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Video games’ influence on popular culture has never been more prevalent. Their effect is visible and audible in today’s music, across the world of TV and cinema, and on the catwalk. Even your favourite language-learning and fitness apps feature progression systems and rewards popularised by games. To reflect the medium’s universal impact, ahead of the 21st BAFTA Games Awards, we asked the public a provocative question : what is the most influential video game of all time?

As more than one responder said, it’s unfair to have to choose just one. Do you pick the pioneers that shaped the early days of the medium, the innovators that were ahead of their time, the ones that proved formative to your own creative journey, or simply the ones that made you most emotional? As might be expected, among the extraordinary number of responses we received was a staggering variety of games — ranging from titles that launched the industry to contemporary giants released mere months ago. The top ten alone spans multiple genres, from platformers to shooters, sandbox adventures to simulations.

So, without further ado, here are the public’s top 21: each of which, it’s fair to say, has had a seismic impact on games and those who play them…

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Amazon has put in a last-minute bid to acquire all of TikTok, the popular video app, as it approaches an April deadline to be separated from its Chinese owner or face a ban in the United States, according to three people familiar with the bid.

Various parties who have been involved in the talks do not appear to be taking Amazon’s bid seriously, the people said. The bid came via an offer letter addressed to Vice President JD Vance and Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, according to a person briefed on the matter.

Amazon’s bid highlights the 11th-hour maneuvering in Washington over TikTok’s ownership. Policymakers in both parties have expressed deep national security concerns over the app’s Chinese ownership, and passed a law last year to force a sale of TikTok that was set to take effect in January.

The Trump/Musk regime is traumatizing the economy. It is abducting innocent people and deporting some without due process to a foreign torture prison. It is dismantling essential government agencies and purging good people who’ve served them well. It is extorting universities and law firms. It has upended our status in the world. It has attacked the rule of law.

And this weekend, there’s something you can do about it.

On Saturday, April 5, thousands – maybe even millions – of people will join together in cities and towns across the country in nonviolent protest.

It’s essential that you take part, if you can. Sign up now. Tell your neighbors. Tell your friends.

The event, called “Hands Off!”, was launched by Indivisible, but now has over 200 organizational partners including MoveOn, the Working Families Party, 50501, Common Cause, Public Citizen, the ACLU, and the AFL-CIO.

Tonight, Democrats have their first chance to fight back against Donald Trump and reverse some of their party’s losses in the 2024 election — and Republicans have a shot to score a big judicial victory in a court currently controlled narrowly by liberals, and in a state that is key to the presidency and control of the U.S. House of Representatives. It’s a race everyone is watching and people are spending significant sums on. I’m talking of course about the Wisconsin Supreme Court race between liberal Susan Crawford and conservative Brad Schimel.

Odds are you have probably heard of the election from the coverage of Elon Musk’s involvement, which has included him spending $20 million in television and digital advertising as well as giving away checks for $1 million to random rally goers this weekend (which is, apparently and shockingly, not illegal). But the stakes are significant: The Wisconsin Supreme Court has recently decided cases on gerrymandering, campaign finance, and voting rights, and would have jurisdiction over a pending abortion case and important electoral cases before the 2028 presidential race. Across all parties, nearly $100 million has been spent on the race.

Prognosticators mostly expect Crawford to narrowly win the race, with room for uncertainty and a small Schimel victory. Crawford has led most of the polls conducted of the race, and the line at Split Ticket is that Republicans have an off-year turnout problem that tilts the scales against them. You can apply a similar logic from my ”dual electorates” piece and draw the conclusion that Schimel is likely to have a bad time, though a win is not impossible. The prediction market Kalshi (I know) gives Crawford an 84% chance (the markets tend to overestimate odds for losers, so her real odds might be higher than this).

Whatever the odds, what really matters is who votes, and here is how to watch the results like a nerd pro:

After adding in-app English translations and bilingual subtitles, Xiaohongshu recently opened a Hong Kong office, and posted a role for global business development based in Hong Kong on its official LinkedIn account. The city is often the first step for Chinese companies expanding overseas. Earlier this month, it also launched a global e-commerce pilot program for mainland Chinese merchants that initially targets the U.S., Hong Kong, and Macau.

