I don’t know where my childhood Nintendo Entertainment System came from. I don’t remember ever asking for it for a birthday or Christmas, I have no memories of ever unwrapping it, I don’t even really remember ever not having it. It was just there along with games I similarly never remember not having. With a few rare exceptions, my parents do not and did not like videogames, so I can’t imagine that my father ever brought it home with him after work because he wanted to try out Super Mario Bros. It’s possible that it was a hand-me down from my uncle, ten years my father’s junior, who was about to embark on an adventure to Florida to try to make it as an actor (he got as far as playing Beetlejuice in Universal Studio Orlando’s Halloween events before eventually moving back to Ohio and settling for opening a video store). For all I know, this magical box might as well have just materialized one day, connected to my television with a collection of games just waiting for me to dive into them. That makes just as much sense to me as either of my parents buying it on a whim for themselves.
For someone who has spent so much of their 37, going on 38 years on this earth playing games, the fact that I have no idea how the events that resulted in me first picking up an NES controller got set into motion makes the whole thing feel a bit more magical than it otherwise should be. Sure, I could ask the people who would remember and who would be able to tell me where that childhood NES came from, but I don’t think I want to spoil that mystery. In a world where the answer to any question is a mere Google search away, I like that I have no idea how my lifelong hobby and love for gaming actually started. All I know is that that NES was there, and at some point, I picked that controller up and set the next four decades into motion.
Throughout the following decades, games and gaming have been a pillar of my life. Childhood trips to the mall to grab a slice of pepperoni pizza, burn some quarters at the arcade (shout-out to the Parmatown Aladdin’s Castle) and then hit up the B. Dalton on the way out to grab the latest Goosebumps book. Snow days spent sipping hot chocolate and trading Pokemon with my neighborhood friends. Summer nights spent staying up deep into the AM hours with friends locked in multiplayer battles on the Nintendo 64. LAN parties in stiflingly hot and sweaty garages. The hobby that started with that mysterious NES has been by my side for every big moment in my life. It’s been there to distract me from and get me through the hard times. It’s been there to enrich the good times with my friends and family. Just like that mysterious NES when I was a kid, it’s just been there.
But the world has changed so much since I was a child. That mall is now an empty parking lot and Aladdin’s Castle lives on only in the handful of tokens mixed into my childhood piggy banks by accident, lost forever in a box somewhere in my parents’ basement. Snow days don’t really exist when you work from home, and even if they did, I somehow don’t think I’d be able to convince my friends to come over for hot chocolate and to help me evolve my Haunter into a Gengar. That Nintendo 64 which kept my friends and I so busy as kids can no longer be hooked up to a modern TV without expensive converters and upscalers. Even with those things, those save files that captured all those hours of good times were lost years ago once the internal batteries within those cartridges started to die. The friends that filled those sweaty garage LAN parties are scattered across the country, some I haven’t seen or spoken to in over a decade.
Between the inexhaustible march of time and how life just naturally progresses, many of my favorite gaming moments are becoming increasingly impossible to recreate. That leaves me really with two options going forward. I can either lament that fact, and become an increasingly bitter and angry old geezer (which I sadly think is the route many people ultimately take once they get to be my age), or I can look back and celebrate those things for what they were: important parts of my past that live on today in me and who I am. I would much rather be the person who does the latter. And while I may not be able to recreate those moments again, I can certainly remember them fondly and write about them.
Which finally gets me to the whole point of this long-winded spiel. Like I mentioned in my 2023 Year in Review, I’ve been finding myself talking a lot about games that I consider to be my top games of all-time. Despite me saying that a lot, I’ve never actually sat down and figured out what those games would be, and in what order I would rank them if I were to choose to do so. So, I sat down and did just that. Over the course of many weeks and many sessions, I’ve slowly put together my personal list of my top 100 games of all-time. The games that led to these moments and these memories that still live with me to today.
It’s subjective as hell like all good lists like this should be. Given how many times I’ve edited and refined the list, it’s probably prone to change the moment I sit down and look at it again, but I don’t care. The games on this list all remind me of something, some moment in my past that led to me being the person who is sitting here today writing this in 2023. And that’s why I cannot wait to get into this project and start writing about these games. The obvious classics that everyone knows, the forgotten gems, the unknown weird shit that I’m sure some of you have never even once heard of, these all mean something to me. And I’m going to share what and why over the course of the next year (which may be an optimistic goal, but we’ll see how it goes).
