Where did the AAA designation come from? And what even qualifies as a AAA game?
I investigated both of those questions in a piece for Warp Zoned back in 2013, and a lightly edited and updated version of that article was reprinted here on Video Game Canon after Microsoft tried to announce a AAAA game in August 2020.
But a few recent discoveries have given us a clearer look where the AAA designation came from, and this article was rewritten to incorporate those updates in February 2024.
The console changeover from the PS3/Xbox 360 generation to the PS4/Xbox One generation brought a lot of worry about the spiraling budgets and massive teams required to create AAA games. Many felt it was hurting the industry, and while there was a reduction in games with blockbuster-sized budgets, these types of games continued to push the conversation among developers, publishers, and players. These same fears are being echoed today in light of the massive wave of layoffs that game executives inflicted upon the industry in 2023.
But for all the hand-wringing about how the AAA game was (and still is) detrimental to smaller developers, no one could seem to agree on what exactly a AAA game was or when the AAA designation was even first used.
In attempting to solve this etymological mystery, I found that the AAA designation shares much in common with Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s obscenity test from a 1964 case (“I know it when I see it”). But I also found out that no one’s quite sure what the future of AAA games will look like.
AAA: Tracing Its Origins
No one knows when the first letter grades were handed out in schools, but it’s widely believed that the grading system was developed in Sweden in the mid-1850s. The system was first imported into the United States by Augustana College in 1860 and was popularized by Mount Holyoke College beginning with the 1897 school year.
Before video games, the general public was probably most familiar with a AAA grade thanks to the media’s obsession with credit ratings. The AAA rating was created by Moody’s in 1909 and was considered the highest score an investment could receive. The familiar AAA-to-D scale was later designed by Fitch Ratings in 1924.
Of course, you might be familiar with a few other groups that use AAA in their names. There’s the highest level of Minor League Baseball, which has been known as Triple-A since 1946. And there’s also the American Automobile Association, which everyone knows as AAA. Wikipedia actually lists a few dozen other organizations that use the initialism, but it seems unlikely that any of them had anything to do with the origins of the video game term.
So letter grades and the AAA designation existed for a long time before the video game industry ever got a hold of them. But you also have to assume that people in executive positions within the industry were familiar with investment rankings and what they meant. So when deciding what games to greenlight, a AAA game could be seen as the safest investment a publisher could make or even as something of a sure thing. It was only later that this designation became synonymous with huge budgets and high production values.
This is where AAA was when Ryan Henson Creighton, a developer at Untold Entertainment and the driving force behind Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure (which he created with his then-five-year-old daughter), first encountered the AAA designation while working at a Canadian game store in 1997:
The first time [I] heard the term “triple-A”, [I] could smell a turd. [I] was working behind the counter at a video game franchise – one of these Buy/Trade/Sell places.
One day, [I] saw Game Boss intently studying a sheet full of facts and figures. [I] asked him what it was all about, and he said it was an order sheet from his distributor. Next month’s upcoming games were listed, and Game Boss was going over them to decide how many copies of each game he would order.
Beside each game was a quality ranking written by the distributor. They were letter ranks that the distributor used to help retailers with their game orders. There were “A” games, “B” games, and “AAA” games. Magically, no game ranked below a “B.”
I attempted to contact Creighton’s former employer to corroborate his memory, but their corporate office never responded to my requests.
While the AAA designation wasn’t as popular with the general public in the late 1990s as it is now, it wasn’t just reserved for your local game store’s regional manager, Chris Chapman recently pointed me towards two even earlier references to AAA games that appeared in game magazines published in the UK.
In the Christmas 1996 issue of Official PlayStation Magazine (UK), a letter from Robbie I. Donald asked why Namco did such a poor job bringing Ridge Racer, “their AAA game”, to the PlayStation. And nearly two years before that, the Blabbermouth column from the January 1995 issue of Super Play included a quote from an Acclaim spokesman referring to the infamously-disappointing Rise of the Robots as a “triple A product”.
Interestingly, editors in both cases didn’t feel the need to explain what the AAA designation for Ridge Racer or Rise of the Robots meant to their readers. It was just assumed that everyone would understand what it meant. So it’s likely that discussions of AAA games (at least among executives) were happening before 1995. I plan to continue to search for earlier examples.
As far as I can find, the sell sheet remembered by Creighton is the first time the AAA designation appears in North America. But it would quickly make its way into public-facing publications beginning with the November 1998 issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly. A sprawling preview of Sonic Adventure positioned the game as a “triple-A mascot title” for the then-in-development Dreamcast.
