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The most "massive" game from the 8-bit era?

T

Terra

Member
The amount of content from games back in the days used to differ a lot.
Some games were small and repetitive, while some games were brimming with content.

What games do you remember to be massive and packed with stuff to do, and maybe a big world to explore?

The games that stand out for me is Star tropics 2 where hours could be spent traveling throughout the time. As I remember it, it was a game huge for its time, and I did not even finish it. The dungeons were great and quite hard too.

startropics2-logo.gif




Another game that comes to mind is Gargoyles Quest 2. I remember that being very big, with a world map and all. Am I right?
 
Mareg said:
NES games were still coming out in 1994 !? Daaaam that system kept giving. Wasn't SNES like 1990 ?
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snes was late '91... but yeah, huge install base. it didn't go quietly. though most of those later games (zoda, ducktales 2, ect) were glossed over
 
Elite if we're allowing for the fact that much of it was effectively generated procedurally.

Also in a similar ilk, there, there's the text adventure Snowball that proudly proclaimed 7,000 locations when text adventures at the time usually had up to 200 or so - but something like 6,800 of those locations were used in one massive colour-coded maze!

I'd also nominate Explorer, which touted "40 billion graphical locations". All of them, though, were a particularly smudgy form of dull jungle, there wasn't actually that much in the way of interesting interactivity.

In terms of large designed worlds, the aforementioned Lords of Midnight and Doomdark's Revenge are pretty good suggestions. I should mention that it does also depend somewhat on the nature of the world, though LoM and DR are effectively wargames, so the world in question does boil down to being a tiled grid - the same being pretty much true of Explorer, as it happens. That's a rather easier sort of map to populate en masse than, say, a city, even if it's technically larger!

Mercenary, I think, is a pretty good bet; a city, much of it explorable, with very open-ended gameplay for what you can do in it.

Outside those - and I think my actual answer - is Starglider 2. The first game was a fairly bog-standard simulatory shmup, but the second added an open world of sorts - the world in question being a full solar system in which you needed to find component of a bomb capable of destroying the titular space station before it was activated. There's a lot of complexity there. It's primarily a 16-bit game - but there was, indeed, a Speccy port.


Edit: Actually, thinking about it, if we're including games we might associate with being 16-bit but 8-bit ports existed, quite a few of the Ultima games appeared on the C64, including 6, which is pretty damn massive.
 
Mareg said:
NES games were still coming out in 1994 !? Daaaam that system kept giving. Wasn't SNES like 1990 ?
Click to expand...
Lots of people still had an NES well into the next generation. First, there wasn't really a precedent for the need to upgrade to the new console. The NES was viewed as good enough by parents. Additionally, many NES owners were upset that the SNES wouldn't be able to play their NES game library and so some people clung to the previous gen for that reason. I don't think I upgraded to the SNES until like '95
 
Whatever it is, I'd bet it's gotta be some amiga game (or at least a game for another home computer)
disk space -> massive game
ultima maybe?
 
The Sentinel by Geoff Crammond (C64/Spectrum)- 10.000 levels, random code for next level given at level conclusion. Awesome game
Explorer by Electric Dreams (C64/Spectrum). Ugly as hell but it was a game composed by 4 billions of jungle locations (each one indistinguishable from the other).
 
Dragon Quest 4
Zelda 2
Gargoyles Quest 2
Super Mario Bros 3
Swords and Serpents (though a bit samey)
Castlevania 2
Battle of Olympia
Elite (cheating a bit lol)
 
Koei's strategic titles like Romance of the Three Kingdoms II were jam-packed with large scale tactical battles, provinces to manage, generals to keep happy, alliances to forge, and so on and so forth. They were big and complex enough that Koei's later titles would routinely use the most advanced NES mappers available.
 
Chinbo37 said:
Dragon Warrior/Quest IV?
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This is my vote for NES, on content at least. Might not be the most massive in terms of physical locations to explore because you revisit quite a few of them, but seriously it is a massive game and awesome all the way through.

