A conversation with Jordan Minor, author of Video Game of the Year (part one)
A conversation with Jordan Minor, author of Video Game of the Year (part one)
Video Game of the Year: A Year-By-Year Guide to the Best, Boldest, and Most Bizarre Games from Every Year Since 1977 is available now, and I spoke with the author about how it came to be.
Debating the quality of video games is a treasured pastime. Comparing them against each other, deciphering which was more important, which was more fun to play — we’re all guilty of enjoying this. So I of course was drawn to a book written by game critic Jordan Minor, released in 2023, titled Video Game of the Year: A Year-By-Year Guide to the Best, Boldest, and Most Bizarre Games from Every Year Since 1977, as that’s quite the gauntlet being thrown down right there in the title.
Below you’ll find the first part of a conversation with Minor, focusing on how the book was conceived, its featured games selected, and more. Part two will publish at a later date.
Marc Normandin: Before we get in too deep here, please explain to the readers what made you want to write Video Game of the Year.
Jordan Minor: I wanted to write a video game history book that primarily focused on the games themselves. While the book talks about development histories and financial success, I mostly wanted to explain why these specific games were so important and beloved. My goal was for the book to be video criticism, arts criticism, that was comprehensive and approachable for mainstream readers who knew nothing about games, that treated games like something more than just any other interchangeable product.
MN: Picking just one video game to represent each year dating back to 1977 sounds like a daunting task. To kick Retro XP off, I ranked the top 101 Nintendo games ever, and came up with all kinds of internal rules and logic for the selections, spent an embarrassing amount of time playing and replaying and taking notes, ranking and re-ranking, and once I finished up I already had a whole bunch of thoughts for what I should have done better or instead or for next time. As you can imagine, I’ve been thinking a lot about how you were able to come to your own decisions for your book, and would love to hear the details of your own process for Video Game of the Year’s selections: how you settled on the method you did, how you prepared yourself for this trip to the past and back, any hurdles you had to overcome recounting the history of an industry that isn’t always great about keeping or sharing that history.
JM: I’ve always been a big fan of game of the year lists. Looking back, it’s actually pretty embarrassing how worked up I got when websites awarded the “wrong” game. But as I got deeper and deeper into the hobby, I realized that the value of game of the year season ultimately wasn’t from seeing the final list but in diving into the discussion it took to get there. In general, the gaming community should get better about realizing how much “objectivity” doesn’t really exist.
So with VGOTY, my methodology was less about choosing the “correct” games, but in picking the games I thought would lead to the best overall discussion. If anything, picking games many people might disagree with would help that goal, as it at least gets you thinking as to why you disagree. The format itself, one game per year, also forces some fun decisions compared to a more traditional best games of all time list.
But what really helped me narrow the list was embracing the idea that first and foremost VGOTY is meant to tell a definitive history of video games. To do that I had to not only get big popular picks (Super Mario Bros., Final Fantasy VII) but games from all kinds of genres and publishers (The Secret of Monkey Island, Rock Band) as well as games whose influence is obvious even if I don’t personally like them (Uncharted 2, Sekiro).
To prepare, I tried to play basically everything I could, and rely on research and memories where I couldn’t. Fortunately, there’s a lot of great writing out there now about older games to refer to. If anything, picking the modern games was more difficult because we have less hindsight to see their impact. But yeah, the game industry’s needless secrecy and hostility towards preservation didn’t help, and the book explicitly touches on that crisis.
MN: It’s true! While there are certainly some lists where I can tell, even as an outsider to their creation, that something was amiss in the making of them — be it what exactly they’re ranking when they say “best” or “greatest” games ever or just a non-thorough investigation into answering the question — there are plenty out there where the thing I’m curious about isn’t so much where a particular game ranked, as much as the discussion that brought about the ranking. A ranking should be a conversation starter of some kind, whether it’s to broaden the horizons of people reading said ranking, to point people to what you’re writing about a game more than where it’s ranked, or even if someone just wants to put their foot down and confidently pull a “debate me” about it.
