Phil Fogg's Favourite Games of the Decade

Phil Fogg proves, once again, that if Tom Towers ghostwrote his content both on and off air, his face would be freer of egg: without spoiling anything, the game Tom advised Phil to award GOTY to over what actually won it that year has been named the best game of the decade, and the game that beat it for the GOTY has not even made the top 10!

But when Tom Towers’ milks the last decade for all its worth with his own list, the winner will be an even weirder choice considering that it only scored 3.5/5 when he reviewed it!

However,this is Phil’s list, not Tom’s, and it’s one well worth taking a look at!

Reward your eyes with numbers by clicking here.

Game Under Podcast Episode 120

Dante, Vergil and Nero.

In Episode 120 of the Game Under Podcast, Tom Towers is joined by Aarny to discuss what many believe is the greatest beat up action characters, slash and burn, beat ‘em off games ever, Devil May Cry 3.

How many people can be wrong—two, or everyone—or do the two (Aarny and Tom) agree with everyone (Gagan and Vader)?

Click here to find out!

N.B. There is no way to compare stats with other players on DMC5, and Gagan has only played 4 on Steam for 40 minutes and DmC for a few hours, so at this stage, we’re all poseurs.

The Cynical and the Dead: 11-11: Memories Retold’s Fascinating Bad Endings

Yoan Fanise’s second game flew under the radar, in spite of the success of Valiant Hearts: The Great War. I suppose that’s the difference between publishing with Ubisoft and Bandai Namco. Nevertheless, it turned out to be a far superior story, albeit an inferior game.

Its endings, in particular, proved to be one of the rare occasions where the bad endings were logical and satisfying conclusions to the narrative. One, in particular, was also (perhaps unintentionally) one of the most cynical explorations of war in any medium.

So I, Tom Towers, wrote something about it, which you can read here.

Pokemon vs the Vatican

In the last episode of the Game Under Podcast, Phil Fogg claimed that Pokemon is the most valuable intellectual property. Tom Towers countered that this was a ridiculous claim, as pretty much any religious IP would be of significantly greater value; suggesting that even the Vatican alone would be worth more.

While anyone with even the foggiest notion of history will be able to tell you that the Catholic church—let alone the myriad other Judaic* spin-offs—is far more valuable than any non-religious IP, let us take a closer look at the value of Vatican City itself in comparison with Pokemon.

Unfortunately both Pokemon and the Catholic church are secretive organisations, so no one actually knows how much either are worth. In the case of the Vatican, Time magazine estimated that it had a net worth of 10-15 billion. This is a similar number to the 15 billion net worth figure reached by Money Inc. for Pokemon, based on a 2014 unnamed source that claimed Pokemon made 1.5 billion a year.

The Vatican has a yearly revenue of 308 million according to the CIA, which doesn’t sound very impressive until you realise that the Vatican only has a population of 800 odd people, making it the smallest (yet 18th richest) country in the world. Also, if we apply the same statistical analysis that Money Inc. did to their unnamed source, then since its founding in 1929, the Vatican has accrued a total net worth of over 28 billion, making it is nearly twice as valuable an asset as the Pokemon franchise.

And even that is a mere sliver of the Catholic Church’s total wealth. In Australia alone, the Catholic church probably owns 30 billion dollars worth of property!

*Some might argue that like for like figures aren’t being compared (due to the secrecy of the IP owners involved), but let us compare the total revenue earned by Pokemon since its conception (1996) and Israel since 2001: approximately 95 billion for Pokemon, while Israel with a five year handicap still made over ten times that: approximately 972 billion!

In the same episode, Phil Fogg also foolishly claimed that the Catholic Church would put more effort into making a game than Game Freak did with Sword and Shield. I’ll let you be the judge:

Game Under Podcast Episode 119

Tom and Phil discuss how they came to their final list of the top ten games of the 2010’s and then talk about the recent release of Halo: Reach for the PC, Pokemon Shield for the Switch and also Gears 5 for Xbox One and PC. Tom also give his first impressions of Fortnite.

We also ponder who has the most money, the Vatican or The Pokemon Company.

Please look forward to Episode 119 of Australia’s longest running video game podcast.

