If you ever needed proof that the average person has the attention span of a gnat, look no further than the IGN Readers’ Top 100 Games, where the top ten games of all time are supposed to be the following:
- Resident Evil 4
- Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
- Splinter Cell Chaos Theory
- Chrono Trigger
- Half-Life 2
- God of War
- Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater
- Soul Calibur
- Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
- Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
All of those are very good games – there’s no doubt about it – but RE4, Chaos Theory, God of War, MGS3, and GTA San Andreas (a close one, but I think GTA3 was the better game) are rated as in the top 10 games of all time!? San Andreas is the oldest and that’s barely six months old, and several of them are less than a month old. Even the perennial favourite of people who’d never played an RPG before 1997, Final Fantasy VII, could only make #29 – obviously too old for people to remember – behind such timeless classics as Devil May Cry 3 (March 2005), Gran Turismo 4 (February 2005), Madden 2005 (August 2004), and Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal (November 2004).
I’d be embarrassed to have even voted on that list, and it’s exactly why any popular thing which is voted for by the public, though lucrative (lots of ad revenue for IGN and those £1/text things on TV are even more so), is utterly worthless. People can’t remember beyond what they had for breakfast.