Horror games existed prior to 1996’s Resident Evil. You had Maniac Mansion and a smattering of Castlevanias, The 7th Guest, and Clock Tower. But none of those were a fraction as scary as Resident Evil. Even booting it up for the first time, it wasn’t clear what you were getting yourself into. The game starts off with a cheesy live-action cutscene that doesn’t exactly instill terror. But once your team enters the mansion, things start getting creepier. Before long, you find yourself walking down a nondescript hallway. It’s quiet. Too quiet? Maybe, but you’re not all that concerned. You’ve played horror games before.
That’s when, out of nowhere, a zombie dog bursts through the window and lands on the floor behind you. Your first instinct is to run, but when you turn the corner, another dog breaks through the glass. Now you’re surrounded. It’s a scene right out of a horror movie, one you’re probably not going to survive on your first playthrough. Those dogs freaked the hell out of players in the ‘90s. They’d never seen anything like it in a game.
Say what you will about Bioshock Infinite's haphazard combat, the game's mind-boggling ending is still a force to be reckoned with. As Elizabeth achieves omniscience, she walks Booker (and the player) through a world literally reconstructing and folding in on itself. Using Bioshock's most iconic location as a jumping off point to explain the multiverse in which the entire series has (apparently) taken place, is a stroke of genius, and walking through the "Sea of Doors" is nothing short of breathtaking. It's a moment that retroactively puts all of the clues and puzzle pieces strewn throughout Bioshock Infinite into place, and turns a nebulous narrative into a bonafide sci-fi classic.
The video game industry's first leading lady was created out of impatience. The original Pac-Man had been a culture-shaking success in 1981 – an arcade game so popular that it's still the highest-grossing video game of all-time, entirely due to the sheer avalanche of quarters shoved into its coin slots over 30 years ago. Adjusted for inflation, it's made over $7,000,000,000 to date, most of that within just its first year of availability! After such insane success, it’s understandable that Midway, Pac-Man’s North American distributor, was more than eager for Namco to deliver a follow-up as the calendar flipped into 1982. So eager, in fact, that they ultimately gave up on waiting and embraced an American team’s conversion kit that transformed existing Pac-Man cabinets into an all-new sequel. After a whirlwind of edits and a presentation to Namco that legitimized the entire project, Ms. Pac-Man was welcomed into the world. Her game was faster and more varied than her husband’s, and in-between rounds spent dashing around its dot-filled mazes were some of the first and most iconic cutscenes in gaming. A traditional love story of boy Pac meets girl Pac (while being chased by ghosts), boy and girl Pac chase one another and then a teeny little baby Pac is delivered via stork to form a full Pac family.
When it comes to licensed games, most of us have learned to keep our expectations in check. For every great licensed game, you’ll find 20 heaps of steaming garbage emblazoned with the names of famous franchises. So it was a terrific surprise when South Park: The Stick of Truth turned out to be fun, hilarious, and filled with creative ideas.
One of those ideas is particularly inspired. It happens when the gang heads north to Canada. For the vast majority of the game, The Stick of Truth is a side-scrolling RPG that looks almost exactly like an episode of South Park. But once you cross the northern border, the game transforms into a top-down game that wouldn’t look out of place on the SNES. The game world becomes pixelated, and the soundtrack goes full chiptune. There’s even an overworld to explore, dotted with towns like Ottawa, Banff, and Winnipeg. The only thing that doesn’t change is the game’s delightful potty-mouthed humor.
When video games dabble in sex, the results are often problematic, laughable, or just plain bad. Leave it to The Witcher 3 to sidestep (and maybe even embrace) all of those issues by serving up one of most absurd sex scenes in the history of moving images.
The encounter begins after the Witcher Geralt and his on-again-off-again lover Yennifer have been apart for years. Circumstances throw them together, and they survive a typical Witcher mission, which means they barely escape with their lives. All that action leaves them with some (sexual) energy to burn.
When they return to their room, they have a chat. If you choose the flirty dialog choices for Geralt, you’ll find that Yennifer is thinking along the same lines. Only she doesn’t want to do it on the bed, presumably because that would be too comfortable. Instead, she hops on a unicorn. A stuffed unicorn.
Geralt goes along with it, and you get the sense that this isn’t the first time they’ve copulated on this unique piece of furniture. Only a game like The Witcher 3 could pull off a scene like this and have players take it in stride. That’s what makes it so perfect.
In a first-person shooter called The Darkness — which follows a mafia hitman named Jackie whose body is host to a mysterious ancient entity that craves violence — it makes sense that you’d spend the majority of your time gruesomely murdering your enemies.
It definitely doesn’t sound like a game where you’d spend much time relaxing on the couch with a loved one. But at an early point in the game, Jackie and his girlfriend Jenny get together for a relaxing night in front of the television. You sit back, snuggle up, and turn on the classic black-and-white movie To Kill a Mockingbird.
Oddly enough, the movie actually starts playing on the television in the game. Soon your partner falls asleep, and your character gets the urge to slip out quietly to go about his business. But maybe you’d rather spend a bit more time with Jenny. Maybe you’re a fan of classic movies and you don’t feel like getting up. Surely the movie clip stops at some point, right?
Wrong. The Darkness contains the entire movie To Kill a Mockingbird. So if you want, you can kick back yourself and watch the whole thing from start to finish. But more unusual and impressive than that is the fact that in such a gritty, dark action game, we could be graced with such a peaceful and loving moment between two people in the first place, before things take a turn for the worse.
In a game full of weird, scripted moments — many of which require a walkthrough to find due to their extremely specific circumstances — discovering Uboa is probably the most iconic and definitive of Yume Nikki as a whole. Yume Nikki is a weird game to begin with. It’s free, it was made by a Japanese developer whose identity is still unknown, and it provides little instruction outside of your primary routine: sleep, dream, and wake up. It’s how and where you end up getting lost in those dream worlds that makes Yume Nikki so special.
Even if you’ve had Uboa spoiled, or had to look up a guide to triggering the event, the mythos it’s built up in the freeware game community by nature of those very things make it worthwhile. So how do you actually find Uboa? Head to a certain character’s house, flip her light switch off then on again, leave the house, and repeat. There’s a 1 in 64 chance that Uboa will appear in the room. It’s unfair to call it a mere jump scare. It’s more like one of the few moments when the wavering dread coursing through most of Yume Nikki peaks into something tangible, but still as baffling and alien as ever — especially since it happens in a relatively pleasant branch of Yume Nikki’s feverishly looping dreamverse.
This isn’t a thing that’s supposed to happen. In fact, until the first time it did to some poor, unprepared soul and word began to spread, it had literally never happened. You’re flying through hyperspace, when an alien pulls forcefully you out, disables your ship, and looms ominously over you as you watch helplessly, left wondering what just happened.
To put this in context for non-Elite players, traveling through hyperspace has always essentially been a loading screen. You charge up your Frame Shift Drive and blast off from one star system to another, the flashing lights and colors of hyperspace speeding by your windows to ease the boredom as new planets load into the game.
But then, without warning, it wasn’t just a load screen anymore. Imagine if that happened for any other game. Imagine if you were loading into a new area of The Witcher or Uncharted when suddenly the load screen starts to glitch out and there’s a boss you’ve never seen and no one even knew existed now staring you down ready to fight.
That’s close to what this is like, except the frequency of hyperspace jumps had made it a completely mundane and common task for players. The aliens pulling you out upset that calm. The first time you get ripped out of that comfortable waiting room is personal and terrifying - and in retrospect, it was a sign of a lot more alien encounters to come.
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City kicks off when Tommy Vercetti gets released from jail and his old mafia boss sends him to Vice City to set up a criminal enterprise. That’s where you meet Lance Vance, a man who’s sympathetic to your cause. The two of you form an alliance that turns into a friendship throughout the course of the game. He even shows you his very own patented Lance Vance Dance.
Like so much in a life of crime, the relationship comes crumbling down eventually. During a drug deal in the “Keep Your Friends Close” mission, Lance betrays you by tipping off the recipient that you’re giving him fake cash. Turns out Lance wasn’t so loyal after all — and it’s because of your big ego.
It’s a jaw-dropping moment that Vercetti probably should have seen coming. Now, in addition to having to defend your house against a storm of Mafiosos, you have to kill you friend Lance for his betrayal.
Maybe the old saying is true, and crime doesn’t pay.
Trivia question: what was the first time, post Return of the Jedi, that a lightsaber battle was filmed? Answer: 1997’s Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2. While Dark Forces was often slighted as a Doom clone, Dark Forces 2 featured FMVs with a full cast, multiplayer support, and a massive campaign. Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight is perhaps now best remembered as the first time gamers got to truly experience the feeling of playing as a Jedi in a video game. In Chapter 4, series protagonist Kyle Katarn finally gets into his father’s house and finds his lightsaber. The cutscene concludes with an immensely satisfying session with a combat remote like the one Luke used in A New Hope! Suddenly you’re deflecting laser blasts and ready for some force powers. Your journey to a Jedi Knight really starts with that first time you flick on the light saber.
At first blush, Rez seems like a standard arcade-style game. You control a blocky figure who floats through space, blasting enemies to the beat of trippy electronic music. As you play, you inevitably find your groove and give into the almost hallucinogenic experience.
If you play well, eliminating enemies and dodging attacks, you’ll notice that your character gradually starts to change. The squares that initially made up your body shift into a more realistic human shape. Keep playing like a pro, and you’re rewarded with metallic skin, kind of like Silver Surfer. The next form has you assume a lotus position, as if you’ve achieved a state of Zen.
At any point, if you start missing shots or getting hit, you can fall back into a previous form. It’s tough to get this far. But if you persevere and play with precision, your character will shift into its final form: a dark sphere encircled by jagged sound waves that pulse with the beat.
What it all means is left ambiguous, but when you’ve entered a state of flow playing the game, the sphere shape makes perfect sense. There’s nothing quite like it. Just don’t get hit, because then you’d have to turn back into a lowly human.
When the Xbox 360 first launched, gamers were keen to discover what kind of experiences this powerful new hardware could deliver. One of the launch games was Condemned: Criminal Origins, a horror game about an FBI agent on the hunt for a serial killer.
At one point you find yourself traversing a mall at night. Naturally, the only light source is your flashlight. As you explore the area, you can’t help but notice a bunch of mannequins standing in a row behind a barrier. Mannequins in the dark are always creepy, but when you turn away to move on, you hear a shuffling sound. Look back, and you’ll see the mannequins lined up behind you, much closer than before.
As you continue, the mannequins keep repositioning themselves, blocking your way back. It’s such an unforgettable sequence that similar gimmicks have popped up in other horror games as clever homages.
And in case you’re wondering, the Doctor Who episode “Blink” didn’t air until two years after Condemned came out. In this case, video games did it first.
For a first time player, Spelunky is brutal. You’re likely to die within 30 seconds as the game teaches you its traps and enemies, and that’s just in the first, easiest area. But as you keep going, you learn from each death, and there’s a special sense of accomplishment as you finish each level and move onto the next one, eventually reaching a new area. For this reason, finally fighting and beating Olmec feels absolutely incredible. After so much time, after so many deaths, you finally come to a final battle that’s a culmination of all of your hard work. And sure, you’ll probably die a few more dozen times fighting him, but finally reaching the end still feels like such a monumental achievement when you look back on your early days dying to bats at the start of the game. Olmec tests every skill you’ve learned, teaches you to be cautious, and beating him in and of itself is a puzzle since you can’t actually damage him conventionally and instead have to figure out how to force him to fall into the lava below (without falling in yourself). There’s yet another secret boss hidden in Spelunky’s Hell area, but nothing quite matches your first moment taking on Olmec’s golden bouncing head.
