Welcome back to Eurogamer’s 25th birthday week – this time, for something of a more personal piece from the team. We’ve already introduced The Eurogamer 100 – the games we recommend you play right now. Well, here’s something different: the games we feel have helped form Eurogamer’s identity over the past quarter century.
Many of these inclusions come from the memories we’ve made working together over the years. It’s telling, perhaps, that a lot of this list are multiplayer titles. Other entries highlight games we’ve found ourselves being associated with over the years – be it because of infamous review scores or recurring memes.
So much of that – as with many of our memories of Eurogamer over the years – has been influenced by you, the readers. You were the ones discussing those scores, sharing those in-jokes, putting up with us as we wrote far too much about Destiny. Thanks for sticking with Eurogamer – hopefully this list is a fun peek behind the curtain, and a reminder we couldn’t do it without you.
Destiny
Destiny is a terrible game to play solo. I know, I did it for a year on Xbox One, after picking the ‘other’ console to everyone else in the Eurogamer office at the start of the PlayStation 4 era. With a staff full of former Halo fans, there was no doubt Eurogamer would go deep on Destiny – so deep, some readers felt we ended up referencing it stealthily in almost every article.
Destiny was a game designed to encourage and reward players to team up with friends and play every day. So Eurogamer’s staff did, and I was terribly jealous. When the game’s first expansion The Taken King came out and I did get a PS4, I remember grinding a new character from scratch to get ready and raid with the Eurogamer clan – Des Tiny OMG – as soon as the doors to the new raid opened.
Des Tiny OMG was a motley crew, but I have so many memories of those days. The evenings spent throwing ourselves at raids and Nightfalls, the hours spent pootling around collecting Spirit Bloom, the many episodes of Love Island I heard in the background from the one player who wouldn’t mute their mic. Simpler times. Anyone got rez? – Tom
Batman: Arkham Oranges
I’m very aware that acknowledging something surreptitious designed to look like a slip-up rather defeats the whole point of it but, after more than a decade, allow me this indulgence. Batman Oranges, our hilarious misspelling of Batman: Arkham Origins, is probably Eurogamer’s longest-running in-joke, though its own oranges do in fact lie with Rayman Oranges/Origins, which Google tells me came first.
There were a few games with Origins in the name at the time, I recall, and we began deliberately substituting the name and enjoying when driveby commenters called us out for the egregious typo. A bit of Google archeology places Rayman Oranges’ first appearance on the website as May 2013, in a news story from a young news reporter named Tom Phillips, though the style of the joke itself is reminiscent of older deliberate typos I remember reading on Eurogamer years prior. Former Xbox exec Don Mattrick was always Don Mattress, I recall, until the point someone complained and made us stop doing it. 11 years later, no one has requested the oranges stop yet. – Tom
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
As with everyone else who played New Horizons, my memory of the Switch’s Animal Crossing entry is closely tied into the circumstances of the time, and the fact I was suddenly using this game to interact with friends and colleagues I could no longer see in person.
I’ve found it difficult to go back to New Horizons since, but my Island – and others I regularly visited – do hold happy memories too. When we couldn’t go outside, I would spend lunch breaks planting virtual trees and flowers. When it came to hanging out with friends, I would pop over to their island and leave them gifts. Within the Eurogamer team, Emma Kent’s swap shop became a fun destination for a few of us to pop over and exchange items and a quick hello. It was all run on trust – and Emma’s ever-watchful eye – and it provided a moment of real positivity at a tough time. – Tom
Pokémon Go
As I write some of these entries for Eurogamer’s 25 Games, there’s something of a theme emerging for me: shared positive experiences found while playing with others. And no game exemplifies that more than Pokémon Go. Years on from the one beautiful summer it felt like everyone in the world was playing, Eurogamer team members continue to log on each day for their daily Pokéwalk, or discuss which regional exclusives might be available whenever one of us goes abroad.
