OK, as promised, Yahoo Games so outraged me with their crappy, Nintendo-centric list of the Top 10 games of the last 10 years, I’ve vowed to to my own countdown, and this is where it all starts! If you want a job done right, do it yourself, correct?

Here we go with the 20th-best videogame of the past decade:

20. The Gran Turismo Series (PSone, PS2, PS3, PSP)

Prior to the first Gran Turismo racing title on the original PlayStation, racing games were generally rather generic; you might get to select from maybe a dozen cars and race on a half-dozen tracks, on average. And most were home to comic-book physics engines.

That all changed when one of Sony’s in-house studios decided to really do a racing game “right.” The first Gran Turismo title may look dated by PS3 standards, but it was a revolution in racing game design. There were hundreds of cars, not dozens, all of the licensed and designed to perform like their real-life counterparts.

Sure, there are flaws to the realism; licensing issues prevents real damage modeling being integrated into the game, and the game is sometimes a bit too hard to master – though hardcore gamers love that aspect – but the extent to which this game improves its graphics, physics engine, realistic feel, and hardcore customization and detail with each new chapter is something special in the world of videogames.

Yes, many have come along since and tried to one-up Gran Turismo; and games like Forza Motorsport, which includes damage modeling as an option, offer something Gran Turismo has yet to bring to the table. However, there’s no denying that without the Gran Turismo series, which sold like wildfire over the last decade, there would likely never have been a game like Forza Motorsports because the template for racing games would never have been changed to begin with.