With today’s cinematic storytelling in video games, plot twists are a commonplace occurrence – 30 years ago, though, the technology of ‘80s games didn’t leave a lot of opportunity for such moments of shock and surprise. Nintendo’s original Metroid therefore set up its big reveal through its instruction manual, telling the backstory of the game and of its hero, Samus Aran, while innocuously using male pronouns to refer to the bounty hunter. Gamers with enough skill and resolve to be able to run through the entirety of Planet Zebes and defeat the sinister Mother Brain fast enough, though, were greeted by an ending credits sequence that revealed the truth: Samus removed *her* helmet, revealing that she was a woman inside all along! (The North American version of the game then took things one step further with the infamous “Justin Bailey” code, a password that, when entered, allowed players to re-experience the adventure with a powered-up Samus who’d swapped out her armor for a bathing suit instead.)
As video games have become more and more cinematic in look and scope, the pressure to deliver a movie-quality experience right from the first seconds of your experience has ramped up. Some games grab your attention well, setting up a strong story to come. Others bobble their first impression, often spoiling the impact of everything to follow. One of the greatest opening sequences in the history of the industry, though, belongs to the 2006 edition of 2K Games’ Prey. Opening in a disgustingly dirty restroom of all places, we meet protagonist Tommy Towadi as he monologues to his reflection in the mirror. It’s quickly established that he’s sick of his current life and wants nothing more than to put his hometown behind him – but his girlfriend’s holding him back. She wants to stay where she’s always lived and... CRASH. Boom! What the heck was that? Is that car floating in the air? WHAT HAPPENED TO THE ROOF??? Tommy’s whining youthful rebellion is cut out from under him when aliens literally rip the building apart and abduct him, his girlfriend and his grandfather on the spot. Cut to their ship orbiting high above the Earth and a few explosions later, and a story that briefly seemed like it was going to be about leaving home has quickly transformed into a desperate struggle to get back there.
Oxenfree’s Freaks and Geeks-meets-Poltergeist adventure is filled with memorable moments ranging from quiet and poignant character interactions to terrifying displays of the paranormal. But none stuck with us quite like when we stumbled our way into an abandoned Army base, only to find ourselves engaged in a game of Hangman against one of the island’s supernatural residents.
What starts with ominous handprints on a chalk board quickly escalates into a spooky game with the specter that tests your knowledge of the island’s history. The game begins to break the fourth wall, with static filling the world, and the entire screen flipping upside down. The tension reaches a high when a wrong answer causes your friends to become possessed, the air filled with their screams. The sense of dread and terror that this game of Hangman exudes solidifies Oxenfree as one of the smartest and most atmospheric adventure games in recent memory.
After the brutal Nazi killing spree of Wolfenstein 3D that reached its climax in the gruesome death of Adolf Hitler himself, id Software had to turn to the depths of hell to find another group of enemies to oppose players in their next first-person shooter, Doom. From cannon-fodder Imps to the mono-eyed, many-horned hovering horrors that are the Cacodemons, Doom’s rogues’ gallery of foes worth carving up with a chainsaw is diverse and disgusting – but none is as terrifying as the game’s ultimate enemy, the Cyberdemon. This massive goat-legged creature has a rocket launcher instead of a right arm and a wholly cybernetic right leg (with hoof), and it hunts you mercilessly as you do your best to keep your distance and fire off rockets of your own. What made the showdown with the Cyberdemon such an especially memorable moment back in 1993 was the fact that the game’s instruction manual listed every enemy in the game... except for him. So you’d blaze through the whole quest thinking you were prepared in advance for everything that would come your way, and then, bam! Eight-foot-tall goat man hurling missiles into your face.
Game developers love throwing puzzles at players. But the Jindosh Riddle in Dishonored 2 isn’t your average video game puzzle. It’s much more involved, and requires a lot more work on the player’s part.
Essentially, it’s a logic puzzle that you find on a locked door in the Jindosh mansion. The puzzle comes in the form of a story about a dinner party that gives you vague details about the five attendees. Your job is to weed through the information presented and figure out which heirloom belongs to which attendee. It’s like a Professor Layton puzzle, if Professor Layton was made for grad students.
The puzzle is randomized, so you can’t look online for a simple solution either. You have to solve it on your own. If you have no patience for these kinds of things, you can find a couple of workarounds, but a trophy or achievement awaits those who put in the work to figure out the solution on their own. In a game about sneaking around and finding creative ways to kill people, a puzzle that involved is an interesting but welcome surprise.
Dragon Age: Origins starts out with your character working their way to the Grey Wardens through whatever specialty and race they chose. All of these several hour long campaigns converge when you journey with Duncan to Ostagar to fight the darkspawn. Loghain’s army are supposed to help fight the darkspawn, the big baddies in the game. But when the time comes, Loghain doesn’t attack the enemy’s flank and instead orders a retreat — the coward! King Cailan and Duncan are amongst the slain. Duncan’s death is particularly painful because no matter what origin story you went with, he played a role as a steady but firm hand that not only saved your life, but initiated you into the Grey Wardens. As far as plot starters go, Loghain’s betrayal at Ostagar is a pretty great one: you’re now one of the last Grey Wardens, capable of defeating the darkspawn. And now there’s no king and so Loghain seizes power for himself and blames the Grey Wardens for everything! What. A. Jerk. The player spends the rest of the game recruiting allies and resources to overthrow Loghain and stop the darkspawn. But in the end, like a true Bioware game, you get to decide Loghain’s fate. Was he a sniveling coward or intelligent for not entering a hopeless battle? Were the Grey Wardens too powerful? Should he be executed or allowed to redeem himself? It’s all set up by a Loghain’s action at Ostagar in the game’s first hours.
There are many wonderful, heartfelt moments in Undertale. It's a heavy game, but moments like the Papyrus date help round it out tonally. This hilarious pseudo-romance topped off with spaghetti establishes one of the best relationships in the game. Perusing his food museum, meeting his pet rock, and going to his room to "do whatever people do when they date" are all an awesome prologue to the actual date. Everything ends up being hilariously gamified — Dating HUD and dating power bar included — until you build up so much tension and dating power that Papyrus snaps. His ultimate confession is strange and sweet, like just about everything Papyrus does. While this route is optional, it is definitely one of the essential experiences you need to have in Undertale.
By the time you discover the hotel in Limbo, you’ve already encountered giant spiders, killer kids, numerous kinds of mechanical death trap, and mind-controlling parasitic glow worms. Limbo is a game that drops you right into the middle of this terrifying black and white world and expects you to navigate it without explanation, but for some reason it isn’t until you reach the hotel — with its giant, collapsing neon letters — that you really begin to question where you are. In a black and white, silhouetted world that feels like the backdrop for some terrifying German expressionist film — all disjointed angles and exaggerated architecture — stumbling upon something so familiar and mundane is almost more startling than its most bizarre and lethal beats. It also makes for quite the moody platforming puzzle.
Over the course of Half-Life 2, the Gravity Gun easily becomes a standout part of your arsenal, with almost limitless ways to utilize it both in combat and puzzle-solving. But near the end, in the sterile confines of the Citadel, it looked like the ingenious contraption was becoming less and less useful, forcing you to rely on more traditional weapons. Then, in a clever stroke, you're relieved of all your hard-earned weapons, save one. Panic sets in once the Combine approach, as you search in vain for something to latch onto with your gun. Then you press the trigger, and the nearest soldier flies into the gun’s grip like a ragdoll, and then shoots into the crowd of Combine, flooring the whole group. With this revelation, a new door was now open, and other weapons just seemed insignificant in comparison.
Only a handful of games can boast strong, active communities for over a decade. Thanks to a dedicated player base and regular expansions, World of Warcraft has managed to keep its servers running since 2004.
It doesn’t hurt that those expansions have infused the game with lots of solid new ideas, areas, and story arcs. The most exciting moment in the history of the game — and one of the craziest moments in the history of gaming itself — happened in the 2008 Wrath of the Lich King expansion.
It takes place during a cut scene that lasts less than five minutes, but is packed with fist-pumping moments — that is, until one final twist.
Lord Bolvar Fordragon has gathered his Alliance army at the Wrathgate to lay siege on the Lich King and his Scourge. Just when it looks like they might be overwhelmed, Dranosh Saurfang and his Horde army arrive, looking to band together with the Alliance to face the Scourge’s greater evil.
And it appears that they’re going to win — until the Forsaken army shows up on the cliffs above and rains down a cloud of New Plague, killing nearly everyone on the battlefield, heroes and villains alike.
Even in 2007, it was obvious Uncharted was an homage to pulp classics, much like the Indiana Jones movies. But which parts it would borrow from the source material was still unclear the first time you played the game.
Nathan Drake is a wise-cracking hero who’s always on the lookout for a new globetrotting adventure involving ancient artifacts. His companion is Elena, a journalist and eventual love interest who’s no slouch when it comes to blasting bad guys. And it wouldn’t be much of a pulp story without a team of villains, led by Gabriel Roman, hot on their heels.
But the one scene that really cements Uncharted as a story for the ages is the moment we realize this isn’t just a swashbuckling tale about rival treasure hunters. When all the characters converge on the treasure they’ve been seeking, the excitement cranks up to 11.
The big reveal happens when Roman opens the treasure of El Dorado. Instead of finding riches beyond his wildest dreams, he finds a dusty mummified corpse whose fumes turn his eyes black and send him into a murderous rage. Turns out everyone who’s made it this far in search of the treasure has succumbed to El Dorado’s Curse, turning them into raging mutants. Cue the raging mutants, who clamber out of a nearby pit, hungry for blood.
The heroes barely make it out alive, and now they have a new supernatural enemy to face. It’s a thrilling scene that lets you know you’re in for a wild ride that’s not necessarily rooted in reality.
Cutscenes have become common in video games out of necessity. Though some games have expertly woven their narratives into their gameplay, there are times when a movie-like storytelling experience can only be achieved by making games temporarily behave like movies do – removing all control from you and just having you watch some scene play out on the screen for a while. Though early arcade games like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong had small story sequences accenting their play experiences, the true pioneer of the cutscene as we know it was Tecmo’s Ninja Gaiden. Its action scenes are fast and frenetic, featuring ninja hero Ryu Hayabusa leaping around the screen, clinging to walls and slashing enemies apart with his katana. But serving as a slower-paced buffer between those fast-action levels were calm, thoughtful cutscenes containing simple exchanges of dialogue between characters. Or sometimes no dialogue at all! The greatest, most iconic cutscene of the game is its very first one, an entirely wordless scene depicting two ninjas clashing in a moonlit field. The two of them leap; their blades meet in mid-air. When they land, one remains standing – the other falls to the ground. This is the death of Ryu Hayabusa’s father, the catalyst for his quest for revenge – and, in retrospect, the catalyst for how decades of other future video games would tell their tales as well!
There’s no shortage of iconic moments in the Metal Gear Solid franchise. But one of its most dramatic sequences takes place toward the end of Metal Gear Solid 4. Snake has been aging at an accelerated rate (don’t ask) and is feeling very old. His mission is to disrupt a network that helps keep the Patriots in control of world events.
Old Snake and Meryl fight their way through enemy territory until they get close to the network’s control center. But to reach it, Snake has to traverse a corridor that’s been rigged with microwaves. That means he’ll essentially be cooked in the process. After a tearful farewell to Meryl, Snake heads into the hallway while she holds off a rush of enemy forces.
What follows is an unforgettable sequence. Conversations with old friends echo in Snake’s mind, as if his life is flashing before his eyes. The heat is intense when he enters the hallway, and Snake is in pain with every step. Then a somber song begins as the screen splits in half, with Snake stumbling down the microwave corridor on the bottom and the other characters fighting to keep him covered on the top. As you watch your allies become overwhelmed by the enemy, you have to keep tapping the triangle button to keep Snake moving, now on all fours, inching along in agony.
