Game of the year, all years
Sometimes used seriously and sometimes used jokingly, it is used to refer to a
game that nearly every gamer has heard of, played and loved. This
game is
one often credited for raising the bar in a particular genre, such as how Goldeneye popularized zoom on rifles in
FPS games and had absolutely amazing multiplayer, or how Starcraft introduced three vastly different races to combat against each other instead of traditional RTS using fairly similar races with a few different units. Other frequent GOTYAY nominations are Deus Ex, System Shock 2, Doom, and many others.