The Last of Us Tops the 100 Greatest Games List: The Dispute Is About Criteria, Not the No. 1 Spot

The day Kinda Funny Games published its list of the 100 greatest games of all time, I was sitting in a small studio in Busan, one ear in a headset following an LCK match, the other listening to my phone buzzing against the wooden desk. It buzzed once; I ignored it. It buzzed a second time; I glanced at the screen. By the twelfth buzz I pulled the headset off entirely, because whatever was happening on social media was louder than a teamfight in mid lane.

The Last of Us sat at number one. The comment section was on fire.

I could have predicted number one. I could have predicted the backlash. What made me take the headset off was something smaller, sitting exactly where no gap should be allowed: not a single line explaining the ranking criteria. No weighting for gameplay, none for narrative, none for historical influence. A list of 100 names, a top spot, and a blank sheet where the rulebook should have been.

Nineteen years in this job have taught me something painful: nearly every major argument in sport and esports starts with a ranking that refuses to publish its own measuring stick.

What actually happened

Kinda Funny Games, a games media outlet built by a group of former journalists and presenters from the United States, published a list of the 100 greatest games of all time. The Last of Us — the post-apocalyptic survival title developed by Naughty Dog and released in 2026 on PlayStation 3 — took first place. Beneath it sat a set of names that anyone who has ever held a controller will either nod at or argue with, depending on which platform they grew up on.

The original article made a notable structural choice: it opened with the controversy before revealing the list. Readers were placed in a state of tension before they knew the content. That is a classic engagement technique, and it works. It also produces a side effect: the entire discussion about criteria gets compressed into a few lines at the end, where the fewest people read.

Three camps appeared almost instantly. The first defended the top spot on historical influence: Naughty Dog moved from Uncharted to The Last of Us and reshaped how the industry tells stories in action-adventure games. The second objected on systems grounds: they argued The Last of Us Part II plays far better, that combat mechanics, level design and control precision are what actually define the peak. The third camp — larger than I expected — dragged an entirely different title into the argument, and the way they did it showed they were using a completely different yardstick.

Then someone asked the obvious question: does this list judge by gameplay quality, by popularity, or by historical influence? The article recorded the question. It did not answer it.

That is the most important detail in the whole story. Not The Last of Us. Not Part II. The unanswered question.

The blank sheet in the middle of the room

I once sat in the meeting room of an esports federation where three people argued for forty minutes about who was the best player of the season. The argument only ended when one of them opened a laptop and said: "Let's agree on the metric first, then we'll say names." Those forty minutes were not wasted. They were mandatory.

The list of the 100 greatest games skipped those forty minutes.

Look at the structure of the two camps' arguments, not the names they defend. The defenders use historical influence — the mark left on the industry. The critics use systems — the feel of the controller and the depth of the mechanics. Those two metrics cannot coexist in a single ranking without weights. One measures in years, the other in seconds.

The fatal flaw of every "greatest of all time" list is never the ranking itself; it is that the organisers hide the rulebook and let two groups using two different metrics argue inside one comment thread.

And here is what I want to say plainly: that ambiguity is not an oversight. A ranking with clear criteria ends the argument in two days. A ranking without criteria lives for two weeks, two months, and generates thousands of re-reported articles. In the attention economy, controversy is the product, not the by-product.

Every contract is a hand of cards — don't look at the cards, read the dealer's eyes. Here, the dealer handed out a deck with no numbers printed on it, then invited the whole room to argue about which card was highest. The argument is not a consequence of the game. It is the game.

Safe versus ambitious: the most durable idea in the piece

If I had to pick one thing from this story that will still be useful in two years, it is the dichotomy the article recorded: The Last of Us part one is framed as the safe choice, part two as the ambitious one. Part one refined a proven formula. Part two pushed risk higher and paid for it with a divided reaction.

This dichotomy is not new. It is the oldest dichotomy in any competitive content industry, and it is the one esports lives and dies with every transfer window.

A star does not shine on its own — whose hand is fanning the flame? That question applies to The Last of Us exactly as it applies to any championship roster. Naughty Dog did not produce a masterpiece out of nothing. They went through Uncharted, learned to build cinematic pacing inside a mass-market entertainment product, then moved that entire capital into a heavier-toned project. That is evolution, not revolution. And that is precisely why it won.

The original article builds a timeline ladder: from simple products like Pong to modern games like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. That ladder is rhetorically persuasive, and it also reveals a bias: it uses a title released in 2026 as the endpoint of history. The endpoint of history, at the time of writing, was a few months away. I don't blame them. Everyone writing about games does this. But it should be named correctly: recency bias, not historical truth.

