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What is the most ported game of all time?

Like the hat?

Like the hat?

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Oct 25, 2017
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I was watching this overview of ports of Joust, and it got me wondering, what is the most ported game ever?
Meaning, what is the single game that has been ported the most? For this I'm not including things like virtual console or rom collections like the genesis/mega drive collections, and not games that are basically the same but technically new games (so no Tetris, unless there is a specific version of Tetris that was ported a lot)

The recent thread on Ikaruga had me wondering if that might have been, but I feel there must be something more.

also, only official ports. I know Doom plays on everything, but Doom on your fridge isn't an official port.
 

Deleted member 7883

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Tetris. I refuse to accept that "Tetris with underwater backgrounds" is unique enough of a gimmick to not be warranted as a port. The Tetris company has survived decades porting the same damn game time and time again. And god bless 'em for it. But we need more Hatris ports

Resident Evil 4 for a more modern answer.
 
RowdyReverb

RowdyReverb

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Oct 25, 2017
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Probably the original arcade Pac Man.
per Wikipedia
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That's 25 and I think most of them aim for the same exact arcade game with visual differences due to hardware restrictions, of course. Not as different as the different Tetris releases I'd say
 
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Peter Ian Staker

Peter Ian Staker

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Oct 25, 2017
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Like the hat? said:
also, only official ports. I know Doom plays on everything, but Doom on your fridge isn't an official port.
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sir_crocodile

sir_crocodile

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Oct 25, 2017
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Officially Prince of Persia is way up there (wiki has it on 23 platforms).

Unofficially it's defo tetris.
 
OP
OP
Like the hat?

Like the hat?

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I know Tetris is on everything but for example Tetris DS and Tetris Effect are not the same game. That's why I mentioned it in the OP.
 
Cdammen

Cdammen

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Tetris or the Snake game on feature phones all across the world. I bought candy once in Germany, and it came with Tetris in the box, as a toy.

I'm going with some arcade game. Like Space Invaders or something like that :)
 
Gen X

Gen X

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Oct 31, 2017
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Could name a few. Tony Hawk, Doom, Space Invaders, Street Fighter 2. Pretty sure if you wiki'd those there would be a massive list of platforms. Whether the games are much different is negligible as most of the time they're modified to suit a desired platforms hardware such as Doom which had levels missing or extra levels depending on where you look.
 
ascii42

ascii42

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sir_crocodile said:
Wiki has 16, so not unless they've missed some.
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Ah, yeah I saw your Prince of Persia comment. That's probably the winner, even if you remove the 3DS and Wii versions for being emulations of other versions. I forget just how many distinct personal computer platforms there were in the late 80s and early 90s.
 
low-G

low-G

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Oct 25, 2017
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How about Tetris ports that weren't fully / properly licensed. I think there was a time that anyone could legally make a Tetris clone. I know the TI994a had one called 'Tris'.

I don't think it counts if it's a clone like all these unofficial ports where the USSR didn't get cash money as a result.
 
Lant_War

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Resident Evil 4 has a fucking Zeebo port. I don't care about the port count, it's that.
 

Jafin

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May 26, 2018
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requiem said:
Tetris, but Rayman 2 ain't far off.
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Literally came in here thinking only of Rayman 2. Aside from the GBC version which is nothing like the original, according to Wikipedia there are 8 different versions of Rayman 2. I'm just surprised Ubisoft didn't port it over to the Switch as a launch title.
 
TubaZef

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sir_crocodile said:
Wiki has 16, so not unless they've missed some.
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SF2 is weird to count because there are a lot of ports of the original Street Fighter 2, but then there's also SF2: Champion Edition, SF2: Turbo and probably more versions with slight improvements which also got many ports. Not to count Super SF2 which got new characters and bigger improvements and got even more ports.
 
Akela

Akela

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Oct 28, 2017
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I'd be more interested in the game that has the most official source ports - as in, which game has the most ports that contain a large portion of the original's source code, engine and art assets?