Game Under Podcast's Top 10 Games of the 2010's - Number 1

1. Minecraft

Mojang, 2011. Most Platforms. Sandbox
The fact that Minecraft is the best selling video game of all-time is not reason enough for it to top our list of the Top Ten Games of the 2010’s. If it were none of the other games on this list would have made it (none were among the ten best selling games of the decade). Minecraft is lightning caught in a bottle, a small game made by what some regard a mediocre coder, Marcus Persson, who had dabbled in Doom-mod games inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Dungeon Keeper. Much as Will Wright had more fun with the development tools he created for The Raid on Bungleing Bay than playing it, and then went onto develop the crafting game SimCity, “Notch” must have identified that people would have more fun with the creation tools of Minecraft than a directed experience game.

Notch used assets from his prior experiments in game develop to Minecraft, including the now iconic pixelated sword.

SimCity eventually became known as the first form of interactive electronic gaming that was a “toy” rather than a game, somehting that could be picked up for as long as the player wanted and relied on their drive and imagination, more so than a linear game that sets milestones and waits for the player to reach them. Minecraft, like SimCity, does have a “proper campaign” but I’ve never met anyone who has actively engaged in it, eschewing it for the far more meditative process of crafting, minecrafting if you will. The game has added different variants over the years, especially under the patronage of Microsoft, which took over Mojang studio in 2014, after Notch tweeted that he no longer wished to bear the pressure of Minecraft and “move on with his life”.

It seems to have been a good move for both Minecraft and Notch, as Microsoft has enabled the unification of the many platforms the game appears on so players can interact regardless of what device they are using, contrary to the exclusivity many feared when Microsoft bought out Mojang.

As an older gamer, with limited time, I’ve not been able to dedicate myself to a single game like Minecraft, but thinking of myself when I was child who was endlessly pursuing programming and anything related to creativity, I can see why all of the children I know are enraptured with Minecraft. As they have aged and moved onto other games, their interest in creation remains, particularly computer enabled design, and to me that is the legacy that Minecraft can be most proud of.

-Phil Fogg

That’s an enchanting table.

Minecraft is a game I’m convinced I bought when it was extremely cheap to pre-order. This was without me knowing anything about it. Then people started to make blogs on GameSpot about it, and I could find no evidence I had purchased it. Did I imagine I bought it, or did Notch scam me? This can be taken as metaphor for Minecraft itself, a game which so defies description beyond its title (you mine and then you craft using the raw materials you have mined) yet is so ubiquitous, that it may not actually exist.

The fact that a game which no one at any point since its release nine-years ago has been capable of describing has proven to be so popular and been just as, if not more, important to the rise of streaming, YouTube personalities and post-forum online gaming communities than MOBAs, horror games, fascism or feminism (and it is also a horror game thanks to its infamous creepers, not to mention its creator’s fascistic tendencies!), would make it more than worthy of being the game of the decade. But for me, as someone who has never played Minecraft, what I believe to be its most significant achievement is its art direction. It proves that indie developers and idiots with no aesthetic appreciation are wrong: pixellated graphics can be just as successful in 3D games as 2D games. In fact, the highest selling game ever was released in the 21st Century and has graphics as chunky as the SEGA Saturn!

So the next time some philistine is calling the original Metal Gear Solid’s graphics dated rather than noticing how incredible it looks—not to mention the editing and framing in the cutscenes!—just remember how successful Minecraft was and is.

I will admit that the ray tracing shaders for it look pretty good, though.

-Tom Towers

To see our full feature on the Top Ten Games of the 2010’s click here.

Game Under Podcast's Top 10 Games of the 2010's - Games 4,3,2

4. Pokemon Go!

Niantic, 2016. Mobile. Augmented Reality, Location-based Game
In retrospect, the success of Pokemon Go! now seems obvious. Take a ubiquitous platform like the smart phone, licence the highest-grossing media franchise in the history of the planet (Pokemon), and release a game that is so novel in nature that it will generate massive amounts of free press and promotion. But perhaps to the developers of the game, US-based Niantic, success did not seem so assured.

Having already made a couple of location-based augmented reality games, they received avid attention from those that played their games. In the case of Ingress, a game that provides the framework for Pokemon Go!, they had also received negative attention for some of the unforseen consequences of combining real locations with fictional augmentation – including tragically the death of at least two players.