Pokémon Go is a remarkably simple concept on top of which sits a web of spaghetti coding and a network of human connections. The game owes its success to the franchise it’s based on, as well as a lightning in a bottle idea to get it launched. But none of that would have worked if it hadn’t also inspired the real-world connections to continue to make it part of the fabric of our lives – and our website – almost a decade on. Eurogamer has been playing Pokémon Go since day one, and some of our most read pages this decade have been our brilliant, evergreen guides written by people who play daily. May Pokémon Go continue to be a success for another decade – for Eurogamer’s site stats as well as our social lives. – Tom
Red Dead Redemption 2
The Eurogamer work I’m most proud of – from various writers across the team over the years – is the reporting we’ve done to highlight working practices within the games industry that need to be improved. There’s hardly a higher calling for games journalism, I believe, than to improve the frequently fraught and typically opaque conditions experienced by those who make video games – and our reporting on Rockstar ahead of Red Dead Redemption 2 was a good example.
Few game developers are as secretive as Rockstar, and few companies produce such wide-consumed, culturally impactful output. It was personally rewarding to see the company seemingly change for the better, in the months and years after coverage from Eurogamer and elsewhere based on the experiences of those who worked within it. – Tom
1-2 Switch
I remember Eurogamer being just an hour or two away from publishing its report describing what the Nintendo Switch would look like, when somebody had a bright idea. We couldn’t show photos of it, and describing it in text only went so far. But… we could draw a picture? In hindsight, it was such an obvious thing, but in the hurry to publish it almost got overlooked. Of course, Anni, one of our brilliant designers at the time, jumped on it based on the description we shared. It was a handheld that plugged into the TV! The controllers break off! It all makes sense now, but at the time it took some explaining. Anni’s illustration made that so much easier.
And then, around half a year later, I was holding it in my hands – shaking a Joy-Con to mime something or other in 1-2 Switch. Nintendo’s hybrid console hit launched with a few games, but none that demonstrated its form factor more. I remember standing at the first UK press hands-on for the console (having stayed the night before on former editor Martin’s sofa as it had been an early start and he lived close by). And I remember thinking of that drawing. It made the day all the better. – Tom
Tetris Effect
Back in 2010, Wesley Yin-Poole dubbed Tetris Effect “the game of all the decades”, in an article which summed up the positive impact its mix of puzzle gameplay, colours and music can have on the soul. It’s something many of us who’ve played Tetris Effect on the team have individually experienced and would sometimes, a couple of pints deep, try and discuss. The game remains a welcome place to return to after long days or difficult times – that rarely fails to leave you feeling more positive as a result. Looking back at that piece now, I can see dozens of comments from readers who agree. One in particular stands out, from a former reader who is now very sadly no longer with us. I’ll leave you with what they wrote. – Tom
“Tetris Effect is literally the only game that has made me cry with joy,” wrote Jonathan White, who passed away in August 2022. “About nine months ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I did not deal with that well. I couldn’t let the anger go. Friends and family helped but… then I found Tetris Effect, dusty and neglected on my PS4. And as the rain dancers danced and the windmills turned and as the dolphins lept through a firework display of pixels, I realised what I needed was just something good and beautiful and simple, just to make me feel it might be ok again, someday.
“And alone on my sofa, late at night, in the dark, I wept like a child, for the straightforward joy that Tetris Effect represents. Tetris Effect combines aspects of psychology and neural feedback to do an entirely positive thing. All it really wants to do is to make you feel better. Game of the year? Game of the decade? It is the game of my life.”
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds
I think you can tell a game’s great if it can make a fundamentally unpronounceable name (one Eurogamer staffer at the time insisted on calling it pub-guh, and quite possibly still does) into something wildly popular. PUBG was a phenomenon, and like many other phenomena it took off in the offices of Gamer Network as a whole.
But PUBG was also a defining game for Eurogamer’s video team, whose livestreamed antics in the game spawned several memes (you’re a Level 2 helmet!) despite the fact that during the entire time that they played it for, they only won one match.
The secret to why PUBG was so successful for the video team was how every match told a different story. The aim was always the same – to be the last team standing – but the unpredictability of the battles combined with some utterly chaotic ‘teamwork’ meant there was always surprises. Even better was when the team played PUBG on stage in front of a live audience at multiple EGXs, and who could forget when we discovered you could make your own Machinimas in-game using match recordings. Cinematic as fook! – Ian
LA Noire
Ask any long-time Eurogamer reader to name their favourite article on the site, and there’s a good chance they’ll instantly say, “Well, obviously, Chris Donlan’s Night and the City, duh.” It’s certainly one of the pieces that sticks in my mind the most – it was practically required reading back when I was a baby journalist in 2012 when it was first published. But this deeply personal account of Chris playing L.A. Noire with his dad, who himself grew up on the streets of LA back in the 1940s under the watchful eyes of his own beat cop dad, remains a piece so inherently and uniquely tied to Chris as a writer that it literally couldn’t have been done by anyone else. And as we said back in 2019 to celebrate the re-release of L.A. Noire, it’s “still one of the very best things ever published on Eurogamer.” And I’d like to add my own personal addendum that it remains the definitive piece of writing about L.A. Noire itself.
