The last 10 years have really pushed gaming to new frontiers; Ian Evenden highlights the most impor tant games of the 2010s

THE LAST DECADE was something of a golden age for PC gaming. It saw the gap between consoles and gaming PCs widen even further, as the hardware we play on became more powerful and capable than ever before.

But it also saw the emergence of the blockbuster game as a rival to the kind you see in theaters. In 2007, 14 years ago, Halo 3 took the largest launch-day sales of any media property at that time, with first-day sales of $170 million, overtaking the likes of Harry Potter and Spider-man at the movies. Since then, in 2017, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds took $900 million on its first day, toppling 2013’s Grand Theft Auto V ($815m).

GTAV—a game that launched on Xbox 360 and has appeared on three generations of consoles—is also emblematic of the past 10 years in gaming, as the decade has seen more in the way of remakes, remasters, and straightforward rereleases than at any other time. This doesn’t mean that the game industry has become less  creative, but it’s a reflection of how much more expensive and intensive it has become to develop a triple-A, bigbudget game in the years that saw the rise of ray tracing, the consolidation of multicore processors, and 4K screens become something you can pick up for a few hundred bucks. Development teams are now huge, budgets reach into the hundreds of millions, and games can be in development for many years before being released, unfinished.

Here, then, are our pick of the PC games of the last decade, in no particular order.

© ROCKSTAR

Grand Theft Auto V

Ridiculous fun, as long as you can square your conscience with playing the bad guy. Rockstar’s satire on western society takes all the best things about TheWire, The Sopranos, and a dozen other box sets and sets them loose under a blazing sun, where they interact and self-destruct with gore-infested glee. Playing as three streetlevel characters up against governments and billionaires grounds the absurdity, while a never-ending multiplayer mode of hits and heists keeps players coming back.

• Released: 2013 • www.rockstargames.com

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Ten years old, and still the most recent mainline Elder Scrolls release. Another game that’s spanned console generations, picking up the Special Edition and modding it heavily is the definitive way to play on PC today. Modern hardware makes graphical updates that once brought GPUs to their knees fly, and it’s still big enough to get lost in. Fighting giants and dragons while auroras whirl overhead is as vital today as it was at release.