It’s hard to think of any term that has had such an impact on the videogame industr y as ‘triple-A game’. Yet for all its power, it’s one we take for granted. Today, ‘triple-A’ is simply part of the furniture, remaining an ever yday term despite the massive shifts in how videogames are made, distributed, played and understood over the decades since this buzzword first emerged. But when was that, exactly, and where did it come from? Our investigation into the label’s origin, in search of a patient zero, swiftly becomes an investigation of its origins, plural. This term has been adopted by multiple generations of developers, working in different regions and disciplines, its exact meaning dependent on that context. So, is there a solid definition of ‘triple-A’ to be found today? And, after a long time at the top, might it finally be time to retire the term for good?
R evolution Studios co-founder Charles Cecil remembers first hearing the term during a visit to Virgin Interactive’s offices in Orange County, California, in the late 1990s, following the release of the original Broken Sword. “The game had done phenomenally well, particularly on PlayStation,” Cecil recalls. “And Martin Alper was their CEO, and he very kindly took me out for lunch. And he talked about ‘triple-A games’. And then he said to me, ‘The reason I make such great purchasing decisions is that I’ve never played a videogame’.” Cecil says this dismissiveness was typical of publisher executives at the time. “They had a contempt for the medium. And they thought that actually what people really wanted to do was watch movies interactively.”
‘Triple-A’ meant little to Cecil, but he looked it up after the lunch and identified it as a borrowing from US credit rating systems, where the term is used to indicate a bond with the very lowest risk of defaulting. Here, it was being used as shorthand for “we’re going to put so much money into this game that it can’t fail,” Cecil says.
He quickly came to associate the concept with arrogance
