Game Overkill: The Announcement

Hi folks,

First of all, I’m not here to announce the triumphant return of Atari Poop. I’m here to ask all of you for some help with my feature here on 1MoreCastle.

After a short Twitter project where people sent me their favourite albums, which I then listened to while sharing my thoughts, I realised that I’d listened to a lot of music I never would have and it was an amazing experience. Almost immediately, I knew I wanted to something similar with video games, but much, much bigger.



Instead of telling me what your favourite game is and then reviewing it, I want all of you to send me a list of ALL your favourite games regardless of genre, console (arcade, handheld, PC, mobile included), region (it is fine if the game wasn’t released where I live), or age (from 1st gen to 6th, and as for PC, I will also accept retro-themed games that were released recently, since generations don’t really apply to PC gaming). Make your lists as long as you want. I want this to be as comprehensive and massive as possible, so I will not complain when I start getting 100, 250, 768 game lists. Consider me an alien who came to Earth having no concept of video games but had a lifetime to experience them, then just list every single game you think I should play, every game you enjoyed, every game that deserves to be played. Now, you might be thinking this is overkill, which would be great because for the sake of giving this project a name, I’ll be calling it Game Overkill (just to make it clear in case you hadn’t noticed the large logo at the top of this post). Regardless, I am absolutely serious about this.

Here’s what I want to do with your lists:

Compile them and order them by the number of times a game appears on people’s lists (so you do not need to put them in any kind of order). Mario 3 is on more lists than Mario 2, then 2 appears lower than 3 in the top XXX. Review the top 100 (or 25, or 50, or 200…it all depends on how many of you participate). The review will let you know where the particular game ranked overall. Review one game per month, always after having completed the game (if possible, within reason). Depending on the console or genre, I may do top 5s or 10s on the side for those that only got a few titles (or none at all) within the top 100 (or whatever it is I go with). For example, a series of 5 reviews in order to cover the top 5 Apple Bandai Pippin games according to your lists, since it is likely none will find themselves on enough lists to be reviewed otherwise. At the end of every review, I will tell you which game is getting reviewed next. This way, those of you interested in doing so can play the next game along with me. I will not be reviewing the games in order for two reasons: it would ruin the surprise of finding out where a particular game ranked, and having to review several +60 hour RPGs in a row would be brutal.

It is my hope that this will end up being a neat retro gamer-sourced Top X Retro Games of All-Time list. Plus, if people are interested in playing the games along with me, and we’re all following each other on Twitter (follow me and let me know it’s because of this project and I’ll follow you back, I swear), it could generate some pretty interesting discussion on games we love and return to frequently, games we played years ago and are rediscovering, and even games we’re playing for the first time. However, how successful and fun all of this will be is entirely dependent on all of you. The more people who participate, the more fun it’ll be for everyone (especially me!)

Now, as for how I want you to send me your lists, I don’t really care. You can leave the whole damn thing in the comments if you want, I guess. That being said, you could email it to me (atsinganoi(at)gmail(dot)com), paying special attention to the fact that it is spelled aTSinganoi, not aSTinganoi. That would be super convenient. Putting it in Dropbox and sending me the link is also an option. You could even be a hilarious asshole and tweet your entire list to me.

Regardless of how you get it to me, I’ll just be glad to receive it, and don’t forget, you do not need to put the games on your list in any kind of order, so go to Collexions, go to Backloggery, go to Gamefaqs, go to your boxes and shelves of games, look at what you have played, and make a list of all of the games you think I should play.

I’m giving you until the end of July to get your lists to me and the first review will come in September. If you have any questions or suggestions, post them in the comments. For now, I’ll just thank you all in advance for helping me with this.