How many lines of code are in a modern AAA video game?

How to get close to this number

Anchor on other large software. A modern car runs on the order of a hundred million lines and an operating system tens of millions, while a small application is in the tens of thousands. A large game is a real-time simulation with graphics, physics, audio, networking and tooling, which places it squarely in the tens of millions.

The composition in the explanation is the part people get wrong. Most of the code is not gameplay — it is the engine, the content pipeline, the physics, the networking and the certification requirements each platform imposes. The visible part of a game, the rules and the levels, is a small fraction of what has to be written to ship it.

Line counts are a poor metric and it is worth saying so. They vary with language, with formatting conventions, and with how much generated or third-party code is counted, and a team can halve or double the number without changing what the software does. These figures come from developer postmortems rather than audits, which makes them illustrative of scale and nothing more precise.