Happy New Year! Time to mark more influential, innovative and absurdly popular events from the last decade. See our coverage of the first five years here.

Hot Coffee
July 20th 2005, The ESRB announced that Grand Theft Auto: SA would be re-rated as Adults Only when a sex minigame was found hidden in the game’s code.
Many games have seen the destructive side of the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, from Mortal Kombat to Manhunt 2, but none received as much press and controversy as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. While it was removed from the final game, Rockstar left the code and assets for a sex minigame in the game’s database of files, allowing savvy hackers to restore the secret scene with unofficial patches. This saw hectic legal battles, the game being banned in certain countries and a series of re-releases, patches and recalls.

For those about to Rock…
November 8th 2005, Harmonix and Activision release Guitar Hero on Playstation 2 with a plastic guitar controller.
Plenty of gamers were excited about Guitar Hero, with its cool guitar peripheral and killer soundtrack of (terrible) covers – what we didn’t expect was the progenitor of a gargantuan sub-industry of music games. With Harmonix now at EA, the games industry is subjected to new Guitar Hero, Band Hero and Rock Band releases multiple times per year as well as endless downloadable content, spin-offs like DJ Hero and artistic specific releases. The original Guitar Hero, which didn’t even reach Europe for six month, was a rather inauspicious introduction to one of gaming’s biggest earning genres.

Plink!
November 22nd 2005, Xbox 360 launches with massive games, HD graphics, effortless online play and… achievements.
Who could predict the potential addictive force of giving gamers imaginary rewards for completing menial tasks? Wherever you go and whatever you play on Xbox Live, you’re constantly adding to your collection of trophies and showing them off to the world, whether you completed Call of Duty on veteran or just pressed start. They’ve been endlessly copied in World of Warcraft (via a patch in 2008), Steam (with The Orange Box in 2007), Playstation 3 (via update in 2008), iPhone games and flash game services.

Horse Armour to The Ballad of Gay Tony
April 3rd 2006, Bethesda asks gamers to pay £1.50 for decorative horse armour.
While not the first piece of downloadable content to appear on Xbox Live, it certainly bought the new distribution system to the forefront with its pointless, superficial content. Publishers are still testing the water with DLC but we’ve started to see a more level playing field for new cars, guns, maps, levels and entire storylines, delivered À la carte.

Wii Would Like to Play
November 19th 2006, Nintendo launches the Wii in North America
Nintendo, previously in last place with the Gamecube, decided to find a new market instead of compete with Sony and Microsoft for the same old teenage male demographic. With its intuitive controls, simple games and living-room multiplayer, the Wii garnered incredible gender and age neutral appeal. While some games, from yoga mat Wii Fit to wand waving Wii Music, have drawn ire from hardcore gamers, the Wii’s ridiculous sales are a testament to Nintendo’s fresh approach. Microsoft’s Natal and Sony’s new motion controller are also radiant evidence of its welcome innovation.

Red Ring of Death
July 5th 2007, Microsoft announces an automatic 3 year warranty for broken 360s after a spate of faulty boxes.
It’s a testament to the Xbox 360’s quality that the system is even still on sale after one of the biggest disasters in console history. Forget the PS3’s poor sales and the Wii’s lame game selection –Xbox 360s were breaking down at an alarming rate. After so many gamers found their 360s overheating, warping the motherboard and messing up the chips (shown by three red lights on the console’s fascia), Microsoft had to redesign the console’s innards multiple times and offer a three year warranty to every 360 owner, costing the company upwards of $1 billion.

There’s an App for That
July 10th 2008, Apple introduces the iPhone and iPod Touch to third party apps and games.
How much do you want to pay for a game? £40? £20? £7.50? 59p?! When Apple introduced their latest devices to third party apps from anyone willing to plonk down cash for the SDK, they inadvertently created one of the most heated marketplaces and frenzied industries since the North American video game crash of the 80s. There are now over 100,000 apps available on iTunes, all vying for customers by reducing prices and offering as much bang for your buck as possible – when there are 100 Sudoku games to buy, why should I choose yours? Alongside oodles of indie developers, Konami, EA, SEGA, Capcom and id are just some big name publishers to get on board with Apple.

Recession Hits the Industry
January 29th 2009, Ensemble Studios shuts down, paving the way for more developers.
The video game industry is a turbulent and ferocious beast at the best of times with massive investments riding on a relatively narrow marketplace – throw a global economic crisis into the mix and you’ve got a problem. Many developers have shut down since the friendly named credit crunch transformed into the evil sounding recession, including GRIN (Wanted, Bionic Commando), Ensemble (Age of Empires, Halo Wars), Pandemic (Mercenaries) and Free Radical (Timesplitters, HAZE).

Duke Nukem Forever is Dead
May 8th 2009, 3D Realms fires the entire Duke Nukem Forever team and puts the game on permanent ice.
The butt of gaming’s longest running joke, Duke Nukem Forever’s promised release spanned 12 years, poking into two decades of gaming. Snippets of Duke Nukem Forever art, announcements of its delay and the constant reminder that someone, somewhere, is still working on this ridiculous game were valuable sources of consistency in the industry. Whether or not it would have even lived up to the hype is debatable, but it was put to rest in May last year.

FarmVille hits Facebook
June 19th 2009, The most popular Facebook game yet, Farmville, is released onto the social networking sphere.
FarmVille, Mafia Wars and Restaurant City; some of the most popular games in the world and you’ve probably never even heard of them. This decade’s obsession with social networking wasn’t just a boon for MySpace, Facebook and Twitter, but also for the casual gaming industry that’s grown around them. Farmville pulls in a colossal 73 million monthly active players by offering it for free, but makes its cash in premium downloadable content and advertising. Is this the future of gaming?