10 Longest-Running Video Game Franchises With The MOST Quality

Stepping over to a genre so very far away that I don’t think we can pop something in the middle of the venn diagram, except for maybe the violence of Street Fighter and the violence of Civ’s Ghandi on a bad day, we have the Kingpin of strategy franchises. Despite being a more niche genre, Civ has stood the test of time for about as long as it takes to get through one of its campaigns.

The first entry was released by MicroProse, and dude you’ve definitely heard of Sid Meier, back in 1991, a year that was equally as exciting due to the release of SF II but ultimately overshadowed by my birth in March.

One of the brilliant things about Civ that you can track with all of these long-running high quality franchises is you can take the core experience and supplant it into 2024 and it’s just as good as we’d have hoped it was going to be. No loss of a grand heyday or evolution from crummy beginnings, just a bold evolution of an idea that has gone from strength to strength on the wave of every new generation of gaming.

Civ is as it has always been, letting you play out a fantasy of a historical civilisation, tactically balancing your alliances, exploration, and warfare, while micromanaging a laundry list of other objectives. Naturally one man’s task-riddled headache is another’s brilliant 4X game and if you’re nodding along to the footage spanning the 20+ years of the franchise so far, you’re probably in that latter camp.

The latest entry, Civ 6, was still releasing expansions up until March of 2023, 7 years after the game launched. In just the standard edition you had eighteen civilisations to choose from. Critics across the board called it another slam dunk for the franchise due to quality of life improvements and an incredible amount of content. So, basically the opposite of what we keep sledging games for these days when they come out cut down to the bone. Also, Civ 7 is coming, we don’t know when, but it’s coming.

Personally, I would have liked to see Sid Meier’s Pirates in this slot but since it was one game that came out 15 times it was ineligible. I’m not even kidding, not counting the platforms, just each year it came out, remakes included, Pirates came out over 15 times in 15 different years. I guess I should have made it an entry.