Activision has told fans of Call of Duty’s DMZ that it intends to continue supporting the extraction mode despite it skipping the upcoming COD Next reveal event.

COD Next, set for this Thursday, October 5, will fully reveal Modern Warfare 3 and what’s next for Warzone 2.0, including its new map. But DMZ mode is not part of the show.

“Although DMZ won’t be showcased at COD Next this week, we’re excited to share that we will continue to support the DMZ Beta,” Activision said in an announcement shared this week. “Players will have continuing infiltration opportunities for Al Mazrah, Ashika Island, Vondel — as well as Building 21 and Koschei Complex.

“Thank you for your continued support and dedication to the Beta! We will share further updates closer to Season 01.”

DMZ launched last year as part of Warzone 2.0, and went down well with fans and critics. Its sandbox extraction gameplay riffed on the likes of Escape from Tarkov, and offered something a little different for Call of Duty. "It’s a really fun and refreshing change of pace between rounds of battle royale," we said in IGN's Warzone 2.0 review.

However, fans of DMZ have complained about a content drought this year, with some saying it lacks support compared to Modern Warfare’s traditional multiplayer and the battle royale. While this fresh statement from Activision is designed to reassure DMZ fans, it has in fact caused concern to grow. Activision’s mention of the DMZ “beta” has raised questions about its status, and whether or not DMZ will then launch proper.

This is as close we're going to get as an admission that the mode won't be getting any new content. Was fun whilst it lasted.

— Mr Fishy McFish - The Fish, So Far (@McfishMr) October 2, 2023

Cautiously optimistic but feel like “beta” and “support” are code for mothballing… would love to see DMZ have a bright future full of content and updates but just happy that it’s not getting unplugged 🫡

— He Is Zee (@_HeIsZee) October 2, 2023

Definitely need them to clarify what support means - this post could be interpreted as just “don’t worry, we aren’t taking the mode offline or removing maps”

— Chad (@ChadOfDuty) October 2, 2023

Glad I didn’t get attached to that game mode

— DrippyPlays (@DrippyPlays_) October 2, 2023

Now people can stop acting like it's just gonna be dropped

— Pr0digyZRX (@Pr0digyZRX) October 2, 2023

Will be interesting to see how long DMZ survives what with everyone playing the new game and all

— Aladdin (@JigsawsAladdin) October 2, 2023

Summing up the sentiment, redditor Gojiwars_Goji posted Activision’s statement to the DMZ subreddit with the thread title: “IT LIVES!”

Modern Warfare 3 is set to launch with an expansive Zombies mode (it’s the first time Zombies is in a Modern Warfare game), and fans suspect this may be the focus at the expense of DMZ.

On the multiplayer side, Modern Warfare 3 includes all 16 launch maps from the original Modern Warfare 2, and will see 12 new 6v6 maps come out post-launch. Activision will host an open beta across PlayStation, Xbox, and PC (PlayStation owners get first access). Those who pre-order gain access to the campaign up to a week before release.

Modern Warfare 3 launches on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X and S on November 10.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

In 1997, when Ultima Online first released, Tess (known online as “TessPhyreForge”) didn’t own a computer. She didn’t know anything about computers. But she was dating a guy at the time who was really, really into Ultima Online. “He made me a character and sat me down and said, ‘This is what you do.’ Then after two hours I was hooked, and I've been playing ever since.”

After her then-boyfriend got her hooked on Ultima Online, Tess eventually purchased her own computer. And then another computer so her son could play with her.

“When he turned 14, the area we lived at, we had a couple pool halls and stuff like that where the kids would go hang out,” Tess says. “But it was so bad an atmosphere for teenagers and drugs and stuff that I told him I would rather buy the $10 a month subscription to play the game if he kept his grades up, and went to school, and didn't give me a hard time…So we actually ended up playing as a family.”

Tess is 59, and for her and other older adults like her in the online community Old Timers Guild (OTG), gaming has become a lifelong hobby that’s connected them not just with family and romantic partners, but with friends all over the world. Tess joined OTG in 2007 with the release of Lord of the Rings Online, and has been with them ever since. She’s played World of Warcraft, Star Wars: Galaxies, Dark Age of Camelot, Atlas, and more Ultima. She’s made friends with people from Canada, the UK, and Japan. She’s currently a chapter leader for OTG’s Elder Scrolls: Online group, where she plays alongside hundreds of other OTG members several days a week. And many of them, she says, are fellow retirees.

“When I got injured at work, and I decided to retire for a few years, [video games] kept me sane, I guess,” she tells IGN. “I had something to do, because I just don't enjoy watching TV as much. There's a few shows I like, but I like interacting with people, so we get in our chat system. We use Discord and sit and just talk. Sometimes we talk about real life stuff, but we don't talk about religion or politics. That's one of our things that we don't talk about in our Discord with our members. You know, it's always about the game, and sometimes real life, about the grandkids or the kids, what they've achieved, what they're doing. Yeah, it's just a relaxing atmosphere.”

OTG was founded back in 2005, originally for the alpha test of Dungeons and Dragons Online. It saw a major surge in membership through the early ‘10s, branching out into multiple other MMOs and at one point boasting several thousand members across numerous different games. While not explicitly billed as a guild for senior adults, OTG has attracted perhaps a surprising number of members who are now in their 50s, 60s, and even older. Part of that is due to its billing as a guild for “older, mature” gamers with a minimum age limit of 25. Another reason might be due to its relatively laid-back atmosphere and strict “no drama” rule. And yet another reason could simply be due to its longevity as a guild: many members who joined as younger or middle-aged adults have stuck around, and are now approaching their senior years.

That’s certainly the case for Coharie, a 62-year-old member of OTG who joined the guild relatively early in its life cycle. Coharie’s first memories of playing video games involved sessions of Missile Command at a friend’s house when he was 18 years old, and then playing a flight simulator he had access to while in the Navy. He got hooked on MMOs when he returned from service and built a computer to play EverQuest with his whole family. He later moved to other MMOs such as Dark Age of Camelot, D&D Online, and joined OTG while playing Pirates of the Burning Sea.

“They're a pretty good size guild,” he says. “But it's just the laid-back-ness and the camaraderie of it and all that. And most of the people that I game with in World of Tanks in Wargaming are my age and stuff, but they won't put up with the drama and all that. That's the main thing is that and stuff. And I just like them. I've always been with them. Well, for this long.

“Some of them talk about their grandkids and stuff like that while we're playing. And a lot of times, if I'm in Wargaming, I'll do more talking than I'll do playing and stuff. I'm not the best player. I'm about probably average or maybe a little below average because I am older. Reflexes have gotten slower and stuff like that. I really don't care about stats. I just want to play.”

Reflection on Reflexes

There are, of course, some challenges to the OTG members working to keep up with video games as they age. One obvious example is Coharie’s aforementioned deterioration of twitch reflexes needed to play fast-paced games, such as online shooters. One OTG member who asked to go by “The Dude” told me this is something he’s struggled with recently, at the age of 54, but finds that older adults like him gravitate toward MMOs for this reason. “I think one of the nice things about MMOs is you can do it at your own speed, whatever speed is going to be,” he says. “And...I think as we get older, we really gravitate toward community, and MMOs are a great way to have that.”

Coharie, too, recognizes the motor struggles at play - but believes games can actually help keep reflexes sharp with age. “They've done a study that people my age and older that are still playing online games or games period, they tend to ward off the effects of Alzheimer's and lose the motor function in their hands and stuff. The coordination stays intact longer. And I work in a healthcare facility, and one of the residents there, she actually plays Final Fantasy [14]. She's in her mid-70s, playing Final Fantasy. She's played every scenario I don't know how many times. But she plays it, and it keeps her motor skills going and her mind sharp.”

Tess notes that another issue many members struggle with is the technology involved in gaming, especially with regards to PC upkeep. Many older OTG members will install a game they want to play, but if their computer can’t run it right away, they’ll give up rather than try to figure out what the problem is. What’s more, increasingly expensive graphics cards and other parts can be prohibited for seniors on more limited incomes.

Other technological struggles have impacted OTG as a guild, rather than just individuals. One 61-year-old OTG member who goes by Mosselyn tells me that for years, OTG used voice chat software Mumble, as well as a forum, for communication. Recently, though, the group moved to Discord, and while the move was technologically a successful one, a lot of members “just didn’t make that transition.”

“They found it hard to understand,” she says. “We tried really hard to offer help and encouragement to people to help them learn to use it, and it's just the traffic on the website fell off quite sharply after we did that. It's very unfortunate. I think it hurt us from a community perspective. The Discord, it's reasonably populated. It's the same thing. It's the same community of people who are comfortable with voice and who were able to make a transition to something new.”

That doesn’t mean OTG is dying by any stretch, though - it still has significant communities in games like World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy 14, Elder Scrolls Online, New World, and others. There are also plenty of members who use the guild channels to chat about games they’re playing on their own, such as Baldur’s Gate 3 or Starfield. And it helps, Mosselyn tells me, that OTG has a very generous community that’s willing to stretch itself to accommodate all skill levels or life situations.

“We have a super casual, anybody can come, open rating group in our WoW Alliance chapter. God bless her, the woman that runs that raid has been doing it for several years, and it's very much like cat herding,” she says.” I don't know how she hasn't pulled out every one of her hairs and just told us all to, excuse my French, f*** off, because we have a really wide skill range, especially, and a lot of that is age-related. You get folks with disabilities, but also you just get the 70-year-old lady who does not game like the 25-year-old kid.”

Both Mosselyn and Tess point to the example of a guild member named Trustee, a 93-year-old man who just recently bought a new gaming PC for Starfield.

“He is the sweetest guy,” Tess tells me. “Now, I remember one event that I had come to him, and I did this raid every Sunday. I said, ‘We can really use a good healer,’ because he likes to play a healer class. He goes, ‘Oh, I don't play on Sundays. That's the Lord's Day.’ He didn't play on Sundays, so we had to change the raid date for him so he could join.”

Retiring Into Gaming

Over the years, older OTG members like Tess and Mosselyn have observed a shift in attitudes about video games. Most of the members I spoke to recalled their gaming hobbies being rather niche in their schools and workplaces when they were younger - part of the reason why OTG has meant so much to them. But in recent years, they’re finding more and more people in their “real lives” who are gaming right along with them. Mosselyn tells me that while she worked in software most of her life, “grownups don’t do that” was largely the attitude toward gaming at her workplaces and within her family. But in the last decade, more young people who grew up with games have come into her workplace. “I don’t feel quite like such a weirdo anymore,” she says.

Tess is in a similar boat. She says she lives in a small community without many activities for adults or kids, so she encourages her five grandkids to play games to keep them out of trouble, and plays with them. And she’s even softened her own mother on the subject.

“Years ago, [other adults] always thought [gaming] was childish,” she says. “When I was going through a divorce, I had moved in with my parents for about a month. [My mom] goes, ‘Oh, you're addicted to that game.’ I was playing Ultima Online. I thought it was kind of funny. At that time, she had a Gateway 2000, which was a large monitor computer, and you could use it as a TV. She would run her soap in the background, listen to it, but play FreeCell. I said, ‘That's a video game. You're sitting there playing that card game, and then I'm sitting here interacting with people, and talking to people, and we learn things from each other as we're discussing different things…Every time I go in through the house, you're always on that computer playing that card game. Is it any different?’ She goes, ‘Well, I guess not.’”

Coharie, meanwhile, wants to share some advice to younger gamers who might be inclined to take things a little too seriously. “It’s for enjoyment,” he says. “Younger ones look at it as a job. And if they lose and if they die in the game, they feel like they shouldn't ever die. Then they get mad and stuff. But that's part of the game. If you don't take risks, how do you know if you can do it or not?”

He tells me about his experience in LOTR Online, which he plays every weekend with his wife. He has three characters at max level now, and she has two; they play by making new characters and leveling up through the campaign over and over again. “And what we do, we don't get in a hurry. We actually explore. We actually move around. And we actually try dungeons we know we can't win, and we go in them anyway and try them…Most of the time, we get our butts handed to us in a bad way.”

Mosselyn, too, wants to encourage adults to keep playing games as they get older, or even try them for the first time if they’ve historically avoided them. She says she tried for years to get her mother to play with her, but was rebuffed repeatedly because the games were too “complicated.” But then, she remembers, she was home for Christmas years ago shortly after her dad passed away. On the night before Mosselyn was supposed to go home, her then-76-year-old mother asked her to show her how to play an MMO. And something clicked.

“At 76, my mother started playing MMOs,” she says. “She was horrible at them, but she enjoyed it very much. We played together every Sunday until she passed away. She died a few years later when she was 81, but yeah, we used to play for about three hours every Sunday. We played various things. We played WoW. We played Guild Wars, we played Lord of the Rings and she loved it. She was really, really bad at it. I could be standing right in front of her and she'd be going, ‘Where are you?’ I'm like, ‘I'm right here, Ma.’ She enjoyed it. It was a good time killer for her. I think she was really bored after my dad died. You’re never too old.

“I think it's good for all of us that there's older people playing games and younger people playing games,” she adds. “I'm retired and I'm living my dream. I can game for hours every day.”

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

A Final Fantasy 14 player has become the first to unlock all 2,751 Achievements, more than a decade after the game launched.

As reported by Games Radar, a Reddit post from PrismaticParrot revealed a Japanese user in the Garuda server is now the one and only Final Fantasy 14 player to have every single Achievement unlocked. The post showed data obtained through Achievement tracking website Lalachievements, which confirmed the feat.

The massively multiplayer online role-playing game has a notorious Achievement list, and not just because it's over a decade old with humungous expansions released regularly, but because some individual Achievements require hundreds of hours of gameplay.

To unlock them all requires players not just complete the ever-growing story, finish all side quests, and obtain all collectibles like most games, but players must also undergo the laborious tasks of five ultimate raids, thousands of dungeons and hunts, engage in PvP with several different classes, and more.

The committed player won't be able to rest for long, however, as Final Fantasy 14 is due to receive the Dawntrail expansion in summer 2024. The update will bring a major graphical overhaul alongside a wealth of new story content.

In our 9/10 review of the latest major expansion, IGN said: "Final Fantasy 14's Endwalker expansion brings its longest story arc to a satisfying close and cements its place as one of the best Final Fantasy stories ever told."

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.

Just because I know that headline will have some of you primed to start typing in the Comments section, know that this column isn’t about Xbox exclusives. Those, as we all know by now, are still dripping out of the Xbox Game Studios spigot rather than flowing. But the back-pressure is rising, and I’m sure I’ll write more about what’s next in a future column. For today, I want to focus simply on games being released for the Xbox Series X and S right now, this Fall, whether they’re exclusive or not. Most of them aren’t, certainly, but it doesn’t make the following statement any less true: we are in the single biggest 90-day stretch of game releases since Xbox 360’s historic Fall 2007.

That legendary run, culminating in the second anniversary of the Xbox 360 on November 22, included an insane smorgasbord of games that were exclusives: Halo 3, BioShock, Mass Effect, The Orange Box, and Project Gotham Racing 4. Throw in the multiplatform releases of Rock Band, Assassin’s Creed, and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and, quite honestly, I’m not sure if we’ll ever top that. But Fall 2023, aka Right Now, is sure doing its damndest to try! Take a look at what’s come out recently and what’s still on the way in the next couple of months:

• Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon
• Sea of Stars
• Starfield
• Lies of P
• Mortal Kombat 1
• Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty
• Cocoon
• Assassin’s Creed Mirage
• Forza Motorsport
• Sonic Superstars
• Metal Gear Solid Master Collection Vol. 1
• Ghostrunner 2
• Alan Wake 2
• Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

That’s 15 big games in the span of about 12-13 weeks. There are more of course, but I’ve particularly chosen the higher-profile releases, with the exceptions of Cocoon – which is from a gameplay designer who worked on Limbo and Inside and just got a glowing review on IGN – as well as Sea of Stars, which has already been released to excellent reviews. Plus, Baldur’s Gate 3 is due out on Xbox Series X and S by the end of the year. And if only they came out at a pace of about one a week, as that averages out to! But alas, groups of them are clustered together, making it even trickier to find time to play them all as they each have their water-cooler moment. On the plus side, at least Sea of Stars, Starfield, Lies of P, Forza Motorsport, and Like a Dragon Gaiden either already launched or will be launching directly onto Xbox Game Pass on day one, making your potential financial outlay a bit less intense (or, perhaps more likely, allowing you to get more of these games this Fall).

By this point in previous years, we’d typically see developers and publishers who’ve realized that their game isn’t going to be ready to ship during the Fall season push out into January, February, or Spring of the following year. But that’s hardly happened this year. Everyone is simply releasing their game, and we are getting an El Niño-like storm of big-deal blockbusters. Are any of us complaining? Heck no! But it sure would be nice to have an extra 12 hours in the day to play them all. Still, it sure beats last year. Remember how dry that was? Conversely, I think we’re going to look back on Fall 2023 with the same fond memories we have about Fall 2007. Let’s enjoy the moment, shall we?

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN's executive editor of previews and host of both IGN's weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He's a North Jersey guy, so it's "Taylor ham," not "pork roll." Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.

How do you break down what makes the ideal television show? It’s not easy, given the fact that each person has their own individual taste, but IGN did our best when it came to outlining our criteria for our 2023 revamp of our top TV shows of all time.

The show must have finished its run or been on the air for at least 10 years and had a significant impact on television as a whole — because how many shows make it to 10 seasons these days? While this does exclude some of our currently running faves like The Last of Us, The Boys, Squid Game and more, those shows haven’t completed their stories yet. Don’t worry — we’ll likely see them eligible by the next time we refresh this list!

Voters were asked to consider the following: How influential was the show? How well has it aged? Did the show have ongoing cultural significance? And, obviously, we considered best vs. favorite. (Just because you love Love Is Blind, that doesn’t mean it’s one of the greatest TV shows ever made. Sorry, those are just the rules!)

And, obviously, the voters all must have spent a considerable hunk of their lives watching what some would describe as “too much TV.” Our voting pool was made up of entertainment-centric staffers as well as critics from across the industry. You can check out our full list of voters and learn more about our criteria, too!

You can flip through our slideshow below to see our choices or scroll down the page to read why each entry is worthy of its spot on our list. If you want to jump to a certain section, feel free to do so by clicking the index below. Once you've finished, all that's left to do is let us know how we did and how it compares to your list...

Oh, and be sure to look out for our Top 100 TV Shows of All Time Face-Off tomorrow, September 26, so you can help decide what the best shows are!

100. Happy Days

After making box office magic with George Lucas in the similarly themed classic American Graffiti, Ron Howard was cast as Richie in Happy Days. Taking a jump into a highly idealized version of 1950s Milwaukee, Happy Days sold audiences by being pretty much just what the title says it is. Along with Potsie, Ralph, and cool guy Fonzie, Richie and his friends have mostly low-stakes teenage hijinks. The nostalgic vibe of the show hit a chord with TV fans, and the series ultimately ran for eleven seasons, spawning multiple spin-offs including the great Laverne & Shirley and Mork & Mindy. Yet, the most important thing about Happy Days was always the incredible cast that brought it to life. Gifting the world with now-major Hollywood players like Ron Howard and Henry Winkler, Happy Days is still an undefeated champion of the wholesome sitcom gag.

99. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

Jon Stewart was a comedian and MTV show host for years before striking gold with The Daily Show after prior host Craig Kilborn moved on. It’s safe to say that this is the work for which Stewart is best known today, considering that his political involvement has only continued with his 2015 departure. Though proceeding host Trevor Noah has now had his own iconic run, Stewart was in the chair through many of the current century’s most infamous historical events. Finding a way to make the audience laugh at the U.S.’s convoluted political system while wresting with regularly shocking news items, The Daily Show became a major source for topical discussions. Creating political humor that holds up years down the line is no small feat, but Stewart’s run on The Daily Show makes it look effortless.

98. The Dick Van Dyke Show

Carl Reiner’s much-loved family sitcom may not have had the most realistic marriage on TV (its central couple was one inspiration behind Wandavision’s black-and-white meta-series, twin beds and all), but it certainly had one of the funniest. Comedy legends Mary Tyler Moore and Dick Van Dyke starred as snazzy metropolitan couple Rob and Laura Petrie, who raised their young son Ritchie (Larry Matthews) while juggling the duties of their home and work lives – hers and his, respectively. While the show’s polished veneer and mostly traditional gender roles make it feel like the antithesis of shaggier sitcoms that would debut just a few years later, The Dick Van Dyke Show is often surprisingly modern – and downright uproarious – in its comedy. Van Dyke is a master of physical comedy, but Moore is the show’s secret weapon, performing her role as an often-overwrought wife and mom with charisma and perfectly honed silliness.