FF3 NES was quite good too. You explore the whole world, which has edges you can see where water is falling off, like you're on a flat, floating planet...turns out you're actually on a floating island that is just 4 small tiles of a much larger world, that's been inaccessible for a long time.

Ivan Amiibo said:
Definitely not any NES game.

Sorry /wet blanket
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Ok then, what's the most massive NES game?
 
My vote goes to Populous for the Master System: 5000+ worlds, each one lasting for a long time!

Loved that game... even being impossible to finish.
 
As a kid growin' up, it always felt like it had to be Kirby's Adventure to me. Big overworld, tons of powers and secrets, amazing graphics and sound, lots of mini-games, parallax scrolling everywhere, percentage completions... it felt like an SNES game for all us kids who couldn't afford an SNES yet.
 
There has to be an open world RPG on 8 bit computers on par with the scope of old school Elders Scrolls games, right?

(Pardon my ignorance, I only got into western RPGs with Morrowind).
 
Ivan Amiibo said:
That's not what thread is about. I'd rather die than hijack a thread with an irrelevant topic.
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OP opens listing NES games and a lot of others have listed NES games. "Massive" is also not well defined. We could talk about how much space they take up in kilobytes, or how much space they would take up if fully uncompressed. We could talk about how long it takes to beat the game, but then games with slow walking speed and lots of backtracking might win. We could talk about the number of in-game tiles you walk across, but then games with large empty areas could win on a technicality that's actually not very interesting. We could talk about the amount of space you physically explore if the game were translated to real life distances, but then sci fi spacefaring games would win by default.

Or we could talk about all of the above and just shoot the breeze about large games in general. NES is in the running for any number of the above categories. I don't think anyone is being a real stickler on the details. Could be instructive to list the most massive games for each platform and then compare those.

If you just want to talk sheer possible explorable area, roguelikes existed in the 8-bit era. Those beat even Elite, which had a pregen universe seed and wasn't actually infinite.
 
I probably ought to mention Exile, too. Massive cave network, full newtonian physics model, open-ended with lots of individual goals.

To highlight the scale we're talking about, here's the game running on the (weaker) Acorn Electron:

zJWY6Ik.png


That's not a decorative border. The game was so large they had to use screen RAM for general storage!
 
sixteen-bit said:
lol last nes release was Wario's Woods in December '94 that's really late
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DiipuSurotu said:
The PlayStation was also released in December 1994 :-o
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The last ps2 game released one week before the ps4 launched - PES 2014


I'm just assuming the largest games were ones that reused assets and just used math to generate areas.

The largest game with handcrafted areas though? Not sure. Largest I played was probably zelda.
 
The original Metal Gear games are enormous. Metal Gear 2 in particular is easier on par with many ambitious 16 bit games.

Whether it counts as "8 bit" is a different discussion, but it's certainly a major accomplishment from the era itself.
 
Dingens said:
Whatever it is, I'd bet it's gotta be some amiga game (or at least a game for another home computer)
disk space -> massive game
ultima maybe?
Click to expand...

Ouch, calling the Amiga - a 16-32bit computer - a 8bit one is rude... Poor Amiga, you didn't deserve this.

On topic, I remember DeathLord being advertised as one the largest world of the time:
874139-deathlord_cover.jpg

Never played myself, though, I cannot confirm.
 
My vote would go to Wonderboy III monster trap on the master system. That game was masterful and very lengthy.
 
baudelinog said:
My vote goes to Populous for the Master System: 5000+ worlds, each one lasting for a long time!

Loved that game... even being impossible to finish.
Click to expand...

This! Populus was HUGE!

From master system i remember miracle warriors was quite lengthy, also most wonder boy games were big.
If we can count gameboy then pokemon was really big, also super mario land 3 had tons of levels.
 
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