The history of tier lists

Born in the arcade

The tier-list concept grew out of competitive fighting-game communities, where players needed a shorthand to describe which characters were strongest. Ranking every character 1-to-N was clumsy, so players grouped them into bands instead — “top tier,” “mid tier,” “low tier.” The S grade, borrowed from Japanese grading where it sat above A, slotted in naturally at the top.

Street Fighter II is the usual starting point. Capcom’s 1991 arcade cabinet — ported to the Super Nintendo in 1992 — turned one-versus-one play into tournament-level competition, and the fighting game community (the FGC) that grew up around it, Mortal Kombat, Tekken, and later Super Smash Bros. Melee needed shared shorthand for character strength. The habit of grading rosters wasn’t new either: Japanese arcade magazines like Gamest had been running reader popularity rankings for years, so sorting characters into bands of competitive play was a short step, not a leap.

From forums to the format

As these tier discussions moved onto forums and early gaming sites, the visual layout we recognize — colored rows, letters down the side, items arranged left to right — became standardized. It was compact, instantly readable, and perfect for argument. The structure made disagreements productive: you could point at exactly where someone’s placement was “wrong.”

The dated milestones are oddly specific. A thread titled “Idolmaster Tier List V.3” hit 4chan’s /jp/ board on May 8, 2009; nine days later a user called Yello River defined “God Tier” on Urban Dictionary; and by August 28, 2010, FunnyJunk hosted a tier list of college majors — proof the format had escaped gaming entirely. It fit imageboard culture, which already loved taste charts, and Smash players even built parody into the tradition: “tiers r 4 queers” and the deliberately garbled “tires don exits” became running jokes about whether tier debates mattered at all.

Going mainstream

The leap from gaming niche to universal internet format came when people realized you could rank anything this way — snacks, movies, fictional characters, even abstract concepts. Drag-and-drop tier list makers removed the last bit of friction, and the format exploded across social media as a low-effort, high-engagement way to share an opinion and invite a pile-on in the replies.

Two dates anchor that leap. The TierMaker domain was registered in July 2016, which put drag-and-drop tier building in any browser. Then on April 25, 2019, iDubbbz uploaded a fast-food tier list that pulled over 4.5 million views — and the dam broke. Twitch streamers like xQc ranked sodas live, YouTube’s own culture team later wrote up the boom as “the tier list phenomenon,” and 2019 became the year the format flipped from gaming reference to viral template. Call it the ranking renaissance; the internet basically did.

Tier lists today

Now a tier list is a genre of content in its own right — a thumbnail-ready, debate-bait template that works for any topic. The tools got easier too: today you can paste a list or upload images, rank in seconds, and export a clean image, no account needed. From arcade strategy to everyday memes, the humble tier list had quite a run.

It keeps sprouting variants, too. The iceberg chart — the same banded template, sorted from most known to most obscure instead of best to worst — took off around 2020, and channels like TierZoo built an audience grading real animals as if they were a playable roster. The format now has its own Wikipedia article and a confirmed Know Your Meme entry, which is about as canonized as a meme format gets. New to all this? What is a tier list covers the basics.

The first tier lists on record

The word came before the picture. Urban Dictionary’s earliest definition of “tier,” added in 2004, already leaned on a Super Smash Bros. Melee example — the FGC was talking in tiers before anyone was drawing them. The earliest tier list that still survives is a forum post: on March 25, 2005, a Tekken Zaibatsu user going by “Nothing” sorted the Tekken 4 roster (a 2001 game) into ranks, with Jin Kazama alone in God Tier and Demigod and Upper tiers below him.

Notice what’s missing: no S. Early forum lists ran on descriptive labels — God, Top, Mid, and less printable ones — and the S-A-B-C-D letter grading standardized later. For where the S itself came from, see what does S tier mean.

How competitive tier lists are actually made

A serious tier list is an argument from evidence. In fighting games it starts with the matchup spread — how a character fares against every other character, one matchup at a time — layered with tournament results and overall tournament viability in the current metagame. Placements get re-litigated after every balance patch, which is why competitive tier lists carry version numbers. Some communities formalize it further: Smashboards has produced tier lists through community-wide polling, so the result reflects the player base rather than one loud poster.

The method traveled well beyond fighting games. MOBA players tier League of Legends champions, hero-shooter communities tier Overwatch heroes, gacha players tier Genshin Impact characters — same letters, same logic, and the grades stretch when needed, the way Guilty Gear Xrd discussion splits S from S- and A+ from A. Whether tiers really “exist” is its own long-running debate: casual players argue skill outweighs matchups, competitive players keep pointing at bracket results. If arguing about it sounds fun, start from a real roster — the Smash Bros Ultimate and Street Fighter 6 templates come preloaded, and live polls let the community vote on the results.