The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has been voted the most important game of the past 30 years by staff and readers of Edge Magazine, as the publication celebrates its 30th anniversary.
Edge issue 390, which is on sale now, features the largest poll in the magazine's history. Readers, as well as current and former Edge staff "and a broad selection of leading lights in game development and publishing" came together to "produce a list of the 100 greatest games of the past 30 years."
At the top of that list is Breath of the Wild, which Edge describes as "the ultimate synthesis of creativity and technology, indistinguishable from magic." Grag Lobanov, developer of beloved indies Chicory and Wandersong, says that "Every year it gets harder to do anything that actually feels ahead of the crowd or that legitimately pushes the medium forward. It's hard to imagine right now that we'll see anything land a leap as ambitious as Breath of the Wild again."
The entire 100-game list is filled with excellent titles, of course, but Breath of the Wild beat out some serious competitors within the top five alone. At five, Resident Evil 4 came in just behind another Zelda game, Ocarina of Time, at four.
Super Mario 64 kicks off the top three, with Edge labeling it "as transformative as videogames get, and perhaps the most harmonious marriage of game and hardware." The runner-up spot falls to Dark Souls, which "stands as one of the most influential games of Edge's lifetime, its DNA traces found in games of all stripes [...] an instant classic whose true value has only grown in the years since."
As for the rest of the top ten, Halo: Combat Evolved sits at number six, with a Valve double-bill of Half-Life 2 and Portal at seven and eight. FromSoftware makes a second appearance with Elden Ring at nine, and the original Doom rounds things out. There are dozens of bangers sitting in the rest of the list, with yet more Nintendo and FromSoft efforts hovering just outside the bounds of the games I've highlighted here, but you'll have to pick up a copy of the magazine if you want to view the top 100 in its entirety.
How does our list of the 50 best games of all time match up?
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