With the best games of the year duly noted (yours and ours), I’d like to highlight some of the work we’ve done covering them. Reviewing the top-performing articles that we published in 2025, I see a portrait of a conflicted year: plenty of great works and games that captured the imagination and the world’s attention, but also growing anxiety about their place in the real world, and the political circumstances they reflect. And a lot of (justified) hand-wringing over Roblox.
But first: I wanted to extend heartfelt thanks to everyone who reads this newsletter and the rest of our work at the Guardian. If you’ve enjoyed our coverage, do consider supporting us to do more of it – either through a recurring or one-off contribution. Without your support, none of the great journalism we produce would be possible. Thank you for being with us in 2025, and I hope you stick around to watch me slowly lose my mind working overtime in the buildup to Grand Theft Auto 6’s release in November 2026. (Finally).
In no particular order, here are the most read feature articles of the year.
The Guardian covered Roblox a lot in 2025, mostly from the perspective of child safety. As Sarah Martin discovered in this article, it is extremely easy to get into inappropriate situations and chats in this free-for-all of a game platform, which has more than 150m daily users (most of them children). I am no fan of Roblox and don’t let my own kids play it, but if your little ones get joy out of it and you don’t want to prohibit the game entirely I recommend making sure it’s supervised where possible and those parental controls are locked down.
For some reason this tale of my self-flagellating travails with Baby Steps seemed to speak to a lot of people. I felt somewhat vindicated for spending more than 12 hours of my life marching a useless person up a hill.
Our games correspondent Keith Stuart, goes down one of his favourite rabbit holes here, emerging with a wonderfully researched tribute to one of Sega’s lesser-appreciated consoles. Revisionist history often crowns the NES as the winner of the 80s console wars, but that was only true in Japan and the US – in Europe, home computers and the Sega Master System reigned.
I must admit that this was extremely satisfying to write. After boasting about his gaming prowess on X, Elon Musk was revealed to have been cheating in some baffling attempt to appropriate gamer credibility. As the year wore on, this proved to be just one of many embarrassing self-owns from the richest man in the world.
Games have a lot of economic and cultural power. They were the original site of the modern online culture wars, during Gamergate, and now the Trump administration isn’t shy to use gamer imagery to mobilise its base. This report from Alyssa Mercante is a story about how Pokémon and Halo imagery is being used to recruit for ICE, but also a story about where games sit now in the wider political context of our times.
Who needs Grand Theft Auto: the upcoming game that Guardian readers are most psyched for in 2026 is 007 First Light. Possibly because the films’ future was still up in the air when it was announced, or maybe because the love for GoldenEye 007 still runs deep. Joshua Rivera interviews the people at IO Interactive who persuaded Eon Productions to let them loose on James Bond.
List features get a bad rap but this is such a good, thoughtful example of the form, in my (biased) opinion, from Keith Stuart and Christian Donlan. We remember the places we tread in games as if they were real, and some of these virtual mansions feel like childhood homes. (We should be so lucky as to grow up in Croft Manor.)
I know many Pushing Buttons readers are gamers of a certain vintage. Adrienne Matei speaks to some of Twitch’s older video game streamers (much love to TacticalGramma) to find out why half of people over 60 play video games, and the potential benefits of doing so.
This story has been ongoing in the Guardian games pages for years, ever since Keith wrote what he thought would be a very niche article querying why some people play games upside down. Finally, after that article inspired an actual scientific study, we have the answer.
I have been interested in the spaceship game Star Citizen for a long time, mostly because I have wondered where the hundreds of millions of pounds it has raised in funding were actually going. (It’s been “in development” since 2012 and its creators don’t pretend it is anywhere close to finished.) Oliver Holmes talks to players to find out why they have invested thousands in this science-fiction dream. Since this article was published, Star Citizen’s revenue has risen to $924,266,846, and it now has six million players.
What to play
This week, I will be playing Guitar Hero and Rock Band, as I have small children and can’t go out for Hogmanay. So instead I’m getting all the ancient plastic instruments out of the attic and bringing the party to me. I can’t insist that you do anything so impractical – last time I tried this I got the dreaded red ring of death on my trusty old Xbox 360 and the whole plan fell apart – but if you do have some forgotten SingStar mics and an old PlayStation two or three hidden away, this is your PSA that all of it still works, and actually it’s just as fun as it was in 2008. Happy new year!
Available on: 2010s console of your choice
Estimated playtime: Twenty years and counting
What to click
Question Block
No reader question this week because we’re all still on holiday, but to kick off 2026, I’d like to invite you to write in with a few sentences on your most anticipated game(s) of the next year. Just hit reply to this newsletter or email us at pushingbuttons@theguardian.com, and your picks could feature in a January issue of the newsletter.
