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After shipping Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic on PC in 2004, a team led by Casey Hudson entered pre-production on Mass Effect, the project that would allow BioWare to explore its own space opera across a three-part epic. Mass Effect’s groundbreaking choice-based systems and role-playing elements set the bar for many RPGs that followed, and solidified BioWare as one of gaming’s most pioneering studios. An innovative save system capable of carrying user progress across each entry further elevated the experience. But the characters, the stories, the carefully crafted lore both pronounced and subtle, along with the player’s intimate role in it all, encouraged millions to flock aboard the Normandy in every form it took. The perceived belittlement of the player’s role at the trilogy’s end tainted the journey for some, however, leaving whatever came next with a decidedly tall order to fill.

Military shooters have come and gone in droves over the last two decades, the genre long proving a tough area of the market to crack and even tougher to maintain a semblance of success in. Thus, developers and publishers looking to make an impact typically push gimmicks the likes of Battlefield and Call of Duty can’t offer, be it Haze’s Nectar enhancements, the Time Manipulation Device in Singularity, or the Hollywood-inspired firefights of Black. For EA Montréal’s Army of Two, the fresh, new gimmick relied on something players were already well-versed in—cooperative gameplay.

Interactive Star Wars adventures ranging from the abysmal to the superb have permeated arcade, console, and PC gaming since the early 1980s. From side-scrolling platformers to demolition racers, there were no shortage of games based on a galaxy far, far away by the turn of the century. LucasArts, to little success, even dabbled in a fair few real-time strategy endeavors, none of which held a candle to 2006’s acclaimed Star Wars: Empire at War.

With 2005’s Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction, developer Pandemic Studios delivered a GTA clone that bucked the common trend, sidestepping crime-ridden urban environments to instead use a politically unstable Korea as its setting. The end result offered a revolutionary experience whose main rival made it to market in the 2008 sequel, World in Flames.

Carving out a niche in an oversaturated market has never been easy, yet developer Volition managed to do so with its open-world series Saints Row, even while in direct competition with the juggernaut that is Grand Theft Auto. The success of Saints Row very much counts as an underdog story, one wherein the power of unique branding proved instrumental to a product’s ability to defeat the odds. Though the franchise’s last few outings made it seem as though the 3rd Street Saints regularly battled identity crises, that level of chaos, which in turn fostered variety, is what endeared fans the most. Unfortunately, whatever identity crisis beset Agents of Mayhem did it absolutely no favors.

Once the seventh console generation arrived, licensing agreements constituted the pillar upon which countless superhero video games materialized, many of them manifesting as movie and TV adaptations. From Batman and X-Men to Spider-Man and the Justice League, comic book enthusiasts had their fill of interactive heroes-in-tights shenanigans. Since few experiences featured original characters built from the ground up with interactivity in mind, Sly Cooper developer Sucker Punch Productions attempted to break new ground in the superhero space upon entering development on InFamous around 2006.

Like Counter-Strike before it, Valve’s and Turtle Rock Studios’s Left 4 Dead altered the course of multiplayer video games. Its advent in the late 2000s laid the foundation for modern cooperative shooters, placing teamwork at the forefront of a zombie-centric experience that penalized individualistic thinking. Notably, four unique Survivors acted as player avatars teaming up in a world overrun with infected humans, a welcome change of pace at a time when friends had become accustomed to fighting against one another in online shooters.

Left 4 Dead’s 2008 release redefined multiplayer, injecting new life into the first-person shooter genre by emphasizing cooperative gameplay above all else. Series creator Turtle Rock Studios began tinkering with early versions of the concept on a whim, a bit of after-work fun not initially intended for public consumption. But even before the crew started toiling away on the genre-defining zombie game, creative leads had another grand idea lingering in the back of their minds, one that would later do for asymmetrical multiplayer what Left 4 Dead did for co-op.

