The Last of Us Tops the 100 Greatest Games List: The Argument Detonated Before the Ranking Was Even Revealed

I read it at two in the morning, in a rented flat in Guangzhou, while a group chat of Vietnamese games-content people was still lit up. Someone dropped a link: The Last of Us had taken first place in the 100 greatest games of all time, published by Kinda Funny Games. Ten minutes later the chat had split three ways. One camp typed “deserved”. One camp typed “Sekiro”. One camp typed “the sequel was better”. None of the three was reading from the same set of criteria.

What made me sit up was not the top spot. It was the order of presentation. The piece pushes the argument to the front and only reveals the ranking further down. Reaction comes first; result comes after. For someone who has spent nineteen years reading sports data tables, that is a familiar smell: when somebody tells you a crowd is furious, the first question is who counted the crowd, where, and over how long. The article answers none of the three.

Kinda Funny Games is a games-content outlet built by a group of former journalists and streamers from the United States, strong on podcasts, commentary and community. They published a list of 100 titles, and The Last of Us — the 2026 Naughty Dog release — sits at number one. The list ships without weights, without a panel, without a method. It is the collective opinion of a group of content people, packaged in the form of a ranking.

The rest of the article is a three-way conversation. One camp backs the 2026 game for its storytelling, its emotional direction, its unforgettable moments. A second camp pushes the 2026 sequel for a denser combat system and greater design ambition, even while conceding that the sequel divides people. A third camp holds up Sekiro as the counterweight, arguing that precision in combat mechanics is the true measure of the summit. The piece also builds a timeline: from early products such as Pong to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, a title released only very recently.

Three camps, three rubrics, one ranking. Nobody is wrong. Nobody is talking about the same thing either.

This is where my trade collides with it. Esports lives on this argument every season: who is the greatest player, which team is the best in history, and every time a list appears that nobody can explain the arithmetic of. In 2026 I wrote a piece demanding Guangzhou R&F sell Eran Zahavi immediately, right after he had scored 27 league goals. The whole city cursed me. R&F finished fifth and conceded 46 goals that season, and the piece passed three million reads. In June 2026, at Luzhniki, after Germany lost 0-1 to Mexico, I posted one line: Germany will go out in the group stage. The next day the odds still leaned their way. On 27 June, Germany lost 0-2 to South Korea in Kazan and finished bottom of Group F.

What I kept from those two episodes was not that I was right. It was this: when a system is measured by a single index — goals, trophies, views — that index covers the rest of the system, and the reader only sees the part that is lit.

The problem with the 100-title list is not whether The Last of Us deserves the spot; it is that no weighting table was ever published, so each fan camp has to build its own rubric and then argue against the other camp’s rubric. That is the media version of a rulebook nobody is allowed to read: the complaints never stop, because there is no basis on which to close them.

The article records this itself, fairly clearly. One passage puts the question plainly: does the ranking judge by gameplay quality, by popularity, or by historical influence? There is no answer. Then at the end the author writes that every player has their own criteria, from gameplay and story to influence. That reads as fairness. In practice it is retroactive validation: admit there is no measuring stick, leave the ranking untouched, and let the reader conclude the ranking was right.

One more detail belongs in the notebook. The article discloses that even dissenters concede The Last of Us is one of the most outstanding games in history. It sounds like generosity. Look closer and it is a consensus-manufacturing device: concede a smaller claim and a split poll becomes an apparent near-consensus. I have watched that move on football analysis panels for nineteen years. They do not need you to agree with them. They only need you to nod at a softer sentence, and then proceed as if you had.

The most durable frame in the whole piece is not The Last of Us. It is the pairing of safe and ambitious. The 2026 game is described as a refinement that is almost “flawless” within what it chose to do. The 2026 game is described as a design gamble. That frame outlives the ranking, because it is the eternal argument of any competitive discipline: take the proven approach, or take the high-variance one. In esports it is the story of every team standing in front of a new meta — keep the structure that won, or change the composition before opponents finish reading you. Crowds fear being wrong, so they pick the strong team; I pick the right team — alone, and I know it.

The timeline from Pong to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 deserves scrutiny too. Using a brand-new release as the endpoint of the industry’s history is a marker of recency bias, and it quietly demotes everything in the middle. In my reading, this is a recurring error of Western games journalism: build a historical axis, then place the newest product at its summit, so you can praise it and sell it in the same gesture.

Then comes the part few notice. In competitive terms, this article contains no team, no tournament, no patch, no player. It is games criticism, not esports news. In my classification system it was once tagged esports. That tag is wrong, and I will say so plainly, because a wrong tag corrupts everything downstream: entity counts, topic distribution, sentiment baselines.

The only esports signal sits in the appended headline strip, and it is bare headline, with no data. One line says the LCK doubled its viewership after six years of franchising. One says GAM Esports joins VCT Pacific 2027. One says LOUD returns to VCT Champions 2026. One concerns MLBB Vietnam’s ambition to reach global competitiveness. One concerns the controversy over K/DA’s new look. Not one line carries a measurement window; not one carries a source. To me this is a lead list awaiting verification, not evidence. Germans think they have drawn the map; I only need to see where their finger lands on the paper.

But something here is worth keeping. A generalist games outlet still running an esports strip across five different topics — League, LCK, Valorant, MLBB, a music IP — means esports has become a standing section in mainstream games media, no longer the private corner of specialist sites. Who said football is a sport? It is a stock market with no closing day. The same sentence applies verbatim here: esports has become a listed stock inside the games-media portfolio, and people are buying it with headlines.

Where I could be wrong, and badly.

The charge that the outlet deliberately withheld its criteria to maximise argument may be my own inference. It is entirely possible the method was published elsewhere, in another article, another podcast episode, and this news piece simply did not carry it. I have no evidence of intent, only evidence of outcome. Those are different things, and I have just slipped into the exact error I scold others for.

The safe-versus-ambitious pairing may also be a false binary. The sequel’s problem most likely sits in narrative execution, not in the level of ambition. If so, the frame I just praised as durable is merely another name for “done well” and “done less well”.

And the Harry Kane lesson is still warm. In 2026 I wrote that England would beat Denmark if Kane were benched, because he had one goal from the group stage and looked tired. He reached the final and scored the decisive goal in the 104th minute. I had underestimated the organisational value of a star. Here, I am underestimating exactly the rubric the majority uses: emotional impact and historical footprint. I call it vague, but it is still a measure — just an unwritten one.

My prediction, specific enough to be checked: within twelve months, this outlet’s esports strip will shift from headline aggregation to original content — direct interviews, self-collected data, on-site tournament reporting. The test is simple: count the pieces containing direct interviews in the final six months of 2026. If that share does not rise, I am wrong, and I will write the retraction as harshly as I wrote this.

And one thing I am more certain of: any esports “greatest of all time” ranking that does not publish its weights will reproduce this three-way split exactly. Audiences do not need another list. They need the ruler.