Best Games of 2004
A lackluster 2003 led to a trio of all-timers that dominated the video game landscape for years to come.
San Andreas was the culmination of the journey Rockstar had taken gamers since GTA 3 and became the hallmark of excellence in the genre until arguably Skyrim.
Valve's Half-Life 2 and its physics engine pushed shooters so far forward compared to its peers to such an extent that arguably hadn't been matched since Doom a decade earlier and hasn't been matched since, with perhaps only Modern Warfare being close. While some fanboys would argue Halo 2 should also be considered in this regard, online multiplayer shooters had already been thriving on the PC for years and the awful cliffhanger ending of Halo 2's campaign puts the game below the more complete Metroid Prime 2.
World of Warcraft completely remade the MMO genre, brought it non-gamers to play video games not matched until the rise of cell phone games, and ultimately replaced Internet chat rooms and became the playing ground for nascent meme culture. WoW sparked the rise of widespread use of Wi-Fi, laptop gaming, multiplayer voice chat, min-max build websites, video-based memes in Leeroy Jenkins leading to the rise of YouTube, and, eventually, social forum programs that led to Discord. WoW established modern gaming culture and arguably established modern online social culture. As for the game itself, the world was so massive, the joy of leveling and race/class combos, and use of skills and mix of quests and instances was so great that it became impossible to put down. It became common to sit a friend who was a gamer in front of the game for an hour and plan to take them to the store to buy the game by the end of that hour.
WoW ultimately would change gaming culture and would become what was played inbetween new video game releases, or for some, became the ONLY game they played. Only the few PC stalwarts playing CounterStrike or Koreans playing StarCraft every day had, to that point, established the idea of playing one video game only; every other gamer, for the most part, explored and played multiple types of games. After WoW, the idea of a gamer only playing one game and making it their entire identity as a gamer or content creator (as that term was newly being realized by the end of the decade) became much more common.
