Why settle for ranking within a calendar year when you’ve got a whole (depending on where you start counting) decade available? Wired has cobbled together it’s 15 “most influential games of the decade,” and, it may be safe to conclude from the list, it wasn’t much of a decade for gaming.
There are some iconic games on the list: World of Warcraft (4), Halo (6), Silent Hill 2 (11), and Half-Life 2 (12). But there’s also a few that are more time-filler than influential: Brain Age (5), Bejeweled (7), Wii Sports (8), Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved (9), and Happy Farm (14). (Okay, you had fun with them, but in what profound way did they impact gaming? What legacy did each leave behind that shapes gaming now or in the future?)
Still, in all fairness, Wired seems to acknowledge that its list is a bit dodgy. While expecting great things at the start of the decade, Wired concludes “it went down like this: A whole bunch of companies dumped a whole lot of money down the next-gen sinkhole, and the number of publishers that could be counted on to deliver bleeding-edge entertainment without going broke in the process dwindled to just a few.” In other words, the industry took a big gamble on the high-end and lost, leaving behind a lot of unrealized potential.
As for The Sims, Wired notes that while 100 million copies were sold, “many people don’t even consider The Sims to be a game at all.” Perhaps that about sums it up for gaming over the past ten years.