A month later, a variation of AAA appeared in the December 1998 issue of Game Developer. An advertisement promoting coverage of “A Titles” (such as Bungie’s Myth, Westwood’s Blade Runner, and Microsoft’s Age of Empires) in the magazine’s Postmortem column signaled that the term was also growing in popularity with game creators before the turn of the millennium. Though the grade inflation from A to AAA hadn’t been universally accepted just yet.
AAA would again appear in print in Game Developer (via the Internet on Gamasutra) in March 1999 when an article by Gil Winters explored the realities of an independent team getting their game published in the late 1990s. Winters looked at this subject from the eyes of a few different types of developers, including the “AAA Team”, a term he credited to Activision’s Graham Fuchs and defined as “teams like id [Software] or Blizzard”.
Once we finally reach the year 2000, publishers became a lot more comfortable using the AAA designation in their communications with the press, including a press release from Infogrames Entertainment publicizing the acquisition of Paradigm Entertainment, the developer behind Pilotwings 64, in June 2000. According to Infogrames, which, ironically, was often seen as a publisher of budget-level titles by many gamers, they purchased Paradigm to “strengthen [their] lineup of ‘triple A’ titles.”
Less than three months later, IGN published another early use of the AAA designation in an editorial that asked why Eidos Interactive wasn’t bringing a “AAA game” like Deus Ex to the Dreamcast.
The use of AAA as a descriptor exploded in 2001 with countless examples and a developer with Sony Computer Entertainment America (who wished to remain anonymous) told me that the phrase was entrenched within the walls of the publisher’s Foster City headquarters by 2002: “They’ve always been called AAA games internally. There’s no official designation of what constitutes AAA. It’s something that costs tens of millions and has a huge team.”
And that’s really what this search has taught me… everyone knows what a AAA game is, but no one can define it.
Defining AAA
So the AAA name has a lengthy history within the game industry and the phrase was truly popularized once we entered the Internet age. But there is very little consensus on what exactly a AAA game is. Greg Kasavin was on the front lines of the game journalism scrum when the AAA designation was first gaining steam, and he eventually rose to the position of GameSpot’s Editor-In-Chief in the early 2000s before leaving the site in January 2007 to pursue his dream of developing games.
According to Kasavin, it was still somewhat rare to hear about AAA games well into the 2000s and the phrase was much more popular on the development side of things: “I don’t quite recall when I first heard the phrase ‘AAA game.’ I joined Electronic Arts to work on Command & Conquer [in 2007], and I feel like I first heard the phrase around that time.”
Kasavin was unable to pinpoint the exact game the AAA designation was used to describe in 2007, but in 2013 he felt that the phrase referred more to a game’s price tag than any indicator of quality: “I think ‘AAA game’ has more recently become sort of a short-hand for almost any boxed console game retailing for US $59. Arguably it is an aesthetic.”
As one of the few so-called megapublishers, Electronic Arts deals almost exclusively in AAA games. And their Chief Creative Director, Richard Hilleman, believed that the resources to create those titles were consolidated within just 25 studios throughout the world in 2013. This number comes from his participation in D.I.C.E. (Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain) Europe’s Video Games Intelligence whitepaper on the state of the industry at the time:
What is true today is that there are fewer AAA games being built than at the same point in the previous generation. I’ve done some calculations that say there were about 125 teams in the industry worldwide working on what I’d call a AAA game on a console, and that was 7 or 8 years ago. That number today is well south of 30; probably in the 25 range.
What’s interesting is that, if you look at the composition of those teams, the numbers are exactly the same: those 125 teams became 25; the size of the teams increased by a factor of four.
Though the AAA game is a nebulous concept throughout most of the game industry, Hilleman’s assertion doesn’t make much sense. EA alone operated more than 25 development teams at the time and an argument could be made that at least eight of them qualified as AAA console developers: BioWare (Mass Effect), Criterion/Ghost Games (Need For Speed), Digital Illusions CE (Battlefield), DICE LA (Star Wars), EA Canada (FIFA/NHL), EA Montreal (Army of Two), EA Tiburon (Madden/Tiger Woods), and Visceral Games (Dead Space).
Even the developers themselves have problems differentiating between AAA titles and other, possibly lesser, tiers. In 2012, Official Xbox Magazine UK asked several developers (from companies as diverse as Volition, Valve, and Splash Damage) to describe a AAA game. None of them were confident that their definition of a AAA game was the right one (Frontier’s David Braben even speculated that AAA actually measures the publicity budget) and a few bypassed any serious contemplation of the question and went straight for a joke.
