I Analysed the GOTY Winners from the Past 40 Years and This is What I Discovered

Screenshot courtesy of Steam

I have a tradition whenever a friend or family member's birthday comes up I will create a birthday quiz for them. This could involve listening to bits of music and guessing where it comes from or it could involve answering pop trivia questions. A friend celebrated his 40th birthday recently and since he's also into video games, why not a multi-choice quiz that has him guessing what the Game of the Year (GOTY) was for each of those years?

The method I employed is by no means scientific. I just needed a list for a birthday quiz after all. I used Wikipedia's list of Game of the Year winners to tally up which game featured the most times. Obviously, some years (especially the earlier ones) had hardly any publications and that also meant there were no games that received multiple awards. For these, I just used my own knowledge (which obviously has its own biases) to pick the most famous game as Game of the Year. It wouldn't take long though before there were more publications meaning more Game of the Year awards and games that received multiple awards.

Of course, using a list from Wikipedia is also flawed since this doesn't account for every publication out there. Also, while Choicest Games is predominantly a PC gaming blog, many of these GOTY winners are console games although often these games have been eventually ported to PC so for the PC Master Race in the audience, it's not a totally pointless list!

Anyway, the final list I came up with to create my quiz is below. Considering I come from a PC gaming background, I was surprised that many games that were considered iconic on PC didn't even make the list. There's even one game on the list I've never heard of before. But I think a few trends can be gleaned from the list that can tell us a bit about video gaming history in general and what appealed to fans in the past four decades.

Year	Game	Genre	First released platform
1986	Gauntlet	Hack 'n' Slash	Arcade
1987	Out Run	Racing	Arcade
1988	Double Dragon	Beat 'em up	Arcade
1989	Tetris (Sega)	Puzzle	Arcade
1990	Final Fight	Beat 'em up	Arcade
1991	Sonic the Hedgehog	Platformer	Sega Megadrive
1992	Street Fighter II	Fighting	Arcade
1993	Samurai Shodown	Fighting	Arcade
1994	Donkey Kong Country	Platformer	SNES
1995	Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy Kong's Quest	Platformer	SNES
1996	Super Mario 64	Platformer	Nintendo 64
1997	Goldeneye 007	FPS	Nintendo 64
1998	The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time	Action-adventure	Nintendo 64
1999	Unreal Tournament	FPS	Windows
2000	Deus Ex	FPS	Windows
2001	Grand Theft Auto III	Action-adventure	Playstation 2
2002	Metroid Prime	Action-adventure	GameCube
2003	Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic	RPG	Xbox
2004	Half-Life 2	FPS	Windows
2005	Resident Evil 4	Survival Horror	GameCube
2006	The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess	Action-adventure	Wii
2007	Super Mario Galaxy	Platformer	Wii
2008	Grand Theft Auto IV	Action-adventure	Playstation 3/Xbox 360
2009	Uncharted 2: Among Thieves	Action-adventure	Playstation 3
2010	Red Dead Redemption	Action-adventure	Playstation 3/Xbox 360
2011	The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim	RPG	Multi-platform
2012	The Walking Dead	Adventure	Multi-platform
2013	The Last of Us	Action-adventure	Playstation 3
2014	Dragon Age: Inquisition	RPG	Multi-platform
2015	The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt	RPG	Multi-platform
2016	Overwatch	FPS	Multi-platform
2017	The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild	Action-adventure	Wii U/Switch
2018	God of War	Action-adventure	Playstation 4
2019	Outer Wilds	Action-adventure	Windows/Xbox One
2020	Hades	Roguelike	Windows/Switch
2021	Deathloop	FPS	Playstation 5/Windows
2022	Elden Ring	Soulslike	Multi-platform
2023	Baldur's Gate 3	RPG	Windows
2024	Astro Bot	Platformer	Playstation 5
2025	Clair Obscur: Expedition 33	RPG	Multi-platform

Arcades Dominated the 1980s

Game of the Year winners from 1986 to 1993 (with the exception of 1991's Sonic the Hedgehog) all started their lives as arcade games that were eventually ported to a variety of platforms. Arcade machines were more powerful than consoles and PCs, offering the most spectacular experience. Console and computer game developers wanted to emulate the arcade experience, developing clones or ports which needed cuts to graphics or audio quality.

Screenshot courtesy of MobyGames

While PCs received many arcade ports, text and graphic adventures were a popular genre on the PC, making use of the keyboard and mouse as input devices.

Beat 'em Ups were Popular in the Late 1980s and Early 1990s

Double Dragon was Game of the Year in 1988 and Final Fight in 1990: both are scrolling beat 'em up games where you can play with a mate as you go around bashing up thugs across multiple levels. This genre would prove to be very popular during the late 1980s and early 1990s and some of the games even allowed four people to play the game simultaneously. Other notable games during this period include 1989's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, 1991's The Simpsons, 1991's Streets of Rage and 1992's X-MEN.

