A great game intro can hook you before you've even touched the controller, setting tone, stakes, and atmosphere in a matter of minutes. From cinematic cutscenes to haunting first moments of gameplay, these openings have become legendary for how they pull players straight into their worlds. Which game nailed its opening the best? Cast your vote and help crown the finest introduction in gaming history.
What counts: The crowd's votes decide the order — seeded neutral.
The Last of Us prologue▲ Rising
Sarah's twenty minutes of screentime end with a soldier's rifle and a father's scream, and gaming had never opened a story by killing hope so fast. It recalibrated what a 'game intro' could emotionally cost you before you'd even picked a real weapon. The gut-punch justified every brutal choice that followed for the next decade of prestige games chasing the same gasp.
added by IJR
BioShock's lighthouse▲ Rising
A plane crash, a burning ocean, a lighthouse door swinging open to reveal a bathysphere descending into neon-lit Rapture while a radio croons 'Beyond the Sea.' It's the moment atmosphere became argument, selling an entire fallen utopia's ideology through art deco decay before a single shot was fired. Still the gold standard for 'show, don't tell' worldbuilding.
added by IJR
Ocarina of Time's Kokiri Forest▲ Rising
Waking up as a Kokiri without a fairy, wandering Deku trees and cel-shaded glades that felt impossibly alive in 1998, it taught a generation what a 3D world could feel like instead of just look like. No explosions, no death — just curiosity as the hook. Its quiet wonder earns it a spot among openings that changed the medium's grammar.
added by IJR
Half-Life's tram ride▲ Rising
No cutscene, no control wrestled away — just Gordon Freeman riding a train deeper into Black Mesa while the facility unfurls around him in unbroken first-person. It proved you could tell story through environment and momentum alone, birthing the 'immersive sim' opening as we now know it. Every walking-sim intro since owes it royalties.
added by IJR
God of War (2018)'s hunt▲ Rising
A single unbroken shot follows Kratos and Atreus stalking a deer through Midgard's woods, ending with a quiet gut-stab that reframes the entire God of War series as a story about fatherhood, not fury. The camera never cuts for the rest of the game, and that promise is made in these first wordless minutes. It's a franchise reinvention disguised as a hunting trip.
added by IJR
Red Dead 2's blizzard▼ Falling
Snow-blind horses, a gang scattering through a mountain storm, Arthur Morgan trudging through white-out silence toward a cabin that might save them — Rockstar spends nearly an hour just making you feel cold and hunted before the open world even opens up. It's patience as spectacle, trading fireworks for dread and texture. The slow burn became the whole game's thesis statement.
added by IJR
Mass Effect 2's Normandy▼ Falling
The opening move is unthinkable: blow up the beloved ship from the first game and kill Shepard in the vacuum of space within minutes. It's a bold, almost cruel statement that nothing is safe and the stakes just got existential, resurrecting the hero through Cerberus tech as a grim reset button. Few sequels have announced their darker tone with such a gutsy sucker punch.
added by IJR
Ghost of Tsushima's beach charge▼ Falling
Samurai lines break against Mongol arrows and cannon fire on Komoda Beach, a doomed, gorgeous last stand that ends with Jin waking alone among the dead, honor in ruins. It's pure cinematic bravado — sweeping vistas, sword-clang chaos, then devastating stillness — setting up the whole samurai-versus-ghost identity crisis to come. Few intros sell a game's entire moral conflict this efficiently and this beautifully.
added by IJR
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The crowd is sleeping on the bottom half of this list.
This order is closer to right than any editor would've gotten.
Exactly the kind of argument the internet was built for.