The Games Gen Z Grew Up With*
[List] The games me and everyone I knew owned growing up.
Disclaimer: I was born in 2000 on the older end of Generation Z, lucked out into owning all 3 of the major consoles of the day and grew up in the UK, this list shouldn’t be taken as concrete fact and instead as an anecdotal list of games that were common among classmates and friends.
You won’t be seeing any Xbox or GameCube games on this list because the PS2 absolutely dominated, very few people I knew besides me owned those consoles.
Something I’ve noticed in my 14 months of Substack so far is that generally, my readers tend to be a lot older than I am; a lot of the games I’ve written about predate my time on Earth so it’s only natural. As such, I’ve heard mentioned a lot of games from the NES, SNES and other platforms that everybody owned… that wouldn’t necessarily pop-up in best of lists: games like Ikari Warriors, Winter Games and so on.
I’ve always been a retro gamer (if you could even call it that back then) and played my PS2, GameCube and Xbox all the way up until 2009 with those classic Sega compilations on each.
With this all in mind, I wanted to make a list of games that my generation grew up with. These aren’t necessarily the greatest games ever made (though a few stone cold classics appear) instead they are games I just remember floating around wherever I went; growing up in the 2000’s, these games are the kind you’d always see, without fail, laying atop your friend or cousin’s PS2 Slim.
Star Wars Battlefront 1 & 2
I can count on one hand how many people I’ve met in my age range who didn’t grow up with Battlefront 1, 2 or both. As a kid I preferred Battlefront 2 but as an adult? I feel they’re about equal. Adore these games.
The 2000’s were a golden age for Star Wars video games. While the prequels are contentious to this day, gamers were feasting on classic after classic: Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy and Outcast, The Force Unleashed, Republic Commando, Rebel Strike on the GameCube, KOTOR I and II, I could sit here all day listing the amazing Star Wars games I grew up with that came out between 2000-2010 but the Battlefronts and LEGO Star Wars were easily the most ubiquitous.
The premise of Battlefront is that you relive famous battles from the films as a standard, rank-and-file soldier. Each match of Battlefront plays out a bit like Battlefield (in fact, EA’s Battlefront reboots in the 2010’s were essentially just Battlefield clones) where you capture points using infantry and vehicles in order to drain the enemy team’s ticket counter to 0 and win the game. Both games have their own merits and are worth playing. Battlefront 1 has the better maps, better infantry gameplay and the campaign features clips from the films but Battlefront 2 adds space battles, playable heroes, a much improved campaign and maps from Revenge of the Sith. If you play on Steam, both games had their multiplayer restored (mod free) a few years back and are very cheap, it was a dream come true playing these online with some people I knew who also had fond memories.
LEGO Games
Starting with LEGO Star Wars in 2005, TT Games began to flood the market with LEGO games based upon popular, family-friendly licences like Indiana Jones and Batman. Everyone I knew had at least one of these when I was growing up. I owned LEGO Star Wars 1 and 2 as well as Indiana Jones and Batman though by the time Batman rolled around even my single-digit aged self was getting tired of how samey these games all were.
I think most people have played a TT Games LEGO game but in case you haven’t, they’re essentially action platformers with some light puzzle elements and although short, they tend to have a huge roster of characters to unlock to keep you coming back.
Don’t quote me on this because it’s been somewhere in the region of 15 years since I last played one of the classic-style TT LEGO games but I remember LEGO Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy’s DS version being shockingly good, you could drag and drop parts and make your own character on the touchscreen.
Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets
The garbage PlayStation 1 Harry Potter game is much more well-known than Chamber of Secrets which is a damn shame because this game is actually good.
With a fantastic soundtrack composed by Jeremy Soule of The Elder Scrolls, Chamber of Secrets had bright and whimsical graphics, took you to an impressively realised, fully-explorable Hogwarts and played well; it was a platformer with some light Metroidvania elements, before 9/10 indie games matched that description. As you progressed through the game you unlocked new spells which enabled access to new rooms in the castle. I have fond memories of this one. Chamber of Secrets won’t make any best of lists but it was an above average game with a really warm, charming atmosphere. I owned it on GameCube but my classmates tended to have it on PS2. Quidditch World Cup was also fairly popular but I’ve never played that one.
I was really hoping Hogwarts Legacy was going to be in the same vein as Chamber of Secrets, especially as the Harry Potter games that came after this one fell off a cliff in terms of quality but that game just looks devoid of any charm or colour to me: more of a product made for international audiences than the real Harry Potter, which was always weirdly relatable for school-aged British kids, I don’t know, tell me in the comments if I’m wrong.
Chamber of Secrets was my favourite Harry Potter book as a kid so I hope I’m not overselling this game.
New Super Mario Bros Or Super Mario 64 DS
As the decade progressed, the GameBoy Advance was gradually replaced at school breaktime by the Nintendo DS and the DS Lite; I had the old, original version DS for a while but had upgraded to the Lite by 2007 at the time Pokémon Diamond and Pearl were spreading like wildfire.
