I am cataloging what I feel were the best-looking games on their release time. Art direction, though important, isn't going to be the end-all-be-all to make it on this list (which is why I'm not putting Alan Wake II here, for example. It's a better-looking game than Avatar to me, but Avatar is the more impressive work on a technical level, and more technical ground is broken by it.). I have another list that covers that already at https://backloggd.com/u/SolMerse/list/best-art-direction-of-the-years/ . This is really about just being the technical peak of graphics for the specific points of gaming history where they came out.
I skipped years where I felt like there wasn't the kind of advancement justified to make it here. Those years are 1963-1970, 1972-1973, 1975, 1977, 1979, 1987-1989, and 2009-2010