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Curated playlist

Video games set in outer space

  • Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 reached stores on the 10th of November 2009, and within 24 hours it had sold roughly 4.7 million copies in the United States and the United Kingdom. Those sales brought in $310 million. At the time, that made…
  • Metroid PrimeMetroid Prime first reached the public as a ten-second video at Space World 2000, a flicker of footage for a game that would not appear on shelves until 2002. When it did arrive on the GameCube, published by Nintendo, it carried the weight…
  • Star Wars: SquadronsStar Wars: Squadrons opens with an Imperial captain disabling his own wingmen. He refuses an order to destroy refugees.
  • Call of Duty: GhostsWithin 24 hours of Call of Duty: Ghosts reaching stores in November 2013, Activision had shipped $1 billion worth of copies to retailers. The publisher still counted the game as a letdown. Ghosts was the tenth major Call of Duty release…
  • 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.…
  • Prey (2017 video game)Prey, the 2017 first-person shooter made by Arkane Austin and published by Bethesda Softworks, opens by lying to the player about where they are. You wake up as Morgan Yu in an apartment in 2035, and within minutes you learn the apartment…
  • Astro BotBy April 9, 2025, the PlayStation 5 game Astro Bot had become the most awarded platformer of all time.
  • Cyberpunk 2077Cyberpunk 2077 broke a record within hours of its midnight GMT launch on the 10th of December 2020. More than one million people played it at once on Steam, and one million viewers watched live on Twitch. Together, the figures doubled the…
  • Starfield (video game)Starfield is a 2023 action role-playing game from Bethesda Game Studios, and it lets the player land on more than 1,000 planets. That scale raises a few questions. Why did a studio tied to Skyrim and Fallout 4 turn its attention to space?…
  • 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…

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