Halo, Flight Simulator & Minecraft Ranked In The 50 Best Video Games of All Time

TIME today released their “The 50 Best Video Games of All Time” list and three Microsoft owned games are present on the list. Those three games are Minecraft, Flight Simulator and Halo.

Representing multiple generations of gamers, TIME’s tech team put more than 150 nominees through a multistage ranking process to compile a cross-section of gaming’s best ideas across nearly four decades. Here are our picks for the 50 greatest video games of all time.

Read TIME’s comments on these three games below.

Minecraft:

Swedish studio Mojang’s indie bolt from the blue turns out to be that rare example of a game whose title perfectly sums up its gameplay: you mine stuff, then you craft it. At its simplest, it’s a procedurally generated exercise in reorganizing bits of information—all those cubes of dirt and rock and ore strewn about landscapes plucked from 1980s computers—into recognizable objects and structures and mechanisms. Or put another way: part spreadsheet, part Bonsai pruning. Since its launch in November 2011, it’s sold over 100 million copies, colonized virtually every computing platform, spawned an official “Education Edition” tailored for classrooms and inspired feats of mad grandeur, like this attempt to model staggering swathes of George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire. Has there ever been a game as impactful as this one?

Microsoft Flight Simulator:

Next time you’re on a commercial flight, ask your pilot if they ever played Flight Simulator growing up. Odds are the answer will be “yes.” The hyper-realistic series puts players in the cockpit of everything from tiny Cessnas to massive jumbo jets. Obsessed flight simmers have built gigantic, multi-screen rigs in basements worldwide to better imitate the real thing. 2006’s Flight Simulator X, meanwhile, let players into the control tower, giving birth to a diehard community of simmers who to this day spend hours flying and directing mock routes.

Halo: Combat Evolved:

Fun fact: It was Steve Jobs who first introduced Bungie’s Halo: Combat Evolved to the public, promising in 1999 that it would arrive simultaneously on Windows and Mac. That, of course, was before Microsoft acquired the studio and turned Halo into the definitive 2001 Xbox launch title, simultaneously proving shooters could work brilliantly on gamepads. Set on a mysterious artificial ring-world, players take up as Master Chief, a faceless, futuristic soldier fighting the alien Covenant and, later, the zombie-like Flood. The single-player campaign offered a gripping storyline that brought plot to the fore for one of the first times in a mainstream shooter, though some grumbled about its repetitive level design. The multiplayer, meanwhile, offered one of the finest such experiences of any shooter in history, replete with sniper rifles, sticky grenades, vehicles and other twists.

Read the full list of top 50 video games here.