The Best Game Ever

About three years ago, I came up with my very own icebreaker question: assume you had access to all the resources you would possibly need (money, talent, etc.) to make a video game, so whatever you make, it'll be pretty much the best possible product. What kind of video game would you make?
This question has now become mostly irrelevant to me for two reasons. First, I just got as a gift "Hypertheticals" by Chuck Klosterman, which is 50 ridiculous icebreaker questions in one convenient box.

The second, more important reason, is that someone beat the question. This someone is Austin Bening, so all credit for this idea should go to him. I'm just writing it up here for posterity, so future generations with the capability and balls can follow through on the idea. As it stands now, it's a total pipe dream, but it's a very, very fun one. What follows is the pitch:

Raise your hand if you've ever played Guitar Hero. Any Guitar Hero.

Now keep your hand raised if you still play Guitar Hero. (For purposes of this demonstration, you'll have to pretend there are a bunch of people with you who raised their hands for the first question, then lowered them for the second. Meet me halfway, that's all I ask.)

There are a ton of games this applies to. Games that we remember fondly which, for whatever reason, we just don't play anymore. Maybe we don't have the time, or we don't want to tarnish any nostalgia we might have for them. But they're still great games, and we still want that experience of playing them, even if we don't have the dozens of hours required to sink into them to get to the really good bits. And even then, there's no way to recapture that spark that happens the first time you ever play the game. The sensation you get of winning that first battle or race, or nailing that particularly tricky solo that makes you fail the song every damn time. That's more or less where this idea is coming from.

In short, the best game is the game that essentially is all the really cool games you know and love mashed up into one long, super varied game. If you were to try and make a game that combined the rock-offs of Guitar Hero with the thrill of coming from behind to win the world cup in Fifa, you'd fail, because those would require two completely different teams with completely different design philosophies. But you don't need to, because those games already exist.

Basically, the game would look like this. You'd download the main game, which would take the form of an overarching narrative tying all this together. This could be a super meta, "game world" type thing, but I think it would work much better if you just made it basically Scott Pilgrim. That is, have it take place in a world where all this ridiculous, over the top stuff happens just as a matter of course. The player character could be a Buckaroo Banzai type figure, who is a genius master swordsman and gunfighter who is also in one of the most popular rock and roll bands ever, and in his free time competes in pro sports and street races, winning all of them.

The bits from other games would take the form of downloadable content for those games, pretty much just extra levels that you would play when you got to that part of the story. If you didn't have the game (or in the case of Guitar Hero, plastic controller), that's where a social element could come in. It would be up to you to track the games down, and if you'd never played them before, it would give you an excuse to discover them for the first time.

The reasons why it's a pipe dream are obvious: licensing alone would sink this thing right out of the gate, as well as finding ways to develop for games whose studios have gone belly up or since moved on way beyond their older productions. But it's such an enticing idea that it's still really fun to think about. In short, you don't have to make the best game ever, because it's already been made. It's just spread out over all these different games. Looking at it another way, it would one big old celebration of the medium by looking at the best of what this console generation had to offer, and presenting it all in one fun, hyperkinetic package.