As Chris relays his dad’s memories of his own father at the time, we realise that developer Team Bondi was really quite on the money with the tone and atmosphere of L.A. Noire, and how carefully they’d excavated the city’s forgotten corners and landmarks. But more than that, it’s the way Chris invites us to practically pull up an armchair in his own front room beside him that makes this journey down memory lane so insightful and evocative. We, too, gain a new understanding of L.A. Noire and its place in the wider history of the city, and for a few brief moments, we’re all bundled into the back of the same car Chris and his dad are driving around in, admiring the sights as fellow virtual tourists. And if you’ve haven’t read it yet, cor, you’re in for a treat. After all, how can you beat that opening that begins, “Today, I’m going to tell you about the time my grandfather shot a man in the ass”? – Katharine
Metal Gear Solid 4
All games mags and websites have published their fair share of controversial reviews over the years, but the 1718 comments currently anchored to Oli Welsh’s Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots review surely has to be some kind of record. It’s a rare occasion to break the 100 mark on review comments these days, but quadruple digits of online discussion is practically unheard of now. Still, even if some of the discourse descended into what Oli described as “pretty colourful personal feedback” when Eurogamer revisited it on the eve of Metal Gear Solid 5’s release back in 2015, it remains a testament to both the passionate and vibrant communities of readers that have been coming to Eurogamer all these long years, and how, as critics, the site’s writers have continually strived to challenge the status quo and cut through the hype to deliver thoughtful and comprehensive analysis of what makes a game tick.
For Metal Gear Solid 4, there was a heck of a lot of stuff to tick off, too, from its overstuffed storyline, backbreaking levels of excess and also just the nuts and bolts of what it was like to actually play and experience. Subjects that Oli absolutely takes in his stride, and with a sense of humour that demonstrates both his deep love of what Metal Gear Solid is, and its many, many flaws and missteps. Whisper it, but it’s reviews like this that we all try and aspire to even now – not to provoke the same level of fierce discussion, perhaps (8/10 is still absolutely the right score for that game), but certainly to that level of insight, wit and intelligence. And let’s be real: who can forget the perfection of that seven-word sign-off that ended up bringing the internet to its knees? “We love you, Snake. Don’t come back.” – Katharine
Half-Life 2
Eurogamer has always been the home of hard-hitting interviews and expert reporting, and Simon Parkin’s The boy who stole Half-Life 2 is up there with the site’s very best. An essential story, thrillingly told, it recounts the tale of the $250m robbery that occurred when a young Axel Gembe in Germany made off with the source code of Valve’s then-to-be-released iconic shooter back in 2003.
As it deftly weaves between the state of panic unfolding at Valve and the giddy excitement of Gembe wondering what to do with this motherlode of information he’s obtained, we’re taken right inside one of the most riveting launch lead-ups from the past 25 years – and all the while you’ll be wondering why you don’t have a bucket of popcorn in your lap, because you’re that glued to your screen, itching to find out how it all unravels. Half-Life 2 is the kind of game we all know was a great success in hindsight, but by lifting up the curtain on its altogether more troubled final moments, we’re afforded a rare glimpse into the inner workings of one of today’s biggest game makers and industry players. It’s the type of story that doesn’t come along very often, but one that undoubtedly moves the conversation forward, and strengthens our understanding of the wild ride Half-Life 2 took before eventually making its way (officially) in our willing and ready hands. ‘The boy who stole Half-Life 2’ remains one of the benchmarks for investigative reporting, and it couldn’t feel more at home in the pages of Eurogamer. – Katharine
Hearthstone
Eurogamer has always catered to a mix of video game tastes, and over the years has boasted aficionados of pretty much every genre out there. It’s good we play different things, and it makes the rare moments we’re all playing the same game even better. Hearthstone was one of those moments, when I remember looking around the office on my lunch break and seeing it on everyone’s screen: the Eurogamer writers, even our tech team and sales. It was a game I now think of as being eminently snackable, and brilliantly simple to pick up.
