Fall 2007 Was the Greatest Stretch in Gaming – and Definitely Xbox – History

This is an IGN opinion piece from Ryan McCaffrey, who worked at Official Xbox Magazine from 2002-2012 during the original Xbox and Xbox 360 era before joining IGN, where he remains “the Xbox guy.” In the run-up to Xbox’s 25th anniversary, he’ll be sharing his memories from the platform’s first quarter-century.

Sometimes, video game release schedules converge to create memorable superstorms that live on for years after the fact. The Fall of 1998 (Half-Life, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Doom 3, Metal Gear Solid, Grim Fandango) comes to mind, as does the Fall of 2004 (Half-Life 2, Halo 2, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, World of Warcraft). But for my money, the greatest season in gaming history was the Fall of 2007. It was so unbelievably brilliant that you could take just the Xbox 360 releases from this window and it still probably takes the cake. But when you add in PC, PlayStation 3, and Nintendo Wii releases, it’s an absolute murderer’s row of video games that will probably never be topped in a 3-4 month period.

At Official Xbox Magazine, we knew it was going to be big. But looking back and remembering our Game of the Year debate a few weeks after the dust settled (Rock Band won, and no I have no regrets about that), I’m not sure we were able to fully appreciate the gravity (gun) of the moment. One first-ballot Hall-of-Famer shipped after another. Take a look:

BioShock (August 21): If you tried to argue that August 21 is still the Summer…I’d say I respect your point of view, but lots of kids are already back in school by August 21, so it counts as the Fall! Anyway, the original BioShock is an often-imitated, never-duplicated narrative-driven first-person shooter classic whose stunning underwater setting in the failed utopian city of Rapture – with its terrifying Big Daddies and mysterious Little Sisters – took gamers on a ride fit for a great novel,complete with a huge, jaw-dropping plot twist. Its only blemish is its weak final boss fight, but I’ve never seen anyone try to argue for that being enough to disqualify BioShock from the list of all-time greats. Emergent gameplay possibilities abounded, with Plasmids that let you ignite the pools of oil beneath an enemy’s feet on fire or to electrocute bad guys standing in puddles of water. This is legendary game designer Ken Levine’s magnum opus.

Halo 3 (September 25): It’s wild to think about now, but for as successful as the Xbox 360 was, it didn’t launch with a big new Halo game. Instead, Halo 2 was a late release on the original Xbox, and thanks to Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2 having their backwards compatibility baked into every Xbox 360, gamers were able to continue right on playing the first sequel. But when Master Chief’s first next-gen adventure finally dropped and it was time to “finish the fight” that Halo 2 had left painfully unresolved, it was hugely anticipated and it actually delivered. The Chief got a proper sendoff in the final cutscene, making it one of the few sagas that actually stuck the landing.

The Orange Box (October 10): Sometimes, Valve just does things, kinda like The Joker. The Orange Box was a ridiculous package of 10 out of 10 video games that any publicly traded game publisher would’ve split up and sold as a bunch of separately-sold 10 out of 10 video games. But not Valve. Steam makes Gabe Newell more money than he could ever know what to do with, so Valve, seemingly just for the love of the game, bundled Half-Life 2, Episode 1, and the then-new Episode 2, Portal, and Team Fortress 2 into a single $60 package. We’ll probably never see anything like this ever again…unless Valve drops Half-Life 3 out of nowhere in a “Crowbar Crate” with Portal 3 and Left 4 Dead 3. Which, honestly, we can’t 100% rule out.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (November 5): Infinity Ward’s third Call of Duty (Treyarch handled Call of Duty 3) not only brought the series out of World War II for the first time and into the modern era, but it also catapulted the franchise from Very Big Deal to The Biggest Deal, putting it in the same rarified air as Mario, Zelda, Halo (at the time), and Grand Theft Auto. It boasts an incredible campaign and multiplayer on which the entire last 20 years of Call of Duty have been built.

Assassin’s Creed (November 13): You know it’s a killer list when this is the “worst” game on it. No one really spends time wistfully recalling the original. It was a heck of a four-hour gameplay loop that was more or less just repeated a couple of times, and most agree that Assassin’s Creed 2 – the start of the Ezio Trilogy – is where the series really took off. And more often than not, it’s a terrible idea to launch a new IP in the holiday season against established tentpole franchise sequels. That Ubisoft not only shipped Assassin’s Creed into the hurricane-force headwinds of Fall 2007 but the series gained a foothold and rose to become a megafranchise of its own speaks to how good the core idea of this “social stealth” game was.

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Mass Effect (November 20): I’ve already shared my extensive memories of this one elsewhere in this Xbox 25th anniversary retrospective series. But everything I said about Assassin’s Creed above also applies here. Maybe the lesson here is that publishers should place more big bets on bold new ideas…

Rock Band (November 20): I’ve covered this one at length as well. You want to talk about a game that has aged beautifully? Rock Band is in fine-wine territory. The only hassle is finding functioning instruments to still play it with. It’s not a software problem, it’s an equipment problem. Even typing this makes me want to go play Rock Band immediately.

But even though the OXM offices had Xbox 360s on every desk, the staff were gamers who played every platform. So now let’s add in a PC exclusive, a PlayStation exclusive, and a Wii exclusive to really cement Fall 2007’s GOAT status:

Super Mario Galaxy (November 12): My personal favorite 3D Mario game was also a bold reinvention of the 3D platformer from the masters of the genre. At this point, there isn’t a superlative that hasn’t been written about Super Mario Galaxy. Heck, it was so monumental that Nintendo and Illumination based the Super Mario Bros. Movie sequel around it earlier this year, almost 20 years after Galaxy debuted on the Wii.

Crysis (November 13): Let’s just say there’s a reason that “Can it run Crysis?” became a meme. This wasn’t just a technical showpiece for the ages. It was also a tremendously good first-person shooter from the team that originally created Far Cry before Ubisoft bought it and took it over.

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune (November 19): The first Uncharted not only launched Naughty Dog into the upper echelon of game developers in the world and eventually paved the way for a movie starring Spider-Man, it took the mantle of third-person action-adventure gold standard from Tomb Raider, the series that arguably invented the genre. You could also make the case that this was the beginning of PlayStation’s insane run of top-shelf first-party exclusives that helped propel the PS4 to nearly the same record heights as the PS2.

The fact that you can slice up the Fall of 2007 in so many different ways – best Xbox season ever, best PC season ever, best November ever – and the argument for its unmatched brilliance still holds up is iron-clad proof that it is, indisputably, the best season in video game history.