So! When it comes to VGOTY, it’s clear the broadening of horizons and conversation you tried to draw attention to involved the ebb and flow of the industry over time. Just in terms of what was there making a huge impact year in and year out, changing the direction of the industry and the tastes of the people playing these things. And to go back to rankings for a second, there’s something you need to achieve there in terms of balance, where you’ve got some obvious candidates to discuss because they merit it, but you also want to be able to introduce the reader to something they might not be familiar with that’s just as great, albeit not as notable. And one thing VGOTY did to address this sort of thing is to include the Extra Life bits. You don’t have just the one game per year: there’s the focal point of 1978 or what have you, the titular video game of the year, but then another smaller entry on something else significant from that year or thereabouts.
It’s difficult to argue against Pac-Man in 1980, for instance, given its incredible success in the arcades, its ports to home consoles at a time when the idea of that was a new thing itself, how it helped keep a string of Namco’s hits going and allowed them to go on and create even more new genres and subgenres that would influence… well, it’d be quicker to list who wasn’t influenced by Namco’s early-to-mid-80s arcade run. But then something like Rogue, aka the game that gave “roguelike” its name, also landed in 1980. It might have taken more time for Rogue to be a massive influence on the industry, but check those Steam categories these days, and you can’t avoid roguelikes even if you want to. Noting the origins of that genre alongside the far more obviously notable Pac-Man makes a lot of sense to me. How did you go about selecting these games for the Extra Life entries?
JM: I can’t tell you how much time some of my group chats have spent picking apart various best games/movies/TV lists we see online.
Before we even sold the book, the publisher wanted to know what the main game lineup would be. So one of the first things I did was just write this massive list of games I thought might make it in, and then start arranging them by year to see how much the list would naturally fill in. That led to some decisions like, say, picking Vice City as the highlighted Grand Theft Auto because that then frees up 2001 to talk about Halo. And I think in the end Vice City was the cooler and more illustrative choice anyway.
But that also meant a bunch of games just had nowhere to go until I decided to do the Extra Lives, too. And since so many of those games are such important titles, that could very easily fill chapters or books themselves, not doing something with them I think would’ve reduced the book’s overall scope in a way I wouldn’t have been satisfied with. The Extra Lives get more games and more types of games in the book. Can you imagine games like Mortal Kombat or Myst not even getting a mention at all? And like you said, this also gave me a way to introduce readers to something more off-kilter that maybe couldn’t support a chapter but is fascinating nonetheless, like Dynasty Warriors or the Jackbox Party Pack games.
I enjoy how the Extra Lives break up the reading experience, how it offers you something shorter in between the main chapters. Going back and forth before shorter and longer essays definitely helped me less get burnt out while writing. The first sample chapter actually had the Extra Life text more integrated into the chapter’s main body, but I think splitting them up was the way to go.
This isn’t necessarily the case with every selection, but I also tried to pick Extra Lives that formed an interesting dialogue with the main game, in comparison to or contrasted against, to establish the larger mood of that particular year. In 2006, Wii Sports as the main chapter and Brain Age on the DS as Extra Life really drives home just how dominant Nintendo’s casual era was. Like we’ve been saying, the history and discussion is the point more so than picking the “best” game, and having two games broadens the perspective without losing the tight focus I wanted to keep.
MN: You made the right call splitting them up, especially since, for a book like this, some people are going to want to flip through and pick out specific games to read about before settling in to read it all in order. (I jumped right to 1986, for instance, since that’s when I was born, and also it was a hell of a year for influential and important video games.)
There’s also an additional component to the Extra Life sections, and those are games covered even more briefly, by additional contributors, without necessarily being from the year in question. What went into selecting and organizing those games within the chapters?
JM: Having guest contributors was something we wanted from the very beginning. I started making the list of people I wanted to reach out to as I was coming up with the games themselves (and the vast majority of people said yes!). Having more voices was meant to make the book even more definitive. As just one person, I don’t have the final word on anything, but having this whole chorus of contributors (a very intentionally diverse chorus) adds to the legitimacy I feel. Plus it gets even more games in there. If you can only get one book on gaming this is it.
I wanted to make contributing as easy as possible for anyone gracious enough to spend time on this project. I told them they could choose any game from any year, anything they could speak passionately about. I felt that freedom was the best way to get the best writing, not trying to force anyone into any “game of the year” box. The only rule was they couldn’t pick something that someone else had picked, and I even had to bend that rule once.