Ingress, however provided much needed user experience stats (telemetrics – sigh) and location trend information that made Pokemon Go! Successful. In the game you must traverse actual locations with your GPS-enabled smart phone to locate Pokemon and capture them, though a fairly simple flicking motion. You can play the mode in augmented reality (AR) mode where by using the forward facing camera on your smart phone you can see the Pokemon in the environment before you. Not developing this game first for Hideo Kojima, famous for Metal Gear Solid but also the maker of Boktai:  The Sun is in Your Hands - -a game that made you play in the Sun, as well as Death Stranding, a game that used telemetrics as a influence on world design seems like one of the top ten lost opportunities of the 21st Century. But I’m not his agent, nor his business manger. Thank God.

Pokemon Go!, incredibly, was first conceived as an April Fool’s Joke from the President of Nintendo, Saturo Iwata, and went on to be one of the best selling games of all time, and continues to support millions of users across the globe giving it place on our Top 10.
- Phil Fogg

3. FIFA Ultimate Team - First Featured in FIFA 10

EA Canada, 2010. PlayStation Portable, PlayStation 3, Wii, Xbox 360. Sports Game.
There are two words to validate this game on this top ten list, let alone how high it is, and those words are not Tom Towers, they are Loot Box. The concept of buying something “blind” is not new — look no further than baseball cards sealed in foil wrapping, or gatcha machines in Japan. Putting up money first to get a guaranteed — albeit random — payoff has been a longstanding recreational pastime. There is a certain gambling quality to Loot Boxes, that no doubt provides a dopamine drop to the brain. Risking a known quantity for an unknown reward is stimulating and unlike stock trading, or other forms of gambling, Loot Boxes in video games have a low point of entry, and with digital payments there is no friction detected from giving it “just one more try”.

What is likely the most lucrative asset in EA’s current gaming lineup is their FIFA Ultimate Team, (which has the useful initialism of FUT, as in FUTball, which enables players to buy blind-packs of player cards which can be used to staff their team rosters. This feature was a logical progression of collectible sports cards (or Trading Cards) which have been sold in sealed packages, including cigarette packs, since the late 1800’s. Adding to this is the concept of opening an unknown gift, something that has kept Christmas and birthdays going for quite a while as a cultural phenomenon, not to mention the several highly successful YouTube channels devoted to opening presents and toys.

EA, observing how lucrative gambling can be for their bottom line, soon added the mode to all of their sport franchises, and then almost all of their offerings, including the staid RPG Dragon Age. Other publishers soon caught on and Loot Boxes could be found in everything from mobile games to Halo 6. For years the practice was only slightly marginalized, and obviously still very profitable for game publishers.

Predictably, it was EA itself that killed (or at least winged) the proverbial golden goose with their release of Star Wars Battlefields 2, which took the concept too far in it’s beta release and the reaction was so intense that they removed it abruptly before the game was released. Their mistake was causing a media distraction just before Disney was about to release Star Wars: The Last Jedi. No one messes with the House of Mouse. Governments and legislators around the world woke up to the concept and finally someone was thinking of the children, those poor impressionable minds exposed to gambling. FIFA Ultimate Team deserves this high place on our list for creating the latest monetisation scheme to gaming, a trend that began with Pong.

-Phil Fog

2. Fortnite

Epic Games, 2017. Most Platforms. Battle Royale
For those who avidly follow gaming news the development of Epic Games’ Fortnite had become an inside joke. It was a game that had been in development for several years, and had gone through many iterations and challenges -- including a change in ownership and a departure of key developers like Cliff Blesinsky. For a studio that had developed popular and well -regarded games like Unreal Tournament and Gears of War, as well as a game development engine that a majority of the industry had adopted, Fortnite seemed like the company’s first failure on an epic scale.

Then, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, a 100-player deathmatch with no re-spawning, became a phenomenon.  Seeing the success of Battlegrounds, Epic re-focused their roughly six years of development into a similar “Battle Royale” mode in reportedly two weeks. Releasing the mode as free-to-play, while the more-established Battlegrounds was still asking full-price, Fortnite soon eclipsed it’s influence.  Epic’s rapid deployment across almost all available platforms, while Battlegrounds was just in the starting stages of expanding beyond the personal computer.

Beyond removing barriers to entry like price and access, Fortnite also enjoyed its success due to the still fresh appeal of the Battle Royale, which was an evolution of many aspects of the online shooter genre Epic had so much success with almost twenty-years earlier with Unreal Tournament.  Fortnite’s colourful and cartoony visuals, compared to realistic military shooters, are presumably less threatening to new players (and more importantly for younger players less threatening to their parents).  