But Snake makes it through, and falls to the floor vomiting as he exits the hallway. We know how you feel, Snake. We’ve just witnessed one of the most powerful and triumphant sequences ever to appear in a video game.
Some of the best moments in gaming are those that hit you with a sense of déjà vu. In long-running series in particular, the judicious re-use of a setting from a previous installment can instantly trigger an incredible form of nostalgia. “I’ve been here before! I know this place!” Such was the delight that greeted players of Super Mario Galaxy 2 who progressed far enough into its adventure to come across its incredible callback to Super Mario 64: the Throwback Galaxy! It was a full, visually enhanced remake of the Whomp’s Fortress area first seen as Mario’s second hunting place for Power Stars 14 years earlier. As before, a massive Whomp King lorded over the area – though the fight against him was even more epic the second time around! What further callbacks to his previous quests can we expect Mario to come across in the future? The Galaxy games themselves would certainly be worthy of such a nostalgic nod.
Put down your peanut butter and jelly. Drop your ham and cheese in the garbage. Those old sandwiches are played out. The Sinner Sandwich is what you need. What’s in a Sinner Sandwich, you ask? If you’ve played Deadly Premonition, you’ll know it’s the best sandwich around.
Clearly made on a shoestring budget and modeled after Twin Peaks, Deadly Premonition is a murder mystery that’s set in a small town called Greenvale. You play as FBI agent Francis York Morgan, who’s been sent to investigate a murder.
The game is certifiably creepy and darkly comedic as you encounter the strange residents of the town. But perhaps the strangest part happens when you and a local deputy sit down for lunch in a diner. Just after you order your food, a man wearing a gas mask named Mr. Stewart enters and has his assistant order his favorite sandwich. The sandwich in question consists of bread, turkey, strawberry jam, and cereal.
Overhearing the odd request, Agent Morgan labels it a “Sinner Sandwich,” a meal so gross that it could only be ordered as a form of self-imposed punishment. Not so, says Mr. Stewart, who insists Morgan try it. Morgan does, and you know what? He loves it. He even changes his order to a Sinner Sandwich.
The cutscene is so weird and memorable that even if you don’t think Deadly Premonition is a cult masterpiece, you might treat yourself to a Sinner Sandwich anyway.
No games do spectacle on a grand scale like the God of War series. The first two installments brought the myths of ancient Greece to life in a way that seemed hard to top. But when God of War 3 came out on PS3, it did exactly that.
The whole first level is a marvel of design, as Kratos hitches a ride on the titan Gaia as she ascends the towering Mount Olympus. As the titan’s earthy flesh writhes beneath you, you slice your way through hordes of enemies before facing off against Leviathan, a massive mythical beast that’s made of water. But if you thought the scale of the Leviathan battle was big, you haven’t seen anything yet.
In a watery surge, Poseidon himself emerges from the water and soars up the mountain to where you cling to Gaia. Not only is Poseidon an astonishingly colossal presence, but he also comes riding on an entire herd of Leviathans. This multi-part battle rages a mile up Mount Olympus as you and Gaia work together to stop him. It’s a stunning boss fight that anyone who plays the game won’t soon forget.
By the time Nintendo fully took the leap into 3D gaming with the release of the Nintendo 64 in 1996, The Empire Strikes Back was over 16 years old – already old enough to drive! And yet we hadn’t yet been able to drive one of its iconic snowspeeders. Despite a few past video game attempts to adapt the Star Wars sequel’s opening action scene, the Battle of Hoth, no prior game design had truly managed to capture the feeling of launching out a harpoon and tow cable, wrapping it around the legs of a lumbering AT-AT and watching it trip itself to fall over and topple into the snow below. Shadows of the Empire was the first game to get it right, doing so as one of the earliest third-party adventures released for the Nintendo 64. Though the rest of scoundrel Dash Rendar’s quest seems dated today, that snowspeeder sequence still holds up over two decades later!
It’s hard to top the emotional rollercoaster that is fist-fighting the Pope, but Assassin’s Creed 2 managed to up the ante in a jaw-dropping reveal as Ezio encounters the image of Minerva in a vault from the first civilization. If this wasn’t a big enough bombshell, the act of Minerva turning away from Ezio to look straight at the camera to address Desmond sent chills down my spine. In that moment it feels like you're being acknowledged directly as the one reliving the memories of Ezio — and the fact that a ghostly hologram knew that this would one day happened blew our minds. We were also left feeling bad for Ezio, who struggled to accept that his entire journey culminated in a message for someone he would never see or meet. This moment stands as a great turning point for both the series unveiling more of its world, and for Ezio finding meaning in his own path.
The Mass Effect series is overstuffed with great companions. But Salarian scientist Mordin has always stuck out as a fan favorite with his fast-talking, rambling, pronoun-free language. He’s a lovable mad scientist and not terrible in a fight. He sees the world in black and whites though, and that can be difficult when trying to navigate interpersonal relationships. During an exchange with Shepard, he remarks uncharacteristically about how Mass Effect 2’s villains lacked culture or art. Such a love for the arts suprises Shepard, and when you call Mordin on it, he professes a love for singing, especially Gilbert and Sullivan. You’re then treated to his own version of "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General" — which is just a treat. It embodies so much of what Bioware does right: humorous moments in a dark subject matter, an added layer to a character, and just exceptional writing.
For all of the big, weird moments that the Metal Gear series is famous for, it’s a surprisingly quiet, introspective scene that ranks among the highest in fans’ memories. The infamous ladder sequence in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater comes immediately after the fight with The End — a grueling one-on-one sniper battle that plays out like a hypnotically slow game of cat and mouse in the dense green jungle of the Russian wilderness. Unlike most action-oriented games, there are plenty of moments to sit and reflect on your deeds in the stealth-based Metal Gear series. The fight with The End is one of them. A later battle, against the ghostly Sorrow, is another. But that ladder sequence is perhaps one of the most graceful and visually striking of all.
As you approach the ladder, you have no way of knowing how high it is. It’s just a ladder. You’ve climbed plenty of ladders in games. But once you start your ascent, something starts to feel off. The ladder keeps going. And going. There’s no way to tell how close you are to the top, so all you can do is stare down at Snake as it gradually becomes too hard to tell how far you are from the bottom. Then a haunting, vocals-only version of the theme song starts playing. Fans have discussed the “meaning” of the ladder for years. Is it a representation of Snake’s isolation? The sheer scale of his undertaking? His inability to have perspective on his own journey? Is it simply a moody interlude after an intense fight? An elaborate snakes and ladders joke? It probably doesn’t matter. The ladder is equal parts haunting, hilarious, strange, and solemnly introspective, qualities that not only make Snake Eater such a beautiful entry in the series, but which have defined much of Metal Gear Solid’s legacy for years.
Persona 4 is all about the bonds you make with friends and classmates in the town of Inaba. You’re a transfer student without anyone on your side, and the people you meet quickly become your family. But none of the bonds you form are quite as special as your relationship with your surrogate younger sister Nanako, and no moment in the game hits quite as hard as her eventual kidnapping. Persona 4 is a murder mystery that sees lots of victims taken into the Midnight Channel, but the shock at sweet little Nanako disappearing from your doorstep and showing up on the TV is genuinely upsetting in a way few of the other victims even come close to. Nanako is completely innocent and caught in the middle of something she couldn’t hope to understand, and her Heaven dungeon and the snippets of her voice you hear throughout are the game’s most heart-wrenching scenes. In the aftermath of Heaven, losing Nanako even temporarily is the final step that bonds the investigation team and pushes Persona 4 toward its endgame, and checking in on Nanako in the hospital becomes the emotional center of the later parts of the game. Nanako is one of the most pure, sweet characters in the franchise, and seeing her in trouble is a gut punch that’s hard to forget.
On the surface, Frog Fractions is about as unassuming as video games come. It looks for all the world like an educational game made for school-age kids. You play as a frog sitting on a lily pad. You control the frog’s tongue, which you use to ensnare insects that buzz around the screen. Collecting fruit lets you purchase upgrades that make your frog even more of a bug-eating powerhouse.
Silly game, right? Who cares? Turns out that’s just the beginning. When you upgrade your lily pad to a turtle, you can move around the screen. If you move to the bottom of the screen, you go underwater, where you find a huge piles of dropped fruit. Collect it, and you’ll find yourself with (and I quote) “like a billion” fruit pieces.
With that much currency, you can upgrade your turtle to a dragon and fly through an asteroid field to a bug planet, where… well, you should probably just see for yourself. It’s a free flash game after all. But for anyone who plays Frog Fractions without being in the know, going underwater and beginning the “real” game is a mind-melting experience you won’t soon forget.
Portal 2 is a game full of incredible moments, but none of them payoff quite as spectacularly as the last portal Chell ever has to fire. Plopping a portal on the moon in your final fight against Wheatley is spectacular and tense, but it’s also incredible how subtly it is set up throughout the game.
Suddenly Cave Johnson’s recorded ramblings about moon rocks making great portal surfaces isn’t just to set up how he got sick, it’s also foreshadowing for this moment — along with the space-obsessed corrupted core that gets sucked through the portal with you. Johnson even has a threatening line where he says, “I can put a doorway on the moon and another into your parking lot!”
So when the roof peels away and the moon is in clear view, white and shimmering, you just fire. Everyone fires. Everyone knows to fire, despite the game doing nothing explicit that tells them to do so. You’re just ready to do it because it’s what needs to be done in the moment. It’s not a cutscene, you get to click and fire… and then immediately suffer the consequences of what that means.
It’s incredible how natural Valve made this choice feel, to the point where hardly anyone stops to think about the implications of it. It’s a catastrophic move, and one that makes for an insane finale. It’s hours of subtle preparation adding up to an incredible climax, which is just about as Portal as you can get.
The idea of large-scale enemies wasn’t exactly new when God of War landed on PS2 in 2005. We’d seen bosses like Kraid, the towering reptile in Super Metroid, and fought our way up three screens’ worth of Kefka in Final Fantasy VI. But compared to the hydra battle in God of War, those enemies feel stiff and rigid.
As God of War begins, you take control of Kratos as he makes his way from one end of a ship to the other while sailing through a raging storm. You get a feel for the fluid combat as you swing your chain-attached Blades of Athena at all manner of mythical monsters. But none of that prepares you for what waits at the bow of the ship.
To say the hydra is a towering enemy is an understatement. This dragon-like boss is the size of a skyscraper, but still remarkably nimble. And that’s just one of its heads. When an unfortunate shipmate makes a run for it, a second hydra head erupts through the deck of the ship and gobbles him up. Finally a third head springs into view, and the fight begins.
Enemies in God of War have gotten even bigger in subsequent games, but the hydra boss was our first glimpse at the epic scope this series had set for itself — and we were mightily impressed.
Killing off the main character is such a rare thing in general, but killing off the main character before the final act of the story? It was almost completely unheard of both back in the 90s and even more than 20 years later, but that’s exactly what happened in Chrono Trigger, and it was shocking. Crono sacrifices himself in the battle against Lavos, and from there the remaining party members can either continue on without him, or go through a lengthy quest to bring him back to life. It’s this flexibility of Chrono Trigger’s storytelling that help make it one of the most beloved stories in video games, and it’s shocking moments like this that make it a game we’ll never forget.