Voices without a count

This is the part that bothered me most as a reader of data.

The article describes community reaction with phrases like "one player", "some gamers", "many people". No platform named. No timeframe. No count. No ratio.

In my profession, that is a first-order error. If I filed an analysis saying "many viewers believe team X is in decline", it would come back with a red note. Because "many" cannot be measured, verified, or cross-checked.

The stadium fell silent, but football's heartbeat still drummed in a sound no camera could capture. I wrote that line in 2026, when the K-League played in empty stands because of the pandemic and I had to learn to hear a match through something other than cheering. But there is a fundamental difference between listening for signals that cannot be filmed and granting yourself the right to speak for a community without even counting how many people are in it.

Invisible signals must be described through observable detail. Community sentiment must be measured with a sample. This article does neither. It asserts controversy immediately after publishing the ranking, then constructs that controversy from a handful of anonymous quotes. That is controversy by assertion, not controversy by measurement.

Based on my experience following matches in the LCK and in Southeast Asian regional leagues across many seasons, I have derived a rule: when a community is genuinely angry, you can count it. Comment volume spikes within an hour. Negative review volume follows a curve. Re-reported articles carry timestamps. When an outlet says "the community is divided" with no number attached, it is usually a division inside the newsroom presented as a division in society.

The geography of canons

There is another layer the article does not state, and I think it matters more than the top spot.

A list assembled by a group of games media people in the United States, however it is labelled as "history", is in practice a regional canon presented as a universal standard. This is not a conspiracy. It is the natural consequence of list-makers growing up with one console, reading one set of criticism, and playing the titles promoted by one media ecosystem.

Game canons form from three sources: media lists, critical consensus, and studio lineage. No formal body ratifies them. No league publishes them. They resemble a legend passed by word of mouth and gradually treated as law.

That explains why a first-party cinematic action-adventure sits on top. The list rewards production value and narrative presentation. The opposing camp, demanding systems depth, is demanding an entirely different standard — and they lost before the argument began, because the game was designed for the other side to win.

In esports we have a similar version, and few call it by its name. Every time a major outlet publishes an all-time greatest players list, someone asks: titles, statistics, or cultural impact? And someone always answers by counting trophies, because counting trophies is the easiest way to avoid an argument.

Carrying this argument into esports

I cover esports for the Korean market, so I have to ask myself: does this games ranking story say anything about esports?

The honest answer is: very little, and the boundary must be stated clearly. The Last of Us is a single-player product with no competitive server, no balance patch, no season. Applying esports patch analysis to it would be fabrication. I refuse to do that.

But one thing does transfer: the structure of the argument.

The dispute over The Last of Us part one and part two is the cinematic version of a dispute every major league goes through — between a proven playstyle and a high-risk one. A team that wins by refining an old formula to perfection is called disciplined. A team that experiments with an off-meta composition and wins is called brilliant. A team that experiments and loses is called delusional. Three labels, one action, different outcomes. That is why I never trust praise or condemnation written before a season ends.

I once mispronounced a legend's name — and since then I listen to the ball more than to the title. That lesson applies here intact. The name at the top of the list teaches me nothing. The way people defend that name teaches me something.

And in the appendix of the original article there is a block of esports headlines worth recording as a verification queue, not as evidence.

First, a headline claiming LCK viewership doubled after six years of franchising. On timing, this fits: the LCK moved to franchising in 2026, and six years later lands around 2027. But the headline carries no source figures, no measurement window, no baseline. If the number is real, it is a strong argument for the franchising model. If it is a platform-migration effect — audiences shifting from one channel to another, or co-streaming folded into the total — it proves nothing. I am putting it in the verification queue.

Second, a headline about GAM Esports becoming a VCT Pacific 2027 partner. If accurate, this is a notable pivot: a Vietnamese organisation rooted in MOBA entering Riot's first-person shooter circuit. I have followed that team long enough to know they do nothing without calculation. But a headline is still a headline. No official confirmation from the tournament organiser.

Third, a headline about VCT Champions 2026 and another about the international competitiveness of Mobile Legends: Bang Bang Vietnam. Both require independent verification before use.

Fourth, a headline concerning K/DA — the virtual music group Riot built as a marketing product for its league brand. A headline about controversy over a new look. No figures, no official response.

