2001 was the year of the PlayStation 2

On first blush, it would be easy to see something a little dispiriting in the fact that most of the “great” PS2 games on this list are sequels, a category of game typically associated with play-it-safe design decisions and a desire for refinement over sheer innovation. But one look at Grand Theft Auto III, published in October 2001 by Rockstar Games, puts the lie to that idea—and not just because there’s nothing at all “refined” about the game’s boldly vulgar writing and crime-film-soaked take on big city Americana. In taking a perfectly serviceable pair of top-down car games of the prior generation and transforming them into a full and fully realized world, the third Grand Theft Auto literally altered the entire landscape of gaming, in a way almost no other title of its generation can claim.

To be fair: Grand Theft Auto III was not the first great interactive 3D world in video gaming. (PC designers, including those working on Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls series, had been poking at these ideas for years.) But it was one of the biggest and most vibrant, and the first available on a home consumer console chugging along cheerfully in millions of people’s living rooms. By dropping players into the living world of Liberty City and allowing them to carry out mayhem as they might, GTA III granted those players the freedom that is now the bedrock of the massive open-world “genre”—but which, at the time, was one of those defining “I’ll always remember the first time I saw this” moments. Blending the sheer scope of that accomplishment with a distinctive—if occasionally distinctive-to-the-point-of-irritation—personality, GTA III didn’t just establish a once-niche crime gaming brand at the forefront of gaming; it proved that the PlayStation 2 was a place where whole worlds could suddenly spring to life.

In a rare move for a video game, Metal Gear Solid 2 has only gotten better with age. It was always a brilliant work of art, but its twisty, meta plot about a whiny soldier who was raised on video games and who served as a consciously poor imitation of original series protagonist Solid Snake, was a little much for players who just wanted another cool spy action game after PS1’s Metal Gear Solid. The subsequent decades have allowed MGS2 to step out of that haze of expectations, and stand on its own as a meta-commentary on gaming, politics, and whether omni-present, media-controlling robot brains should run humanity from the shadows. (No, apparently.)

But if the plot required some analysis to really appreciate, one thing that immediately shined about MGS2 was series creator Hideo Kojima’s attention to detail. In Sons Of Liberty, you can hang over a ledge to hide from enemy soldiers, and if you repeatedly pull yourself up, your character will get stronger and be able to hold onto ledges for longer. If you shoot an enemy’s radio, they won’t be able to call for help. Ask any video game fan who was around in 2001 what the most impressive part was, though, and they’ll say the same thing: If you shoot the ice out of a bucket, you can sit there and watch it melt in real time. It had no bearing on gameplay, but the same level of detail is applied throughout the game. It’s still a masterpiece.

The Final Fantasy franchise’s cinematic ambitions had been clear since at least 1997’s Final Fantasy VII, the series’ first attempt to blend long, lush CGI cutscenes with its traditional RPG action. But while one effort to make a “Final Fantasy movie” in 2001 produced only an infamous box office bomb—the disastrous theatrical release Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within—the other, more traditional effort was far more successful. Because while Final Fantasy X isn’t the best-written installment in the long-running franchise, or the most robust in terms of its battles or its systems, as a triumph of presentation, it’s damn hard to beat.

That includes the sudden addition of voice-acting, a first for the series, as James Arnold Taylor and Hedy Burress brought to life the game’s two star-crossed leads, Tidus and Yuna. (He’s a sports star that just got Narnia’d into a medieval apocalypse; she’s a priestess with a martyrdom complex. Can these two make it in this crazy, Sin-afflicted world? Tune in to the spin-off to find out.) Sacrificing none of the sweep of previous installments, FFX nevertheless managed to get Square’s flagship series somewhere close to its “playable movie” dreams at last, featuring big, bold, loud characters; environments of jaw-dropping beauty; and one of the most baffling mini-games in the franchise’s history. (Sorry, Blitzball fans.) The phrase “generational leap” has become a bit ironic in gaming of late, especially given the minor leaps in console power marked by the transition from the PlayStation 3 to the 4, or the 4 to the 5. But it takes little more than a comparison between FFX and its immediate predecessors to see what a seismic shift was taking place in gaming in 2001, a staggering destruction of the barriers between what was possible and what had been living for years in designers’ most cherished dreams.