It was also highly competitive, of course, and the fact you could play each other meant we often did, creating a LAN tournament-style atmosphere as challenges flew back and forth across the office. It was brilliantly balanced, too. I remember a few grumbles from those who spent money on additional card packs, who still found themselves losing to those who were free-to-play. Perhaps my favourite nerdy memory, though, and a sign of just how much we played, was an evening we sat in the pub and realised how many of the cards’ war cries we could recount without a second’s thought. “This is our town, scrub! Yeah, beat it.” – Tom
FIFA (all of ’em)
There’s beat reporting, and there’s beat reporting. I’m not sure any game has been the subject of such intense and relentless monitoring as FIFA has over the years on Eurogamer.
At times this became a meme and, honestly, I get it: you don’t play FIFA because you couldn’t care less about football, or you don’t play FIFA because you care a lot about football and can’t stand what it represents. Or actually you do play FIFA but, man, you really don’t need to read any more about it. We have covered a lot of FIFA.
But here at Eurogamer a combination of factors created a kind of perfect storm of coverage. For one FIFA, now EA Sports FC, is one of the most popular games in the world, but also specifically one of the most popular games in the UK, our home country and back yard. It’s one of the few games – alongside Call of Duty and GTA – that you’ll probably find first in the TV cabinet of most UK gamers’ homes, and as such there’s a genuine imperative for us to be across it. It may not matter to all of our most regular readers, but it matters to an awful lot of people who play (and read about) video games.
It’s also intensely, repeatedly controversial. The most obvious controversy of course being its various battles with the governments of the world in protecting its legal right to include loot boxes, and the endless debate around whether or not they constituted gambling (which rather missed the point: that they have the potential to cause as much harm, and that they’re repeatedly dangled in front of children). But there was also the FUT coins controversy, don’t forget, and the little kerfuffle around a ‘grind currency’ snafu at one E3.
But there’s one more reason we covered it so much: because we played the life out of it at the Eurogamer office. This was a tradition going way back before my time, with everyone from former Eurogamer editor Tom Bramwell taking defeats famously well, to company-wide tournaments, to me always beating Wesley Yin-Poole and never ever losing. Frequently, the first half hour after lunch in the Eurogamer office would feature one or the other sitting at a desk and quietly fuming over a loss, cursing what I’ll phrase here as “FIFA nonsense” – and all the while itching for another round. It’s been the definition of love-hate, and has culminated in reporting from Wes – on cashing out, regulation, and each year’s collection of very silly bugs – of such relentless tenacity that I still look up to it and use it as an example today. Without it, there’d be no exclusive sit-downs with EA’s monetisation executives as they sought to clear the air. And much less swearing coming from the old console room. – Chris
Call of Duty (also all of ’em)
Much the same as some other games here, Call of Duty as a series has been a staple of Eurogamer beat reporting over the years but, rather than single issue as with FIFA, or single, defining piece of coverage as with the likes of LA Noire or Half-Life 2, Call of Duty’s a game that made us by virtue of the sheer breadth of articles we’ve published on it.
For one, over several years it became something of an annual tradition for me to look over at professional scooper Tom Phillips’ screen and see him announcing the next Call of Duty to the world several months ahead of time. But beyond that it just seems to keep coming up. Emma Kent wrote up the Modern Warfare reboot’s bizarre choice of including a level where you play as a child soldier in one E3 demo. Simon Parkin wrote one of my personal favourite pieces on the site, in a 2012 exposé on the way shooters such as CoD fund arms manufacturers with the licensing of their real weapons. And, lest we forget, there’s our fearless reporting on one Colin the dog. (I’m promised this was very funny at the time – I’m not sure Activision ever quite got it.) – Chris
Quake 2
Quake 2 is where it all began for Eurogamer. If you don’t know, the site grew out of the competitive Quake 2 gaming scene. Eurogamer co-founder Rupert Loman (who created the site with his brother Nick) was a pretty good Quake 2 player too, but it was his behind-the-scenes organisational work that led to the formation of the site. The Lomans ran large LAN events based around competitive Quake 2. There was EuroQuake, EuroLan… You start to sense a theme. The Lomans were also the backbone behind the UK Quake 2 team (yes there was one) when it travelled to events like LAN Arena 3 in Paris. It’s one of the first things we wrote about on Eurogamer – sorry: EuroGamer – when the site was created.
