SlangEditorial
The Game
The Game: A mind game everyone is playing; thinking about it means you just lost. Posting "I lost the game" made everyone else lose. Example: "I just lost the game"
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The Game: A mind game everyone is playing; thinking about it means you just lost. Posting "I lost the game" made everyone else lose. Example: "I just lost the game"
The Facebook game your aunt sent you requests for
FarmVille, launched by Zynga in June 2009, was the biggest game on Facebook in 2010 with tens of millions of daily players and more than 80 million monthly users at its peak. Its crops withered if...
The 99-cent game that defined the smartphone era
Released for iPhone in December 2009, Angry Birds became the best-selling paid app of 2010, arrived free on Android in October, and passed 50 million downloads across platforms by December. Its...
Always, I wanna be with you: the Flash game of 2010
Adult Swim's Robot Unicorn Attack, released in February 2010, was the Flash game of the year: a rainbow-trailing robot unicorn dashing through a pastel dreamscape to Erasure's Always. It was played...
Big in Latin America and Portugal
hi5 was one of the world's largest social networks in the mid-2000s, especially in Latin America, Portugal, Romania and Thailand. In 2010 it was pivoting toward social games and virtual gifts as...
Everything, by everyone: the Flash portal
Newgrounds was the original home of Flash games and animations, where amateur creators uploaded movies and games for the community to rate. In 2010 its Flash Portal still launched careers, and its...
Zynga's fastest-growing game ever, December 2010
CityVille launched on Facebook on 2 December 2010 and passed 20 million monthly users within two weeks, faster than any Facebook game before it. It was FarmVille with a city, and it showed that...
The trick-question Flash game every classroom knew
Splapp-me-do's The Impossible Quiz, from 2007, was still one of the most-played Flash games on school computers in 2010: 110 trick questions, three lives, and skips. It was the kind of small, cruel,...
An original one-button runner in the style of 2010 Flash games
Pixel Dash is this exhibit's own, original browser game, written for the time machine to show what playing a Flash game felt like in 2010: a fake preloader, a sponsor splash, a one-button runner and...
Scrabble by push notification
Words with Friends, from Newtoy, turned Scrabble into a slow, asynchronous game between phones, with dozens of matches running at once. It was huge on the iPhone in 2010, arrived on Android in 2011,...
From Newgrounds Flash game to indie hit
Super Meat Boy, released in October 2010 on Xbox Live Arcade and in November on Steam, grew out of a 2008 Newgrounds Flash game. Its brutal platforming and a million sales made Team Meat a symbol of...
One button, endless rooftops
Canabalt, made by Adam Saltsman in 2009 for a Flash game jam, invented the one-button endless runner: a man in a suit sprinting across rooftops as a city collapses. In 2010 it was on every...
Ragdoll physics and a level editor, born in 2010
Jim Bonacci's Happy Wheels, released in June 2010, was a gory ragdoll physics game with a level editor that let players share courses. It spread through Flash portals in 2010 and became a YouTube...
The Wii party game that outsold the critics' favourites
Just Dance 2, released in October 2010, was one of the best-selling games of the year despite lukewarm reviews, proving the Wii's audience wanted to dance in the living room. Alongside Rock Band 3...
A Java game sold from a one-man website, before it ruled the world
In 2010 Minecraft was an alpha you bought for about 10 euros from Markus "Notch" Persson's website and played in a Java window. Survival mode had arrived in 2009, Alpha began on 30 June 2010, and...
Rockstar's western, the game of the year for many
Red Dead Redemption, released on 18 May 2010, put Rockstar's open-world design in the dying American West. It won many game-of-the-year awards, its Undead Nightmare expansion in October became a cult...
Text-based crime, energy bars and a lawsuit
Mafia Wars was Zynga's text-heavy crime game where you did jobs, recruited friends into your mafia and waited for energy to refill. It had millions of daily players on Facebook and MySpace in 2010...
Swipe to slice, avoid the bombs
Halfbrick's Fruit Ninja, released in April 2010, made the touchscreen itself the game: swipe to slice flying fruit, avoid bombs. It was one of the top-selling iPhone apps of the year and later a...
$200 million on day one
Bungie's last Halo game launched on 14 September 2010 and made $200 million in its first 24 hours, the biggest entertainment launch of the year until Black Ops. Its multiplayer, Forge editor and...
Free games, and the school-computer favourite
Miniclip was where school computer labs went to play 8 Ball Pool, Club Penguin's ancestors and hundreds of other Flash games. In 2010 it claimed tens of millions of monthly players and was expanding...
The browser MMO played in the school library
RuneScape ran in a browser with Java, needed no download, and had millions of players in 2010. Its low-polygon world, skill grinding, Wilderness PvP and player-run economy made it the MMO for anyone...
One-minute matches and a weekly friends leaderboard
PopCap's Bejeweled Blitz turned the match-three classic into 60-second rounds with a leaderboard of your Facebook friends that reset every week. In 2010 it was one of the most-played games on...
