What would a Criterion Collection for Games look like?
And would Duck Hunt make the cut?
Hey everyone. I’m writing on the tail end of a Cool Tolerated Dad Summer here in beautiful Kentucky. I hope you’re well and playing games when you can. I ended up playing… a bunch of Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader. It’s a good game but it’s a lot. And now I'm free.
I’ve been throwing around ideas for what to write on the substack and I have a few - but the other day I got caught on this idea and I don’t feel like letting it go. In the last couple of years I’ve found my way back to physical media. I buy vinyl when I have a chance, I am starting a modest Blu-Ray collection of films, mostly for teaching - yes I am a dude in my 40s, why do you ask? - and I even find myself reading physical books almost as much as I use my beloved Kobo. The horror.
Anyway, particularly when looking at films and daydreaming of shelves full of films I occasionally watch, I’ve been spending a lot of time on the Criterion Collection’s website. It rules, if you didn’t know. Just a wonderful resource for various levels of film nerd. I remain permanently in my novitiate in that regard, and happily so. My favourite film is Rocky, for example. But it is great fun to read about films and to really kind of take them in as full works. If you don’t own a Criterion film I strongly encourage you to have a look. Every disc of theirs I’ve ever seen has been made with love.
They are true to their origins in that regard. Criterion, effectively, is a self-curating collection that seeks primarily to geek out over films. They have tons of high-brow stuff of course, and they’ve always been consistent in looking to introduce English speakers to foreign film. But their understanding of artistic and cultural relevance is holistic: the collection includes Robocop, The Rock, and most recently Risky Business.
I love what they do, and it got me wondering, what would a Criterion Collection for video games look like? First things first, I feel like we have to be honest with ourselves: the landscape is pretty grim. There are strong writers on games out there but outside of a few notable people with specific wheelhouses (Bogost is the intellectual/academic, Schreier is the reporter, and so on) things are tough for games writing. The Guardian is doing a good job of showing how it’s done, but the Washington Post’s step back from a distinct gaming vertical is more indicative of where things are with the old houses. Beyond that, you have a mix of sites working hard at the classic issue of games writing, finding the right space between consumer advice and cultural criticism. Individually, a lot of games writers move on as they get older or their careers or lives offer them different opportunities, and entire publications are frequently - at least it feels frequent - being dismantled or neutered.
A lot of this is tied to broader media issues of course; any sports fans here remember Sports Illustrated as one of the titans of American journalism? And maybe it’s not surprising that in the games world of all places the written word, in terms of coverage, truly is dead. But it’s also true that we in games culture have been struggling for a long time with how to talk about games, how to value them, and how to critique them. Bogost has made a career of talking about this (and many other) issues. What are we trying to do?
For example, one thing the Criterion Collection values enormously is the idea of the physical object. Yes, they have a (fantastic) streaming channel. But their heart and core lies in sending you a physical thing that you can enjoy and love. And hold as well. Bogost has been banging the drum on video games as material culture for a while - you can read a brief summary of one of his papers on the subject here - but games people (I can never settle on what to call the games… sphere) struggle to agree with each other as to what it is we’re trying to do. And games’ existence as objects, exacerbated by the industry and the audience’s embrace of streaming, digital downloads and the like, is very difficult to pin down indeed. This is also of course a major historical/archival problem. We are losing the ability to play games in their original form. Does that matter?
Well, yes. It matters. But the Criterion Collection thrives because of its success, not just its good intentions. So for now I will cheat and avoid the enormous question of whether or not it’s important to play Super Mario 3 on a NES (or FAMICOM) or whether we can simply play a painstakingly produced version to download. Just as Criterion films are now on 4K discs and have gone through various media iterations. I’m also cruising right by the question of how this would work given copyright and publishers and Nintendo, because where’s the fun in that?
I think it’s fair to point out, too, that a collection would work most effectively if the people running it, as Criterion do, took on directly and owned the idea of it being a finite list curated and selected by the organization. So you’re not trying to see these are the best or most important games: you’re trying to say that, according to us and our collection, these are important games we think you should know about, and we love them and we want them to be experienced in as pure a manner as possible.
Right. So what would our Criterion Collection look like? I have no idea. But I have some questions I want to ask myself (and you) about how we would get there.
Relevance?
How relevant should a game be? And how relevant does it need to be, to be included? An inaugural collection would have to include Super Mario Bros., right? Well, should it include all the Mario games? Do we just stick with one Mario game for the first run? Probably. But that starts to feel very… I don’t know. Unimaginative maybe. Just another list.
Let’s go a little further. Where do Grand Theft Auto games fit in? Which Assassin’s Creed game makes the cut? How recent do we go? There’s a temptation to give ourselves some kind of a cutoff but on top of that being arbitrary it immediately commits us to a pretty half-baked gatekeeping system. Criterion for example is happy to include quite a few films from last year but Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One isn’t one of them. Neither is Oppenheimer, incidentally.
Of course, I suspect Barbie is a shoe-in in the future. So how do we pick? Well, we shamelessly decide that the tastes of those choosing is the deciding factor. And we embrace the idea of working with creators to produce specific version of their games. So yes, chances are if we had a collection like this Animal Well might be on the list within a month of coming out. If those choosing willed it.
