The Last of Us Tops the 100 Greatest Games List: The Flaw Is in the Criteria, Not the Game

I did not sleep that night. Not because of a final, but because of a ranking.

Kinda Funny Games published a list of the 100 greatest games in history. The number one slot went to The Last of Us. I opened the comment section at 11:40 PM and read the first four lines. Line one: "You're joking." Line two: "Sekiro deserved it." Line three, in full capitals: "PART 2 IS BETTER THAN PART 1." Line four, the shortest and the heaviest: "Where are the criteria?"

Four lines, four kinds of reaction. Only one of them was a real question.

I sat there until three in the morning, cold coffee beside me, headphones still replaying an old match. Ten years of covering sports and esports rankings taught me one thing: when a ranking provokes fierce argument, the crowd is usually arguing about the wrong thing. They fight over who deserves it. The problem sits in the scorecard nobody is allowed to see.

The Last of Us finished first. I do not object to that result. I object to the way it was presented as a final verdict.

Three camps, and only one asking the right question

The list covers 100 titles, ranked from 100 up to 1, compiled by a Western games content outfit. The Last of Us — developed by Naughty Dog, released in 2026 on PlayStation 3 — took the top spot. Its sequel, The Last of Us Part II, arrived in 2026.

The first camp defends the result on historical grounds. To them, The Last of Us shifted the storytelling standard for an entire generation of cinematic games, extending the line from Uncharted and clearing the path for countless narrative-driven titles that followed. Greatness, in this reading, means influence.

The second camp attacks on systemic grounds: combat mechanics, level design, gameplay depth. They point at Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice — FromSoftware's title that won Game of the Year at The Game Awards 2026 — and ask a compact question: if greatness is measured by design craft, why is it not first?

The third camp, quieter, only asks about method. Where is the weighting table? Where are the published criteria? Who judged, over how many rounds, with which scores discarded?

Of the three, the third is the least loud and the most correct. The other two are arguing with two different rulers, and neither ruler appears in the document. One says "influence", the other says "mechanics". Those two can argue for a decade without needing a single new fact. That is the signature of a debate broken at the root, not a debate making progress.

The one thing not published is the one thing that decides

I read the article through several times. One detail made me stop longer than the rest: the piece itself records the question about evaluation criteria, then never answers it. It places the question on the table, looks at it briefly, and moves on to quoting both sides.

For an analyst, that is an alarming moment. When an organisation publishes a ranking without publishing its method, every conclusion drawn from that ranking is drawn from air. You cannot say "game X is greater than game Y" if X and Y were scored on two different sheets and you do not know which sheet carried more weight.

The core point: this ranking does not lack emotional data, it lacks division. Without weights, every position is an opinion formatted as a number.

In sport we have a crude but transparent standard: standings built on points, goal difference, head-to-head. You can argue about rules, referees, scheduling — you cannot argue that the team with more points sits above. Game rankings have no such mechanism. They have an editorial board and a belief.

The Last of Us did not get its greatest-of-all-time title by luck — it is a verdict on an industry too lazy to define its own criteria.

Safe and ambitious: a pair that cannot be separated

The most interesting part of the whole affair is not the number one slot. It is how the community weighed the two halves of The Last of Us against each other.

Part one is described as the safe choice: refined, steady, almost free of major flaws. Part two is described as a gamble: more ambitious, more experimental, and therefore more divisive. One is "perfection inside a proven frame". The other is "push the risk higher and accept the cost".

I did not sleep that night — The Last of Us taught me that what cannot be measured always carries a price.

This pair is the pair I meet every season in esports. One team wins with a verified style: map control, low error rate. Another dives into off-meta compositions and tempo shifts nobody predicted, and either wins by force or collapses by it. Audiences always reward the second team with praise, and always hand the trophy to the first.

That is why this argument never ends. It is not an argument about The Last of Us. It is the permanent argument between refinement and risk, and every generation of fans joins it under a new name.

A studio's lineage read as an industry's history

One detail matters more to me than the top spot, and it was almost entirely ignored.

The defence of first place is built on a lineage: Uncharted leads to The Last of Us, The Last of Us leads to the cinematic storytelling standard of the following decade. It sounds persuasive. Look at the structure, though: that is the history of one studio, retold as the history of an entire industry.

One studio doing one direction well for fifteen years does not prove that direction is the industry's main axis. It proves that studio did it well and was remembered. Those are different claims, and confusing them is the most common error in any heritage vote.

I have seen exactly this error in esports many times. One team dominates a period, history gets rewritten around that team, and three years later a new generation of fans believes the scene always revolved around that name. Collective memory compresses history into a straight line, and every straight line needs a start, a middle and an end. The problem is that the end is usually chosen by the writer, not by history.

In this list, that end point is Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, released in 2026. A brand-new work placed as the terminal point of the medium's entire history, in the same sentence as Pong. I am not saying it does not deserve attention. I am saying that placing a 2026 release at the end of a historical axis is a marker of recency bias, and recency bias is what makes any ranking age faster than the ranking itself.

The map of the canon writer

One more dimension the article does not raise, and I should be explicit that this is my background judgement rather than a fact from the source: rankings of this kind form what we call a canon — the set of works informally treated as the medium's most important. No body certifies a canon. Lists, critics and developer lineages build it together.

And canon, historically, tilts toward wherever the most critical voices sit. For games, that has been North America and Western Europe, where console is central and English is the default language of criticism.

