AAA (video game industry)

In the video game industry, AAA (pronounced "triple A") or Triple-A is a classification term used for games with the highest development budgets and levels of promotion. A title considered to be AAA is therefore expected to be a high quality game or to be among the year's bestsellers.

Origin

With the early modernism of the video game industry occurring during the '80s and after the North American video game crash of 1983, gaming companies needed to find a standard term in order to help the audience distinguish good titles from the poorly developed ones. Nintendo was one of the first companies attempting to create their own system through the use of a Nintendo Seal of Quality on their products, denoting that the games had been properly tested and approved. Alfred Milgrom of Beam Software revealed how this changed the development attitude towards games: "In terms of game testing they revolutionized the concept. They said zero defects – we will not allow you to release a game that has any bugs in it whatsoever. Now zero defects was an unheard of concept in any other software or on any other gaming platform. We had to change our programming attitude and the way we developed games, which was brilliant. It was really hard work.”. Nevertheless, the rest of the industry lacked an independent term that could translate the overall quality of a title. Most of the times, companies used magazines endorsement, or score reviews printed on the game box to assure the audience about the quality of their titles.

In the late 90s, during gaming conventions in the US (CES, CGDC, E3 and private ones), some development companies started using the expression AAA among themselves, based on the Academic grading in the United States (A being the highest and F, denoting failure, the lowest).

AAA is not an acronym, but a way to classify games, in some cases, referring to it as an equivalent to a movie blockbuster.

As the years progressed and during the new millennium, many publishers started to consider their games to be AAA even before their release, and justified this decision through huge development and marketing budgets.

Classification

A AAA title is intended to demonstrate the very best within a gaming company or franchise. Games not considered to be AAA have been referred to as "B titles", by analogy to B-movies.