Throwback BANGERS

Released 2015 or earlier, BANG 86 or higher, 189 games. I set that bar a point above the 85 I use for the 2020s list and it is still too low. Only 5,303 of the games I score came out in 2015 or before, and 189 of them clear 86. That is 3.6 percent. The modern list clears at 0.36 percent. Old games hit ten times as often.

That gap is survivorship, not quality. The 2012 games still on Steam with a live price and a review pile are the ones that made it, and everything forgettable from that era either left the store or never gathered enough reviews to score at all. Read this list as a filter time already ran.

The Room is 99.6 for 2.6 hours, 31,630 reviews. Hotline Miami is 98.1 across 5.2 hours and 126,808 reviews. Left 4 Dead 2 is a 2009 game still holding 97.1 with 1,050,532 reviews behind it. Plants vs. Zombies GOTY Edition is 97.3 over 8.2 hours, and it came out in 2009, which I refuse to think about.

There is no price clause in this cut at all. Cheap is a side effect: a decade old game is usually cheap by now, so the value term carries it. And 2015 is a round number I chose. A great 2016 game lands on the modern side of the site for no reason other than the line I drew.