1. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007)
The final, most recent entry on this list, and with good reason.
Sales may have tapered off for last year's Black Ops 2, but we're still living in the age of Call of Duty, a franchise which had its breakthrough with this installment. The implications of the age of Call of Duty go beyond the game's considerable impact on the FPS genre. Like it or not, Call of Duty is
the game now, the one around which wider cultural associations, good and bad, with the term gaming are formed. This is the multiplayer age. It's the age in which we can connect to our friends and treat gaming as a social, online activity, but it's also the age in which the prevailing image is not the would-be serial killer plotting his (it's always his) latest crime wave in Liberty City, but the teenager (it's always a teenager) yelling into a headset because he's just been killed in an imaginary war by a stranger 500 miles away. This is the DLC age, the age in which we can continue to supplement our favourite games with additional purchases after the fact, but also the age in which entire games are being built around spending more and more real world money to get ahead. The extent to which Call of Duty has actually contributed to these trends is irrelevant. As the defining game of our time, it stands as their representative, and the representative for gaming as a whole for the foreseeable future Did we miss any of the games that defined modern gaming? Share your own picks below.