97. NYPD Blue

Gritty police procedurals are old hat by now, but NYPD Blue helped establish a formula that many have followed but few have surpassed. Delving into the frustrating bureaucracy of the American judicial system and moral failings of the police entrusted with finding justice for victims of violent crime, NYPD Blue went several steps over the preestablished line when it came to depictions of an unethical system. Zooming in on the severely bigoted detective Sipowicz and his conflicted partner John Kelly, this was a masterclass in taking unlikeable protagonists and dissecting their characters, much the same as dramas like The Sopranos would perfect years down the line. Striving for realism, NYPD Blue never balked at the sheer unpleasantness of its subject matter, instilling a morally ambiguous tone that its still effective today.

96. I May Destroy You

I May Destroy You is a staggering example of turning pain into something beautiful. It may not have started as the focus for creator and star Michaela Coel’s next project, but it became a clear choice while processing her own personal experience of being drugged and sexually assaulted while writing her prior series, Chewing Gum. As a rising millennial writer actively denying her assault, Coel’s Arabella is also juggling deadlines, promoting her profile, cultivating her own friendships, and maintaining a long-distance relationship. It’s a tough subject to write comedy around, but Coel captures the complex process of processing and rebuilding one’s life with harsh truths and denial but with total grace. The show emphasizes that the conversation around rape is complicated and should be ever-constant.

95. Living Single

Khadijah is a magazine editor living with her comparatively naive cousin Synclaire and friends Regine and Max, while on the other side of the brownstone apartments, we have bachelors Kyle and Obie. These twenty-something singles navigate their career and social lives, but of course, it’s the glorious hilarity of their dating misadventures that makes the show work. Living Single provided a take on life in the city that merged real world problems with over-the-top sit-com antics. With an unforgettable theme song by series mainstay Queen Latifah, it’s defined today not just by its now-iconic humor and characters, but also by a killer soundtrack. Airing throughout the middle '90s, Living Single can easily be viewed as a precursor to similarly formatted sitcoms like Friends. Yet, it’s best viewed on its own merits as an vastly underrated comedy gem featuring some of the most beloved characters to ever grace the small screen.

94. The Prisoner

The term “prestige television” didn’t exist back in 1968, but if it did, it certainly would have been used to describe The Prisoner. The series served as star Patrick McGoohan’s follow-up to Danger Man. But far from being another straightforward espionage drama, The Prisoner is a surrealist and heavily allegorical look at one ex-spy’s ill-fated attempt at retiring. Trapped in a bizarre coastal village and slapped with the moniker Number Six, McGoohan’s character struggles to make sense of his surroundings and his strange plight. The series may have only lasted 17 episodes, but it was and still is hugely influential in the TV realm. It paved the way for everything from Twin Peaks to Lost.

93. Pushing Daisies

Forensic detective shows and fairy tale homages are both well-tread ground, but only one show springs to mind that was able to combine the best of these two seemingly unrelated genres. Pushing Daisies follows the story of Ned, a baker that can reanimate the dead through physical contact. Naturally, this isn’t without its drawbacks, and nothing he brings back can live without causing deaths nearby. Also unsurprisingly, this dubious gift is quickly enlisted by a detective seeking to solve murder cases by interrogating the recently deceased. When Ned sees that his lost love Chuck has been murdered, he’s unable to let her rest, which provides the set-up for one of TV’s most delightfully strange offerings. Drenched in purposefully over-saturated colors, hopeful but haunted, funny but bleak, it’s no wonder that we continue to see this at the top of lists mourning shows that were “gone too soon.”

92. Mystery Science Theater 3000

This quirky, low-budget riff-fest rustled up an entire story about a janitor being sent into space with two robots so that mad scientists could force them to watch old B-movies as, more or less, a complicated excuse to sit around and make fun of silly sci-fi. MST3K fans know, however, that this series changed how we interact with movies. Not just “bad” movies. Not just “so bad they’re good” movies. But ALL movies. What began as a humble Minneapolis broadcast grew, thanks to fans sharing via VHS tapes, into a cult cable classic featuring a group of inventive comedians who figured out a way to create a shared viewing experience at home long before social media. Whether it was host/creator Joel Hodgson or head writer/successor Mike Nelson as the Mads' unfortunate lab rat, it was always quality laughs, and even today the format still thrives.

91. Alfred Hitchcock Presents

Predating The Twilight Zone by four years, the Master of Suspense brought this nightmarish anthology show to terrified viewers in 1955. While Hitchcock only directed 18 episodes of the series which would run for a decade, he was heavily involved in its production, including his famously dry introductions for the spooky stories. HItchcock wasn't the only famous filmmaker to work on the atmospheric anthology as names as eclectic and impressive as Robert Altman, Ida Lupino, and William Friedkin also directed episodes. This is a true joy for fans of crime cinema and genre television as each of the noir-hued episodes play with our expectations and deliver shocking twists that are still entertaining and engaging to this day.

90. Dexter

Putting aside the later, weaker seasons — and how it originally all ended before Dexter: New Blood (which wasn’t fully the writers’ fault) — Showtime’s Dexter was crazed pulpy awesomeness when it was firing on all cylinders. Told through the blood-craving eyes of a serial killer who’d been trained to eliminate other serial killers, Dexter is on the Mount Rushmore of white male anti-hero TV. Not a mobster or a drug kingpin, Michael C. Hall’s Dexter Morgan was an honest-to-badness murderer hiding within the Miami police department, using his forensics expertise to evade his colleagues so that he could fulfill the desires of his “Dark Passenger.” With amazing guest stars as “Big Bads” and an unrivaled gallows humor, Dexter was a cosplay-ready phenomenon that allowed us to safely root for a (TV safe) demon walking among us. A vividly macabre must-watch.

89. Ted Lasso

Ted Lasso was a series that came into our lives exactly when we needed it. Premiering in August of 2020 — before the world had vaccines for the global pandemic we had found ourselves trapped in — the show served as a balm for viewers seeking one single ounce of serotonin. It was a beacon of hope for the hopeless, centered around Jason Sudeikis’ endlessly positive Ted and his delightful fish-out-of-water story as an American football coach who made his way to the UK to coach, well, the other football. Every cast member shines in this layered, complicated, beautiful story of joy, loss, biscuits, and an understanding of just how awful tea is.

88. Justified

Elmore Leonard’s special brand of character-driven crime stories have been Hollywood fuel for six decades now - from Mr. Majestyk to Jackie Brown to Out of Sight - but Justified delivered Leonard’s dialogue-focused “smart dumb people” tone to TV for an impeccable, incredible modern Western that crackled with wit and wickedness. Timothy Olyphant’s Raylan Givens, a Deputy Marshall filled with both rage and wisdom, was the perfect amount of righteous and reckless and his cat-and-mouse arc with charming crook Boyd Crowder (a divine Walton Goggins) made for an exceptional dramatic dance. EP/Showrunner Graham Yost was dead set on getting the “Leonard”-ness of the series right, having initially adapted a short story, “Fire in the Hole,” as the series set up. What followed — even in Dave Andron and Michael Dinner’s new season, Justified: City Primeval — was a shaggy, cool, authentic Neo-Noir that rebelled against cliches and archetypes.

87. Roseanne

The sitcom was a well-worn format by the time Roseanne rolled around, but there was something different about the Conner family when the show debuted. Most network TV families were so polite and polished and, basically, well-off, but not on Roseanne. This was a family of working-class stiffs who were barely scraping by (even Archie Bunker didn’t seem to have money problems), they were often dealing with heavy topics, and Roseanne was abrasive and rude. But also, funny as hell? The family and their friends, despite all their problems, very quickly became beloved fixtures of the TV landscape. The show would go wackadoodle when Roseanne won the lottery in its final season, and it would be revived 21 years later, only for its star to get herself fired (and her character killed off) due to racist Twitter comments. But the Conner family lived on, just as they would’ve in real life, in a sequel/spinoff series that is still going as of this writing.

86. Frasier

One of the best examples of a spin-off that is so different from the original show you'd never guess that it was actually connected at all, Frasier Crane (Kelsey Grammer) began life as a recurring character on Cheers (another of our Top 100) before getting his own show in 1993. This delightfully droll and funny series centers around the titular radio host and psychotherapist as he navigates his life in Seattle. Though the central character is far from likable, the writing is hilarious and the supporting cast -- including his brother Niles (David Hyde Pierce), father Martin (John Mahoney), housekeeper Daphne (Jane Leeves), and legendary dog Eddie (Moose) -- make this an unendingly charming watch. When it comes to '90s sitcoms you need to rewatch or try for the first time, the searing heroes of Frasier should absolutely be on your list.

85. The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson

The talk show as a format is as necessary to the fabric of TV as anything else, and nobody elevated it quite like Johnny Carson. It was as likely for him to be aloof and cool playing along with a bit, as it was losing his mind to something funny. He was serious when he needed to be and just as happy to wear an enormous, shiny turban to get laughs and the move from New York to LA brought an insanely casual dynamic with Hollywood's biggest stars. He also represents one of the last times everybody in America watched the same thing. The Late Night Wars that raged in the wake of Carson’s retirement sent everybody to one side or the other, leaving Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show a truly special place in television history.

84. The Larry Sanders Show

Long before Garry Shandling was a Hydra sleeper agent, he was a sitcom writer turned stand-up turned sitcom creator and one of the funniest people ever to walk the earth. With The Larry Sanders Show he created a ruthless satire, taking down the world of TV from behind the scenes. Shandling led the hilarious cast as the host of a late night talk show featuring a non-stop stream of celebrity guests who couldn’t wait to be in on the joke. (Right up to the final episode when Tom Petty and Clint Back got into a fight that Greg Kinnear had to break up.) It also aired on HBO in the early '90s and undoubtedly influenced the comedy wing of the prestige TV era. Other shows on this list owe Larry Sanders a debt of gratitude for blazing a truly original trail during the beginnings of the Prestige TV era.

83. My So-Called Life

If it’s the 90s and you’re a teenager, guess what, you’re watching My So-Called Life. Though it ran only for a nineteen-episode season, this is a show that lived on in the re-runs. Taking the teenage Angela as its main character, this is widely considered to be the first dramatic TV series aimed at teens that worked to meet them on their level. Angela’s “teen crush” on the aloof Jordan is never minimized, nor are her concerns about her parents’ marriage. Major arcs introduced the world to primetime’s first queer character through Angela’s friend Ricky, as well as exploring the complexities of friendship between teen girls with problematic bestie Rayanne. Coming-out stories, teen love, troubles at home, drug use, and homelessness are all tackled in this short series. While many bemoan its short run, this is a show with a lengthy so-called shelf life, still impactful when watched nearly three decades later.

82. The Wonder Years

According to Kevin Arnold, “When you’re a little kid, you’re a bit of everything. Scientist, Philosopher, Artist.” Bittersweet, then, that so much of The Wonder Years is about leaving those days behind in exchange for the responsibilities of adulthood. With each episode ostensibly taking place exactly twenty years before the date on which it aired, The Wonder Years is both an upbeat coming-of-age comedy and a heartrending exploration of getting older. With best friend Paul and love interest Winnie along for the ride, Kevin guides us through the historical events and day-to-day life of an adolescent boy, ages 12-17, growing up in the 1960s. Told to us by the 1980s adult version of Kevin, The Wonder Years struck a perfect note between reminiscence and modernity. By the end of the show, Kevin has left childhood behind, but the narrator’s nostalgic musings assure us that he hasn’t forgotten any of it.

81. Survivor

The U.S. version of this international reality competition series franchise sees two “tribes” of competitors taken to an exotic, remote location where each player must fend for themselves, live off the land, and navigate the internal politics and schemes of their competitors. Since debuting on CBS in 2000, viewers have remained engaged in watching its “heroes” and “villains” connive against each other, forging and breaking alliances in beautiful far-flung locations like Brazil, Australia, Kenya, or Fiji all to be the sole survivor to win the grand prize.

80. Batman (1966)

While it has for decades been the campy butt of many-a DC joke, it's hard to overstate just how influential the '60s Batman series has been on the superhero landscape. Not only was the show a hit that spawned the first feature length western superhero movie, but it also spawned the creation of Barbara Gordon's Batgirl. The brightly hued comic book show introduced the Caped Crusaders to generations of viewers and shaped the perception of the artform for decades, for better or for worse. It also shaped the future of superhero blockbusters too as one young viewer, Michael Uslan, hated the representation of his Dark Knight so much he dedicated his life to making a dark and gritty Batman movie, and in 1989 he achieved that with Tim Burton's legendary film. So, if you've never revisited this joyful love letter to Silver Age DC, it's time to rectify that.

79. Oz

In the fictional maximum security prison Oswald State Correctional Facility, “Oz” for short, rehabilitation is the goal of unit manager Tim McManus. Heading up a heavily monitored sector of the prison, McManus and Warden Leo Glynn work to strike a balance between the many warring factions under their watch. PoV character Tobias Beecher should be an ideal candidate for rehabilitation, considering that his crime was accidental. Yet, in the land of Oz, survival means having to make moral concessessions. Oz is considered to be the forebearer of shows like The Sopranos and The Wire, engaging head-on with social issues with no shortage of gallows humor. Taking a moral but corruptable character like Beecher as its center and fleshing out his own Emerald City, grounded in brutal realism rather than magic and wishful thinking, Oz remains the punch to the gut we didn’t know we needed.

78. Bob's Burgers

Creator Loren Bouchard was already animation royalty well before Bob’s Burgers, having brought cult classic series like Home Movies and Lucy: The Daughter of the Devil to the small screen. Taking the working-class Belcher family as its focus, Bob’s Burgers is ostensibly about their shared attempts to keep their struggling diner afloat. Yet, it’s the heartfelt comedy of a slightly odd family that loves each other dearly that makes the series click. Embracing the wholesome, Bob’s Burgers introduces us not just to the Belchers, but to the community around them, providing a loving look at the realities of life as blue collar business owners. Brilliant comedic performances from some of the best voice actors in the biz and offbeat conflicts made this one of the most endearing comedies in recent memory, while the animation has such a unmistakable visual style that it has helped cement the series in animation history.

77. 24

The relentless story of the longest day of Counter Terrorism Unit badass Jack Bauer’s life took everybody by surprise. Kiefer Sutherland, starring in an action drama series about a covert government agency foiling assassination attempts, didn't reinvent any wheels on paper. Doing it all in real time with split-screen, multi-camera coverage and an iconic digital clock ticking in and out of every commercial break, however, made this show something else entirely. 24 is a prime example of why good shows become great. Layering a unique production device on a proven format can be all the innovation a show needs. That and opening season 2 with Jack murdering and decapitating a witness in an effort to prevent a nuclear attack on Los Angeles doesn’t hurt either. The show was salty as hell at its peak, even if it did make it seem like you could drive from Downtown LA to Reseda in the span of one commercial break.

76. Six Feet Under

While it may have spent its five-season life living in the shadow of juggernauts like The Sopranos, Alan Ball’s Six Feet Under remains one of the finest shows to emerge from HBO’s golden age. The series revolves around the Fisher family, undertakers struggling to balance their myriad personal problems with the struggles of running a very unorthodox business. Fittingly, Six Feet Under is a series preoccupied with death, to the point where most episodes feature characters conversing with the imagined ghosts of the departed. The resulting combination of deep psychological drama and macabre humor makes Six Feet Under a show unlike any other.

75. Boardwalk Empire

Created by Sopranos veteran Terence Winter and exec produced by Martin Scorsese and Mark Wahlberg, this aesthetically opulent yet gritty crime drama was set (largely) in Atlantic City during Prohibition. Like Deadwood before it, this HBO show mixed history with fiction in the saga of a boomtown marked by rampant greed, corruption, and violence. Steve Buscemi gave what is arguably his finest dramatic performance in the lead role of racketeer and political boss Enoch “Nucky” Thompson, whose quest to hold power and influence events propels the (mostly tragic) fates of those people in his orbit.

74. In Living Color

With Keenan Ivory Wayans’s satirical film hits Hollywood Shuffle and I’m Gonna Git You Sucka in the bag, he turned his eye for parody to primetime TV. Envisioning a boundary-pushing sketch comedy series with a mostly PoC cast, In Living Color was born. Hoping to capture an array of comedic perspectives, Wayans casually introduced the world to what are today some of its biggest stars, including Jim Carrey, Jamie Foxx, and Jennifer Lopez. Featuring musical performances from all-timers like Queen Latifah, Public Enemy, Mary J. Blige, and Tupac Shakur just to name a few, In Living Color took a cue from variety shows of old to create the perfect combination of humor, music, star power, and aesthetic. Though behind-the-scenes creative differences eventually led to Wayans’s departure from the series, its five seasons remain a hilarious deep dive into 1990s pop culture.

73. Roots

Based on Alex Haley’s best-selling, Pulitzer-winning novel, ABC’s landmark 1977 miniseries tells the saga of Kunta Kinte, a Mandinka youth who is captured and sold into slavery to a Virginia plantation, chronicling his life and later his descendants who finally become free in the years following the US Civil War. Roots featured an epic cast, including James Earl Jones as Alex Haley and, in his breakthrough role, LeVar Burton as young Kunta; beloved TV dads such as The Brady Bunch’s Robert Reed and Bonanza’s Lorne Greene were cast against type as slave owners. Roots was a cultural phenomenon and a massive ratings success, particularly its final episode, spawning two sequels and a 2016 remake miniseries.

72. Law & Order

DUN-DUN! An institution of American television, this procedural from creator Dick Wolf has retained its simple formula for over three decades, from its original 1990-2010 run on NBC to its revival in 2021. The first half of each episode focused on the NYPD detectives investigating the crime and the second half followed the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office prosecuting the (usually ripped from the headlines) case. Although they were often faced with moral dilemmas, the personal lives of the protagonists were more hinted at than deeply explored (that would change with the spin-off Law & Order: SVU, which has now been on the air longer than the original), making the case the primary focus of each episode. There have been many characters and lead actors shuffled in and out over 20-plus seasons, but several of the cast – most notably Jerry Orbach, Sam Waterston, S. Epatha Merkerson, Jesse L. Martin, and Steven Hill – spent upwards of a decade or more on the show. The Law & Order franchise has so far generated six spin-off series and a UK remake.

71. Schitt's Creek

As F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “The rich are different from you and me,” but what if they lost all of their money? So begins Schitt’s Creek, as wealthy businessman Johnny, wife and former soap opera queen Moira, and adult children David and Alexis lose their home to a shady manager’s illegal financial practices. Forced to take refuge in a town named Schitt’s Creek that Johnny once bought as a joke, the family struggles to make the most of things, and hilarity ensues. Reuniting SCTV and Christopher Guest collaborators Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy, Eugene and son Dan developed a series that never exactly absolves the rich of their bad behavior, but which works to uncover the humanity within through humor and understanding. By the end of the series, each character has undergone hard-earned change and learned to appreciate the little things in life while maybe helping us do the same.

70. Sex and the City

Inspired by the work of columnist Candace Bushnell, this hugely popular series ran on HBO from 1998 to 2004. It followed four very different female friends – Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), Samantha (Kim Cattrall), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), and Charlotte (Kristin Davis) – living in New York City and their different approaches to relationships, sex, and social life. While ostensibly a romantic comedy, the show could veer into drama at times as its characters faced loss, heartbreak, and even cancer. After the release of two big-screen movies, the sequel series And Just Like That… debuted on HBO in 2021, but infamously without the participation of Cattrall, who would eventually cameo in Season 2.

69. ER

The term “all-star cast” was never quite the same after ER ran its monumental fifteen season course. Sporting names like George Clooney, Angela Bassett, Juliana Margulies, Laura Innes, and Anthony Edwards in the credits, any given scene plays out like a masterclass on the art of creating a TV drama. Created by real-life M.D. Michael Crichton, the series was directly based on his time attending Harvard Medical School. To its benefit, the sense of realism this grants the show is grounded not in cynicism, but in a profound respect for the tireless work of medical professionals that save lives every day. Over hundreds of episodes, ER remained a clear mirror of its times, regularly tackling taboo social issues from the standpoint of medical practioneers and the people they treat. Other medical dramas have followed suit to great results, but there is no overstating the importance of ER to the evolving TV climate of the '90s and 2000s.

68. Adventure Time

In the annals of animation history you can define much of modern animation as Before Adventure Time and After Adventure Time. Shows like Nickelodeon's SpongeBob SquarePants and Cartoon Network's Flapjack bridged the gap between the '90s animation boom and the first episode of Pendelton Ward's game-changing Adventure Time. The technicolor adventure series began as a seemingly simple kids cartoon about two unlikely brothers before revealing itself to be an existential journey of friendship and identity with influences as eclectic as Alejandro Jodorowsky and Ingmar Bergman. This is one of the singularly most satisfying animated shows to watch to completion — with one of the best finales ever — but still works as a classic kids cartoon AKA watching what you can when you can. It also introduced the world to Rebecca Sugar, who wrote many of the show's incredible songs and went on to create Steven Universe.

67. Firefly

Firefly always faced a perpetually tumultuous flight path as both in the show’s plot and the series’ tenure. But that rocky path only made its fans love Firefly and its crew all the more. Following Captain Malcolm Reynolds and his crew of misfits, the series showcased the weekly misadventures of our (mostly) begrudging heroes as they did their best to help folks on the outer rim and stay as far away from Alliance — the governing body that wanted to basically rule all of space — control as possible. Part of the series’ sticking power is its universal tale that showcases the power of found family and sticking it to the man whenever you can.

66. Mindhunter

Inspired by the career of pioneering profiler John Douglas (who the character of Jack Crawford was based on in the Hannibal Lecter books/movies), Mindhunter probed the depths of the broken minds that commit atrocities. As the second marquee series David Fincher delivered to Netflix, while also directing a few episodes, Mindhunter was dark, gruesome, and disturbing in all the ways Hollywood usually avoids when creating pulpy serial killer fare. While the protagonists — played by Jonathan Groff, Holt McCallany, and Anna Torv — were amalgams of real people, the killers presented were real. Infamous murderers like Jerry Brudos, Richard Speck, and Wayne Williams were at the heart of this series. Specifically, the creation, through harrowing interviews, of a database for traits and behaviors that could be put into practice as a tool to help catch future maniacs. Sadly, a third season seems impossible but what we got was riveting and raw.

65. King of the Hill

King of the Hill might not have stayed on the air as long as fellow Fox animated mainstays like The Simpsons or Family Guy, but one could argue the series maintained a far more consistent level of quality over the course of its still impressive 13 seasons. The series is set in the fictional small town of Arlen, Texas and focuses on everyman propane salesman Hank Hill, his family, and a truly memorable lineup of eccentric supporting characters. King of the Hill distinguishes itself from other animated sitcoms with its more low-key sense of humor. While infinitely quotable (“Pocket sand! Sh-sh-shah!”) and often hilarious, the series takes pains to treat its kooky cast of Southern-fried characters as three-dimensional people, not caricatures.

64. All in the Family

This American remake of the British TV series Till Death Us Do Part was developed by the legendary Norman Lear and followed the Bunkers, a white, working-class family in Queens, New York. Played to perfection by Carroll O'Connor, patriarch Archie Bunker’s mouth is big and his worldview narrow. He’s an aging bigot at odds with the changing times and counterculture embraced by the younger generation. Through humor and sharp writing, All in the Family pushed the boundaries of what was deemed acceptable on TV for that time, exploring a host of controversial topics and social issues. All in the Family remains one of the most influential TV comedies of all time, and begat a handful of notable spin-offs, including The Jeffersons.

63. The Haunting of Hill House

Home to what may have been the best jump scare in history, The Haunting of Hill house showcases creator Mike Flanagan’s impeccable understanding that to create the deepest of horrors, you have to make the audience care about your characters. The series is a perfect marriage of heart-wrenching and beautiful as we follow the Crain family along two timelines while they navigate the horrors of a house that was simply meant to be a pit stop on the way to their dream home. Don’t forget to count the ghosts when you dive into the series.

62. Atlanta

Atlanta is the perfect harmony between creator/star Donald Glover’s comedic sensibilities and his Childish Gambino rap persona. With a standout cast featuring Brian Tyree Henry, LaKeith Stanfield, and Zazie Beetz, and a constant collaboration with director Hiro Murai, Atlanta is a thoroughly focused chaos machine with a clear vision of the commentary it wants to make on race, class, relationships, and the music industry. A satire through and through, the one-off, standalone episodes that don’t feature the main cast more than hold their own and that reflect the absurdities of the world we actually live in. Every episode is a wildly unpredictable experience that will make you laugh, cringe, and ponder deeply about America’s state of affairs.

61. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air

Today, Will Smith is easily one of the most famous performers in the world, making it hard to believe that there was ever a time when he wasn't a household name. Still, looking back at Smith’s first acting gig on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, the star power is clear. Featuring easily one of the greatest theme songs of all time at the top of each episode, the series took Smith’s talent as a comedic rapper and made sit-com gold with it. Playing an exagerated version of himself, West Philly teen Smith is sent to live with his wealthy aunt and uncle, and their son, Carlton. The culture shock between these two worlds is the main theme of the show, allowing plenty of space for both comedy and commentary. The heartwarming love and loyalty Will feels for his family despite their differences is the backbone of the series.

60. Chernobyl

“What is the cost of lies?” That’s a question Jared Harris’ Valery Legasov poses to viewers as Chernobyl opens, and it speaks to the true power of this utterly gripping miniseries. Chernobyl dramatizes the events surrounding the infamous 1986 nuclear power plant disaster. And if that’s all the series did, it would still be a taut, utterly suspenseful and lavishly produced thriller. It’s nothing if not a testament to the many selfless heroes who staved off a far worse crisis. But the real genius of the series is how directly it speaks to our modern climate of misinformation and alternative facts. Chernobyl offers a sobering look at what happens when truth is treated like an inconvenience, not a necessity.

59. South Park

South Park is second only to The Simpsons when it comes to the sheer length of time this animated sitcom has remained on the air. Yet even after hundreds of episodes and several spinoffs and specials, the series remains as fresh and witty as it did in 1997. Much of that lasting appeal rests with the show’s willingness and ability to parody current events as they happen. The series’ breakneck production process allows the writers and animators to lampoon the news days, or even hours, after it unfolds in the real world. Fortunately, the series is also just as funny when it focuses on the day-to-day lives of Stan, Kyle, Cartman and the rest of the kooky inhabitants of this small Colorado town.

58. The Jeffersons

One of the longest running sitcoms in history, The Jeffersons is also one of the best. Though many people forget, the show began life as an All in the Family spin-off created by the legendary Norman Lear. As the unforgettable theme song "Movin' On Up" explains, the show follows the wealthy Jeffersons who have moved from Queens into a fancy high-rise condo in Manhattan. Isabel Sanford and Sherman Hemsley lead the wonderfully funny series as Weezy and George Jefferson, and the show still feels vibrantly relevant today. Though it's a gold-standard sitcom, it also delivers on exploring the realities of being Black in America, as well as tackling topics like gun control, mental health, and suicide. Through all of that it still manages to be one of the funniest shows on TV.

57. Futurama

Futurama was born in the shadow of The Simpsons, with its Matt Groening imprimatur and Brave New Springfield design style. But while the humor and outlandish hijinks of Fry, Bender, Leela, and the rest of the Planet Express crew certainly match those of the Simpson family, it’s the clever sci-fi concepts at the heart of Futurama, and how they are interpreted through that Groening (and co-developer David X. Cohen) comedy lens, that truly elevate it. Whether it’s the man(child) out of time, Fry, travelling to the past just long enough to become his own grandfather, Bender the drunken robot becoming a god, or Leela the mutant cyclops getting to live her teen years all over again, Futurama has a way of simultaneously being smart and dumb. And despite its zaniness, the animated series can also sometimes be just plain lovely. Just don’t ask about Fry’s dog Seymour! We don’t need to cry.

56. Friends

Friends is one of the most successful and popular sitcoms of all time. Putting out more than 200 episodes over the course of 10 years, the sitcom has some of the most iconic moments on television. With a catchy theme song, a will-they-won’t-they relationship, some truly special guest stars, a mysteriously large apartment, and memorable catchphrases, the show set the standard for shows about roommates and pals dealing with dating, work woes, and shenanigans for years to come.

55. Rick and Morty

Metatextual humor has long been the ally of genre fiction, but it’s safe to say that Rick & Morty has taken the joke to heretofore unimagined heights. The series odd couples Rick, a stereotypical self-absorbed, seriously dangerous scientific genius, with his comparatively naive grandson, Morty. Hopping through extradimensional portals and defeating world-devourers is all in a day’s work for Rick, while Morty has to learn to keep up or die. A wild romp through sci-fi tropes while dealing with closer-to-home feelings of PTSD, difficult familial relationships, absent parents, and the fear of becoming obsolete, the series has now birthed its very own plethora of in-universe references. Though the terrain may seem familiar at times, Rick and Morty combines rapid-fire deep cut one-liners with an unexpected level of emotional depth to create something all its own.

54. Band of Brothers

Following the incredible success of the WWII period drama Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks opted to continue their collaborations via a ten-episode mini-series. Inspired by the historical account of the same name written by Stephen E. Ambrose, Band of Brothers follows the harrowing tale of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division during the war. The series takes Major Richard Winters as its PoV character, kicking off with jump training at Camp Toccoa and winding through some of the most infamous battles and historical moments to occur during America’s involvement in WWII. Each episode zooms in on a different “brother,” showing us more about these everday people that fought against the Axis powers. In the end, the star of the show is the deep sense of comraderie between these men as they quite literally leap into battle.

53. Barry

Bill Hader upended any expectations that people had when his darkly humorous half-hour series hit HBO. While the setup, a hit-man who attends acting classes, seemed like it had potential for broad comedy, Hader and co-creator Alec Berg instead delivered one of the most heartbreaking series in HBO history. This brutally violent and often scathingly bleak show took on toxic masculinity, Hollywood, domestic abuse, and PTSD while presenting a genre-bending satire that could make you weep and fall over laughing within the same 30 minutes. Not only is Barry brilliant as an entire season but it also includes one of the best episodes of TV ever made in the Season 2 episode "ronny/lily" which blew many minds when it debuted in 2019.

52. 30 Rock

30 Rockerfeller Plaza in New York has an indisputable role in TV history due to the many shows filmed there, from Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show to Saturday Night Live and Marvel’s Hawkeye. Oh, right, and a little show called 30 Rock, a self-referential riff on the struggles of working in weekly TV production. This is told through the eyes of Liz Lemon, a bedraggled showrunner trying to keep her show on track. The over-the-top Tracy Jordan and the equally zany Jenna Maroney regularly derail any hope of harmony while Liz trades quips with network exec Jack Donaghy. Created by Tina Fey following her departure from SNL, 30 Rock tapped a cast of SNL faves alongside fresh faces and endless cameos. Known for making its single-camera set-up a part of the gag, this loving send-up of behind-the-scenes TV will ring a bell with anyone who knows what it’s like to love a job that runs you through the wringer.

51. The Shield

Years before every primetime series attempted to address police brutality, Shawn Ryan’s The Shield was making a prestige drama meal out of the everyday violence and corruption of the LAPD. With the real-life Rampart scandal in mind, The Shield imagined a gritty, volatile world run by guys like Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis), the spitting mad, hypermasculine leader of a particularly murderous police strike team. Mackey’s villain arc is the show’s most recognizable piece, but The Shield rewards steadfast viewers with plenty of treasures, like impeccably crafted interrogation scenes featuring Detectives Wyms (CCH Pounder) and Wagenbach (Jay Karnes), and fantastic performances from supporting players like Walton Goggins, Glenn Close, and Benito Martinez. The Shield isn’t everyone’s cup of tea – it has an ugly view of humankind, and shaky-cam, cinema verite-style filmmaking matches its frenetic energy – but in the end, it’s a damning, potent antidote to decades of TV copaganda.

50. Columbo

Many viewers rediscovered the joys of Columbo during the pandemic thanks to its appearance first on IMDBtv (soon to be renamed Freevee) and later on Peacock and it's easy to see why. Peter Falk shines as the bumbling and ruffled detective who is underestimated by both colleagues and criminals as he solves murders throughout Los Angeles. Filled with incredible guest stars including Leonard Nemoy, William Shatner, Faye Dunaway, and Dick Van Dyke, the series also features one of Steven Spielberg's earliest directorial efforts in the series' inaugural episode "Murder by the Book" that established much of the tone of the show. Despite the fact that Columbo debuted in the late '60s, it still stands as one of the best examples of the police procedural. Plus, how many of your favorite shows have over 100 feature-length episodes?

49. Key & Peele

Following their individual runs on Mad TV, Keegan Michael-Key and Jordan Peele were not yet ready to leave the wild world of sketch comedy behind. Instead, they launched one of the most influential comedy series of the century so far. The format of the series, introducing scenarios and spinning off of them, allowed for ever-escalating absurdist returns. By the end, this comedy duo created something that bridged sincere social commentary, self-aware satire, and the over-the-top slapstick gags of old. With a veritable who’s who list of cameos over its brief but hilarious run, the star power of the leads is often met in equal measure by its guest stars. While Peele is today best known for turning out some of the best horror films in recent years from behind the camera, the celebrated nuance of those works is easily traced back to Key & Peele.

48. The Good Place

If you took the time to explain everything that happens on The Good Place, from Parks and Rec’s Michael Schur, to someone else it would truly sound insane. Like a fantastical, hilarious modern version of Dante’s Inferno, The Good Place follows four recently-deceased people as they navigate the afterlife after they’re told they’ve landed in heaven and been assigned a forever soulmate. Kristen Bell and Ted Danson headline this addictively offbeat, often touching look at the hereafter, filled to the brim with actual existential crises and major questions of ethical philosophy. Now, you may wonder how a story about people in heaven could last four seasons? Well, it’s because of the Season 1 twist. One that Schur even ran past Lost’s Damon Lindelof to make sure it landed the right way. And boy howdy, it sure did, creating a madcap metaphysical puzzle for our flawed heroes to solve.

47. Monty Python's Flying Circus

The main influence and crucial blueprint for most modern sketch comedy, to this day, didn’t come from an obscure, niche offering. Monty Python was huge. They were rock stars in their own right, The Beatles of comedy as they were often labeled. Brits John Cleese, Michael Palin, Graham Chapman, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and lone American Terry Gilliam made a huge splash in '60s TV with Monty Python’s Flying Circus, creating instantly memorable bits of intelligent idiocy that’s directly inspired everything from Saturday Night Live to The Kids in the Hall to Key & Peele. The Ministry of Silly Walks. Wink Wink Nudge Nudge. The Dead Parrot. The list goes on and on for this tremendous troupe of insanely-educated silly men who skewered repressed English society. Then, in the '80s and '90s, reruns of Flying Circus on PBS and MTV birthed an entire new Gen X fandom that's kept Python thriving.

46. Doctor Who (2005)

The original run of Doctor Who premiered in 1963 and lasted 26 seasons before going on a very long hiatus. Jump to 2005 and the series, just like its main character, The Doctor, regenerated back onto TV screens with a fresh coat of paint on the TARDIS. And much like how The Doctor is a big ol’ softie at their (two) hearts, Doctor Who is still about a humanoid alien who travels with friends in a blue, '60s-era British police phone box throughout time and space, learning important lessons about humanity while meeting historical figures or fighting off hokey robots. As a show that originated as children’s programming, keeping that youthful spirit at the forefront has been a strength of the series. NuWho approaches more mature ideas, tells emotionally complex stories, and weaves some truly timey-wimey plot twists that are accessible to audiences of any age.

45. The West Wing

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. might be one of the most famous addresses in the world, but chances are you don’t know much about what happens there when the doors are closed. Inviting the audience to be a fly on the wall in the White House, creator Aaron Sorkin's The West Wing showed us the day-to-day life of fictional president Jed Bartlet. The inner workings of the Oval Office coincide with thoughtful character development from the president, his family, and his advisors. Featuring career-defining performances from the likes of Martin Sheen, Stockard Channing, and Rob Lowe, the series practically invented its own unique style of TV storytelling with its famed “walk and talk” scenes. Notably subtle in its commentary on then-current issues, The West Wing rarely came out swinging on politics, rather existing as a thoughtful study of the complexities of power.

44. Mister Rogers' Neighborhood

For many American kids, Fred Rogers was a staple of children's television growing up. Mr. Rogers was genuine and loving and wholeheartedly cared about people, but he also respected how difficult it can be to be a child. The educational portion of his show was less about how crayons are made, although field trips often covered that sort of thing. Instead, he taught us how to love and appreciate each other. He was never performing, never admonishing, just earnestly interested in the well-being of children.

43. BoJack Horseman

Bojack Horseman can be a tough sell. “No, really,” your friends may have told you, “I promise this animated show about a washed-up talking horse actor is actually one of the best stories about depression, addiction, Hollywood, and our obsession with redeeming bad men ever made.” In case you need a second opinion: your friends are right this time. Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s unforgettable series is about as thoughtful as TV gets, using its show business satire and talking animals schtick as a jumping-off point for sincere conversations about growth and stagnation, accountability and denial, and a thousand other messy and complicated topics that typically resist artists’ attempts to boil them down into a tidy narrative. Bojack Horseman works in part because it’s beautifully untidy; the show allows its characters to regress, get confused, disappoint one another, and make mistakes we can forgive – as well as some we ultimately can’t.

42. The Americans

Eighties Cold War espionage epic The Americans kicks off with a rather hook-y premise. What if an FBI agent moves right across the street from Soviet agents who’ve spent years in the States assimilating to American life? Or…let’s flip that. What if Soviet Agents — the characters the show wants us to invest in - have spent all this time building a family life in the U.S., even having kids who are unaware their parents are spies, find out their new neighbor is with the FBI? This is how The Americans became one of the best, most intense TV dramas of all time. We touch down in the lives of Philip and Elizabeth Jennings — Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell — the embedded Russians. And we watch them struggle to complete their missions, protect their cover, raise a family, and even question their own government. A perfect series that nails the ending.

41. Deadwood

David Milch mixed historical fact with fiction in his gritty saga about opportunists and cutthroats in search of fortune in Deadwood, South Dakota as it evolved from a mining camp into a Wild West boomtown during the 1870s. The show’s near-Shakespearean dialogue and rich character work were as much hallmarks as its debauchery and violence. Deadwood boasted a stellar ensemble cast, particularly Ian McShane as the hilariously profane and vicious saloonkeeper Al Swearengen and Timothy Olyphant as tough-as-nails sheriff Seth Bullock. In 2006, HBO infamously canceled the show after three seasons without a proper conclusion but later produced a feature-length film in 2019 that picked up the story of the surviving characters in 1889.

40. Friday Night Lights

Few shows have ever felt as real as Friday Night Lights. The heartfelt drama spent five seasons taking a topic some fans knew little about – Texas high school football and the thick cloud of toxic masculinity that surrounds it – and turning it into an exhilaratingly intimate viewing experience. With minimal blocking, rehearsals, and sets, and handheld cameras capturing all-star actors like Kyle Chandler, Connie Britton, and Taylor Kitsch up close, Friday Night Lights broke down the barriers between its naturalistic world and our own. Couple its sense of verisimilitude with the profound emotion coursing through every second of the ultra-earnest show and the result is one of the small screen’s biggest tearjerkers. You don’t have to be a sports fan to cheer for Saracen’s first game-winning pass or smile through the Panthers famous mud bowl. You just have to know the trusty team words: clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.

39. The Leftovers

The enigmatic catastrophe facing the world in Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers isn’t a world-ender. Heck, it isn’t even enough to make society collapse. But 2% of the world’s population mysteriously vanishing one day, with no explanation, also in every way that contradicts religious doctrine, is enough to send most people into an existential spiral. The Leftovers starts dark and heavy as our characters sort through unimaginable loss and overwhelming anxiety but the miracle of this glorious, beautiful show is the joy and silliness it begins to embrace in its second season. An inspired lunacy that feels like a much better way for the world to spiral. Justin Theroux's Kevin and Carrie Coon's Nora (in a star-making role) play lovers in a world gone sideways as The Leftovers morphs, over the course of three seasons, into one of the most sublimely human stories ever put to screen.

38. Hannibal

We’re still wondering HOW Hannibal aired on network TV. Bryan Fuller’s artistic, romantic, and genuinely disturbing mix tape of Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lecter-verse combined elements of novels Red Dragon, Hannibal, and Hannibal Rising (and some gentle Silence of the Lambs surrogacy) to deliver the most whacked-out horror ever put on the boob tube. People got turned into trees, beehives, mushrooms, totem poles…look, a lot of people got turned into things! Mostly dinner, of course, since Hannibal knew how to prepare humans in such a gourmet way that we found ourselves salivating. Stepping into the Lecter role was a big deal, but Mads Mikkelsen brought his own sexy, impish flare, depicting a genius madman who loved to roll the dice and toy with people…sometimes to his own demise. And with Hugh Dancy’s suuuuper broken Will Graham as Hannibal's favorite plaything, the series became a "murder husband” love story for the ages.

37. Curb Your Enthusiasm

Larry David has done pretty, pretty, pretty good for himself in TV comedy, from writing for SNL to co-creating Seinfeld to this hilarious, semi-fictionalized take on his own life and career, which has run for 11 seasons over 23 years on HBO. Larry has a penchant for pissing off nearly everyone he has any interaction with; no matter how petty the grievance, misunderstanding, or social faux pas, Larry always manages to only make things worse for himself (and funnier to the audience).

36. Battlestar Galactica

Imagine if you will that humanity exists not on Earth, but on a cluster of planets referred to as the Twelve Colonies. There, we are entrenched in a war against the cybernetic race known as the Cylons. Yet, not all is as it seems, not for the Cylons, and not for us. A reimagining of the 1978 TV series, the 2004 version of Battlestar Galactica allowed the many compelling ideas of the original the space to develop, albeit a couple decades plus down the road. Taking cues from the first series and absolutely stacking the ensemble cast, Battlestar Galactica hit the air via a mini-series on SYFY, which was quickly followed by a show. Directly reflecting the politics of Iraq War-era America with plots that mirrored a number of then-current news items, Battlestar Galactica excelled by doing what science fiction does best - making it political.