This first question really kind of reveals the impossibility of it, at least the way games are currently made and played (or produced and consumed).
Artistic Merit?
This ties into relevance, really. But how would we choose? Video games are at the forefront of the twenty-first century’s pop culture’s ever increasing refusal to be embarrassed about embracing fun and immediacy, and I think it’s great. But when is a game instantly kitsch, or brave, or interesting? Would we include the first Borderlands game, at some point include the Tell Tale Borderlands game, and collect every physical copy of the other games in that series and throw them in a pit and burn them? Maybe.
Dragon’s Dogma 2 is a game that captured the imagination of most who played it and has made a big impact. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has been a massive flop. But are we now deciding merit based on whether or not the vibe was good a week after release?
It reveals, again, some of the challenges in game culture. Things do tend to happen fast.
I’ve also largely abandoned the idea of artistic merit. In part because the challenge is so large.
What DOESN’T make the cut?
This one is tough. What doesn’t make it? Suicide Squad, I suspect. What about mobile games? It’s a wasteland of crap and cash grabs. But there are some fascinating games out there. And then there’s Marvel Snap, which is a great game and a shameless and immoral cash grab.
We hit up against an issue that has been in the background of both the first two questions: films have different production histories and backgrounds, but once they’re available you can typically watch a film without barrier. Yes, it might be on a particular streaming service but - perhaps after a delay window - anyone can buy a copy of that film. You don’t have to be a Disney Plus subscriber to watch Marvel movies. If you have a Blu-Ray player, you can play Andor.
Do you want to play Kirby’s Dream Land 3 legally? You need to either buy yourself an actual SNES or FAMICOM (those devices are now forty years old or so by the way) or own a Switch and pay Nintendo a monthly fee. So how do we create a curated physical collectible product for Kirby’s Dream Land 3? We don’t.
It answers itself I suppose. A key element of the Criterion idea is effectively impossible. Beyond that, if we just accept we’re recommending lists to people like every other website on the Internet, what doesn’t make it? Things that are new? Things that are made purely for profit? The latter decision eliminates a LOT of games and effectively renders the collection inscrutably esoteric. You may as well just link to Itch.
Sample Collections
Okay. I’m allowing things to get bleak. Let’s try and have some fun before we go. Criterion, in a nice example of dorkery and marketing, periodically groups various films in the streaming collection into sub-collections. It’s a clever idea that gives you places to go and hopefully help you get past the Netflix disease of scrolling through film posters for an hour. The collections can be thematic (fun!) or tied to a single creator (also fun! and easier to do!). So what would some of my personal sub-collections look like? This feels like another post but let’s have a quick stab at it now, one thematic and one creator-focused.
Red Planet
I am having fun already. What Mars-focused games would we include? Let’s go for five:
Commander Keen in Invasion of the Vorticons (1990)
Doom (1993)
Red Faction: Guerrilla (2009)
Jamestown (2011)
Offworld Trading Company (2016)
Honorable mention to Surviving Mars, which I personally love but probably wouldn’t include in a collection, at least not if there was a tight limit on the number. Why not? In part because I’m not terribly sure that Surviving Mars, despite being a great city building game, necessarily stands head and shoulders above other city building games. So here I am, judging a game on whether or not I think it’s good… as opposed to artistically credible or relevant.
It also feels a little too similar to Offworld Trading Company. If only a little. Doom has to be in there of course. The Red Faction game is likely a bit of a favourite for a lot of people my age, therefore confirming the shamelessly personal and arbitrary nature of this whole thing. Jamestown is my deep cut. It’s a great little game. And I’ve always had fun using it in class.
Kojima
Yes I’m doing someone obvious. Listen, this entire time I’ve been writing I was supposed to be working on a syllabus for Age of the Samurai, so cut me some slack. In reality, a creator-based list has all the games that person (or group) made. But who has time for that? Both now, as I write, and also humans in the world. I mean, playing every Elder Scrolls game sounds like fun but very few of us can do it. So, I would include five again:
Metal Gear (1987)
Snatcher (1988)
Metal Gear Solid (1998)
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (2001)
Death Stranding (2019)
So we include the obvious ones (Metal Gear and Metal Gear Solid), the deep cut (Snatcher - though this is the deep cut everyone picks), the most recent game which in my particular case doubles up as maybe his best work (Death Stranding) and a pick that could be genuine or just a troll (Metal Gear Solid 2).
Funnily enough, I thought this list would be easier but getting up to five was a little tricky. Yes, Kojima’s been prodigious but a lot of his work has been around one franchise. It’s tricky; what role did Kojima play for example in Castlevania: Lords of Shadow (2010)? Should it count?
What would we call this thing?
This, I have no idea. None. Criterion Games Collection is beyond pathetic, and I assume legally infringing.
I’ve written on this enough today that now I kind of want to do it. That makes naming it easy: personal lists compiled by random dude.
I can dream, though. I love the idea of there being a games version of the Criterion Collection. Then again, maybe it’s a minor miracle the Criterion people have come so far.