I was a close friend of Rupert’s at the time, and still am, so I remember almost all of this. I was at EuroQuake and I helped set up EuroLan in our sixth form college, and I distinctly remember the moment Quake 2 entered our lives. I didn’t have a computer so I lived vicariously through Rupert, and I remember him excitedly showing me the opening levels of Quake 2 and, especially, what the newfangled ‘graphics cards’ could do. Ooh smooth 3D edges! Ooh fancy coloured lighting! It was groundbreaking at the time. But it was never the single-player side of the game we were drawn to: everything back then was about this new world of online.
Today, multiplayer map names like The Edge, Tokay’s Towers, and Lava Tomb are seared into my mind. We cycled around server playlists playing them over and over again, though The Edge was always my favourite. Those map names are also emblazoned onto the toilet doors in Eurogamer’s office in Brighton, in case you didn’t know (and which has sadly just closed). It reflects how fundamental multiplayer Quake 2 was to the formation of the company, which was once known only as Eurogamer. Without Quake 2, we very probably wouldn’t be here. – Bertie
The Witcher 3
It’s testament to the game’s quality how well it holds up now, almost a decade after its release. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is still a peerlessly grounded, dirty, and touchable fantasy game. No other RPG farts like The Witcher 3, no other RPG burps and swears like The Witcher 3. But it’s not just its presentation: there’s an earthiness and relatability in the way it’s written too. This isn’t high fantasy, it’s a kind of everyday fantasy. You can picture yourself being there, I think. No storyline typifies this better than the iconic Bloody Baron. This gruff leader seems like a lout to begin with, crude and uncaring, but over time, as you talk, a much more vulnerable and flawed persona emerges. A human appears. It’s this depth and detail that lifts The Witcher 3 above what other fantasy games present us with. It’s a game that made CD Projekt Red one of the most famous developers in the world.
It’s also a game we’ve covered in more ways than perhaps any other, and that’s led to some of our favourite pieces on the site. We told the history of CD Projekt Red, and we were at the studio in Poland when The Witcher 3 was released. We tracked down Geralt voice actor Doug Cockle before he became a household gaming name, and we spent a weekend in a castle in Poland learning to become a real-life Witcher. We also, lest we forget, met the creator of it all, author Andrzej Sapkowski, and snapped perhaps the most memorable picture – of Bertie beaming and Sapkowski fuming – we’ve ever posted on the site. Few games have provided a seam as rich as The Witcher 3’s. – Bertie
Fable Legends
This one’s a personal one. Eight or nine years ago, I was a part-time cashier at a local cinema writing amateurishly in my spare time about video games, when I applied to be a guides writer at Eurogamer. I’d got through to the interview stage, which was promising, but there was a slight catch. I’d read Eurogamer (I promise), but I wasn’t a regular. I knew its reputation, that it’d won a couple of awards and had a bit of a history. I reckoned I could probably blag it, just about, in an interview if I had to – but I didn’t really fancy trying to if I had a choice. So, between phone calls from pensioners struggling with an online ticketing system and serving myself scoops of popcorn, I started properly searching through the site. And then, like magic, just as I was rooting around with our at the time less-than-stellar internal search function on the hunt for defining articles, this story appeared on the homepage: Lionhead: the inside story.
This thing is 20,000 words long, and I devoured it in an afternoon. The next day I read it again. And a third time. Writing about Xbox’s recurring struggles earlier this year I went back to it once more to grab a quote, and ended up reading the whole thing over once more. It is, in my opinion, the single best written report on video games out there, at once accounting for the humanity and unworkability of Peter Molyneux’s creative leadership at Lionhead, the shifting sands of cultural change across time and corporate acquisition at a once-independent studio, the structural, financial failures of an industry that seem to be just as pertinent today as they ever were. The demise of a video game, a series, and a team that birthed it. The strange, doomed repetition of the same failures at Xbox each generation.
