Online Study Shares the Best Year for Video Games Based on Metacritic User Scores

The greatest year of video gaming is an interesting and often debated question. You talk to some people I know and if it came out after the SNES era, it’s no good. Others see anything before the latest generation as garbage. It’s wide mix and video games have brought joy to many gamers over the years. Well, the site Spades Challenge went on a quest to determine the top year of video game history. They analyzed the 2,000 titles that have the highest user scores on Metacritic. It should be noted that when I looked on Metacritic, the earliest game I could find was Full Throttle in 1995. It is the only game from 1995 available and there’s nothing on the site from before then that I could find. This means that the results of the study by Spades Challenge will be skewed. That being said, let’s see what they had to say with their top 10 list of years.

As you can see, 2003 is the winner based on the data they used with 199 games in the top 2,000. This really was a great year though with Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Fire Emblem, and more releasing. Plus, that was the year that Valve released Steam. Second is 2004 with 168 titles like Burnout 3: Takedown, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and Half-Life 2. Then, in 2005 we had 158 games like Resident Evil 4 and Shadow of the Colossus. Needless to say, a lot of great games were released in the 2000s. That being said, what is your favorite year for video games?