The Last of Us Tops the 100 Greatest Games List, and the Argument Is About the Yardstick

At 2 a.m. in a small PC bang on a Mapo side street in Seoul, the kid next to me read the headline on his screen out loud: The Last of Us at number one. The noise in the room was not coming from him. Three men at the next table had already been arguing for a while. The first said Part I was an untouchable masterpiece. The second slapped the table and insisted Part II was what Naughty Dog actually wanted to make, and that Part I was merely a draft that got lucky. The third, silent until then, delivered the line that killed the table: Sekiro is the best game ever made, it just isn't popular with the people who write the lists.

I sat there, thirty-four years old, Vietnamese, an esports analyst working in Seoul, listening to an argument I have heard in stadiums, in practice rooms and on every team ranking of the past eighteen years. Those three men were not arguing about a game. They were arguing about who gets to define the word great.

Kinda Funny Games published a list of the 100 greatest games in history, placing The Last of Us first. The reaction was immediate and split into two clear camps. The opposition argued the list over-rewards cinematic storytelling and undervalues systemic depth. The defence leaned on historical influence: Naughty Dog, the Uncharted line, then The Last of Us, an entire generation of design following behind.

One question is quoted verbatim in the piece, and it is the most important sentence in it: does this list rank by quality of gameplay, by popularity, or by historical influence? The article records the question, moves on, and does not answer it. It also records an opponent conceding that Part I remains one of the most outstanding games in history.

No sales figures. No completion rates. No player counts. No weighting table. A hundred places, and the entire quantitative content of the list is the ranking itself.

I should be clear about my own trade: this material belongs to games criticism, not to competitive esports. No tournament, no roster, no patch. But the argument inside it runs on the exact vocabulary esports uses every week, which makes it worth reading as a case study in criteria.

At the bottom of the same page sits a block of esports headlines: LCK viewership doubling after six years of franchising, GAM Esports joining VCT Pacific 2027, LOUD returning to VCT Champions 2026, MLBB Vietnam becoming globally competitive. No numbers, no sources, no measurement window. I filed them as leads to verify, not as conclusions.

A ranking that does not publish its yardstick is a rulebook nobody is allowed to read. When the weighting lives inside the list-maker's head, every argument afterwards is an argument about guessing that person's intent. The yardstick settles the answer before the argument begins, and that is why the argument never ends.

Put two yardsticks side by side and it becomes obvious. The historical-influence yardstick asks: how did this work change the way everyone after it worked? The systems-depth yardstick asks: in every second of interaction, how many decisions genuinely belong to the player? A game can win outright on the first and draw on the second. Both camps in The Last of Us dispute are right, because they are answering two different questions with the same word.

Football has lived with this for thirty years. Pelé or Messi never resolves, because one side counts trophies and the other counts moments. Esports is younger and assumed it would escape: we have metrics, win rates, gold differences at minute fifteen. Yet when fans ask who the greatest League of Legends player in history is, the answer still depends on whether you count World Championship titles or count years spent at the top.

The most durable part of the article is the pairing of Part I and Part II: one is the safe refinement of a proven formula, the other an experimental gamble. That pairing outlives the list, because it repeats in every sport.

In July 2026 I wrote an analysis arguing that a support-marksman jungle style would dominate LCK Summer. The community pushed back hard, because it ran against a settled role order. Two weeks later Samsung Galaxy brought exactly that structure into a series against SK Telecom T1 and won 2-1. People called me a pioneer. What I actually learned was not that I was good at predicting. Every tactical turning point begins as an idea that gets laughed at and ends as a standard that gets copied. The Last of Us Part II sits precisely in the position of the laughed-at idea. Every generation needs a shock to believe the impossible can happen, and for a narrative game the shock usually arrives as a second part that is hated before it is loved.

In the summer of 2026, right after South Korea beat Germany 2-0, I wrote about how Shin Tae-yong used a 3-4-1-2 to strangle the opposition midfield. A colleague at a broadcast station laughed when I called it a jungle gank. The logic was identical: cut the supply line in the middle of the map, force the opponent into ground they do not want to fight on, then punish the space they leave. One positioning problem, two different sports, and a vocabulary broad enough for both if the writer bothers to explain it.

In 2026 I worked on a project connecting K League player sensor data to a win-probability model for League of Legends matches. The model ran beautifully until the LCK Summer final, when Gen.G lost 0-3 to Damwon Kia and ShowMaker inside an arena with no crowd. Every measurable variable leaned Gen.G in at least one scenario. What I had left out was the pressure of silence. I wrote a 5,000-word self-critique and changed how I write. My model was right on every variable I could measure and wrong on the one that decided the match.

The hundred-game list sits on the opposite side: a very strong conclusion with almost no variables at all. No sales, no completion rate, no player count. By the standard I set for myself after 2026, it is a qualitative claim presented in the form of a quantitative table.

The article's structure is worth reading as a design template. It opens with outrage, then reveals the ranking, then quotes both camps. Cause and effect inverted the way a match is cut into a trailer. The controversy here is the product, not the by-product. Sports sponsorship runs the same way: a global brand puts a logo on a shirt and measures success in impressions, not in how many people stay with the club after the contract expires.

One professional detail bothers me. The evidence for the backlash is phrasing like “one player said” and “many people feel.” No count, no platform, no date. A source with no name and no number is a mood, not a measurement. Quoting one voice and calling it a community is the cheapest way to manufacture a trend that does not exist.

Suppose Kinda Funny Games published the weighting: forty per cent historical influence, thirty per cent systemic depth, thirty per cent storytelling. The argument would collapse within a day. That says more about the arguers than about the list: most of us are not chasing truth, we are chasing the right to speak without having to prove anything. The opposition is no more honest than the defence. They are defending a yardstick too, one that was never written down.

The real blind spot lies elsewhere, and it lands directly on my trade. Games canon rewards the cinematic moment and under-accounts for the system that produced it. Apply that to esports unchanged: we replay Faker's Shockwave millions of times and almost nobody replays the twenty minutes of vision control that made it possible. Same bias, same consequence. Viewers learn that greatness is a moment, when greatness is usually a process.

And the line about even critics conceding Part I is a consensus device: concede a weak claim so the strong claim looks jointly signed. It is not false. It is simply a split presented as a near-consensus.

This list will be forgotten in a few weeks, like every other ranking. What stays is a question sports fans should ask earlier: what is your yardstick, and who gets to write it down? Belief does not die on the day the match ends; it dies when we stop asking questions. Viewers can walk away, but the stories we tell will stay in the arena.