2001 was the year of the PlayStation 2

If there’s one serious gap in the early PlayStation 2 library—one that both of its major competitors would take full advantage of in the years to come—it’s in the realm of multiplayer. In an era before online gaming was a norm, and wireless controllers still a luxury, the two-player-by-default PS2 simply had a hard time stacking up to the four-player chaos readily available on, say, Nintendo’s GameCube. (Especially since, when the ’Cube launched in September 2001, it did so with Super Smash Bros. Melee, one of the all-time party multiplayer greats.) But it wasn’t all bleak—even if one of the console’s best multiplayer treats absolutely, determinedly was.Automotive combat series Twisted Metal had been a mainstay on the PlayStation One for years, blending arcade driving action with an increasingly goofy story of planetary mayhem and wishes gone awry. For its first PS2 incarnation, though, new developer Incognito stripped away many of the franchise’s sillier excesses, in an effort to make something more, for lack of a better word, “serious.” (Well, mostly: The serial killer clown with his head constantly on fire got to stay.) Soundtracked with a very on-the-nose license of The Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black,” Black’s tales of violent cannibals and revenge-obsessed preachers reads almost embarrassingly over-the-top to adult eyes. But the actual gameplay has aged far better: a fast-paced, invigorating run through a series of secret-filled levels, encouraging players to race through destroyed landscapes in an effort to secure enough power-ups to blow their enemies (and friends) to bits.

There had been cool video games before 2001, but had there ever been a video game that directly rewarded you for being cool? Yeah, probably. But surely none of them did it better than Devil May Cry—a game that began life as a Resident Evil sequel before the developers at Capcom realized a protagonist whose entire identity is about being cool didn’t really fit with the zombies and bio-terrorists of its horror franchise. The most telling thing about Devil May Cry’s legacy is that the game has now gotten four sequels, and other than an attempted reboot that tried to tweak the formula a little bit, they’ve all been functionally the same.Capcom nailed it on the first try with DMC, resulting in a game that plays really well and centers on an instantly iconic character who looks very cool (long red coat, big sword, white hair, dual pistols!) and does very cool things (flipping enemies into the air, juggling them with his guns, launching at them with his sword!). DMC is a hard game, requiring players to attack hard and fast to maintain a coolness rating that goes from D for “dull” to A for “absolute” and S for “stylish”—but also, everything about it already looks so cool that even a basic proficiency for its combat will result in some truly rad nonsense.

By 2001, the “Are games art?” conversation—still among the tiredest in all of gaming—was already old enough to be a well-worn cliché. But defenders of the medium got a powerful new weapon in their arsenal in September of that year, when Sony and Team Ico released the title that lent the latter group its name. Largely wordless, strangely gentle, Ico looked like very little that had come before it. (Well, okay, some of the block-pushing stuff looked pretty familiar.) With its fairy tale premise of a young horned boy leading a silent princess through a shadow-afflicted castle, the game inspired feelings of mystery and connection. (And with its focus on light and shadow, a new appreciation for the PS2’s graphic prowess.) Among other things, it was one of the first titles to recognize the indelible tactile power of a firmly held hand.Developer Fumito Ueda and his team would later go on to create titles like Shadow Of The Colossus and The Last Guardian, efforts to marry more traditional, action-y breeds of gameplay to their distinctive style. But in 2001, Ico was one of those rarest of things in the world of gaming (and in the sequel-packed library of the PS2): something wholly and uniquely its own.

Madden 2002 wasn’t the first Madden on PlayStation 2, but it was the first entry in the series to debut on the system (the previous year’s game had come out on the PlayStation 1 a few months earlier, since the PS2 hadn’t come out yet). With Sony’s second console already on a rocket ride to the moon, Madden was poised to be bigger than ever—and also bigger than it would ever be again. Three years after this game came out, publisher EA secured the exclusive rights to make NFL console games, detonating any potential competition for Madden, and giving the series the opportunity to become creatively stagnant over the next 20 years. 2002 wasn’t the first or last good game in the series, but it very well might’ve been the first entry in the series that virtually everyone on the planet owned. The PS2 was a Madden machine for a lot of people, and EA’s now-evaporated need to innovate and improve the series from year to year made it so that, if you wanted to play a football game, you wanted to play Madden. These days, if you want to play a football game, you have no choice but to play Madden.

The first Silent Hill game, released on the PS1 in 1999, was a perfectly standard survival horror game, riffing ably on the genre by replacing Resident Evil’s now-standard zombies (or Dino Crisis’ less-standard velociraptors) with a series of malformed creatures pulled from a foggy, rusty Lovecraftian netherworld. But it was with Silent Hill 2 that Konami transformed the franchise into something genuinely special, channeling the energy of films like Jacob’s Ladder and the works of Cronenberg and Lynch into the kind of horror game where the worst monsters are always going to be the ones running around inside your own head.For instance: Unlike the previous games’ stalwart dad, Harry Mason, SH2 protagonist James Sutherland has precious little in the way of good reasons to be running around a clearly haunted town, having been dragged there as much by his unresolved feelings about his wife Mary’s death as for any concrete quest. And the city itself is no longer the generically monster-clogged lakeside town of yesteryear, now apparently tailoring its hells to each visitor’s individual tastes. Heavy with symbolism, and as interested in how players play it as what weapons or items they acquire—including, boldly, a system that attempts to extrapolate how suicidally depressed James is by how recklessly the player guides him—Silent Hill 2 was a burst of ambition from a series that had previously showed little sign of possessing it, and an early high-water mark for digital storytelling on the PlayStation 2.

What is there to say about Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater at this point? The third game in the series was like the second game but better, which was like the first game but better. It’s one of the single greatest video game franchises ever, and Pro Skater 3 is arguably the best of these original games (Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4, released in 2002, removed the two-minute time limit and embraced a more open-world design that swiftly began to have diminishing returns). The big innovation here, beyond better graphics made possible by the PlayStation 2’s processing power, is that the PS2 was capable of more complex button inputs and animations, resulting in the addition of a new move called the “revert” that would allow you to connect vert tricks to street tricks, which, for people who don’t keep up with skating or video game skating, basically laid the groundwork for expert players to assemble never-ending combos. The revert was so enormously important to the basic act of “playing Tony Hawk” that it was even added to last year’s (despite the fact that nothing else from THPS3 made the cut).