“RedNote’s pivot signals an evolution to take markets outside China seriously,” Ivy Yang, a China tech analyst and founder of consulting firm Wavelet Strategy, told Rest of World. While the company had been trying to expand overseas, the “TikTok refugee phenomenon likely made this pivot a must-have rather than simmering on the back burner.”

The unexpected surge of global users in January due to fears of a TikTok ban could provide a windfall for Xiaohongshu. But for the platform to compete with Western social media apps, it must retain these users, build cross-border e-commerce functions, and clarify its overseas business strategy, experts and business owners told Rest of World.

The latest Gallup polling shows Americans’ trust in mass media at a historic low, with just 31% expressing “a great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence that news organizations report “fully, accurately and fairly.” Even more alarming, 36% of Americans now say they have no trust at all in the media—a staggering increase from the 6% who felt that way in 1972 when Gallup first started tracking this metric.

While legacy outlets still maintain the prestige, the buildings, the brand recognition, and the access, they’ve lost something far more valuable: credibility with the public. The past few years have made this painfully obvious, as one journalistic failure after another has demonstrated that these institutions aren’t equipped to handle our current moment.

It’s not just the endless “Trump in a diner” profiles that treat fascist supporters as passive victims rather than people with agency, as Brynn Tannehill argued in The New Republic. It’s also the normalization of the absurd—like Peter Baker at the New York Times treating Trump’s unhinged ramblings about annexing Canada as a serious policy proposal worthy of electoral analysis.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and journalism is no different. As the legacy press continues its slow-motion collapse, independent journalists are increasingly doing the heavy lifting of holding power to account.

We see it in how independent outlets were the first to call out the GOP’s anti-trans moral panic for what it was. We see it in how newsletters like Popular Information track corporate political spending and hypocrisy in ways the business press won’t. We see it when former newspaper journalists and editors, freed from institutional constraints, launch newsletters that expose the corruption and cronyism the mainstream press normalizes.

When the New York Times was treating Trump’s Tesla stunt on the White House lawn like a car show instead of corruption, independent outlets were the ones pointing out that having a president use the people’s house to promote his billionaire donor’s private company is, in fact, a serious ethical breach.

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How did this all happen? After first touching base with our team and ensuring our interest, the team at Gunzilla Games secured the rights to Game Informer. From the start, the new owners insisted on the idea of Game Informer remaining an independent editorial outlet; they felt just as strongly as our team did that the only path forward was with an editorial group that made 100 percent of the decisions around what we cover and how we do so, without any influence from them or anyone else.

Game Informer now operates under an entity called Game Informer Inc., and our intent is to continue to focus on highlighting the coolest games, celebrating the history and legacy of the gaming industry, and shining a spotlight on the creators and players who are charting its future. I am deeply grateful for the trust and enthusiasm from the team at Gunzilla Games; they see the same potential in Game Informer as our team does, and their encouragement to do so ethically and free of outside pressure is laudable.

The global backlash against the second Donald Trump administration keeps on growing. Canadians have boycotted US-made products, anti–Elon Musk posters have appeared across London amid widespread Tesla protests, and European officials have drastically increased military spending as US support for Ukraine falters. Dominant US tech services may be the next focus.

There are early signs that some European companies and governments are souring on their use of American cloud services provided by the three so-called hyperscalers. Between them, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) host vast swathes of the Internet and keep thousands of businesses running. However, some organizations appear to be reconsidering their use of these companies’ cloud services—including servers, storage, and databases—citing uncertainties around privacy and data access fears under the Trump administration.

“There’s a huge appetite in Europe to de-risk or decouple the over-dependence on US tech companies, because there is a concern that they could be weaponized against European interests,” says Marietje Schaake, a nonresident fellow at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center and a former decadelong member of the European Parliament.