Dark Souls named 'Ultimate Game of All Time'

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Director Hidetaka Miyazaki said he was "deeply moved" by the honor.

Dark Souls
(Image credit: From Software)

The PC was declared the Ultimate Hardware of All Time at the Golden Joystick Awards yesterday, an obvious and completely correct acknowledgement that PCs both predate and outpace any game console you care to name. As Gabe Newell put it in his award acceptance speech, "Gamers and developers have benefited enormously from the relentless innovation in PC gaming hardware."

But if PC is the ultimate gaming hardware, then what, you might reasonably ask, is the ultimate game? That, according to the Golden Joysticks, is FromSoftware's 2011 ARPG Dark Souls, which beat out other contenders in the fan-voted category including Doom, Half-Life 2, Minecraft, Halo: Combat Evolved, Grand Theft Auto 5, Portal, and Space Invaders.

"Thank you very much for receiving such a wonderful award," Dark Souls director Hidetaka Miyazaki said in a statement reported by Yahoo Japan (via Google Translate). "It's still unbelievable that the user chose from the nominated works, but I feel it's a great honor."

"I was deeply moved by the award," he said. "We will continue to make interesting and valuable games. I hope you look forward to it. Thank you!"

It's interesting to recall, in light of this award, that the original release of Dark Souls on PC, the Prepare to Die edition, was really quite a mess. FromSoftware described it ahead of launch as "strictly a port from the console version," with no optimizations for PC, and they weren't kidding: Among other issues, it was locked to 720p/30fps at launch, which even in 2013 was definitely not cool. Modding hero Peter "Durante" Thoman quickly released a patch that did away with those graphical limitations, but it still suffered from wonky sound and brutally bad mouse-and-keyboard controls. It wasn't until the 2018 release of Dark Souls Remastered that we got an out-of-the-box experience that didn't look like it was deliberately calculated to make us all buy PS3s.

Hopefully the rollout of FromSoftware's latest soulslike will be a lot smoother: Elden Ring is currently set to arrive sometime in February 2022.

Andy Chalk
Andy Chalk
US News Lead

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.