Four Developers, Twelve Games, No Consensus

You can’t settle the greatest-games debate—every attempt just generates better arguments, which is probably the point. But when Famitsu, Japan’s long-running games bible, asked four major developers for their all-time top threes, I found myself reading the answers more carefully than expected.

Daisuke Yamamoto, who made Puzzle & Dragons, went with Street Fighter II on Super Nintendo, Pokémon Red and Blue on Game Boy, and Tetris on Game Boy—a clean, unimpeachable list that tells you exactly which era formed him. Kaname Fujioka of Monster Hunter shares the Street Fighter II pick but otherwise goes deep into NES history with Mega Man and Castlevania: games about precision and punishment, which tracks if you’ve ever played anything Fujioka made.

Keiichiro Toyama—Siren, Gravity Rush—went full arcade: Space Harrier, Xevious, Virtua Fighter. There’s a coherent aesthetic in that list, something about immediacy and spatial feel, games that communicate everything through sensation rather than instruction. And then Yasumi Matsuno of Ogre Battle made the strangest and maybe most interesting selection: The Legend of Zelda on NES, Ultima Online on PC, Red Dead Redemption on 360 and PS3. Three decades, three completely different scales of world-building. I respect the range.

What strikes me is that none of them listed anything recent, and none of them listed the games they actually made. That’s either humility or honesty. I’m not sure there’s a difference.