On May 20, 274 climbers reached the top of Mount Everest, setting a new record for the biggest group to reach the top in a single day.
The world’s highest mountain is scaled yearly in Spring, and these achievements constantly highlight how far human endurance, will, and guts can take us. Real-world mountaineering is a grueling, perilous feat that few will ever attempt, and I’m certainly not among that group of willing participants. However, thanks to the magic of open-world games, the rest of us can also sit in awe of insurmountable peaks from the safety of our living rooms.
While most games rely on clever optical illusions to make little hills look like massive summits, a select few titles feature mountains so monumentally huge they make our planet’s highest peak look small. These video game mountains’ highest peak reaches higher than Mount Everest’s 8,849 meters; naturally, they don’t compare in any way to the real deal.
The mountains get progressively bigger.
What’s That Weapon?
Identify the silhouettes before time runs out.
Identify the silhouettes before time runs out.
Easy (7.5s)Medium (5.0s)Hard (2.5s)Permadeath (2.5s)
Cairn
Mount Kami (9,005 Meters)
We couldn’t start with a better pick than Cairn, the only game part of this list that revolves entirely around mountain climbing. As shown by Breath of the Wild‘s Death Mountain or Skyrim‘s The Throat of the World, open-world games regularly throw a mountain as set dressing, with some of them even letting players climb them. However, since 99.9% of the genre’s releases don’t emphasize mountaineering as a core mechanic, reaching these summits rarely feels like a huge achievement. At most, you might need to stock up on a few cream soups or risottos.
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Cairn isn’t like that. From the very first second to the very last, the entire experience revolves around climbing Mount Kami. The Game Breakers crafted perhaps the most in-depth mountaineering sim of all time, or at least within the open-world genre. The game forces players to think about every movement, be it the position of their hand or how the center of gravity impacts them. You must anchor pitons to avoid a grim end, and failing to keep track of your stamina or supplies means certain death.
Kerbal Space Program
The Ridge of Bop (21,758 Meters)
Well, that just looks wrong. Orbiting the planet Jool, Bop would be an entirely unremarkable potato-shaped moon, if it were not for a massive pimple sticking out. The Ridge of Bop covers around 1/3rd of the moon’s 65,000 meters, basically turning it into a continent that happens to be shaped like a mountain. It doesn’t look that incredible from the image above, but the sight from the mountain’s peak should be a lot more impressive. As a sandbox game that doesn’t take itself too seriously tonally (but does mechanically), Kerbal Space Program being responsible for such an anomaly feels fitting.
Space Engineers
Olympus Mons (21,900 Meters)
Now, here is an interesting one, as Olympus Mons really can be found on Mars. As just under 22,000 meters, the mountain towers over K2 and Everest by being roughly three times the height. As Space Engineers strives for authenticity and realism, the game naturally creates Mars and Olympus Mons in all their glory, albeit scaled down significantly in the official map. This mountain also appears in way more games than just hard sci-fi Minecraft, including making appearances in Red Faction and Surviving Mars. Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare even has a supercarrier named after the mountain.
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Due to being a shield volcano, Olympus Mons looks far less impressive on the ground level than Mount Everest or even much smaller mountains, as it stretches on like a never-ending hill. However, this hill just keeps on going for seemingly ever, getting gradually higher and higher.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t source an image of Olympus Mons, but there are quite a few videos on YouTube that showcase the mountain.
Elite Dangerous
Mount Neverest (50,000 Meters)
Elite Dangerous is a fantastic MMO and one of the greatest space-travel games of all time, and it is still going pretty strong more than a decade following its release. Building one of the biggest maps in gaming history, Elite Dangerous lets you travel across the Milky Way, a journey that should produce quite a few unique sights. Planets with mountains aren’t that uncommon, but one anomaly stands out due to its absurd scale. Mount Neverest earned its name by being so absurdly big that it makes some planets seem small.
As shown above by AarkTheDragon in a Reddit post from 9 years ago, the mountain towered over the rest of its world, with its height being reportedly around 50,000 meters. That would be more than 5 times the size of Mount Everest, just to really stress the sheer size of it all. As far as I could find, Mount Neverest was eventually removed from Elite Dangerous, turning the biggest mountain into something of a legend.
Mount Neverest was basically a glitch. A really, really cool glitch, mind you.
Best Games Where You Climb A Mountain
Several fun and highly acclaimed video games have featured climbing a mountain as their main focus. These are some of the best.
