What’s the best game that has no business being brought up on a podcast that’s all about the Best Games Ever? If you can get your head around that, you’re already way ahead of our regular panel.
Some of the worst games ever made are also the most interesting. Take Night Trap, for example: it’s arguably one of the most important games in the history of the medium. Questions were asked about it in congressional hearings: it was, despite narrative overtures to the contrary, a peeping-tom simulator where you, the player, spied on a house full of teenage girls having a sleepover via a bank of (extremely rubbish quality) video feeds. Your objective was ostensibly to save the girls from vampires, or something, but it doesn’t matter, because few people actually played Night Trap and even fewer would admit it.
What’s interesting about it is that it caused such a moral panic in the US that it led directly to video games having their own age ratings systems, which is an important thing in the evolution of the medium, because now it’s an accepted fact that the video game audience isn’t solely comprised of impressionable children. Which means we get mature, grown-up games like The Last of Us, which is about headshotting zombies and chucking bricks.
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