Tetris might be considered the most "ported" game but if half the ports make pretty substantial changes to the gameplay and basically none of them use the original source code, are they really ports?
 
Spring-Loaded

Spring-Loaded

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Oct 27, 2017
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We should have two categories: one for just the raw number of ports, and another with a weighted scale based on how ridiculous each port job was (e.g. RE4 on Zeebo should count higher than a PlayStation-to-XBox port)
 

seki

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Oct 30, 2017
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I don't think it's quite the most ported, but I think Dragon's Lair is definitely up there. I feel like it's been available to play or buy in some form since it was released almost 40 years ago.
 
TubaZef

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Akela said:
I'd be more interested in the game that has the most official source ports - as in, which game has the most ports that contain a large portion of the original's source code, engine and art assets?
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That one could be RE4 or DOOM.

I think that was harder to do back in the 80's and 90's as there were so many platforms with such a substantially different hardware that in a lot of cases it was easier to just make everything from scratch.
 

dedge

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Sep 15, 2019
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I always laugh when people meme about Skyrim when it's basically just the same number as any multiplatform game that was remastered lol

The true kings are showing up here
 
Akela

Akela

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Oct 28, 2017
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TubaZef said:
That one could be RE4 or DOOM.

I think that was harder to do back in the 80's and 90's as there were so many platforms with such a substantially different hardware that in a lot of cases it was easier to just make everything from scratch.
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Yeah, probably still Doom, maybe RE4. Though I think Sonic 1 and Super Mario Bros are getting up there.

Also people may disagree with this, but Wikipedia recently made the decision that the Tetris mobile game by EA and Tetris by Nintendo for Gameboy are separate video games, thereby making Minecraft and GTA5 the best selling games. To be honest, I agree. Tetris is a series of games, not a series of ports.

The difference between Tetris on Gameboy, The Grand Master series, Tetris Effect etc are substantial enough to be considered their own unique video games that build off the Tetris DNA.
 
nampad

nampad

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I have no evidence but Pong has to be up somewhere.
There were devices just with it.
 
Mirage

Mirage

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Akela said:
Yeah, probably still Doom, maybe RE4. Though I think Sonic 1 and Super Mario Bros are getting up there.

Also people may disagree with this, but Wikipedia recently made the decision that the Tetris mobile game by EA and Tetris by Nintendo for Gameboy are separate video games, thereby making Minecraft and GTA5 the best selling games. To be honest, I agree. Tetris is a series of games, not a series of ports.

The difference between Tetris on Gameboy, The Grand Master series, Tetris Effect etc are substantial enough to be considered their own unique video games that build off the Tetris DNA.
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Yeah especially before the tetris guidelines started in the early 2000s there were some big differences between versions. But like even now hard to say Tetris 99 and Tetris Effect are the same thing.
 
orava

orava

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ascii42

ascii42

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seki said:
I don't think it's quite the most ported, but I think Dragon's Lair is definitely up there. I feel like it's been available to play or buy in some form since it was released almost 40 years ago.
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Yeah, Dragon's Lair has the distinction of being able to ported to things like DVD and Blu-Ray.
 
Akela

Akela

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Meeps said:
The wiki page lists 73 ports of the original.
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That's definitely up there. Granted, quite a few of those diverge pretty heavily from the original Laserdisc game - I'm pretty sure all of the pre-Sega CD games bare little resemblance to the original due to the lack of FMV support, look at the C64 game:



And then some of them are just straight up different games - the ones labelled Dragon's Lair 3D for example are platformers:

 
LegendofLex

LegendofLex

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Nov 20, 2017
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I'm not sure I agree with the Tetris argument. I think we'd need to settle on a specific entry in the Tetris franchise that was clearly ported largely as-is rather than treating each version of Tetris as a port.

I think Arcade PAC-MAN is probably a better fit here.
 
bionic77

bionic77

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Oct 25, 2017
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I would have to assume it is Pacman just because it is the oldest and was given the chance to be on the most systems.

After that it would be Tetris and Street Fighter 2.
 
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