It’s Warp Week on Kotaku! What is Warp Week? I’m glad you asked. It’s a theme week aimed at excavating gaming’s past with stories about big games, events, and moments as if we were reliving them. These aren’t just retrospectives. Some of the reviews, features, and news posts are written as if it were 2002 again. Some offer a retelling of gaming’s history with the insights and sensibilities of today.
We’re kicking things off with a front-page splash, but will have additional stories going live throughout the rest of the week while continuing to cover gaming’s present as we normally do. Warp Week will culminate on Friday with a list of our top 12 games from 2002, just like the ones we publish at the end of every year currently. We thought this would be a fun side quest to go on during the mid-summer news slowdown before we head into Gamescom and the fall release calendar picks up. You can find the full list of stories here.
Were you alive in 2002? If the answer is no, good news: you’re playing a crucial role in lowering Kotaku‘s overall audience age demographic. For everyone else, well, it was a year to remember that gave us A Walk To Remember. American Idol debuted on Fox. And Jay-Z and Beyoncé collaborated on their first track together. In gaming, people were accusing The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker of looking like it was for babies while Grand Theft Auto: Vice City was heralded as proof that games were finally growing up.
The console war was in flux. The death of the Dreamcast provided an opening for the Xbox. It was coasting off a strong holiday launch the year prior. One in two Xbox owners were playing Halo: Combat Evolved. Nintendo, the established giant, was getting its ass kicked by the PS2 despite an incredible slate of games coming to both GameCube and the Game Boy Advance. Sony, without hardly any meaningful first-party exclusives to its name, was running away with it.
But in other ways, 2002 looks surprisingly familiar. People were hyped about a new GTA. People were hyped about a new Spider-Man movie. People were hyped about Cloud Strife and Mickey Mouse being in the same game. The top five best-selling games in the U.S. were, in order, Vice City, Madden NFL 2003, GTA 3, Spider-Man, and Medal of Honor: Frontline. Substitute Modern Warfare 4 for Medal of Honor and Wolverine for Spider-Man, and the 2026 list probably won’t look shockingly different.
2002 has never traditionally been on the list of contenders for best years for gaming that people tend to toss around, but it was certainly one of the most important ones. I hope this brief detour through some of its biggest and weirdest moments is a fun one. Let’s get started.