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[Smash T.V.]

I haven't made many new requests for arcade game maps until recently.

I was thinking that we sure do have some early '80s arcade classics, but that we should have some more from the early '90s.

I remembered Smash T.V. and requested it here, and resident arcade mapper George s came through!

Have you played this twin-stick shooter that takes place in the future year of... 1999? 

Thanks, George s!

Ninja Five-O

For this month's "Maps Of The Month" featurette, I wish to draw your attention to Spanettone's Ninja Five-O (GBA) maps.

Known as "Ninja Cop" in Europe, Ninja Five-O is a platformer that might remind you of old-school ninja action games like the Shinobi series.  Besides jumping around, Joe Osugi will have to utilize stealthy approaches and master combat skills to make his way through 20 stages.

Spanettone, a GBA mapping veteran, has laid all those stages out here, with items and hostages labelled in all of the rooms so you can survive all these missions that will take you from the Bank all the way to the Base.

This game received rave reviews at the time, but didn't sell well. It has since become very sought-after, with the GBA cartridge now going for hundreds of dollars on eBay.  Its delayed appreciation made way for its rerelease last year, for the PS4, PS5, Switch, and PC, so that more gamers can appreciate it, despite the original version's rarity.

So to recognize the effort put into mapping this coveted classic, Spanettone's Ninja Five-O (GBA) maps will be known as VGMaps.com's Maps Of The Month for May 2026.

[Super ZSNES]

zsKnight and Demo are back, and working on Super ZSNES, a rewritten-from-scratch GPU-powered emulator, a 17-year-later "sequel" to the original ZSNES, a popular Super NES emulator that I'm sure many if us here have memories of.

Here's Super ZSNES's website.

Some new features include being able to add high-res textures and even some 3D effects.  Also enhanced audio.  Thanks to a user-friendly enhancement editor, other users will be able to design their own mods.

Now, I'm sure several of us are purists and might not use enhancements, but there might be something here of use for mappers.

For example, as seen in the video, it's possible to play it widescreen, by seeing more of the playfield that's in the game's memory, normally off-screen.  I know other tools already exist to see beyond the normal play area, but the extra area might be handy for those who like to map directly from screenshots (by reducing the number of screenshots required and/or getting to hard-to-reach areas without needing location/walk-through-walls codes) or in conjunction with autostitching tools.

In any case, increasing interest in Super NES games can always help get more people intrigued about game mapping... (maybe we'll get the Super Star Wars trilogy and Shadowrun maps yet!)

[VGCartography]

VGCartography has completed his map set for Chrono Cross!

I remember enjoying this game enough back in the day, despite actually getting annoyed at all the characters I was gaining without having the time to learn how to really use them...

But I don't think I ever did New Game+.  Which is silly considering how often I find myself chastising people who don't do the New Game+ in Chrono Trigger.

These maps are tempting me to play this again... maybe one day I will, and I'll surely use these maps if/when I do.

Thanks as always, VGCartography.  Your maps of games for the original PlayStation are nothing short of exemplary!

Here are 100 words in game titles/map names, listed here by frequency.

"Man" is among the most common, but "Woman" is the least.
"Final/Battle/Dark/Kid" & "Space/Alien/Force" are next to each other.

50,000 maps for 3401 games means an average of 14.7 maps per game.

So how about individual platforms?

This table shows the average number of maps per game, per platform.

(How often do you see the Wii U ranked so highly?)

3401 games have at least one map on VGMaps.com.
Here's the breakdown by platform.
818 games are on the NES (including the Famicom and Famicom Disk System), a whopping 24%.

Still celebrating VGMaps.com having 50,000 maps!
It's little surprise that the majority of maps are for console games.
(It'd be nice to have more computer games mapped!
And I don't know what to classify the Virtual Boy as, so it might as well be its own category.)

Thank you so much, Jon, for making it possible for all of us to contribute to this amazing internet project you began so long ago. And I'm happy to have been a helping hand in reaching the 50,000 milestone.

It's been a lot of fun viewing all of these "windows" into the state of the website these past few weeks.

And wow, I definitely wasn't expecting to be the fifth most active contributor on VGMaps! Have I really done that much?!

You're welcome!

I have a few more stats I could show off, and probably will (just not tonight), but it's definitely winding down, there's only so much that's worth saying.
Glad people find them interesting!  I knew this one about how much the top mappers have contributed would get people's attention!

