The Last of Us Tops the 100 Greatest Games List: The Argument Is About the Ruler, Not the Game

At three in the morning in Seoul, I read an article about a list of the 100 greatest games and got caught by a detail smaller than its headline. The piece spends its entire opening paragraph telling me the community is arguing fiercely. Only in the third paragraph does it bother to say who took first place.

That inversion is a technique. In a commentary booth, I learned that whoever describes the roar of the crowd before describing the play is guiding your emotions, not reporting the match. And across that long article, one thing never appears even once: the ruler. No criteria, no weighting, no method. Only a ranking, and a crowd described as angry.

I sat for another forty minutes after finishing it. Not because of the list. Because of the gap that had been filled with somebody else's voice.

One list, three camps, no ruler

The list was published by Kinda Funny Games: one hundred titles, ranked from bottom to top, with first place going to The Last of Us — developed by Naughty Dog, arriving after Uncharted within the same studio lineage. The article about that list, as retold, builds three distinct camps.

The first camp holds that The Last of Us deserves it, and their argument is historical: the game cannot be ignored when the industry's development is retold, because it set a storytelling standard an entire generation of developers had to confront. The second camp holds that The Last of Us Part II is the peak, because its play and combat systems were pushed further. The third camp, smaller but louder, drags other names into the fight — Sekiro and a few others — arguing that systemic depth is what makes greatness.

These three camps are not arguing with each other. They are speaking three different languages about the same object, and each believes the other is mishearing.

The article quotes anonymous players. "One player said…", "some gamers argue…", "many people feel…". No platform is named, no count, no timeframe. Midway through, a question is raised and abandoned: does this list evaluate by gameplay quality, by popularity, or by historical influence?

The piece closes on a gentle note: choosing the greatest game of all time has never been easy. Before that, it builds a timeline ladder — from primitive products like Pong to a very recent title, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 — as though the industry's history flowed straight into the present and stopped there.

That is the entire raw material. No sales, no completion rates, no player counts. Everything rests on a single axis: rank.

The hidden ruler, and why it is the breaking point

The article records the collision it never resolves: one side defends the pick on historical influence, the other attacks on systemic quality. Two different rulers applied to one ranking. When the organisers do not publish the rules, every dispute becomes a dispute about the rules — and nobody wins.

The absence of published criteria is the breaking point of every ranking, and it is almost always an editorial choice rather than an oversight. Once the measure is public, most of the argument dissolves on its own: people may disagree with the weighting, but they no longer have grounds to say you graded the wrong subject.

In six years sitting in the back rows of competition rooms, I have watched this mechanism repeat in a place where it costs far more: disciplinary rulings in esports. A penalty issued without a cited clause produces two weeks of argument, an online campaign, and a crack in trust that never fully closes. The same thing happens with this list, except the price is paid in credibility rather than by a team.

One detail caught my eye: the article never defends itself. It does not say "this is how we calculated it". It merely notes that people are questioning, then moves on. In my trade, that handling is called letting the match play itself out.

Canon is a geography, not a truth

The "from Pong to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33" ladder is where I lingered longest. A title released within the past year or two is placed as the endpoint of the industry's entire history. That is a marker of recency bias, and also a marker that whoever built the list is telling a story from where they stand.

The games canon is formed mainly by Western lists that privilege consoles and production value — and it is usually presented as though it were a universal voice. This is not technically wrong, but it is a geography mistaken for a truth. A title that sold enormously in Southeast Asia, a title that shaped an entire generation of internet cafés in Hanoi or Saigon, may not appear among those hundred names — and that absence is not a verdict, only a limit of the observer.

I think about this every time someone asks why Korean esports commentary differs so much from Vietnamese esports commentary. The same match, the same teamfight, but a Korean reader sees it through the lens of an industrialised scene, while a Vietnamese reader sees it through the memory of un-airconditioned internet cafés. Both are right. And both tend to believe they are speaking about truth.