Samus Aran isn’t a perfect bounty hunter. Though hired to eradicate the entire Metroid species during the events of 1991’s Metroid II: Return of Samus, compassion grips her armored heart when she discovers one last baby Metroid in the aftermath of her victory over the venomous Queen. She takes charge of the baby, transporting it to a research facility and trusting in the team of scientists there to keep it safe. They don’t. They lose their lives in an attack by Ridley and his Space Pirates, and though Samus makes it back to the facility before that vile alien dragon completes his theft, he nevertheless manages to flee back to Planet Zebes. That’s the last Samus sees of the baby... until the final minutes of Super Metroid. As Samus blasts through the reconstructed Space Pirate stronghold of Tourian and does battle with the resurrected Mother Brain, the baby reappears – but as a baby no longer, as it’s been horribly mutated into a grossly oversized version of itself. The Space Pirates’ torturous treatment hasn’t erased its memory of its “mother,” Samus, though, and in a critical moment when Mother Brain is on the verge of killing Samus, the baby intervenes, sacrificing itself. Samus’ job was to kill all the Metroids. Because her heart kept her from following through and finishing that mission, her life was saved at the end of her next.
What makes finding Eventide Island such a great moment in an already incredible game is just how unexpected it is. Breath of the Wild does everything it can to encourage freedom — going anywhere, doing anything, and getting stronger along the way.
So when you look out across the water near Hateno Village and see an unmarked island way off in the distance, farther even than a shrine you’d already consider far away, the curious part of your mind needs to know what’s out there. Traditional open world games may have trained some people to think it’s nothing but an empty decoration, but it’s actually one of the most untraditional Zelda levels ever.
For lack of a better way to say it, Eventide Island is a permadeath, survival game within Breath of the Wild. Who on Earth thought we’d ever be able to say something like that was in a Zelda game? It’s completely unlike the series to make a level like this, even in the context of a Zelda game that’s already unlike any of the ones before.
There’s no pomp or circumstance to it either, the moment you make landfall you’re stripped of everything and told to fight for your life. You can’t even save, and some of the fights you’re tasked with are incredibly hard if you find Eventide early enough. All this makes it a wonderfully surprising moment of discovery in a game with no shortage of them.
The original Portal wasn’t just great because of the brilliant puzzle-shooter gameplay, though that was a big part of it. Much of the game’s charm comes from GLaDOS, the AI that accompanies, guides, and taunts you as you play the game.
While GLaDOS is put out of commission at the end of the original Portal, she’s very much still alive by the time Portal 2 rolls around. In fact, with the grudging help of your new robotic friend Wheatley, you bring her back online.
And when you do, it’s a scene for the ages. An elevator lifts you and your talkative pal out of a massive breaker room, flipping switches as it goes. You emerge in an overgrown area strewn with broken electronics that begin to self-assemble into GLaDOS herself. Once she’s whole, GLaDOS sees you and is none too thrilled to have to deal with you again after you tried to kill her.
But she says, “I think we can put our differences behind us, for science. You monster.” She then proceeds to drop you down a long, dark, narrow shaft — into the incinerator.
Not that she holds a grudge.
Lots of video game villains want to destroy the world. It’s a trope nearly as old as the medium itself. It’s also a fairly empty threat, because the world never ends in video games. The hero, controlled by the player, always swoops in, defeats the enemy, and saves the day.
That’s what you’d expect to happen in Final Fantasy VI (or Final Fantasy III, as it was called when it launched on the SNES). Sure, the villainous Kefka had big evil plans, but we had it under control. On our side were heroes like Celes and Terra, Edgar and Sabin. We got this, right?
Wrong. Around the game’s halfway point, Kefka — one of the most iconic Final Fantasy villains of all time — actually destroys the world. Apocalyptic music plays as mountains rise, fires rage, the earth shatters, and explosions ravage the planet. The planet is ruptured in such a way that no team of heroes could ever reverse it. Even though the game uses cutesy art, this scene remains fully effective.
Sora spends the entirety of the original Kingdom Hearts battling Heartless in his effort to find and save his friend Kairi. But upon learning that the unconscious Kairi's heart lies within him, Sora has to sacrifice himself to free her heart — and restore the keyhole to Hollow Bastion. But in doing so, he becomes the very thing he's been fighting all this time — a puny Shadow Heartless. The late-game twist is a shock in itself, and a wonderful reversal of the satisfying combat players become so accustomed to. But what really sells the moment is the defenseless Sora-Heartless having to scramble through Hollow Bastion to find his friends. And in a moving moment that encapsulates the series' themes of friendship and its power, Kairi instantly recognizes Sora-Heartless as he jumps in to defend the group. Friends truly were his power. (And while we didn't know this at the time, this moment becomes the crux of Kingdom Hearts 2, as Sora's transformation into a Heartless also creates his Nobody, Roxas.)
Everyone knows Halo is the story of Master Chief. At least that’s what everyone thought when they played through the original game and got five chapters deep in the sequel when it launched in 2004.
But in Halo 2, chapter six is not like the chapters that came before it. Instead of continuing Master Chief’s story, it yanks you out of his iconic helmet and has you play as the Arbiter, a disgraced Covenant Elite, who’s about to be sent on a suicide mission. Thanks to some precise shooting, the mission turns out not to be a fatal sentence for the Arbiter after all. But this chapter is important for Halo as a series. The very act of including a second playable character in Halo 2 enlarged the scope of an already epic-sized story. It also gave us a look into the inner workings of a previously inscrutable alien race. It’s a revelatory moment that everyone who played it remembers.
And in case you haven’t played it yet, the Halo 2 Anniversary Edition included in Halo: The master Chief Collection kicks off this section of the game with a stunning CG cutscene.
For younger gamers who’ve experienced true 3D gaming for as long as they can remember, it’s hard to fully convey the absolutely mind-blowing spectacle that was seeing Super Mario 64 for the first time. This mustached hero whom we’d adventured alongside from a simple sidescrolling perspective for years had suddenly leapt into a fully rendered, go-anywhere reality! The low-poly count may look unappealing today, sure, but back in 1996 it was pure magic. Among all the awe-inspiring moments of freedom and exploration in Super Mario 64, though, none was as exhilarating as taking to the skies with the power of Mario’s new Wing Cap! Again, we’d seen Raccoon Mario and Cape Mario before, and flown through the clouds of Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World. But in full 3D? Actually soaring up and down and left and right, gazing down to see the abyss below? Breathtaking. The pinnacle of the Wing Mario experience came in the level “Wing Mario Over the Rainbow,” accessible when Mario turned his gaze to stare straight up into a beam of light shining down into the entryway of Peach’s Castle. Entering a level in that way added just an extra bit of surprise and whimsy to a game already overflowing with each. (Just don’t actually stare up into the sun, kids, no matter what poor example Mario happened to be setting here.)
Red Dead Redemption is a game filled with moments that make you feel incredibly small in an impossibly-large world. Quietly riding across the American south, spilling blood across the prairies, and soaking in the views bring forth those feelings that Sergio Leone and John Ford emblazoned on the big screen in the past.
But of all the memorable moments in Rockstar’s open-world adventure, none stuck with us quite like the first time John Marston rode his horse into Mexico. The music, which had been orchestral up until this point, slowly transitioned into Jose Gonzales’ Far Away, a haunting melody with lyrics that point to just how far Marston had traveled from his family, and from the familiar. He doesn’t know it yet, but Mexico is the beginning of the end for Marston. And while there’s definitely heartbreak that follows, you have to agree that it’s a hell of a view.
While most great video games make themselves memorable through eye-popping visuals, uniquely gripping gameplay or fantastically told stories, Lucasfilm’s Monkey Island series made its mark on a whole generation of gamers through sheer humor! A point-and-click adventure that was as much a 10-hour-long playable comedy sketch as it was a video game, The Secret of Monkey Island was infused with hilarity in every scene and interaction. The dialogue always took precedence over all, even in this world of swashbuckling, sword-wielding pirates – so when it came time for their blades to cross, the winner of a duel wasn’t determined by whose parries and thrusts were quickest, but rather by whose wit was sharpest. Insults flew as the swords clashed, and players had to scroll through a list of possible comebacks in order to determine which line was the most appropriate and funny counter for the put-down just hurled their way. At first, hero Guybrush Threepwood is so inexperienced at insulting opponents that he actually can’t win in these confrontations. But he learns more and more verbal jabs as the adventure goes on, and by the end of the quest he’s able to bring any foe to tears with nothing more than words.
In December of 1988, Capcom brought their inventive platforming adventure Bionic Commando to America. In that game, hero Rad Spencer uses his futuristic grappling arm to wage war against an army of Nazis, ultimately leading up to a final confrontation with Adolf Hitler himself – whose head explodes in as much bloody gore as the 8-bit NES could muster. Nintendo was squeamish about this scene, though, as so the localized version American players got had the Hitler character slightly altered and renamed to be “Master-D.” Well, id Software had no such qualms. Just a few years later, the company that would go on to bring us the Doom and Quake series first cut their teeth on 3D, first-person shooting with Wolfenstein 3D, an over-the-top firefight of fury starring hero B.J. Blazkowicz mowing down Nazis left and right during his escape from a German prison. As with Bionic Commando, Wolfenstein 3D’s final boss was Adolf Hitler – but this time fully named and depicted as the dictator himself. Well, OK, not entirely himself – he was instead made into an appropriately intimidating final foe by being rendered as a mutant cyborg named Mecha-Hitler, complete with four massive Chain Guns in the place of his arms. Despite the increased firepower, though, he dies with just as much gratuitous gore as before.
Miranda Lawson opens Mass Effect 2 with boundless praise for Shepard's feats. On what should have been a simple mission with your loyal companions, Mass Effect 2 sends Shepard's closest thing to home and companions into a nightmare when they're attacked by the then unknown Collectors. Understandably, Shepard goes down with the burning ship when trying to get everyone safely off-board. Coming off the heels of a triumphant adventure in Mass Effect, it's difficult walking through the destroyed sections of the Normandy. There we partnered with our friends Garrus, Tali, Wrex, Liara, and others to expose Saren. Shepard gets Joker to an escape pod, but runs out of time to save themself. Of course it is only the beginning of Mass Effect 2, so you know everything turns out alright for Shepard. Still, seeing Shepard tumble through space while slowly suffocating is as shocking as it is sad.
Chapter 17: Stowaway starts off as a simple fistfight in front of an open door of a cargo plane. We’ve seen that before. But then quick-thinking Nathan Drake decides to deal with the bad guy by pulling the parachute off a cargo container. The problem is that this is tied to all of the other cargo, which then begins to fall out of the plane and take him with it. The resulting battle takes the netting fight from The Living Daylights and pushes it to 11. Suddenly you’re hanging from a net and climbing up trucks and dodging gunfire — all while over the Sahara desert. It’s a remarkable set piece and sequence that just keeps escalating. When you manage to get back onboard, the resulting firefight rips a hole in the plane and tosses you back outside into the sky — only to grab a timely supply crate’s ripchord. The entire scene is very scripted but still offers players quicktime moments and a challenging firefight to give them more agency than a Hollywood movie. And Drake, as ever, survives something no stuntman would ever endure. When you land in the desert, knowing that you’re not even close to out of danger, it feels less like a pause for breathe and more like a moment of applause.
A Link to the Past started a trend that many Zelda games would follow: Complete an introductory series of quests to find the Master Sword, and pave the way for a plot-twist that would expand the scope of the adventure. Being the first of the series to so this, I wasn’t quite prepared at the time to defeat the evil Agahnim, only for him to pull a vanishing act, and transport me to an entirely different world. There’s a great moment to take it in as Link stands on the top of a pyramid, with the eerie and mysterious blood-red horizon behind you. Even the music holds its breath as you take in your new surroundings, and the sage Sahasrahla tells you that it’s up to you to rescue the seven maidens and take the fight to Ganon. And then with the spin of the Master Sword, the Dark World theme begins.