Tilt to jump, on graph paper
Doodle Jump, released in 2009 by two brothers, was among the most-downloaded paid iPhone games of 2010, with its hand-drawn Doodler bouncing up endless platforms using the phone's tilt sensor. It was...
Monkeys, darts and the tower-defence craze
Ninja Kiwi's Bloons TD 4, released in late 2009, was one of the most-played Flash games of 2010 on Kongregate, Newgrounds and Ninja Kiwi's own site. Tower defence was the dominant Flash genre of the...
The horror game that made YouTube scream
Frictional Games' Amnesia, released in September 2010, gave players no weapons, only a lantern and a sanity meter. Its terror made it the perfect subject for webcam reaction videos, and it fuelled...
Draw a line, watch the sledder ride it
Line Rider, the 2006 Flash toy where you draw slopes for a tiny sledder, was still a school-computer staple in 2010, and elaborate Line Rider tracks synchronised to music were a YouTube genre of...
Away from keyboard; the gamer's brb.
afk: Away from keyboard; the gamer's brb. Example: "afk 5 min, pizza's here"
Flash games with achievements, bought by GameStop
Kongregate hosted thousands of free browser games with badges, chat rooms beside every game and a levelling system for players. GameStop bought it in July 2010, betting that browser games were the...
Playfish's cute pets, bought by EA
Pet Society, from Playfish, let you dress up a pet, decorate its house and visit friends' pets, and was one of the largest Facebook games of 2010. Electronic Arts had bought Playfish for about $300...
Feed Om Nom: a million sales in ten days
ZeptoLab's Cut the Rope launched in October 2010 and sold a million copies in ten days, one of the fastest-selling iPhone games to that point. Its physics puzzles and green monster Om Nom were, with...
Steam comes to the Mac, and sales that emptied wallets
Valve's Steam store launched on the Mac in May 2010 with Portal free for two weeks, and its holiday sales, with daily deals at 75 percent off, became a ritual. Steam had around 30 million accounts...
Nintendo's best-reviewed game of the decade
Super Mario Galaxy 2, released in May 2010 for the Wii, added Yoshi and even more inventive gravity-bending levels to its predecessor's formula. It was one of the highest-rated games of the year and...
A writer, a flashlight, and the dark
Remedy's Alan Wake, released in May 2010 for the Xbox 360, was a Twin Peaks-flavoured thriller about a novelist fighting shadows with a flashlight. It launched the same week as Red Dead Redemption...
Tower defence with peashooters, on every platform in 2010
PopCap's Plants vs. Zombies, released for PC in 2009, arrived on the iPhone in February 2010 (selling 300,000 copies in nine days), then the iPad, Xbox 360 and DS. Its lawn, its zombies and its...
Twelve years later, the sequel arrives
StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty was released on 27 July 2010 and sold three million copies in its first month. It relaunched competitive real-time strategy, Battle.net 2.0 and the esports scene, with...
12 million subscribers and Azeroth remade
World of Warcraft reached 12 million subscribers in October 2010, its all-time peak, and its third expansion, Cataclysm, sold 3.3 million copies in 24 hours when it launched on 7 December, a PC...
Hexes, one unit per tile, and one more turn
Civilization V, released in September 2010, moved the strategy series to hexagonal tiles and one-unit-per-tile combat, and became a Steam fixture for the next decade. It was one of the year's big PC...
The suicide mission
BioWare's Mass Effect 2, released on 26 January 2010, opened the year with one of its most acclaimed games: a squad-recruiting space opera whose final mission could kill your favourite characters...
Black-and-white, silent, and the summer's indie darling
Playdead's Limbo launched on Xbox Live Arcade in July 2010 as part of Microsoft's Summer of Arcade. Its monochrome silhouettes, giant spider and puzzle-platforming won dozens of awards and helped...
Johto remade, with a Pokéwalker pedometer in the box
The DS remakes of Pokémon Gold and Silver reached North America and Europe in March 2010, bundled with the Pokéwalker pedometer. They sold more than 12 million copies and were the Pokémon games of...
BioWare's acclaimed space opera opened the year's run of major game releases and went on to win many game-of-the-year awards.
Verified Supported Editorial Labels show how well each record is documented; open any result for its sources.
Adult Swim released the rainbow-trailing Flash runner set to Erasure's Always, which became the browser game of the year.
Rockstar's western became one of the year's most acclaimed games and a frequent game-of-the-year pick.
For Pac-Man's 30th anniversary Google replaced its logo with a playable version of the game, its first interactive doodle. It reportedly cost the world's workers millions of hours.
Bungie's final Halo game had the biggest entertainment launch of the year until Black Ops two months later.
Rovio released Angry Birds free with ads on Android; demand crashed the GetJar app store that hosted it, and the game passed 50 million total downloads by December.
CityVille reached 20 million monthly players within two weeks, the fastest-growing Facebook game yet.
Blizzard's third WoW expansion set a PC sales record weeks after the game hit 12 million subscribers.