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.