This article was a window into a platform, into the industry as a whole, and also much less importantly, a window into Eurogamer for me personally, leading me back through the archives to Tom Bramwell’s infamous editorial on Microsoft killing game ownership and expecting us to smile, and then other old Eurogamer long-reads from Christian Donlan, Ellie Gibson or Simon Parkin. And then acting as the springboard we used for inspiration, alongside the likes of now-editor-in-chief Tom’s report on Red Dead Redemption 2, when starting an irregular series of longform writing again this year – from Donlan and Bertie and our new generation of writers like Ed Nightingale. Fable Legends, sadly, never existed in the public eye, but it’s woven into the fabric of Eurogamer. And is an essential part of what I think this website’s all about. – Chris
GTA 5
There’s no great nuance to this one. Once upon a time, when Eurogamer still had an office – and, before that, when its office had just one floor – we used to have one big-ish screen with a list of URLs on it. This was a simple, hacked-together kind of traffic board, just black font on a white background, full URLs with a number next to them, where we could see what articles across the network were popular at that very moment. But it became a kind of de facto water-cooler, the point you gather around when big articles go live, big games launch, big record-busting guides take off.
Forever nestled amongst the top ones, however, was one curious mainstay: gta-5-cody-tipsy. For a brief period some people in the office thought Cody Tipsy was an actual character from GTA who was, for some reason, just really popular, until it was explained that this was a guide page with cheat codes and general game tips for GTA 5 from one of our sister sites, Eurogamer Poland. Across the network’s guides teams, however – Eurogamer, USGamer, RPS, VG247, Metabomb and more – Cody Tipsy became an obsession. Our white whale. This thing was always on the board. It was unbeatable, unshakeable, immutable. The two great truths of the universe are death, and Cody Tipsy doing quite respectable traffic. It will be there, on that screen, after all life on Earth comes to an end. No doubt it’s still going even now, ticking away on the traffic board, after the doors to our old home have closed. – Chris
Unreal Tournament
1999 was a hell of a year for iconic games, and for all that Eurogamer grew out of the competitive Quake 2 gaming scene, it’s hard to ignore another towering shooter series that arrived with Quake 3 that year: Unreal Tournament. It was the big showdown at the time – could this new game by a company called Epic dethrone the de facto shooter champion id Software? It was really a close-run battle. Unreal Tournament had new ideas like alternate fire on guns, so you could save up barrages of rockets rather than fire one at a time, and it even dared come for Quake’s instagib crown – which is to say, the one-shot-one-kill railgun style of battle.
Even now, I have vivid memories of floating around the low gravity Morpheus map, on the tops of those three tall towers, above some fictional city far, far below, and splattering people into chunks of bloody body parts with a beam from my Super Shock Rifle gun. Float, splat, float, splat was how it went. It was endlessly brilliant.
It’s testament to the strength of Unreal Tournament that it made a dent on Quake’s legacy at all, and that die-hard Quakers like Eurogamer founder Rupert Loman would spend so long playing it. Of course, it’s grown into something of a legend today. The Unreal Engine underpins the blockbuster output of the industry, and through Fortnite, Epic Games has become one of the biggest gaming companies around. But it all started back then. – Bertie
Stephen’s Sausage Roll
I feel like explaining this one would ruin it, so: here.
Fez
There’s an article on Eurogamer that sums up Fez’s impact on the company perfectly. It’s called Eurogamer’s Fez Notebooks and it is, as it sounds, an article about the notebooks Eurogamer writers kept while playing the game Fez. You’ll know if you’ve played Fez that it’s almost impossible not to reach for pen and paper. I tried it myself for a long time and got what I thought was a long way through the game without writing anything. But then the real game of Fez started, the tricky puzzle, and trying to hold that in my head, I quickly realised, was impossible.
Fez is a decryption game – that’s the real puzzle lying at its heart. You don’t need to decode it in order to enjoy the game – you can play it through as a puzzle platformer and get plenty from it; even now, few games are so well thought out and meticulously put together – but it’s in going the extra distance to solve the big puzzle that lodges Fez deep in people’s minds. You have to invest significant mental effort to do it, you see, and so that investment multiplies the eventual reward you feel when you nail it. That’s what that Fez notebooks piece is about: personal triumph – showing the world what you’ve done.
