Setting The Scene: The 12 Best Video Game Openings Of All Time

The first 10 minutes of a film are integral to the work's effect—a director only gets one chance to pull in the viewer. Video games are under similar pressure. It's not like we need Michael Bay explosions in order to fuse our hands to the controller for the next 10 hours, but we do expect more of a hook than we did back in the NES days. As games have become more graphically advanced, our pasty brains have been conditioned to search for a reason to keep playing past the first hour. And a game’s beginning sets up the main course. Hence, our picks for the 12 best game openings of all time. Sure, a lot of the games on this list lean heavily towards the new school, but that's developers have really been able to fine tune their art due to the tech. Don't think the old-timers are giving up their spots without a fight, though.

By Ryan Woo

Snake’s voice was always gravelly, but now he sounds like he’s choking on chicken gristle and nostalgia when the narration begins. “War has changed,” he rattles, throwing it right into our faces from the beginning. The seamless integration between cinematic and gameplay is stunning. If not for the menu HUD popping up after Snake tosses himself into the battlefield, we wouldn’t have even known to start pushing the analog stick.

But then a bipedal mech makes a bovine mooing sound, and it's game on.

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be executed? We think about it every time we sit through a PowerPoint presentation, so this immersive cinematic is like sweet deathwish relief.

With a pointy-eared nod to The Chronicles of Riddick, Batman: AA walks us through the escort of a familiar prisoner. The mood of the entire game is expertly set up as you progress down the Arkham corridors, listing to The Joker talk smack to everyone except Jesus Christ’s pet rabbit. Also, Croc makes it known that he will later eat you. How'd that work out for ya, Croc?

Everyone’s favorite asshole deserves an opening for the ages, so GOWIII wastes no time, picking up where GOWII left off. Within the first ten minutes, you’re traversing the giant moving body of Gaia (why the hell couldn’t Kratos have shrunk himself and done that with Athena instead?), hanging upside down while fighting a giant horse-crab, and then taking on Poseidon himself. And to think it takes you a half-hour to get off the couch sometimes.

Never before has the plight of a self-hating Native American been so well-fleshed out. Granted, we never really wondered what that identity crisis would feel like, but now we can’t imagine life without having experienced it. First those Euro-Americans hopped off their boats and gave them a raw deal, and now these alien douches swoop in and %$# up their bar. But, man, the jukebox’s timing with Blue Oyster Cult is a beautiful thing.

You’ve barely had time to sit down on the couch and open your can of Mountain Dew before you realize “OMG I’m hanging off a train on a cliff”—at which point you almost throw the near-full soda can onto the coffee table and quickly snag up the controller because the game already started and sh*t you just soaked your “rent overdue” notice in neon green soda.

Do you remember the first time you ever saw the bright lights of NYC? Or when you first encountered the rolling Hollywood hills of LA? Or the bustling visual seizure of Tokyo? Well, your introduction to City 17 is the complete opposite of any of those experiences. And that’s what makes this intro so remarkable. Oppressive bleakness dominates the first few minutes of the game, and it’s perfect.

We’re used to seeing montages of life stages in cinema; UP’s was probably the most stunning in recent memory, so we’ll give you a pass if your eyes watered up a bit during the first 20 minutes of that one. And yet it's outdone by Fallout 3’s first 40 minutes, which bring you from diapers through young adulthood—and that’s something we'd never seen handled well in a game. (And no, Baby Mario doesn’t count. Have you ever played an FPBP [First Person Birthday Party]?) And if you think it peaks there, you're wrong. The eventual emergence from The Vault comes close to breathtaking.

By today’s standards, the voice acting in SH2 isn’t the greatest—but the music, tone, and ambience are the true stars here, and no other Silent Hill has ever had as atmospheric an opening.

Everything’s going great—you’ve got the hottest ship in the galaxy, and you probably just had intergalactic relations with a blue-skinned dime in ME1. All of a sudden, your entire galaxy is ripped inside out when a mysterious ship appears out of nowhere and starts tempura-frying the Normandy. Everything’s pure chaos, and the music builds and builds as you try to retrieve Joker…and then, nothing. You open the door to the main bridge, only to be greeted by dead, vast space and the last remains of your vessel. Everything you knew from the first game is gone. That violently shocking silence is what will make this game’s opening a legend for years to come.

BioShock did it best: it’s another one of those openings where you’re not even sure that the game has actually started. Open water is your first path to Rapture, and each awe-striking moment (“No Gods or Kings. Only Man.”) and set piece (whales swimming by) one-ups the previous one.

The O.G.’s supremacy still reigns. Despite the fact that game openings have mutated technologically, this haunting intro serves as proof that you don’t need retina-searing CGI and movie-director camera angles to make a huge impact on the player. The moment when Terra’s theme kicks in as the snow trek begins is one of the most memorable of all time. OF ALL TIME!