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The Best Gaming Year Ever

There’s been a lot of talk lately that 2015 is a banner year for video games, one of the best in recent history, and I tend to agree. We got the New 3DS, Splatoon, Metal Gear Solid V, Batman: Arkham Knight, and a huge slate of highly anticipated games yet to come out this year, including Star Wars Battlefront, Halo 5, Fallout 4, Super Mario Maker, and Rock Band 4.

Hearing this talk made me think about other great years for games, and I think the best year might have been 1998. Looking back to the games released then, I have a hard time believing just how many great games came out in that single year, and how many genres were defined, or redefined, by games that year.

Metal Gear Solid, the first game in the long-running series, came out on the Playstation that year, as one of the first good examples of a 3D game having great action gameplay and telling a compelling story at the same time.

The first Mario Party game came out in 1998 too, finally justifying the four controller ports on the front of the Nintendo 64, and giving me a reason to buy third and fourth controllers.

The most important release of the year, though, based on the impact to the industry at large, was probably Pokemon. The first titles in the series, for the original Game Boy, were released in the United States that year. I got my copy of Pokemon Red the day it came out (thanks to a promotional VHS tape Nintendo had mailed me a few months before), and I loved it. But I had no idea it would evolve into the sensation that it became.

Also out in 1998 were StarCraft, Marvel vs Capcom, Half-Life, Sonic Adventure, Banjo-Kazooie, and a dozen other games that I just don’t have time to talk about, not to mention the Game Boy Color and the Japanese release of the Sega Dreamcast.

This year is great, but it’s no 1998, and maybe no year ever will be again.

Samuel McConnell is a games enthusiast who has been playing games in one form or another since 1991. He was born in northern Maine but quickly transplanted to Wichita.