The house lines
The Lines
Every list and the bracket draw from the same field, and the field is set by three lines: the players, the data, and the critics. These are the opponents that need no listening — published standings you can check your own canon against.
Backloggd
The players' line
The community canon: the all-time standings of the players themselves, from Backloggd's ratings and published best-games lists.
backloggd.com →IGDB
The data line
The catalog backbone: IGDB's game data and community ratings. The catalog, the covers on this site, and one of the composite's two standings come from here.
igdb.com →OpenCritic
The critics' line
The modern-era critics line, 2015 onward: what published reviewers scored highest, through OpenCritic's review aggregate.
opencritic.com →Each line, ranked on its own
When the full catalog lands, each line gets its own ranked canon, and your lists score overlap against all three — so you can see whether your taste runs with the players, the data, or the critics.
The Panel
In December the Kinda Funny Gamescast prediction sheets join this side of the site: published sheets, seeded as they land, that your Game Awards ballot is scored against.
See the ballot →The starter canon
Today's field: 64 games, ranked on a composite of the Backloggd and IGDB all-time standings, cross-checked against the Video Game Canon meta-ranking of published best-games lists. It is the field the Best Video Game Ever bracket runs on, and the pool the first lists draw from. One entry per game: a full remake is the same entry as its original and carries the original's year. Nothing here is presented as more than the starter set it is.
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