Retro gaming on MojoPlays, where the audience corrects the list
The top-scoring subject in the run is a MojoPlays lane. 'How is Metroid NES not on this list' is the audience telling you the next one.
What was measured, and what it means here
Left, the four scores as computed for this subject. Right, a person's reading of each one for WatchMojo in particular.
- Strongest signal
- Demand at 94
- Weakest signal
- Fit at 62
- Videos on the subject
- 29, 27 of them owned
- Comments naming it
- 88, 50 unprompted
88 comments, 50 of them unprompted, and the highest request count of any subject. Viewers are naming specific games: Metroid, Illusion of Gaia, Battle of Olympus, Batman Returns on SNES.
Conversation velocity is up 54x on a small prior base, which means it arrived with one video: the N64 list.
No competitor in the set published on it in the window. The one adjacent breakout is BuzzFeed's Pokemon Snap experts video.
10 N64 Games That Were Almost Impossible to Finish ran at 5.3x MojoPlays' median. Owned index on the subject is 1.39 across 27 videos.
Scores are 0 to 100 percentile-style ranks among the 262 subjects in this run, never absolute claims: a high demand score means most other subjects drew less conversation, not that most viewers want it. Fit is read from 27 owned uploads on the subject itself. Everything on the left is counted from the corpus; everything on the right was written by a person and cites its evidence further down the page.
When to publish
The call and the measurement side by side, so an override is visible rather than silent.
Nostalgia does not decay. The comments under a retro list keep arriving.
The measurement alone would say: Now. The author overrode it, for the reason given beside this.
- Momentum
- 85
- of 100, rank in this run
- Recent mentions
- 88
- comments in the last 14 days, 0 in the 60 before
- Late share
- -
- no upload on the subject is old enough to tell
The rule is simple on purpose: hot conversation plus rising uploads reads as now; rising with less heat reads as within days; a subject still drawing comments a month after upload reads as evergreen; the rest waits for its moment in the cycle.
The shape the evidence points to
In the corpus's own vocabulary of ten format lanes, matched on titles.
Hardest, most impossible, most different: difficulty and regional-difference framings are what the audience replied to.
Index is views over each channel’s own median for the same video type, on uploads at least three days old. An index above one means the format beats the channel’s typical upload; the two bars share a scale.
Where the editorial team would start
These are title directions for the editorial team, not scripts. Each is written in the shape the channel's own record rewards; the writing stays with the writers.
- 0120 SNES Games That Were Almost Impossible to Finish (the comments already picked half)
- 0210 Retro Games You Could Only Beat With a Password
- 03Top 20 Arcade Games That Ate Your Allowance
What could make this call wrong
This is a MojoPlays finding at MojoPlays' scale (15k median). The two main-channel retro videos in the window did not break out. Keep it on the gaming channel.
Weakest measured signal: Fit at 62 of 100 among the 262 subjects in this run.
What the call was read from
First the comments and videos the author cites. Then the live record, pulled from the corpus at render time: what WatchMojo has already made on this subject, and what broke out for competitors.
Comments the call cites
3 citedHow is Metroid NES not on this list!?
You forgot Illusion of Gaia.. one of the best adventure games ever made for the snes that not a lot of people played or know about
I remember struggling with the Donkey Kong arcade game.
Videos the call cites
1 citedWatchMojo’s own record on this subject
26 owned uploads old enough to index, top 8 by indexCompetitor breakouts on this subject
top 1 by indexComments are the top-sorted sample YouTube returns for each video, capped at our own limit, never a video’s full comment count. The index on each video is its views over its own channel’s median for the same type, on uploads at least three days old, which is why a small channel’s breakout ranks above a large channel’s ordinary day. Competitor supply means the 15 competitor channels collected for this run, not YouTube as a whole, and everything here comes from a single collection on 2026-08-27.
6 of the 20 inputs in the brief
The brief lists twenty inputs and asks that they be combined, not presented. These are the ones this call rests on most, with how each was measured in this run.
Comment classes: requests, 'where is X', order debates and questions, each counted per subject.
329 main-channel uploads from 25 May to 27 August, each indexed against the channel median, aggregated by subject, vertical and format.
13,584 screened comments tagged by subject and by ten classes from requests to nostalgia.
Days since WatchMojo last covered each subject, against demand and competitor supply.
Request-class comments ('part two', 'do a top 30', 'next time') counted under owned videos and per subject.
Verbatim comments per subject, with the recurring phrases surfaced by discovery over the corpus.