To this day, the Dark World theme remains one of my favorite compositions, due to this moment alone. There’s something foreboding, and yet altogether heroic and triumphant as the music kicks in and renews you with purpose. After exploring so much of Hyrule in the Light World, it was exciting to find a new land to explore. Link may be in a world of monsters, but he’s not afraid to keep pushing forward and take back the Triforce, and neither was I.
We hadn’t really stepped into the next generation of gaming until we stepped out of the sewers in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. You’d been fated with the responsibility of saving the world by a beloved emperor, murdered before your eyes. The city of Kvatch had already burned to the ground. The entirety of Tamriel was counting on you to fight back against the invasion of hell itself! But how could you focus on any of that when lush green hills, and a world of unlimited possibilities beckoned your fresh tracks?
Shigeru Miyamoto once said that his inspiration for The Legend of Zelda came from exploring caves when he was young. I’d like to think a smile came to his face as he left the sewers in his own playthrough one day. A smile at the thought of coming full-circle—this big, bright, beautiful world of Cyrodiil was just waiting for the next generation of budding game designers to do their own spelunking. Well, big, bright, and beautiful, until you closed ONE oblivion gate and then couldn’t frolic ten feet without the sky turning red and being ambushed by demonic fireball-spewing munchkins, that is.
Bats and rats. Crocodiles, wolves and gorillas. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! (Well, OK, there are no tigers. There are panthers, though.) For the most part, the enemies that players encounter throughout the first-ever adventure of Lara Croft are the kinds of unsurprising aggressive animals you’d expect to see lurking in the shadows of the caves and ruins and tombs she raids. But even after things turn supernatural and foes like demons and mummies appear to oppose Lara in her exploration, little prepares you for the moment when a towering Tyrannosaurus lumbers out from behind a corner and begins to chase Lara down. At this early point in console gaming history, the Tomb Raider 1 T-Rex was the most intimidating foe yet encountered in any 3D adventure – and its appearance was especially timely given the massive box office success of Jurassic Park just three years earlier. The movie taught us to fear the T-Rex, and then here we were, face-to-face with one with only Lara Croft’s acrobatic backflips and dual-wielded pistols able to keep you from being its next meal.
Truly impressive gaming accomplishments abound today, as gamers have had decades to invent, practice and perfect such wildly difficult challenges as finishing the entirety of Ocarina of Time while blindfolded. In the NES era 30 years ago, though, no feat of achievement was more worthy of acknowledgement and praise than taking down Mike Tyson in the game that bore his name. Video games had had challenging final bosses before this point, but the Mike Tyson of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! was so punishingly brutal that most attempts at sending him to the mat ended without even landing a single blow! If you were serious about taking away his championship belt, you had to bury your pride, dig in and practice, practice, practice. Memorize the timing. Perfect each and every move. Any single punch from Iron Mike would send Little Mac to the ground, so your dodges had to be spot-on accurate. And if you did it? If you actually invested the time it took to master this bout? If you were one of the few to honestly, legitimately earn a viewing of the Punch-Out!! end credits? You became the stuff of playground legend.
Things took a turn for the dark early in Warcraft’s Human campaign. Protagonist prince Arthas of Lordaeron showed a willingness to slaughter innocents to stop the threat of the scourge, eventually alienating longtime friend Jaina Proudmoore. But Arthas’ cruelty didn’t come to a head until he took up frostmourne and fell under the Lich King’s sway. The end of the Human campaign (and the start of the Undead campaign) is marked by Arthas’ transformation into a Death Knight and his graphic slaughter of his father. The fall of a hero into villainy is a trope that Blizzard utilized more than once in their games, but Arthas is perhaps the least redeemable of these characters. Not only does he slaughter his father, but later series regular Uther. These dark moments encapsulate the new direction Blizzard was taking the series — no character was safe, no cow was too sacred. The undead scourge would be a formidable new enemy and Azeroth would never be the same.
The opening of Resident Evil 4 is one of the most intense introductory sequences you’ll find in video games — ammo is scarce, there are crazed villagers with murder in their eyes everywhere, and most of all, there’s nowhere to hide. You duck into a house thinking that you’ll get at least a moment reprieve.
Then you hear that noise.
The revving of a chainsaw that signals the coming of the “Chainsaw Dude,” the sack wearing, one hit killing, bullet spongey nightmare. It was a bold move by Capcom to throw in such a tough enemy in the opening hour of the game, but the gamble paid off, as his appearance immediately set the tone for Resident Evil 4 and forced players to adapt to its new gameplay style right away.
Half-Life starts out like a normal day at work and ends with you floating around an alternate dimension, closing a dimensional rift, and being frozen in time on a space train. But somewhere in-between, there’s another twist that’s stuck with us for all these years. The initial chaos of the resonance cascade sends the top-secret research facility of Black Mesa into a frenzy — headcrabs flying every which way, zombie scientists lumbering around every corner, and increasingly bizarre alien foes to contend with. But after a few bloody chapters, you learn that government officials have finally arrived. After navigating several rooms full of suspicious sentry guns, you eventually encounter a shocking scene: a marine gunning down a fellow scientist who thought the soldier was part of the rescue team. The realization hits you then, but really begins to sink in once you enter a nearby lift and the music starts up — there is no rescue team. The marines are here to contain the situation, which means killing aliens and human witnesses alike.
Technically, the first time you encounter one of Bloodborne’s Lesser Amygdala — easily one of the most terrifying enemies in a video game, period — you can’t even fully see it. It comes at you as a giant ghostly hand, which sears a burning purple void into the air as it reaches into your reality to crush you. You might catch a glimpse of its outline on the cathedral wall, but it isn’t until later that its full form is revealed. There are actually two ways to do this: defeating Rom, the Vacuous Spider or gaining 40+ Insight. By the time you slay Rom, Bloodborne’s Lovecraftian roots are pretty clear. But if you manage to earn enough Insight before that, it’s possible to go into Bloodborne thinking you were about to get witches and werewolves and find yourself face-to-face with colossal cosmic horrors instead… with plenty more to come.
Final Fantasy VI's opera scene might be the most important scene in Final Fantasy history. Not because of its signifigance to the narrative, not because of its unconventional use of the game's mechanics, and not because you suddenly find yourself participating in an opera. What's impressive about the opera scene is how much Squaresoft manage to make the player actually feel. Love, loss and song all compressed into a 16-bit cartridge and relayed through your TV's crummy speakers. And yet, somehow, those sprites bouncing around on screen, "singing" their hearts out, managed to be one of the most believable and gut-punchingly real moments the medium had yet delivered. Then you gotta fight a purple octopus.
It’s always fun to see how actions can have consequences in video games, and Fallout 3 took player choice to a big new level by giving you the choice of setting off a nuclear bomb in Megaton. Your told upon first arriving at the city that the unexploded bomb should be left alone (and I even tried shooting at it to see what would happen — oops). However, it’s not until later in your travels that you hear that someone wants the entire town gone — merely for being an eyesore to a spoiled wealthy owner of a nearby hotel.
I admit, it was a tough decision to make for me — I liked Megaton, but it was a dump compared to getting my own luxury suite at Tenpenny Tower. In the end, I caved, and was offered to flip the switch that would forever alter the landscape of Fallout’s world. You don’t always get to see how your actions play out in the larger world of some RPGs, but here I was forced to witness the destruction I had played a part in, as the sky lit up with fire. I even felt enough remorse to return to the smoking crater that was Megaton, just to see firsthand the damage I had caused. I went beyond morality — I had erased dozens of characters from existence; their quests, stores, and homes. Gone. It hits harder considering Megaton is often the first place you find after leaving Vault 101, and it takes a certain kind of evil to repay that hospitality with an unwarranted nuclear blast.
There are few things in video games that have given players more dread than the moon from Majora’s Mask. The massive, scary-faced celestial body that’s always drawing closer to its inevitable crash into Termina never ceases to creep us out. Just the sight of it alone is reason enough to ensure you have plenty of time left on the final day to warp back in time, otherwise you'd risk encountering the game over sequence where the moon crashes into the world, and a giant blast engulfs Link and everything in its path. What is the deal with this moon? Did it always have that creepy face? There are lots of theories about the moon and Majora’s effect on it — and the fact that these mysteries are left unsolved adds to its allure.
This mystery comes to a major point when you finally fight Skull Kid for the last time, and the mask itself retreats into the moon — beckoning you to follow. It's hard to know what to expect, but none of us were prepared to enter a large sunny field with a giant tree in the center. Something about the innocent-looking scene comes off as downright unnerving and eerie, like it’s a place that doesn’t belong there and shouldn’t exist. It’s a stark parallel to the scene unfolding outside the moon as giants struggle to stop it from smashing into Clock Town. The inside of the moon, and the spooky masked children playing in the shade of the lone tree raise a lot of questions about what Majora truly is, and whether its actions are something we were ever meant to comprehend.
Secrets have been a part of the Super Mario series from the start, with Warp Zones being the earliest and most shocking ones to discover. What ‘80s kid wasn’t delighted to find a hidden room full of pipes that let Mario bypass huge chunks of the game and make it to the final showdown with Bowser faster? When Super Mario Bros. 3 came around, though, stationery secret rooms of Warp Zone pipes were swapped out in favor of something a bit more versatile: the Warp Whistle! Three Warp Whistles in all, actually, and gamers of the day might have happened upon any of the three as their first moment of discovery. The first could be found in the game’s third level, but was trickily hidden “behind” the scenery and was only accessible if players knew to make Mario kneel down on a White Block for five seconds – a technique odd and obscure enough that likely only readers of Nintendo Power magazine knew just what to do. The second Warp Whistle was a bit easier to come across, as its placement mirrored the hiding place of the first Super Mario Bros. game’s first Warp Zone – sending Mario up and over the ceiling in the game’s first fortress was what was required to claim it. The third and final Whistle was buried deeper into the game, hiding behind what at first appeared to be the furthest boundary of the second overworld map. A correctly-placed Hammer bash opened up the road to it, though! Once any of the three were claimed, a toot on the horn summoned a whirlwind to whisk Mario away to an isolated island full of world-skipping Warp Pipes. And if you had two Whistles in your inventory before tooting on the first? You could toot yourself directly to World 8 and its final gauntlet of challenges leading up to Bowser.
Video games can make players feel frustrated, triumphant, intrigued, and even astonished. But it’s rare for a game to make you cry. One game that could draw tears even from a brain-dead zombie is Telltale’s Walking Dead: Season One. You play as Lee, a man who becomes something of a father figure to Clementine, a young girl he finds stranded alone in the walker apocalypse. They go through many adventures over the course of five episodes, culminating with the two of them sitting in a room, with Lee on the verge of turning into a walker himself. It’s over for him, and the game gives you a choice. You can choose to have Clem turn away, leaving him handcuffed to the wall to become a zombie. Or you can have her shoot him, freeing him from the horror of turning, but traumatizing her in the process.
Either way you go, the two must say goodbye. “You’re strong, Clem,” Lee tells her. “You can do anything.” He wants to give her the confidence that she can make it in the world without him. She doesn’t want to lose him so soon after losing her parents. It’s a heartbreaking scene that caps off a brilliant game. Don’t be surprised if you shed a tear.