35. Sesame Street

For kids, the residents of Sesame Street are furry little friends to share their time with. The actors and puppets have spent decades imparting a kind sort of wisdom through funny earworms and vignettes at Mr. Hooper’s store. Most importantly, they've always operated on the same level with the kids. It’s easy to relate to lessons when they’re coming from a monster that’s trying to have a conversation as opposed to giving a lecture. As those kids have grown into parents to find Sesame Street still airing, it’s fascinating to see how the show has constantly evolved (Cookie Monster eats his vegetables now?!?!). Knowing that a new generation also knows how to get, how to get to Sesame Street, that it's still filled with the same thoughtful approach to speaking to children is a real treat. Fifty-plus seasons later Sesame Street is still all Sunny Days.

34. Saturday Night Live

Saturday Night Live has been on since the 70s. It’s currently airing in its sixth different decade. But it’s longevity doesn’t top the list of reasons it belongs in our Top 100. The most engaging thing about Saturday Night Live is that everybody has their own favorites; favorite cast member, favorite era, favorite Weekend Update anchor (my answer is Norm Macdonald for all three, by the way). The sheer volume of stars that got their break on the show is staggering as well. There may be no bigger contributor to American comedy than the spotlights in Studio 8H as fifty years worth of comedy fans have been introduced to Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Will Ferrell, and Amy Poehler thanks to creator-producer Lorne Michaels and generations-spanning sketch comedy institution. At this point it seems likely to run forever and that’s just fine.

33. Better Call Saul

After the finale of Breaking Bad, it seemed guaranteed that there would be some kind of a follow-up on the horizon. With many of the original show’s central characters now deceased or otherwise indisposed, showrunners opted to delve into the past. And so this deep dive into the past life of fan favorite lawyer and Walter White accomplice, Saul Goodman, was born. Fleshing out his early days as Jimmy McGill alongside other series faves like Gus Fring and Mike, this is the rare prequel that may have actually improved on the initial format by making Breaking Bad’s tragedies seem even more unavoidable. As Breaking Bad made TV history showing the corruption of Walter White, Better Call Saul followed a man who seemed destined to live a life on the wrong side of the law, and showed us exactly what it cost him to do so.

32. Community

Before taking the animated world by storm with Rick and Morty, Dan Harmon gave us the beloved cult-favorite Community. The series revolves around a study group of seven students at Greendale Community College, simultaneously the world’s most pathetic university and a place where comedic gold lurks around every corner. Community cleverly draws from all manner of pop culture influences as it explores the group’s increasingly wacky misadventures. But beneath all the epic paintball showdowns and explorations of chaos theory, Community thrives on the strength of its lovable cast of misfits. That’s why the show defied the odds to survive six seasons and multiple showrunner change-ups. This series is truly streets ahead.

31. The Mary Tyler Moore Show

After half the country (or was it the whole country?) fell for Mary Tyler Moore for five seasons on The Dick Van Dyke Show, where she played Laura Petrie, the wife of Van Dyke’s character, the actress jumped into her own self-titled show which also took Moore’s persona to a realm beyond being the mere “wife.” Tracking with the changing times of the late ’60s/early ’70s, The Mary Tyler Moore Show depicted an independent woman who was career-focused rather than family-focused, one who didn’t have a husband or kids, but instead had a job. And with that job came her coworkers, who were also her friends, and eventually her family (and popular enough that three of them eventually got their own spin-off shows as well). Along the way, Mary and the gang dealt often dealt with adult problems, but always with a smile. She made it after all!

30. M*A*S*H

Korean War sitcom M*A*S*H is best remembered today for its massively popular series finale, as it should be: it’s remarkable to think that at one point in America’s history, nearly 106 million people chose to watch any show together, nonetheless one as radical as this one. Based on Robert Altman's 1970 film of the same name and Richard Hooker's novel, M*A*S*H started in 1972 with Vietnam on its mind, and largely kept its anti-authority bleeding heart alive across its eleven seasons. Witty, pacifist surgeon Hawkeye (series writer-director Alan Alda) was our guide through an endless landscape of bloodshed and tragedy, which was punctuated regularly by the 4077th mobile army surgical hospital’s almost manic commitment to pranks and tomfoolery. M*A*S*H invented the TV dramedy early on, then continued to perfect it throughout its impressive lifespan, tying different eras of the series together via a dazzling cast, New Hollywood-inspired filmmaking, and searingly great scripts.

29. The Golden Girls

Aging is scary, but anyone with a TV set who was born after 1985 doesn’t have to do it alone. That’s because we’ve got The Golden Girls, a sitcom that’s blunt and hilarious in its portrayal of women of a certain age. Menopause, death of a partner, body image, sex and dating as an older woman, illness, mortality, and more are all topics of conversation broached around the table of Dorothy (Bea Arthur), Rose (Betty White), Blanche (Rue McClanahan), and Sophia’s (Estelle Getty) Florida home. Few topics in the groundbreaking sitcom were off limits, while all of them were addressed with candor and – as importantly – some of the best comedic chemistry ever put to screen. The show’s character archetypes (dumb country girl, serial seductress, humorless rule-follower, and crotchety old lady) were familiar, but its all-star ensemble turned every dirty punchline into high art. Thank you for being a friend, ladies.

28. Veep

If Seinfeld begat Curb Your Enthusiasm then all paths led to swirling torrent of hilarious misery, Veep, which was just a den of bitter, jaded, self-loathing vipers hurling some of the nastiest (and cleverest) insults at each other while barely keeping it together. Oh, did we mention they’re also all government officials in service of Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Vice President Selina Meyer? Created by The Thick of It’s Armando Iannucci, who served as showrunner for four seasons until Seinfeld/Curb’s David Mandel took over and, somehow, made everything even more crass and ludicrous, Veep was always out for the jugular. Fortunately the series ended, after seven seasons, right as our own political landscape became almost indistinguishable from the sinister satire it was doling out but it will always be remembered as a crown jewel of cringe comedy as well as yet another lasting testament to Louis-Dreyfus' comedic brilliance.

27. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

Sometimes it’s wild to think about how a show about overconfident, insufferable, ignorant sociopaths who are constantly foiled by their own ineptitude, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, is officially the longest-running live-action sitcom in U.S. TV history. (Beating a show that couldn’t be more different, by the way, in The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.) Still, despite the riotous antics and runaway narcissism of the gang at Patty’s Pub, there’s televisual dependability here that works. They’re always going to lose. All ploys and schemes will end in disaster. That’s the bizarre comfort that’s kept Rob McElhenney, Glenn Howerton, Kaitlin Olsen, and Danny DeVito (who came on board in Season 2 to help boost the fledgling series) going for nearly two-decades now. Known for grinding out gut-busting laughs from seriously taboo topics, little-cult-show-that could Always Sunny broke new ground while also delivering a few genuinely emotional moments ("Mac Finds His Pride")

26. The Muppet Show

Jim Henson's signature creation is so singular that decades later there still isn't any show that comes close to imitating or at this point even trying to recreate what The Muppet Show achieved. Building on the success of the characters that he created, Henson piloted his magnum opus in 1974 before the show truly launched in 1976. The Muppet Show was a hybrid sketch show, talk show, and variety show hosted by Henson's cast of now legendary puppet / marionette mashups. It was in '76 that Kermit the Frog became the face of the show changing Hollywood history forever, as the amphibian became a household name and launched the Muppets into the stratosphere. Now that the whole series is finally streaming on Disney+, it's the perfect time to delve into one of the most ambitious and unusual TV shows of all time.

25. Succession

When it was announced that Jesse Armstrong ,the creator of cult British comedy Peep Show, was taking on the Murdochs, many audiences expected a searing satire in the shape of another show he'd worked on, Veep. Instead, we got a dramedy so engaging and dynamic that by its final season it was nothing short of a cultural phenomenon. Telling the story of the Murdoch-inspired media dynasty known as the Roys, Armstrong brought his knife-sharp wit and a gut-wrenching tension to the series that followed who would succeed the elderly patriarch of the family. Perfect casting and writing make this a four-season tour de force that never lets up on the anxiety-inducing cruelty and cringe-inspiring terrible choices. Though it ended this year, it's not recency bias making us say that this is one of HBO's — and TV's — best shows ever.

24. Freaks and Geeks

Created by Paul Feig and executive produced by Judd Apatow, two of some of the many geniuses to shape comedy in the 21st century, the single season of Freaks and Geeks still is considered one of the best and most authentic portrayals of teenagedom in television. Following two teen siblings entering new phases of their respective young lives, their high school experiences as outcasts highlight the confusing, messy reality of growing up and determining who you want to be versus who you should be. Featuring a young cast of actors who would also go on to star and write some of the finest, funniest comedies themselves, it became the launch pad for these talented people to embrace the awkwardness of life in their own works.

23. The Office (US)

It’s often difficult for the US version of a British TV show to justify its existence let alone stand on its own, but The Office US had something special in its watercooler. The Office set the bar for workplace comedies to follow in terms of ensemble chemistry and comedic timing, led fearlessly by Steve Carell and his eager, if sometimes misguided manager Michael Scott. The banality and politics of American office life grounded the show, but just like any upper-management mantra, these characters really became family, and as Michael Scott puts it at Jim and Pam’s wedding, “I feel like all my kids grew up, and then they married each other. It's every parent's dream!”

22. Arrested Development

Sorry to Succession and Schitt’s Creek, but Arrested Development is the original “story of a wealthy family who lost everything, and the one son who had no choice but to keep them all together.” A cult classic that was canceled on Fox, but lived on in timeless memes and reaction GIFs, the show made a return on Netflix for two more seasons. Jason Bateman masterfully plays the straight man against his out-of-touch, spoiled family members, self-martyring himself for people who aren’t interested in adapting to their new reality. Constant miscommunications give way to some hilarious Benny Hill runarounds and the show’s candid camera approach and interactive narration captured all that chaos.

21. Avatar: The Last Airbender

What does it mean to be a kids’ show? Can a show for children talk about war and trauma? Can it preach nonviolent resistance in the face of evil, or love of nature as a path to harmony? If that show is Avatar: The Last Airbender, it can do all that and a whole lot more. The beloved three-season Nickelodeon series takes on each of the surprisingly mature issues above without talking down to young viewers, but it also delights and entertains every step of the way. Avatar Aang’s world-saving story balances its Buddhism-influenced takes on war and peace with moments of silly, youthful adventure. From blind earthbender Toph to scorned prince Zuko to wise Uncle Iroh, the show is chock full of characters worth loving, each with their own stunning story arc. A pitch-perfect voice cast and endlessly creative worldbuilding are just more icing on an already fantastic cake.

20. Batman: The Animated Series

For many kids who grew up in the '80s & '90s there's only one Batman: Kevin Conroy. That is the impact of this beautifully animated show that enchanted viewers and still holds up as one of the best comic book adaptations of all time. Taking inspiration from Tim Burton's noir-steeped vision for Gotham, this stunning series adapts some of Batman's most famous comic book adventures while also introducing iconic new characters in its own right. Most famously, DC Comics' beloved Harley Quinn debuted on an episode as one of the Joker's henchies before becoming a staple in the DC roster. With stunning animation, brilliant writing, and an atmosphere you could cut with a knife, this is truly one of the greatest shows ever made.

19. I Love Lucy

You think of Lucille Ball and most likely you picture her stuffing her face with chocolate on an out of control assembly line. Or maybe she’s pitching the 1950s version of an energy drink, “Vitameatavegamin,” only to get drunk from the concoction mid-speech. Or perhaps it’s her husband/co-star Desi Arnaz singing "We're Having a Baby (My Baby and Me)" on the occasion of not just their TV pregnancy, but also their real-life one. From off-the-wall to heartwarming, I Love Lucy remains eminently rewatchable over 70 years after it debuted. But it was also groundbreaking in that it essentially created the sitcom format that would be used for decades to come when Arnaz and the show’s director of photography (and Hollywood legend) Karl Freund perfected a multi-camera system that enabled the show to be shot in sequence “theater” style while a live studio audience reacted in real time to Lucy’s antics. And react they did.

18. Star Trek: The Original Series

This is where it all began. Almost 60 years after Captain Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise embarked on their five-year-mission, Star Trek has grown into one of the biggest media franchises of all time. And while the must-watch factor of The Original Series has faded some with time (witness The Next Generation overtaking it on this list as those who grew up on ’90s Trek tend to relate to that show more), the mission statement that has sustained Gene Roddenberry’s creation all these decades was conceived here. The use of sci-fi to examine thinly veiled real-world issues wasn’t a new idea, but Star Trek consistently elevated the genre by probing topics that mattered to the humans of 20th century Earth as much as they did to those of 23rd century outer space. That the show did so in an exciting, emotional, and frequently humorous manner only made it that much better.

17. Cheers

Although not initially a ratings success, this beloved NBC sitcom about a Boston bar “Where Everybody Knows Your Name” ran for 11 seasons and spun off another classic sitcom, Frasier. What made Cheers work was its bevy of lovable characters who either work at or frequent the titular bar, from womanizing proprietor Sam Malone to fixtures like know-it-all Cliff Clavin and sardonic Norm Peterson. Like other long-running shows, Cheers saw its share of characters leave and cast changes, most notably when Shelley Long’s Diane Chambers was replaced by Kirstie Alley’s Rebecca Howe or when Nicholas Colasanto, who played bartender Coach died, and the character of dopey Woody Boyd (played in his breakthrough role by Woody Harrelson) was introduced. Its final episode remains one of the highest-rated series finales of all time.

16. Buffy the Vampire Slayer

What if the gorgeous girl victim in a horror movie was actually the one doing the slaying? That simple question served as the foundation for one of the greatest hero’s journeys of all time – that of teen vamp hunter Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar). A found family comedy, teen drama, and feminist fantasy story all rolled into one, Buffy the Vampire Slayer built a singular TV world that’s endlessly fun to revisit. Of course, the cracks in the show’s oversimplified girl-power ideology show more with age – and in light of everything we now know about series creator Joss Whedon – but Buffy still packs a punch thanks to its ever-excellent cast, nimble scripts, and its clever, thoughtful exploration of what it means to grow up in a world full of monsters.

15. Seinfeld

One of the most celebrated, quotable, and re-watchable sitcoms of all time, Seinfeld mined comedy gold from the mundane and minuscule. Whether it's the proper etiquette for dipping chips, parallel parking, or sharing toilet paper in public restrooms, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David’s “Show About Nothing” was a series about everything. Well, except hugging and learning. Which were abject no-nos on a series that felt, at times, like an Upper West Side fable about a quartet of characters who became more unlikable and unhinged with each passing season. Soup Nazis, Bubble Boys, Anti-Dentites, Library Cops, Schmoopies, Bizarro Jerrys - the juggernaut that was Seinfeld paved the path for shows like It's Always Sunny, The League, and You’re the Worst. It created it's own style of comedy and played by its own (ever-changing) rules.

14. Watchmen

HBO’s Watchmen is an odd duck when it comes to comic book shows. It’s not an adaptation of the iconic series from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, but rather a sequel that lovingly remixes many of the comic’s tropes and character archetypes. The result is a series that not only lives up to the lofty source material, but actually manages to enhance it. Despite taking place in an alternate universe set decades after a staged alien invasion, Watchmen is a series with an awful lot to say about racism and violence in our world. Impeccably acted and wonderfully written, Watchmen is as good as anything Damon Lindelof has produced on television.

13. Star Trek: The Next Generation

It may be tough to fathom given how beloved TNG is now and how much Star Trek there currently is out there but the notion of following the original Star Trek’s run with an entirely new cast was a massive long shot back in 1987. While TNG struggled creatively in its first two seasons, it found its footing in Season 3. Its rich new crew of characters was led by Patrick Stewart’s thoughtful Jean-Luc Picard, a very different Starfleet captain than the impetuous James T. Kirk. TNG was one of the first true successes in establishing a shared universe and ushered in even more complex and compelling storytelling in the Trek mythos that has kept the franchise boldly going to this day.

12. Fleabag

Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s two-season wonder Fleabag was a paean to the messy women among us. During its short run, the show’s unnamed central character became a patron saint to the heartbroken, the grieving, the selfish, and the horny. The show and its protagonist were often funny as hell, but Fleabag’s greatest accomplishment was its slyly profound character study, executed with the help of an aside-to-camera gimmick that grew increasingly meta as the show unfolded. Fleabag began with a woman joking her way toward oblivion and ended with her waving goodbye to the fourth wall that stood between herself and the people she loved. It was two seasons of laugh-out-loud therapy (or, in season two’s case, confession), delivered in such an entertaining way that the scope of its impact was impossible to feel until it ended and left us, like our hero, with no one’s company but our own.

11. Lost

In 2004, a bunch of beautiful strangers crash-landed on an island and TV was never the same again. Millions of viewers not only tuned into Lost, but obsessed over fan theories, lived on message boards, and analyzed every episode for signs of things to come. Lost ushered in the modern TV puzzle box, a trend that still persists (often with pale imitators) today, but that’s only the second-best thing the show did. The first was to craft a story that balanced big-idea sci-fi and metaphysics with matters of the heart. Fans didn’t just care about what was going on with the island; we cared about what was going on with our favorite characters. Part survival series, part existential drama, part out-there genre fiction, Lost made captives of us all for six years – and no communal viewing experience has felt the same since. We have to go back!

10. Parks and Recreation

Parks and Recreation, from The Office's Greg Daniels and Michael Schur, may have stumbled out of the gate for its first, shortened season but in its sophomore run it truly found its form, reshaping many of its characters to suit the performers, which included de-Michael Scott-ing Amy Poehler’s Leslie Knope, shifting her from incompetent to immensely capable. Overly capable, in fact, which only added to the comedy given that someone as talented as Knope would have to struggle to get anything done in the weird web of local Midwest politics. What followed was a phenomenal seven-year run featuring characters we all came to adore and a love story that didn’t need to fall apart over and over in order to remain endearing and hilarious. Chris Pratt, Nick Offerman, Aubrey Plaza, and more became stars while Adam Scott's Ben became one of the best non-Darcy Mr. Darcys of all time.

9. Game of Thrones

Billed as Lord of the Rings for those who like epic fantasy with heaping doses of sex and violence, George R.R. Martin’s beloved (and still unfinished) book series was adapted into an HBO series that became a pop culture phenomenon during its eight-season run. Game of Thrones stumbled badly in its final two seasons – without GRRM’s source material to draw from, the show moved at an accelerated rate to wrap up the saga of who would win the Iron Throne as well as the apocalyptic threat posed by the White Walkers. But when GoT worked, it really worked, delivering masterful storytelling, fully realized performances from its great ensemble cast, stunning spectacle, gripping suspense, and countless, passionate fan conversations. Dracarys!

8. The Twilight Zone

When we talk about Rod Serling’s seminal series The Twilight Zone, we often talk about the show’s perfectly crafted twist endings: bent realities, nightmares come to life, and twists of fate that are as existentially harrowing as sci-fi has ever been. Across its 156 episodes, the show played with big ideas, delivered big feelings and, yes, sucker-punched audiences with big surprise twists that still astound today. Yet Serling’s grandest achievement was a moral one. His tales of alien invasions, it turned out, were actually about xenophobia and hatred. His stories of well-respected men questioning their sanity portrayed PTSD before the term existed. Serling’s self-contained sagas – some of them adapted from short stories by literary giants – were not just excellent episodes of television but also clear-eyed lessons about how essential unity and kindness are. The best episodes of The Twilight Zone have a mighty heartbeat – one viewers can still hear today.

7. Mad Men

Nostalgia for a past that never truly was can be a dangerous thing and nowhere was that more apparent than in Mad Men. Taking the fictional Don Draper, creative director of ad agency Sterling Cooper, as its case study, any rose-tinted longing for the 1960s was immediately shattered as the office politics and biases of the time were explored. Draper’s ad-making brilliance and greeting card family don’t make him happy, and so much of the series was dedicated to watching his slow motion fall from grace. Meanwhile, former protegee Peggy Olson rises the ranks with new opportunities for women in the office. With the stunning, historically accurate set design and period-accurate clothing and characters, the series is a tour through the workspace during a decade of change. Where it ends is a far distance from where it began, but the journey is worth it.

6. The Sopranos

For six wild seasons, we all watched excitedly as mob boss Tony Soprano did the unthinkable and sought help for his mental health struggles. This came in the form of therapist Jennifer Melfi, who spent much of the series engaging with the moral complexity of knowing of Soprano’s crimes while attempting to effectively treat him. As we soon learned, these were not to be run of the mill sessions: Soprano’s life story was a nod to gangster tales of old, but the series shone its brightest when showing the complex social balance between family and criminal behavior Tony was compelled to uphold. Unpacking toxic masculinity through a classic unreliable narrator, The Sopranos regularly delved into serious existentialism while delivering laughter, tears, and chills (and helped launch a second golden age of television, but who’s counting?)

