Live ranking

The full ranking.

5,035 video games face off in duels and 368,051 duels have already been settled. The ranking is recomputed with every vote: filter by genre, decade, platform or period.

70 games Reset

  1. 1 Hotline Miami 2012 · Shoot 'em up 1,767
  2. 2 Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number 2015 · Shoot 'em up 1,696
  3. 3 Alien Swarm 2010 · Shoot 'em up 1,683
  4. 4 Metal Slug 4 2002 · Shoot 'em up 1,553
  5. 5 Zombies Ate My Neighbors 1993 · Shoot 'em up 1,547
  6. 6 Ikaruga 2001 · Shoot 'em up 1,545
  7. 7 SuperHot VR 2016 · Shoot 'em up 1,542
  8. 8 Until Dawn: Rush of Blood 2016 · Shoot 'em up 1,542
  9. 9 Commando 1985 · Shoot 'em up 1,514
  10. 10 Battle City 1985 · Shoot 'em up 1,509
  11. 11 Not a Hero 2015 · Shoot 'em up 1,509
  12. 12 Halo: Spartan Strike 2015 · Shoot 'em up 1,501
  13. 13 Nex Machina 2017 · Shoot 'em up 1,497
  14. 14 Super Animal Royale 2021 · Shoot 'em up 1,496
  15. 15 1942 1984 · Shoot 'em up 1,493
  16. 16 Contra Force 1992 · Shoot 'em up 1,493
  17. 17 Postal: Redux 2016 · Shoot 'em up 1,493
  18. 18 Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris 2014 · Shoot 'em up 1,491
  19. 19 Asteroids 1979 · Shoot 'em up 1,490
  20. 20 Gradius 1985 · Shoot 'em up 1,485
  21. 21 Touhou Koumakyou: The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil 2002 · Shoot 'em up 1,483
  22. 22 Touhou Eiyashou: Imperishable Night 2004 · Shoot 'em up 1,481
  23. 23 Combat 1977 · Shoot 'em up 1,480
  24. 24 Resogun 2013 · Shoot 'em up 1,474
  25. 25 Defender 1981 · Shoot 'em up 1,470

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FAQ

Questions about the ranking

How is this ranking established?

The ranking comes solely from player votes, in duels between two games. Each vote updates an ELO score, the rating system used in chess: every game starts at 1,500 points and its score moves duel after duel.

How often is the ranking updated?

Continuously: every duel voted immediately adjusts the score of the two games involved. The badge on the right shows how each game's rank moved over the past seven days.

How many games take part in the ranking?

5,035 games, selected for their fame, face off in duels. The full GameForever catalogue covers tens of thousands of titles, across every era and platform.

How can I see the best games by genre, decade or platform?

Use the filters at the top of the page: genre (RPG, FPS, platformer, strategy...), decade and platform (PC, PlayStation, Nintendo, Xbox, SEGA). Filters combine, and the selection is numbered from 1, from the highest ranked down; each game's world rank stays shown on its own entry. The period filter instead ranks on the points gained recently, from 7 days to 12 months (all time by default).

Why can an indie game finish ahead of a blockbuster?

The ELO score measures neither sales nor budget, but the preferences expressed in duels. An indie game that regularly wins its match-ups against higher-ranked titles climbs mechanically, owing nothing to its production budget.

What is the difference between the position in the list and the world rank?

The position is that of the selection on screen, numbered from 1 and carried on from page to page: filter on RPGs and the top RPG becomes number 1. The world rank depends on no filter and is shown on each game's own entry, along with its duel count and win rate.

Why rank by duels rather than by a score out of 10?

Absolute scores saturate: nearly every game that matters ends up between 7 and 9, and what is left of the gap often says more about a site's audience than about the games. A duel asks a question you cannot answer with "both", and it lets a 1994 game and a 2024 game be compared without correcting anything: they are not scored on two scales, they are set against each other.

Vote on a duel