LANDMARK GAMES

The most influential titles of the decade

THE LAST DECADE was something of a golden age for PC gaming. It saw the gap between consoles and gaming PCs widen even further, as the hardware we play on became more powerful and capable than ever before.

But it also saw the emergence of the blockbuster game as a rival to the kind you see in theaters. In 2007, 14 years ago, Halo 3 took the largest launch-day sales of any media property at that time, with first-day sales of $170 million, overtaking the likes of Harry Potter and Spider-man at the movies. Since then,

the numbers have only got bigger, and in 2017, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds took $900 million on its first day, toppling 2013’s Grand Theft Auto V ($815m).

GTAV— a game that launched on Xbox 360 and has appeared on three generations of consoles—is also emblematic of the past 10 years in gaming, as the decade has seen more in the way of remakes, remasters, and straightforward rereleases than at any other time. This doesn’t mean that the game industry has become less creative, but it’s a reflection of how much more expensive and intensive it has become to develop a triple-A, bigbudget game in the years that saw the rise of ray tracing, the consolidation of multicore processors, and 4K screens become something you can pick up for a few hundred bucks. Development teams are now huge, budgets reach into the hundreds of millions, and games can be in development for many years before being released, unfinished.

Here, then, are our pick of the PC games of the last decade, in no

particular order.