Older heads might remember Gamerankings.com, a site that rounded up reviews from all over the place and gave them an overall aggregated figure out of 100, as a cornerstone of forum arguments the world over back in the day. Sadly, it’s about to close its doors.
I’ll be honest: I wasn’t even aware the site was still around, so dominant is its more scientific—and not exactly helpful—sister site Metacritic (both are owned by CBS) in this day and age, while Opencritic has also stolen much of Gameranking’s thunder.
The closure was announced earlier today, and the site will cease operations on Monday, December 9. After that, anyone visiting gamerankings.com will be redirected to Metacritic, while “the entire GameRankings.com team will continue our mission to create informative game review content and bring reviews of classic games to Metacritic.”
Gamerankings was far from ideal, and indeed its shortcomings led to the creation of Metacritic’s more curated approach in the first place. It cast a very wide net with the number and quality of reviews it incorporated, and once publishers and investors started paying attention to the idea of metascores late in the last decade, it was only a matter of time before a more professional approach, one that differentiated between professional reviews and fan blogs, emerged.
But as an old head myself (the site was founded in 1999!), and someone who more than once would have referenced Gamerankings scores in a GAF thread arguing about Zelda games, it’s still sad to see a part of your internet childhood fade away.
As it stands, the top-ranked games at the time of the site’s closure are very representative of Gameranking’s prime:
