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Curated playlist

Video games using procedural generation

  • Stardew ValleyStardew Valley had sold more than 50 million copies by February 2026, and one person made it. That person is Eric Barone, who works under the name ConcernedApe. After college he could not find a job in the games industry and ended up…
  • The Binding of Isaac (video game)The Binding of Isaac is a 2011 roguelike action-adventure game from independent designers Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl. It reached Steam in September 2011 with almost no fanfare, and McMillen expected it to sell only a few hundred…
  • Persona 3Persona 3 asks its player to press a gun-shaped device against their own head and fire. The device is called an Evoker, and the shot summons a Persona, a physical form of the shooter's psyche. Atlus developed this role-playing game, which…
  • MinecraftMinecraft, the 2011 sandbox game from the Swedish company Mojang Studios, tells its only story through a poem of roughly 1,500 words. The End Poem was written by the Irish novelist Julian Gough. It scrolls past in about nine minutes when a…
  • Persona 5Persona 5 opens in an interrogation room in Tokyo, and it keeps pulling the player back there. The 2016 role-playing game, built by the Atlus development studio P-Studio, is the sixth installment in the Persona series, which grew out of…
  • Dead by DaylightIn Dead by Daylight, four Survivors fix generators to escape one Killer who tries to hook them all.
  • Persona 4Persona 4 is a 2008 role-playing game from the Japanese developer Atlus, and it opens on a puzzle that sounds like a ghost story. In a small rural town, bodies are found dangling from television antennas, and no one can say what killed…
  • TerrariaTerraria sold more than 50,000 copies on its first day in 2011, and 432,000 in its first month. By May 2026 the total had passed 70 million, placing it among the best-selling video games of all time. The game itself looks modest. It is a…
  • Elden Ring NightreignElden Ring Nightreign reached 2 million sales on its first day. It is a 2025 spin-off from the developer FromSoftware, published by Bandai Namco Entertainment, and it takes place in a land where night never lifts. The people of this land…
  • 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…
  • 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?…
  • 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…

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