As Polygon’s recent fifth birthday approached, we started thinking about what we could do to celebrate it. And what’s more fun than ranking the 100 best games of all time? 500? So we did. We started by setting rules upfront. We asked everyone to vote based on innovation, polish and durability, rather than simply personal taste. We cut games released in 2017 to eliminate recency bias. And we left out sequels that we deemed too similar to the games that came before them. Then we voted, but we knew we had gaps in our knowledge on staff. So in addition to gathering votes from the Polygon team, we worked with a group of external and freelance writers to pull in their input: Kahlief Adams, Susan Arendt, Katherine Cross, Jon-Paul Dyson, Benj Edwards, Cara Ellison, JC Fletcher, Jenn Frank, Harold Goldberg, Janine Hawkins, Blake Hester, Laura Hudson, Henry Lowood, Jeremy Parish, Carolyn Petit, Andrea Rene, Jaz Rignall and Gary Whitta. Collecting all those votes together, we then combed through the data for anomalies and came up with the final order you see here, with personal choices for each voter’s favorite game sprinkled throughout as sidebars — including, as you’ll see below,…