Gaming

● Aliven.✎ 3

Wallbang

Shooting an opponent through a wall, door or crate that the game's bullets can penetrate, and the kill that results. Counter-Strike players had the word by about 2002 and Valorant inherited it in 2020; knowing which walls 'bang' is a form of scholarship. The record's entry for the shot that the victim swears was hacking.

▸ 2002peak 2016still up

☠ Deadn.✎ 4

Warcraft III

A real-time strategy game with heroes, a story that became World of Warcraft's, and a map editor that produced Defense of the Ancients, tower defence and most of the genres of the following decade. Its Chinese and Korean competitive scenes lasted years. In January 2020 Blizzard replaced it with Reforged, which removed features and set a Metacritic user-score record.

▸ 2002peak 2004†2020

▲ Fossiln.✎ 4

Day of Defeat

A Second World War team shooter that began as a Half-Life mod, was bought by Valve and became the second game in every early-2000s LAN after Counter-Strike. Its trend moment was 2003 to 2006 in Europe's clan scene, and Day of Defeat: Source in 2005 was the game Valve used to show off HDR lighting. It faded as Call of Duty took the setting.

▸ 2001peak 2005†2010

▲ Fossiln.✎ 4

Grand Theft Auto III

A 3D city you could drive around, with radio stations, a silent criminal and the option to do none of the missions. Released a month after the September 11 attacks with some content changed, it defined 'open world' for the following twenty years and started the moral panic that San Andreas finished. The record files it as the Scottish studio's second trend after Lemmings.

▸ 2001peak 2002†2004

▲ Fossiln.✎ 4

Halo: Combat Evolved

The launch game that justified the Xbox: a console shooter with a working control scheme, a two-weapon limit, a warthog and sixteen-player LAN via system link. Its trend moment was the university LAN party of 2002, four consoles and four televisions in one room, and the machinima series Red vs. Blue, made in the game's maps from 2003.

▸ 2001peak 2002†2004

◐ Dyingn.✎ 2

Ninja Looting

Taking a rare item from a boss's corpse before the group could decide who should have it, an MMO crime with its own vocabulary by the early 2000s and a career-ending one on servers where reputations were kept. The record notes the term is dying because the games now distribute loot automatically, which is the only thing that ever stopped it.

▸ 2001peak 2008still up

● Aliven.✎ 4

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney

A courtroom visual novel in which a spiky-haired lawyer shouts 'Objection!' and points, and the pointing is the game. Released in the West on the DS in 2005 after Capcom thought it would not sell, it did, and 'Objection!' became a speech bubble used in any online argument. The record files the trilogy, the anime and the 2024 collections.

▸ 2001peak 2007still up

● Aliven.✎ 4

RuneScape

A browser MMORPG written in Java by two brothers in Cambridge and played in school IT rooms across Britain and beyond. Its trend moment was around 2007, when it claimed the most active free MMO in the world and removed the Wilderness to stop gold farming, causing an uproar; Old School RuneScape, a 2007 snapshot, now has more players than the modern version.

▸ 2001peak 2007still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Shiny Hunting

The pursuit of alternate-colour Pokémon that appear at odds of roughly one in eight thousand, a hobby that dates from their introduction in Gold and Silver in 1999 and grew a livestreamed culture of counters, resets and multi-day sessions in the 2010s. The record's entry for the most patient thing ever done for a slightly different green.

▸ 2001peak 2019still up

↺ Undeadn.✎ 4

Silent Hill 2

A man receives a letter from his dead wife and goes to a foggy town to find her. The 2001 sequel was a psychological horror game about guilt that critics treat as literature, and its trend moment came twice: in 2001, when it was the reason to own a PlayStation 2, and in October 2024, when a remake by a Polish studio was, to general surprise, good.

▸ 2001peak 2002†2012

● Aliven.✎ 4

Super Smash Bros. Melee

A GameCube party game that became a competitive fighting game against its publisher's wishes. Wavedashing, L-cancelling and other techniques made it a tournament staple for two decades, from basements to EVO, and Nintendo's attempts to stop streams and events made the community more stubborn. The record notes it is still played on CRT televisions by choice.

▸ 2001peak 2014still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Teabagging

Crouching repeatedly over a defeated opponent's body in a shooter, a gesture of contempt performed in Halo from 2001 and industrialised by Xbox Live in 2004, whose name the record declines to explain in detail. The oldest surviving taunt in online gaming, and the reason several games now let you crouch slower.