High-Level Rules
Before I get into some Honorable Mentions that didn’t quite make the list, let’s get some basic ground-rules out of the way:
- No collections or compilations. While it sure would be convenient to open up a few additional slots by lumping some games together in collections or compilations that include multiple titles, I am avoiding adding any to this list. Generally speaking, collections or compilations allow me to replay games that I’ve already fallen in love with again on a new system. Very rarely have I ever discovered a new game via a collection for the first time (there is one notable exception which will be mentioned when I get to it). As such, my memories and nostalgia are largely for the original game and not the collection itself.
- Remakes will be addressed on a game-by-game basis. It’s impossible for me to come up with one overarching rule for remakes. Some remakes are completely different games that simply follow the same plot and have the same name. Others are glorified remasters that change virtually nothing outside of a few quality-of-life tweaks and visuals. As such, you’ll find some games on this list multiple times if their original release and remake both mean something to me and are materially different games. Others will be grouped together and discussed simultaneously if there’s little meaningful difference outside of a few tweaks here and there. Remakes are far too varied for me to treat them all in the same way.
- Remasters and ports will be mentioned, but generally not considered as a stand-alone game unless they add meaningful new content. If a game has been ported to or remastered for a different system, I am not going to treat those as separate entities for the purpose of this list. The exception to this rule will be special editions, ports or remasters that add meaningful new content, in which case they’re replacing the original release on my list given that they are largely more definitive experiences.
- The list will remain as-is until I finish this project, but then will be updated annually with new inclusions over the past year. It’s inevitable that something I play in the next year would make this list if I sat down and revised it. Because it will take so long to write this series in the first place, I’m not going to update it in real-time as I play new games. Rather, I will be revising this list on the side and am planning on doing annual updates to the list at the end of each year discussing what changes I’ve made and writing similar write-ups for new inclusions.
So with all that out of the way, let’s get into a few games that almost made the list (in no particular order):
Honorable Mention #1: Castlevania (Nintendo Entertainment System, 1986)
The original Castlevania was one of those mystery NES games that just happened to be in my house as a kid. As much of a mystery as that NES itself was, Castlevania is even more of a mystery to me. I can understand how Super Mario Bros got there as it was arguably the biggest game ever released at that point in time. Tecmo Bowl made sense given my father’s love of NFL football. But a weird horror platformer about fighting through Dracula’s castle? No clue how that got there.
But I’m glad that it was there. As I’m sure you can figure from my article on Spooky Season and the fact that I have an entire category of this blog dedicated to “Spooky Shit”, I’m a big horror fan. And I think having the original Castlevania in my house as a small child may have been the formative thing that set me off on that path. If it weren’t for Castlevania stoking my love of horror, I’m not sure I would have ever picked a copy of Goosebumps or Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark off the library shelves. I’m not sure that I would’ve rushed home on Halloween to watch The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror specials, or stayed up late in the summers to watch Are You Afraid of the Dark? on SNICK. And I don’t know if I would’ve fallen in love later in life with Magic: the Gathering through its horror world of Innistrad or with Bloodborne and its Castlevania-meets-cosmic-horror world of Yharnam. My top 100 list is littered with horror games, and if it weren’t for this mysterious copy of Castlevania, it’s entirely possible this list, and my life in general, would look very different.
Given this game’s brutal difficulty, I never actually finished it and slayed Dracula as a child. I remember that I could pretty reliably get to level three, but that’s about as far as my childhood reflexes were able to get me. Between the precise platforming and instant death pits, the army of skeletons chucking bones, flea men bouncing around, and dive-bombing crows, childhood me just could never quite get past this bit. My neighborhood friends and I tried for years, but that goal eluded all of us. But thankfully, Castlevania was eventually re-released on the Nintendo Wii’s Virtual Console in 2007. And it was then, 21 years later, when I was finally able to finish what I started as a child and slay Dracula. By that point in time, I had finished many other Castlevania games (more on those in later installments of this series), so this was not my first time besting the vampiric fiend, but there was something about finally accomplishing something that had eluded me for so long that felt fantastic.