But before Diamond and Pearl, the game everyone had was either Super Mario 64 DS or New Super Mario Bros, I for sure played both but I think NSMB was the one I actually owned myself.
Here is where I lose 400 subscribers… I never liked Mario as a kid, instead I was firmly in the Sonic camp and spent an ungodly amount of hours on the GameCube versions of Adventure 1 & 2 as well as the classics plus some weird Saturn inclusions in those old Sega compilations like Sonic R. I got a snide comment some time ago on my best retro games list saying that a lot of it was Nintendo fanboy stuff and I couldn’t help but laugh internally because I didn’t become a Nintendo fan really until the Switch came out; the GameCube was my first console, I’ve always loved Zelda and grew up with Metroid Prime, Luigi’s Mansion and Double Dash but didn’t care for Nintendo’s other franchises until much later.
3rd and 4th Generation Pokémon
As with every generation for the past few decades, Pokémon was extremely popular when I was growing up and usually the sole game people had for their DS/GBA besides some licensed crap; you had a PSP to play GTA without your parents knowing or you had Pokémon for your DS, that’s just the way it was. I had all of the Pokémon games because I lucked out, my older brother would dip in and out of gaming, losing interest then giving his consoles to me when he was done.
If we’re not counting home consoles then Pokémon Sapphire was the first game I ever played, as such, the juiced up Gen III Pokémon Emerald remains my favourite game in the series. Something about Hoenn’s Okinawa-inspired volcanic archipelago has always spoken to me and the seaside towns would always remind me of places I’d been on caravan holidays to here in the UK.
Like I said at the beginning, the GameCube and Xbox were quite uncommon when I was growing up so don’t expect to see many of their games here but I’ve genuinely never met another GameCube owner who didn’t have Pokémon Colosseum. If I had to make a list of GameCube games everyone had then that one would certainly end up on it.
Tie-In Disney And Pixar Games
Film tie-in games have pretty much gone extinct these days but in the 2000’s these things were everywhere: The Incredibles, Shark Tale, Shrek: if you could name the film, it had a (usually dreadful) game on the PS2, Xbox, GameCube and often an even worse GameBoy Advance version.
Among friends and family there always seemed to be a few of these floating around. Most tie-ins were complete crap but a few I remember being good were both The Incredibles and The Incredibles: Rise of the Underminer, the Spongebob film tie-in game and once I got a bit older and moved on to the Xbox 360 I had quite a bit of fun with the tie-in game for The Simpsons Movie. Among my slightly younger Gen Z contemporaries and going into Gen Alpha I have heard that the Ratatouille and the Cars game were everywhere and that the former was abhorrent but the latter was okay.
I want to give a special shout out to the Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith tie-in, that game was not only really fun but featured an alternate ending where Anakin kills Obi Wan and the 2-player mode pit you and your friend against each other in a 1v1 lightsaber duel. I have distinct memories of inviting a friend over in 2015-16 with the intention of playing some Xbox One, him getting curious about the game once I mentioned the alternate ending and then us spending hours on Revenge of the Sith fighting each other and pissing about. I still own my copy today, had it since I was a kid and the film was new.
FIFA, Pro Evo and FIFA Street
Growing up in the UK, you’ll generally be pulled in one of 4 directions in regards to sport: if you’re working class it will be towards your dad’s favourite football team or to the TV to watch F1 on a Sunday and if you’re posh (or Welsh) you might be directed towards rugby; I’ve never met a cricket fan in my life that wasn’t British Indian/Pakistani or privately schooled but there is that direction too.
I’ve never really cared for football so few footy games ever graced my shelves, I love watching international tournaments like the Euros or the World Cup but I just can’t get invested in the Premier League. I’m sorry but watching 11 people represent a city none of them are from against another 11 people who also weren’t raised in the city they’re playing for doesn’t interest me. Anyway, regardless of what I think, these games have always and will always be popular. These days EA FC (formerly known as FIFA) pretty much holds a monopoly on arcade-style football games but I’ve been told in the past that Pro Evolution Soccer had the better gameplay and that it was let down by the lack of licences forcing them to give teams and players silly off-brand names like ‘Man Red.’
I’ll take a moment here to show some appreciation for the Football Manager series of strategy and management games, I don’t really watch football outside of international tournaments but playing FM has given me a greater appreciation for the sport.
Need For Speed Underground 1 & 2 and Most Wanted
While the quality of racing games today is superb it certainly feels like we’re missing variety. 15-20 years ago you could find Dirt, Need For Speed, Burnout, Midnight Club, Test Drive and more on shelves whereas today it feels like you get Forza, Gran Turismo, an occasional legacy reboot or nothing. The racing genre in general was always pretty popular here but Need For Speed seemed to be the go-to for most.