Introducing the AAAA Game
On that note, some publishers have moved on to promoting AAAA games in the 2010s, as they clearly weren’t content with creating something as pedestrian as a AAA game. Microsoft’s Black Tusk Studios added a fourth letter to the phrase in late 2012 when they began hiring for their first project, an untitled espionage-themed shooter that they claimed would be “the next Halo“.
Black Tusk retired the AAAA descriptor from their Careers page, but they did release an interesting teaser of their first project during the 2013 E3 Expo. Even though the game would have been Black Tusk’s debut title, using Kasavin’s definition, its highly cinematic presentation certainly matches the aesthetic you’d expect from a AAA title.
Black Tusk would go on to be rebranded as The Coalition in 2015 before switching gears and launching Gears of War 4 in 2016, which certainly fits the bill for a AAAA game even though the designation was scrubbed from the company’s mission statement. Sadly, their very impressive untitled shooter has never seen the light of day.
Microsoft brought back the AAAA designation while promoting the debut game from another new studio, The Initiative, in August 2020. The Initiative would later reveal their AAAA game as a Perfect Dark reboot with a World Premiere Trailer at The Game Awards that December.
But first, Ubisoft joined the AAAA club when the French publisher began using four As to describe the scale of PS5/Xbox titles like Beyond Good & Evil 2 and Skull & Bones in a September 2020 report to investors. Ubisoft’s CEO, Yves Guillemot, reiterated that he considers Skull and Bones a AAAA game ahead of its launch in February 2024.
Are AAA Games In Trouble?
While developers and publishers can’t seem to codify what a AAA (or AAAA) game is, everyone has an opinion on the health of the industry segment that produces games with high production values.
We know that Richard Hilleman believes the number of AAA studios is shrinking while the number of people producing AAA content has stayed roughly the same size, but the guru of Gears of War, Cliff Bleszinski, said in 2013 that rising costs for AAA projects will eventually lead to the death of the used game. Bleszinski thought that Microsoft’s attempt to control used games on the Xbox One was proof that the AAA development model is broken.
In fact, you couldn’t swing a dead bandicoot in the early 2010s without hitting a developer who believed that the AAA game development sphere was in for a rude awakening. Patrice Desilets (the co-creator of Assassin’s Creed), Denis Dyack (the creator of Eternal Darkness), Naughty Dog’s Neil Druckmann, and a trio of former AAA developers who escaped to independent teams all shared this opinion with the public at the time. And they all said the same thing: the budgets for AAA games are out of whack with the way the public currently buys games, and that something is bound to change.
However, comments from developers over the past year have shown that, unfortunately, not much has changed. While some publishers have promised to do better when it comes to reducing crunch and avoiding burnout, and they did, the belief that AAA game development is unsustainable is still rampant throughout the industry. A survey from the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees of game developers (and with most respondents working in the AAA space) revealed that most were unhappy with their working conditions:
Most game workers reported that their game career is either unsustainable or they’re unsure whether it is sustainable, and less than half make it to their seventh year working in the industry.
[…]
Unfair pay disparities within singular job titles, lack of retirement security, pressure to work unpaid overtime, low wages, burnout, and exhaustion were widespread and commonly reported.
Ultimately, two in three respondents indicated they did not believe they were in a position to negotiate viable solutions to these problems on their own, highlighting an environment where unionization and collective bargaining could be a viable alternative to the status quo.
Of course, not everyone feels that way about AAA development today or in the past. Jade Raymond, then the Managing Director of Ubisoft Toronto, had just completed work on Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist in 2013 when she told CNN that she was overseeing production on five AAA games for Ubisoft including Watch Dogs, the next Assassin’s Creed game (which was eventually revealed as Assassin’s Creed Unity), and three unknown titles (one of which turned out to be Far Cry 4). The profile cited Raymond’s expertise in developing blockbuster games and Ubisoft’s ambitious growth plan for the decade. While there were a few stumbles along the way, the publisher has mostly stuck to this plan, though Raymond left Ubisoft in 2014.
Not to be outdone, Take-Two Interactive bragged about their plan to produce ten Next-Generation games across more than a dozen development houses in the early 2010s (and Next-Generation is another term that’s riddled with rabbit holes we could spend weeks exploring).