Given how clunky and archaic the original Castlevania feels to play today, I’m not sure I’ll find myself ever revisiting it again. But that’s okay. I can look back, appreciate it for the direction it set me in, and be thankful that this cartridge had mysteriously found itself in my childhood home.
Honorable Mention #2: Ms Pac-Man (Arcade, 1982)
There’s something really special about finding an old-school arcade cabinet out in the wild. Throughout my life, I can think of how some of my favorite places to go or hangout have also had a random arcade machine tucked away in a corner. My childhood Pizza Hut where I’d beg my mother for a quarter to play Arkanoid while we waited on my free Book-It pizza (this is not the last time you’ll hear of this Pizza Hut in this series, by the way). My friend’s grandparents’ basement with the Mr Do! cabinet we’d play during summer breaks. The bowling alley my grandparents would take me to with the Dig-Dug machine which was the true main event for me. My college concert-venue of choice, where I would burn through quarters waiting through opening acts playing Galaga. The barcade next-door to that concert venue with the BurgerTime machine I’d compete for high-scores with friends. There’s something about finding a spot, finding a cab, and pouring in quarters for quick-bursts of old-school arcade gaming that I really love.
And while all of these games are great, there’s one that stands above them all. And that’s Ms Pac-Man. To this day, there’s something about the simplistic perfection of Pac-Man that I just can never turn down when I come across a cab in the wild. There are a million versions of Pac-Man and while most of them are great, Ms Pac-Man is still the perfect encapsulation of that formula. It’s endlessly addicting, replayable and fun. If a place has a Pac-Man cabinet, I’ll be happy. But if it’s a Ms Pac-Man cabinet, I’ll be absolutely in love. But for me, the real thing that makes Ms Pac-Man so beloved is where I remember blowing the most quarters on it. And that’s a little local pizza shop called Romito’s Pizza.
I didn’t discover Romito’s until I was older and in high school. By this point, the glory days of chain pizza places were beginning to end as they cut costs and local mom-and-pop shops started to surpass the chains both in quality of pizza and delivery. There was just one problem with Romito’s and that was that they didn’t deliver. Normally, this would be a fatal flaw for a pizza joint, but Romito’s had an ace up their sleeve. They had a sit-down Ms Pac-Man cocktail cab. And while the convenience of having a pizza delivered to wherever my friends and I were hanging out at was great, if we went and picked up Romito’s or ate there, we could jam Ms Pac-Man while we were waiting. And that’s precisely what we did.
Jamming Ms. Pac-Man while listening to the hustle and bustle of a busy pizza shop, taking in the smells of pizzas baking and steaming up delivery boxes, eating greasy slices of pepperoni pizzas (later I came up with a concoction that was a white pizza with Italian sausage, banana peppers, broccoli and a ton of red pepper flakes that is still, to this day, my favorite combination of pizza ingredients), sipping fountain Coca Cola from styrofoam cups, and challenging each other to see how far they could get before succumbing to the endless march of ghosts was a top-tier Friday night. Ms Pac-Man is a great game in its own right. But its place as a central component of those nights is why it will forever live on in my heart. And while I no longer live by Romito’s, I have thankfully discovered a combination Ms Pac-Man/Galaga arcade cabinet at a nearby deli where I can continue to forge new memories.
Only this time it doesn’t cost me any quarters because it’s a free-play cab.
Honorable Mention #3: Okami (PlayStation 2, 2006)
Okami should probably be higher on my actual top 100 list. I remember loving the Legend of Zelda-inspired gameplay, finally being able to play something akin to that series on my PlayStation 2 that actually delivered on that promise unlike so many other games that came out around that time (shout-out to my fellow geriatrics who fell for the marketing for Dark Cloud and were similarly disappointed by that one). I remember loving the gorgeous art style inspired by Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints. Slowly restoring a drab, black-and-white world with increasingly vivid colors was incredibly satisfying and made the impact of your actions on the game world so much more tangible. I remember thinking that the paintbrush mechanic was incredibly unique and was a perfect fit for the motion controls of the Wii when Okami was later ported to that console. I remember really loving my time with Okami.
