Open-world game with mountains so big that Everest looks small

On May 20, 274 climbers reached the summit of Mount Everest, setting a new record for the largest group to reach the summit in a single day.

The world's highest mountain is scaled annually in the spring and these achievements constantly show how far human perseverance, will and courage can take us. Rock climbing in real life is a grueling, dangerous feat that few will ever attempt, and I am certainly not one of that group of willing participants. But thanks to the magic of open world gamesthe 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 small hills look like massive peaks, a select few titles feature mountains so monumentally huge that they make our planet's highest peak look tiny. The highest peak of these video game mountains reaches higher than Mount Everest's 8,849 meters; of course, they in no way compare to the real deal.

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Cairn

Mount Kami (9,005 meters)

We couldn't start with a better choice Cairnthe only game part of this list that revolves entirely around rock climbing. As shown by Breath of the Wild's Death Mountain or Skyrim's The Throat of the World, open-world games regularly cast a mountain as a set, with some of them even letting players climb them. But since 99.9% of the genre's releases don't emphasize rock climbing as a core mechanic, reaching these peaks rarely feels like much of an accomplishment. At most, you may need to top up with some cream soups or risotto.

Cairn is not so. From the very first second to the very last, the entire experience revolves around climbing Mount Kami. The Game Breakers created perhaps the most in-depth rock climbing sim of all time, or at least in the open world genre. The game forces players to think about every movement, whether it's the position of the hand or how the center of gravity affects them. You must anchor pistons to avoid a grim end, and not keeping track of your stamina or supplies means certain death.

Kerbal Space Program

The Ridge of Bop (21,758 meters)

Well, it just looks wrong. Bop, orbiting the planet Jool, would be a completely unremarkable potato-shaped moon if it weren't for a massive pimple sticking out. The Ridge of Bop covers about 1/3 of the moon's 65,000 meters, basically making it a continent that happens to be shaped like a mountain. It doesn't look that incredible from the picture above, but the view from the top of the mountain should be much more impressive. As a sandbox game that doesn't take itself too seriously tonally (but does mechanically), Kerbal Space Program to be responsible for such an anomaly feels fitting.

Space engineers

Olympus Mons (21,900 meters)

Now, here's an interesting one, because Olympus Mons can indeed be found on Mars. At just under 22,000 meters, the mountain rises above K2 and Everest by being about three times as tall. As Space engineers striving for authenticity and realism, the game naturally creates Mars and Olympus Mons in all its glory, albeit scaled down considerably in the official map. This mountain also appears in many more games than just hard sci-fi Minecraftincluding making appearances in Red Faction and Survive Mars. Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare even has a supercarrier named after the mountain.

Because Olympus Mons is a shield volcano, it looks much less impressive at ground level than Mount Everest or even much smaller mountains, as it stretches like a never-ending hill. But this hill seems to go on forever, gradually getting higher and higher.

Elite dangerous

Mount Neverest (50,000 meters)

Elite dangerous is a fantastic MMO and one of the best space travel games of all time, and it's still going pretty strong more than a decade after its release. Building one of the largest maps in gaming history, Elite dangerous lets you travel across the Milky Way, a journey that should provide a lot of unique sights. Planets with mountains are not that uncommon, but one anomaly stands out because of its absurd scale. Mount Neverest got its name by being so absurdly large 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 his world, with its height reportedly around 50,000 meters. That would be more than 5 times the size of Mount Everest, just to really emphasize the size of it all. As far as I could find, Mount Neverest was eventually removed from Elite dangerousturning the biggest mountain into something of a legend.