Les Miserables: The Game Of The Book is the start of a project that will add more and more stories to the same game world. Eventually it will be the biggest adventure game in the world. And it covers bigger topics than any other game: poverty, faith, history, the purpose of life, and more.
How does this compare with other big games? This page looks at the biggest games of all time. Most of this data is from Wikipedia, with numbers correct as of the end of 2006.
The biggest sales:
The biggest selling game franchise of all time is Nintendo's Mario (193 million units across all platforms)
According to the Guinness Book of Records, the most successful coin operated game ever was Pac-Man., which shifted nearly 300,000 arcade machines in just seven years. Pac-man is the world's most recognized computer icon, has been played at least ten billion times, and revolutionized the games industry.
The best selling PC game of all time is The Sims (16 million units). The best selling PC Adventure game of all time is Myst (6 million units)
The biggest financial success
The Pokemon franchise has slightly lower overall game sales than Mario, but it probably makes a lot more money through its card games, hit cartoons, merchandising, etc.
In other news, "Halo 2" did $125 million dollars of business in its first day.
The biggest success (according to critics)
The highest rated game of all time, according to multiple reviews from different sites, is The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for the Nintendo 64.
Most aggregate sites place Ocarina as number one. Game Rankings calculated Ocarina's average score at 97.8%, Gamestats gave it 98%. and Metacritic calculated the average scores as 99%. Game Ratio is the odd one out and places Ocarina at number two with Halo 2 for the Xbox at number one. Halo 2 does not feature in the other top tens, so Game Ratio must use a different way of counting the scores.
Note that the best selling, most profitable, and most critically acclaimed games are all from Nintendo.
The most players
In September 2005, Eve Online set a new record of over 15,000 concurrent users. Performance took such a hit that they had to install massively more powerful hardware. "Within four days of installation, EVE Online set a new Peak Concurrent Player (PCU) record with 17,032 playing at the same time." (Source)
A year later, by September 2006, Eve Online doubled that record. "Eve Online is steadily setting brand new records in terms of concurrent users on a single shard, the latest being acknowledged just one week ago with over 30,000 players online at the same time." (source)
The above map shows the EVE universe. Each dot is a complete star system. Please note that other online games have more users, but they are usually split into separate worlds. For example, FIFA Online had 100,000 PCUs in just one country when it opened in Korea, but each player would only see a limited number of other players. "Unlike most MMOGs that split a large player base up among small clones of the same game world (called "shards") containing no more than 3,000 people, EVE is unique in that all of its players inhabit the same game world."(source) In theory this number could be beaten by Dark and Light, which is designed for up to 500,000 PCUs, but time will tell.
The biggest game world (most hours of gameplay)
World of Warcraft, with over seven million paying subscribers, deserves a special mention. It may not have the most people in each shard of the online game (though it has plenty), and it may not cover as many square miles as other games (though it does cover a huge area), but the enormous investment of time and people means it almost certainly has more detail and more richness than any other game.
Each individual quest has mountains of back-story behind it. As a fan wrote in to a WoW forum: “There is more story in the Orc city of Orgrimmar than there is in the entire game of EverQuest.” And the developers have enormous financial incentives to add more and more and more and more and...
The biggest land area
Some games feature enormous galaxies that are mostly empty space. The game with the biggest explorable land area is probably Dark and Light.
"Players will inhabit a world that is equivalent to over 15,000 square miles of land, all on one server, that can have up to 500,000 inhabitants concurrently playing the game. Let’s put that much space into perspective. The explorable area of Morrowind, generally regarded to be an enormous game, is only about 10 square miles. The original Everquest, after nine expansion packs, covers about 350 square miles, one fortieth (1/40) of the space in Ganareth, the world of DnL which covers an area that's twice the size of New Jersey." (source)
The biggest explorable area
All of this is nothing compared with flight sims. However, you cannot interact directly with the land in a flight sim, so this is a special case. The big developers use the same terrain plug-ins, so they are all effectively the same size: they cover the entire planet earth!
If you have enough money your flight game can include every nation on earth down to whatever detail you can afford and the military will allow. For example, FS Global Special Edition contains the entire world on 3 DVDs, with images mapped onto a mesh with nodes just 76m apart.
Nothing gives the feeling of wide open spaces quite like a flight sim.
The number of hours gameplay is difficult to define, as some online games go on forever. One World of Warcraft fan calculated that it took him 511 hours to reach level 60.
Games that have a story can have an average length for a typical player to feel they have finished it. 20 hours is normal. 40 hours is considered good value for money for a 40 dollar game. Rockstar Games co-founder Dan Houser said Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas had 150 hours of gameplay.
The biggest game universe (measured in light years)
Games such as Eve Online and the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises have many star systems, but each appears to stay within one galaxy. The only recent game I have found that travels between different galaxies is Stargate Worlds. This allows the user to travel between worlds in at least three different galaxies (our own, Andromeda and Orion I think, but the game is still in development .)
More then twenty years after its release (in 1984), the biggest game of all time is probably still Elite, which featured eight galaxies of 256 worlds each. Remarkably the whole giant game fit onto one floppy disk. The original plan was to have 2^48 Galaxies (around 280,000,000,000,000 galaxies!) but the publisher decided that might be too much, since the real universe has less than that. The sequel, Frontier, only had one galaxy (our own) though with more detail.
The biggest game in megabytes
The PS3 uses the enormous capacity of a blu-ray disk, and one of the launch titles claimed to need all this space. "Resistance: Fall of Man" takes up a 22 gigabytes for music, level data, textures and code. However, it has been claimed that 17 gig of this is just padding.
The RPG game Blue Dragon should fill 3 DVDs, mainly because of all the animations.
The biggest adventure games
Myst III Exile has been described as "the world's biggest adventure game" but the developers say "Exile is comparable to the size of Riven and should take approximately 40-60 hours to complete." It comes on four CDs and has beautifully rendered 3D scenes, but takes place within a geographically limited game world.
"A Quiet Weekend in Capris" was famously made with over 4,500 photos of Capris which make up the still images that form most of the game. The images (being photos of the beautiful island) are very attractive but reviewers say they tend to look the same after the first few hundred.
The sequel to Capris, named Anacapris (after the other town on the island) is rumored to have 8,000 photos. If so, that makes it bigger that the Les Miserables game in terms of raw backgrounds, but we shall wait to see when the game is actually published. The third edition of the Les Miserables game will exceed this number (mainly due to more outer space and undersea locations) but who knows what else will be available by then?
The biggest concept
Will Wright's Spore promises to be the biggest game ever in terms of possibilities. The player begins with a single celled organism and guides its evolution until it is a galactic empire. It's obviously designed to be fun, but there are big concepts there as well.
There must be other games that deal with serious topics in a profound way, but I can't find them. Can you help?
