As of 5:36 PM today, when ozderya submitted maps for
Pop Breaker (J) for the Game Gear over on the VGMaps Discord server, its "Stage 08" became the 50,000th map here on VGMaps.com!
We knew this was coming;
Cyartog959 asked about this in November 2024 and started a topic about it. Earlier on in the year (January 6), I counted 48,189 maps, and based on the rate of maps we'd been getting over the past four years, I estimated that the remaining ~1811 maps would probably take another eight months, so, probably late September. (Though apparently I didn't actually say that in the topic thread, hmmm.) However, instead of the start of autumn, we got to 50,000 by today... spring literally just started!
Why was my estimate off by half a year? Because, just shortly after we were talking about it in that topic in January, map submissions shot up through the roof! Guard Master began regularly submitting maps from his massive hoard that he'd created before, though originally for GameFAQs. Along with submissions from others, there was (probably?) a record made or broken here, as there were 17 consecutive days of submissions between January 19 to February 4. As you can see from the news page on the front, the submissions have been very constant this year, including loads from MP83, gymzatan, VGCartography, and zagato blackfist. And several other mappers, too, but those ones in particular stood out this year. (I love your work, guys, and I shouldn't complain, but... maybe space things out a bit more? Were you racing to 50k?)
The congratulations aren't just for ozderya, or just any of the recent mappers. Because to get to 50,000, we of course need all the maps that came before. Every single one of them. So if you've ever submitted a map to VGMaps.com, and it's still up, it all counts towards this total (which is actually 50,042 now, since Pop Breaker has 50 stages).
I'd love to put up some more stats and interesting facts and pie charts and whatnot, but this will take a bit longer.
While I have a lot of data on hand, with some neat trivia (
did you know that the PC section ALONE takes up ⅓ of the whole site in terms of file mass? Or that the NES section is largest by quantity as it has 8615 maps, the most of any section, but by mass, it only accounts for 1.8% of the actual bytes?) but I'd like to take some time to get things sorted and checked, including an audit on the games to make sure the number of game title image files equals the number of games actually mapped (a few might still be missing title images, some are linked offsite that I probably don't need to keep, etc.).
Maybe G.E.R. could do another count to see who's contributed how many maps?
Anyway, I should go mention this on social media before the day is over, look forward to some stats in this topic thread soon (if you're into that kind of thing).
But yeah, congratulations and thanks to everyone that's ever submitted a map to VGMaps.com: The Video Game Atlas! (Now over 1/20th of the way to a million!)
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