The Best Ever
Everything.

"Nintendo made a game about isolation and called it an adventure."

"A boy holds a girl's hand and leads her through a castle—Team Ico's 2001 debut reduced gaming to its most essential gesture and created something closer to poetry than product."

"Konami flipped a castle upside down and invented a genre."

"Steve Reich built a piece of music that breathes, and fifty years later it's still inhaling."

"Namco made a game about inflating monsters until they explode, and somehow it's adorable."

"John Hughes locked five teenagers in a library and found the universal in the specific."

"The joke density approaches one per second, but the real genius of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker's 1980 masterpiece is casting dramatic actors who play catastrophe completely straight."

"Holden Caulfield called everyone a phony in 1951 and hasn't stopped—J.D. Salinger's only novel remains the definitive text on adolescent alienation because it refuses to resolve into wisdom."

"Alain Delon barely speaks for ninety minutes and communicates everything—Jean-Pierre Melville's 1967 masterpiece invented a grammar of cool that cinema has been speaking ever since."

"No narration, no characters, no plot—just images of a world out of balance set to Philip Glass's pulsing score. Godfrey Reggio's 1982 film invented a form and remains its only necessary example."

"Thirty-five million people wanted an answer. Lynch gave them a door."

"Spike Lee made a movie about the hottest day of the summer, and America is still arguing about it."

"Animal Collective stopped hiding behind noise and let the songs breathe—the result was 2005's most emotionally direct experimental rock album, a record about love that actually sounds like love."

"Capcom invented competitive gaming by accident and changed arcades forever."

"Valve's 1998 debut made the radical argument that shooters could tell stories without cutscenes—and that silent protagonists could be more present than any voice actor."

"A missing cat, a dry well, a war crime in Manchuria. The connections never resolve. That's the point."

"FX's adaptation of James Clavell's novel immerses viewers in 1600 Japan with unprecedented authenticity—ten episodes of political intrigue, cultural collision, and performances that transcend prestige-TV conventions."

"Joe McPhee walked into a SUNY gymnasium in 1970 with a tenor sax and a pocket trumpet and recorded one of the most emotionally direct free jazz statements ever committed to tape."

"Joseph Heller wrote a war novel so funny it makes you forget you're reading about death, and then makes you remember."

"Tom Leaf's oral history assembles the voices around Brian Wilson into a symphony of perspectives—finally, a Beach Boys book that understands pop genius as collaborative act."

"Roman Polanski made a film noir in 1974 that's darker than anything from 1944."

"T.S. Eliot wrote a poem about paralysis that changed what poetry could do."

"Before antihero dramas, before prestige TV, there was J.R. Ewing teaching America to love a villain."

"Before punk had a name, Patti Smith walked into Electric Lady Studios and recorded an album that fused Rimbaud with rock and roll—the 1975 debut that proved poetry could sweat."

"Before the concept albums consumed them, Pink Floyd made their most texturally adventurous record—a 23-minute song about absolutely nothing that somehow contains everything."

"Marc Bolan made glam rock's perfect album by refusing to take any of it seriously."

"Fourteen playable characters, an opera scene that still produces tears, and a villain who actually destroys the world—Square's 1994 masterpiece remains the high-water mark for narrative ambition in the 16-bit era."

"Jane Austen's final completed novel is her quietest and her deepest—a story of second chances that understands what first chances cost."

"The Duffer Brothers built a nostalgia machine and accidentally made the best horror show of its decade."

"Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's post-Thunderbirds live-action opus stranded 311 people on a runaway Moon—and in doing so, created television's most philosophically serious science fiction before Battlestar Galactica."

"Andrei Tarkovsky made a science fiction film with no special effects, and it's the most alien thing you'll ever see."

"Ernest Cline wrote a nostalgia delivery system so effective it became the thing it was nostalgic for."

"Bob Newhart played the straight man to an entire Vermont town for eight seasons, then delivered television's greatest finale—a punchline that retroactively improved everything that came before."

"Capcom burned down their own franchise and built something new from the ashes—the 2005 reinvention that made survival horror into action horror and influenced everything that came after."

"Sly Stone made a funk album that forgot how to dance, and it's the truest thing he ever recorded."

"Dan Erickson made a show about work-life balance and turned it into existential horror."

"Truman Capote invented the nonfiction novel by spending six years with two murderers—the result was a book that reads like fiction and haunts like fact."

"David Milch made a Western about how civilization is born from mud and blood and profanity."