▸ 2001peak 2007still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Ace (FPS)

Killing every member of the opposing team in a single round, in Counter-Strike from about 2000 and in Valorant from 2020, where the game announces it and the clip goes on social media within the minute. The record's entry for the shooter's highest ordinary honour.

▸ 2000peak 2020still up

↺ Undeadn.✎ 4

Diablo II

Click, loot, repeat, over a modem, in a dungeon crawler that defined the action RPG and ran on Battle.net for two decades. Its trend moment was the early 2000s, when Baal runs, Stone of Jordan rings as currency and item duping were a shared economy, and the 2021 remaster, Resurrected, brought it back for the same players, now older.

▸ 2000peak 2002†2012

↺ Undeadn.✎ 4

Marvel vs. Capcom 2

Three-on-three tag fighting with fifty-six characters, a jazz soundtrack about taking you for a ride, and a tournament scene that ran for a decade on a game nobody expected to last. 'Mahvel' was the shout, the 2009 re-release was the peak, the 2013 delisting the death, and the September 2024 collection the return, with a crowd waiting for it.

▸ 2000peak 2009†2013

● Aliven.✎ 3

Noob

A new or bad player, from 'newbie' by way of 'n00b', established in Counter-Strike and forum chat by about 2000 and later the name of Roblox's classic yellow-headed default avatar. The record notes the distinction old hands insisted on — a newbie is new, a noob refuses to learn — and that it was never once respected in practice.

▸ 2000peak 2007still up

● Aliven.✎ 4

The Sims

A dollhouse simulator in which small people speak gibberish, need the toilet and can be drowned by removing the pool ladder. It became the best-selling PC game of all time by 2002, sold mostly to women, and produced a franchise whose fourth instalment went free in 2022. The record files the pool ladder as the medium's most shared crime.

▸ 2000peak 2004still up

↺ Undeadn.✎ 4

Age of Empires II

Medieval real-time strategy with thirteen civilisations, a priest who says 'wololo', and a Wikipedia-level history lesson in the campaigns. It was the school-network game of the early 2000s and then, from a 2013 HD re-release onward, an esports revival with tournaments, streamers and a 2019 Definitive Edition that outsold the original.

▸ 1999peak 2001†2006

● Aliven.✎ 4

Counter-Strike

Terrorists against counter-terrorists, one life per round, bought weapons and a bomb. A free Half-Life mod from 1999 became the internet café game of the 2000s on every continent, the backbone of early esports, and the reason the map de_dust2 is known to people who have never installed a PC game. The record notes it has never stopped.

▸ 1999peak 2004still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 4

EverQuest

The 3D MMORPG that came before World of Warcraft and was known to its players as EverCrack. Camps, corpse runs and forty-hour raid weeks made it the first game to generate addiction stories in ordinary newspapers, and the first with a real-money economy studied by an economist. It still runs, with expansions every year, for a loyal middle-aged population.

▸ 1999peak 2002still up

● Aliven.✎ 4

Heroes of Might and Magic III

Turn-based fantasy strategy on a hand-painted map, with hot-seat multiplayer that needed one keyboard and several evenings. It never had a launch craze in the West; its trend moment is that it never stopped, particularly in Poland, Russia and the rest of Eastern Europe, where it is played competitively, streamed, and expanded by fans a quarter-century on.

▸ 1999peak 2000still up

↺ Undeadn.✎ 7

Neopets

Virtual pets, a stock market, and a fandom that learned HTML to decorate its shop. Lost most of its games when Flash died and was bought back by fans who had become adults with money.

▸ 1999peak 2005†2020

▲ Fossiln.✎ 4

Pokémon Gold and Silver

The sequel to the 1998 craze, with a hundred new creatures, a real-time clock that made events happen on Tuesdays, and a second region unlocked after the first, so that the game was twice the size anyone expected. It sold as fast as the original and was, for many players, the end of the playground era and the beginning of the private one.

▸ 1999peak 2001†2003

↺ Undeadn.✎ 4

Pokémon Snap

An on-rails photography game on the Nintendo 64 in which the player takes pictures of Pokémon and a professor grades them. Its trend moment was 1999, when Blockbuster stores installed kiosks that printed the photos as stickers, an arrangement so specific to its year that it reads like fiction. New Pokémon Snap arrived in 2021.

