25 May 2026·5 min read·By Kai Nakamura

The Sunday Papers

Rock Paper Shotgun's Sunday Papers is back with a new collection of recommended reading from the wide world of games and tech.

The Sunday Papers lands every weekend like clockwork. For 811 editions now, Rock Paper Shotgun has gathered the most compelling, strange, and indispensable games writing scattered across the internet and placed it in one carefully curated Sunday list. If you have ever lost a lazy morning to a browser groaning under the weight of too many open tabs, you already understand the rhythm. This is not a news roundup. It is not a hot takes digest. Think of it more like a friend who reads voraciously, remembers what you actually care about, and then says, "Here, you need to see this one."

811 Sundays and Counting

The number deserves a pause. Edition 811 means this series has been running every single weekend for over fifteen years. That spans entire console generations, the collapse and rebirth of studios, the rise of live service games, and a complete transformation in how people talk about this medium. Most weekly columns burn bright and vanish within a year. The Sunday Papers kept going. Not through grand reinvention, but through a stubborn, quiet belief that good writing about games deserves an audience. That someone out there on a Sunday morning, coffee in hand, wants to read something deeper than a patch notes summary.

A Weekly Ritual

The format is deceptively simple. Editors at Rock Paper Shotgun spend the week reading. When Sunday arrives, they publish a selection of links, each with a short bit of commentary. The topics sprawl. One week might feature a lengthy investigation into emulation preservation. The next could highlight a personal essay about finding community in an MMO that shut down a decade ago.

The Art of the Blurb

What separates The Sunday Papers from a raw bookmark dump is the voice. Each link arrives with context. A sentence or two that tells you why this piece matters before you ever click. The blurbs are never dry academic summaries. They read like a knowing nod across the room.

What Makes the Cut

The selection criteria are invisible but unmistakable. Certain patterns emerge if you read long enough:

Pieces that treat games as culture, not just product
Writing from voices outside the mainstream enthusiast press
Stories that would not trend on social media but deserve preservation
Independent blogs, personal newsletters, forum posts that hit like lightning

The editors clearly favor depth over speed. A feature published three weeks ago is just as likely to appear as something from yesterday. The Sunday Papers operates on its own clock.

The best Sunday reading makes you forget about the week ahead and think instead about the games that shaped you, the ones still waiting in your library, and the stories players tell each other when nobody is watching.

The Hidden Value

There is a practical benefit here that most readers do not notice at first. The Sunday Papers functions as an archive. Over 811 editions, it has documented what the games conversation actually sounded like at any given moment. Historians of the medium will one day comb through these posts the way researchers now sift through old zines and mailing list archives. But for the rest of us, it simply solves a problem. The internet is vast and algorithm feeds are terrible at surfacing thoughtful writing about niche topics. The Sunday Papers acts as an antidote to the churn.

Why Browsers Groan on Sunday

Anyone who regularly follows the column knows the ritual. You open the page intending to scan a few headlines. Forty minutes later you have fourteen tabs open. Some articles run five thousand words. Others are short photo essays or video documentaries. The variety is the point. You might start with a breakdown of ray tracing performance and end up reading a meditation on grief and save files.

The Community Speaks

The comments section beneath each edition tells its own story. Readers share what they have been reading, recommend pieces the editors missed, and sometimes spin off entire discussions that last well into Monday. Over the years, a genuine community has formed around this Sunday appointment.

Longtime readers who remember edition 200
Newcomers discovering the back catalogue
Writers who found their audience because a Sunday Papers link changed their traffic overnight

That last group matters more than people realize. A mention in The Sunday Papers can redirect an entire career. Independent writers have described watching their analytics spike and knowing, instantly, that the RPS editors had been reading.

What Comes Next

No announcement suggests the formula will change. The Sunday Papers endures precisely because it does not need to. As long as there are writers producing thoughtful, weird, passionate work about games and as long as Sundays keep arriving, the series will likely continue its quiet weekly rhythm. The only sensible thing to do now is what the column has always asked of its readers. Open the links. Read slowly. Let the tabs pile up. Sunday is long and the week ahead can wait.