What these four headlines do establish: the outlet running that games ranking maintains a standing esports vertical. That is a mildly positive signal for esports merging into mainstream media. It says nothing about the strength of any league.

My scars, and why I still wrote this

In 2026 I published an article naming a 25-year-old goalkeeper at Incheon United, citing a save rate against shots from outside the box of just 61 percent, below the league average of 68. I called him an inflated star. I got a week of abuse. Four months later he moved to another club and played markedly better, because the new defensive system covered exactly the weakness I had identified.

That feeling taught me two contradictory things. One: specific data carries real weight, even when it makes people hate you. Two: a single data sample can be right about the phenomenon and wrong about the cause.

In 2026 I was invited to commentate on-site for a local broadcaster during the World Cup in Russia. In the group-stage match between South Korea and Sweden, I mispronounced a midfielder's name three times in the first half. Complaints flooded the station. I spent the following month reviewing qualifier footage for all thirty-two teams, learning pronunciation and memorising nicknames. That mistake accidentally gave me a data archive on squad composition and form that I still use today.

In 2026 I spent six weeks analysing the scouting data of a mid-table Portuguese club and wrote a piece declaring that a nineteen-year-old Brazilian left-back, with zero first-team minutes, would attract the attention of major European clubs within a year. The piece was mocked. Eight months later, two big clubs began sending scouts, and a twelve-million-euro contract was signed with another club in the same country.

Three scars, three lessons. But one thread runs through all of them: in each case, what I offered was a verifiable metric. Save rate. Correct pronunciation. Minutes played and bench appearances. I could be wrong about the conclusion, but the reader always knew what I was measuring with.

That is exactly what the 100 greatest games list did not do.

Where I might be wrong

I write to argue, but I read to understand — if you only want to hear what you already like, this piece is not for you.

So here is my self-rebuttal.

Possibility one: the organisers did have criteria, they just did not put them in the article. The piece may be a summary of an internal vote lasting weeks, where each participant scored on their own scale and the results were aggregated. In that case, what I call "hiding the rulebook" is really "failing to communicate the rulebook". Different levels of severity. And if so, the fault lies in presentation, not evaluation.

Possibility two, and I consider this fairly likely: The Last of Us at number one is a reasonable choice to the point of being boring. It is a title with thirteen years of life, multiple re-releases, a hit television adaptation, and a fanbase that still argues about it every year. If the criterion is "cultural impact over a decade", it wins. If the criterion is "mechanical depth", it loses. I object to the presentation, but I do not object to the result. I must separate the two, because merging them is the easiest way to write an irresponsible hot take.

Possibility three: my esports comparison is forced. And yes, it is forced at one very specific point. In esports, the greatest-of-all-time argument has data behind it: title counts, win records, season-by-season statistics, head-to-head results. People can argue about weighting, but not about whether data exists. In games criticism, most "greatness" is an aesthetic judgement with no unit of measurement. Placing the two side by side may make my argument look tighter than it is.

Possibility four, and this is the one that keeps me up: maybe criteria ambiguity is a good thing. A list with a clear rulebook becomes a spreadsheet. People look it up and close the tab. An ambiguous list forces people to tell each other why they love a game. In nineteen years of watching audiences, I have seen that what keeps people in a discipline is usually an endless argument, not a perfectly correct ranking.

If so, this piece of mine is attacking the very thing that gives its target its life.

I accept that risk. But I keep the original thesis: readers have the right to know which metric they are being invited to argue under. Transparency does not kill argument. It only kills fake argument.

What I will be tracking

I am setting three checkpoints for myself, following the habit I have kept since 2026 with my column on unknown names.

Checkpoint one: if within six months Kinda Funny Games publishes a weighted criteria framework for their list, my "ambiguity is strategy" hypothesis is wrong. I will write a correction, in full, with my name on it.

Checkpoint two: if in the same window discussion of the list dies within two weeks, the "controversy is product" hypothesis weakens too, because the product expired too fast to be profitable.

Checkpoint three: I will watch whether that outlet's esports vertical shifts from reposting headlines to original interviews. If it does, they are building a real gateway funnelling general gaming audiences into esports. If not, those four headlines were just clickbait.

And while I wait, I hold on to a fairly stubborn belief: a ranking does not tell us what is great. It tells us who holds the pen, who holds the criteria, and who sat in a meeting room for forty minutes to agree on a metric before daring to say a name.

If you have read this far and still believe The Last of Us deserves the top spot — good. Write down your measuring stick. That is the only thing I actually want to read in the comments.