The history of video games:

begins, of course, with predigital play, from the dice games of Ancient Greece and feudal Japan to the card-based multiplayer deathmatch that landed a bullet in Wild Bill Hickok's brain to, finally, 70s-era American basements, where Dungeons & Dragons arrived like a prophecy. The more recent history of gaming includes a mushroom-devouring Italian plumber, a lot of references to Pong, and mythical places called arcades, where 25 cents bought you a glimpse of the kind of graphics and processing power that only a fool would ever have hoped to own himself. By the end of the millennium, the video-game ecosystem appeared to have stabilized. Arcades were extinct. PC games were big but also niche, requiring top-of-the-line hardware. And the console business was a three-way heavyweight title fight between Nintendo, Sony and, naturally, Sega.

What happened to video games during the next 10 years would have been impossible to predict, and is still pretty hard to process. Microsoft went into the hardware business, passing Sega on the way out. Before the slow rollout of the Wii forced "Nintendo" and "black market" to appear in the same sentence, there was the opening-day mayhem of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 launches, punctuated by tramplings, robberies and at least one shooting. And as the decade closes, the debut of a video game that invites the player to massacre unarmed (digital) civilians has managed to slaughter nearly every sales record the entertainment industry keeps.

There's plenty to be said about the failures of the 2000s, whether concerning the tragic death of ahead-of-its-time Dreamcast, or the literal car crash that was Gizmondo. But there were at least as many epic wins over the past decade, individual milestones that collectively made gaming bigger and more influential than it's ever been. These aren't necessarily the best hardware and software releases—here's looking at you, Facebook games—but the ones that had the most impact.