VGOAT is a database that manually compiles "best of" lists from video game publications over the years, including books, magazines, and websites. It introduces an element not often considered in the analysis of game rankings: how placements on these lists introduce and omit games over time as the critical and cultural landscape changes. By compiling this data—entry by entry, review by review—VGOAT helps illustrate which games were short-lived fads and which have stood the test of time.
The site compiles lists from any book, magazine or site with an editorial process that claim to rank the 'best games'. Sometimes, it's obvious that lists that purport to be about the 'most influential' games are comparable. The lists have to be from editors and not user polls. To ensure a fair comparison, lists that rank the best games by platform or limit the rankings to a time period are out. One exception is computer games, which by nature were multiplatform for a long time. I've tried to be relaxed on this, because many publications will obviously have their own preferences, even if their scope is multiplatform. For instance, Nintendo Power's best games of all time list is obviously focused on Nintendo consoles, even if it is multiplatform.
The database is built from manual data entry of lists I've searched for. The Internet Archive has been instrumental in finding archived magazines and websites. To input this into a large and probably poorly optimised .json file, I created a tool to record the games and basic publication information. It is probably held to together with glue at this stage but as a simple set of filters it seems to work alright! Full disclosure that the site and tools do involve liberal use of copilot input, but I've gone through every single publication and input every single entry.
My name is Ryan Cybreco. I work as a data analyst, and in my spare time I like to research, write about, and play old video games, particularly from the Windows 9x era of the 90s and early 00s. I love collecting old computers and consoles. This project came about as a result of compiling data on video game reviews to write Wikipedia articles on games. I found that there wasn't really a resource for rankings on "best of" lists on the internet in the same way aggregators store reviews on sites like Metacritic. I figured, if there isn't one, why not create one?
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