The 50 best video games of all time, according to critics on Metacritic

There are dozens of ways you could put together a list of the best video games ever made.

You could look to classics, like "Super Mario Bros." here. You could look at impact on the medium, or highest sales. You could write down your personal favorites on a bunch of pieces of paper, then throw them into the air. Where the pieces land? That's your list.

But what we've got here is something a teensy bit more scientific. Reviews aggregation site Metacritic compiles all reviews of games, then it averages those scores into an overall average. What you'll find below is the top 50 highest-rated games of all time, based on the averages obtained by Metacritic. We made one small change: Since there are a handful of duplicates on the list (multiple versions of the same game, released on multiple platforms), we've just taken the highest-ranked version of the game to make room for a handful of games that wouldn't have otherwise made the list.

Without further ado, these are the 50 best video games of all time: