Every game we track, on one map
3,065 of 3,201 games, plotted by when they came out against how widely they are still documented today. This is the only map with effectively complete coverage, because it uses the two things every game in the catalogue has: a release date and a Wikipedia presence.
3,065 of 3,065 games shown · 22 most notable labelled
- Mobile
- Multi-platform
- Nintendo
- PC
- PlayStation
- Xbox
Every point links to that game's full entry. The same data as a table sits below, which is also what screen readers and answer engines read.
How positions are decided
No paid placement, no favouritism, live third-party data
- Placed by the published method, not by us. Every coordinate is computed from the axis definitions and weights printed on this site. Nobody moves a point. See the axes.
- Nothing here is paid for. No sponsored placements, no promoted slots, no arrangement of any kind affects a position. If that ever changes it will be labelled and sit outside the ranking.
- No favouritism, including our own. The 16 games we have written full reviews of are scored by exactly the same formula as the other 1,510, from the same third-party inputs, and they land where it puts them. Our own opinion of a game does not enter its coordinates.
- A position is not an endorsement. It says how a game was received and what it costs, not that we recommend it. Where we do recommend something, it carries a written review with a name on it.
- Fetched from live third-party data. Player sentiment from Steam, critic aggregates as published on store pages, prices checked hourly, attention from Wikipedia. Each figure carries its source and the date it was read, and we do not adjust any of them.
What this map is showing
X, release year. 1962 at the left edge, 2026 at the right.
Y, reach. How many language editions of Wikipedia carry an article about the game, log-scaled to 0 to 100. It is a proxy for cultural reach rather than sales, and it is the only measure available for every game in the catalogue, including console exclusives that never appeared on a storefront we can read.
The interesting corner is top left: games released decades ago that the world still documents in dozens of languages. Those are the ones that actually endured, as opposed to the ones that merely sold. The bottom right is its opposite, and is mostly noise: recent games have not had time to accumulate coverage, so a low position there means far less than the same position on the left.
Catalogue by decade
| Decade | Games | Share |
|---|---|---|
| 1960s | 1 | |
| 1970s | 10 | |
| 1980s | 133 | |
| 1990s | 391 | |
| 2000s | 575 | |
| 2010s | 1,304 | |
| 2020s | 651 |
Coverage. 136 of 3,201 games are absent, because they have no recorded release date. Every other map on this site holds fewer games, because their axes need store data that console exclusives, arcade cabinets and pre-digital releases simply do not have. We would rather show a small honest map than a large invented one, so the other maps stay small. See how the four compare.