This does not make the list wrong. It makes it a local document wearing a global label. When a Western outlet publishes "the 100 greatest games in history", it presents a regional critical consensus as universal truth. I have seen this pattern in football, in esports, and now in games criticism.

As a Korean working in Chengdu, writing for readers in China and Southeast Asia, I am more sensitive to this than I need to be. I have watched matches described as "the history of the discipline" when they were really the history of whichever region had better cameras.

The economics of anger

Now the part I consider the real core, and the least discussed.

The article opens with the controversy, then reveals the ranking. Inverting cause and effect like that is an editorial choice with an obvious purpose: build tension before delivering information. Readers enter in a defensive state, and a defensive state produces comments.

I am not saying this to scold. I say it because this is my trade and I know how it runs. A ranking with clear positions and blurry criteria is the cheapest and most effective content format a newsroom can produce. No interviews. No data. Just an order and a place to argue.

And here is the central paradox: the controversy is the product, not the by-product. The blurrier the criteria, the better the product sells.

If the board published a weighting table — say 40 percent historical influence, 30 percent mechanical depth, 20 percent storytelling quality, 10 percent popularity — the argument would narrow instantly. People would move to arguing about the weights, then about the sub-scores, then stop. Most would comment nothing. Engagement would halve. Nobody wants that, writer or reader.

That is why I do not buy the explanation "we forgot to publish the criteria". An organisation capable of ranking 100 titles is capable of writing four lines about weighting. The silence is a strategic choice, not an oversight.

Community evidence that is really anecdote counted by faith

One more point bothers me methodologically.

The article quotes "one gamer", "some gamers", "many people". No platform, no count, no time window. This is a common way to write and also the way that renders every claim about public sentiment worthless.

From my own experience tracking matches and community arguments, I know exactly what happens: the first three comments on a large forum can shape how an entire newsroom describes a "community" reaction. Those three comments may come from three accounts, in three time zones, with three different motives. Rewritten as "many players objected", they become data.

I have made this mistake and paid for it with a week of being called out by name. Since then I hold one rule: any sentence beginning with "the community is" must carry a sourced number, or it gets deleted.

Here, there is no number. So the real scale of the backlash could be larger than described, smaller than described, or barely existent outside a few organised fan groups. We do not know. And when we do not know, we are not allowed to write as if we do.

And here is where my own industry must look at itself

I write this with professional discomfort, because game rankings are repeating the exact play that esports has run for a decade.

We have "greatest player of all time" debates built on criteria nobody publishes. We have all-time lineup votes where voters are never asked to explain themselves. We have honours lists that look like data but are really the taste of an editorial group with similar preferences.

A ranking empty of method, and yet I see it more clearly than ever: our industry is slowly dying inside its own polls.

What stands out is that this same outlet maintains an esports section. The related headlines mention K/DA and the controversy over its new look, the LCK with a claim that viewership doubled after six seasons of franchising, GAM Esports named as a VCT Pacific 2027 partner, LOUD at VCT Champions 2026, the competitiveness of MLBB Vietnam, and a sponsor-named event, VISA VMC Fall 2026.

I have to be explicit: every one of those is a headline only. No figures, no sourcing, no measurement window, no baseline. To me they are a lead list requiring verification, never evidence. The LCK item especially: "doubled after six years of franchising" is a very strong claim, and without a baseline it could simply reflect a change in measurement platform or the inclusion of co-streaming. I will not use it until official numbers appear.

But the existence of that section is itself a real signal. General gaming outlets are absorbing esports as a standing vertical. That is good for the mainstreaming of the discipline. It is also a warning: when mass media enters, it brings its ranking habits. And ranking habits, as we have just seen, rarely arrive with the habit of publishing criteria.

Where I might be wrong

I have to interrogate myself on three points, because I do not want to become the man who doubts everything in order to sound sharp.

First, I am applying competitive logic to a non-competitive product. The Last of Us is a single-player title with no tournament, no competitive ladder, no season. Demanding it be judged by a transparent rubric like a championship may be a demand in the wrong place. Art criticism does not run on scorecards. If so, my error is dragging a cultural conversation into my own technical frame.

Second, I cannot measure the actual scale of the controversy. I criticised the article for using anecdote while holding no platform data to rebut it. I am in the position of saying "you have no numbers" while having none myself. That is an uncomfortable position, and I accept it.

Third, I may be undervaluing the cultural function of canon. A controversial list still does something data cannot: it makes people go back and play, go back and read, go back and argue about old works. If the purpose is to keep collective memory alive, then a methodologically perfect list might be a dead list.

A hot take is not a hasty judgement — it is how I read sport with the rationality of an outsider.

What I am betting on

I make a conditional prediction, with a clear time frame, exactly as I do before every tournament.

If within the next twelve months Kinda Funny Games publishes a weighting framework for its next ranking, the argument around the top spot will shrink by at least half, and the list will become citable for the first time. If they do not, the next ranking will be louder and less valuable than this one, and by the third edition nobody will remember what came first — only that there was a fight.

For my own industry, the bigger worry sits elsewhere. Esports is entering a phase where mainstream media starts writing about it in the language of honours. If we let others write our scoring rules, we will get beautiful lists, unverifiable, outliving a single season. Writing that handbook before someone writes it for us — that is our job, and it is worth more than any poll.