The Last of Us Tops the 100 Greatest Games List: The Dispute Is About the Rubric, Not the Craft

I read the result while wiping down a microphone before a podcast taping, and I had to put the cloth down. Kinda Funny Games published its list of the 100 greatest games in history. The top spot went to The Last of Us. The comment section exploded within the hour.

What made me stop was something else. Even the loudest dissenters conceded that the original is one of the finest games ever made. One player said they preferred The Last of Us Part II because its combat systems are denser and harder. Another hoisted Sekiro onto the altar. But nobody called the 2026 release a mediocre work.

Some matches are not played on grass; they are played deep inside people. The fight over a game ranking is exactly that kind of match.

Kinda Funny Games is a gaming content channel built by former industry journalists, with a loyal audience large enough to turn every ranking into an event. This list runs from Pong to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which is to say nearly the entire commercial history of the medium. The Last of Us sits at number one. The Last of Us Part II appears too, but further down.

Three camps formed instantly. The first defends the original on historical influence: Naughty Dog went from Uncharted to The Last of Us, set the standard for cinematic storytelling in action games, and every major title since has borrowed something. The second argues on systems: Part II plays better, the enemy AI is sharper, the spaces are tighter and more pressurized. The third camp, no smaller, calls both products the beneficiaries of Western media favoritism.

Those three camps are arguing with three different rulers. And the organizers published none of them.

A ranking that does not disclose its weightings is a measuring instrument that has never been calibrated, and the entire heat of this argument comes from that empty space.

If the editors had stated 40 percent historical influence, 30 percent systems depth, 20 percent storytelling, 10 percent durability, most of the fight would dissolve. The Part II camp would immediately know where they lose and where they win. The Sekiro camp would know what cost their game points. Instead, readers received an order without receiving the method of ordering.

This is where esports and gaming share a root. In competition, every argument about who is best begins with the question: by which criteria. A player can lead every statistical category and still trail in trophies. A team can win a title while playing a style widely considered narrow. Nobody ever wins that argument while the weightings stay off the table.

And this is where it all feels familiar. In 2026, writing the Hiep Ba blog from a student apartment in Chicago, I published my first piece on Chicago Fire. That team had the lowest pass completion rate in MLS, 78 percent according to Opta data, yet scored 14 goals from counterattacks, the most in the league. I argued that direct play was a tactical manifesto. A male commentator on Twitter sneered: women do love seeing through tactics, don't they. I did not delete the post. I pulled the data tables and wrote a response with charts.

Chicago Fire taught me that football always knows how to trample the script. But the larger lesson sat elsewhere: to prove the script was trampled, you first need a clear ruler.

The dichotomy the gaming community is using to fight over The Last of Us is very old: proven safety versus high-risk experiment. The 2026 release was a genre-perfecting run, doing everything already established and doing it superbly. The 2026 release was a structural gamble, pushing players into morally uncomfortable choices and stretching emotional duration beyond what the market required. In esports these two approaches have names: playing the verified meta, and playing a structure nobody has decoded. The price of the second is that losing gets you called reckless. The price of the first is that winning gets you called boring.

In the summer of 2026, stadiums stood empty, yet sport had never been more honest. That same summer I sat in a WSCR production room and got word that Chicago Fire were negotiating a loan for Robert Beric from Saint-Etienne. I checked his numbers: seven goals in 22 Ligue 1 matches. I called an agent to verify. The newsroom doubted it. I published anyway. On August 12, 2026, the club confirmed.

The lesson from that day has followed me since: a claim is only as credible as the source behind it. The source behind a list of the 100 greatest games is a branded content channel. Nothing wrong with that. It is just that a brand is not a method.

Where I might be wrong, and badly: I am applying competitive logic to a single-player product. The Last of Us has no season, no standings, nobody who must prove anything on a Saturday. Demanding that an entertainment ranking publish its weightings is like demanding that a concert come with a frequency spectrum. Perhaps I am the one misreading the genre.

Worse still, the evidence for community outrage that I just constructed is thin. The source piece only says one gamer said, some players believe, many people. No counts, no platforms, no timestamps. Across thirteen years of watching sports and esports, I have seen enough online eruptions to know that three anonymous quotes do not make a movement. If I used them as a sentiment measure, I would be doing exactly what I criticize in others.

The third act of this story is not the number one slot. It is the question of who gets to define what good means, and who pays when that definition is rejected.

My prediction, specific enough to verify: the next major greatest-games list will still not publish its weightings. Because that empty space is what generates traffic. A ranking with a clear rubric draws fewer comments than one without, and content people know it.

What I would rather see: when Vietnamese esports enters its own greatest-player-of-all-time argument, put the ruler on the table before putting names on the board. As for The Last of Us, the top spot does not need my defense. It needs a critic good enough to show what it won with.

I started Hiep Ba to write about football, and it turned out I was writing about myself.