Metacritic Got Ocarina of Time's Score Wrong

Ocarina of Time's heralded as the greatest game ever made, as evidenced by its 99 out of 100 Metacritic score, the highest of all time even to this day. It won a Guinness Book World Record for that distinction, but unfortunately, the score is fake. You might even say fraudulent cuz which reviews were

included and excluded were effectively cherry-picked. Zero magazines that scored it less than 100 were counted in Metacritic's aggregate despite there being many noteworthy publications at the time of its release. A lower website review that should have been included got left out. Two reviews that

Metacritic cited as perfect 100s actually gave Ocarina a lower score or no score at all. Together, those factors artificially inflated Ocarina's meta score higher than it ought to be. In this video, we'll explain all the details, then crunch the numbers, and see if Ocarina still holds the record

for the highest rated game of all time. And if not, what game should hold the record? Before we get into the particulars, first we want to say Ocarina is an absolute classic. Many of you grew up with it, and so did we. And after 12 years reviewing games, Famitsu magazine gave Ocarina their first ever

perfect score. This video isn't meant to take away any of that. In fact, originally this video started out as more of a celebratory retrospective about its launch with trivia on all the records it broke, interesting pre-order bonuses, developer quotes, sales numbers, and critical acclaim. It was

going to be sort of a fandom victory lap with three decades of hindsight. But while we were researching, we accidentally stumbled over some discrepancies and started digging.

First, a little background on Metacritic just so we're all on the same page about what a meta score is and how it's calculated cuz it's not [music] as some may think. Metacritic was founded in 2001 by three former lawyers who like video games, Marc Doyle, his sister Julie, and former law school

classmate Jason Dietz. Rotten Tomatoes already existed as a review aggregator for movies, so they figured they'd make a similar website, but mostly for video games. Game Rankings already existed, too, but Metacritic took a different approach that resulted in different scores, mostly because of two key

factors. First, while basically any review could get into Game Rankings, Metacritic is more selective. In their own words, Metacritic curates from a selection of highly respected critics.

The vast majority of reviews are not included cuz they're not up to Metacritic standards. In other words, every outlet is either whitelisted or blacklisted. The other key difference is that Game Rankings' score is a raw average of every review, but Metacritic gives some outlets more weight than

others [music] based on stature. They're not transparent on the specifics, but basically they give more reputable reviewers more influence on the metascore. According to Mark Doyle, though, the weighting system only affects the final score a maximum of one or two points in either direction. All

that to say, Game Rankings was more democratic while Metacritic's is more prestigious and ultimately became the more popular aggregator. To be clear, we're not saying one system's better than the other, and we're not calling it to question the methodology. But for the purposes of this video, it's important