So much of the appeal of EarthBound is its heart. There’s a lot of weird humor, bizarre enemies, and subversions of RPG tropes, but the bond between the chosen four and the people they meet along their adventure is what will stick with you. After everything you go through, the most exciting moment of the final battle isn’t a huge bombastic explosion, but instead a quiet, powerful moment: you reconnect with most of the game’s key players via Paula’s prayers. In the middle of this frantic battle, it’s simple words of encouragement from people you’ve encountered throughout the game that push you through to the end, reminding you of what you’ve achieved and what you’ve been fighting for. EarthBound is populated with so many colorful characters and experiences that it can be hard to keep track, but this moment of reflection lets you relive different pieces of the game and be reminded of the bonds you’ve built. For Ness specifically, who feels homesick when he doesn’t call home enough, it’s also a good chance to remember where you started in Onett all those hours ago. While EarthBound is a great game long before the finale, looking back on everyone is when it stands out for the truly special, unique experience it is.
You could spend a lot of time trying to figure out what Inside is about, and it would still make no sense. Without any dialogue, the goals of your adventure constantly change with each new encounter. Are you a boy just trying to avoid capture by mysterious people? No, you're on a mission into the heart of a city of mind-controlled slaves, but are you meant to free them? No, you're meant for something greater, something lying at the heart of everything going on in this twisted world. And then you see the blob.
It was amazing to think that objectives can be conferred not just because you can only move on a 2D plane always going forward, but because you know just by looking that this was what you were meant to do from the moment you were first put in control of the main character. And then it got stranger — you stopped being the boy, and became something else. But maybe you never stopped being the main character. Maybe the protagonist of this adventure has been working through you this entire time — it is a game about mind-control, after all. And if your unspoken task was known and guided by you from the start, maybe the player is as much the main character as the one they control, which would beg the question: who’s really in control?
Pyramid Head is undeniably one of the most iconic horror game monsters of all time, despite its mere handful of appearances throughout the Silent Hill series, but not without good reason. The strange and terrifying entity has haunted fans ever since its debut in Silent Hill 2 as “protagonist” James Sunderland’s personal tormentor. Learning the upsetting truth about James during his journey through Silent Hill also casts light on the true nature of Pyramid Head itself, making its official introduction even more disturbing. After catching a glimpse of the red triangle-headed entity behind a barred-off hallway, James later walks right into a room where the creature is assaulting two headless mannequins. James dives into a closet, watching the horror unfold in a scene that parallels a key moment in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet — a nod to a movie that, by no mere coincidence, also explores men’s perversion and violence, both potential and fully realized. The encounter is unsettling not just because it’s unexpected — it’s also confusing and violating. James isn’t the target of the violence in the scene, but it’s clear that what’s happening is a step further than the violence we’ve committed against those very same mannequin creatures. To see the minor enemies we’ve already fought several times so easily dominated by another creature feels like an immediate threat, but one that has even deeper psychological implications than we can possibly imagine the first time we see it. It isn't until the end of the game that we realize the scene served as a mirror of James' own inner violence, and dark foreshadowing for the reveal to come. Pyramid Head has since had a number of weak cameos outside Silent Hill 2, but it's hard to deny what an impact that first introduction had on both fans and horror games alike.
Games are more terrifying when they break their own rules, and you can no longer trust the information you are given. So it is with Batman: Arkham Asylum, somewhere between the punching, sneaking, and exploring that Scarecrow appears and changes the rules. The first time Batman gets hit with fear toxin, it’s subtle, with just enough foreshadowing that something isn’t right. Suddenly, voices start whispering, getting louder — angrier. The room you enter is the same as the room you just left, and for the first time, Batman is up against something he can’t punch his way out of, and it’s amazing to behold.
Even that pales in comparison to the final dose of fear-toxin, as Arkham Asylum goes so far as to trick you into thinking your game glitched out and crashed, with just the right amount of visual and audio distortion to freak you out. It goes beyond terrifying Batman - it terrifies you. It even goes so far as to replay the entire opening scene in a sick and twisted way, taunting the player with fake game over screens and tooltips that don’t make sense. Scarecrow’s hallucinations stand as the perfect translation of a comic book power put into a video game, and the way that fear seeps into everything on so many levels makes it brilliant and unforgettable.
Surprise, soldier. System Shock 2 is a hybrid first-person shooter/survival horror game set in a spaceship infected by a zombified crew and mind-altering aliens. Standard video game stuff, right? But, true to the game’s name, there’s a real shock in store for you if you think this is all just a normal mission of blasting bad guys. After your nameless protagonist soldier awakens from cryo-sleep with amnesia, his only hope is to seek out the one surviving human on the ship – Dr. Janice Polito. She’s been in contact with him since the moment he woke up, guiding him to find and rescue her. After fighting through hundreds of enemies and navigating the maze of the ship, you at last arrive at the doctor’s location... and she’s dead. Long dead. She’s been dead all along! The screen goes black and the ominous antagonist of the game appears: SHODAN, a malevolent artificial intelligence. She reveals the truth that she’s been manipulating you from the start, guiding you to reach this very point. And if you don’t continue to follow her instructions to the letter, she’ll kill you instantly. So it is that System Shock 2 casts aside any sense of normalcy and instead becomes a game wherein you yourself are an underling doing the bidding of the primary villain. How’s that for a shock?
Modern Warfare 2’s campaign missions hopscotch all around the globe. In one level you’re raining fire on terrorists in an Afghan town. In the next, you’re using ice axes to climb a mountain in Russia. This keeps you off balance, so when you start a new mission, you’re not sure what to expect. The briefing for “No Russian” is vague. You know you’re embedded in a terrorist organization headed by a man who “doesn’t flinch at torture, human trafficking, or genocide.” You’re ready for a standard Call of Duty level that has you shooting bad guys. Except that’s not what happens. Instead, you and your team step out of an elevator into a standard modern airport. Your squad mates bring up their weapons. Your weapon appears in your hands too. Then the shooting begins.
The people waiting in line at security — unarmed and defenseless — turn to see what’s happening as they’re mowed down by automatic rifle fire. It’s awful to watch. And if you’re a certain type of player, you might wonder what would happen if you pull the trigger on your controller. Try it. The game won’t stop you. This level is clearly designed to make you feel bad. It’s possible the developers included this sequence just to spark controversy and make headlines to get publicity. Or maybe they wanted to make a point about the violence at the heart of these games. Either way, that moment in “No Russian” packs a punch in a way that few other games can match.
For a while there, most war games treated violence about as seriously as a game of football. Explosive set pieces and skyrocketing kill counts took center stage, while the horrors of what actually happens on battlefields got glossed over.
Spec Ops: The Line has no time for that kind of whitewashing. From the start, it’s a war game with something to say. The scene where this comes through most clearly is when our “heroes” use white phosphorous on an enemy-occupied city. The team needs to get through the city to complete the mission, but they’re far outnumbered. They decide their only choice is to use white phosphorus, an extremely potent chemical weapon. Your job is to target clusters of enemies from above while your teammate launches missiles loaded with the stuff. The attack is successful, but the game isn’t done with this scenario yet. What happens next is unforgettable for anyone who played through the game. You make your way through the newly cleared city and come face to face with the results of your actions. It’s ghastly.
The few enemies still alive claw their way across the ground, their limbs blown off. Cries of “please help” and “kill me” can be heard in the background, while your character insists the squad needs to press on because “there’s nothing we can do.” Soon the true horror of what you’ve done comes into focus. It turns out a civilian camp had been set up right in the middle of the town you bombed. Now every one of them is dead, innocent children and adults, huddled together in a tableau of charred flesh. After this heart-wrenching scene, it’s more clear than ever: Spec Ops has more on its mind than your average war game.
Metal Gear is a series full of twists, but to call the Colonel’s glitchy freakout near the end of Metal Gear Solid 2 a mere twist doesn’t do the sheer weight of the sequence justice. After learning to trust and rely on Colonel Campbell for your main mission objectives two games in a row, you discover the person Raiden has been talking to this whole time was an AI based on the real Colonel. But it's the leadup to the reveal that makes it so eerie. Once Raiden is cut loose from captivity inside Arsenal Gear, naked and alone and desperately in need of guidance, the Colonel — for the first time — isn’t there for you. Where he once fed you useful information, his codec calls are suddenly full of nonsense. In one of Metal Gear’s many fourth wall-breaking moments, he even starts urging you to turn off your game console. But it gets weirder, from his eerie skull face and disjointed voice to the original Metal Gear clips that flash during calls to a live action video clip of a woman in the upper corner that feels unsettlingly at odds with the tone of the level. It’s a chaotic sequence that catches you completely off guard. Its execution is made even stronger by how it puts into action the themes of misinformation that have been explored up until that point, and brought more fully into light as you learn the truth about Raiden’s predicament.
The most important thing in The Last of Us isn’t the apocalypse or your quest to save the world. It’s the relationship between Ellie and Joel. External circumstances bring them together, and they grow close as they journey across the country, fighting clickers, dealing with desperate survivors, and even finding the occasional friendly companion. By necessity, Ellie and Joel’s relationship is built on trust. Trust that the other person isn’t using you for their own gain. Trust that you can count on them to save you when you can’t save yourself. Trust that you can share a vulnerable moment when you stumble on a herd of giraffes in the city. Trust that the other person won’t lie to you.
Joel and Ellie’s relationship comes to a head at the end of the game — but not when you’d think. It’s not when Joel learns Ellie must die for a chance to save humanity and he shoots his way out of the hospital with her unconscious body in his arms. The real test comes when she asks what happened. He lies to her. He says the Fireflies have stopped looking for a cure. Ellie later asks him to swear he’s telling the truth, and Joel swears. Ellie looks at him searchingly. Does she believe him? Maybe she does and maybe she doesn’t. “OK,” she says.
It’s a perfectly ambiguously note to end the game on. And really, whether she believes him or not isn’t for us to know. That’s between Ellie and Joel.
Those of you who haven’t played The Witness yet and have any interest in doing so, we encourage you to skip this entry. There are plenty of spoiler-filled moments on this list, but somehow this one feels more significant than a plot twist or a character death. Even now, we hesitate to talk about it, because it was truly shocking — and more importantly, the feeling it evoked was the defining moment that made The Witness one of the best puzzle games we've ever played.
It’s incredible to think that you could put hours into this game, soaking in its beautiful and vibrant scenery, without ever seeing what the game was truly about. The puzzle boards are fun and challenging, but once you take a closer look at the world around you they almost felt like distractions, intentional misdirection from the really amazing parts of The Witness.
There is that "click" moment where you figure out what’s going on, that all of these intricate and gorgeous landscapes are puzzles themselves, and it's unlike any other game moment we've experienced. The puzzles prescribed to discrete boards suddenly melt out of importance, and the rabid search to retrace every step you’ve already taken begins.
It honestly feels like a whole new game, and in many ways this is where The Witness really starts. You’ve secretly been trained by the game to see circles and lines everywhere, and the moment you realize you aren’t just imagining things is revelatory.
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has only been out for a few months, but we can’t deny how momentous winning your first match is. After 20 to 30 minutes of grueling survival involving stocking up on weapons, ammo, and other gear, surprise shoot-outs against other players, and maybe even some stealthy cat-and-mouse action, finally making it into the top 10 feels like a victory in itself. It’s a thrill to survive until the late game, but few game moments beat the adrenaline of also besting the second-best survivor in the whole match and knowing you’re the only person out of 99 others who dropped out of that initial plane ride to make it out alive. And unlike most moments on this list, the circumstances are always wholly unique. The excitement might be the same, but the stories that unfold for each of us in every PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds session are always our own, which is part of what makes this moment uniquely unforgettable.
Halo: Combat Evolved wastes no time dropping you in the middle of the action. You find yourself in the space boots of Master Chief, a Spartan super soldier on a ship that’s just escaped from a disastrous military operation on Reach. Unfortunately, the bad guys have caught up with you and are invading the ship. You narrowly escape on a lifeboat. So far, it’s a pretty exciting start to a video game. Then comes level two.