A childhood spent on Jak II racing missions scared me off playing racing games at the time but as an adult, now that the PS2 and Xbox libraries are dirt cheap, I’ve had a great time rediscovering these titles and seeing exactly why they were more popular. This type of racing game isn’t exactly a perfect simulation but the ability to speed down the road with easy to grasp controls in the sorts of cars that got the boy racers of the UK drooling with tightly put together soundtracks is a power fantasy all of its own.
The popularity of Fast & Furious, the impressive graphics of racing games compared to others, the UK’s strong car heritage, the chav culture of the 2000’s and F1 arguably being at its peak from 1998-2012 certainly helped racing games like Need For Speed to find a strong audience in the UK; there was a time here where the Subaru Impreza was every young male’s dream car… for some of us, it still is.
Doritos Crash Course
Advancing beyond my early years into the later years of my childhood we have Doritos Crash Course: a free Xbox Live Arcade game from 2010 where you were tasked with steering your very own avatar through Wipeout-esque obstacle courses.
Those veterans of the golden age of Xbox Live will remember that the indie section (more on that soon) was full of what I can only call avatar slop: countless awful games where the only appeal was the ability to play as your own avatar. Doritos Crash Course stood out by being great fun to the point where me and other idiot 10 year olds were hopeful they would release paid DLC for the game; a sequel did come about in the final months of the Xbox 360 but I remember very little of it and you can no longer revisit the game since, according to Wikipedia, it was delisted all the way back in 2014.
Everyone I’ve met who owned a 360 back in the day has at least tried Crash Course and most enjoyed it… absolutely none of us have any idea what it had to do with Doritos.
Total Miner, Castleminer, Murder Miners and FortressCraft
There was a brief time: between 2010 and early 2012 when everyone was watching Minecraft explode in popularity but most of us lowly console players were unable to try it; I had an awful laptop at the time that ran the game at an N64-esque framerate but that’s all I could do. For us, Xbox Live Indie clones like Total Miner, Castleminer, Castleminer Z, FortressCraft, Murder Miners and many many more filled the gap.
Most of these like the original Castleminer and FortressCraft were pretty crap but once Minecraft finally arrived on the 360 in May 2012 these clones had to get creative if they hoped to survive and that’s when they really hit their stride.
Total Miner was the most popular and introduced RPG elements, a wider array of weapons than Minecraft and let the player explore some really gnarly cave systems, cave systems that were quite honestly better than most to be found in that era’s version of Minecraft. Castleminer Z introduced guns, zombies, dragons and aliens, tasking you and your friends with surviving the horde while making the pilgrimage across a set of unique biomes; Murder Miners was basically Halo with Minecraft-style building and Red Faction-like destruction, that game was awesome too. These games began as shameless knock-offs but developed a legacy all of their own. We all played them and we all remember the days before Minecraft arrived.
Halo 3 or Modern Warfare 2
Halo: CE and Halo 2 were accessible but a little before our time, so Halo 3 is where most of us cut our teeth… or Modern Warfare 2.
I do mean that ‘or’ word too, in my school, you were a Halo player or a CoD player and usually subject to slander from the opposite side; I did and will always prefer Halo. I can’t express to anyone how good prime Halo 3 was on Xbox Live, you just had to be there. Hopping on to see 90/100 on your 360 friend list all playing Halo 3, getting a party and game invite before you even knew what you were doing then putting on the worst headset possible to spit utter bile over a match of Slayer on Sandtrap is an experience I wish everyone had. It’s impossible to really put into words how much this game means to me, I made friends playing Halo 3 I would meet years later in real life. I’m not one to succumb to outrage and being butthurt on the internet but it still pisses me off what they did to this franchise.
Modern Warfare 2 is a great game as well but it’s one I got into more in my teens long past its heyday. I’m not a fan of CoD multiplayer but that campaign is absolutely stellar and I think the Call Of Duty franchise gets more hate than it deserves; CoD games were 60FPS before anyone cared about that on console, consistently deliver entertaining campaigns and maps like Rust, Nuketown and Shipment deliver a special kind of carnage nothing else can.
My favourite Call Of Duty is Black Ops 1 but MW2 is awesome.
This has been a by no means exhaustive list of games common among people my age growing up but for older gamers, I hope this gives you some insight into what the people who will soon be running this industry grew up playing; for my contemporaries in the 25-30 age bracket… I’d smash you in a 1v1 on Guardian.
Thank you very much for reading to the end. The majority of my readers don’t leave a like on their way out so I’d really appreciate it if you did, it does wonders for the publication.
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Thank you for the shout out on the Harry Potter games - if you hunt, you may well see me in the credits on a load from those early years, including Quidditch.
For me, it was Lego games and Wii Sports/Resort that occupied most of my gaming time. Then I went on to PC gaming with Minecraft and Civilization V.