Before you start: it wasn’t easy.

Sure, it sounds easy, but deciding on the fifty greatest games of all time is as simple as picking the fifty greatest experiences ever, trying to decide if tasting a strawberry is better or worse than skydiving. It’s good that gaming’s so diverse, that there are adventures for everyone, but there’s such a contrast of experiences across the medium. Genres are often impossible to directly compare. Trust us, we’ve thought about this a lot. We’ve had to play a lot of games. We know that sounds tough, but we’re very brave.

The only solution? To create a book that makes sure it represents that diversity. So that’s why this isn’t a linear, straightforward top fifty but a patchwork tapestry of videogame brilliance, picking out the fifty highest points from across gaming’s beautiful spectrum. The majority of videogaming genres are here, not just the media mainland like shooting and driving – the games that represent what people think games are – but the outlying islands too, like Sony’s beautiful Ico and Sega’s sugar-sweet Super Monkey Ball.