The Best Year in Gaming: The Sweet Sixteen, Northeast Conference

Welcome back to our Best Year in Gaming March Madness bracket competition! Yesterday we finished off the Southwest Conference, and with it the second round. We're on to the Elite 8 this week, and we've now published every single article in our series, so it's just head-to-head competitions now. We'll be doing two per day and finishing this weekend.

First, let's look back at the results, which give us an interesting contrast. First, 1995 beat 2017, showing a triumph of nostalgia (1995 had some interesting stuff but I don't think those first generation PlayStation games are much to write home about and the Virtual Boy was just a hilarious misstep), while 2023 beat 2016, showing off the value of recency bias. Though it's worth noting that 2023 was a pretty stellar year for games, and it deserves its high seed.

Results: 1995 and 2023 win

Today we're returning to the Northeast Conference for our Sweet Sixteen matchups. The first of these sees our 2-seed, 2004, up against 1999.

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1999 cruised through the first round, beating 1984 pretty easily but then faced much tougher competition in the second round against 2003, though it was able to squeak past on the strength of some stellar releases that year, including System Shock 2, Age of Empires II, Planescape: Torment, and Unreal Tournament. That said, 2004 was an amazing year for games - it has its own, better version of Unreal Tournament, even, plus Halo 2, Half-Life 2, GTA: San ANdreas, The Sims 2, FarCry, and Doom 3.

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The other half of the Northeast bracket sees 1991 squaring off against 2009. '91 isn't the strongest year of the 16-bit era in our competition, but with the entry of the Super NES to the US market it really marks the dawn of the 16-bit console wars between Sega and Nintendo, and all of the amazing games which would come out of that competition - games like Street Fighter 2, A Link to the Past, Sonic the Hedgehog, Streets of Rage, and Final Fantasy IV lead a stacked list of amazing games (and there were some pretty great tabletop releases, too). 2009 beat 1987 to get here - no small feat - and included a number of important games as the industry made the transition to mobile - Canabalt and Angry Birds are two underrated releases from that year - but also some other big names like Minecraft, Arkham Asylum, League of Legends, and Torchlight, not to mention some solid tabletop releases like Fiasco and Malifaux.

If you’re interested in voting on the outcome, head over to our Patreon and join our Discord server to vote. Otherwise, check back tomorrow for the winner and the next matchup in the Southeast Conference.

This article is part of a larger series on the best year in gaming. For more years, click this link. Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com.

Tags: history | Best Year in Gaming