The problem is that’s all I really remember about Okami. Despite the game leaving such a positive impression on me, I don’t really remember many specifics about it. I don’t remember the exact specifics of the plot. I can’t remember any specific dungeons or bosses. I don’t even really remember any specific moments or bits of gameplay outside of the high-level art style and paintbrush mechanic. It’s one of two games in my honorable mentions that initially started on the top 100. But as I started to refine the list and comb through it game-by-game, I eventually realized that I just don’t really remember much of why this game left such a positive impression on me.
Given that I played Okami at one of the more stressful times in my life, I’m not overly surprised that it didn’t really stick with me in a meaningful way outside of that general positive impression. The initial PS2 version came out right before final exams my sophomore year of college. Strangely enough, the Wii re-release came out right before my final exams my senior year of college, which also came with saying goodbye to all my college friends one last time before we all split up and scattered across the country and I moved back home with my parents. Given the circumstances under which I’ve played Okami in the past, I’m not really all that surprised that it didn’t manage to sear itself into my brain all that well. And while it’s sad that I don’t remember it well enough to really properly include it on this list, I guess that means that when I get around to playing the copy of Okami HD I just picked up this past week, it will be kinda like I’m playing it for the first time all over again. And I’m really excited for that and to figure out where it should actually be on this list after all.
Honorable Mention #4: Pokemon Go (Mobile, 2016)
It’s a few days after Independence Day in 2016. I’m at work, back after taking some time off for the holiday, dreading being back in a boring old office having to go to meetings and stare at spreadsheets all day. After getting to my desk and unpacking my laptop, I go on my typical morning walk downstairs to get coffee and that’s the first time I notice that something weird is happening. While I’m not the only person who would make a similar trek each morning, there are way more people walking around the ground floor today. They’re in groups, loudly laughing and in general just look way too excited for a first-day back at work. As I near the office coffee shop, I notice an enormous group, probably 20 people deep, gathered around an art installation at the end of the hall, all similarly laughing and smiling. It’s not until I get into the coffee shop and I actually hear what they’re talking about do I figure out what’s going on.
“Oh my god, there’s a Pidgey over by the coffee pot!”
By the end of that day, I had downloaded Pokemon Go, joined Team Mystic, watched my boss download the app and catch a Bulbasaur during a meeting that never actually got on topic and officially started, and learned that the art installation by the office coffee shop was a gym and successfully wrestled control of it from Team Valor, the first of many battles for control over that gym. Over the next year, I would take time off work to participate in a Mewtwo raid where, to much enthusiasm from the fellow participants, I would catch a Mewtwo with perfect stats. I’d somehow win the lottery and catch shiny versions of the original three legendary birds just by chance. And eventually I completed the goal I set for myself and completed the original 151 Pokedex by organizing trades with friends and coworkers who traveled to Pokemon Go Fest to capture the regional Pokemon not available in our area. Pokemon Go changed a lot of how I approached things over the next year I played it. I would take more walks to hatch eggs. I would get to places early so I could scope out nearby gyms and Pokestops. Whenever I’d see groups of strangers playing, I’d get pulled into conversations, making fast friends with people I’d never once talk to or see again. It was all incredible.
But then, like all things, the magic wore off. Those groups of strangers I’d see playing the game became smaller, less frequent, until it was pretty much just my wife and I. The novelty of hatching eggs wore off once I hatched my 50th Geodude from an egg. The new Pokemon, while cool, didn’t carry the same nostalgia for me that I had for the original 151. So like many people who got swept up in the original rush of Pokemon Go, I eventually dropped it and stopped playing.
Like many people after 2020, I no longer even go to that same office I once did. While still employed by the same company, my morning coffee walks are no longer spent walking those halls where I finally hatched a Porygon, they’re spent walking from my upstairs office downstairs to my kitchen. That office coffee shop near the gym where I battled and bonded with so many of my coworkers has been replaced by me making a batch of pour over while listening to some lofi music and playing with my cat. Those spontaneous conversations with coworkers and strangers about this stupid little phone game replaced by an increasing sense of social isolation and loneliness.