5. Twin Peaks

Nightmare maestro David Lynch and TV vet Marc Frost came together in 1990 and injected some much-needed weirdness and wonderfulness into network primetime. The result was the incomparable Twin Peaks and, despite the show's basic story elements being a small town murder mystery, there was absolutely nothing like it on television. "Who Killed Laura Palmer?" became a puzzle that gripped the world as Twin Peaks helped reinvigorate 'water cooler TV.' This time though, the show people couldn't wait to discuss at work the next day had a fantastical assortment of goofy oddities and scary dreamscapes: damn fine coffee and cherry pie that’ll kill ya; red rooms in black lodges; One-Eyed Jacks; magic, mysticism, and David Lynch's penchant for peeling back the veil of suburban life and revealing the creepy crawlies residing underneath. Suffice to say, when Twin Peaks returned to TV decades later, there was still nothing quite like it.

4. The X-Files

The X-Files hit Fox in 1993 and became a massive cultural touchstone after landing as a cult hit. Blurring the lines between grounded reality, conspiracy theories, and the paranormal, the case of the week procedural is like no other. Led by one of the greatest unlikely duos in TV history, David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson's chemistry made fans fall in love with the show as the bickering FBI agents explored murders, vampires, folkloric myths, and more. Chris Carter's creation went on to become the longest running sci-fi show in TV history as well as one of the most influential genre series of all time. Blending monsters of the week with a decades-long overarching story, The X-Files has been engaging, infuriating, and inspiring audiences for 20 years and carving a path for all the weird shows that have come in its wake.

3. Breaking Bad

Vince Gilligan’s pitch for Breaking Bad was “Mr. Chips becomes Scarface," and that’s exactly what he and his fellow creatives delivered. The sordid saga of Walter White, a cancer-stricken high school chemistry teacher who turns into the meth kingpin Heisenberg, gripped audiences as his moral erosion violently and cruelly escalated over the course of five seasons. Walter corrupted or betrayed everyone close to him from his wife Skyler to former student Jesse Pinkman, who became his accomplice and eventual adversary. The writing and characterizations were rich and complex, and the stunning cast – particularly Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul as Walter and Jesse – gave career-defining performances. Heartbreaking, suspenseful, and shocking, Breaking Bad later spawned the sequel film El Camino and the prequel series Better Call Saul.

2. The Simpsons

It’s impossible to understate The Simpsons’ impact on the pop culture landscape. Running continuously since 1989, the series is now one of the longest-lived shows in TV history, and certainly among the most influential. Its classic episodes are quoted endlessly: one need only shout “Dental plan!” in a crowded room to be bombarded with calls of “Lisa needs braces!” The series has added entirely new words to the English language, like “D’oh” and “cromulent.” And much like how no musician has truly made it until they have a song parodied by “Weird Al” Yankovic, no celebrity is truly famous until they’ve guest-starred in an episode of The Simpsons. Sure, most fans bemoan the fact the show is a far cry from the glory days of the first eight seasons, but those eight seasons are about as good as animated sitcoms get.

1. The Wire

Starting HBO's acclaimed crime drama The Wire may feel like the equivalent of cracking into a tome like Tolstoy's War and Peace but it's some of the most rewarding TV "homework" you'll ever do. Created by former police reporter David Simon and former police detective/public school teacher Ed Burns, The Wire explores the complex lives of both cops and crooks, delving into the bureaucratic ins and outs surrounding the war on drugs, inner city life, poorly funded education systems, and bent politics in modern day Baltimore. Furthermore, the Wire's sprawling world pulsates with thrilling life, its massive, charismatic ensemble there to aid in the story's daring, zig-zagging format of switching focus season to season (we're especially looking at you Season 2!). Simply put, The Wire is one of the grandest zero-sum saga's you'll ever experience.

What are your favorite shows? Let's discuss in the comments!

Hispanic Heritage Month is here, and what better way to kick off the season than to look back at some of the most iconic Hispanic video game characters? From heroic protagonists such as Spider-Man’s Miles Morales to unforgettable side players like Jackie Welles of Cyberpunk 2077 and villainous favorites like Sombra from Overwatch, there's no shortage of excellent Hispanic characters in gaming.

Hispanic representation in video games has gone from sidekicks and villains to leading heroes and scene-stealing, beloved icons. Here are some of our favorites...

Carlos Oliveira (Resident Evil 3: Nemesis)

While Carlos may share the spotlight with series protagonist Jill Valentine in Resident Evil 3: Nemesis and its subsequent remake in 2020, he’s only been in one game since (three if you count The Umbrella Chronicles). His heroic demeanor, tragic backstory as a child soldier, and snazzy haircut make him not only one of the standout characters in the series, but also one of the most memorable heroes in a franchise full of iconic protagonists and villains. Here’s hoping we see Carlos again sometime…

King (Tekken)

It takes a lot to stand out in a series full of characters that are both memorable and downright unique. King is a luchador who, unlike a typical Mexican wrestler, swaps a traditional luchador mask for a jaguar mask and in some iterations of the Tekken series has a seriously fashion-forward sense of style. While King’s look may be goofy in a series full of big, goofy and eccentric characters, he’s based on two real-life masked wrestlers: Japanese legend Satoru Sayama a.k.a. Tiger Mask and Fray Tormenta, a Catholic priest who took a side job as a luchador in order to raise money for his orphanage. While King doesn't speak much in the series outside of the occasional growl — which is fine because everybody in Tekken is a bit of a weirdo — his character is a love letter to lucha libre. That’s made King not only one of the most instantly recognizable and iconic characters in Tekken, but in fighting games as a whole.

Reyna (Valorant)

Reyna is not only an instantly recognizable character in Valorant, but also one of the most popular characters in the game according to player data and community interest. While the Mexican native sports a similar color palette to Sombra from Overwatch, that’s where their similarities end. Reyna’s abilities and play-style are really what makes her pop in Riot’s shooter due to her steep but rewarding learning curve and her overall fascinating character. While she may not be the most uniquely designed female in a genre full of diverse and fun characters, Reyna’s popularity amongst players has made her not only a positive Hispanic character, but a female gaming icon as well.

Rico Rodriguez (Just Cause)

What would a list of memorable and iconic Hispanic video game characters be without the wingsuit-flying, grapple hook-using, destructive force that is Rico Rodriguez from the Just Cause series? The Mexican-born CIA super-soldier turned sworn enemy of gravity and physics is an easy entry into this list due to him being the embodiment of a tough but likable action hero who is both masculine and also relatable. If you want to experience a fun sandbox of things blowing up, and a cool and likable character, then Rico is your man.

Sombra (Overwatch)

Sombra, a.k.a. Olivia Colomar, is one of Overwatch’s antagonists and a member of the terrorist organization Talon. While she might be associated with the “bad guys” in Overwatch’s story, she’s far from your typical mustache-twirling, evil super-villain. Sombra’s story makes her more or less a rebel without a cause rather than someone who is just bad for the sake of Overwatch’s need for villains. The Mexican orphan who became a super hacker is also popular with players due to her ability to swiftly and stealthily disable enemy teams and dish out a decent amount of DPS with her trademark SMGs. With her trademark look, engaging backstory, and popular play-style, Sombra is an excellent Hispanic representation in a game full of diverse and larger-than-life characters.

Jackie Welles (Cyberpunk 2077)

With Night City based on a dystopian amalgamation of Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco, it’s not surprising to see a heavy Chicano influence on the city, its people, and its culture. From the stylish but violent Valentinos gang to its Latino radio station and locations like El Coyote Cojo, it's not hard to see why a character like Jackie Welles works so well in this distinctly Latino metropolis. From the game’s first real trailer to the end of its first act, Jackie is a prominent part of V’s story and is an excellent example of how video games can create impactful characters that are deeply rooted in their culture without coming off stereotypical and disingenuous. From Jackie’s casual blend of Spanish and English when talking to V, to his interest in the spiritual and supernatural “big brother” arc, it's easy to see why this gun for hire is such an important character in a world full of vibrant and unforgettable players.

Miles Morales (Spider-Man)

What else can be said about Spider-Man that hasn't been said a million times already? While Miles Morales has only recently become as well known as Peter Parker, he’s become a mainstay in Marvel’s roster of superheroes and stars in one of PS5’s best games. Miles is the definition of what it means to be an iconic and excellent representation of a Hispanic character; from his carefree and excited attitude to his unforgettable black Spidey suit to his unique set of powers, he is his own Spider-Man to be sure. The Afro-Latino of Puerto Rican descent superhero has not only become one of the most important superheroes of late, but also one of the most iconic heroes in video games with his co-starring role in the highly anticipated Marvel’s Spider-Man 2.

Those were seven iconic Hispanic characters in video games. Did we miss any of your favorites? Let us know in the comments below, and for everything else Hispanic Heritage Month, keep it locked to IGN.

This week’s explosive Xbox leak set the Elder Scrolls community into overdrive with the revelation that Bethesda may be working on an official Oblivion remaster.

Documents accidentally published as part of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) versus Microsoft trial over the buyout of Activision Blizzard include a chart put together in July 2020 ahead of Microsoft’s March 2021 purchase of Bethesda parent company ZeniMax Media. This chart contains a Bethesda release schedule, which is now over three years old.

Here’s the list:

Financial year 2022:

• Oblivion Remaster
• Indiana Jones game

Financial year 2023

• Doom Year Zero and DLC
• Project Kestrel
• Project Platinum

Financial year 2024

• The Elder Scrolls 6
• Project Kestrel: Expansion
• Licensed IP Game
• Fallout 3 Remaster
• Ghostwire: Tokyo Sequel
• Dishonored 3
• DOOM Year Zero DLC

The release timings are obviously out of date, but word of an Oblivion remaster was enough to cause fans to imagine what an updated version of the much-loved 2006 role-playing game would look like.

For the modders behind the ambitious Skyblivion project, however, the potential existence of an official Oblivion remaster could spell trouble. Skyblivion is a fan effort to remake Bethesda’s Oblivion in The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim engine, and has been in development in various forms since 2012. Over 50 volunteers currently make up the development team at the TESRenewal modding group.

Speaking to IGN in an exclusive interview, Rebelzize, lead developer of Skyblivion, seemed unconcerned by the reports, and vowed to release Skyblivion come what may.

“With the release in sight nothing can stop us / me from seeing this through and finally rewarding that amazing support by letting people experience the game we have collectively poured years of our lives into,” Rebelzize said.

Perhaps surprisingly, Rebelzize said it would be a good thing if Bethesda plans to release an Oblivion remaster. “Whether these rumors are true or not having Oblivion or any other older Bethesda title getting a remaster in my eyes would be good news for everyone,” Rebelzize insisted.

“Getting these old games to run properly on new hardware simply allows more people to experience these fantastic titles for themselves which can only be a good thing as they are some of the greatest western RPGs of their time.”

Rebelzize said “remasters and remakes are two completely different beasts at the end of the day”, and pointed out differences between the Skyblivion project and the potential Oblivion remaster. Remasters, Rebelzize said, “are the exact same games from way back but usually with a touch of paint like higher res textures, modern features like widescreen monitors support, controller support, maybe ray tracing and the like." Remakes, according to Rebelzize, “are creative takes on the original."

“With Skyblivion for instance our goal has been to make Oblivion the way we imagine it looking should it come out today,” Rebelzize continued. “Should a real Oblivion remaster be in the works I hope that it makes more people excited about seeing what our interpretation of that story and setting would look like.”

While Bethesda has a history of embracing the modding community, and indeed has benefitted greatly from the continued good work modders do to keep its games alive long after launch, there is now talk of the dreaded cease and desist from Bethesda’s lawyers.

Rebelzize, again, is unconcerned. “About the cease and desist, I can confidently say no,” Rebelzize said. “We have been in touch with Bethesda throughout the years and they know exactly what we are doing and more importantly how to get in touch with me should they have any concerns (they even got my home address).

“On top of that we recently spoke with them about our project which they turned into a featured article for on their official website. All of this makes me confident that Bethesda is still the mod loving and support developer they always have been and will continue to nurture this community, especially now that Starfield is out with nearly limited modding potential (as soon as they release the modding tools).”

Skyblivion is on track to launch in 2025, but still needs volunteers to help it over the finish line. If an official Oblivion remaster is in the works, which will come out first?

Bethesda is yet to comment on the leaks, but Xbox boss Phil Spencer has insisted the details are out of date.

"We've seen the conversation around old emails and documents," Spencer said. "It is hard to see our team's work shared in this way because so much has changed and there's so much to be excited about right now, and in the future. We will share the real plans when we are ready."

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Hideo Kojima isn't shy about his love for movies. The creator behind games like Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding even wanted to make movies before becoming a game developer, and his games often pay homage to some of his favorites. Even Snake, the main character of the Metal Gear Franchise, is named after Escape from New York's protagonist, Snake Plissken. He famously goes out of his way to inject cinematic sensibilities into his works and loves working with big-name actors. The man just loves movies.

Criterion, the organization behind the Criterion Collection, invited Hideo Kojima to do a video in its 'Closet Picks' series on its YouTube channel. The series is dedicated to highlighting notable voices in creative industries where a selected luminary picks their favorites from the "Criterion Closet," which is exactly what it sounds like; a closet containing physical copies of each film in the Criterion Collection.

In the video, Kojima looks like a kid in a candy store. "It's like being in heaven," he says, before bemoaning the lack of movies from the '50s and '60s on streaming services. He goes on to discuss how he usually buys physical copies of his favorites from that time through Criterion because it's the only place he can find physical prints of some of his favorite classics.

Here are Kojima's picks:

High and Low

Before picking High and Low (1963), Kojima introduced this police procedural-meets-domestic-drama as his favorite among director Akira Kurosawa's other, more popular works like Seven Samurai and Yojimbo. The Death Stranding director said, "I love High and Low the most. I was so shocked when I saw this, so I'd love for you to watch it."

Late Spring

"Now, where there's Akira Kurosawa, there's Yasujiro Ozu." Kojima introduced Yasujiro Ozu alongside his more globally known counterpart. His first pick, Late Spring, is a story about a widower and his daughter set in postwar Japan.

Tokyo Twillight

The second picture from Yasujiro Ozu to go into Kojima's bag is an obscure selection that's part of a posthumous anthology of Ozu's films. He mentions its different tone from other Ozu films, "Ozu films are usually very light, but this one is really dark. I really like that about this film so I highly recommend it."

Ugetsu

Kojima was very visibly happy to be in good company with this one. Martin Scorsese helped to restore Kenji Mizoguchi's 1953 classic about the ravages of war. "This scared me as a kid," he says laughing into the camera, "It's got ghosts in it. It's a black-and-white film, but it's a beautiful film."

Kwaidan

He said, "They have my favorite. By Masaki Kobayashi. Kwaidan." This series of stylized, artsy ghost stories from 1965 also scared Kojima as a kid, and are based on stories from Japanese folklore.

Harakiri

Another Kobayashi joint, Kojima lauds this influential, award winning samurai flick before diving into its influence on the Spaghetti Westerns that started popping up later on in the 1960s.

Jigoku

Another horror film, this time by Nobuo Nakagawa, Jigoku (also known as Hell or the Sinners of Hell) puts a student through–well–Hell. The Metal Gear creator talked about how another of Nakagawa's horror films, The Ghost of Yotsuya, led him to finding the much more surreal Jigoku.

Onibaba

"Again, I watched this at night as a kid and it shocked me," he said, before he recalled discussing Kaneto Shindo's folk-horror set in medieval Japan with Guillermo Del Toro when they met for the first time. He added, "He loves this film as well. There's a monster called Onibaba in Pacific Rim."

Woman in the Dunes

Kojima got discovered Hiroshi Teshigahara's 1960 art-house darling after reading Kobo Abe's book (also called Woman in the Dunes).

If you'd like to watch the full video–and watch Kojima light up as he talks about some of his favorite Japanese movies–check it out on Criterion's YouTube channel.

Even though Terraria developer Re-Logic mostly doesn’t use Unity, it’s made a strong statement of condemnation in regards to the engine’s recently announced, controversial install fee policy – and it’s putting its money where its mouth is.

In a statement on X/Twitter today, which you can read in full below, Re-Logic said that the team “has been watching the recent events surrounding Unity with both interest and sadness."

pic.twitter.com/ZqzGMTui0f

— Terraria🌳 (@Terraria_Logic) September 19, 2023

“The loss of a formerly leading and user-friendly game engine to the darker forces that negatively impact so much of the gaming industry has left us dismayed to put it mildly,” it continued. “While we do not personally use Unity (outside of a few elements on our console/mobile platforms), we feel like we cannot sit idly by as these predatory moves are made against studios everywhere."

Re-Logic went on to say they “unequivocally condemn and reject the recent TOS/fee changes proposed by Unity and the underhanded way they were rolled out,” in a “flippant manner” that disregarded the trust of publishers, studios, and gamers alike.

Adding that they “do not feel a simple public statement is sufficient,” they then promised to donate $100,000 each to game engines Godot and FNA, in addition to $1,000/month moving forward, with the condition that “they remain good people and keep doing all that they can to make these engines powerful and approachable for developers everywhere.”

Unity garnered near industry-wide backlash when it announced the new policy, dubbed the Unity Runtime Fee, last week. Per the policy, which would go into effect on Jan. 1, 2024, Unity would charge $0.20 per install for any game with more than 200,000 installs. This spawned both confusion and derision among developers and gamers alike, and Unity’s attempts to clarify the policy did little to help.

Over the weekend, however, Unity apologized for the “confusion and angst” the announcement of the policy caused, and promised that it “will be making changes” to it in the coming days. While the engine still hasn’t announced said changes, Bloomberg reported yesterday that it's considering capping fees to 4% of a game's revenue for customers making over $1 million, among other tweaks.

Alex Stedman is a Senior News Editor with IGN, overseeing entertainment reporting. When she's not writing or editing, you can find her reading fantasy novels or playing Dungeons & Dragons.

This week, several unredacted, highly confidential documents from Microsoft began appearing online. These documents were part of Microsoft's legal case against the U.S. regulator, the Federal Trade Commission. The case was argued back in June, with a verdict reached in July, ruling in favor of Microsoft.

The documents in question have revealed highly sensitive information regarding Microsoft's gaming arm Xbox, where its hardware roadmap is in the coming years, and other game developers it has its eye on acquiring. To dive in deeper, check out our breakdown below of all the news and reveals from the latest leaked documents.

The Elder Scrolls 6 Is an Xbox Console Exclusive

The Elder Scrolls 6, the next major installment in Bethesda's fantasy RPG series, entered the early stages of development late last month, but outside of that and a teaser trailer revealed back at E3 2018, news on this highly anticipated action RPG has been seldom.

While Xbox boss Phil Spencer said a PlayStation version of The Elder Scrolls 6 was still up in the air, during the trial, this new document recently spotted by Axios reporter Stephen Totilo reveals that The Elder Scrolls 6 is not only skipping PlayStation platforms but could release as early as 2026.

It should not be entirely surprising, however, that The Elder Scrolls 6 will remain a console exclusive on the Xbox Series X/S. With Microsoft acquiring Bethesda's parent company ZeniMax Media a few years ago, console exclusivity for future ZeniMax titles, both new and existing, felt like a given.

Activision Was Briefed on Switch Successor Late Last Year

In recent weeks, multiple reports have surfaced that Nintendo is working on a successor to the Switch. And thanks to emails published yesterday, this discussion continues to get more fuel.

The emails reveal that Nintendo briefed Activision on a next-generation console in December 2022. While heavily redacted, one email revealed preparations for a meeting between Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa and several Activision executives, including CEO Bobby Kotick. A note from Kotick also read aloud during the trial was visible in one of the emails, noting that the next-generation Nintendo console offers performance more aligned with the PS4 and Xbox One.

Microsoft Is Planning to Release Updated Xbox Series X and S Models Next Year

Despite Phil Spencer saying multiple times that there is no need for a mid-generation refresh of its Xbox Series game consoles, leaked court documents show that Microsoft is planning to launch hardware refreshes for both the Xbox Series X and S next year.

The new Xbox Series X, codenamed Brooklin, is more compact than the original mode, and like the Series S, it lacks a disc drive. The document also reveals that this console will feature 2TB of storage and 16GB of RAM and will come in 100% recyclable packaging. The updated Series S, codenamed Ellewood, will include 10GB of RAM. Pricing will remain the same as its predecessors, according to Xbox.

The document notes that both consoles will be announced concurrently next summer, with Ellewood releasing in August 2024 and Brooklin releasing in October 2024. Xbox explained placing a two-month release gap between the consoles in order to give Ellewood a "moment" to shine before Brooklin becomes the more sought-after console ahead of the holiday 2024 season.

Fallout 3 and The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Are Getting Remastered

One of the many documents leaked online this week included a three-year-old document for Betheda's release schedule prior to Microsoft's acquisition of ZeniMax Media in 2021. The document included some unannounced games, most notably remasters for The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion and Fallout 3.

Other information revealed in this document included the fact that Starfield was forecasted to generate $900 million in revenue, though again, this information is likely dated due to the document being published before Microsoft closed its acquisiton of Bethesda's parent company.