The immediate influence of the game was to spawn a countless number of games seeking to capture the same following of gamers, almost all of which have failed completely. Epic has been able to adopt the good creative components of those failed games, keeping Fortnite fresh for long-time players.

In many ways, Fortnite has followed the same path as World Of Warcraft. First they popularized and already existing format, they used an accessible style of art to draw in new kinds of players, their successful formula was copied repeatedly and unsuccessfully, and finally both games provide a stage for social interaction.  It’s fairly predictable that Fortnite will follow another trait of World of Warcraft and still enjoy success for years to come.
- Phil Fogg

Game Under Podcast's Top 10 Games of the 2010's - Games 7,6,5

7. The Last of Us

Naughty Dog, 2013. Playstation 3, Playstation 4. Action Adventure.
Naughty Dog, as a developer, was becoming stale. No-one acknowledged it yet [except for me-Tom Towers], but after producing top-selling franchises like Crash the Bandicoot for the original Playstation, Jak and Daxter for the Playstation 2, and the first two entries of the Uncharted series for the Playstation 3, the Californian developer was flying close to the Sun in terms of predictability and safeness. All they had to do was crank out the required third game of the Uncharted franchise and call it a generation. But shortly after the development of Uncharted 2, leadership within Naughty Dog decided to innovate by developing a second game simultaneously  for the first time in company history – The Last of Us. 

Everyone that was working on the Uncharted project was not invited along for the ride, either by necessity or choice, and the result was a triple-A game that had some semblance of gameplay as well as spectacle. A triple-A game that was dark, not in the spirit of Jak II, but one that touched on the grim mundanities of day-to-day survival raised by Cormac McCarthy’s book, The Road. And after four years of development, The Last of Us enjoyed unprecedented levels of critical and commercial success, but beyond that received universal praise from all segments of the gaming community.

Directed by Bruce Straley and Neil Druckmann, they were able to make a story intended for adults commercially viable. Cutscenes no longer need to be cheesy, they could just be scenes, and feature actors who would influence the script in meaningful ways. The developers stated that they drew influence from Resident Evil 4 and Ico and like those games The Last of Us has a gravitas that is earned in moment-to-moment play. Everything the player does has an impact that is respected. My most memorable moment in the game, while lacking ammunition, was to perfectly aim a brick at an opponent’s head, surely leading to his instant demise. Instead, he took the hit and turned to fight his attacker, leaving me to run away while yelling, “Shit, shit, shit, shit, SHIT!”

Every interaction with nature (including humans) is a threat to survival, and your means to overcome this is combat in some form or another, but also in providing support.

The last few moments of the game provided fodder for indignant gamers who months prior had successfully petitioned Bioware to change the ending of Mass Effect 3. That simple line of dialogue and the non-verbal response from Ellie has set the stage for the sequel, to see how that decision by Joel has played out.

The Last of Us deserves its place in this list through allowing triple-A games to cross into more mature and thoughtful content, while also leading other triple-A games into acknowledging that all games are meant to have some semblance of gameplay, and not just coast on appearance and reputation.
- Phil Fogg

6. Dear Esther

The Chinese Room, 2012 PC, Playstation 4, Xbox One. Exploration Game
The original Dear Esther was part of a PHD project on first person shooters by academic Dan Pinchbeck (not to be confused with this guy) and composer/radio presenter Jessica Curry (together they are known as the husband and wife sex-negative-developer duo, The Chinese Room). Doctor of First Person Shooting Dan Pinchbeck wanted to alter the academic discourse surrounding games from theoretical argument, to practical experimentation by taking academic questions, and making experimental mods out of them.

The first experiment aimed to answer an academic question (can the first person shooter structure be inverted, and still remain a visceral experience?) was the Doom mod, Conscientious Objector. Instead of encouraging the player with the positive reinforcement and moral support of a Cortana, Conscientious Objector featured a discouraging drill sergeant disparaging the player, and instead of levels becoming progressively simpler as the player killed more and more enemies (thus simplifying the environment by removing obstacles), the player’s gun fired rubber bullets allowing him or her to progress past a single enemy, but not reduce the number of enemies (and therefore obstacles) over the course of a level.