And then, back in October, I was hanging out with my wife and closest friends at a Chinese restaurant prior to going to an escape room. A friend that I had very recently made was there with us, and I looked over during dinner to notice the telltale sign of someone trying to hide that they were catching a Pokemon, phone under the table, hand unmistakably spinning a Pokeball juuuuuuuust right based upon whatever magic formula each individual player thought gave them a better chance of catching that Pokemon. We talked about Pokemon Go and I saw that same love for the game that I once had still there going strong. An idea began to take shape in my brain. A few months later I started thinking about my top 100 games of all-time. I kept thinking back to Pokemon Go. I wasn’t sure I could put it on my top 100 list. There just wasn’t enough game there to justify its inclusion, I thought. But I did think of one thing I could do.
I could reinstall Pokemon Go, check up on my poor neglected Gengar, and go out on a walk to get coffee a few blocks away. Maybe I’ll find a gym or a Pokestop along the way. I’ll never be able to recapture that magic that was Pokemon Go back in 2016 and 2017, but maybe it might help me just a little bit with how lonely working from home can feel at times.
Honorable Mention #5: Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles (Nintendo Wii, 2007)
Yeah, I’m totally serious about this. I am actually including a Wii-exclusive, Resident Evil spinoff light-gun game as an honorable mention. I’m so serious about this inclusion, as ridiculous as it may sound, that I need to stress to you that this game was on my actual top 100 list until one of my last rounds of edits and cuts. Ultimately, I realized that it was just ever so slightly below that top 100 threshold and that there were other games that absolutely deserved to be on the list above this. While I don’t want to spoil the list yet, if I were to tell you the game that finally vanquished this to the Honorable Mentions, I think there’s a fair number of you who would think I’ve completely lost my mind.
Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles is one of those games that makes this list purely on the basis that it was fun as hell. While the Wii did eventually peter out like a lot of Nintendo consoles tend to do later in their life, those first few years when developers were really trying to come up with fun and unique games was really magical. One of the best parts about the Wii is that it finally allowed lightgun games to feel as good at home as they could in the arcades, something that every console prior to the Wii tended to struggle to do. And what better formula for a lightgun game than recapping and remixing the events of a few of the original Resident Evil games?
Umbrella Chronicles allows players to play through five different scenarios. The first of which covers the events of the ambitious but ultimately extremely frustrating and annoying Resident Evil 0. While playing through Resident Evil 0 itself eventually turns into a tedious slog, remixing it into a lightgun shooter is the perfect way to experience the story without all the gameplay issues that make that game such a slog. The second scenario goes on to remix the events of the original Resident Evil which, spoiler alert, you’ll be reading my thoughts on a few times in the top 100 list itself. The third scenario is Resident Evil 3: Nemesis which has always been one of my favorite oddball entries in the series. Nemesis leant much more heavily into action, and featured Jill Valentine being stalked throughout the streets of Racoon City by the giant, persistent stalker Nemesis (a feature first introduced into the series in RE3, but has become much more of a series staple in the more recent entries in the series). The fourth scenario is original and finally shows us the fall of the Umbrella Corporation, one of the most important and yet never shown in-game moments of the entire series. The game then concludes with a final original scenario where you get to play as my boy himself, Albert Wesker.
This game is Resident Evil boiled down to its most simple, stupid of roots and I absolutely love it for that reason. You’ll spend one level blasting away at shambling leech-men, only to then find yourself fighting a zombie snake, to having to outrun a giant corpse with a grenade launcher, to playing as a character that I can only describe as the videogame equivalent to Nicolas Cage’s late 2000’s filmography. It’s so stupid, but also so much fun. While I’ll have a lot of more personal or meaningful things to write about many of the games to come on this list, I do want to make sure that I’m finding room to include games like this. Games that are just so goddamn fun that I don’t care how stupid or nonsensical they otherwise are. Games are meant to be fun, and Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles is exactly that.
And the game that knocked this to the honorable mentions list was Half-Life, by the way. I initially forgot about Half-Life when I was making my top 100 list. It’s going to be a weird list.
Next Time!
A silly little mini-game attached to a game that, somehow, started off an entire movement in graphic design! The single best (kinda) fan game I’ve ever played! A game so good that I tried (and failed) to update my parent’s computer in a vein attempt to actually play it! It’s time for the first ten games on the list.
Get ready for games 100-91!
The Cult Classic 
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