Xbox Is Planning to Release a Next-Gen Xbox Console in 2028

Mid-generation console refreshes for the Xbox Series X/S launching next year are not the only hardware ambitions Microsoft has, as the tech giant is planning to launch a next-generation Xbox console in 2028.

One document released mentions this new Xbox system will be a "next generation hybrid game platform," with development kits slated to launch in 2027. More interestingly, the document you can view above mentions a "thin OS" for a sub $99 "consumer or handheld devices," implying that Microsoft may release a handheld device dedicated to cloud games.

Previous discussions of Microsoft kicking off the tenth generation of game systems surfaced during the trial, where the tech giant anticipates the successor will release in 2028.

Phil Spencer Really Wants Microsoft to Buy Nintendo

During the trial, it was revealed that Microsoft had its eyes on 100 developers Microsoft considered acquiring at one point before narrowing it down to eight studios, including Sega, Square Enix, and Zynga. However, there's another studio Xbox was eyeing: Nintendo.

An email from August 2020 revealed that Spencer was enthusiastic about acquiring the studio behind beloved video game franchises such as Mario and The Legend of Zelda. Spencer noted in the email that the acquisition "would be a career moment" if it happened. The email also revealed that Spencer was interested in acquiring Valve and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, the latter of which would mean Xbox would own developers such as NetherRealm and Rocksteady.

New Xbox Hardware, Including a Direct-to-Cloud Wireless Controller

The leaks also revealed that Microsoft is working on additional gaming hardware beyond that of new consoles. A slideshow from May 2022 shows basic concepts for a few devices, such as a one-hand controller and a mobile controller akin to the Backbone or Razer Kishi. An additional slide in the same document reveals a new game controller currently in the works under the codename Sebile which, according to Xbox, will feature direct-to-cloud connectivity.

Phil Spencer's Honest Opinion of the PS5 Reveal

After Sony revealed the technical specifications of the PS5 in March 2020, Spencer wrote an email to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and CFO Amy Hood. After half a day of absorbing the information Sony disclosed for its console, Spencer was enthusiastic about what the Xbox Series X and S were capable of, writing that Microsoft has "a better product than Sony has, not just on hardware but equally important on the software platform and services on top of the hardware."

While the first few years for Xbox's ninth-gen consoles paint a different picture, this email was sent out in 2020 before this current generation of hardware was released. Not to mention, during the trial, Microsoft admitted in a separate document that its gaming arm has "lost the console wars."

An Email Chain Shows Microsoft Scrambling to Fill "Huge Gap Hole" in Its 2022 Game Lineup

In May 2022, an email chain between senior Xbox executives, including Spencer, Matt Booty, and Sarah Bond, revealed how Microsoft was scrambling to find games as the company had a huge hole in its lineup last year.

Games originally slated to release in 2022, including Starfield, Redfall, and Stalker 2, all being delayed were mentioned in the email. "This is really a disaster situation for us given all we've invested in content across studios at our GP content fund. We need to learn from this and build a plan forward," Spencer said in the email chain before issuing a call to action from the team to ink third-party deals to circumvent the gap.

Other interesting tidbits include Microsoft's comment on Baldur's Gate 3, described as a "second-run Stadia PC RPG," and Spencer's suggestion that Microsoft go after FromSoftware's Dark Souls series and add it to the Game Pass library.

Red Dead Redemption 2 Might Get a Next-Gen Update

In the same email chain from May 2022, a list of potential day-and-date Game Pass titles mentioned Red Dead Redemption 2 "D&D for gen9" indicating that Microsoft expected Rockstar Games' critically acclaimned 2018 western game would release on ninth-generation consoles sometime during the second quarter of its 2022 fiancial year (October to December 2022 for context).

The FTC Blames Microsoft for the Leaks

There is no doubt that these are some of the worst leaks in Xbox history. With all the extremely sensitive information made publicly available, the question remains: "Who did it?" According to the Federal Trade Commission, Microsoft is to blame for the court document leaks.

"The FTC was not responsible for uploading Microsoft's plans for its games and consoles to the court website," said Douglas Farrar, the Director of the Office of Public Affairs at the FTC, in a post on X (formerly Twitter).

The FTC was not responsible for uploading Microsoft's plans for its games and consoles to the court website. https://t.co/MspoQN1exL

— Douglas Farrar (@DouglasLFarrar) September 19, 2023

Taylor is a Reporter at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.

Microsoft documents have leaked a number of unannounced Bethesda games, including an Oblivion remaster.

The documents, apparently accidentally published as part of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) versus Microsoft trial over the buyout of Activision Blizzard, include a chart put together in July 2020 ahead of Microsoft’s March 2021 purchase of Bethesda parent company ZeniMax Media.

As such, the release timings are obviously out of date (Starfield was heavily delayed, for example, and MachineGames’ Indiana Jones game has yet to come out), and some of the unannounced games included here may have been canceled. But what we do have is a Bethesda release schedule accurate as of three years ago. Here’s the list:

Financial year 2022:

• Oblivion Remaster
• Indiana Jones game

Financial year 2023

• Doom Year Zero and DLC
• Project Kestrel
• Project Platinum

Financial year 2024

• The Elder Scrolls 6
• Project Kestrel: Expansion
• Licensed IP Game
• Fallout 3 Remaster
• Ghostwire: Tokyo Sequel
• Dishonored 3
• DOOM Year Zero DLC

Of note: ZeniMax Media’s financial year aligns with the calendar year, so ends December 31.

We also have revenue forecast by title. Starfield is down to generate $900 million in revenue, for example, although again, this forecast is out of date. The Elder Scrolls 6 is listed as generating a projected $1 billion in the financial year it comes out. This week it emerged The Elder Scrolls 6 is set to skip PlayStation 5 and launch on Xbox and PC only. It is not expected to launch until 2026 at the earliest.

Even though this document is now over three years old, it represents a devastating leak for Bethesda and an embarrassing gaffe for Microsoft, which has also seen a damaging leak of its own reveal its plans for a mid-generation Xbox console refresh. IGN has asked Bethesda for comment.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Following a brief tease earlier this year, we finally have a better look and a release date for Helldivers 2 courtesy of today's State of Play. It's coming out on PS5 and PC on Feb. 8, 2024.

Helldivers 2 was first announced in May as a sequel to top-down shooter Helldivers, and is planned for release on PS5 and PC. IGN gave the original game a 9/10, saying it "isn’t the prettiest game you can play on PS4, PS3 or Vita, but Helldivers is one of the most exhilarating" and that it was "brutal, focused, and mechanically rich." Developing...

Dark Horse continues to be one of the best outlets for Mass Effect fans hungry for new collectibles. IGN can exclusively reveal a set of three new figures inspired by the popular sc-fi gaming series.

Head down to the slideshow gallery below for a closer look at all three figures included in this new wave:

Featured in this line are figures of both Liara T’Soni and Garrus Vakarian, as well as a ship replica of the Reaper Sovereign. The latter marks the third time Dark Horse has tackled this iconic sentient villain, following the original 14-inch Reaper Sovereign statue and the scaled-down silver rerelease.

All three figures are actually non-posable statues cast in PVC. Liara and the reaper Sovereign measure 8 inches tall, while Garrus is 9 inches tall.

These figures are priced at $59.99 each and are expected to hit stores in February 2024. Until then, you can check out the other Mass Effect collectibles available in the IGN Store.

For more on the series, check out our review of every BioWare game and see where the Mass Effect games rank on our list of the top 100 games of all time.

Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.

The first three Tomb Raider games are being remastered for Nintendo Switch and they are set to arrive on February 14, 2024.

Tomb Raider I-III Remastered Starring Lara Croft will not only feature updated visuals, but they will include all of the expansions and secret levels for each game. Players will also be able toggle between the original polygon look of the games and the updated visuals whenever they desire.

The original Tomb Raider was released in 1996 and Tomb Raider 2 and 3 followed in 1997 and 1998, respectively. These games kicked off one of the most iconic franchises and characters in gaming history.

There have since been many new entries and spin-offs, and the series got a reboot trilogy beginning in 2013 that brought Lara Croft to modern consoles in a big way. While we don't yet know what Lara's next main adventure will be, it was teased in 2021 that the team at Crystal Dynamics was "working to unify" the timelines of Core Design's original games and its own reboot trilogy.

If you need some more Tomb Raider as you wait for this remastered collection, be sure to check out how you can play all the Tomb Raider games in chronological order and the PowerWash Simulator DLC that lets you clean Lara's mansion.

For more, be sure to check out our Nintendo Direct roundup for all the other Nintendo Switch games that were highlighted in September's big show.

Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and Jedi: Survivor director Stig Asmussen is leaving Electronic Arts, Bloomberg reports.

"After careful thought and consideration, Stig Asmussen has decided to leave Respawn to pursue other adventures, and we wish him the best of luck," an EA spokesperson said. "Veteran Respawn leaders will be stepping up to guide the team as they continue their work on Star Wars Jedi: Survivor."

Asmussen has been a director at Respawn Entertainment since 14. Before that he worked at Sony Interactive Entertainment, where he worked primarily on the God of War series, including helming God of War III. Asmussen has not disclosed his next destination.

The Star Wars: Jedi series has been a notable success story for EA, making it something of an exception to the company's overall experience with the franchise. When EA first revealed Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order back in 2018, the company was coming off Battlefront 2, which had proven hugely controversial owing to its implementation of loot boxes.

While criticized for its bugs, Fallen Order proved to be successful for EA, and Survivor further established the series. Asmussen has previously said that he wanted to make Star Wars: Jedi into a trilogy, making his sudden departure all the more surprising.

Asmussen's departure comes amid an uncertain period for EA, with Respawn among the studios being split into a separate EA Entertainment group. BioWare has been among the studios most affected by the change, having experienced harsh layoffs in the midst of Dragon Age: Dreadwolf's development.

Asmussen leaves EA on a high note, with our Jedi Survivor review praising his team's efforts.

"It’s a sequel that does virtually everything better than the original – which was already an exceptional Star Wars game," we wrote. "If Respawn makes one more like this it’ll complete the best Star Wars trilogy in 30 years, hands down."

Whether that happens is now an open question.

Thumbnail image credit: Barry Brecheisen/Getty Images

Kat Bailey is IGN's News Director as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.

The AndaSeat Kaiser 3 is the best gaming chair going, but there are plenty of solid alternatives, from ergonomic and racing-style seats to more sophisticated or budget-friendly chairs. Jump to detailed looks at the best gaming chairs, or check out our list below:

TL;DR – These are the Best Gaming Chairs:

• AndaSeat Kaiser 3 - Best Overall
• Corsair TC100 Relaxed - Best Budget Chair
• Secretlab Titan Evo 2022 Series - Best High-End Chair
• Vertagear SL5800 - Best Ergonomics
• DXRacer Air Pro Series - Best Mesh Chair
• Noblechairs Icon - Best Leather Chair
• Herman Miller Vantum - Best Fabric Chair
• Respawn 110 - Best Budget Fabric Chair
• Secretlab Titan Evo XL - Best Big and Tall Chair

The best gaming chairs deliver solid frames, quality materials, padded cushions, and lumbar support, ensuring you play in comfort. Unfortunately, the market’s full of duds, so we’ve done all the testing and research, bringing you the nine best seats – and click here to find them in the UK.

The Best Gaming Chairs

1. AndaSeat Kaiser 3

Best Gaming Chair

The AndaSeat Kaiser 3 is a perfect teammate whether you pull it up to your gaming desk or kick back while playing the PS5 or Xbox Series X on the big gaming TV. You’ll rest comfortably for hours on this racing-style chair’s wide, plush seat that loses those uncomfortable side bolsters, ensuring you can place your legs in whatever position you please. That seat, along with the tall backrest, is wrapped in either a durable PVC leather or soft fabric and sits on a sturdy frame ready to hold a range of gamers up to 260 pounds—an XL version supports up to 395 pounds.

Ergonomics were not forgotten on this throne, starting with the 4D armrests featuring magnetically interchangeable toppers, while inside the backrest, you’ll find easily adjustable lumbar support. A memory foam neck pillow even attaches to the headrest at different heights. When you want to kick it between games, the chair reclines down to 165°, and the seat base rocks, helping to get out some nervous energy. Finally, the mid-range price point takes this chair one notch above the others.

2. Corsair TC100 Relaxed Gaming Chair

Best Budget Gaming Chair

• See it on Corsair

Corsair isn’t new to the gaming chair game, and that knowledge extends to their wallet-friendly option, the TC100 Relaxed. This racing-style throne offers a robust steel frame and wide seat packed with plush padding to ensure your behind is comfortable during long playing sessions. The entire seat is then wrapped in a durable leatherette or soft fabric material with perforated sections for extra breathability to stay cool during intense play sessions.

Setting you back only $250, this budget gaming chair is great for those that splurged on one of the best gaming PC deals. Though it isn’t as feature-full as more expensive chairs, it has all the basics you need. 2D armrests and a gas lift with a wide range of height adjustments make for an ergonomic alignment with your desk. There is no built-in lumbar support. However, back and neck pillows come with it, while a deep recline lets you kick back between matches.

3. Secretlab Titan Evo 2022 Series

Best High-End Gaming Chair

Secretlab continues to wow us with the Titan series. It takes what we already loved about the series and continues to refine it further with the Titan Evo 2022 Series. A soft, spacious, and generously padded seat is still a staple, and the material options of leatherette or fabric hold up great over time. That's paired with a sturdy backrest containing a sneakily added adjustable lumbar support ensuring you maintain good posture and preventing back pain. Plus, you still get a deep recline that locks into place for better relaxation between heated gaming sessions.

Where the latest model changes things up is in the headrest and armrests. Secretlab has ditched straps for holding the neck pillow in place and instead opted for magnets. This makes for a stylish appearance and finer control over positioning. The tops of the 4D armrests are also held in place magnetically, so you’ll have an easy time taking them off if you want to swap them out for some of the alternate toppers Secretlab has available.

4. Vertagear SL5800

Best Ergonomic Gaming Chair

Ergonomics are the number one feature you will want in a chair, especially if you plan on spending a lot of time sitting. With that in mind, the VertaGear SL5800 offers the most adjustability in a gaming chair we’ve seen. It starts with a ContourMax lumbar support system that combines a layer of memory foam with four flexible panels that adjust to the shape of your back.

Meanwhile, you’re seated on a highly ventilated and plush VertaAir Seat. The bottom cushion is basically fitted with eight foam pucks with a host of air funnels to keep your bottom from getting hot while seated. Add in all the adjustability you get from the seat height, tilting backrest, and armrest, and you can seriously tune your setup for maximum comfort.

5. DXRacer Air Pro Series

Best Mesh Gaming Chair

If you're looking for the best possible way to stay cool, then mesh is the way to go. It's the most breathable fabric out there making these chairs popular in offices, as comfort is essential when spending hours laboring at a desk. But, there's no reason you can't have the same comfort while you game, and DXRacer put this principle to practice with its Air Series, which features both a mesh back and seat with plenty of gaming chair flair.

The DXRacer Air Series’ mesh panels are made of a highly resilient netting material that stands up to everyday wear and tears. Most mesh chairs feel like sitting on a hard sheet of fabric, but this one replicates the cushy feeling of sitting in a foam chair by using suspension springs. On top of that, the Air Series ensures you have proper posture while sitting with built-in, adjustable lumbar support, a lumbar pillow, and a memory foam headrest. Plus, with adjustable 4D armrests and tilt, you're bound to find a position that's best suited for you.

6. Noblechairs Icon

Best Leather Gaming Chair

• See it on noblechairs

Leather often comes at a premium, but it is super durable and adds a bit of sophistication to your setup. The noblechairs Icon is one of the few gaming chairs that use real, genuine leather, rather than a typical PU and other synthetic leather option. Inside the leather-wrapped seat is a healthy dose of cold foam for a soft, comfy place to rest your behind for extended gaming sessions. The subdued design also doesn't scream "gaming chair," so it fits in just as well in a work environment as in a gaming one.

On top of the noblechairs Icon premium leather design, it is also highly adjustable. The seat can be raised or lowered nearly 4-inches in height, giving you plenty of room to get a proper position at your desk. The 4D armrests make it that much easier to find an ideal ergonomic setup. Plus, when you want to kick back, the chair can recline back to 135 degrees, and the base provides a bit of rocking range as well. Though the design doesn’t insist on them, the Icon includes a lumbar cushion and neck pillow for those who want a little extra support.

7. Herman Miller Vantum

Best Fabric Gaming Chair

Herman Miller is known for their innovative, high-quality office furniture, and in collaboration with Logitech G, they’re bringing that expertise to gaming chairs. The Vantum loses the traditional racing chair aesthetic, opting for a more sculpted, sleek design that’ll fit perfectly pulled up to a gaming or work setup. A plush and durable polyester fabric wraps around the seat, delivering a more breathable feel than leather that’s also softer on bare legs than mesh. However, this chair isn’t exclusively fabric, as a fine mesh suspension backrest ensures you don’t overheat during intense action.

The material used in Herman Miller’s Vantum may feel fantastic, but its ergonomic build places it a notch above most gaming chairs. You get both adjustable lumbar support and a passively adaptive thoracic support pad to ensure you’re comfortable and maintain great posture. Also, a unique “active, forward-leaning alignment” feature pushes you slightly forward in the seat, helping with focus and reaction time, though you can always adjust the tilt and tension for a more relaxed position.

8. Respawn 110

Best Budget Fabric Gaming Chair

A good chunk of gaming chairs feature PU leather or pleather for the haters, but if you’re gaming in shorts or a tank top, it doesn’t always feel great on the skin, especially when the inevitable sweat starts to happen. To avoid that sticky situation, you can snag a fabric option, like the Respawn 110, while still staying on budget. You’ll welcome this racing-style chair’s soft, breathable, and surprisingly durable material that’s ready for even your longest gaming sessions.

Respawn didn’t skimp on features, starting with its large, inviting seat toting built-in lumbar support and headrest, while a sturdy frame and piston can hold 275 pounds, so bigger gamers need not shy away. If you want to kick back after each match, you get a deep 135-degree recline, and the tilt tension is adjustable for a bit of rocking action. Unfortunately, the armrests don’t move, but at least it’s easy enough to adjust the seat height to get ergonomic positioning at your gaming desk.

9. Secretlab Titan Evo XL

Best Big and Tall Gaming Chair

The Secretlab Titan Evo 2022 is already on this guide, but we’re happy to see it in an XL model, making it the best big and tall gaming chair. It features a slightly larger form, so you get a wide seat at 19.3 inches, while the bolsters on either side add to that total width. Secretlab also uses a Class 4 lift that combines with the rest of its sturdy structure to support a hefty 395-pound max load.

The Secretlab Titan Evo XL 2022 Series doesn’t forget taller gamers, as it’s ready for individuals ranging from 5-foot-11 to 6-foot-9 with its high back. Of course, you still get all those ergonomic luxuries like integrated adjustable lumbar support, a magnetic neck pillow, and magnetic 4D armrests that you can swap out to get your optimal arm position. It doesn’t stop there, as your behind rests in a well-cushioned memory foam seat with cooling gel, and the base of the chair can even tilt as you recline, letting you comfortably sink back without sliding out in between matches on your gaming PC.

Best Gaming Chairs in the UK

When it comes to gaming chairs in the UK, the Razer Enki and Secretlab Titan Evo 2022 are among the best options available. The Razer Enki offers a comfortable and customizable seating experience, with adjustable armrests and lumbar support. Its sleek design and premium materials make it a popular choice among gamers. The Secretlab Titan Evo 2022 is another top contender, with its durable construction and ergonomic features like adjustable lumbar support and a multi-tilt mechanism. Its attention to detail and customizable options make it a favorite among serious gamers looking for a high-end chair that can keep up with their long gaming sessions. Ultimately, the best gaming chair for you will depend on your personal preferences and budget.

Gaming Chair FAQ

How much is a gaming chair?

Yes, while you can buy a gaming chair for $79 or less, doing so is just asking for pain. Something cheap is usually nothing more than a cheap plastic frame with some thin fabric or pleather upholstery on top.

You can get a quality gaming chair for as little as $200 and that’s the absolute bottom floor of affordability we’d go for. Spending $300 or more will get you access to better options like the Razer Enki X and $319 Respawn Specter. If your budget allows you to soar a bit higher, more expensive gaming chairs start to come with built-in lumbar support, cooling gel layers, and more adjustable ergonomics.

How should you sit in a gaming chair?

Between the tall back and support pillows, you should almost feel like you're being forced to sit up straight. Making them feel almost a little challenging and uncomfortable to sit in. That might sound counterintuitive to how chairs are supposed to be just comfortable, but it'll help save you from a lifetime of lower back pain and developing other gaming-related health complications like repetitive strain injury.

Alternatively, most gaming chairs come with a lever like you’re ejecting out of a jet fighter. This is used to recline all the way back so you can lie on the gaming chair like it’s a mini bed.

Should you get a gaming chair or an office chair?

