The 2010s: A Revolutionary Decade in Gaming

“Have you heard of Minecraft?” My little brother asked me as I peered over his shoulder. It was winter 2009, and I honestly had not heard of it before. I gathered from watching him play that it was a peculiar survival-based game, a sim, some sort of creative sandbox-style free-for-all, and I don’t even know what. Yeah, it seemed like a real strange game, but it was intriguing.

By the end of the last decade, most of the video game landscape was dominated by massive, action-packed, AAA titles from the Halo and Zelda franchises, to the massively multiplayer titan that is somehow still kicking, World of Warcraft. Interesting and engaging titles were being released all the time on every conceivable platform, from the fast-paced and visually breathtaking Mirror’s Edge to the quirky and off-kilter Portal, from the atmospheric and occasionally thought-provoking Bioshock to the fantastic and whimsical Super Mario Galaxy. But by and large, most of the PC gaming landscape could be boiled down to hack ‘n’ slash action RPGs like Torchlight, and apart from Nintendo which always did its own thing, console developers had become fixated on multiplayer military shooters like Call of Duty and the gang, and epic RPGs with dialogue trees.

So then along comes this simple sandbox survival game, a humble bit of freeware launched by then-nobody Notch. These two separate concepts were far from new, but together they had spawned a game defined by limitless creativity. Little did anybody know it would kick off an absolutely revolutionary decade in gaming, that saw the medium ascend from a gradually accepted form of mainstream entertainment to one capable of producing art. Minecraft in particular would end up becoming central to the trends in this decade. Most notably, it paved the way for sandbox survival games like Don’t Starve! and Rust, and more horror-oriented entries to the genre like The Forest.

Today, in recognition of the absolutely amazing decade in gaming we have had, I wanted to count through some of the most important games of each year. Maybe we’ll even learn something about the defining trends of the decade along the way.

Here’s how this is going to work: the games on this list didn’t have to be wildly successful or even financially successful at all, but they did have to be well-known. I mean, you can’t have a revolutionary game if it wasn’t influential to the gaming industry at large, right? Remakes and ports of games from the 2000s and 1990s are out – only games that are original to the past decade will do (sorry Halo fans). Also, I am not going to count expansions to World of Warcraft and other games that predated 2010. This is really just an attempt to tell the story of the trends and major releases of the decade.

Strap yourselves in, because this is gonna be a long one.