Once they were a vehicle for tech innovation, then everyone’s favorite storytelling medium. When we all got online, shooters were there to show us why that was exciting. Whenever the newspapers needed a moral panic, shooters were happy to provide one.
Perhaps more than any other genre, a list of the best shooters tells a story about the medium and what we wanted from it at the time. It’s shapeshifted into something athletes can devote their lives to and fill arenas through their talents, but it’s also been there to ask us uncomfortable questions about what we see on the news. At this point, its library is so rich that it can even parody itself from years past, and to great effect.
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That makes picking just 17 of them a hard task. So we didn’t – instead we built a vast learning AI, made it play every FPS released since the dawn of time, and provide us an empirical ranking of their quality.
Okay, that was a lie. Look, we just chose the best 17 shooters, ok? Get off our backs. That does mean just one game from each series though – otherwise you’d be about to read a lot of Quake and Half-Life entries.