This holds beyond game lists. It holds for every all-time greatest player ranking I have ever read. The people who write these lists are usually not deliberately biased. They simply cannot see the frame they are standing inside.

Safe versus ambitious — the most durable dichotomy in the piece

Across the whole article, the only thing that outlives the controversy is how it frames Part I against Part II: one is the safe, proven template; the other is the ambitious template that accepts risk. This is an analytical axis reusable for years, because it belongs to no single game.

In esports, that axis appears as the question every championship team must answer: do you win with what has been validated, or with what nobody has done? A safe meta gives you a foundation, a stable win rate, a playoff seed. An ambitious meta gives you a chance at the title and a chance at a group-stage exit.

In 2026 I followed DRX for three straight weeks from the play-in stage, only because of a scrim I happened to watch, where a young mid laner named Zeka handled difficult situations in a way I had never seen from someone with barely a single official interview to his name. The entire media corps had its eyes on T1 and JDG. DRX went all the way and Zeka took MVP. The lesson I drew was not "intuition beats data" — it was that the safe is always better documented than the ambitious, so the ambitious always looks like it lacks evidence.

That is exactly what happened to Part II in this argument. Part I's defenders have an entire historical lineage to cite — Uncharted, then The Last of Us, a straight line from one studio. Part II's defenders must argue from feel, from the tension of the combat systems, from things hard to compress into a tidy quote. Whichever side is easier to cite sounds more correct. This is the structural unfairness of every argument about greatness, and esports is not immune.

I have seen this in the LCK many times. A team that wins with a controlled, slow, low-variance style is called composed. A team that wins with an open, aggressive, error-tolerant style is called lucky — until they win a second time. History does not record the ambitious attempts that failed. It records only the ones that succeeded, and then calls them safe.

The economics of controversy

There is a telling commercial detail: the article publishes no methodology, but it publishes the ranking, and it publishes the controversy immediately. Those three things travel together for a reason.

A ranking without criteria is an engagement engine: it does not need to be right, it needs to be contested just enough that people comment. This is a low-cost, high-spread content model, and its value sits in the comment section rather than in the list. I am not saying this to sneer. I am saying it because it explains why the format recurs so reliably, in every market, including where everyone already knows the result will provoke.

There is a paradox here: precisely because the criteria are unpublished, this list cannot be used as data. It can only be used as editorial opinion. In my work, that is the most important boundary — between what can be cited and what can only be mentioned.

And that boundary has practical consequences. A list like this will never enter my broadcast as a data source. It enters as a media phenomenon — something to explain, not something to cite.

A thin signal leaking into esports

The only part of the article that touches esports is the block of related headlines at the end. A few lines: the LCK and a claim that viewership doubled after six years of franchising; GAM Esports appearing in the context of a VCT Pacific 2027 partnership; LOUD returning at VCT Champions 2026; Mobile Legends in Vietnam and its potential for global competitiveness; and a line about K/DA and controversy over a new look. There is even a sponsor-named item, VISA VMC Fall 2026.

I have to be explicit: these are headlines with no figures, no measurement window, no sourcing. They are leads requiring verification, not evidence. The LCK line in particular, if accurate, would be an important argument that franchising stabilised rather than eroded viewership — but it could equally be a platform-migration effect or an artefact of counting co-streaming channels. From a single headline, there is no way to distinguish the two.

What can be drawn from that headline block is not in the content but in the shape: a general games outlet is maintaining a standing esports vertical, and that is a benign signal for esports merging into the mainstream media current. When a newsroom that does not specialise in esports still feels it needs space for the LCK, VCT and Vietnamese Mobile Legends, it means their audience was already there first.

On GAM Esports appearing beside VCT Pacific 2027: if confirmed, it would be a milestone worth tracking — an organisation rooted in MOBA titles stepping into Riot's FPS circuit. That is a cross-title expansion signal in Southeast Asia, not a results item. I file it under watchlist, not under conclusion.

