Curated playlist

Video games set on fictional planets

Final Fantasy XV: Pocket EditionFinal Fantasy XV: Pocket Edition squeezed a console epic onto a touchscreen. Only the first of ten chapters is free.
Compilation of Final Fantasy VIIBefore Crisis, a Final Fantasy VII mobile game, never left Japan. Phones in North America could not run it.
Halo: ReachHalo: Reach, a video game from the studio Bungie, took in US$200 million on its first day on sale. That set a record for the Halo franchise. Yet the game asked players to defend a planet that the series' own fiction had already declared…
Final Fantasy XIIIFinal Fantasy XIII's heroes learn their mission is to destroy their own world.
Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VIICrisis Core: Final Fantasy VII explains a death that fans of the 1997 game already knew.
Final Fantasy VJapan asked Square not to release Final Fantasy V on a school day.
Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VIIDirge of Cerberus was a shooter built around a hero once locked in a coffin. It arrived in 2006 for PlayStation 2.
Borderlands (series)The Guinness Book of World Records credits the first Borderlands game with the ability to generate more than 17 million different guns. Borderlands is a video game series from Gearbox Software, published by 2K, that mixes first-person…
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…
Final Fantasy IXFinal Fantasy IX deliberately turned backward to medieval castles and minstrels.
Final Fantasy VII RemakeFinal Fantasy VII Remake's reveal sent Square Enix's stock to its highest point since November 2008.
Final Fantasy VII RebirthFinal Fantasy VII Rebirth was released on Leap Day, the 29th of February 2024. Square Enix chose that date deliberately.
Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD RemasterThe Final Fantasy X remaster added an audio drama that darkened the happy ending. Its writer has a sequel plot ready.
Final Fantasy XIII-2In Final Fantasy XIII-2, Serah and Noel jump between eras to repair paradoxes in time.
Final Fantasy XVIIn Final Fantasy XVI, the hero hunts a fire monster that turns out to be him.
Final Fantasy XVFinal Fantasy XV shipped five million units in one day. Square Enix said that covered its development costs.
Final Fantasy X-2Final Fantasy X-2 built its costume-changing battles from magical girl anime and Charlie's Angels.
Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIIIIn Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII, Lightning has thirteen days to save the world.
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.
Directive 8020Directive 8020 is a 2026 survival horror game from Supermassive Games, and it opens with a murder. In the prologue, sleep technician Pari Simms kills her colleague Tomas Carter aboard the colony ship Cassiopeia. The two are the only people…
Gears of WarGears of War begins its fiction with a death toll. The event is called Emergence Day. In only 26 hours, the Locust Horde, a race of subterranean creatures, kills 25% of the population of the planet Sera. From that catastrophe grows a…
Intergalactic: The Heretic ProphetIntergalactic: The Heretic Prophet is an upcoming action-adventure game from the studio Naughty Dog, published by Sony Interactive Entertainment for the PlayStation 5. Its first trailer showed a bounty hunter watching anime, listening to…
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…
Final Fantasy XFinal Fantasy X shipped in Japan in 2001 and sold more than 2.14 million units on its first day alone, including 1.4 to 1.5 million pre-orders. A million copies moved within hours of release. Square had expected modest returns from a…
The Elder ScrollsThe Elder Scrolls began as a gladiator game about arena tournaments. Side quests grew as the tournaments shrank.
WarcraftWarcraft got its name because it "sounded super cool." Blizzard's co-founder said the word had no particular meaning.
Marvel RivalsMarvel Rivals reached 10 million players within 72 hours of its release on the 6th of December 2024. NetEase Games built this free-to-play hero shooter in collaboration with Marvel Games, and it draws its fighters from Marvel Comics. A…
Ratchet & ClankRatchet & Clank began with a reptile. Early sketches for the hero of Insomniac Games' new PlayStation 2 adventure showed a reptilian alien. Artists eventually settled on a feline humanoid and gave it a species name, Lombax, which the…
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.…
Halo: Combat EvolvedHalo: Combat Evolved reached shops on the 15th of November 2001, the same day as Microsoft's first game console, the Xbox. Bungie built it, and Microsoft Game Studios published it. A reviewer at Edge magazine called it "the most important…
Apex LegendsApex Legends passed one million unique players eight hours after it went live in February 2019, and almost nobody had known it existed. Respawn Entertainment built the game, Electronic Arts published it, and it cost nothing to download.…
Final Fantasy XIIn 2025, so many new players joined Final Fantasy XI that the server Asura closed to new characters.
Final Fantasy XIVSquare Enix rebuilt Final Fantasy XIV from scratch while the failed original kept running.
Astro BotBy April 9, 2025, the PlayStation 5 game Astro Bot had become the most awarded platformer of all time.
The Outer WorldsThe Outer Worlds is a 2019 action role-playing game from Obsidian Entertainment, and it begins with a history that never happened. In the game's timeline, U.S. President William McKinley was never assassinated in 1901. Theodore Roosevelt…
Super Mario OdysseySuper Mario Odyssey opens with an act of violence against a hat. Bowser's airship drags Mario's cap into its rear propellers and shreds it to pieces. Mario has just been knocked off the ship, and he lands in a kingdom of living hats. From…
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…
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…
Star CitizenOn the 10th of October 2012, the website built to launch Star Citizen crashed in the middle of the game's announcement at GDC. By May 2026, combined crowdfunding and early access sales for the project had passed US$1 billion. That sum…