Now you find yourself on an Earth-like environment, complete with grass, trees, streams, and waterfalls. The thing is, you’re not on Earth. Enemy ships begin descending on your position, drawing your eye upward, where you notice that the whole ecosystem is situated on the inner curve of a colossal Halo ring. It’s an astonishing sight, the size and scope of which we’d rarely seen in a video game by 2001. It was an early showpiece that hinted at the power the then-new Xbox could harness. With a game world that impressive (and smooth controls to match), Halo: Combat evolved set the standard for a whole new era of console shooters.
There are a lot of moments that stand out in the short hour or two it takes to finish P.T. Turning that first corner. Completing your first loop. Finding the baby in the sink. Encountering Lisa. Even as a short demo, the then-mysterious P.T. — released as a free download on the PlayStation Network during Gamescom 2014 — was a treasure. The horror genre was deeply saturated in Slender clones then and true gems felt hard to come by. That’s only part of the reason why solving the final “puzzle” of P.T. and triggering the ending sequence felt so momentous. When it comes to incredible game reveals, watching the names Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro flash across the screen right after you’ve completed one of the most unique horror experiences in years ranks pretty high up there, not to mention the final title reveal — SILENT HILLS — backed by the ghostly mandolin of Akira Yamaoka’s iconic title track. But it would be unfair to P.T. as a standalone experience to say it was only because of P.T.’s true nature as a new Silent Hill demo that people loved it. Actually walking through that door for the final time felt like a true achievement even without the post-game bonus. Most horror game puzzles are pretty obscure, but P.T. took that to a whole new level. Its basic structure of a constantly looping L-shaped hallway, which could be changed only by observing subtle differences with each revisit, forced players to become intimately familiar with their terrifying setting. The Silent Hills reveal may have been the game’s payoff for our exhausting experimentation and exploration of P.T.’s domestic nightmare, but learning to navigate and finally unlock that compact horror game space felt like a reward all its own.
Journey is a game that crams its lean 3-hour adventure full of unforgettable moments, but none stuck with us quite like that fateful moment at the end of your ascent up the mountain. As your nameless traveler trudges through deeper and deeper snow, the wind all-but tearing apart your scarf, you begin to slow down. Each step becomes a herculean task in and of itself. And when you finally collapse into the snow, your journey ending before you manage to reach your destination, there’s profound sense of heartbreak that washes over you. The moment is especially affecting if you ascend the mountain alongside another nameless stranger. Watching them begin to stumble and realizing that neither of you will be able to complete your abstract goal is nothing short of powerful.
Three shining Poke Balls rest on a massive table. Your rival looks on and whines as Professor Oak gives you the go-ahead to choose your first companion. Within the first minutes of Pokemon Red and Blue, you make one of the most important decisions of the game: picking your starter. While many RPGs have set party members with sometimes few options, Pokemon allows you to pick one of three that you won't have an easy time getting later on. But what's more important is that this Pokemon is with you for your earliest trials. The Pokemon you choose here, whether it's Bulbasaur, Squirtle, or Charmander, determine how you'll progress through the rest of your adventure. It's probably the first you'll see grow as a reflection of your hard work. And though this Pokemon doesn't have a written personality, you'll discover and imprint your own feelings onto it as you defeat gyms and explore Kanto. So you step up to the table, examine each of the cute Pokemon's descriptions, and select your new best friend.
“It’s dangerous to go alone” is one of the most-quoted video game sentences right alongside a certain princess being in another castle. It’s a simple message — as the old man passes on a sword to Link at the start of his adventure — but it meant a lot to us. The Legend of Zelda’s world is vast, uncharted, and downright dangerous, and you won’t find many friends along the way. It falls to your sword to become your only companion, in a way that would be echoed throughout the series. In almost all of the Zelda series adventures, the Master Sword is the ultimate tool, the thing you need to banish evil, and at the beginning of all of Link’s quests, the world doesn’t truly open up until you can defend yourself. It may have been a small comfort at the time, but knowing we had some help with a trusty sword gave us courage to press on. Also, it helped for cutting down those pesky Octoroks.
Before making The Witness, Jonathan Blow and artist David Hellman launched Braid as an Xbox Live Summer of Arcade game. For a majority of this immediate classic, we view the game as a super smart puzzle-platformer that’s light on story, but heavy on continually expanding its puzzle rules and logic. Your character Tim’s main motivation to press on is to rescue your princess from her evil captor. But the final world, which toys with the concept of time running in reverse, turns this all on its head. The reveal that this errant knight isn’t out to capture the princess, but rather that she is running away from you and he is there to save her, shines a completely different light on all of the prior events, and makes you look back at moments in your own life and apply a different perspective to them.
Uncharted 2 is the pinnacle of Naughty Dog's venerable franchise and its train sequence might be one of the most impressive set pieces in gaming history. What starts as a rescue mission eventually sees series protagonist Nathan Drake running along the top of a moving train as it careens its way through a mountain pass. Along the way, he kills dozens of armored goons and manages to shoot a helicopter out of the sky, but he's ultimately undone by betrayal. Gunshot, and literally hanging on for dear life, Nate begins the third act of Uncharted 2 exactly where we found him in the prologue, answering the game's biggest questions and delivering an explosive and lengthy action sequence in one fell swoop.
Three Leaf Clover starts out like almost every other GTA mission — you meet up with your colorful Irish friend Packie and your other disreputable partners in crime in order to rob a bank — pretty standard GTA mayhem. But things quickly spiral out of control as the heist goes sideways, leading to one of the most intense, memorable, and unpredictable missions in GTA history. The sprawling shootout that ensues forces you to barrel desperately through alleyways and city streets, eventually diving into Liberty City’s subway system where you have to dodge both SWAT members and subway trains.
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night’s opening half is a brilliantly-designed action-platformer that helped pioneer the now-ubiquitous Metroidvania genre. Donning the cloak of Alucard and fighting your way to the top of your father’s castle provides plenty of thrilling moments, culminating in a battle against a cursed Richter Belmont. If you just fight him traditionally, you get a pretty somber ending. But it turns out, that down-note is only the beginning.
If you find a series of specific items before your encounter with Richter, you discover a way to break his curse without directly killing him. Once you’ve saved him, a CG cutscene shows the clouds above Dracula’s castle part, only to reveal a second, inverted castle looming high in the sky. What we thought was the end of Alucard’s adventure proved to only be the beginning, and what followed only cemented Symphony of the Night as one of the absolute greatest video games ever made.
The Last of Us is an emotionally draining journey that packs harrowing moment after harrowing moment. The excitement and adventure that Naughty Dog created in the Uncharted series gave way to a somber and methodical tone in the PS3’s swan song. We grew to love Joel and Ellie as we walked alongside them on their journey across America, which made every terrible thing that happened to them along the way hurt all the more.
But one single positive moment of catharsis did shine through the darkness. Near the end of the game, our heroes stumble upon a group of giraffes completely removed from the insanity of the world. The pair are able to stop and reflect on what life was like before the world went to hell. When they see the animals, Joel asks Ellie, “This everything you were hoping for?” to which she replies, “It’s got its ups and downs. But you can’t deny the view.”
The Half-Life series doesn’t do cutscenes, so there’s a lot that needs explaining directly to Gordon Freeman’s fixed perspective. Sometimes this comes off as pure exposition — how else is Dr. Kleiner supposed to update Gordon on the events of the last several years? Other times, it’s more natural. You step off a train into a world completely different than the one Gordon knew: a future dystopian nightmare complete with televised propaganda and militarized police ushering confused citizens through the relocation process. The opening moments of City 17 are iconic and tell you everything you need to know about the state of the country with very little hand-holding, but it isn’t until a Combine soldier knocks an empty can to the ground and demands Gordon pick it up that the genius of it really shines through. The scene operates as both tutorial and world-building. It teaches you how to pick things up and throw them. It gives you a choice. You can pick up the can and throw it away, in which case the Combine will move out of your way and let you pass. Or you can throw it at his head and let him chase you in circles. While he's on the move, you can even squeeze through the passage he was blocking before making your escape. Half-Life 2 doesn’t have an incredible branching story with numerous choices, so the moment isn’t quite a taste of what’s to come. But it is a fun way to introduce you to the new order of the world Gordon has found himself in, and to let you engage with it directly rather than remaining a passive observer.
Dark Souls is known for a lot of things. Its finely-crafted, interwoven world full of hidden paths and well-placed shortcuts, the depth and mystery of its somber lore, its endurance-testing combat that keeps you learning new techniques and strategies hundreds of hours in. It’s a game full of our own, emergent moments, products of the unique journeys we carve through its world. But if there is one singularly defining encounter in the whole of the first Dark Souls, it is facing off against a duo comprised of one of Lord Gwyn’s greatest knights and one of Anor Londo’s most punishing executioners: Ornstein and Smough.
By the time you fight Ornstein and Smough, you have already cut your teeth on the Asylum Demon and Taurus Demon, slayed the fire witch Quelaag, felled the Iron Golem, and a handful more. You’ve even had a taste of fending off two bosses at once with the Bell Gargoyles. But Ornstein and Smough are different. Unlike the Gargoyles, they each pose unique threats completely independent of each other, with separate movesets, speeds, and sizes that can challenge even a player who has breezed through Lordran at that point. Taking on these two legendary warriors at once, discovering the distinct challenges that come with defeating one before the other, finding the technique that works for you, and finally slaying both notorious beasts once and for all — with that epic score rising in the background — is an exhilarating moment in a series absolutely brimming with them.
Even taken without any context, the battle against The Boss at the conclusion of Metal Gear Solid 3 is a fantastic final fight that puts your stealth skills to the test in a hauntingly beautiful field of white lilies. But what truly makes this fight unforgettable is the story behind it. All throughout the game, both Snake and the player are left to wonder why — why would The Boss, Snake’s mentor and the greatest hero the United States has ever known, betray her country and defect to the Soviet Union? You never get that answer until after you’re literally forced to pull the trigger on The Boss, and the resulting revelations recontextualize the entire fight. It’s a level of depth that you just don’t often see in boss fights.
After fighting against the Sith Empire for hours, building alliances and relationships, and eventually becoming a Jedi Knight, you’re confronting with the big bad for the game. Only, it turns out, you were the big bad after all. With the revelation, different aspects of the game’s dialogue — when someone suggests you might go down a “familiar” path, or the Jedi council makes an exception by teaching an adult — suddenly make sense. The ramifications for the revelation are huge: You were once the leader of the Sith Empire before your apprentice betrayed you, the Jedi Council used you as a puppet, and Bastila was complicit in all of this. No one comes across that honorably here, giving the player a real choice as to whether they’re going to revert back to darkside Revan or instead redeem him. But it’s all set up by one of the biggest twists in gaming history and one that still holds up to this day.
For those who remember back to Blizzard’s original Starcraft campaign, it was rife with twists. The most shocking in the initial Terran campaign is Mengsk’s betrayal on Tarsonis, leading to veteran ghost and beloved ally Sarah Kerrigan’s apparent death. It’s only in the Zerg campaign that we find out that she is not dead, but corrupted by the Zerg to become the Queen of Blades. When Kerrigan emerged from the chrysalis, she immediately became Blizzard’s most iconic villain-- once the love interest of lovable good guy Jim Raynor, she became a villain responsible for millions of deaths, hell bent on revenge against Mengsk and inhumane in her tactics. But through Kerrigan’s dark transformation, the Starcraft franchise also turned from being just a black and white space opera to a complex story with characters full of depth and shades of gray. Kerrigan, as the leader of the Zerg, granted them humanity — transforming their story from that of mindless insectoids into a somewhat sympathetic race of creatures.
