Whether people love The Elders Scrolls 5: Skyrim or hate it, it’s become the most popular entry in the series since its original 2011 release. Largely because the game’s been ported to nearly every modern machine going in the past decade and change. It’s on the PS3 and 360, the PS4 and Xbox One, the Nintendo Switch, and the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. The original PC version has been updated umpteen times as well.
Many people joke that Bethesda has ported it so often that they’ll make versions of it for anything. However, it only had nine different ports over its lifetime. That’s still more than most, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to its competition. Here are some games that have been ported way more than Skyrim.
10 Resident Evil 4
Capcom’s game was a revolution when it first appeared on the market. It may surprise people to learn that it’s almost twenty years old, as it’s never really gone away since its original 2004 Gamecube. The game ended up on the PS2 and every other Sony console up to the PS4. The Wii got a great port with Wiimote aiming.
It skipped the original Xbox, only to pop up on the 360, Xbox One, and Android. The game even appeared on an obscure Brazilian machine called the Zeebo, but this was more of a demake as it reduced the graphics and level design to PS1 quality. In all, there are approximately twelve different ports of Leon’s Spanish adventure out there.
9 Tetris
Alexey Pajitnov’s puzzle classic is available on everything, officially or unofficially. However, they’re not necessarily ports of the same game. They’re usually new games made from the ground up for one particular machine or another. Nintendo’s versions are different beasts from the ones by THQ or Arika.
Even so, there are single editions of Tetris that have out-ported Skyrim. Mirrorsoft and Spectrum Holobyte, sister companies to each other, produced a total of fourteen ports of the game across the Commodore 64, Amiga, Atari ST, ZX Spectrum, and Amstrad computers among others. They were the first to license Pajitnov’s game and got into a legal mess as a result.
8 Final Fantasy
The original Final Fantasy is a hard game to get into nowadays. It started off the legendary JRPG series, but most of its fan-favorite traditions, additions, and quality-of-life updates came from later games. Final Fantasy 1 doesn’t have Chocobos or Moogles, the story is rather bare bones, and the gameplay was quite broken in places.
Nonetheless, it’s been re-released many times since the original NES version. Many of them spruce things up like the recent PC, iOS, and Android remasters. Other times, they straight-up emulate the original like the Wii and Wii U store downloads. Excluding re-releases and additional ports to the same machine, Final Fantasy 1 has been ported fifteen times.
7 Minecraft
Minecraft Steve has become iconic over the past 10+ years. His little blocky face, land, friends, and foes have been everywhere since the game was first released on PC in 2011. The allure of roaming the land, mining whatever minerals are around, and crafting them into anything the player desired was just too much to stay on one machine.
The Apple and Microsoft ports would be enough for the list. It can be played on Mac computers, iOS, iPadOS, Apple TV, and tvOS for the former, and the Xbox 360, Xbox One, Android, and Windows Phone for the latter. That’s not to mention the PS3, PS4, and PS Vita ports, the Raspberry Pi version, Amazon’s Fire OS, the Wii U, Switch, and New Nintendo 3DS. With everything else, that’s nineteen ports in all.
6 Street Fighter 2: The World Warrior
Some readers might think this is the mother lode right here. The arcades received four big updates of Street Fighter 2 alone, some of them arguably minor enough to count as retweaks than full-on remakes. But this list has to draw a line somewhere. So, it’ll just focus on the original 1991 World Warrior version.
After all, its SNES/Super Famicom release was Capcom’s best-selling game ever made for a number of years with 6+ million units sold. The Genesis skipped it in favor of the Championship Edition, but World Warrior turned up on the Master System and Sega Saturn. It also appeared on aging 8-bit microcomputers like the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64. Altogether, it’s been ported twenty times alone.
5 Doom
There are so many ports of id Software’s seminal space shooter that the port list has its own Wikipedia page. There are versions of it for eight computer OSes, thirteen consoles, both Android and iOS smartphones, and the Raspberry Pi. That’s not including unofficial ports like GIFs, USB Adapters, and TI-Nspire graphing calculators.
Not all ports were the same in quality, like the messy 3DO version, chugging Saturn port, and pixelated SNES release. Nonetheless, there are multiple options to experience this classic FPS. About twenty-four officially, but even more if one counts multiple releases (it can be unlocked in Doom Eternal or bought as part of the 25th Anniversary release).
4 Pac-Man
-1.jpg?q=50&fit=crop&w=1500&dpr=1.5)
Namco’s mascot is the first video game mascot character, beating both Mario and Donkey by one year. The first Pac-Man game has since inspired TV shows, documentaries, songs, and more since its original 1980 release. It also received a lot of ports, some of which were influential in their own right, though not necessarily for positive reasons.
The Atari 2600 port was so notorious that its unsold stock was crushed and buried alongside Atari’s ET: The Extra-Terrestrial. While AtGames’ Bandai-Namco Flashback Blast Plug & Play cheated players by using the Arcade version for review models, then the NES port for retail versions. It was a fine port back in the day, but with twenty-four ports out there, it shouldn’t be hard to emulate the original Arcade ROM.
3 Sonic The Hedgehog
Speaking of first outings, Sega’s Blue Blur has at least tied Bandai-Namco’s Yellow Circle for ports at twenty-five. However, some consoles received more than one way to play Sonic’s first game. The Genesis itself re-released the game with Sonic 2 and Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine in Sonic Classics 3-in-1.
The PS3 and Xbox 360 offered two ways to play it too, either via Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection or as an unlockable in Sonic Generations. Then it’s been released multiple times on PC, either on its own, as part of the Sonic PC Collection, or in the new but flawed Sonic Origins compilation. Pick out any device and chances are, officially or otherwise, Sonic the Hedgehog is there.
2 Prince Of Persia
Jordan Mechner’s original Apple II game gave Mac users something to brag about. Players today may be more familiar with the PS2 series, but without the original rotoscoped cinematic platformers, they’d have nothing. It’s since been released twenty-six times officially across machines old and new.
The later ports spruced the original game up with additional colors, particularly the Genesis and Sega CD ports. But the SNES version went one step further by updating the graphics with some lovely redrawn levels and sprites. It also added in some new features like a Training Mode and extra levels to give players something different from the norm.
1 Lemmings
These green-haired little fellas have all but disappeared from view today. But they were unavoidable back in the 1990s. Created by DMA Design, the people behind Grand Theft Auto (seriously) this addictive puzzle game spread like wildfire after its original Commodore Amiga release. Most old-school gamers may have played it on the SNES like Game Center CX’s Shinya Arino.
But it could also be played by Genesis owners…and Master System owners…and Game Gear owners. People who bought a Philips CD-I got a particularly spiffy version too. Players who couldn’t upgrade to an Amiga had options on the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, and Amstrad CPC. MS-DOS, Mac, PS1, Game Boy, and the Acorn Archimedes had their own versions too. It spread to thirty-one machines in total, but the series is now currently locked in Sony’s vault, begging for a fresh release someday.