One of the biggest differences between gaming chairs vs office chairs is the seats with gaming in mind often come toting a long back and a headrest to better support your back and shoulders than a short office chair. Extra lumbar and neck pillows on gaming chairs help keep you sitting straighter, while office chairs often offer more effective lumbar support and better seat adjustability. However, gaming chairs usually deliver a deeper recline for better relaxation.

Of course, aesthetics set the two apart, as gaming chairs often feature distinct racing-style seats and come in a variety of colors with big logos, while office chairs keep it much more subdued.

How do you make a gaming chair more comfortable?

No matter which type of gaming chair you choose, one thing you'll definitely want is good, adjustable ergonomics. When we say that we mean a chair with customizable lumbar support, adjustable armrests, levers to tilt and height, and a movable headrest. For the most part, all the gaming chairs on this list include at least one to all the points of adjustability mentioned and you'll want to take advantage of them.

Kevin Lee is IGN's Hardware and Roundups Editor. Follow him on Twitter @baggingspam.

Image Credit: Annalee Tsujino is a multi disciplinary designer and illustrator. Check them out on Instagram @antsu_illustrations.

Starfield has overtaken The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim's all-time concurrent players record on Steam in its first weekend available after full launch.

Data from SteamDB shows Starfield sitting in 27th place in Steam's all-time list, while Skyrim is now in 31st. Starfield hit a peak of 330,723 concurrent players on September 10, while Skyrim's record peaked 12 years ago at 287,411. The space epic fell short of developer Bethesda's previous release Fallout 4, however, which sits in 16th place overall with 472,962.

While it's perhaps surprising to some that Starfield hasn't achieved a higher spot on the list, having topped six million players overall with one million concurrents on launch day, its inclusion on Xbox Game Pass has likely largely convoluted its numbers.

Though it was arguably the most anticipated game in recent memory, Starfield is available at no extra cost to those with Game Pass, meaning a large number of players who'd usually buy it on Steam likely opted for the subscription service version.

That's not stopped Starfield from performing well, of course, as overtaking Skyrim is a significant milestone. It also topped the UK boxed chart according to GI.biz head Christopher Bing on X. Its appearance on Game Pass will likely stop Starfield from reaching Steam's top 10, however, which includes recent releases such as Baldur's Gate 3 and Hogwart's Legacy.

Plenty of wild and wacky stories are emerging from Starfield's launch too, such as Bethesda killing off all the poor labradors, players desperately trying to recreate the game on PlayStation, and what else but potatoes showing off the game's "mind blowing" physics.

In our 7/10 review, IGN said: "Starfield has a lot of forces working against it, but eventually the allure of its expansive roleplaying quests and respectable combat make its gravitational pull difficult to resist."

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.

Space Week is still happening over here at IGN, and today we're proud to present the winners of our best space game Face-Off! After thousands and thousands of 1v1 battles with matchups like No Man's Sky vs. the brand-new Starfield and Starcraft vs. Destiny 2, the ultimate space game has been chosen by you.

So, which game claimed the top spot for the best space game and will forever be immortalized in the stars above? Drumroll please...

We're IGN and Mass Effect 2 is your favorite space game on the Citadel! Yes, with an 89.3% win percentage, Mass Effect 2 and its incredible cast of characters, unforgettable suicide mission, and choices that carried over and mattered from the original have risen above the rest of the pack.

We couldn't agree more with this pick as we ranked Mass Effect 2 as the sixth-best game of all time, saying, "As Commander Shepard, I traveled the galaxy on the best recruitment trip I could have wished for, and experienced possibly one of the most heart-wrenching stories – but whether or not the game ends in tears is entirely up to you. As you head out for a suicide mission, you’ll meet some of the best-written characters that feel original and have the power to evoke true emotions."

In fact, all three Mass Effect games placed in the top five, with the original taking third place and Mass Effect 3, despite its controversial ending, following right behind at #4. The still-enjoyable Mass Effect Andromeda fell down to 25, and we hope more than hope that the next Mass Effect brings us back to the heights the original trilogy did.

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, which took home the top prize in our list of the 10 best Star Wars video games, placed second in this Face-Off with a win percentage of 84.8%. Its sequel, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II - The Sith Lords, took fifth place, and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order took spots six and seven, respectively.

Newcomer Starfield took eighth place and showed it's ready to fight against these all-time classics, even though its universe has yet to be fully explored.

Rounding out the top 10 were Star Wars: Battlefront II and No Man's Sky, and they helped make up a top 10 that featured five Star Wars games and three Mass Effect games.

On the other side of the galaxy, RymdResa placed last with a win percentage of 12.3%. Right behind RymdResa was Heat Signature, Duskers, Objects in Space, Avorian, NEBULOUS: Fleet Command, Starflight, Star Traders: Frontiers, Distant Worlds: Universe, and Take On Mars.

Many of these games are either very old or are smaller indie titles, and it's important to note that their placement shouldn't necessarily say very much about their quality as we chose these space games because we think they were worthy to battle! It's just tough when you have to take on juggernauts in more well-known franchises.

Are you wondering where you favorite space video game landed, like maybe Star Wars: Rogue Squadron? (It placed 16th!) For all the rankings, you can check out the full list of where all of the 92 space games that competed in this Face-Off ended up.

For more, check out our Starfield review and the rest of IGN's Space Week, including how Bethesda defined role-playing games, the best sci-fi movies ever made, our look at why there aren't more space RPGs, and what Starfield gets right about space travel.

Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.

Spanning over 16 titles, the Grand Theft Auto series has garnered quite a reputation during its time as one of gaming’s seminal franchises. No matter which entry you visit, you’ll find a sprawling open world filled with high-speed car chases, daring heists, intense gunfights and a huge metropolis to explore. But while carnage and police pursuits are largely Grand Theft Auto’s bread and butter, it’s not the only thing fans rely on Rockstar to provide.

Alongside a fully interactive sandbox, Grand Theft Auto games are lorded for their stories. Across over two decades of releases, the franchise has transformed into a crime saga like no other, telling the tales of an array of ambitious criminals completing seemingly impossible scores, intercepting seedy criminal underworlds and usurping feared crime lords. And as a result, the protagonists of these games have become iconic.

Whether it’s Niko’s silent reflections about the cycle of revenge or Trevor’s uncanny ability to wake up in random places butt naked, GTA’s roster of leading thieves and gangsters have struck a chord with fans, becoming synonymous with both the franchise and the video game space as a whole. So, let’s take a look at the best of the bunch. Below, we’ll rank Grand Theft Auto’s best protagonists, giving you a rundown of the franchise’s most notable playable characters ahead of GTA 6.

10. Vic Vance

A former soldier expelled from the ranks after being framed by his superior officer, shortly after we meet Vic Vance in Vice City Stories, he’s out on the streets with no job or home. Looking for work, he begins to use his skills as a soldier to take the criminal underworld of Vice City by storm, allying with his brother, Lance, and teaming with various crime families to build his empire.

As he does, Vic begins to grow into one of Vice City’s main players, learning to fight for fortune and ascend through the ranks of the metropolis’ various criminal families. A loyal friend and brother, Vic’s sense of morality and honor set him apart from other Grand Theft Auto protagonists. While he understands he has to enter the criminal underworld to survive on the streets of Vice City, he leans heavily on his values as a soldier, helping those around him and remaining faithful to his friends. It makes him a unique Grand Theft Auto protagonist, and one that cares more about doing what’s right than making a quick buck.

9. Luis Lopez

The main character of the Ballad of Gay Tony expansion, Luis Lopez is a former criminal turned bodyguard working for legendary night club owner, Gay Tony. Fiercely loyal and a family man at heart, Luis spends the majority of the Ballad of Gay Tony’s runtime attempting to stop loan sharks from tracking down Tony, who owes a large sum of money to the Ancelotti Crime Family.

Luis is much more than just a bodyguard to his eccentric boss, however, with the pair’s partnership turning into a close friendship. While Tony makes rash, impulsive decisions, Luis grounds his boss, becoming his voice of reason and a key advisor. Although Luis is often overshadowed by Tony’s high-energy persona, his steadfast friendship with his boss and love for his mother and sister make him an endearing lead and a worthy addition to the series’ host of playable characters.

8. Claude

The first protagonist of Grand Theft Auto’s 3D era, Claude may be entirely silent, but his lack of quips or conversation characterize him as an efficient, deadly killer who gets the job done. After his girlfriend, Catalina, leaves him for dead, Claude swears vengeance, teaming with various gangs to track down his former flame and get retribution.

The result is a protagonist that, while not oozing with charisma, has a slick demeanor with a simple goal that’s easy to get behind. Claude is, in many ways, single-mindedly enveloped by his need to get revenge, to the point where he’ll do anything and partner with anyone to track Catalina down. As much as a great performance or a hard-hitting backstory can make a protagonist easy to relate to, that characterisation alone is enough to make Claude one of the best characters in Grand Theft Auto’s roster.

7. Johnny Klebitz

The lead of GTA 4’s The Lost and Damned spin-off, Johnny Klebitz is one of Grand Theft Auto’s best side characters. Driven purely by his oath of brotherhood and loyalty to his gang, the Lost MC, Johnny finds himself in the center of a civil war between the gang’s members after the return of its leader, Billy Grey. Hellbent on recklessly driving the group to destruction, Johnny comes to blows with Billy, stepping up to help his brothers and keep the gang from implosion.

However, Johnny’s sense of unconditional loyalty eventually puts him back in the orbit of his troubled ex-girlfriend, Ashley. Hoping to help his former partner, Johnny’s left in various tricky situations, trying to keep the gang together while getting Ashley the help she so desperately needs. Stretching throughout Grand Theft Auto 4 and into Grand Theft Auto 5, Johnny’s side story is one of Grand Theft Auto’s most tragic, showcasing a deeply loyal leader attempting to hold together a sinking ship before it's inevitably submerged. His character is proof that GTA is just as good at telling mature, serious side stories as they are silly ones.

6. Franklin Clinton

A street-raised Los Santos repot man with a heart of gold, Franklin is a big fish in a small pond. With ambitions to make a name for himself, he finds himself in the tutelage of Michael De Santa, quickly becoming a career criminal who makes his fortune through everything from petty crime to bank robberies, assassinations and more.

Franklin acts as the more archetypal Grand Theft Auto lead during the events of Grand Theft Auto 5, but that by no means makes him a weaker character. With Michael and Trevor locked in a bitter feud, Franklin often finds himself trapped between both of his tutors, quickly learning that a life of crime comes with consequences. Not only that, but his quick rise to power in the city’s underworld leads to a compelling story about how wealth and influence don’t always give you what you want. In the end, Franklin is one of Grand Theft Auto’s best-written leads and an easy inclusion in the upper echelon of the franchise’s roster of protagonists.

5. Trevor Phillips

The most notorious of Grand Theft Auto 5’s three protagonists, Trevor Phillips is, to put it mildly, an ‘eccentric’ character. A former bank robber and member of Michael De Santa’s crew, Trevor has spent years living in the desert just outside of Los Santos, where he’s formed a small crime syndicate known as Trevor Phillips Enterprises. When we meet Trevor, he decides to head to Los Santos in search of Michael, who he learns faked his death to make a deal with the FIB.

In essence, Trevor is the embodiment of how Grand Theft Auto fans play each game. He’s loud, violent, prone to bursts of destructive rage and acts purely on impulsive instinct. Throughout GTA V’s campaign, his storyline veers from wacky to downright sadistic on a whim, whether he’s eradicating a biker gang because he feels like it or stealing an ambulance full of medicine to appease a hallucination of his mother. But through it all, there’s a strange sentimentality to Trevor. He’ll go out of his way to free an FIB torture victim because he sympathises with him and will move mountains to save his former friend, Brad, out of sheer loyalty.

It all creates one of Grand Theft Auto’s strangest but most intriguing characters, which is quite the achievement for a man that, at one point, can be seen trying to violently flush a dismembered foot down a toilet.

4. Michael De Santa

In a lot of ways, Michael De Santa experiences the standard Grand Theft Auto story in reverse. Living in a luxurious mansion in the Los Santos hills, Michael begins the story enjoying a lavish retirement, spending his days drinking expensive whiskey in a lounger next to his pool. However, after meeting Franklin, his life begins to unravel, reawakening the monster within as he robs banks, murders indiscriminately and quickly becomes a main player in the Los Santos crime scene.

As a result, Michael is one of Grand Theft Auto’s most unique protagonists to date. Whether it's having to deal with the whims of his spoiled children, appease the special agents threatening to revoke his witness protection deal or use his wealth of knowledge to expertly execute petty crimes, he’s a crook who escaped the criminal world unscathed and is desperate to revisit it. His storyline stands out as Grand Theft Auto 5’s absolute best, especially when taking into account his feud with Trevor and the secrets about his past he’s desperately trying to keep buried.

3. Tommy Vercetti

An old-school gangster through and through, Tommy Vercetti feels like he’s ripped straight from a Scorcese movie. He’s smart, ambitious and has no problem taking down anyone that gets in his way, regardless of how influential or important they are to Vice City’s crime syndicates. In a lot of ways, Vercetti is Rockstar’s take on Scarface’s Tony Montana, earning respect and his place atop the criminal underworld through his ruthless drive to become the most powerful man in Vice City.

Vercetti’s story begins after concluding a fifteen-year prison sentence in Liberty City, making his way to Vice City on the orders of his boss, Sonny Forelli. Sent to oversee a drug deal, Tommy’s life descends into chaos after the deal is ambushed and he’s tasked with reclaiming the money lost during his escape. As he tracks down the cash, we see Tommy’s desire to become more than an attack dog for the mafia, establishing himself with other local crime families and acquiring several businesses around Vice City.

Tommy is a hustler, and his fearless drive to reach the top of the pile makes him one of Grand Theft Auto’s most beloved protagonists. It also doesn’t hurt that he’s voiced by the late, great Ray Liotta, with the Goodfellas actor lending a touch of authenticity to Vercetti’s charming but ruthless persona.

2. Carl ‘CJ’ Johnson

Returning to the streets of Los Santos after his mother is killed in a drive-by shooting, CJ’s story is arguably one of Grand Theft Auto’s absolute best. A street-raised hustler and former member of the Grove Street Families, his story sees him rejoin his brother and attempt to take back the streets from a rival gang known as the Ballas, only to be betrayed and exiled from the city by his former friends.

CJ is not only one of the series’ more charismatic protagonists, but his backstory and motivations in GTA: San Andreas are among the most engaging in the series’ history. Leaving his family and the criminal underworld for good after the death of his younger brother five years prior, CJ enters the story as an outsider, forced to return to street shootouts and aiding corrupt cops to help his family and restore the reputation of his former gang.

Compared to the typical GTA protagonist looking for fortune and fame, CJ’s rise to the top of the Los Santos crime scene is about reputation and a fierce loyalty for his family, making him one of the series’ most likable leads.

1. Niko Bellic

Coming to Liberty City inspired by his cousin’s promise of a land of wealth and opportunity just to sleep on a couch in a tiny, rundown apartment, Niko Bellic is not only the most compelling take on the archetypical rags-to-riches Grand Theft Auto protagonist but the series’ best lead character. An Eastern European immigrant and ex-soldier, he’s haunted by the horrors of war and guided by his determination to seek revenge on those who wronged him by any means necessary.

Niko’s rise through Liberty City’s underworld in Grand Theft Auto 4 is easily the darkest and most morally probing adventure any of the series’ protagonists embark on, acting as a dissection of the American Dream and the constantly revolving cycle of violence. But this more mature story never turns Niko into an atypical, grizzled lead with a single-minded need for revenge. He’s loyal to a fault, witty and introspective, often reflecting on his past and doling out sage wisdom about the futility of violence and conflict.

In a lot of ways, Niko starts out with the insight and clarity most GTA protagonists earn as they conclude their story, and his journey stands as the most unique and gripping of the bunch as a result.

Callum Williams is a freelance media writer with years of experience as a game critic, news reporter, guides writer and features writer.

In late 2001, the dot-com crash struck ZeniMax, and a team of thirty-some developers in the company’s basement feared for their jobs. They were late delivering their new role-playing game, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, to Microsoft; their board of directors had begun having doubts about the whole videogame enterprise. People were pulling seven-day workweeks on something none of them were sure would ever see the light of day. Morale was in the toilet.

When project leader Todd Howard called an off-site meeting, mere months ahead of launch, most of his crew thought they were being laid off. In fact, it was to be the most important moment in the studio’s history. Howard had sent out emails to everyone on his team days earlier, asking them, “If you could have any title in life, what would it be?” In a dim-lit hotel conference room in Rockville, Maryland, he handed out a personalized business card to each Morrowind dev, complete with their chosen honorific, and gave a brief speech. It was a rallying call that saved the game and, according to those who were there, probably the entire company.

“It was a bad time,” Howard told me in 2019. “Morrowind was a very difficult crunch. There was this sense that if we don’t get the game done, and done well, we would be in trouble.” It had been six long years since the developer’s last big hit, 1996’s Daggerfall. “For me, it was kind of a no-fear moment: ‘Well, it can’t get any worse, right? We’re about to go out of business, and now we have a lifeline, so you better take advantage of it.’”

And so they reached for the stars. Morrowind became the first Elder Scrolls game to land on consoles, roughly six months into the life cycle of the original Xbox. It sold millions on Xbox alone, rivaled only by the likes of Halo, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, and Fable. Howard refers to that period as “the recreation of Bethesda.” Its story spans nearly four decades, from humble beginnings in sports games and movie tie-ins to blockbusters like Skyrim and Fallout 4. But so much of that journey would never have come to pass without Morrowind — and that fateful meeting they remember so vividly.

“Morrowind was kind of this galvanizing, make-or-break moment,” says Skyrim environment-art lead Noah Berry. “It was the crucible by which the modern Elder Scrolls, and the studio as a whole, evolved and was shaped.” Look at Bethesda’s single-player titles from Oblivion on, and you’ll find more or less the same formula Howard concocted for The Elder Scrolls III, a game that changed RPGs forever.

Elder Scrolls: Arena and The Introduction of Tamriel

Years earlier, in 1994, The Elder Scrolls: Arena became a cult success thanks to its playful spell-creation system and effectively infinite fantasy world. But some folks at Bethesda weren’t satisfied with the somewhat generic look of that first game, its limited number of memorable locations, or its derivative story, which began in a weekly Dungeons and Dragons campaign. For the sequel — originally called Mournhold and set in the province of Morrowind, where Arena’s story had ended — the devs had a new sense of vision for what their dungeon-crawling series could be. Its first-person 3D perspective led them to push for a greater level of detail, which came in the form of their new XnGine technology, as well as a more literary style of storytelling.

Arena had been a fairly standard D&D adventure, albeit one set in an original world called Tamriel, with nine large provinces. The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall would center around two of those regions, High Rock and Hammerfell, and take inspiration from sources like French literature and Vampire: The Masquerade, another tabletop game known for its gothic setting and rich mythology. Some of what Daggerfall’s designers wanted to achieve proved untenable at the time; the team didn’t manage to implement dragons the way they’d hoped, for example. But its procedural world-generation system was a landmark achievement, allowing for more than 15,000 unique locations. (For comparison’s sake, the original Diablo, released the following year, had 16 levels.) The sequel became a huge triumph for Bethesda, selling over 100,000 copies in just 48 hours.

After Daggerfall, the development arm of the company — eventually rechristened as Bethesda Game Studios, to differentiate it from the publishing division — would adopt a fairly different game-design philosophy, particularly under Todd Howard’s direction. And yet much of the studio’s history reflects the awesome ambition of those early Elder Scrolls games, including this year’s Starfield, which leverages procedural generation and boasts more than a thousand explorable planets.

As audiences and tech alike headed for a new millennium, the teams working on the Elder Scrolls series thought constantly about ways to make their next game better, and more like the dense, sprawling fantasy epic in their imaginations. A pair of spinoffs, Battlespire and Redguard, underperformed commercially, but Redguard in particular set a new standard for the Elder Scrolls’ world-building. The game’s print manual included The Pocket Guide to the Empire, an in-world lore bible containing references to gods, goddesses, a “Dragonborn,” and “the disappearance of the Dwarves,” along with an extensive history of the various peoples of Tamriel.

When lead designer Ken Rolston came aboard the project in 1996, Elder Scrolls III was meant to be set in a place called the Summerset Isles, home of the High Elves. But some people on the team, including concept artist Michael Kirkbride and writer Kurt Kuhlmann, were passionate about the volcanic island of Vvardenfell. So the idea for a game set in the land of the Elves, ruled by a Tribunal, was transplanted to Morrowind.

Noah Berry recalls seeing early documentation for The Elder Scrolls III that described a sequel encompassing the entire territory of Morrowind. “That was an initial plan, if not the initial plan,” he says. But eventually the scope of the game was whittled down to the island of Vvardenfell itself, and the surrounding areas were cut during the preproduction phase. With Rolston and Howard steering the project, the team sought to trade Daggerfall’s vastness and cookie-cutter environments for a more detailed and believable world — one with several thousand lines of voice-over.