▸ 1999peak 1999†2001

↺ Undeadn.✎ 4

RollerCoaster Tycoon

A theme-park builder written by one Scottish programmer in assembly language, in which children could design a coaster and then drown its passengers. It sold millions from 1999, ran on any office PC, and was inherited in 2014 by OpenRCT2, a fan re-implementation that keeps it running on modern systems. The record files the drowning under 'universal'.

▸ 1999peak 2002†2004

↺ Undeadn.✎ 4

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater

Two minutes per level, a combo counter and a soundtrack that taught a generation about ska-punk. The 1999 skateboarding game and its first three sequels were the party games of the PlayStation era, until yearly releases and a 2009 plastic skateboard peripheral killed the series. A 2020 remake of the first two games sold a million in a fortnight.

▸ 1999peak 2001†2007

☠ Deadn.✎ 4

Unreal Tournament

The arena shooter that shipped three weeks before Quake III Arena and split the deathmatch community in two. Its announcer, who shouted 'Headshot' and 'Monster Kill', became the voice of online gloating. Epic's engine went on to run most of the industry; the game itself was pulled from sale in December 2022 while a 2014 remake sat unfinished.

▸ 1999peak 2000†2022

● Alivev.✎ 3

Whiff

To miss an attack entirely — a swing that touches nothing — borrowed from baseball into fighting games by the late 1990s and from there into shooters, where a whiffed shot at point-blank range is the standard reason a round was lost. The record's entry for the miss with a sound effect.

▸ 1999peak 2016still up

● Aliven.✎ 3

Wipe (Raid)

The death of an entire raid group to a boss, in EverQuest from 1999 and in World of Warcraft from 2004, after which forty people run back, and someone is blamed in a voice channel for an hour. The record's entry for the collective failure that MMO players have organised their evenings around for twenty-five years.

▸ 1999peak 2007still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 4

Dance Dance Revolution

An arcade machine with a floor of four arrows and a screen telling you when to step. Konami's 1998 game made the arcade a spectator sport again and, in the 2000s, spread to American school gym classes as an anti-obesity measure. It still runs in arcades, with new cabinets and a small competitive scene.

▸ 1998peak 2004still up

▲ Fossiln.✎ 4

Half-Life

A physicist with a crowbar, a tram ride instead of a cutscene, and a story told without taking the controls away. Valve's first game, built on a licensed Quake engine, was the critics' choice of 1998 and the platform for the mods that followed: Counter-Strike, Team Fortress Classic and Day of Defeat. The record notes the third game's absence is on file under its own name.

▸ 1998peak 2000†2004

◐ Dyingn.✎ 4

Lineage

Korea's first mass MMORPG, a castle-siege game that filled PC bangs alongside StarCraft and made NCSoft. Its trend moment was 1999 to 2004, when it had millions of Korean and Taiwanese accounts, sieges scheduled like sporting fixtures, and a real-money economy that produced court cases. Lineage M on phones in 2017 returned it to the top of the charts.

▸ 1998peak 2003still up

● Aliven.✎ 4

Mario Party

A board game with dice, stars and minigames that has ended more friendships than any other Nintendo product. The 1998 original's trend moment was medical: minigames that required rotating the N64 stick gave children blisters, the New York Attorney General got involved, and in March 2000 Nintendo agreed to provide protective gloves. The series continues, without the rotating.

▸ 1998peak 2000still up

▲ Fossiln.✎ 4

Metal Gear Solid

A stealth game in which a boss reads your memory card, comments on your other games and makes the controller move by itself, and in which the codec frequency for a character is printed on the back of the box. Its trend moment was 1998, when it sold the idea that a game could be a film; its ending was Kojima's departure from Konami in 2015.

▸ 1998peak 1999†2015

● Aliven.✎ 4

StarCraft

Three asymmetric alien races in a real-time strategy game that South Korea adopted as a national sport. Brood War ran on two Korean television channels, made stars of players like Lim Yo-hwan, filled stadiums, and survived a 2010 match-fixing scandal. The record notes the game is still played professionally in Korea and that 'zerg rush' is filed separately.

▸ 1998peak 2005still up

▲ Fossiln.✎ 4

Starsiege: Tribes

A team shooter with jetpacks, enormous outdoor maps and vehicles, in which players discovered that hopping while descending a hill let them slide at speed. 'Skiing' was a bug that became the game, and Tribes' trend moment was 1999 to 2001, when it was the fastest thing online and the founding text of movement shooters. Later sequels and a 2012 free relaunch did not hold.

▸ 1998peak 2000†2004

● Aliven.✎ 4

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

The first 3D Zelda, with lock-on targeting, a horse and an ocarina played with the C buttons. It was the highest-rated game on Metacritic for most of the site's existence and is the reference point every open-world adventure since has been measured against. The record files the Water Temple as the trend moment: a level so disliked that the 3DS remake fixed it.

▸ 1998peak 1999still up

● Aliven.✎ 2

Aimbot

A cheat program that aims for the player, first written for Quake in 1997 and since then the standard accusation levelled at anyone who is better than you, on the grounds that no human could hit that. The record notes the accusation is right about once in fifty times and that the other forty-nine are the point.

▸ 1997peak 2010still up

↺ Undeadn.✎ 4

Final Fantasy VII

The role-playing game that made the genre mainstream in the West, sold the PlayStation as a serious machine and killed a main character at the end of disc one. Its trend moment was 1997 and 1998, with a television ad campaign of unusual scale, and its second, a remake announced in 2015 and released in parts from 2020, with the same death still argued about.

▸ 1997peak 1998†2005

↺ Undeadn.✎ 4

GoldenEye 007

A film licence that became the console's first great multiplayer shooter: four players on one screen, a rule against picking Oddjob, and the Facility level with proximity mines. Its trend moment was every student flat of 1997 to 2000. Rights problems kept it off later consoles until a 2023 re-release, by which time the players were forty.

▸ 1997peak 1998†2001

▲ Fossiln.✎ 4

Snake (Nokia)

A line of pixels eating dots and growing longer on a monochrome phone screen. Nokia shipped it on hundreds of millions of handsets from 1997, which made it the most-distributed video game in history for a time and the only one a great many people ever played. Its trend moment was every bus, bench and waiting room of the early 2000s.

▸ 1997peak 2001†2007

● Aliven.✎ 4

Tibia

A tile-based MMORPG from a group of German students, one of the oldest still running, with permadeath-style loss on dying and a player base that moved to Brazil and Poland and stayed. Its trend moment was the mid-2000s in Latin American LAN houses, and its afterlife includes a level cap so high that a Brazilian player reached level 2,000 in 2021 and made the news.

▸ 1997peak 2007still up

◐ Dyingn.✎ 4

Ultima Online

The first MMORPG to reach a hundred thousand subscribers, with a player-driven economy, houses you could lose, and full player-versus-player theft and murder until the world was split in two in 2000. Its trend moment produced the genre's vocabulary and its founding legend: the game's creator, Lord British, killed during a beta test by a player with a fire spell.

▸ 1997peak 1999still up

● Alivev.✎ 2

Camping

Staying in one spot with a good weapon and waiting. The oldest gaming insult still in use and the oldest gaming strategy still in use.

▸ 1996peak 2002still up

▲ Fossiln.✎ 4

Command & Conquer: Red Alert

An alternate-history Second World War in which Einstein removes Hitler and the Soviets invade Europe with Tesla coils and attack dogs. Its trend moment was in internet cafés and school networks from 1996 to the early 2000s, powered by Frank Klepacki's 'Hell March', a metal track that a generation cannot hear without wanting to build tanks.

▸ 1996peak 2000†2008

↺ Undeadn.✎ 4

Crash Bandicoot

An orange marsupial spinning through crates in a 3D corridor, built by a small studio as Sony's answer to Mario and sold with adverts in which a man in a costume shouted at Nintendo's offices. The original trilogy sold tens of millions; the 2017 N. Sane Trilogy remake sold ten million more to the same people and their children.

▸ 1996peak 1998†2008

▲ Fossiln.✎ 4

Duke Nukem 3D

A shooter with a wisecracking hero in a vest, strippers, a toilet you could drink from and one-liners borrowed from Evil Dead films. The 1996 shareware hit was Doom with a personality and a moral panic, and its sequel, Duke Nukem Forever, was announced in 1997 and released in 2011, which made it the medium's longest joke.

▸ 1996peak 1997†2011

▲ Fossiln.✎ 4

Mario Kart 64

Four players, one television, and the debut of the blue shell, which hunts the leader and has been an argument about fairness since 1996. It was the party game of the late 1990s in any house with the console, and its Rainbow Road, Wario Stadium and Block Fort battle arena are still described as the best versions by people who have not played them since.

▸ 1996peak 1998†2003