As readers will see, this led to a list of guest games from a bunch of years that don’t necessarily line up cleanly with the main list. But I was willing to accept that messiness if it meant folks could truly write about what they cared about, choices constantly surprised and delighted me. I love deep pulls like Chris Franklin talking about the 1993 Jurassic Park FPS or essays that counter some of my own more negative opinions in the book, like Scott Benson praising Demons’ Souls and Janet Garcia’s love for The Last of Us Part II.
When placing essays, I tried to make sure there was at least some thematic connection, however vague, to the main chapter, whether it was the same year or same genre or same publisher. A lot of guest essays got swapped around as we were doing the layout. But I also think the chaos makes hopping around gaming history more fun and unpredictable than it would’ve been if this was just a strictly linear list.
MN: It was definitely a little chaotic, but I mean that as a positive. I was enjoying what I was reading from these guest essays early on and not yet thinking too hard on the what and why of it all, and then suddenly I’m reading about OutRun 2006: Coast 2 Coast in the 1979 chapter. Which at first got a “huh” out of me, but that was followed by “well of course OutRun 2006: Coast 2 Coast should be in here, that game rules.” And as you said, its inclusion was thematically appropriate in that chapter, since the main title was on Speed Freak, a monochrome racer that helped get the industry down the road that would lead to OutRun in the first place.
And sure, even if they don’t line up cleanly with the years in question all the time like you said, it’s worth whatever messiness it creates. Like we noted before, starting a conversation is important with this kind of endeavor. And not everyone who would buy a book like this one necessarily has a head as overly stuffed with historical industry esoterica as the people in this conversation… but the book can help fill their heads with it! I’m all for maybe introducing someone, anyone, to Killer7, or letting people know that those licensed N64 wrestling games they loved so much were based on a Japan-only series that you could play now if you really want to, or for Asura’s Wrath to get its due and for that to maybe, maybe lead to someone discovering the absurdity that is God Hand because of it. No one’s going to confuse any of those for the best game of their respective release year, but like with the book, there’s more to games than just that.
Was there a game that you weren't very familiar with (or even familiar with at all) heading into this project that you ended up including, and you're now in love with after all that went into preparing for its write up?
JM: It’s funny you mention Speed Freak because that’s my answer here. Granted, that’s a game I unfortunately didn’t get to have any hands-on experience with since it’s such an old and fairly obscure arcade game that relies on bespoke hardware. But after I discovered it I loved how it confirmed my long personal belief about racing games historically being graphical showcases, and how that dates back to the beginning of the genre. Researching all the history for vector display tech was also very fascinating.
MN: Racing games absolutely are that way, or at least used to be if that isn’t the case anymore. Speed Freak, Hang-on and OutRun changed how arcade cabinets were even designed and conceived, like, half of Gran Turismo’s reason for being… I recently published something that got into how, as cool as having Daytona USA was at home for potential Sega Saturn owners, Namco’s Ridge Racer on the Playstation sold so many more people on what that console could do and which of the two they were going to want to get.
Now, on the other side, were there any games that you would have loved to get in the book either through the year essays or as an Extra Life, something you kind of assumed would make it, but in the end you couldn’t justify as vital in the way that, say, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice was to the project’s mission? Anything in particular you want to spotlight, and why?
JM: Another racing game actually, Burnout Paradise! That’s just the pinnacle of everything I personally enjoy about racing games between the open freedom and sense of speed and wanton destruction. Forza Horizon gets mentioned in an Extra Life, so at least that style of racing game got represented, but Burnout Paradise to me is peak.
If I didn’t care about keeping things somewhat balanced I would’ve added way more games from franchises that already had other games featured. Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, Metroid Prime, Metal Gear Solid V. Some more fighting games may have been nice, like a Tekken game or maybe something from SNK.
The 2021 chapter ended up being all guest essays with nothing from me, but I think if I had written that chapter it would’ve been about the new Hitman games and how they steadily grew into such an incredible package. Bayonetta 2 to me is also a basically perfect game and would’ve been great to include, but at least in 2022 I did write an essay for PCMag on Bayonetta 3 that captured some of what that chapter might have been.
Part two of this conversation will publish at a later date. You can find Video Game of the Year for sale at bookstores and online retailers such as Bookshop.org. Jordan Minor is the Senior Apps and Games Analyst at PCMag, and you can follow him on Twitter and Bluesky.
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This was awesome to read - I love the book! I carry it in my bookstore
Love this!