“Morrowind was a healthy steering away from what Daggerfall had done,” says Berry. “We consciously pivoted to: ‘Let’s hand-build the world.’ And so Morrowind had very little to no procedural generation, if I remember correctly.” Part of the reasoning for this was the team’s love for immersive-sim games like Ultima Underworld and System Shock, which took advantage of the first-person perspective by giving players a greater degree of interactivity with objects in the world.

The Elder Scrolls III took a more kitchen-sink approach to game design, favoring density, character behavior, and artfully arranged “clutter” over scale alone. It’s an approach that’s stood the test of time, and helped define later Bethesda RPGs like Skyrim and Fallout 4. One of its greatest innovations, inspired by Ultima VII: The Black Gate, was “NPC scheduling” — the illusion that non-player characters throughout the game world live full, human lives, working and eating and sleeping at designated times. “We wanted it to feel like this simulated, detailed space that persisted and existed after you had shut your computer off at the end of the night,” Berry explains. “And one of the ways that came to life was this idea that NPCs were not just talking dispensers for quests, stuck in a static spot saying their lines over and over again. They were real entities doing their own thing as much as possible, as much as was allowed by the crudity of our pathfinding system and their ability to know where they were in the polygon soup.”

According to Fallout 4 lead producer Jeff Gardiner, it was Morrowind’s sequel, Oblivion, that really put these systems to the test. “When you do a simulated AI, they use a lot of CPU cycles, and that’s where you get a lot of limits in terms of creature density. Even frame rate is oftentimes affected by that,” he says. “But the designers at Bethesda are big proponents of making NPCs feel as real as they could within the technical limits of the time. When you play a lot of modern open-world games, they’re still very scripted. Over time, things have gotten a little better, but they don’t have these eat-and-sleep packages and desires and all these things that they would wake up and do — where you see some of the most amazing interactions, and you also see some of the ‘jank.’ But jank comes with the territory. I’m a big fan of RimWorld and other games that do this, but they’re doin’ it in like two-dimensional, top-down views, so they don’t need quite the graphics horsepower.”

“A lot of big open-world games are very cleverly resetting things behind your back,” Berry adds. “But as a player, if you pick up a cup and put it two inches to the right in a Bethesda game — when you come back 200 hours later, it’s still there in that spot you moved it to.”

As with Daggerfall’s missing dragons, there were ideas the Morrowind team would’ve loved to implement, like real-time boat travel or Silt Striders that moved naturalistically through the world, that just weren’t possible given the constraints of the time. In game development, every feature comes at the cost of another. “There’s a phrase that the Bethesda studio likes to bandy about,” says Skyrim lead designer Bruce Nesmith, “and that is that we can do anything, but we can’t do everything.”

“Everyone always dreamed big about the worlds. I think that’s probably what drew a lot of us together,” Morrowind world artist Mark Bullock observes. “Growing up, I was never that much into video games, but I loved tabletop games. I was playing D&D with my friends, and I’d be like, ‘But the picture in my head is so much better.’ So that’s where we started seeing the possibilities: ‘How can we move toward these open worlds that we played in pen-and-paper campaigns?’ Whether it be fantasy or sci-fi. I think everyone just wanted it to be more convincing, with that sense of joy and discovery of moving through a space. And have a good driving story, but with the freedom to pay attention to it or not pay attention to it. That’s been the backbone of Bethesda, even going back to Arena’s side quests. As the worlds get bigger, and the players get to have more opportunities to express themselves, that’s still the core.”

Into Oblivion

Although wildly different from Daggerfall, The Elder Scrolls IV offered another example of Bethesda Game Studios going big in response to the game that preceded it. If Morrowind could be described as “Alice in Wonderland meets Dune meets The Dark Crystal,” as Berry puts it, its sequel would be the Elder Scrolls series’s answer to the Lord of the Rings films. The fourth entry would aim for a wider audience, more approachable writing, and some familiar iconography — yet not without taking advantage of the fact that the roman numeral IV could be found dead center in Tamriel’s name for hell: Oblivion.

Given the Xbox 360 era’s higher polygon counts and the addition of pixel shading — but still being a scrappy studio of fewer than 50 people — Oblivion returned to procedural generation for things like rocks and trees. It also added a number of quality-of-life features absent from the launch version of Morrowind, including a full-fledged quest journal, waypoints, a horizontal compass, and fast travel.

“We added in things to make the user experience more palatable — things we learned from other games or we wanted internally,” says Gardiner. “And I think that there are some games today that have gone too far with that, where it’s too convenient. I get to a new zone, and there’s this big list of chores. For me, I like a sense of discovery, which that stuff totally kills. Two, I’m also OCD when it comes to gaming; I’ve been trained my whole life to do all the stuff in every zone before I go on to the next one. And I’ve had a lot of these big open-world games where I actually stopped 70, 80 percent of the way through because I can’t not do everything. And then by the time I get toward the end, I’m burnt out. I’ve sucked the marrow out of the bone of the game. So that’s the magic of Elden Ring — because Elden Ring didn’t do any of that. Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t doing a lot of that. You need to find a balance.”

“Audience expectations continued to change over the years,” Nesmith says. “I was a game developer for decades, and if you go way back, you find that games are extremely unforgiving — lack of save games, and the fact that you could die really, really easily. They were difficult; in those early days, what was celebrated was mastery. It was me against the machine. As the audience matured, and the industry matured, it became more about telling fun stories and less about the fact that I had to be better than the software. It became, ‘Let’s have an experience together, and it doesn’t have to be something that’s nearly impossible. It can be something that’s fun in and of itself.’ And that goes, too, for things like waypoints and fast travel. In the early days, you had to walk everywhere. Well, where’s the fun in that if you’ve already been there?”

Oblivion was a challenging project for Bethesda for a number of reasons, not the least of which was Microsoft deciding, late in the development of the Xbox 360, to ship its new console without a hard drive. “Which is quite a nightmare for an open-world, streaming game,” says Gardiner. Still, Howard’s notion of capitalizing on the success of Peter Jackon’s Rings trilogy proved out. It became another bottled-lightning moment for Bethesda, and, for some, The Elder Scrolls IV remains the sweet spot. Oblivion might lack the handcrafted, richly imagined quality of Morrowind’s ashen landscapes. But the tools it gave players for navigating its own province of Cyrodiil have endured ever since.

And where Morrowind had relied heavily on dice rolls and under-the-hood statistics for its combat, Oblivion strove for a more intuitive and tactile style of swordplay.

“It sucks to swing a sword and miss,” Gardiner reflects. “When you’re standing in front of something, you’re swinging madly, and you’re hitting every third time, it feels like a bug. It works in top-down tactical games because you see the dice rolls and you understand it. A lot of those early games were an attempt to mimic Dungeons and Dragons, so they used these mechanics. But we thought, ‘No, it needs to be more skill-based, where you actually have to hit the thing.’ Even through Oblivion, I believe we had a ray-cast system where you did the attack, there was a ray that cast out, and if the enemy was within the cone of that ray, it registered a hit. So it had nothing to do with collision spheres, or any kind of collision on the sword. We struggled with that.”

Dropping Morrowind’s dice-driven combat in favor of a more hack-and-slash approach to the action was the right move, but it presented its own unique set of problems that persisted through the two games that followed. “Stun-locking” was a popular complaint among players, who found that your character’s hit reaction, or stagger animation, could leave you vulnerable for longer than it took for an opponent to start attacking again. “You just get locked, especially if two of them are hitting you,” says Gardiner. “So what we had to do in the end — and why the combat never felt as good as I thought it could — is because we never got those timings down. And we had to randomize the hit reactions. That stopped the stun-lock problem, but it also made it feel weird, because sometimes you’d swing a sword and hit, but you wouldn’t see the guy flinch. So there was this weird disconnect; the combat didn’t feel very responsive.”

Oblivion also made use of smaller bits of downloadable content players could pay for to modify their game, even on Xbox and PlayStation. (Its widely criticized “Horse Armor Pack” has become something of a meme.) If you look at Bethesda RPGs that followed, these decisions still reverberate through the Elder Scrolls series today, as well as in the franchise the company acquired in 2007: Interplay’s Fallout.

Fallout and Reinventing RPG Combat

Fallout 3, Bethesda’s open-world, fully 3D entry in a series known for its old-school isometric RPGs, had a lot to live up to — and some significant problems to solve from a design standpoint. Players knew and loved the world that Interplay and Black Isle had created. Thankfully, so did Bethesda, dating back to the studio’s Redguard and Morrowind days. Not wanting to make only Elder Scrolls games, Howard once toyed with the idea of a game series called Apocalypse Road, along the lines of the early Fallout games, with the same immersive open-world design that had helped make Western role-playing games like Morrowind viable on consoles. He and the rest of the company fought hard to get out of ZeniMax’s dusty warehouse basement and break out into the mainstream. With Fallout, they had a chance to do it again.

The move from Tolkienesque Tamriel to the irradiated rubble of postnuclear Washington, D.C., meant figuring out how to make first-person gunplay feel at home in a Fallout sequel. “We were operating under the tagline that this would be ‘Oblivion with guns,’ and that’s kind of how we approached it,” Bruce Nesmith recalls. “We wanted all the best things about the Elder Scrolls games — the open world, interesting character creation, lots and lots of loot and things to pick up — but with the Fallout background.”

Bethesda’s solution was VATS (“Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System”), a slow-motion mode you use to target specific body parts on a given enemy, without having to react as quickly as you would if you were playing a shooter like Doom. It didn’t require you to aim so much as make decisions, which fit with the turn-based combat of the original Fallout. Similar ideas had been used by BioWare, with its dice-based Dungeons and Dragons combat for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Action would play out in real time, but the player could pause, evaluate the battlefield, and issue commands.

“We were afraid we were going to make the RPG too action-focused, and turn off the RPG people,” Gardiner says. “That’s where VATS came from. It was an attempt to make it more palatable for people who weren’t into twitch combat. First-person shooters were in their heyday back then, but not everybody played them. People were coming from Baldur’s Gate II and other role-playing games, so it was this big conundrum. That combat evolved quite a bit. First-person melee is very difficult to pull off. Some games have done great at it, but you can’t see three-sixty around you. You might get little reticle indicators and stuff, but it can be a chaotic experience.” Ironically, he says, Bethesda largely perfected melee combat for the sequel, Fallout 4, a game in which people tend to avoid melee weapons.

“With Fallout 3, we were very concerned. I think the whole team was,” says Noah Berry. “It was a dramatic tone shift across the board. There were some things that translated very nicely, in a gameplay-loop kind of manner, but we were extremely self-conscious about how to go from our more colorful, atmospheric fantasy — that Alan Lee, Lord of the Rings, brooding fantasy world — into Fallout.”

“We weren’t used to writing with modern dialogue. We weren’t used to writing with something as simple as cuss words,” Nesmith says. “And some of our early attempts at it were positively dreadful. Emil Pagliarulo, who was the lead designer for Fallout 3, really helped us get into the modern vocabulary and how to make all that stuff feel right. Because that was trickier than we had anticipated.”

From a world-building standpoint, Fallout 3 was also a great challenge for the art team. Improvements in graphical fidelity had led to a huge increase in workload, so they were doing more hand-painted textures than ever before, putting in more hours per area (or “cell”), and struggling with the limited kit pieces used to construct the environments. “They were like chunks of rooms,” world artist Nate Purkeypile remembers. “This is a corner piece, this is a wall piece, and it has the whole floor and ceiling. Whereas by the time we got to Fallout 4, going through Skyrim, that started to break apart more and more, so you could have all this destruction, and every dungeon was a lot more custom that way.” He compares the process to putting together a LEGO kit, which he grew up loving to do.

Enter the Dragonborn

After the artistic and technical hurdles of Oblivion and Fallout 3, Bethesda Game Studios hit another high point with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, one of the most beloved games ever made. Skyrim combined the team’s love of Norse mythology, “low fantasy” like Conan the Barbarian, and the snowy, pine-laden mountainscapes of the Pacific Northwest. They sought out native Scandinavian speakers to lend authenticity to the game’s considerable voice-over cast, which included Christopher Plummer, Max von Sydow, and series mainstay Lynda Carter. And they pushed their tools and engine to new heights, crafting the franchise’s most lifelike game world to date.

Nesmith and Kurt Kuhlmann collaborated on a new kind of dynamic procedural content they dubbed the Radiant Story system, which introduced emergent quest lines based on how the player behaved in the game. The idea being that players could never truly run out of things to do in Skyrim. Where Morrowind and Oblivion had emphasized NPC scheduling as a way to add verisimilitude to their respective worlds, Skyrim would stretch things even further, with characters that reacted to the user in more meaningful ways.

“Kuhlmann and I worked really hard, on Skyrim, to redefine procedural content — to try and make it feel less rote or mechanical or bland,” Nesmith recalls. “And I think we had a decent amount of success in that. But there’s been a couple of times throughout all of Bethesda’s games where the realization was kind of slapped in our face that, you know, totally procedural content is not what the audience wants. There’s a certain amount of procedural processes that can be acceptable and can enhance the game, but at the end of the day those elements are tools in a very large toolkit for creating fun for the player. And they are not the end-all, be-all.”

This was a point in Bethesda’s history when folks could focus their passions on specific things they wanted to see in the game, as with earlier titles, while also taking full advantage of better hardware and a better understanding of what their Creation Engine was capable of. Nesmith pitched Todd Howard on the idea of overhauling the magic system, and was given a lot of leeway — along with programmer Steve Meister and some others — to revamp the way spells worked, and how elements like lightning, fire, and ice behaved.

“You could more or less do what you wanted on Skyrim,” Purkeypile says. “Me and Joel Burgess and Daryl Brigner snuck in Blackreach, basically, which is kind of a big thing to sneak in when it’s not on the schedule.” Blackreach stands as one of the things players remember and cherish the most from Skyrim — a vast subterranean region filled with bioluminescent flora and fauna, hidden laboratories, and interconnected Dwemer ruins. “That’s part of why I liked that era of the studio the most. There’s a lot of trust that you’re putting in people. Like, ‘Hey, go make something cool. That’s why we hired you.’ And not just checking off another thing on a list.”

Skyrim’s crowning achievement, perhaps, was its implementation of dragons — the return of the Nords’ world-destroying gods of legend, long thought dead forever. It was a herculean technological feat, with its own “strike team” dedicated to making the noble creatures work as intended. But it was also the realization of a dream dating back to the Daggerfall days. “Todd was all over dragons. That was something that he very much wanted to shepard,” says Nesmith. “And it was a big lift. It was a lot harder than we thought it was going to be.” Like the VATS system, Skyrim’s dragons took years of steady work, right up until the moment the game shipped.

“Things are very broken for a long time, like dragons flying backwards and shooting up from the ground,” explains Purkeypile. “That’s really true for any open-world game with all these systems at play. It worked out in the end, but you have to kinda have faith for a long time that it’ll be fixed. Just not too much faith.”

“At one point, for the Giants, one of the values that imparted momentum upon a strike got set wrong. It’s akin to somebody putting an extra zero on the end of that number,” Nesmith recalls. “And so when the Giant hits you, you went flying. And I mean up above the clouds, you’re looking down on the entire map, and you can see stuff you shouldn’t really be able to see. Todd and the other leads, including myself, thought that was just absolutely hysterical. So it’s like, ‘We gotta keep that in.’ We dialed it back to where it was a little more reasonable, but to this day, you get hit by a Giant, you go flying through the air and rag-doll to an insane amount. Because it was just fun to watch that happen.”

How Fallout 4 Was the Guinea Pig for Starfield

Before Skyrim went out the door, a small team was already hard at work on Fallout 4. Their concept art depicted a post-apocalyptic Boston, with its colonial U.S. history and MIT-driven science community inspiring the retrofuture Commonwealth in equal measure. Purkeypile flew into the city and took countless photographs of Fenway Park, the real-world basis for the location he’d be spending most of his virtual time in for the next few years: Diamond City, “the great green jewel” of the Commonwealth.

“With Fallout 4, we took an important step toward not shying away from color,” Noah Berry explains. Where earlier Bethesda RPGs had favored muted colors and selective palettes, the art team wanted Fallout 4 to be recognizable as a 20th-century coastal cityscape, the atom bomb notwithstanding. They studied artwork from the period, and it’s probably no accident that the game was in development while Mad Men aired. Naturally, it came out looking like an Edward Hopper painting.

A new generation of hardware allowed for huge improvements to Bethesda’s level-of-detail system, or LOD, which players can see in the long-distance vistas when standing atop a tall building, aboard the Prydwen airship, or along the harbor. It’s certainly one of the best-looking games Bethesda Game Studios has made, down to technological leaps in performance capture, facial animation, saccadic eye movement, and lighting. Upwards of 40% of the game’s 111,000 lines of dialogue were recorded by the two actors voicing the player character, Courtenay Taylor and Brian T. Delaney — quite a change from Skyrim’s silent hero.

One of the pie-in-the-sky ideas Todd Howard had for Fallout 4 early on was a settlement-building system, a Sims-like diversion for players to fool around with when they’re not off adventuring. It seemed likely to be too difficult, and many thought it would be the first feature to get cut. But after some experimentation, a team led by Steve Meister managed to get the building mode working, and it’s a large part of Fallout 4’s magic. So much so that it became the basis for Fallout 76, an online multiplayer spinoff.

The Final Frontier

Looking ahead to Starfield and its emphasis on customizable spacecraft, it’s easy to spot the creative lineage. “And if you look throughout all of Bethesda’s games, you can start to see that,” says Bruce Nesmith, who worked on the starship systems before retiring from the studio in 2021 to write novels. “It started with being able to buy and own a home, which we did in Oblivion, and then slowly it got better and better. One of the DLCs for Skyrim was something I personally worked very hard on, which was the Hearthfire expansion, and it just got taken further and further in Fallout 4 and then Fallout 76. So building bases, and being able to customize your spaceship, is just a natural outgrowth of that.”

For years, Howard daydreamed about Bethesda’s “space game,” and would talk openly about it with others in the studio, but the timing had to be right. You couldn’t just knock out something of that scale, with a thousand planets and interstellar travel, alongside a Fallout 4 or Elder Scrolls VI. In the mid-to-late ’90s, Bethesda went so far as to announce a collaborative project with Centropolis Entertainment, called The 10th Planet, which was delayed a handful of times before ultimately being canceled. Nesmith and others worked for years on that first attempt — which had its own in-depth system for starship customization and space combat. But it would’ve been closer to Bethesda’s version of TIE Fighter, the popular Star Wars dogfighting sim of that era, with Earth fending off an alien invasion.

The team at Bethesda is full of Star Wars fans, Howard chief among them, but Starfield has more in common with the grounded, dirt-under-the-nails futures of Ridley Scott’s Alien and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. It poses a fascinating question: If space is the final frontier, so to speak, for open-world games, at what point do all those pixels and planetary bodies begin to lose Bethesda’s signature “cluttered” feel? Sure, Starfield looks to fit with the studio’s long tradition of single-player RPGs, from the procedural dungeons of Arena and Daggerfall to the glittering horizons of Skyrim and Fallout 4. But what’s the essence of that tradition? What keeps us coming back to the worlds of The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, year after year, to make a new character and step out into that harsh light of a dawning adventure?

“The big word would be freedom. Freedom to make your character the way you want to make them,” Nesmith says. “You’ll notice that we don’t really have classes. From Daggerfall on, characters are a conglomeration of whatever attributes you want to assign them. That’s true in the Fallout series, the Elder Scrolls series. Freedom to go where you want. Todd’s very fond of saying, ‘If you can see it, you can go there.’ And you don’t have to follow a storyline the way we present it to you. Coming out of character gen, if you want to go left rather than straight, hey, go for it. That freedom is probably the number-one thing that defines a Bethesda game.”

“The first thing that comes to mind is world simulation and persistence. The level of detail,” says Berry. “Presenting the world as though it’s a real place that the player can interact with to increasingly complex degrees, and in ways that also tie back to and influence the moment-to-moment gameplay. And how big a bite they take off of what they’re trying to chew — we’re gonna go for it. I can picture everybody’s faces that I knew, and conversations along the way, and they loved what they were doing and sharing that with people. Gently pulling other people into that love, that explorative interaction in a virtual space.”

With the release of Starfield, Bethesda’s first new universe in decades, there’s a palpable excitement among a certain kind of player. Whether or not it lives up to its promise in the minds of fans or the folks who made it is not something that will be decided in a matter of days. But it’s a welcome reminder, some eight years after the launch of Fallout 4, of why we care about these games so much. Characters like spymaster Caius Cosades, Piper Wright, and Preston Garvey illustrate how a Bethesda RPG is defined not just by its vast environments but also the people who live there.

And that includes the user, from the casual role-player indulging their vampire-lord fantasies to the hobbyist game designer building their own custom modules with the Creation Kit. A new Bethesda game is only the start; countless stories await that the developers themselves can’t possibly foresee. More than any dungeon or spell or starship, the player is the key ingredient.