Destiny is the best-selling game franchise launch of all time

By Will Fulton Published September 23, 2014

Read our full Destiny review.

Grossing more than $325 million worldwide in its first five days on shelves, Bungie’s long-anticipated, massively multiplayer shooter Destiny is the best-selling new video game franchise launch of all time. That’s good news for publisher Activision, for which the series is a reported $500 million investment. According to the developer, fans have already logged more than 100 million hours of online play in the first week, putting Destiny on par with the much more established Call of Duty games.

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Destiny builds on Bungie’s legacy as creator of the genre-defining first-person shooter Halo: Combat Evolved by taking it to a massive new scale, injecting elements of MMORPGs like level/gear progression, public hubs, community events, instanced dungeons, and high-level raids. While it certainly stumbles a little in multiple respects, the core gameplay is very gratifying, and serves as a solid foundation for something that could become truly great in time.

“This is just the beginning,” said Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg in the publisher announcement touting the sales success. “Destiny is a platform that will grow and evolve and we will continue to work closely with our partners at Bungie to bring a long line of new experiences and content to life in the game.”

In Destiny you are one of humanity’s Guardians–elite warriors tasked with protecting the last city on Earth from alien incursion while seeking to reclaim mankind’s lost golden age in the stars. Check out our review and starter guide if you want to join the fight.

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Will Fulton is a New York-based writer and theater-maker. In 2011 he co-founded mythic theater company AntiMatter Collective…

Gaming

The best video game Easter Eggs of all time

The chris houlihan room in Link to the past.

As long as there have been video games, there have been secrets hidden within them. There are some things like secret endings to find, but Easter Eggs are more about the fun of finding them than actually adding something to the game. It is a tradition that began at the beginning of the video game console generation timeline and persists to this day. Fans love scouring the biggest open-world games and looking into the code of the best indies to see if there's some secret waiting to be found and shared. We can't wait to see what Easter Eggs are found in all the upcoming video games, but for now, we wanted to look back and round up all the best ones from gaming history.
Adventure - Secret credits

We couldn't start with any other Easter Egg than the one widely considered to be the first one in gaming history. Adventure is a very basic Atari game where you guide a block of pixels around a sprawling map trying to reach a chalace. This was in a period when games didn't have credits, so no one knew who was making them besides the publisher. The solo developer of Adventure wanted to tell the world he made the game, but had to do it in a secret way that Atari wouldn't see and remove. So, Warren Robinett made a secret room in the game that requires players to carry an invisible pixel to a specific place to access where he wrote out "Created by Warren Robinett." He wasn't sure anyone would be able to discover it, but a boy named Adam Clayton managed to somehow figure it out and even wrote to Atari to share his discovery. Thankfully, Robinett had already left the company at that time.
Diablo 2 - The cow level

Gaming

The hardest video games of all time

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

We all come to video games for different reasons. Sometimes we want a chill game to relax to, others a fun co-op experience with a friend, but other times we're looking for a challenge. Early on in the console generations, difficulty was the norm and it took a lot of trial, error, and skill to even see the end of most games. We still face hard bosses in modern games, but it usually isn't the entire game that is punishing. There's an expectation that most people will be able to beat most current and upcoming video games, but not all games are so kind. Whether it be due to bad controls, unfair mechanics, or simply because the developers wanted to make things unfair, these are the most difficult video games of all time.

Before getting to the list, we are basing this list on the core game itself and not any extra challenges or going for secret endings. We also won't be including games that are meant to be impossible or that feature user-generated content.

Gaming

Worst video game controllers of all time

tech flops

The best video game controllers are the ones you don't even think about. They let you fully immerse yourself in the game and let you forget you're even holding them. The best controllers today all follow a mostly standard design, but in the early console generations, each system took a completely unique approach. In fact, many consoles would experiment with multiple types of controllers of various shapes, sizes, and input methods. Most of them were bad, and there were a few that were even painful. No matter how amazing the game was to play or how great the graphics were, a bad controller would completely tank the experience. Looking back from the days of the NES up to the PS5, we've recalled the very worst video game controllers of all time.
Dreamcast controller

We're starting off with a tame one here before working our way up. The Dreamcast controller looks fairly standard for the time -- it has an analog stick, D-pad, triggers, and four face buttons. The problem with it is everything else. This thing is somehow bulkier and less comfortable to hold than the original Xbox's Duke controller but made worse because the cable comes out of the bottom rather than the back or top. This made it awkward to handle for any length of time, and even the D-pad and buttons were hard on the thumbs. It wasn't bad enough to cause the console to die the early death it did, but it by no means helped.
Power Glove