite flat out turned it into an inescapable cultural phenomenon.
- Dark Souls (2011) Dark Souls, from developer From Software, loomed over the decade like a gargoyle. The original Dark Souls has proven to be like the Velvet Underground’s first album; not everyone played it, but it inspired everyone who did.
- The Stanley Parable (2013) Few games have deconstructed the structure of games like The Stanley Parable did, and walking simulators have struggled to surprise players in the same way.
- Cuphead (2017) Cuphead is the first game to nail the cartoon aesthetic. Everything from the rubber hose animation, to the big band soundtrack, to the character design invoke the classic toons that inspired it.
- Stardew Valley (2016) Stardew Valley almost single-handedly brought Harvest Moon-esque small life RPG experiences back into the limelight. Players could create their own farm, get married, go fishing, and even fight monsters in a cave.
- Darkest Dungeon (2016) Darkest Dungeon combined turn-based RPGs, rogue-likes, dungeon crawlers, and Lovecraftian horror to create a game where failing and dying are just part of the gameplay loop.
Nov 5, 2019 · From Minecraft to the Avengers, Fortnite to Star Wars, Pokémon to the DC Universe, League of Legends to Marvel’s Spider-Man, it was an incredible decade in pop culture. And it was also marked ...
Aug 10, 2020 · 16 Games that Defined 2010s. Minecraft. Braid. League Of Legends. Dark Souls. DayZ. Dear Esther. Hearthstone. Path of Exile. Pillars of Eternity. XCOM: Enemy Unknown. Wolfenstein: The New Order. Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. PUBG. Fortnite: Battle Royale. GTA Online. Minecraft. Release date: 2009 (public alfa), 2011 (official release date) Genre: sandbox.