Several experimental mods later and we arrive at Dear Esther. Inspired by environmentally rich games like Shadow of the Colossuses, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., and Metro: 2033, Dear Esther aimed to answer the question: Can you make a similarly rich environment in a game, yet remove anything resembling traditional gameplay mechanics, and still end up with an engrossing experience?

What makes Dear Esther inarguably the greatest experimental game of all time, and arguably the greatest indie game of all time, is that regardless of whether your answer is yes or no, you are participating in the experiment yourself: your own take on the merits of Dear Esther is the answer to the question Dear Esther asks.

The same cannot be said of even the most divisive walking simulators that came in its wake. It is very easy to love or hate Gone Home for political or moral reasons, or to dismiss or love The Stanley Parable on the basis of it being a trite stand-up comedy routine of it’s funny because it’s true-level observational jokes (or love it for the same reason), but because the narrative of Dear Esther is essentially meaningless outside of its lyrical content, the thematic content of Dear Esther remains purely experimental.

And this is apparent in Dear Esther’s reception. As stated above, it may be no more divisive than Gone Home, but read a handful of reviews of both games and you’ll find that the division when it comes to Dear Esther is indeed primarily about the validity of walking simulators as a genre, whereas Gone Home, while still being ridiculed for being a walking simulator, manages to attract even more vitriol on the basis of its moral content.

Ultimately, the experiment was undeniably a success, commercially and critically. And for me personally, the retail version is a beautiful little jaunt through the English countryside, even more enjoyable than Fable, for instance, because it allowed you the time to wander freely and enjoy the scenery which could also be rendered in much greater detail due to not having to dilute its visual and architectural design to fit more complicated gameplay mechanics. And the original mod, with its simpler audio design and musical accompaniment, as well as its starker, darker visual design, which allowed for one’s imagination to complement its aesthetic—just as the disjointed, incomplete writing style allowed for the imagination to complement its narrative—is a masterpiece of videogame lyricism and atmosphere, even greater than the retail version. But, alas, it came out last decade, so cannot make the list.
- Tom Towers

5. Dark Souls

FromSoftware, 2011. Playstation 3, Xbox 360, PC, Playstation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch . Action RPG
Souls fans are the worst. While the gaming press praised Demon’s Souls for its melancholy beauty, its intricate level design, its unique online features, its engrossing world and subtle storytelling, all that Demon’s Souls fans noticed was that it was hard. Ask them if there was anything else good about the game, and their response was, at best, yes, but did I mention just how hard it is? At worst, it was to interrogate you as to why you were such a coward as to want something out of a game other than a challenge.

By the time Dark Souls was released, all of a sudden Souls fans were engaging in some critical revisionism. Apparently critics had failed to properly appreciate Souls games, only noticing that the game was hard, whereas they, the connoisseurs that they were, had always loved the series for its melancholy beauty, its intricate level design, its unique online features, its engrossing world and subtle storytelling; sure it is indeed hard, they’d say, but there’s so much more to it than that!

In fact, Dark Souls’ reputation for being hard was such that soon any difficult game started to be compared to Dark Souls. And indeed, one of Dark Souls’ most divergent and ultimately influential design decisions was to focus on challenging the player. But more important than the difficulty, per say, was the decision to not avoid friction.

The greatest example of this is that there is very little instruction on how to play what is pretty much a rudimentary beat ‘em up in slow motion—a very weird combat system, let alone one for an RPG. Learning how long attack animations last, how far to roll out of the way of enemies, and the timing of blocks is entirely up to the player, and is by far the hardest part of the game. Once one has figured out how these basic mechanics work, then the rest of the game is as simple as learning the moves and behaviour of each new enemy one encounters. From this point on, the game really isn’t all that hard.

But the very fact that the hardest part of any Souls game is the very beginning of it, and that it is hard precisely because you must acquaint yourself with just how the game plays without any didactic hand-holding to make it any less of a frustrating experience, is an astoundingly original design decision in any decade, let alone one that prized a frictionless experience over any other consideration. The only other games that follow a similar structure are the most hardcore of sims!

While frictionless experiences still dominates the gaming landscape, Dark Souls nevertheless allowed developers to make mechanics more tactile and enemy attack patterns more complicated; there was even a little more wiggle room to make things more difficult—though not without a copious application of lube.