Yeah, you're up there, FlyingArmor.  Is there really any doubt?

What I find interesting is that the top five contributors are all about 1000 maps apart from each other.  That's pretty even!

There's some mathematical theory or law or something about how when something is big (like population, for instance), the largest one will be considerably larger than the second, whose difference from the third isn't as big.  Probably some distribution thing I can't remember right now, and Google's not helpful.  Maybe it applies to map sizes, seeing as how G.E.R.'s latest huge map is three times bigger than his previous one, as mentioned here.

In any case, it's clear from that table that this site's content and success is due to you guys, so I should be thanking you.  I mean, just look at that!
G.E.R. alone has made almost 11% of maps on this site, that's over one-tenth - and almost one-ninth - of ALL of this!  The top 12 mappers alone have made up half the site!
Guard Master only recently starting sharing his maps with VGMaps, with so much of it in 2026... which is amazing, already shooting up to 7th place by providing 1/40th of VGMaps.com in a short amount of time.

So thank you all again for your hard work!  This community may be small, but it's amazing.

Have faith, and peace and prayers to Jon and the forums' staff to resolve such situations.

Your faith and prayers are misplaced; they would be better applied to something more productive.
Considering the state of the world, there are more pressing things you should pray for.  Even if God is omniscient and omnipotent and therefore able to hear every prayer and infinitely kind and patient that he doesn't mind you asking for any little thing, I think it would still be better to show what you value by thinking about real world issues when you pray... instead of the condition of the forums on a video game maps web site.

Anyway, I'm aware of the forums timing out and choking up frequently lately.  I'll bring it up with bustin98 again.

Hey! I just remembered something that's been forgotten/overlooked in the midst of our celebration!

Presently, for 3D games, VGMaps doesn't count the length of maps in distance meters, kilometers/square kilometers, miles, and so forth. The many game console atlas pages that have 3D game maps in the site, regardless of perspective, doesn't have their meter size counts alongside pixel and data file sizes, for traveling in different directions.

As I recall, from the GDC 2009 YouTube video presentation Sega made about Sonic Unleashed after its launch, the stages ranged from 5 to 20 square km, spotted at minute 43:28 in the video(I've left a video link to it in one of my posts). This led me to think, "What many other 3D games do have their meter size counts?".

I just had this thought after seeing your numerous calculations for select maps that are the longest, largest, narrowest, smallest, etc., etc., and my mind went "DING!" through a little thinking, and that's where it hit me.

Jon, if you're around, perhaps the atlas pages may need a new distance meter count section for 3D game maps added sometime soon. Think about it. I'm curious to see what they are.

Measurements in meters or square meters really don't mean enough to be listed on the atlas pages.
And technically, it could be applied to 2D games as well, but we're not going to do that.
Even now, as it is, some days I wonder if the pixel area and filesize are even necessary, so I'm definitely not going to add another column with limited value.

Calculating it isn't easy for multiple games, let alone just one.  For one thing, it's completely arbitrary what scale is in each game.  It's usually calculated by taking the known height of a character.  But what if that isn't known, or it's some abstract game?  Or if there are changes in perspective or game modes, you have to calculate them for each one?

It can be interesting in certain instances (like comparing the cities of GTA-style games, or open worlds in general), but not something you can realistically expect to be applied to maps "en masse".  If you still want to discuss the intended area of particular game maps, that should be a different topic thread.

Over 400 people have submitted maps to VGMaps.com: The Video Game Atlas!
Thanks to G.E.R. for providing the data on these video game cartographers!
It helped me to make this table of the top 30 mappers showing how many maps they've made, including how many that are for their fave platforms!

It's insane that G.E.R. alone has created almost 11% of the entire site's content by himself!

Is your name on the list?

VGMaps.com: The Video Game Atlas now has a NEW largest map! 🤯

G.E.R.'s HOLLOW KNIGHT: SILKSONG (PC) map of Pharloom & The Citadel is 3.65 gigapixels, over three times larger in area than his own Limbo (X360) map, and at 242 MB, 1½ times larger in filesize than his own Ori And The Will Of The Wisps (PC) map!

As it says on there, it required around 420,000 screenshots.  Incredible!

Here's a summary of all the maps of extreme sizes, including the tallest/shortest/widest/narrowest (no thumbnails because they'd just look like sticks anyway).

After looking at the largest and smallest maps by image area, here are those in the middle. ozderya, who mapped the 50,000th map, also mapped many of the maps here at the center!