Archive Panic / Video Games

• Video game console libraries tend to be very large, and are guaranteed to burn a hole in your wallet and chew up lots of time;
  • The NES game library consists of a staggering 826 games. Even if you factor out the unlicensed games, it's still an impressive 713 titles. Several of these titles, such as Ufouria, are games that never saw release in the US, and are quite difficult to find in cartridge form. One speedrunner, The Mexican Runner (TMR), undertook the NESMania challenge to play every NES game released in North America. It took from 2014 May 28th to 2017 February 26th, and he clocked around 3,435 hours of total play time by the end (the NESMania archive itself also falls under this trope).
  • The Atari 2600 game library isn't quite as overwhelming as the above, but 565 games is nothing to stuff at either.
  • The European/Australian PlayStation 2 has a whopping 2,231 games, of which 61 are unavailable in English.
  • Steam is often a cause of this, thanks to its large library of games and steep sales that make it easy to accumulate far more games that you have time to play. There's also the fact that, while console libraries can be limited by generations, your Steam library is always available and growing no matter what hardware you have.
• Large as they are, console libraries pale in comparison to the number released for computers, especially in the 8 bit era:
  • The ZX Spectrum has nearly 25,000 pieces of software archived at World of Spectrum, including over 10,000 games.
  • According to Wikipedia, the Commodore 64 amassed a library of nearly 10,000 titles during its lifetime.
  • According to Wikipedia, the Commodore Amiga accumulated over 12,000 games and over 10,000 utilities during its lifespan.
• In terms of video games, the Super Mario Bros. franchise is leaps and bounds ahead. Just go to their page and look at the list. Since 1981, it has accumulated enough sub-series, spin-offs, crossovers, and remakes that the game total is well in the triple digits. Even counting only the mainline Mario platformers (of which there are over 20, so it's no slouch), playing and completing them all is a tall order. And it shows no signs of slowing. Other lengthy sub-series include the Mario Kart games (of which Mario Kart 8 Deluxe stands out the most when counting its DLC), and the Mario Party ones.
• Mario's former rival Sonic the Hedgehog is no slouch either. Counting handheld version of his console games (which often play differently enough) he has around 70 games under his belt. And if you want to check out some of his non-gaming material, they can cause a panic all on their own.
• The Mega Man franchise is another long runner with loads of entries, and eight series across two timelines means you're going to be at it for quite awhile. The classic series alone has over 30 titles. Add in all of the sequel series, and you're up to around 70. Including all of the ports, remakes and mobile games, and you have well over 100 titles to cover. Good luck!
• Shooter games such as Call of Duty, Doom and Battlefield suffer with this trope. With even More Dakka, drinks, food and such (apart with some Sleep) in order to complete them all, you'll have an even harder time to finish them all.
• Contra. No less than thirteen games which WILL last a long time because of their famous difficulty.
• Kingdom Hearts. Kingdom Hearts III is actually the tenth game in the series, which might not seem like a lot until you consider that these are not short games. The shortest will take between 12-15 hours, the others can take as much as 35-45+, depending on how much of a completionist you are. And the series has a Kudzu Plot which makes it unwise to skip any installment.^note It would also be unwise to skip the Updated Rereleases of the game - the 1.5 and 2.5 HD Remix respectively as Square calls it - as they tend to have content from the initially Japan-only Final Mix version of the game, which is necessary to understand said kudzu plot fully. Then there are the ongoing Manga adaptations. The Cutscenes alone qualify as they are the longest in any video game ever. To watch all of them in the second game would take thirteen hours.
• Final Fantasy has no less than 35 games and counting. Even just counting the numbered titles, that's still 15 long lasting RPGs. Even if you did a heavily optimized Speed Run, it would still take 66 hours, as Final Fantasy Relay shows. The good news, however, is that most of the games are self contained and can be understood without playing the previous title, so you can start with any entry in the series. Sequels of a title are clearly labeled to indicate which continuity they belong to (ie IV and IV After Years, X and X-2, the entire XIII trilogy), so you'd have the common sense to play the prequel before touching the subsequent titles.
• Need for Speed is speeding up to have a Garage full of games for the Players to collect literally every car and complete every race. That would cost you a million-dollar supercar.
• Metal Gear is shaping up quickly to be this. With 6 main Solid entries (including both parts of V), 2 handheld spin-offs, another spin off, and the two pre-solid games, you have some catching up to do as these aren't short games. The kudzu plot makes matters worse with the 4th game having a large amount of Continuity Lockout.
• Pokémon. First, the lengths required to "catch 'em all"; by the end of the eighth generation, almost 900 different species of Pokémon existed, with a decent chunk of them being "mystical" Pokémon that are only available during time-sensitive special events or with use of major glitches. While you can generally expect to only need to play with the two most recent generations to get every Mon (though games starting with Pokémon Let's Go, Pikachu! and Eevee! begun limiting the Pokémon available), if you wish to get some special variations such as Spiky-Eared Pichu, you'll have to hope you can find a used copy of their respective entries with them. Of course, if you want to experience all the plots and characters, then you have eighteen mainline games to get through ^note thirty-two, if you want to play both games in each pair. Then you have the various spin-offs that cover every genre from roguelikes to puzzles. Pokémon Stadium alone qualifies as it has the longest Speedrun of any game in the franchise at twenty-seven hours.
• The Super Sig World (Super Mario World Game Mod) series would probably be this for anyone who hasn't played it, since there are nearly thirty different installments in about three or four years. Already kind of long for a fan work, made worse by how they're separated on a bunch of different websites, all have about 99 levels in and take about 20 hours to complete if you're lucky.
• The Legend of Zelda series has 20 main games, which can take anywhere from 10-to-100 hours to beat 100% based on the entry, plus 7 spin-off games, several manga adaptations and a TV animated series.
• Every MMORPG ever can and will cause this. Hope you have plenty of free time. This will get even crazier once you factor in content updates and expansion packs.
• Popular Fighting Video games such as Tekken, Virtua Fighter, The King of Fighters, Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter suffered these thanks to Capcom Sequel Stagnation. It'll take hours of challenge, mastering and of course...a lot of food and drinks to complete them all.
• Though Super Smash Bros. only has 5 games so far, there are many things to do, and it's only gotten bigger with each subsequent installment. As of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, there are hundreds of achievements, trophies, stickers, spirits and more to do throughout the franchise, some of which will require you to be good at using every single character which only further adds to the time.
• And then there's DLC. Rock Band has several thousand songs available for download, the equivalent of hundreds of games worth. And for Guitar Hero, none of its DLC has been available to purchase since March 31st 2014. That announcement sparked another panic to pick it all up before it was gone for good.
• Assassin's Creed has hit this. There are nine main console games and three portable side games, plus countless iOS spin-offs. And that's not even getting into the Expanded Universe of novels, comics, short films, and a feature film.
• Just Dance became this because it'll take more than almost a year to complete all of the songs but fortunately, Just Dance Now fixed this problem with most of the songs within the series being included there.
• The iDOLM@STER has undoubtedly suffered an Archive Panic problem. There's 20+ games, 5 television adaptations (some of them Truer to the Text), some films, a lot of manga adaptations and counting.
• Kirby has a total of 25 games, 28 if you count the three Updated Rereleases. Granted, Kirby games are easier than most, but it's still a hefty number. There's also a 101 episode anime and a gag manga.
• Attempting to binge the entire Trails Series will set you back quite a while. For a series that's famous for its Door Stopper-length scripts in the hundreds of thousands per game, between all the sidequests, lots and lots of NPC dialogue that changes every time there's a plot development, and intricate Worldbuilding, it'll take 150 hours on average to fully complete a game, and unlike most Eastern RPG developers, every Trails title takes place concurrently in the same continuity with several references made between games with quite a few character cameos. Between the Trails in the Sky trilogy, the Zero/Azure duology which has yet to be translated, and the Cold Steel tetralogy, you're looking at 8 games that will take hundreds of hours to read. There are also novel adaptations, manga that retell each game with their own sidestories, drama CDs that are largely canon, an adaptation of Trails in the Sky running for 2 45 minute OVA episodes, and a mobile game, you'll be spending a lot of time exploring its world.
• Baten Kaitos is a rare single game example. To reach 100% Completion would take three hundred forty-two hours...at mininum. That amounts to over two weeks for a single game. Fortunately, most of said time is just idly waiting for items to evolve into other items^note Some items can take upwards of forty hours to evolve. The Shampoo item takes two weeks in real time to evolve.. Anyone aiming for 100% Completion can simply leave the game running and get on with their lives.
• No Man's Sky is more extreme than any other example here. It was advertised as the largest video game Universe in history. To explore every planet, even if it was a rate of one planet per second, would take billions of years. It's simply impossible to complete.
• Candy Crush Saga was first released in 2012, and it's still going (having celebrated its 10th anniversary in November 2022, and having reached 1000 episodes in September 2023). New episodes began releasing on a weekly basis since mid-2014, with three episodes a week becoming the norm by the end of 2018. To even keep up, you would have to complete at least half an episode a day, every day (a tall order when some levels are nigh-impossible without boosters and/or extra moves), with the over a year-long "content drought" where nothing new is truly introduced^note Gummi Dragons were introduced in Spring 2023, but they are merely a substitute for ingredients and behave the exact same way not helping matters.
• The Elder Scrolls has five main series games (WesternRPGs with Wide-Open Sandbox game worlds making for hundreds of hours of content each), five spin-offs, two novels, countless more in-game books, dozens of developer-written supplementary items, and the fanbase is not particularly welcoming to newbies ignorant of the lore. Getting into the series (and community) as a late-comer can be quite the challenge.
• Bomberman has a very intimidating timeline of releases (not even including the two anime adaptations it had), dating all the way back to 1983.
• Criminal Case has eight seasons, with the total cases of each season ranging from 56 to 60 (they got shortened to 30 for the sixth and seventh seasons, and 17 for the eighth). Each case (except Grimsborough's Case #1) may need a few days to complete, unless it's sped up using cash.
• Trying to play every game in The Modding Tree would be an endeavor. While quite a few trees are either the unchanged template or have only one short layer without much content, there are more than a hundred games which have at least three layers with content, with some of them taking more than a week to finish. The Tree of Life in particular is known for being the biggest game made in that engine, as it has received over 300 patches with 25+ layers to get through.
• Brushing through all of Puyo Puyo might keep you busy for a while, as the main series comprises 16 games as of 2020, all with surprisingly detailed plots for simple Falling Blocks games. And that's not factoring in the more obscure parent series Madou Monogatari, the games that spun-off from Puyo itself, and the other media such as the light novels.
• When They Cry:
  • Higurashi: When They Cry: Reading all the eight installments of the original visual novel series can easily take over 80 hours... and then there are all the additional story arcs to catch up with. Limiting yourself to just the Studio Deen anime adaptation is less of a time investment, but will still require you to watch 50 episodes across two series just to catch up with the main plot, and then there's a number of bonus episodes which are often referenced in fandom. Woe be to people who hoped to get into the series with the 2020 anime, only to find out it's a Stealth Sequel and they should watch the entire original series first.
  • Umineko: When They Cry is even more of a time-sink: the main story is divided into eight visual novels which may take about 120 hours to read through. And this time, while an anime adaptation does exist, it cuts out halfway through the story (and is often considered to be significantly inferior to the visual novel).

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