I came to Fez years after everyone else, which meant I had a legacy to weigh it against as I hopped and climbed through it. I’m delighted to say it lived up to it – it’s as good now as it ever was. I also managed to coax the game’s mercurial creator Phil Fish out of hiding for a rare interview. – Bertie
Fortnite
It’s the 15th of October in the grand old year of 2019 and the atmosphere in the Eurogamer office (RIP) is one of excitement. This is the morning Fortnite Chapter 2 launches. For the past few days the Fortnite universe has been consumed by a void, but soon this will vanish to reveal a whole new map.
I say excited, but the air is also a little tense. Christian Donlan of ‘Hide in a bush to win Fortnite’ fame is worried the new map won’t hold up, meanwhile, as a guides writer, I’m wondering how long the match queues will be and what the new features are. (Turns out it was fishing. Gamers love fish.) We’re only waiting for a little longer, but the minutes stretch as we each keep an eye on YouTube and Twitter to see if someone’s already playing, or if anything else has leaked… And then, like all things, it just happens.
Chapter 2 opens in classic Fortnite fashion – on the battle bus filled with characters waiting to commit acts of violence upon each other. A singer declares we’re starting a ruckus as the bus doors open before Jonesy leaps out to the reconfigured Island below. Most of my time at Eurogamer so far has been during the years of the pandemic and its direct aftermath, meaning I haven’t had much experience of physically working alongside the team. So I’m glad I was there to hear people’s shouts of joy upon realising the opening cutscene melded seamlessly with the game, allowing us to perform that previously-mentioned violence straight away. – Lottie
Overwatch
It’s easy to forget how exciting Overwatch was when it arrived. It had a ripple effect. People were nonplussed about the original announcement at BlizzCon 2014, but as the beta opened and people played it, word started to get around. This thing was good – like, really good. It combined fast first-person shooting with the team-based tactics and classes of MMOs, and in doing so invited many more people than twitchy no-scopers to the fray. It also had the best built-in and shareable show-off mode of any game at the time: play of the game. Soon, clips of people using their Ultimate abilities in devastating ways spread far and wide. The world was obsessed.
The Eurogamer office was also obsessed. Overwatch is one of the very few games that has captivated what felt like the entire team. Around the game’s launch, it wasn’t uncommon to see a whole bank of Eurogamer desks with Overwatch running on them. Chris Bratt, Bertie, Johnny, Aoife and Chris Tapsell regularly teamed up, as did others from around the Gamer Network company. There was yelping and army style coordination – the place was alive with Overwatch.
It had a transformative effect on Blizzard, too. It’s also easy to forget that before HearthStone and Overwatch, Blizzard was looking a bit worn out, but then in quick succession came two experimental projects, developed openly, that jolted the company back to life. – Bertie
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is an ‘office game’. There’ve been a few of these over the years, in truth. FIFA is an obvious one, though as time went by that went from an office game to more of a just-a-few-people game. ARMS was another, secretly one of the great couch co-op games when you can get a full four players going, or even more to tag in while the winner stays on.
Mario Tennis had a decent run for a bit as well on the office Switch, particularly when we could get groups of doubles going, Overwatch was huge around launch, as was PUBG during its early, wonderfully janky zenith. And Among Us over Discord naturally took off as we went remote, as did Warzone, and more…
But Smash is, appropriately, the ultimate. At some lunchtimes you’d get up to a dozen people crowded around the communal TV, from across the company’s tech team, sales, editorial, video and more, enacting total carnage in 8-player, all items on, all hazards on, Final Smash on brawls. I maintain this is, genuinely, video games at their very best: celebratory, nonsensical, immediately learnable and at the same time with everything going on at once – and some back-seaters screaming in your ear while they wait for their turn – almost impossibly hard to parse. What a wonderful mess – and one that genuinely brought all corners of the company together, as deeply corporate as that may sound. I’m sure I got a few tech requests agreed to during a few of these rounds.
Personally I am just dreadful at it, all I can do is play Ganondorf and hope to connect the odd charged-up swing. But you knock out four of your much more talented colleagues with a single button press and tell me you haven’t just found video game nirvana. – Chris
Halo
And finally, Halo. Nothing could be better, right?