Earth’s Mightiest Heroes have starred in dozens upon dozens of video games in the last four decades. The iconic web-slinger’s first interactive adventure dates back to the Spider-Man action game released on the Atari 2600 in 1982, for example. That same decade also saw The Hulk and Captain America migrate to the world of gaming. However, an actual Avengers game would not hit the market until Data East shipped its arcade beat ‘em up Captain America and the Avengers in 1991. A range of mobile games, crossover titles, and LEGO-branded experiences have since allowed players to assemble their favorite heroes, yet no title was expected to capture the weight of being an Avenger quite like 2020’s Marvel’s Avengers.

Historically, Nizari Ismailis, the much-feared hashashins known to modernity as assassins, constituted a Shia Islam sect that employed political murder as a chief means of dismantling their political and religious enemies. The 11th Century Muslim missionary Hassan-i-Sabbah founded the religio-political movement in support of Nizār, the Fatimid Caliph heir-designate who led an ineffective revolt following the denial of his succession. Interestingly, details about this Order of Assassins relayed in Arkon Daraul’s A History of Secret Societies, as well as development on a sequel to Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, inspired Patrice Désilets to spearhead the creation of Ubisoft’s multimillion dollar Assassin’s Creed property.

Grand Theft Auto Co-Creator David Jones founded developer Realtime Worlds in 2002, then set out to produce an experience that could venture beyond the confines of GTA. The studio placed such a weight on itself with its first project, Crackdown, an action-packed, sandbox adventure that provided players with free-form styles of play, intuitive game controls, and a true feeling of empowerment. While a super-cop tasked with ridding their city of the criminal element represented the lens through which users explored Crackdown’s Pacific City setting, narrative storytelling took a backseat in favor of building a world that revolved primarily around gameplay and exploration.

Credited as the original creator of Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto, programmer David Jones founded Realtime Worlds in 2002. The Dundee, Scotland-based studio produced Crackdown first, an open-world experience wherein players portrayed a biologically enhanced Agent tasked with dismantling crime syndicates in a dystopian metropolis. Its incredible success propelled Realtime Worlds to greater heights, providing the cache necessary to recruit additional staff and focus on the pursuit of a far more ambitious project—the MMO that initially hit the ground running as APB: All Points Bulletin.

Video games have replicated myriad historical periods, recreating the likes of ancient military conflicts in strategy games and both world wars in third and first-person shooters. World War II, in particular, has long remained a favorite backdrop for first-person military shooters, and by the mid-aughts, such titles dominated the genre in nearly every conceivable way. Battlefield, Call of Duty, and Medal of Honor enjoyed great success on this front, effectively laying the foundation for all manner of copycats. But Polish developer Techland adopted a different approach when devising plans for its second stab at an FPS property.

The graphical leap between the seventh and eighth console generations proved momentous. Though titles such as The Last of Us pushed the older hardware to its limits, the first showing of something like Killzone: Shadow Fall running on PlayStation 4 demonstrated how the boost in memory and raw processing power could enhance interactive entertainment. From environments replete with higher-quality details to real-time lighting effects that dynamically elevated the digital world, the PS4 and Xbox One bridged the gap to realism that had long eluded video games. Early in the generation, no game came quite as close to bordering the line of authenticity as Ready at Dawn’s The Order: 1886.

Hardware manufacturers typically position racing games as the premier showpiece of a new console’s graphical and performance capabilities. The original PlayStation had Ridge Racer; the first Xbox hit the scene several years later with Project Gotham Racing in tow. While Microsoft managed to ship Xbox One with a first-party racer—Forza Motorsport 5—the PlayStation 4 had to rely on third-party fare such as Need for Speed: Rivals. Notably, Driveclub from Evolution Studios initially constituted the must-have racing experience on PS4, but issues with the game's core conceit postponed it well beyond the console launch window.

A fully-fledged MOBA, the project bore many names and assumed multiple forms throughout its relatively brief lifecycle. It first appeared manifested as Blizzard DOTA, then adopted the title of Blizzard All-Stars due to a legal dispute, before the developer settled on Heroes of the Storm. But the name arguably mattered little overall, especially since players had made their preferences known by the time Blizzard tried cutting itself a piece of the battle arena pie.

