I can’t quite find an answer and it’s such a broad question it’s hard to find a correct historical answer. Basically, I know that lots of games are made cross platform, meaning it was made for the PS4, XBONE, PC, handheld device, etc. what game had the most ports to other consoles? I imagine it was a Fifa or madden game but I have no idea.
Note: different OS systems on a PC don’t count. For the most part, PC is PC and it’s barely a hard task to port between them as it is to make a game for gameboy AND PC AND Xbox, etc
Moved to the Game Room.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Tetris, maybe?
FIFA is all over the place, I imagine Madden is another game to consider.
Do you mean a specific game or an entire franchise?
Tetris has been on a lot of different platforms, but the bastardized version in circulation today isn’t the same game from years ago.
Worms seems to have been on everything but the kitchen sink too.
It might be back in the old day when there were a lot of systems, Atari, Coleco, Intelivision, C64, Apple II, PC, etc.
I’d think it’d have to be something from the 80s. My first thought was Pac-Man. Cabinet game ported all over the place. Tetris is a good choice as well.
Tetris has been on graphing calculators, laser printers, and projected on the sides of buildings. The game is 30 years old. The simplicity, graphics wise of the game, makes it easy to port.
I really, really, doubt that it can’t be Tetris.
From Wiki
The game (or one of its many variants) is available for nearly every video game console and computer operating system, as well as on devices such as graphing calculators, mobile phones, portable media players, PDAs, Network music players and even as an Easter egg on non-media products like oscilloscopes.[5] It has even inspired Tetris serving dishes[6] and been played on the sides of various buildings.[7]
It probably is, but Pac-Man can’t be far behind. It’s every bit as simple as Tetris, if not more so because it doesn’t require a button, just a joystick or d-pad. Atari sold millions of copies and it wasn’t even a good port.
Another good guess is the simplest of games, included in the very first home gaming console: Pong. It’s been a standalone game or minigame on every console I can think of, and there are countless versions of it on the Internet.
Tetris didn’t really gain very much ground til the late 80s when Nintendo made it the free game that came with the GameBoy.
What about something generic like “pinball” or “slot machine”? I can remember early crude versions of those way back in the 70s, and they still make ever-more-sophisticated versions of those types of games today.
I don’t think generic pinball slot machine games would count since you could argue that they were all similar, but separate, games.
Pac-Man and Pong are interesting candidates. Pong is one of the oldest but the popularity began to seriously wane once actual graphics became all the rage. Its simplicity made it easy to spread around to new systems, but again I would question whether all the various versions made for different systems are technically the same game. Even if they were I don’t think Pong or anything else would come close to beating Tetris.
Except Pac-Man. If anything could give Tetris a run for it’s money, it has to be our favorite yellow dot-munching orb. Even though the games are only 4 years apart in creation, I would say Tetris didn’t become well known in the U.S. until the 90’s, but Pac Man was very well known and popular here in 1982-83. And it too, has been released either as a stand-alone or “Namco Museum Collection” on nearly every system, including mobile phones, iPods, tablets, etc.
So to me it seems to come down to the Pac vs. the Red Menace. Remember, we’re not talking total copies sold/released, but biggest number of different systems appeared on. Not sure what the answer to this is, can’t find this particular info on either game’s Wiki page.
Possibly Chess?
I still have a copy in my garage of the source code for Chess 4.x on the Control Data 6600 mainframe circa early 1970’s, and most of the mainframes of that era had Chess programs. And Alan Turing had one in 1951, and Konrad Zuse in 1941 (though I don’t think that ever got played). Plus most game consoles & PCs since then have had a Chess program available, plus all the specific Chess-playing machines.
Seems like Chess would be a contender here.
(Or maybe even something simpler: is there a version of Tic-Tac-Toe for nearly every machine?)
We’ll need the OP to clarify, but I think he means which single game was released on the most platforms, within a relatively short space of time? I would suggest his excludes many of the excellent suggestions so far like Tetris, Pong, Chess, or Pac Man. One of the FIFA variants is probably it, but I don’t know which.
I would count Tetris, Doom or Pac-Man but I don’t think games like chess or generic “pinball” count because they’re not a single licensed product. Someone owns the license to Tetris or Doom, but anyone can knock out a chess game.
I suppose it’s up to the OP if he means a single licensed product or even a single title released (near) simultaneously as Dead Cat suggests vs Pac-Man for the Atari 2600 and some “Super Pac-Man 2000” game for another device decades later.
The Force Unleashed probably isn’t the winner, but it did come out on a marked number of consoles. Nintendo DS, PC, PS2, PS3, PSP, Xbox 360, and Wii.
The original *Mortal Kombat *was released on : arcades, Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, Game Boy, Game Gear, Sega CD, Sega Master System, Sega Megadrive, Xbox, PS2, PC and Amiga. It is still commercially available on the PSN & Xbox Live Arcade.