Three weeks ago, our sibling site NextGen  posted the article, "The Ten Greatest Years in Gaming." It was full of cool industry info, but the first thing we asked was, "So, the PlayStation was first designed as an add-on for the SNES. We get the irony, but what were we actually playing in 1993 that made it so great?"

We checked it out. We made a huge list of the best games of the past 34 years, taped it to the wall, and fought for days about stuff like whether one Zelda is worth more than two Dragon Warriors and a Mortal Kombat.

We considered each year as a whole, looking at how many great games came out, just how great each was, and even how they play today. And our final results shocked even us - many of our own favorite games aren't here, because the years in which they were released didn't make the cut.

This feature has very few rules. It's based upon the US market - no "Speccy" games, and only one Japanese import will be mentioned. If a game appeared on multiple systems or spawned sequels, we gave the first, best-known, most influential or highest quality version more weight. Sports games come out every year and so had almost no impact whether one year is better than the last.

This was crazy-hard to narrow down - we really did fight, agonize, and fight some more - so you might not see your favorite game or year mentioned. Feel free to head into our forums and voice your opinion.