Shovel Knight is the quintessential post-Souls game, from the obvious aesthetic touches such as bonfires, to the more important things like its focus on precise control and complicated enemy attack patterns and intricate level design. But even though Shovel Knight was not much easier than a Souls game, it was still a frictionless experience, requiring very little time to learn how to play in spite of an unorthodox jumping mechanic and dangerous bosses; nor did it ever harshly punish the player for dying.

The revolutionary co-operative and competitive online system and the limitations it placed on player communication also paved the way for more dynamic online systems that could be adapted to fit games as diverse as Death Stranding, Sky: Children of Light and Forza Horizon!

Like the rest of our top 5, there is an argument to be made that Dark Souls isn’t just the fifth best game of the decade, but the best. However, we’ll leave that argument to be made by someone else.

- Tom Towers

Game Under Podcast's Top 10 Games of the 2010's - Games 10,9,8

10. Tetris Effect

Monsters, Resonair, 2018. PC, PS4. Puzzle.
Since Rez on the Dreamcast, Tetsuya Mizuguchi has been chasing the goal of bringing synesthesia (where a single sensory stimulus produces a sensation in multiple senses) to the masses, or at least those who play video games. In Rez, he orchestrated visual images, music, controller input and vibration to affect all senses at once (except smell)—either through the controller or with a peripheral device only available in Japan but that could be inserted, well, wherever one chose.

Utilising the hypnotising visual repetition of one of the most universally mesmerising games of all, Tetris, Mizuguchi was able to make manifest the visual hallucinations of avid Tetris players in virtual reality.

The Playstation 4 VR headset has outsold all other 3D headsets.

Even without the full body vibration suit that was available to the press, Tetris Effect won game of the year awards for the experience itself, but for this list it carries the additional honour of representing the rise (albeit followed by the plateau) of virtual reality. The progression of virtual reality continues to be invested in as the decade fades with multiple hardware and software developers committed to the concept, and it has at least outlived the 3D fad perpetuated by television manufacturers. While perhaps being influential only for the number of Playstation VR kits it sold, it none-the-less represents the most successful progression of virtual reality to date in the gaming world (sorry Nintendo Labo[cardboard VR is way cooler, though-Tom Towers]).
- Phil Fogg

9. The Walking Dead

Telltale Games, 2012. Most Platforms. Graphic Adventure.Companies like LucasArts and  Sierra had great success with the adventure game genre for almost two decades before losing the interest of English-speaking gamers. Games like King’s Quest, The Secret of Monkey Island and Space Quest mixed puzzle solving and exploration, often with writing that drew on the imagination and good humour of players, just as the text adventure games that provided their foundation did.

About ten years after the decline of the genre, a small group of developers formed Telltale Games with the goal of serving the loyal fans of the genre who were asking for a return to the heyday of “point and click” adventure games. After a modest start with Sam and Max that proved there was still a niche audience for adventure games, Telltale finally found mainstream success by making a game based on The Walking Dead licence. While building on the structure of adventure games—explore an area, solve puzzles (in the case of The Walking Dead that means pixel hunt) before moving to the next area—instead of motivating the player with the new area they discovered once they've solved the puzzles in the current area, they were rewarded with the next development of the soap opera-style story, in which they were able to select dialogue choices that would in differing degrees change the path of the plot.

Like Tim Schafer, Adventure game aficionado and site co-founder, Tom “ESC Room” Towers, has always found adventure games to be about the setting more than the story/characters/dialogue (which are nevertheless usually of interest in and of themselves), while people who don't play adventure games tend to think they're about the story and the characters. The Walking Dead, by focusing on story and characters over setting and puzzles, became what the average non-adventure game player thought adventure games were, and thus was an adventure game with mass appeal for the first time since the days of Grim Fandango. This broad appeal and passive gameplay led to phenomenal commercial and critical success, enabling Telltale to drag its broken game engine throughout the world of immoral-licence, making games for any company that would lend a brand. (ED: Sadly at the time of Telltale’s demise, The Game Under Podcast was in advanced talks to develop, The Game Under Podcast: The Telltale Series in which Phil Fogg and Tom Towers journey on foot across a near-future dystopian Australia).