The PlayStation 2 launched with quite a few racing games, and while a few of them were okay, none strived to achieve “this is as close as you can get to driving a car without driving a car”-level of perfection as much as Gran Turismo 3 did. The developers at Polyphony Digital were, and still are, famous for trying to simulate driving as accurately as possible, down to recording actual engine noises, mapping out real racetracks, and lovingly rendering each car (even the stupid ones, like the PT Cruiser) into the digital space. At the time, it was hard to imagine any game looking better than Gran Turismo 3, or at least in-game cars looking any better. Even today, there’s a level of simplicity and purity that helps it still look relatively good in relation to similar games from this era.

More stylized aesthetics age better than anything approaching realism, but Gran Turismo 3 landed at the perfect point when the PS2 was capable of making games that look good, but still look distinctly like video games, meaning there’s something charming about the fact that it still looks nice—even if nobody is going to mistake its PT Cruiser for a real PT Cruiser.

If there’s one serious gap in the early PlayStation 2 library—one that both of its major competitors would take full advantage of in the years to come—it’s in the realm of multiplayer. In an era before online gaming was a norm, and wireless controllers still a luxury, the two-player-by-default PS2 simply had a hard time stacking up to the four-player chaos readily available on, say, Nintendo’s GameCube. (Especially since, when the ’Cube launched in September 2001, it did so with Super Smash Bros. Melee, one of the all-time party multiplayer greats.) But it wasn’t all bleak—even if one of the console’s best multiplayer treats absolutely, determinedly was.

Automotive combat series Twisted Metal had been a mainstay on the PlayStation One for years, blending arcade driving action with an increasingly goofy story of planetary mayhem and wishes gone awry. For its first PS2 incarnation, though, new developer Incognito stripped away many of the franchise’s sillier excesses, in an effort to make something more, for lack of a better word, “serious.” (Well, mostly: The serial killer clown with his head constantly on fire got to stay.) Soundtracked with a very on-the-nose license of The Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black,” Black’s tales of violent cannibals and revenge-obsessed preachers reads almost embarrassingly over-the-top to adult eyes. But the actual gameplay has aged far better: a fast-paced, invigorating run through a series of secret-filled levels, encouraging players to race through destroyed landscapes in an effort to secure enough power-ups to blow their enemies (and friends) to bits.

There had been cool video games before 2001, but had there ever been a video game that directly rewarded you for being cool? Yeah, probably. But surely none of them did it better than Devil May Cry—a game that began life as a Resident Evil sequel before the developers at Capcom realized a protagonist whose entire identity is about being cool didn’t really fit with the zombies and bio-terrorists of its horror franchise. The most telling thing about Devil May Cry’s legacy is that the game has now gotten four sequels, and other than an attempted reboot that tried to tweak the formula a little bit, they’ve all been functionally the same.

Capcom nailed it on the first try with DMC, resulting in a game that plays really well and centers on an instantly iconic character who looks very cool (long red coat, big sword, white hair, dual pistols!) and does very cool things (flipping enemies into the air, juggling them with his guns, launching at them with his sword!). DMC is a hard game, requiring players to attack hard and fast to maintain a coolness rating that goes from D for “dull” to A for “absolute” and S for “stylish”—but also, everything about it already looks so cool that even a basic proficiency for its combat will result in some truly rad nonsense.

By 2001, the “Are games art?” conversation—still among the tiredest in all of gaming—was already old enough to be a well-worn cliché. But defenders of the medium got a powerful new weapon in their arsenal in September of that year, when Sony and Team Ico released the title that lent the latter group its name. Largely wordless, strangely gentle, Ico looked like very little that had come before it. (Well, okay, some of the block-pushing stuff looked pretty familiar.) With its fairy tale premise of a young horned boy leading a silent princess through a shadow-afflicted castle, the game inspired feelings of mystery and connection. (And with its focus on light and shadow, a new appreciation for the PS2’s graphic prowess.) Among other things, it was one of the first titles to recognize the indelible tactile power of a firmly held hand.

Developer Fumito Ueda and his team would later go on to create titles like Shadow Of The Colossus and The Last Guardian, efforts to marry more traditional, action-y breeds of gameplay to their distinctive style. But in 2001, Ico was one of those rarest of things in the world of gaming (and in the sequel-packed library of the PS2): something wholly and uniquely its own.

