Game Rankings By Console?

[Palmtree]

Hello, I’m very interested in how various games were ranked compared to others on their console shortly after they came out without 20-30 years of hindsight (ie, “top 10 ps1 games”). Are there any magazines that did this often and/or how could I search for this? Similarly, are there any magazines that made best game per year rankings (ie, “top 10 games released in 1997”)?

[kitsunebi]

I think just about every magazine out there made various "best of the year" features, and on certain milestone occasions, they might have made "best of all-time" lists.  I don't think anyone made any such lists on a monthly basis, though, if that's what you're hoping for.  The only monthly lists you'll find are sales charts and rankings like the ones in Nintendo Power based on reader poll votes - essentially a popularity contest.

[Areala]

Hi, @Palmtree!

An awful lot of magazines, going all the way back to the 1980s, ran "best of" lists in their pages. As just one example, PC Gamer Issue 3 ran a feature ranking the top 40 PC games of all time (well, at least up through August of 1994, when that issue saw print). They would go on to update this list numerous times over the next two decades.

Features like this were guaranteed to generate a lot of buzz and talk among the typical subscriber base, to say nothing of people who only periodically picked up magazines, and publishers usually made these their cover feature to entice rack shoppers to pick them up and see where their favorite game(s) wound up ranking. Browsing through our cover gallery is a pretty easy way to locate these.

Many console-specific magazines kept floating ranking lists like these as regular monthly features, where the editors and readers would submit their choices to the magazine. Nintendo Power did this for years, maintaining not just a list of what the readers liked, but also the best-loved games played by their game counselors.

Magazines which didn't focus on a specific console, like EGM and GamePro, usually published monthly statistics on the ten best-selling titles and most-rented titles, where their figures were pulled from consumer sales indexes along with information supplied by large video game rental outfits, like Blockbuster Video. These were regular departments in the magazines, so any given issue from the 90s to the early 2000s had a page or two showcasing the trends.

Landmark issues of specific magazines were often causes for retrospectives of this nature, where the magazine would dig through the archives and put together features about their best- and worst-ranked games over the publication's life to that point. Depending on the frequency of a magazine's publication, you might look at issue #6 (for bi-monthly publications), issue #12 (for yearly publications), issue #24/25, issue #50, issue #100, fifth anniversary, tenth anniversary, and so on. It wasn't uncommon to see this sort of thing from a first issue, especially if the magazine was making its debut in the middle of an already-crowded field, which is what PSM did in their first issue.

Finally, if a magazine made a transition from one name to another, check out the first issue published under their new moniker. When Computer Gaming World re-branded as Games For Windows, sure enough, their very first issue featured their countdown of the Top 10 PC Games of 2007.

Welcome to the site, and I hope this helps give you some starting points to work with!

*huggles*
Areala

[Palmtree]

1 hour ago, kitsunebi said:

I think just about every magazine out there made various "best of the year" features, and on certain milestone occasions, they might have made "best of all-time" lists.  I don't think anyone made any such lists on a monthly basis, though, if that's what you're hoping for.  The only monthly lists you'll find are sales charts and rankings like the ones in Nintendo Power based on reader poll votes - essentially a popularity contest.

Tysm for the information!

[Palmtree]

1 hour ago, Areala said:

Hi, @Palmtree!

An awful lot of magazines, going all the way back to the 1980s, ran "best of" lists in their pages. As just one example, PC Gamer Issue 3 ran a feature ranking the top 40 PC games of all time (well, at least up through August of 1994, when that issue saw print). They would go on to update this list numerous times over the next two decades.

Features like this were guaranteed to generate a lot of buzz and talk among the typical subscriber base, to say nothing of people who only periodically picked up magazines, and publishers usually made these their cover feature to entice rack shoppers to pick them up and see where their favorite game(s) wound up ranking. Browsing through our cover gallery is a pretty easy way to locate these.

Many console-specific magazines kept floating ranking lists like these as regular monthly features, where the editors and readers would submit their choices to the magazine. Nintendo Power did this for years, maintaining not just a list of what the readers liked, but also the best-loved games played by their game counselors.

Magazines which didn't focus on a specific console, like EGM and GamePro, usually published monthly statistics on the ten best-selling titles and most-rented titles, where their figures were pulled from consumer sales indexes along with information supplied by large video game rental outfits, like Blockbuster Video. These were regular departments in the magazines, so any given issue from the 90s to the early 2000s had a page or two showcasing the trends.

Landmark issues of specific magazines were often causes for retrospectives of this nature, where the magazine would dig through the archives and put together features about their best- and worst-ranked games over the publication's life to that point. Depending on the frequency of a magazine's publication, you might look at issue #6 (for bi-monthly publications), issue #12 (for yearly publications), issue #24/25, issue #50, issue #100, fifth anniversary, tenth anniversary, and so on. It wasn't uncommon to see this sort of thing from a first issue, especially if the magazine was making its debut in the middle of an already-crowded field, which is what PSM did in their first issue.

Finally, if a magazine made a transition from one name to another, check out the first issue published under their new moniker. When Computer Gaming World re-branded as Games For Windows, sure enough, their very first issue featured their countdown of the Top 10 PC Games of 2007.

Welcome to the site, and I hope this helps give you some starting points to work with!

*huggles*
Areala

Wow tysm for all the information!!!

[Rando1975]

Your best bet for "best of (insert year here)" is from the January issues as they would release in December.

Best games of a particular system is more work. Probably have to scan the covers or check to see if someone indexed the magazines contents. Checking covers would probably be quicker as most magazines that did those lists advertised it on the cover.

[SynthMilk]

You might want to check out the annual EGM Buyer's Guide standalone issues.

The 1999 guide appears to be the first (possibly only -- I don't have later editions) to include Top 10 rankings per console (though not limited to 1998 releases). Earlier editions have per console game of the year awards as well as an overall game of the year award and some awards given out for the best title in specific genres, and some technical categories (e.g., best sound effects).  They also reprint Review Crew scores for each console's library, but these tables don't list the game's release year or what issue it was reviewed in, so I don't find them very helpful.

Gamefan's 1994 Buyer's Guide (Vol 2 issue 12) collected viewpoint scores for the best games of '94 in each genre on each console. Pretty nice format for seeing how the top games of that year stacked up against each other. They probably felt it was redundant to have an end-of-year buyer's guide and an awards special in the January issue as (AFAIK) we don't get the Buyer's Guide in subsequent years — just the MEGAWARDS which are more like the awards section in the EGM Buyer's Guides (just a category winner and maybe some honourable mentions).

As Areala suggests, the console-specific mags (PSM, Sega Saturn Magazine) are probably the way to go for per-console Top 10 lists.