#BGE2020 - Hindsight Edition

[This Old Neon]

In this time of reflection and refraction as the year winds down, please begin calling to mind all the games that have never been nominated for the "BEST GAME EVER!!!" Project, particularly games that came out last year.

Hindsight is 2020, and 2020 means we'll be reevaluating all the decisions we've made over the past ten years of the "BEST GAME EVER!!!" Project's existence.

More to come...

The #BGE2020 voting will all take place in forum polls. Posting forms to the public website was a valuable experiment, but it resulted in little to no increase in engagement in exchange for a significant increase in workload.

[Kong Wen]

Welcome to This Old Neon's "BEST GAME EVER!!!" Project

Game of the Year votes and similar exercises are common in video gaming communities. The "BEST GAME EVER!!!" Project continues this impulse to its natural conclusion. The aim of the Project is to determine the single greatest video game of all time.

The “BEST GAME EVER!!!” Project’s tongue-in-cheek title betrays an underlying awareness of the absurdity of its mission. The competition itself is earnest, albeit under the pretense of the pursuit of an admitted impossibility. So what are its true goals? How does it promise to be a meaningful as well as entertaining event?

The Project embraces the necessarily subjective nature of our experiences with games and the various pleasures we derive from them. Attempts to measure their objective values—as narratives, as works of art, as pieces of interactive entertainment, as design achievements—and the restrictive definitions and categories leveraged in the service of this quantification are ultimately futile.

Eschewing this mindset confronts us with new avenues of discussion and analysis that can be simultaneously enlightening and discomfiting. Can we use the same interpretive tools on games of thirty years ago and games of today? In what ways can we claim a puzzle game to be “better” than an action game? How do we even compare them?

The purpose of the Project is to generate interesting discussions of video games, their place in our world, what makes them memorable, what makes them mean something to us. An additional benefit is that it will inevitably raise awareness of unknown or underrated gems that many players may not have given a chance.


"BEST GAME EVER!!!" Project History

The inaugural "BEST GAME EVER!!!" Project launched in 2010 and was hosted at the erstwhile Virtual Console Forums. Members of various communities around the web joined to participate. Almost 1600 games were nominated, and after several months of activity, Super Metroid (SNES) defeated The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (SNES) by a single vote to become the first official "BEST GAME EVER!!!"

During the second "BEST GAME EVER!!!" Project in 2012, over 1700 individual games were nominated. By the time the dust had settled, Chrono Trigger (SNES) had defeated Metal Gear Solid (PS1) to be crowned the new official "BEST GAME EVER!!!"

The third "BEST GAME EVER!!!" Project launched in 2015 and saw Super Mario Bros. 3 (NES) defeat Tetris (GB) to become the new official "BEST GAME EVER!!!"

The fourth "BEST GAME EVER!!!" Project took place in 2019, and was the first Project to be hosted on the main This Old Neon site instead of the forums, with voting conducted via Google Forms, which allowed people from many other communities to vote without being TONe forum members. The finals ended up being a battle between two previous runners-up, with Tetris (GB) rising above Metal Gear Solid (PS1) to claim its spot as the current official "BEST GAME EVER!!!"

The fifth "BEST GAME EVER!!!" Project—#BGE2020: Hindsight Edition—is currently active. By the end of the 53-week-long opening round of pools, 2690 games have been nominated for the greatest free-for-all in Project history.

[Kong Wen]

#BGE2020 will feature competition between every game that has ever been nominated for the 2010, 2012, 2015, and 2019 "BEST GAME EVER!!!" Projects. All seeding and ranking from previous Projects will be discarded. Ranking for the double elimination phase of the contest will instead be determined by two rounds of group pools, both populated by random draw.

There will be an ongoing monthly nomination thread that will allow new releases to filter into the contest throughout the year. This will help mitigate our usual problem of a great game launching on the eve of the Project and then not being included.

To summarize:

• Monthly open nomination thread
• Weekly randomly-populated pools
• Second round of weekly randomly-populated pools
• Results from pools seed main elimination bracket
• Eliminated games relegate to the "losers"/double elimination bracket
• Winner of the losers bracket can only promote back into the main contest at a certain rank

[Kong Wen]

Here is the cumulative list of every game that has ever been nominated for the "BEST GAME EVER!!!" Project up to and including the end of the #BGE2020 round of pools, with some stats from the current event included:

#BGE2020 Master List