Backloggd has annual game of the year events and occasional “flashback” events where people are invited to choose the top games for a given year in the categories of gameplay, narrative, art direction, soundtrack, multiplayer and overall game of the year. I’ve enjoyed taking part in a few of these events and a few months ago Backloggd added the ability to create game of the year lists for past years that they’ve done events for. All of my picks can be found on my Backloggd profile.

Like my other annual picks I’m being somewhat strategic in choices, preferring not to double up awards for individual games other than in a few places where the game of the year also gets one of the other prizes, so Transistor is overlooked for best art direction for 2014 because I already gave it best soundtrack. That said I didn’t take these too seriously and some picks are more tongue in cheek than others.

A couple of years are also missing multiplayer picks because I just don’t play that many multiplayer games and I don’t think that I have played any multiplayer games from those years. I am surprised that I was able to fill out some of the lists at all to be honest, considering various lulls I’ve had in my gaming habits over the years. But I think I’m fairly happy with these lists as they are and I’m looking forward to future events when the site does them.

New Backloggd list for games that contain scenes:
https://backloggd.com/u/Caoimhe/list/these-games-contain-scenes/

I previously posted lists I’ve made picking one game and one film per year since 1990. 1990 acted as a good arbitrary stopping point as it’s a nice round number, it’s the year I was born and the number of games I’ve played at all from before then is pretty small, and it would be be fairly difficult to pick out shows for each year before then for me too. I’ve made a dedicated page on the site for these picks, made a few substitutions, added a pick for each for 2025 and added one series of television per year as well. All put into one table with the ability to toggle off which media you want to see selections for as well as some dynamic rearrangement based on screenspace, all done with (a horrendous mess of) Cascading Style Sheets and no Javascript.

These are not necessarily my favourite from each year. I have tried to be deliberate to give a spread of different styles and series I like as well including some weirder picks. Especially with games I spent a lot of time weighing choices for particular years based on what series I wanted to include and some years are just packed with formative games for me. 2001 has Metal Gear Solid 2, Silent Hill 2, Commandos 2 and Halo (and Grand Theft Auto 3 and Advance Wars and Worms World Party…). I eventually gave the year to Metal Gear Solid 2 after weighing up that I could have Resident Evil 2 and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories covering some bases for Silent Hill 2, Shadow Tactics was spiritually taking up a place for the Commandos series and there’s already plenty of shooters there to justify dropping Halo.

Similarly Prey is spiritually covering for System Shock so that I can have a childhood favourite Soleil for 1994 and Half-Life would probably beat out Resident Evil 2 in a head-to-head but there’s already two Half-Life games on there and I wanted it to carry the survival horror water for both the aforementioned Silent Hill 2 and for the REmake that got booted out from the previous iteration to make room for Robot Alchemic Drive. And yes after going on about carefully spreading out my choices I did give three picks to Sonic games, one to another Sonic Team-developed game and two more to Sonic-inspired indie games (and four different series of Doctor Who for the TV list). I will not be taking feedback on this.

Again the page is here and the lists are also on my Letterboxd, Serializd and Backloggd accounts as well as a second Letterboxd list covering the years 1970-1989.

When I made my one game per year list I went back as far as 1990. This was because at that point I was struggling to come up with games I had actually played for a given year and while I could probably have filled in some stuff for the 80s, 1990 seemed like a good place to stop because it was a nice even number and also the year I was born.

When I went to do my one film per year list I stopped at the same point. I hadn’t put much thought into that, covering the same years for the list just seemed the obvious thing to do to me. When I shared it with some people they asked why stop there and some of them made their own lists, going back much farther in years and certainly further than when they were born. So I decided to go back look at how I would expand out the list back in time.

I haven’t updated the list yet but with just my preliminary scan through Letterboxd’s lists of movies by year I surprised myself with how few gaps I had. I was expecting to have trouble filling in entries once I hit the 70s on but it’s not till 1970 itself that I hit a gap where I don’t think that I’ve seen anything from that year and it’s not till the early 50s where I start to have more years where I don’t have anything than do.

But for 1970 I’ve been meaning to watch Crimes of the Future and I have other films that interest me for many of the gaps in my list, so I think I’m going to try to fill in the gaps in my list pushing it back a bit more before I update it and post it again, so expect me to post some reviews for older movies to my Letterboxd.

And if you have any recommendations for movies from 1955 or earlier I would be all ears to hear them. Or also for 1969 in particular as well because that is a year I seem to be struggling to find something I want to watch for.