Madden 2002 wasn’t the first Madden on PlayStation 2, but it was the first entry in the series to debut on the system (the previous year’s game had come out on the PlayStation 1 a few months earlier, since the PS2 hadn’t come out yet). With Sony’s second console already on a rocket ride to the moon, Madden was poised to be bigger than ever—and also bigger than it would ever be again. Three years after this game came out, publisher EA secured the exclusive rights to make NFL console games, detonating any potential competition for Madden, and giving the series the opportunity to become creatively stagnant over the next 20 years. 2002 wasn’t the first or last good game in the series, but it very well might’ve been the first entry in the series that virtually everyone on the planet owned. The PS2 was a Madden machine for a lot of people, and EA’s now-evaporated need to innovate and improve the series from year to year made it so that, if you wanted to play a football game, you wanted to play Madden. These days, if you want to play a football game, you have no choice but to play Madden.

The first Silent Hill game, released on the PS1 in 1999, was a perfectly standard survival horror game, riffing ably on the genre by replacing Resident Evil’s now-standard zombies (or Dino Crisis’ less-standard velociraptors) with a series of malformed creatures pulled from a foggy, rusty Lovecraftian netherworld. But it was with Silent Hill 2 that Konami transformed the franchise into something genuinely special, channeling the energy of films like Jacob’s Ladder and the works of Cronenberg and Lynch into the kind of horror game where the worst monsters are always going to be the ones running around inside your own head.

For instance: Unlike the previous games’ stalwart dad, Harry Mason, SH2 protagonist James Sutherland has precious little in the way of good reasons to be running around a clearly haunted town, having been dragged there as much by his unresolved feelings about his wife Mary’s death as for any concrete quest. And the city itself is no longer the generically monster-clogged lakeside town of yesteryear, now apparently tailoring its hells to each visitor’s individual tastes. Heavy with symbolism, and as interested in how players play it as what weapons or items they acquire—including, boldly, a system that attempts to extrapolate how suicidally depressed James is by how recklessly the player guides him—Silent Hill 2 was a burst of ambition from a series that had previously showed little sign of possessing it, and an early high-water mark for digital storytelling on the PlayStation 2.

What is there to say about Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater at this point? The third game in the series was like the second game but better, which was like the first game but better. It’s one of the single greatest video game franchises ever, and Pro Skater 3 is arguably the best of these original games (Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4, released in 2002, removed the two-minute time limit and embraced a more open-world design that swiftly began to have diminishing returns). The big innovation here, beyond better graphics made possible by the PlayStation 2’s processing power, is that the PS2 was capable of more complex button inputs and animations, resulting in the addition of a new move called the “revert” that would allow you to connect vert tricks to street tricks, which, for people who don’t keep up with skating or video game skating, basically laid the groundwork for expert players to assemble never-ending combos. The revert was so enormously important to the basic act of “playing Tony Hawk” that it was even added to last year’s phenomenal Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 + 2 remake (despite the fact that nothing else from THPS3 made the cut).

It could never have lasted. The uncontested ascendancy of the PlayStation 2, which hit its peak in 2001, was the result of many factors—Nintendo’s relative retreat from the market, the complete collapse of Sega as a going hardware concern, and (as we’ve hopefully demonstrated here) a slate of some truly amazing video games. But there was always going to be another competitor coming in to scoop up all that precious open space, and when Microsoft made its move to muscle onto Sony’s freshly carved-out territory in November of 2001, it did so armed with one of the great system-sellers of all time.

Like multiplayers, shooters were a major gap in the PlayStation 2’s early genre coverage. Sure, it launched with TimeSplitters (and X-Squad!), but there was little else to suggest that Sony had any real ambitions to build out the console first-person-shooter groundwork that Nintendo and Rare had laid with GoldenEye and Perfect Dark on the N64 a few years prior. In 2001, shooters were still mostly a Western genre, and a computer-based one, but Halo changed that forever. By making running, shooting, and punching feel natural (or as natural as anything could, on the unwieldy original Xbox controller), Mac FPS veterans Bungie turned millions of console kids into shooter fans—and loyal soldiers for Microsoft in the latest battlefield of the ever-raging console wars. When Halo 2 arrived a few years later—backed by the power of Microsoft’s then revolutionary Xbox Live online service—the transformation was complete.

The Xbox, even supported by the endlessly regenerating shields of the Master Chief, would never come close to beating the PlayStation 2 in sales. (Nothing ever has—it remains, at press, the best-selling video game console of all time.) But what Halo actually destroyed, like so many casually detonated Warthogs, was the air of universality the console carried. By 2002, PS2 vs. Xbox was a choice that every gamer had to make, guided by tastes, titles, and trends. But in 2001, for 11 blissful months of gaming excellence, the PlayStation 2 reigned supreme.