The History of Every Video Game Genre

Mark Brown's Game Maker's Toolkit article, published on Substack on 2026-10-29, traces the history of video game genres using a dataset of 9,902 games. The author built it by listing the 200 most popular games per year from 1975 to 2025 on Backloggd, excluding remakes, ports, remasters, and compilations, then taking genre labels from each game's Wikipedia infobox. The dataset covers about 130 genres and sub-genres. The author notes that the data has oversights and biases, and that many visual novels are missing because of the language barrier.

The article moves through genres in acts, starting with early racing, sports, and action games from the 1970s. It then covers the shoot 'em up, the platformer, beat 'em ups and fighting games, shooters, rhythm games, puzzle and strategy games, simulations, role-playing games, adventure games, and action-adventure games. Later acts cover indie-driven genres such as horror, roguelikes, incremental games, sandbox, survival, cozy games, and friendslop.

The author attributes the shift toward indie genres to changes in how games were made and distributed. In the dataset, the platformer was the most popular genre from 1989 to 1995, and it was the most popular genre overall with 1,273 of 9,902 games. The action-adventure was the biggest genre from 2002 to 2017.