It’s strange to write about the now-infamous cliffhanger that closed out Half-Life 2: Episode Two, in light of series writer Marc Laidlaw’s publication of the elusive Half-Life 3’s story. But even before we knew that would become the last thing any of us would experience of the Half-Life series before Laidlaw’s leak, the finale of Episode Two was still unforgettable. With the menacing Combine portal successfully closed, Gordon Freeman and Alyx Vance prepare to leave for the lost ship, the Borealis. Only moments after Alyx shares a touching moment with her father Eli and the three of you step off the lift, two Advisors – among the Half-Life universe’s most menacing enemies – burst into the room. Alyx’s trusty robot pal D0g manages to save you and Alyx, but Eli is not so lucky. He’s murdered by one of the Advisors and we’re forced to watch Alyx hold his body sobbing as the screen fades to black. After an action-packed series of missions and at least one rocket-fueled victory for the Resistance, the abrupt loss of a beloved character and utter devastation we see Alyx suffer is perhaps one of the most shocking endings of a game ever. The fact that we’ll never quite get the closure that ending deserves (besides Laidlaw’s letter) makes it all the more haunting.
Most Call of Duty campaigns are marked by loud moments of sheer spectacle — escaping a sinking tanker, shooting bad guys while inside a collapsing building, fending off terrorists while hanging off the side of a bus on a busy freeway, and so on. But Call of Duty 4 had an outlier: A moment that wasn’t loud, bombastic, or very fun to watch, but it did leave an indelible impact.
After succeeding in rescuing a crashed pilot, Sgt. Paul Jackson and the rest of his team make it to the helicopter to evacuate the area, only to be met with a nuclear explosion off in the horizon that sends their helicopter careening into the ground. What follows is a heartwrenching scene straight out of a nightmare where the player must crawl through a scorched radioactive warzone while listening to the panicked and pained breathing of their dying squadmates. At the end, you stare up at the mushroom cloud, the screen fades to white, Jackson dies, and one of the perspectives that you had been switching between since the beginning of the game is gone forever.
It’s an incredibly powerful scene and a haunting reminder of the terror of nuclear war.
You don’t truly get a sense of scale in Shadow of the Colossus until your first adversary is blotting out the sun in front of you. Up until that moment, you’ve been travelling through a vast and empty world. Open plains and looming mountains with nothing but the occasional lizard scuttling about. But now you’re standing at the foot of an enormous monster, and somehow you have to kill it.
It’s massive, imposing, and completely ignoring you. That last part might be the most intimidating, because it’s a creature so large and powerful that (until you start jumping around its feet) it doesn’t even really notice you’re there. You’re inconsequential in its presence, and the game does a great job of letting you know exactly that.
So the task becomes “what the heck am I supposed to do here?” It’s not an easy question at first, and initially not an easy task even after you’ve figured it out. You madly hop at its ankles, and when you finally cling to the leg and pull yourself up, you’re faced with another “now what?” moment as the stamina bar starts dropping.
Even if it’s the easiest fight in the game, it’s unlikely most people got through it without being flung off your opponent’s head at least once. And the magic of that first colossus is that it teaches you nearly everything you need to know for the 15 that come after it without feeling like a tutorial.
It’s an awe-inspiring moment that can be as impactful today as it was 12 years ago. It sticks with you throughout the game as well, still holding weight and wonder even as you fight bigger and more elaborate enemies. Seeing that first colossus tower over you is a moment that’s topped in scale throughout Shadow of the Colossus, but stays memorable because it truly makes you understand what you’re about to go up against.
You’ve gone to Mexico and back. You did what the Bureau of Investigation asked, and tracked down all the remaining members of your former gang. You’ve made it back home and finally found a moment of peace and tranquility with your family. But there’s no rest for the wicked, and John knows what’s coming for him.
What begins as a quiet, mundane scene between John and his son is quickly interrupted when Uncle yells from outside. You fend off the Bureau long enough to see that your family is able to escape on horseback. After watching them make it to safety, you take a deep breath and open the doors of the barn you’re held up in.
There are dozens of men in front of you, all have their guns pointed at you. The game activates Dead Eye -- you manage to take a few out, but it quickly becomes apparent that Marston isn’t making it out alive. The Bureau riddles him with bullets, blood soaking the ground around him. Your adventure with John ends with you staring up at the sky as you take your final breath.
“Assume the party escort submission position.”
Portal has been the source of so many memes in the decade since its 2007 debut that it’s easy to forget the jaw-dropping impact the game had on players when it was first sold as a tiny addition to The Orange Box. The subversive, surprising, and unexpectedly funny moment players realize they had to stop playing by the game’s rules to survive, and the mad scramble through the bowels of Aperture Science that ensues, is one of the most brilliant and memorable moments in video game history.
It’s a magnificent and perfectly-foreshadowed moment of player-directed environmental storytelling.
The first Resident Evil was goofy even back in the ‘90s, with its campy dialogue, stilted voice acting, and that atrocious live action intro. But the first time you encounter one of the franchise’s most iconic baddies feasting on a fallen Bravo Team member in a dark corner of the eerie Spencer Estate, it’s hard to scrub the image from your memory.
Dubbed the “Turning Around Zombie” by series producer Shinji Mikami, the blood-soaked undead can be found just moments after Wesker, Barry, and Jill/Chris enter the mansion, in a cramped hallway just past the dining room. It’s the first zombie you see in the game in both the original and the HD remake, but there’s something so much creepier about the version from 1996. It could be its scaly, sheet white skin, its more human-like eyes, or the unnatural way it seems to turn its head to face you. Over the years, Resident Evil has not proven itself a master of subtlety, with its lineup of gory scientific abominations and no shortage of jump scares, but back in 1996, alone in that claustrophobic corridor, it managed to sear an image in fans’ heads that few of us will forget.
It’s hard to understate how impactful the Bioshock twist is to the gaming world. Like the twist in The Usual Suspects, the twist in Bioshock completely changes how you view the story, both inviting you to reexperience Rapture and encouraging you to continue to see how it ends. Like Verbal Kint in the aforementioned noir drama, Ken Levine and his team do a masterful job of hiding the ball while immersing you in a story. Through most of Bioshock, you’re guided through the libertarian/art deco nightmare world of Rapture by the kindly Atlas, an Irish family man with a curious way of requesting things. It’s not until you stumble upon Jack Ryan’s office that you understand that everything you thought was true was a complete lie. There are plenty of revelations in video games where the player or the villain are revealed to be something else. But the “Would You Kindly?” moment instead makes us question if we ever had any choice at all. “A man chooses, a slave obeys.” Suddenly, you’re no longer a survivor of a plane crash stumbling upon a strange world. Suddenly, you are the biggest monster in the place.
These words — uttered by a small man in a funny hat — are more than just an apt summation of the entire Super Mario Bros. experience. Players remember this moment because it feels like a super effective metaphor for life: No matter how fast you run, no matter how many enemies you stomp, no matter how many bricks you punch with your bare fists or giant turtle men you drop into lava pits, there’s always another castle and another Toad that needs saving (and we're not even trying to save him). Yes, life can be frustrating, but it can also be rewarding. Each flagpole that's cleared is a reason to celebrate, and every castle conquered gets you one step closer to your true goal of saving the princess. The lesson here is that with enough hard work and persistence, it is indeed possible to finally live happily ever after...until the turtle man comes for the princess all over again. Then it’s back to work.
There have been plenty of character deaths in gaming over the years, but few have resonated with players as strongly as Aerith Gainsborough’s untimely demise in Final Fantasy 7.
Aerith isn’t the first Final Fantasy character to take one for the team (we’ll never forget you, Galuf!) but unlike previous sacrificial lambs she isn’t a mere sidekick who hangs around on a temporary basis. Aerith is a crucial party member who not only provides invaluable healing support in combat but is also instrumental in Cloud Strife’s growth as a person. In other words, she is a — if not in some way the — main character in Final Fantasy VII, which makes her death from above all the more shocking.
Sephiroth impaling Aerith on his Masamune blade while she prays to save the world is a heinous and cowardly act, and the expression on Aerith’s face when Sephiroth attacks mirrors the player's emotions: one minute she’s smiling because everything is alright, the next she stares disbelievingly at the sword running through her body before crumpling to the ground. The whole thing is so sudden and jarringly violent that it leaves both the player and the heroes in total shock.
But the most emotional moment comes after the subsequent fight with Sephiroth, when Cloud gently lays Aerith’s body into the Lifestream and watches it slowly sink into the depths. The art direction and music cues here are superbly done: every shot of Cloud’s grief-stricken face and every piano key tinkering softly in the background as Aerith disappears is calculated to tug at the heart strings. It’s one of the most emotional send-offs in gaming history, and even 20 years later listening to the first few notes of Aerith’s Theme triggers a wellspring of teary-eyed emotions.
It’s hard to quantify how many ways Hideo Kojima changed the video game industry with the release of Metal Gear Solid in 1998 on the original PlayStation. Solid Snake’s mission through Shadow Moses pushed the boundary of cinematic storytelling in games, gave us a playground to experiment in with a litany of strange items and weapons, and introduced us to a cast of unforgettable characters that paved the way for one of the most iconic series in our entire medium.
But if we had to pick one single moment that encapsulates not only Metal Gear Solid, but Kojima himself, it would be the way Psycho Mantis blew our collective minds during his boss fight. Fighting the gasmask-wearing member of FOXHOUND is an absolute crash-course in breaking the fourth wall. It starts off small, with Mantis addressing the player and displaying that he can make your controller move by activating the rumble. He makes your think your TV is broke by cutting to a black screen with the word HIDEO in the upper-right corner. Then, most memorably, he has the ability to read your memory card and comments on other Konami games you might have played. Hearing Mantis say “So... you like Castlevania, don’t you?” a few months after I had finished Symphony of the Night left me absolutely shook.
Hideo Kojima has spent the past two decades building upon this amazing foundation with some truly iconic moments, but none stuck with us quite like the time we spent with Psycho Mantis.
Pulling a sword from the stone is a memorable motif that spans different mythologies, representing a transference of power to the chosen hero of legend, and has made its way into The Legend of Zelda series. This wasn’t the first time I pulled a sword out of a stone in a video game, so I thought I had a pretty good idea of where this was heading. I was wrong. Pulling the sword out and watching the pedestal light up with the triforce icon - it felt right, and looked amazing. However, in Ocarina of Time, obtaining the Master Sword is both a blessing and a curse. It allowed Link to wield the blade of evil’s bane, but only after sealing him away for seven long years. And it was then I learned with a shock that this was Ganondorf’s plan all along.
Ever since teaming up with Princess Zelda, I felt like I had pulled one over on the King of Thieves. I was out collecting mystical stones and unlocking the Door of Time, and it never occurred to me that my goals perfectly aligned with the antagonist until it was too late. Watching Ganondorf gloat to my face and laugh at my confusion was a big moment for me: I screwed up. He got to enter the Sacred Realm and take the Triforce, and I got to take a very long nap.
Awakening seven years later as Link in his adult form, it was hard to take in what had transpired in that time without a hero. The skies were dark and ugly, Castle Town was a smoldering redead-infested wreck, and the castle itself had become a bastion of evil. Guilt is a powerful thing to convey, and Ocarina of Time did it well, making me feel directly responsible for my part in transforming Hyrule into the twisted mess it had become. Things got really dark in Hyrule: Gorons were being fed to a dragon, Zoras were trapped in ice, and this was all because Link was too young to be the Hero of Time. There are points like these in any story that can fill you with hesitation, but it also marks a turning point. To me, I felt more determined than ever to make things right. I owed it to the people of Hyrule I met in my adventures, and I owed it to myself to put that Master Sword to use and save the world, because I was the Hero of Time now, and there was evil that needed banishing.
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