As for Vietnamese Mobile Legends, a headline about global potential says nothing about current strength. The real measure lies in regional events, in whether the team can hold a top-four place against Indonesian and Philippine representatives. A headline cannot substitute for a results table.

Esports GOAT debates have no ruler either

We like to pride ourselves that esports arguments are settled on the server. They are not. Match results are settled on the server. The question of who is the greatest is not.

When someone says Faker is the greatest player in history, they are using a ruler. When someone rebuts with the number of international titles, they are using another. When a third person speaks of cultural influence and the ability to shape how an entire generation plays, they are using a third. Three people speaking three languages, and none of them publishes their weighting.

The esports GOAT argument shares the same structural flaw as this list: people argue about the outcome while the disagreement sits in the criteria. And just like the article, whichever side has more easily citable facts — titles, win rates, finals appearances — usually wins the argument, regardless of whether their ruler is the right one.

An empty stadium still echoes with the applause of a generation it never met.

I wrote that line a few years ago, and I still use it whenever someone asks why I do not end arguments with a table of numbers. Because a table of numbers only answers the question people have already agreed on how to ask.

In 2026 I was one of the few reporters allowed into LoL Park in Seoul to cover a match in a completely empty arena. No cheering, no banners, only keyboards and quick breathing. After that match I did not write the usual meta analysis. I wrote about the loneliness of a winner with no one watching.

Ten years from now, when a viewer not yet born opens this list, they will not see the cheering. They will see a rank and a gap. And that gap will be the only thing they can read.

Checking the romanticisation

There is a far more attractive version of this story than the reality, and I want to say plainly that it once seduced me. That version says: the community is deeply split, the list ignited a war, and the greatness of The Last of Us is being called into question.

The article dismantles that version near its end, with a line I read over and over: even the dissenters concede that Part I is one of the most outstanding games in history. That is a large concession, and it collapses the whole "deep split" structure. The argument is far narrower: not whether the game is great, but what greatness should be measured by. An argument about the ruler always looks fiercer than an argument about the result, because it cannot end.

And I have to remind myself of something else: I have no right to narrate the feelings of the players in that article. They are anonymous voices, without count or platform. I can speak about the frame the article builds, not about what any of them actually felt.

There is a place where I find myself closer to this article than I would like to admit. In 2026, in my debut live broadcast at LCK Summer, I mispronounced a player's name three times in a row. The crowd murmured. Social media made memes within minutes. I stayed in the commentary room for four hours listening back to my own tape, then spent the following month rewatching matches from all ten teams just to learn how to say names correctly.

The lesson that year was not "be accurate". It was that one small error can make people doubt everything else. The same applies to that list. It may be right at number one, but without a public ruler the reader has every right to doubt the other ninety-nine places.

Faker's twelve seconds of silence taught me that failure is also a language.

In this case, that language is silence about method. It does not say the list is wrong. It says the list has not agreed to talk.

What remains after the argument cools

Arguments of this kind have a very short half-life. Next week brings another list, another headline, another crowd. But one thing is not swept away: the evaluative frame.

If a list gives first place to a cinematic action-adventure title from a first-party studio, it is telling the whole industry that production value and storytelling are the highest measure. That does not stop at one article. It seeps into how studios allocate budgets, how investors read risk, how a creative director defends an idea in a meeting.

I am a storyteller, not a judge. There are already enough referees.

But a storyteller carries a separate duty: to say where they are standing while telling. A list that does not publish its criteria is a storyteller hiding their position and pretending the story told itself.

What I take from this article is not an opinion about The Last of Us. It is a question for my own trade: if tomorrow someone asked me to rank the ten greatest players in esports history, would I publish the ruler first or the ranking first?

The trophy is not the destination; it is only the full stop on a long story that began in the dark. That long story only stands if the teller is willing to say what they are measuring with — before the audience of a generation not yet met turns this page and asks: on what grounds?