Final Fantasy VIII was one of the best-selling PlayStation 1 games, which means a whole lot of four-disc jewel cases were manufactured for it. If we acquired every single copy of FF8 for PS1, what could we do with them?
First, we have to figure out how many we’re dealing with. Our ballpark figure is that by 2003, according to a Square Enix sales source from Wikipedia (to be quick about it because I don’t want to dig into other sources right now), the game sold about 8.15 million copies worldwide, making it Square’s second-best selling game at this point. That figure includes an unspecified mix of PS1 and PC copies, but let’s assume they’re all PS1 copies for the sake of simplification. We’re not trying to land on the moon here, people.
Now how much space do those copies take up? I don’t have a PS1 multi-disc jewel case handy to measure, but from what I can tell from people who collect them, a PS1 multi-disc case was about 5.5″ x 4.9″ x 0.9″. We will use these measurements for our calculations.
Volume-wise, one copy of Final Fantasy VIII is 24.26 cubic inches, or about 402.38 mL. So if we gather all 8.15 million copies of Final Fantasy VIII, their total volume would be around 3279 cubic meters.
If you put all of them in a perfect cube, it would be 14.86 meters long on each side.
If you stacked every copy on top of each other, lying flat, it would be 115.77 miles tall.
If you laid all these games out on the floor, they would be about 1,525,295 square feet, or about 35 acres.
Now what do we do with these?
My original plan was “fill a lake” or “fill a gorge,” but unfortunately this isn’t even close to filling most lakes. Even the urban lake near me in the Bay Area, Lake Merritt, is about four FF8 collections in surface area alone.
My second choice was to replace the White House, but based on measurements provided by the White House Historical Assoociation, the main White House building is about 24,403 cubic meters. That’s way more space than we can fill.
Here are some realistic alternatives:
- Fill 1.3 Olympic swimming pools (assuming a depth of 2m)
- Lay them end-to-end from New York City to Gary, Indiana (approx. 700 miles)
- Beat every single copy back-to-back to 100% completion with no breaks (around 72,560 years)
