Forget letter grades, numbers, stars, and percentages: No metric for evaluating videogames has ever matched what Chet Faliszek and Erik Wolpaw (who both went on to write for Valve) came up with in the year 2000. It was the crate review system, dubbed “Start to Crate“: the time it takes between beginning a game and encountering a crate.

Often, that time can be measured in mere seconds because crates are utterly ubiquitous in games. Whether you smash them open to collect weapons and ammo, duck behind them for cover in a firefight, or stack them up to solve puzzles, rare indeed is the game that doesn’t have a crate of some sort in it. Always has been. Always will be.