Beyond games that Telltale would make itself, the influence of The Walking Dead can be seen in a myriad of other puzzle-less, story instead of setting, adventure games, such as Life is Strange.  Even other genres started to use player-choice as a component of their story telling, and while the episodic mode of distribution was ultimately abandoned, it was adopted by many developers as a way to sustain funding during development by selling a game in several smaller-priced instalments, at least until crowd-funding and early access became easier sources of income. The episodic release schedule added more than funding though, it lent to a true cultural phenomenon, generating conversation and anticipation (not to mention word of mouth marketing) around the release of each episode.
- Phil Fogg

8. Depression Quest

The Quinnspiracy, 2013. PC. Interactive Fiction.

Outside of sporting organisations, religions and political parties there are few “communities” as passionate and squeamish as enthusiast gamers. Gamers really, really love games. And gamers, really, really hate those who love games in ways they do not. The religious zeal with which gamers debate what games they love and hate is why I find the gaming “scene” (lol) so endlessly fascinating. There is no greater worship of the arbitrary achievements of human creativity today than the church of gaming and, personally, I find a world without arbitrary creativity to be, counterintuitively, completely and utterly pointless.

However, evangelical passion is tremendously easy to manipulate (creating and spreading it is the hard part). Console manufacturers and videogame publishers were the first entities to turn previously unbridled nerd rage into grassroots marketing by fanning the flames of the console wars, turning fanboys into guerrilla marketers—a tremendously important strategy before the internet when word on the street was just as important as magazine reviews, or YouTube “influencers” and witty astroturf tweets are today. The likes of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk stand out in other markets, but cultish propaganda strategies building a brand on the zealous proselytising of its own consumers are par for the course in gaming.

Last decade—only two or three hundred years after Romanticism killed God and secular humanists began to invent new religious structures based on art, science and the occult—the evangelical atheist movement suddenly realised God no longer existed. Simultaneously, some two-hundred or three-hundred years after the height of molly houses and women masquerading (often unnoticed) in public as men, liberals suddenly realised crossdressing was a thing that occurred outside of TV comedies.

Next minute and gaming forums were overrun with the dogmatic atheist mind virus and feminist cooties, the former mainly just taking every opportunity to make straight-faced, acerbic responses to Christians arguing that God existed because bananas came pre-wrapped by nature in condoms, allowing for safer insertion into the mouth; the latter just kinda calling for more female characters in games. But some atheists dabbled in running a cheer squad for wars of aggression and torture because their targets were Muslims—that the war criminals and torturers they were defending were Christians acting on the righteous instruction of God, didn’t seem to matter for some reason. And some feminists didn’t really like that games featured penises, believing that the biologically-superior penis was kryptonite to the biologically-inferior vagina (as you can tell from this, their understanding of pop culture was questionable: Superman may have had one crippling weakness, but was otherwise essentially invincible; whereas their vision of an archetypical woman was someone who could not only be torn asunder by a soft sack of skin filled with blood, but was also utterly incapable of dealing with day to day life).

Oh, and then the economy crashed. Five years of stagnation later, and Depression Quest was released. A free browser-based game, you could also choose to pay-what-you-wanted, with part of the proceeds going to the suicide prevention hotline. It was a critical success, and other than a few voices in the gaming community who were annoyed that a game about a serious topic like depression existed, no one really objected. Then a jilted ex-boyfriend of Zoe Quinn (the mastermind behind Depression Quest) decided to slutshame her; accusing her of having once cheated on him (of course the anti-cuck crowd’s hero would literally be a cuckold) with a games critic who gave Depression Quest a positive review.

If there’s one thing gamers can’t stand, it’s critical bias—and other people, especially women, having more sex than they do. The idea that critics and game developers who have intermittent contact might end up engaging in more intimate intercourse than sending and receiving press releases was incomprehensible and morally outrageous to gamers. And so, somehow, out of a cuck slutshaming the woman who cucked him grew a crusade against corrupt games critics.

This crusade then began to slowly but surely mutate into a massive reactionary political movement (though one might argue that a slutshaming, sex-negative, anti-social justice cultural movement was probably reactionary to begin with), laying the foundations of structural communication for dissident right-wing political movements in the internet age (from gamers who are just annoyed that games no longer market themselves towards a limited demographic, to activists who dox and harass people, to terrorists who like to shoot people) as well as strategies for internet disruption and harassment. It also influenced the language and cultural and political discourse that has spread all over the internet, building on the propaganda techniques of atheist takedown videos and people who didn’t realise Angry Video Game Nerd was a parody, altering not just the discourse of gaming communities, but all cultural and political commentary—from memes to social media algorithms to talking heads on the television. In response, games critics weaponised the penis; not realising that, in reality, penises are utterly harmless—even Superman’s!

