Culture
A Short History of Tier Lists
From fighting-game forums to classrooms and boardrooms: how tier lists became a universal format.
By Tier List Maker Team ·
Tier lists feel like they’ve always been around, but the format as we know it is surprisingly recent.
Fighting-game roots
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, competitive fighting-game communities began grouping characters into tiers based on tournament viability. Online forums published and fiercely debated these lists, and terms like “top tier” and “low tier” entered gaming vocabulary.
The S tier arrives
Borrowing from the S ranks awarded in many Japanese games, communities added an S tier above A to mark characters that were in a class of their own.
The template era
In the 2010s, image templates and dedicated tier list websites made it easy for anyone to make a list about anything — not just characters. Food, films, music and everyday life became popular subjects, and video creators turned live ranking into a genre of its own.
Everywhere today
Today, tier lists show up in classrooms, product planning meetings and social feeds alike. The format endures because it’s simple, visual and inherently social: everyone has an opinion about where things belong.