Fighting Games Went Mainstream in the Early to Mid 1990s

Fighting games where you had one player fight another existed before the 90s. In fact, the original Street Fighter released in 1987 had this ability, although the game was mainly meant to be a single-player experience where you fought against computer-controlled opponents. Street Fighter II was Game of the Year in 1992 and it was around this time that fighting games started to become popular and a staple of the arcades (and eventually, home systems too). Mortal Kombat would release in 1992 along with Virtua Fighter in 1993 and Tekken in 1994. The Soulcalibur series would start a bit later with 1996's Soul Edge being the first entry in the franchise.

Nintendo Dominates

Despite many advancements occurring during the 1990s with PCs becoming popular gaming systems in their own right and the release of powerful competitors such as Sony's PlayStation in 1994, Nintendo still managed to dominate the Game of the Year Awards especially 1994 - 1998 with a five win streak on the SNES and Nintendo 64. It's also interesting to note that three of the games are platformers with back-to-back wins for the Donkey Kong Country series by Britain's Rare Studios and Nintendo's first 3D platformer, Super Mario 64 which took advantage of the Nintendo 64 controller's analog stick. Also entering the world of 3D was the Legend of Zelda series in 1998 with the release of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The Legend of Zelda series would feature another two times on different consoles: 2006's The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess on the Wii and 2017's The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on Nintendo Switch and Wii U.

Don't underestimate the power of nostalgia and family-friendly games! It has served Nintendo well over the years.

Screenshot courtesy of MobyGames

FPS were popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s

PC gamers are no stranger to the FPS genre and in fact were quite familiar with the genre since the early 1990s thanks to id Software's shareware titles Wolfenstein 3D in 1992 and DOOM in 1993. id continued to dominate the genre with the release of a fully 3D FPS in 1996 called Quake but it wouldn't be until 1997 that a console would not only receive a 3D FPS but one that featured on many publications as Game of the Year. I'm of course talking about Rare's Goldeneye 007 for Nintendo 64. Goldeneye 007 proved that you could have FPS titles on consoles and is the first time an FPS has made its way onto our GOTY list. Despite many more FPS games releasing to console over the years (such as Halo and Call of Duty) it would be PC FPS games that received Game of the Year awards such as 1999's Unreal Tournament (a highly regarded multiplayer title), 2000's Deus Ex (a hybrid FPS/RPG set in a cyberpunk future where conspiracy theories are real) and 2004's Half-Life 2 (which introduced the world to the Source Engine and a new digital distribution platform called Steam). It would be a long wait before an FPS game featured again as Game of the Year and it wasn't until 2016's hero shooter Overwatch that this would finally occur.

Where are the RTS games?

As a PC gamer, RTS games were pretty big in the mid to late 1990s. So one of the things I noticed about this list is the lack of RTS games. Looking back on the sources, the only major publication I found that actually awarded a Game of the Year award to an RTS was Gamespot back in 1997 (it went to Total Annihilation). Starcraft, Warcraft, Command & Conquer, Age of Empires and Company of Heroes, don't receive a mention. If you dig deeper though, despite RTS games being shunned for overall Game of the Year awards in major publications and award ceremonies, they often won Game of the Year awards for strategy publications or won Strategy Game of the Year awards instead. Also, since Game of the Year awards tend to cover all platforms, it's worth noting that the RTS genre never really took off on consoles and maybe that affected its ubiquity.

Action-Adventures for everyone!

Action-adventure is a rather vague term and it's a pretty large umbrella. If you're a gamer that grew up in the 80s and 90s, you probably think that an action-adventure is some sort of point 'n' click adventure mixed in with action sequences. However, the modern action-adventure didn't really become a thing until devs mastered the ability to make 3D adventure games containing action elements such as combat, jumping puzzles etc. and it was often played using a controller. The genre didn't enter the Game of the Year list until 1998 with The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time but the genre then dominated the Game of the Year winners for the rest of the 21st century with seven winners being classified as action-adventures so far. Franchises such as Grand Theft Auto, Uncharted, The Last of Us, God of War and Red Dead Redemption have all become famous and well respected, with some of them even being made into movies and TV shows. They also have made Rockstar Games, Naughty Dog and Santa Monica Studio juggernauts in the industry, employing thousands of developers collectively.

Screenshot courtesy of MobyGames

RPGs for the 21st Century

RPGs have been around forever on every single platform and it's mainly thanks to "Dungeons & Dragons" being a favourite of pioneer gaming devs. While some publications picked JRPGs as winners in the 80s and 90s, a western CRPG was yet to win a decent number of Game of the Year awards. This changed in 2003 when Bioware managed to successfully introduce console players on the Xbox to Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (it probably didn't hurt that it was in fact a "Star Wars" game too). Open world RPGs were popular in the 2010s with the likes of Skyrim, Dragon Age: Inquisition and The Witcher 3 all winning many Game of the Year awards. In more recent years, things have come full circle with Baldur's Gate 3, an actual "Dungeons & Dragons" CRPG, winning many Game of the Year awards for 2023.

Rise of the Indies

Finally we come to the most recent years and while indie development proliferated in the late 2000s thanks to digital storefronts like Steam, it wouldn't be until 2019 till indies started to receive widespread acclaim in terms of Game of the Year awards. After 2019's Outer Wilds, three years would feature indies winning a plethora of GOTY awards including the roguelike Hades in 2020, the aforementioned RPG Baldur's Gate 3 in 2023, and the RPG Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 in 2025.