After a lengthy period of silence, the marketing blitz for Cyberpunk 2077 got off to an incredible start in June 2018, courtesy of an E3 presentation that would fuel years of hype and millions of pre-order purchases. Not even multiple delays and an eventually admitted lack of transparency could curtail interest, not when the neon-drenched streets of Night City and a Keanu Reeves-starring narrative seemed so enticing.

Rockstar Games had only explored relatively rudimentary modes of multiplayer in its games before the advent of Red Dead Redemption in 2010. The American West-set adventure, with its cooperative and competitive offerings, engendered the development studio’s first step into the wild west of expansive online gameplay. It made sense, then, that Grand Theft Auto 5’s multiplayer suite, GTA Online, allowed the team to unfurl its wings and do so in a way that generated multimillion-dollar earnings via in-game purchasing. But GTA Online didn’t achieve incredible success overnight. Several years and various post-launch updates would land before the experience hit its stride with 2015’s Heists update. The hope was that Rockstar would afford Red Dead Redemption 2’s online component the same room to grow.

Capcom published the Shinji Mikami and Tokuro Fujiwara-created Resident Evil for the original PlayStation in 1996, lighting the way for survival horror as a genre and reinvigorating interest in zombies across popular culture. Several sequels and spinoffs followed in the wake of its meteoric success, and though Mikami produced each one, his hands-on involvement in the franchise’s day-to-day development significantly reduced after the release of Resident Evil 2 in 1998. Such a pivot gave the visionary room to lead production on Dino Crisis, another tension-filled adventure that shook survival horror to its core.

The use of computer-run industrial control systems has grown exponentially over the last decade and change. Such infrastructures help cities and nations around the world manage power plants, surveillance, and countless other integral functions. But as sci-fi media has long predicted, interconnected supercomputers can facilitate just as many problems as they solve. In 2010, 100,000 Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition, or SCADA, networks were discovered to have been targeted with the sophisticated Stuxnet virus, a digital weapon allegedly co-engineered by U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies to debilitate the Iranian nuclear program. Developer Ubisoft Montréal studied such headline news when formulating its cautionary tale about the horrors of an interconnected world in Watch Dogs.

Released in 2003 on the PlayStation 2, and then on PC and Xbox in 2004, the first Manhunt captivated players with its premise of a former death row inmate who’s coerced into killing at the behest of a mystifying figure. Obscene violence steeped in dizzying levels of gore made for what some consider a murder simulator. Yet, others, especially in retrospect, perceive a semblance of depth that’s long gone unappreciated.

Capcom veterans Atsushi Inaba, Hideki Kamiya, and Shinji Mikami joined forces in 2007 to found PlatinumGames. The company developed an impressive stable of IP within a matter of years, operating out of Capcom’s backyard in Osaka, Japan, while producing critically acclaimed games such as Bayonetta and Vanquish for Sega. These titles and several others set a cadence for Platinum, mixing combo-based action with over-the-top visuals for incomparable interactive experiences. All the while, however, Hideki Kamiya had another idea brewing in the back of his mind, a concept that would finally give respect to the larger-than-life creatures he’d long adored.

The 2007 release of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare significantly altered the trajectory of the first-person shooter genre, revolutionizing multiplayer games by introducing now irrevocable standards such as perk and progression systems. In unleashing the groundbreaking experience, developer Infinity Ward turned Call of Duty into a household name, effectively setting the stage for its transition into one of entertainment’s most lucrative brands. But while publisher Activision’s golden goose reached for the stratosphere, a behind-the-scenes falling-out slowly begat a very public legal dispute. Infinity Ward’s ousted co-founders Jason West and Vince Zampella refused to sit idly by after their split from Activision, however, instead striking out on their own with dozens of Call of Duty veterans tagging along.