Depression Quest itself may have been relatively unremarkable (Tom was unimpressed by it when he reviewed it on the show and Phil not only couldn’t be bothered playing it, he doesn’t even remember Tom talking about it!) but the political movement it inadvertently spawned is arguably the biggest mainstream cultural impact gaming has ever had, surpassing that even of the Wii!

Bonus Backstory: Harvard-Educated Leninist and Goldilocks Saxon, Steve “Mercer” Bannon once ran a gold-mining business in World of Warcraft using Chinese Labour—back then he was a little more iffy on the whole trade war thing. It was during such humble blue-collar beginnings (growing up on a farm in World of Warcraft, not going to Harvard and working as a Golden Sacks bagman, obviously) that he first realised the reactionary potential of gamers. Without him, among others, coming to this realisation, GamersGate may never have grown so big. But it’s easy for any grifter to make such claims in hindsight. I, on the other hand, observed such things at the time—as evidenced in my GameSpot blogs. Unfortunately, GameSpot deleted them all. But if you can believe that a Harvard-Educated Leninist Gold-spooned Saxophonist shilling for the Mercers is fighting for oppressed gamers, you should have no trouble believing me—admittedly I own Telstra shares but that, if anything, just shows you how bad of a businessman I am; I’m practically Trump!

Fuck Ace Watkins. Tom Towers 2020!

- Tom Towers

Game Under Podcast's Top 10 Games of the 2010's

This is the best open-source image our crack team of artists could find with a rudimentary image search before lunch.

When we first started putting together our top 10 games of the decade, our first reaction was to question whether there even were 10 notable games that truly deserved to be considered the greatest of their decade? But as we began to put together the list, we started to realise that there have been a number of fascinating changes for better and worse in the games industry over the last 10 years, from the rejection of motion controls (as well as the acceptance of them for VR) to the transition of flash games from browsers to mobile phones, best exemplified by the life-ruining success of Flappy Birds.

The indie games scene over the past ten years has solidified itself as the new mid-tier level of development (but instead of most mid-tier games being action adventures as they were in the past, now they’re all procedurally-generated rogue-likes or Metroidvanias) both in terms of its influence in the ecosystem of the industry, as well as the size of independent budgets! More interesting than the continued rise of e-Sports has been the dystopian phenomenon of games streaming, where gamers film themselves playing games while begging for donations from people who believe they are friends of the streamer. I’m not sure friends is really the right term, because I don’t know about you, but I don’t give my friends copious amounts of money when I’m watching them play a game. But maybe I’m just a bad friend.

Phil fogg (Left) and Tom Towers (Right) playing Rockband Country released in 2011 to see if it would qualify as one of the top ten games of the 2010’s (Spoiler Alert: It didn’t).

With the indie scene cementing itself as the new mid-tier, triple-a development has been creatively reinvigorated—building on the creative achievements of indie devs and a couple of bigger budget titles (read our top ten to find out which ones!) that proved you can be a huge commercial success even if your game is actually a game. Unfortunately it also developed a fixation for open-world games and RPG elements (probably just an excuse to avoid level and progression design) and a schizophrenic approach to player reinforcement, integrating the structure of achievements into an endless stream of busywork for the player to do to earn experience.

Games criticism itself was also afforded greater freedom by YouTube. The video essay format allowed games critics to get away with standards of writing (and creativity) that no one would accept if they were reading the script as an article, rather than listening to it being narrated over video clips. From comedy to academic-style discussion, thanks to the video format, there has never been a wider variety of criticism available to gamers. It’s just a shame nearly all of it is still crap…

The games we have chosen as being worthy of immortalising as our top 10 games of the decade, aren’t necessarily the “best” games of the decade—or even the most influential,—but they are the most important; each epitomising an important development in the games industry.

Phil Fogg (Left) and Tom Towers (Right) seen leaving the deliberation room after a heated confrontation on the final selection of games for the Top Ten Games of the 2010’s.

N.B. League of Legends is obviously a top three game of the decade, but unfortunately it came out in 2009, so pedantry has disqualified it.

- Tom Towers and Phil Fogg