Back in the days before Metacritic’s ubiquity – where every relevant critic score is now handily collected for the almighty “Aggregate” – netizens were expected to remember in their heads the domains to the hundreds of different game-reviewing outlets around at the time, and to do the maths themselves if they wanted something like an average review score for the latest releases. With this in mind, most folk simply couldn’t be bothered, and settled into the habits of swearing by a single online outlet. And in most cases, your allegiance would likely come down to one of the two major sources for gaming news: GameSpot or IGN. Sure, you could go on telling folk that ‘Old Man Murray’ had you covered; but at the end of the day, you still ended up relying on one of the big two when it came to the latest breaking and most all-encompassing coverage.

Of course, I was one of those odd cases who didn’t really vibe with either at the time: I actually got most of my news by way of GameSpy in the mid-to-late 1990s, before getting sent in the direction of GameTrailers in the early aughts. That’s my knack for betting on winning horses. But despite my best efforts to “stand out from the crowd” and pledge myself to “less conformist” gaming news outlets (or whatever my dumb young reasoning was), I would still find myself drawn to GameSpot’s doorstep for some particularly special ocassions: Namely, whenever the review team saw fit to score a game as something lower than a 2.0 out of 10. For in the cases of these spectacular duds, there was the chance that you might see a special sort of video review attached — a break from the traditional format and presentation they had established.

In these rare reviews, you could witness the GameSpot staff engaging in what felt like uncharacteristic goofiness: Smashing eggs against their foreheads, speaking in over-the-top trucker vernacular, or even going entire minutes staring into the camera without saying so much as a word. The purpose behind these videos wasn’t to provide in-depth game reviews, but to instead focus solely on entertainment [at the expense of some truly terrible software]. There was no telling what strange directions they might decide to take these skits in, as each installment allowed for the reviewer’s unique personalities and comedic sensibilities to shine through. But across them all, there was in fact a singular constant — a shared refrain which could come to link and to canonize this unofficial “series.” Four one-syllable words which – when said in sequence – harnessed the power to forever damn a game to infamy:

“DON’T PLAY THIS GAME.”

Needless to say, I was a huge fan of these reviews: Partially for the comedy stylings, but perhaps more so due to a developing fascination with video games of questionable quality. Each title to receive the dubious distinction has been forever burned into my brain, to the point where I can actually recall all their names in the order they were reviewed! Which gave me the idea: “Why not do exactly that for the purposes of an article?” Which brings us to the here and now. This article will list and briefly review the reviews for / contents of every game to receive the “DPTG” branding by GameSpot. In this way, I hope to provide a catalogue for this unsanctioned game collection, and to pay homage to what was surely an influence on my perspective of bad games. Eventually, all these listed titles should receive the full article treatment on this website. But for the purposes of this article, we’re just here to list them.