I feel like this list has some games that are too new to put on a “most influential” list. Let’s give it at least a few years to see how Baldur’s Gate 3 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 influence the industry.

On the other end, how is Rogue not on the list? The number of games calling themselves “roguelikes” or “roguelites” has been ballooning every year for the better part of a decade now, and some of its ideas have found their way into other genres, especially the use of procedurally generated level layouts.

Edit: Ohhhhh the poll methodology was to ask people to pick one game, and then they sorted them by popularity. So even though I think Rogue is definitely a top-20-most-influential game, it’s harder to argue for it being top 1. But… that makes it even crazier that KCD2 is on the list. A significant number of people voted for KCD2 as “THE most influential game of all time”? It just came out!

Ahhh that’s the part I forgot or didn’t catch, thanks!

So this isn’t the main point of the article, but near the end they mention the fan game Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden. I don’t know if I’m forgetting the plot of Gaiden or what, but they say it mixes the original game with the plot of Space Jam which… is not how I’d describe it? My recollection is that it takes place in the post-apocalypse and centers around the power of Barkley’s devastating Chaos Dunk, a dunk so sick that it can nuke an entire city.

Americans are notoriously terrible at protesting. I was in high school in the '00s and our American history textbook had a sidebar about the 1999 Seattle WTO protests. The bit that stuck with me: a French dignitary interviewed on the scene was unconcerned about the protesters. He pointed to an untouched BMW (or similar luxury car, I forget the exact make). “In Paris,” he said, “That car would be burning.”

What I don’t get is the bit at the end where it explains that Trump can be the guy they root for even though he is literally a smarmy big city elite who only goes to church for photo ops, doesn’t pay his workers, etc. And the article is like, don’t you root for Tony Stark and left-leaning talk show hosts, because they target the people you don’t like?

And I’m like, no, honestly, those guys are insufferable. I need someone to explain why anyone likes them.

Also I grew up in a right-leaning area and I didn’t understand their values any better when I was a kid, honestly. At least as a little kid I was religious, but when I got to high school and started asking tough questions at church it became obvious that our supposed religious leaders didn’t have satisfactory answers to questions like “It would be immoral if I had the power to stop evil and didn’t use it, why isn’t it immoral for God to allow evil to exist?” So then I stopped being religious, too, which pushed me further out of their subculture.

(I guess some of my actual values aren’t popular almost anywhere; I’m a pacifist anarchist which is fairly uncommon. So there has to be more to why people end up the way they do than where they live.)