Were all of them AAA games? Not necessarily. But one of them was Grand Theft Auto VI, which will likely be the most expensive game ever produced when it launches in 2025. This spare-no-expense philosophy was also employed by Grand Theft Auto V, but even after reaching for the loftiest AAA heights, they game was still insanely profitable for Take-Two.
Did Indie Kill the AA Star?
With all this talk about massive teams and megapublishers, it’s easy to forget that AAA games make up only a fraction of the PC and console games released every week, with many falling into a variety of other camps known as AA (or Mid-Tier) and Indie. Like AAA, these designations are hard to define.
Circana has tracked video game sales in North America for decades now, and in 2013, Liam Callahan told Computer and Video Games that “middle-tier games as well as catalog titles are suffering.” However, Circana (which was then known as The NPD Group) doesn’t track the full range of downloadable games available for consoles and the PC. And in 2013, they didn’t track the sales for any of them.
So has the AA (or Mid-Tier) game simply shifted away from store shelves and onto our hard drives? I think it has.
In the early 2000s, a developer like Supergiant (a team led by Greg Kasavin) would have released their debut game, Bastion, on a disc and shipped it out to retail stores. But calling it an Indie game isn’t entirely accurate either, as the developer initially partnered with Warner Bros. to publish Bastion on the Xbox 360’s Xbox Live Arcade. Yet, the team only numbers about a dozen people, and all of their subsequent releases have come without the assistance of a publisher. But their success (and the similar success of many other smaller development teams) proves that the walls between the tiers below AAA are slowly toppling over.
Because of this, the Indie developer who self-publishes their game and the AA (or Mid-Tier) developer who partners with an established publisher for their project has slowly coalesced into one group. Though in 2013 there was growing belief, including from Capybara’s Nathan Vella and Ubisoft Montreal’s Yannis Mallat, that Indie teams had killed the Mid-Tier game.
Some developers attempted to capitalize on the rise of the Indie game with a new tier in the latter half of the 2010s. At a GDC Europe presentation in 2015, Ninja Theory’s Tameem Antoniades tried to position their then-upcoming Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice as an Independent AAA game. The term was later refined as Triple-I in a Gamereactor piece from 2016, and the author also placed games like Double Fine’s Psychonauts 2, Wildcard’s Ark: Survival Evolved, and Yu Suzuki’s Shenmue III in this bucket. They also tried to pitch a formal definition for the designation and tied its creation to the end of the AA game:
What then is triple-i (or iii)? Well, it’s a game that’s independently funded, fully or at least in part, it offers high production values in many (if not all) areas. Something to fill the void between the increasingly rare AAA productions and the numerous very small and modest (in terms of scope and production values) indie releases.
[…]
Perhaps the most important factor in the rise of the triple-i is the shrinking spectrum of triple-A development, and it’s not that we’re not getting the truly massive giant productions – it’s those smaller triple-A titles, sometimes referred to as double-A (AA) that are decreasing in numbers. These were the hallmark of many mid-sized publishers and as few of these remain there just isn’t the same amount of games in retail boxes.
The Triple-I designation never really took off, and it’s probably for the best, especially in light of the Dave the Diver controversy at the 2023 Game Awards. Dave the Diver was developed by Mintrocket, a small team within Nexon, an absolutely massive Korean publisher. While the game sports a pixel art style that has become the hallmark of many Indie games, it was produced by a publisher with very deep pockets.
Geoff Keighley, the host of The Game Awards, held a Q&A on Twitch before the 2023 ceremony and said that whether something is Indie or not is left up to the nominating committee, though he felt a case could be made for the game either way as it was made with an “independent spirit”:
Look, it’s a great question. Independent can mean different things to different people and it’s sort of a broad term, right? I mean, you could argue “Does independent mean the budget of the game? Does independent mean where the source of financing was? Is it based on the team size? Is it the kind of independent spirit of a game, meaning kind of a smaller game that’s different?”
Everyone has their own opinion about this, and we really defer to our jury… 120 global media outlets that vote on these awards… to kind of make that determination of is something independent or not. You know, in other industries, sometimes… I think in the film industry there’s like, “The budget can’t be above this amount of dollars” if it’s an independent film or not.
Keighley later cited Larian’s Baldur’s Gate 3 and Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding (which was published by Sony) as other games that sort of straddle this line between Indie and AAA (or Triple-I, if you prefer). Where this line is (and where it exists for AAAA or AAA or AA) was a hard question to answer when I first wrote this article in 2013, and it’s no easier today.
And we still don’t know where AAA games are going, but at least we have a better idea about where they came from.