Skip to content
Curated playlist

Video games about extraterrestrial life

  • Halo (franchise)Halo is a military science fiction franchise, and in 1997 its earliest form went by a codename its own programmer was too embarrassed to say aloud. Bungie's team first called the project "Monkey Nuts." Jason Jones could not bring himself…
  • Mass EffectMass Effect began in 2003 as a pitch to build a universe on the scale of Star Wars. BioWare wanted to own it entirely.
  • Honkai: Star RailHonkai: Star Rail, a free-to-play role-playing game from the Shanghai studio miHoYo, had 22.98 million people in mainland China pre-register before it opened its doors. Another 10 million signed up from outside the mainland. That is an…
  • Among UsAmong Us, an online deduction game from the American studio Innersloth, arrived in June 2018 to an audience of roughly 30 to 50 players online at any one time. In late September 2020, the same game peaked at 3.8 million concurrent players.…
  • Marvel's Spider-Man 2Marvel's Spider-Man 2 sold more than 2.5 million copies in its first 24 hours, the fastest start of any game from PlayStation Studios. Insomniac Games made the action-adventure for Sony Interactive Entertainment, and it reached the…
  • Megami TenseiMegami Tensei reached Japanese players on the 11th of September 1987, when Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei launched on the Famicom. The game grew out of a science-fiction novel series by Aya Nishitani, and the franchise took its name…
  • No Man's SkyWithin a day of its launch, players of No Man's Sky had registered more than 10 million distinct species. That beat the roughly 8.7 million species identified on Earth so far. Those creatures were produced by algorithms, not placed one at…
  • Helldivers 2Helldivers 2 begins with a fall. Players drop onto hostile planets inside a metal pod called a Hellpod, launched from a starship known as a Super Destroyer. Once on the ground, they call down bombardments by tapping out sequences of…
  • Outer WildsOuter Wilds, a 2019 action-adventure game from Mobius Digital, gives its player exactly 22 minutes to live. At the end of that time the sun goes supernova and the whole planetary system is destroyed. Then everything begins again. The…
  • Super Mario GalaxySuper Mario Galaxy is a Nintendo platform game in which Mario runs around tiny worlds shaped like ice cream and apples. It appeared on the Wii, and the people building it were not all sure the idea would work. Some feared the technology…

Queue